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Today, Walt Robillard and I are giving you a sneak peek at a new project we’ve been working on. Give it a read (below), or a listen (Above), and check it out, and yeah, that’s Walt’s killer voice doing the narration

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Hobo Recon:

Hard Luck and Trouble

by

Nick Cole and Walt Robillard

Chapter One

Hobos in the Wind

“This is why we can’t have nice things, Troubs!” Hardy shouted across the cargo containers in the yard.

            It’d been a while since he’d had to draw the heater, much less fire it. This wasn’t the gun he’d normally shuck from beneath his worn patchwork “dirty” military jacket when things went south fast and desperate. The dialed-up M4.  This was definitely the shotty he used for tense negotiations with uncertain characters who harbored bad intentions.

Bad intentions was everyday and everyone now days. In these times.

He pulled that shotgun from under the coat where it dangled on a single point underarm sling as he ate up the miles and rode the rails. A model 870 SPS Marine Magnum he’d rattle-canned to look more used, weathered, subdued. On the road and the kinda gun a desperate man lookin’ for work might use to protect himself in these lawless times.

 He’d save his sidearm for the real intense gunfights up close that needed more rounds on target. Less fiddling with the firearm when he wanted to put a hurt on someone. The double stack mag held enough, “go screw yerself,” forty-five caliber ACP. Usually good to get out of whatever scrape he and Trouble had gotten themselves into this time behind enemy lines and in service to SOCOM and the Heartland that was all that remained of the U.S.

             Trouble—because it wasn’t a middle name, it was really… who he was—Troubs had his head shoved into the open cargo container in the shipping yard, using his teeth to strip off the casing around a wire he was working. He had a multi-tool with wire strippers too. The ones all those old EOD guys carried back in the day on their rig and chest plate carriers in the wars in other places not the battleground they found themselves in now… America. Still America regardless of what all factions were involved and especially the ChiComs.

The sudden appearance of a Chinese security agent had Trouble stripping wires with his teeth for expediency in order to, “get it done in one, son.”

It didn’t help that Hard Luck had been muttering that same phrase as he got ready to distribute some hate-spray from the barrel of the rattle-canned 870. Rattle-canned old BDU multicam because that was the way the world was now, and the lands they found themselves in, and was the camo of the day when they’d both started out as Eleven Bravo privates in the last days of the Old Cold War.

Not the hot one now.

            The unlucky and early security agent was currently dead behind where Trouble was kneeling, large caliber holes bleeding over his gray uniform and onto the wet pavement of the yard.

            “Brah, that shot was like Mozart on a motorcycle. That’s how we do it, my brother in combat arms!” Trouble quietly exclaimed as he twisted the end of the newly exposed wire, pumped his fist, and continued whatever Def Leppard song he was keeping time to, to get his EOD on like he’d always done. Then he pumped his fist again and bit his lip, hearing some searing unheard guitar solo from long ago. “Need me a little cover while I finish this last bit, Hardy.”

            Hard Luck.

            SFC James C. Hardy. SOCOM. Eighteen Bravo. Shoulda been a Master Sergeant before retirement. But he spent some unrated time doing dark stuff in uncertain places along the way for shadows that didn’t want to come out into the light before America got sold out by those shadows and all that was left was SOCOM to defend the Heartland and give the Chinese and the rest a bad time. There was the 82nd too, even though they were stuck in the irradiated remains of Russian-occupied Poland and fighting for their lives living on dead horses and hate. The Marines held Sand Diego and were officially listed as insurrectionists and traitors, allies of Russia.

            But that wasn’t true. Not at all.

            Eighteen Bravo.  The weapons sergeant within the Special Forces career field, employs conventional and unconventional warfare tactics and techniques in individual and small unit infantry operations. Employs individual domestic, foreign small arms, light and heavy crew-served weapons, anti-aircraft and anti-armor weapons. He is… a master of all weapons.

            And don’t ask about the Rangers and where they are in the mess we find ourselves in called America’s Darkest Hours on a good day. All four Battalions were dead. As they say in SOCOM, “Ain’t no Rangers here,” and then those that can, point to where they once rolled the scroll and wink. “They just on the fade.”   

            Hardy leaned into the shadows beside his own container he was covering from. No use standing in the same spot as his partner. The guy was either going to blow himself up or get trounced by the incoming security responding to the shots. Why risk both of them getting schwacked?

