The North (#wattys2016)

Chapter 3

I wanted to sleep, but my brain wasn’t having any of it.

Sanctuary Base: it sounded tranquil enough. Too tranquil.

We’d been talking about breaking out of the armory now for more than a month while towns and cities burned and the stuff of nightmares clawed at the barred windows on the ground level of the armory. But that was simply chatter between team members. We’d all kept our opinions to ourselves when Sgt. Green was in earshot because he’d have clamped down on that notion immediately. He wanted us focused on just getting through the freaking day alive.

We weren’t exactly going to starve in our location. The armory had at least a year or more worth of rations in the company stores. We had ammunition, lots of it, and weapons. We could rain death onto the creeps at a murderous rate any time we wanted to but even with our guns and ammo, we’d still lost more than 90 percent of those who’d made it to the armory when the call out came. And there was also the matter of fresh water. We’d filled two storage rooms with plastic Jerry cans of fresh water in the days after the siege began. We kept filling them until the municipal water supply finally shut down. But we all knew we’d eventually run out and the closest source of fresh water was from the Bow River – a death sentence for anyone wishing to venture even two hundred feet from the safety of our position.

Surely Sgt. Green had to have realized that we couldn’t stay here forever. I sat up in my cot and glanced at Jo. Her stringy mop of red hair covered her face and I listened to the sound of her breathing when the sheer magnitude of Sgt. Green’s death hit me like a brick thrown in anger through a shop window: I could no longer defer to an adult’s wisdom. None of us could – we just didn’t have that luxury anymore.

“We’re going to figure something out, Jo,” I whispered as I climbed out of my cot and grabbed my flashlight. I snuck out of our room and crossed the hallway into what was Sgt. Green’s billet. On the floor across the room was a half open sleeping bag on an air mattress. His helmet and fighting gear was laid out neatly next to his ruck sack, and it looked like he’d just crawled out of bed to take a leak and would return minutes later. Only that wasn’t going to happen.

I shuffled across the room, placing my flashlight on the floor next to his gear.

“He must have had a plan,” I said quietly as I started fishing through his kit. I found his trusty field message pad stuffed in a pocket of his webbing and started flipping through the pages. There was a list of everyone’s names dating back to Day Zero, most with a line struck through them. I saw a detailed list of rations from the company stores along with a count of ammunition, each one listed by its NATO nomenclature.

I tossed the pad onto the sleeping bag and pulled out Sgt. Green’s junior general kit, an olive drab cotton duck covered portfolio containing maps, plastic coated sheets to write on and china markers. I tore open the Velcro fastener with a loud rip and flipped through the pages. There was a detailed drawing of potential routes of access away from the armory along with a series of scenarios he’d written under the heading THREAT ASSESSMENT: SIMMONS – READ THIS.

I arched my eyebrows and flashed my light on the page.

Simmons:

            Congratulations, you found my OPS kit and that means I’ve bought the farm so guess what, kid? You’re in charge now. Before you start protesting that someone else should take command of what’s left of the King’s Own, dig through my ruck sack and look for the ball peen hammer. It’s there for you to club yourself in the head with for being a moron. I picked you as my 2IC because you’ve got a tactical mind and you get shit done. More importantly, I chose you because out of all the survivors of the King’s Own, you have the most to lose and by that I’m talking about little Jo. Your kid sister is going to be the catalyst for a hell of a lot of tough decisions. Because of her, you’ll make the hard choices – the ones that twist your stomach into knots because you know deep down inside you’re ordering someone to their death or to take a life. That’s the burden of leadership, kid. It’s not pretty, but there it is.