Cover Of Night

"Um… m.f. and s.o.b."

She blinked. She could just hear those words coining out of four-year-old mouths – probably when her mother was in the grocery store with them.

"I heard a giggle and looked around, and there they were, all ears. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I threw the hammer, jumped up, and yelled, ‘I’m a damn idiot!’ They thought that was hilarious, especially when I told them ‘damn idiot’ was a really, really bad thing to say and they should never say it, and I should never have said it in front of them, but that was what you said when you were really mad." He paused. "I guess it worked."

"I guess it did," she said faintly. He certainly knew how little boys’ minds worked. They had promptly forgotten the words deemed not as bad, and concentrated on what he’d told them were really bad words. She should count her blessings.

She clapped a hand over her mouth as she shook with laughter, giggling and snorting. In that moment, listening to the sheepishness in his voice, delighting over the mental picture of him swearing a blue streak and suddenly looking into the fascinated faces of two little boys, she tipped over the emotional edge she’d been hovering on – and fell.

Chapter 27

When morning came, Teague sat up and rolled his shoulders, glad the night was over and nothing had happened. He’d forced himself to stay alert through the graveyard shift, knowing that it Creed had planned anything, that was when it would take place; a person’s natural arcadian rhythm was at its lowest point in those hours – at least for those who waited and watched. Teague had expected something, anything, even if just a few experimental forays. But hour after hour he’d scanned with the scope, without seeing the bright flare of a human thermal signature. Blake had been on edge, too, getting on the radio way too often to ask if Teague saw anything, but nothing had come their way.

Dawn was overcast, with sullen, low-hanging clouds that wreathed the tops of the mountains in mist. The warmer temperatures had held during the night, but now a chilly wind was beginning to blow. September weather could be iffy, as the seasons transitioned. Teague checked the level of coffee in his thermos; it was getting low. He’d need more if this wind kept blowing.

He glanced across at Frail Stop. It looked like a ghost town, with no one moving around. No, wait – he was certain he saw some smoke rising from the far side. It was difficult to tell, because the sky was so gray and, with the clouds hanging low on the mountains, everything sort of blended together, but – hell, yeah, that was smoke. Someone had a fire going in their fireplace. That was where the people would be, where they could get warm, maybe heat some soup, make some coffee. He keyed the radio. "Blake. Check toward the river, the houses farthest away. Is that smoke?" Blake’s eyes were younger than his, more reliable.

Blake came back with an answer in just a few seconds. "It’s smoke, no two ways about it. Want me to try getting a shot in there?"

"I don’t think you have a clear shot, too much structure between here and there. I know I don’t."

A minute went by. and Blake was on the radio again. "Negative on the clear shot. Used my binoculars to check it out."

"What I figured." Teague settled back on the blanket, once again studying the road and the houses closest to him. An uneasy feeling skittered up his spine. There was something spooky about the place today, but it could have been the grayness of the morning and the low clouds that made him feel sort of hemmed in. The empty road was somehow wrong. He froze, staring. The road was empty, completely so.

The bodies were gone.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. He blinked, stared, but they didn’t magically reappear. The bodies were fucking gone.

He picked up the radio. "Blake," he said hoarsely.

"Come back," said Blake.

"The bodies are gone."

"Wha – ?" Blake must have then looked for himself, because he said, "Shit."

Teague kept staring, unable to quite take it in. How in hell – ? Creed. Fucking Creed. He’d figured out they had thermal scopes instead of night vision, and devised some way for the locals to move around without being detected. Thermal imaging wasn’t foolproof; going into water to mask your thermal signature was the best-known trick. But if they’d gone into the stream to the right, the water was damn rough from all the rocks and practically impassable; then they would have had to walk a good distance to get to the bodies, and by then they would have been showing a thermal signature again. Likewise, they couldn’t have gone to the left, because that would have put them right in Blake’s front yard, and he’d have seen them way before they got to the stream.

Some other way, then.

He narrowed his eyes, studving the place, then picked up his binoculars and made a slow sweep from house to house, pausing at what, from this distance, looked like a low block wall. There hadn’t been a wall there before. He’d have noted something like that when he made his reconnaissance. Besides, the top wasn’t level. Instead of a wall, it looked more like sandbags.

Well, son of a bitch. The locals had been busy during the night. He felt perversely pleased that they hadn’t just rolled over and played dead; he’d have been embarrassed in front of the city boys if they had. He’d said they were tough, and they’d just proven him right. They were fortifying their positions and providing themselves with a safe way of moving about. Behind those bags, no bullets could reach them.

He got on the radio again. "Blake. Take a look at those sections of low wall. Those aren’t walls. Looks like sandbags to me." Even as he said it, he realized they wouldn’t have had access to sandbags. Something else, then, something in bags. Feed, concrete mix, something like that. Didn’t really matter; the principle was the same.