            “You were supposed to wait,” Hardy muttered as he scanned the misty and wet dark.

            “I was supposed to be a rock star,” Trouble responded, humming metal to himself as he cursed the wire he was working with. “Playing the axe at night; beach, beer, fish tacos by day. Maybe even charm my way to seeing a bikini hanging off the end of the bed post, ya know? Life comes at ya fast, Hardy, but don’t worry… Trouble’s my name and causin’ it is my… game,” he whispered almost to himself as he continued to solve the problems in his hands.

            SFC Stephen X. Bach. Eighteen Charlie.  SFC when he shoulda retired at least an E8 just a few years ago as things began to get truly weird and surreal and even the Army lost its mind and lowered standards, painted nails and even let some girls wear the Ranger Tab when no one who’s actually earned one thinks they even got remotely close to meeting standard without a lotta help along the way.

            Eighteen Charlie. Special Force engineer sergeants are specialists across a wide range of disciplines, from demolitions and constructions of field fortifications to topographic survey techniques.

            Trouble was his tag with SOCOM, and it wasn’t because he was cool. He caused it on mission more than effectively, on behalf of the teams, and didn’t stop back behind the wire when it was generally not needed or in his own best interest.

            So… Trouble had run his mouth about the general current state of affairs, and if he wasn’t so highly decorated that some of his awards were redacted, and so competent at the delicate art of high explosives… then he might have found himself with an even lower rank and very little retirement in light of the various courts martial and articles of offense.

            But he knew real bad guys in high places even there at the end of all things. And so, he’d gotten a chance to walk with some retirement and rank for the last six months of America.

            “Then get it done, and don’t be that guy,” Hardy growled. Trouble liked to talk it up when things were getting thick.

And things were getting definitely thick.

Like the song lyrics from long ago Trouble always had running… It was distracting. Not to mention, Trouble had a tendency to sip his own cool aid, or so Hardy thought. “Got more coming.”

Matter of fact statement. No drama. It was about to be get-it-on-thirty in the midnight yard of bad decisions and insertion behind enemy lines with assets to deny and mayhem to be caused.

            The sound of rushing boots thumping across the wet concrete was getting louder, as was the group barking loudly in Mandarin the way the Chinese do as they approached the x they had no idea they were walking onto. It was funny how the Chinese all ran the same way, or at least, that’s how it sounded to Hardy. And it… bemused him. He was a thinker, and he’d never have used that ten-cent word on the teams. But in his mind, that and other words like it… they were there. He was a reader, and a thinker. And so, to Hard Luck all the Chinese seemed to have that same mincing pitter-patter run where they never really stepped it out like they were Usain Bolt intent on not just winning… but winning with icing. It was like watching that cartoon Martian run while trying to nab a, “P-32 ulidium space modulator!”

            Or whatever it was.

            Of course, the newer generation had no clue about good ol’ Marvin, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t funny.

            And…

            “Sucks to be them,” exhaled Hard Luck and readied the shotty for sudden thunder.

            The Chinese shouts changed to whispers as the pitter-patter running soldiers got to the container group close to the two operators. Hardy knew the trick. Direct the guys into the target, then shift to the radios to keep their opponents guessing as to what came next. Only, the two operators had seen this particular Chinese trick before, as this wasn’t the first time he and Trouble had gone up against the Puffies.

            Of course, their enemy didn’t refer to themselves as Puffies because their units always went about with names to make them feel special. Hardy got the intel on these mooks a couple of weeks ago when Trouble blew up that cargo ship down in the gulf. They’d called themselves Thunder of the Gods and gay stuff like that. Because of course they did. And this was a reference to the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s Airborne Brigade.

            Which was who they were facing today. This was their operation area on the road to New Orleans.

            Now, sounding all that out had been a mouthful for the various teams rolling out of the SRC, and instead of just shortening it to PLAAF, it came out like Puff. The few Puffies that Hardy’s unit had managed to capture and talk to, got all sorts of mad about the slur. Which was great when they caught and released a few of them to spread the legend of the Special Reconnaissance Companies SOCOM had deployed into Occupied America. Get the rest of the Puffies all nervous about facing an invisible covert military force hiding in plain sight within the subjugated population.

            Ghosts in the night in plain sight.            And deadly ghosts at that.

            Some of the SRC teams had even conducted massacres that were simply bone-chilling so the Chinese could have their very own boogie men to be afraid of in the night.

