Hard Rain Falling (Walking in the Rain Book 3) by William Allen Page B

called them submachine guns and left it at that. We got four of each, as well as four .45 ACP Gold Combat II Kimber pistols. I was impressed and sickened. Wow, that was my parents’ tax dollars at work. Those pistols alone ran over two grand each.
    As our two small convoys prepared to move out, Lt. Germann waved me over for one more little nugget. I wondered why he was so quick to release all of these cool new weapons for us. I would have been happy just to pick up the spare ammunition, but the man barely blinked. Maybe he figured we would need them soon enough.
    “We need to watch for drones. Hate to catch a Hellfire in the teeth. If the opposition really is from Camp Gruber, they have the capacity. We really need air defense systems, but not going to happen for a while. We have some Strykers configured for air defense, but the software is fried.”
    “Why here, Lieutenant? And why now?”
    The lieutenant shocked the heck out of me by sharing what appeared to be his unvarnished opinion.  I still didn’t know a lot about officers, but he seemed refreshingly frank with me.
    “Maybe because we are finally starting to pull our collective heads out of our proverbial asses and started working the problem. I don’t know what the feds have planned, if anything, but striking this way makes sense… sort of. I think they don’t want us, the States, getting our acts together anytime soon. And I need to get word back East to your Colonel Hotchkins, on the q.t., to warn them to watch out for similar attacks. Hell, Camp Gruber is a lot closer to Fort Chaffee than it is to us.”
    That thought made my stomach hurt.
    “Shit, Lieutenant, you missed your calling. You should have been a motivational speaker.”
    “Get out of here, kid. Go buy a Justin Bieber album or something.”
    “I think they are called discs, Sir. Except none of the players run anymore; and I threw my iPod away almost four months ago.”
    “If we can ever get electric up and running, something tells me vinyl will make a comeback.”
    I sighed theatrically. Something about this junior officer’s sense of humor reminded me of my father’s bantering ways. That made me realize just how much I was missing home and my family.
    “Shit, Lieutenant. I think you may have just ruined the apocalypse for me. Old people music.”
    I was weird. I knew it. Here we were laughing and joking and an hour ago three men we all knew were killed not far from this spot. Germann had three body bags going home with them. Grady, Halloran, and Sanchez. Well, what there was left of the other two. They used some heavy duty fire extinguishers to get to the shriveled forms, but I didn’t go look.
    I would miss Grady… and I barely knew him. I was learning that sometimes you have to laugh, even in the face of horror and death; often, especially then.

 
    CHAPTER TEN
    Lori drove with the seat pulled all the way forward so her feet could reach the pedals. With the UMP45 resting in her lap, she looked more than a little cramped, but I held my tongue. The girl still looked tense and it had little to do with the road conditions. Someone had cleared the stalled vehicles from the lanes of the Indian Turnpike and in some places stalled cars lined the concrete shoulders. So while the route looked clear, even I could figure out this was prime real estate for an ambush.
    We rode in the middle of the convoy, behind the two modified five ton trucks, and in front of “our” Humvee. Specialist Markum was now driving our Humvee and carried the electrical repair parts for the Bradley Fighting Vehicles as his cargo. He also had a gunner perched in the cupola, covering our advance with a medium machine gun.
    They could have used the five tons, if they hadn’t already been converted into rolling pillboxes. The canvas sides of the truck concealed the firing ports of two machine guns mounted inside the beds of the trucks, one on each side. Someone had taken steel plates and armored up the sides but left the