“Food is of the utmost importance. And guns. When these people begin starving they'll begin shooting.”
“Yeah.” Gary stood up and stretched, rubbed a hand across the rubble on his cheeks. “Well, let's get moving. I'm hungry now.” He cast a last look at the men behind the machine guns, and again shook his fist at them, repeating the single descriptive word he had used earlier.
Oliver said, “Likewise.”
They climbed into the near-by car and Gary turned it around, heading back along the blacktopped highway that slowly pulled away from the river and wound through flat, sticky bottomland on its route to the nearer hills. The heat was intense and the air not moving. His eyes kept returning to the rear-vision mirror, watching the bridge fading behind.
“The muttonheads!”
* * *
The machine gunners blankly watched the car out of sight. A rifleman thought to replace the round he had fired. Silence settled over the bridge.
5
EX-CORPORAL GARY carefully stamped out the remains of the small cooking fire and with his shoe scraped a bit of loose dirt over the embers. The skillet he cleaned by scrubbing it with a handful of grass, and then turned it upside down to thump it on the ground. Finally he ran his tongue over teeth and gums to lick away any remaining taste of the egg.
“That was the last one,” he announced.