            What had Colonel Spear said when he created the Special Recon Teams for SOCOM as it waged its war out of what remained of North Carolina and the battle lines down in Georgia… "Now they will know why they are afraid of the dark. Now they learn why they fear the night."

            One of the nerdy Green Berets, an 18 Delta, had told everyone that was a line from Conan the Barbarian. No one cared and all agreed it was as cool as it gets. And if there’s anything Green Berets love… it’s cool stuff that’s super deadly. See the tats since ‘Nam for examples. Cobras, skulls, knives… women.

            The Puffies had rightly guessed Trouble and Hardy would eventually come after this cargo depot along the gulf after they’d slagged that cargo ship. So, the Chinese high command out of New Orleans had deployed a company of PLAAF airborne forward in the hopes word would get out, and the “American GI special forces terrorists” prowling the Area of Operations North of New Orleans would come and enter the dragnet the PRC had thrown across much of the South and Southwest of what the maps once called the United States of America.

They were anything but united.

Most of the States that remained were fighting for themselves with what little was left of their veterans and National Guard. What was known as “Caliphistan” centered around the Midwest out of Michigan, was engaged in a brutal no-holds-barred plains war with the Chinese 3rd Army and being supplied and trained by SOCOM with what could be begged, borrowed, or stolen.

California was behind enemy lines except for Marine-held San Diego and some warlord in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and parts of San Bernardino proclaiming an independent nation called Vanistan and being held by heavily armed and mobile militia.

They had vans.

            Hardy scanned the angles and shadows of the cargo containers past where Trouble was working.

            Their night vision had been a step up from what he’d had when he’d been a regular grunt. The overhead lighting shining down on them from gantries and industrial light towers of the cargo yard situated around the cargo docks didn’t even factor in to how these new NODs worked out in the dark. Running next gen night vision based on the ENVG-B—still in use—their gear just factored in the lighting and highlighted anything warmer than the surroundings. Complex motion tracking fed into augmented reality, highlighted potential targets and let the soldier see in complex low light conditions.

            “Trubs,” Hardy said quietly into his throat mic. “Hooking out to get an angle on our new friends.”

            “Gonna leave me here all by my lonesome,” Trouble joked. “You know… I’m afraid of the dark, right?”

            “NODs and that red lens you’re working ain’t enough?” Hardy asked.

            Trouble waved the flashlight in the direction of the incoming Puffies. “Seriously, come over here and hold my hand while I finish this. You know how I get.”

            Hardy knew all too well, which is why he left his partner alone to finish his chore.

            He slipped past several of the containers, then used a small stack of metal frames to vault himself to the top of the nearest CONEX. The cargo containers were the standard variety, so he had to move cautiously as he jumped, then crept across the top of the ribbed metal box. Walk too fast and he’d sound like he was pounding on a metal drum with each footstep. After jumping across several of the boxes, Hardy had a good line of sight to Trouble and several avenues of approach.

            The operator leaned into the shadows against the cargo container stack, then removed his cell phone from the sleeve pocket of his patrol parka. Set to lowlight conditions, the EUD—End User Device—was loaded with the latest and greatest ATAK interface, allowing Hardy to act as a battlefield information hub. The screen was already pinging two angles of approach off the trip sensors Hardy had placed when they’d first snuck into the yard.

            The fact they were coming at all worried the veteran operator. He scratched the few days’ worth of stubble on his chin, trying to figure where they’d botched the insert and alerted this security detail tasked with holding the yards. The Chinese had their own version of EUDs, and if they ran something like the Android Team Awareness Kit, all it would’ve taken was for Hardy and Trouble to trip a sensor they’d missed, and the soldier responsible for the zone would have called it in.

            Hardy shook his head, internally bashing himself for not being more careful. It’s why they’d taken to calling him Hard Luck for his call-sign. Throughout his military career and now out in the Special Recon Companies, he’d never found a stretch of bad luck that didn’t stick to him. And that included being partnered with Trouble.

            That guy was bad luck personified.

            Looking up from his EUD, Hardy saw the Chinese first fire team angling on the objective. A single soldier with three more behind him was trying to pie the corner as though this was the first time he’d done it for real. Hardy had to give the Asian kid credit though, he was sticking his QBZ-191 rifle around the corner, trusting the optic to broadcast whatever was past the CONEX to his night vision, so the soldier didn’t have to stick his head in the open and get it blown off.

            SOCOM’s PsyOps guys had made sure all the illegal social media sites still operational were filled with GoPros of Chinese guys getting their heads blown off. Some of them were even real. AI made the rest.

            Hard Luck, that internal monologue, that thinking machine he was, a thinking-killing machine who’d even had profound thoughts while running a belt fed two-forty in a hostile combat zone and laying some serious hate, that thinking machine he was always… wondered…

            Warfare had gotten weird when advanced sighting devices operated on wireless link tech and rifles could see around corners.

            It wasn’t… fair. But when was war ever fair. He’d seen enough kids get talked into it only to end up lying in the tall grass by some road a few days later. Just where he’d left them.

            No, there was nothing fair about war.

            Now that it wasn’t close quarters in the dark, he gently let the shotty slide back under his old “down and out in occupied America” hobo-coat and shucked the heater.

            The heater.

            It wasn’t an issued weapon. There were very few issued-weapons for SOCOM, and all the kids and whoever would show up to get trained on them and sent out to die in any of the seven directions the heartland was being attacked from. Plus… shipping and transport weren’t easy.

            In the SRTs everything went on your back just like the old LRRP teams in Vietnam. And you looked like a hobo so you could pass with all the refugees, transients, and mad homeless displaced by the war, or just… whatever.

            You looked like a hobo because you were… a hobo.

            The heater was his own personal truck gun he’d dragged everywhere from Bragg to wherever he got stationed along the way.

            Everything on it was his. Paid for by his salary. Just in case it hit the fan. Just in case he got invaded at home one night, wherever home happened to be between deployments. Honestly, he’d never thought he’d need it for what he was using it for now.

            A domestic insurgency.

            But he sure had built it to do the trick.

            It was a Daniel Defense MK18 with a ten-inch threaded barrel he could go quiet with. He had jungle-mags ready to go and one stack in. Along the barrel he had illuminate and IR. He’d added a BCM foregrip and done some work with the internals to get it just where he wanted it to run. He had a match grade flat-trigger because that felt best for the tap. The optic was a basic Aimpoint T-1. It didn’t look tactical-cool guy but if you knew you knew. The T1 was a great optic system if you needed to keep both eyes open and see everything while keeping the dot on target.

            And in the SRTs, outnumbered, behind lines, running gun fights and using everything and being as aware as possible, wasn’t just optimal or maximal… it was vital to continued birthday parties.

            Hardy lined up his optic to target and let the heater bark. The first round caught the kid in the neck, splattering a good amount of the kid’s blood across the CONEX’s side panel. The assault took the trio behind the kid by surprise, forcing them to turn and instantly shoot in all directions except up because they weren’t fighting Batman. Hardy covered behind the metal boxes, trusting their contents to bullet sponge enough of the bouncing rounds to keep him from getting accidentally blasted.

            Then… leaning from cover, Hardy put a trio of shots that tore off the commie soldier’s face, before transitioning to the third trooper in the stack. Then he sent more rounds sailing past the number three paratrooper’s chin and behind the space at the top of his chest where the armor didn’t cover.

            And thinking-killing machine he was… he reflected that it was good “commie” was back in use as the dirty word it really was.

            It was the truth.

            And it was always good to stack them.           

            The fourth Chinese paratrooper decided to run for it when he couldn’t find the spot the shooting was coming from. In a show of solidarity, he grabbed the trooper who’d just soaked up rounds behind his chest plate, dragging the downed soldier to cover with him.

            Probably thinking he was gonna get a medal someday for this.

            Poor Schmoe, thought Hard Luck, guy didn’t observe the first rule of combat first aid, and it was going to cost him. Now. Hardy lined up the optic dot to the soldier’s hip, having already figured out the sight was probably off because he’d been shooting center mass but hitting high. The thinking but really killing machine part of his mind doing that math too… and then his suspicion got confirmed when the rounds punched into the spot on the Chinese soldier’s back right behind and beneath his shoulder, once again where their PLA armor didn’t cover.

            The round tore into the kid’s torso, punching him to the ground next to his friend he was gonna rescue and get a medal for, and twenty years after, they’d drink Tsing Taos and celebrate a ChiCom-dominated world they’d made happen, with their little part, and managed to survive as they watched their loud children shout, and their pretty wives dote over them.

Now both PLA troopers gasped for air and coughed out blood-soaked ragged Chinese, definitely drawing all sorts of attention to the hate he’d laid on them.

Now we wait, he thought.

Killing Machine taking over in the night and the dark and the mist.

            Hardy jumped across the space to the next set of containers, allowing him to get a better view of the opposite line of advance. “Trouble, how long, man?”

            The radio broke squelch in the small earpiece he wore under his hood. “Hard Luck, this is Trouble, coming at you with all the classic rock your ears can swallow!”

            Great, Hardy thought. Could this guy really not take anything seriously?

            The operator pushed the toggle for his PTT and growled, “Trubs, how long?”

            “Closing it up now,” Trouble said. “Moving to zone two, pushing out at the crane, toward the water.”

            “Roger out,” Hardy said, cutting the comms.

            They’d sand-tabled this. They’d done it many times without each other in other teams not this one and other days better than this. And together, lately, Hard Luck and Trouble were becoming known for this little act of behind the lines terrorism.

            Miss USA on the Nightly Free America Broadcast has even noted them in the scramble codes sent to the military and operators as far behind lines as North Dakota and New Mexico where the Chinese ran their death camps night and day, and hope is just a voice in the night right now. Near the end of the broadcast. Her warm voice coming in clear.

            “Chris… sleeps until dawn.”

            “The number is forty-two.”

            “And to all the patriots listening tonight out there in the dark… Our boys with the Raiders and the Packers thank two particular hobos for their roadside assistance at Route Twenty-Four with the Chinese Column moving in on Nashville that was causing many patriots in the area much Hard Luck and Trouble. The supplies are through, and the children have been evacuated back into the Homeland behind the Green Zone. Thank you, boys.”

            Then…

            “There’s a match in Peterborough. No Slack in effect.”

            And finally…

            “That’s the news for tonight, America. Stay in the fight. We aren’t done yet. Good night. And now… The Star Spangled Banner. The lights are still on.”

            Both men had listened in that night after a long and very hard day on the hump, sleeping in a wet ditch out near a county road. It was cold. They’d said nothing. In the dark a few minutes later, Trouble spoke. He was gonna take first watch as they faded off the hit, avoiding Chinese Air Cav Hunter killer teams that had been roaming the countryside in HINDs.

“She sounds hot, Hardy. Like that girl on the White Snake video back in the day. Remember her?”

“Yeah,” said Hard Luck with his poncho pulled over him and the shotty in one hand nearby on his pack. “I do.”

Pause.

Then…

“Do you think she’s hot? Miss USA.”

Hard Luck was fading. Dreaming that dream he never told anyone about.

But just before he’d fallen asleep, he said, “I think she’s good, Trouble. And that’s what makes her beautiful.”

And then Trouble might have grunted or said, “Okay.” But Hard Luck had gone to that other world that didn’t exist anymore. Yesterday, some call it.

But that wasn’t now. Now they were in the fight in the supply yard with the PLA airborne thinking they had them right where they wanted them, barking Mandarin radio chatter and thumping hard heavy too-short-step boots and even untargeted fire at ghosts and phantoms in the mist.

They were conscripts after all. They were afraid. Afraid of the PRC. And now, down range and right near the boogie men… they were afraid of the hobos that had come for them.

            Another fire team of Chinese paratroopers slowly advanced to the corner of the new row of containers Hardy now faced. They mimicked the first group of soldiers, sticking their rifles around the corner to let the optics assume the risk. When they dropped their field of view on the fire team dying across from them, they retreated from the corner and broke out in a heated conversation of harsh whispers.

            Yeah, the operator could smell their fear.

            Behind the dying paratroopers on the ground Hard Luck had put rounds on target into, a third fire team slowly advanced, careful not to get too close to the fatal CONEX corner. They fanned out, with the tail man in the stack launching a slick matte-black drone.

            Hushing-hushing in the way of Chinese battle-speak.

            That was smart of them, Hardy thought. Get some eyes in the air and cover the ground quickly to find their targets. What they didn’t count on was Trouble sliding in behind them, running his knife out the front of the drone trooper’s neck, starting from somewhere near his ear. The battlefield surgery was grizzly, wet work, but Trouble seemed to be totally cool with it, going so far as to gently lay the soldier down and relieve him of his drone controller even as his buddies, soon to be bodies, were eyes forward and fighting for the Fatherland or whatever the godless b******s believed in these days.

            With a few deft taps on the screen, Trouble had a good grip on the flight mechanic and stepped back into the shadows, fading from the fire team of Chinese paratroopers. Hardy watched as his wingman sailed the drone across the cargo yard, dropping it in line with the enemy crew close to him. They froze in place, unsure of what to make of the machine hovering in front of them at eye level.

            “Hard Luck, this is Trouble. If you wouldn’t mind taking advantage of the little distraction I just created, I’d appreciate it.”

            There were times when James “Hard Luck” Hardy really wanted to punch his partner straight up in the grill. They all paled in comparison to those times when Trouble just couldn’t be serious about an operation. Times like now.

            Hardy reached into his pack, pulling a grenade from where it was taped to the inside. He yanked the pin and let the spoon fly. After mentally ticking off a count of One Mississippi, the operator flicked the weapon over the CONEX boxes to land in the middle of the fire team.

            The grenade rolled and then popped, its kinetic fury suddenly and obnoxiously ignoring the Chinese soldiers’ armor and planting them onto the pavement in piles of ruined meat and shredded gear.

To them it was sudden and brutal, and none of the Chinese propaganda about “a glorious war of liberation” matched their violent deaths. The close proximity to the cargo containers funneled some of the blast and over-pressure across the way, startling the final team of Chinese paratroopers on approach to where they thought their boogie men might be. This group stumbled backward behind the cover of the containers, suddenly shouting in their hushed and harsh speech pattern… only to come face to face with Trouble ready to take advantage of their surprise, as they’d retreated to where they thought they might be safe.

Trouble’s thoughts were synched to “Breakin’ the Law” by Judas Priest as he assessed the funnel they’d been forced into. The funnel and area they’d chosen as… safe.

“Ain’t nowhere safe in America for you,” hissed the operator.

            He muzzle-thumped the first man to see he was there, pushing the suppressed Berretta pistol into the soldier’s throat. The paratrooper doubled over, coughing and holding his throat after the hit. Trouble lowered himself at the same time, using the stunned soldier as cover. Angling to the side, the predatory operator sent two rounds into the lower torso of the next guy in the stack, dropping him to the concrete. He lowered the pistol to the man recovering from the throat hit, sent a round through the top of the man’s boot, then followed him through a series of pain-soaked hops as he tried to recover his balance.

            This was a song.

            Just like all the ones he’d learned on his guitar as a kid. And they were his sheet music as he moved them about in a fatal dance of lead and death at twenty-four hundred feet per second.

            Seeing how quickly things had devolved into chaos, the last man ran into the intersection, probably hoping the smoke and noise of the grenade going off in the intersection would hide his escape. All it did was bring him into Hardy’s sight picture, where the concealed operator put a single round into the soldier’s leg, adjusting the aim on the scope he needed to re-zero next chance he got. The paratrooper tumbled into the stack of bodies from the first fire team to get murked, a bloody mess on the ground really, screaming as he pushed himself to his back and frantically whirled his rifle in any and all directions.

            In a moment of clarity, the surviving para realized the nature of his injury. He expertly pulled a tourniquet from a pouch on his armor, then slid the contraption over his leg before tightening it down.

            “Fàngxià nǐ de wǔqì!” Trouble hissed from around the corner. The man had hugged the shadows until he got in position, then slid from the dark holding a confiscated QBZ-191.

            The Chinese soldier held his hands out wide at seeing his own style battle rifle pointed at him. He let the rifle slip from his fingers, while glaring daggers at Trouble coming in. As the dark and dirty man advanced, the paratrooper used his good leg to push himself against the other bodies and prop up to a sitting position.

            Trouble looked the part of a hobo riding the rails. He had an old-style military trench coat over a hoodie covering his normally unkempt hair. His beard was wispy, with patches of hair not growing in for some reason or another. His dirty military-style civilian pants seemed to have as many stains as they did pockets, lending credence to looking like someone who slept among the garbage. Trouble advanced on a set of well-worn high-top sneakers, complete with the Velcro strap at the top, a look no kid on either side of the Chinese militarized zone would be caught dead wearing.

            He got a few yards from the downed soldier, then repeated, “Move the weapon away,” in Chinese. He spoke with the inflection and tone of someone who knew the language intimately, although he’d never be truly taken as a native speaker.

            Trouble hovered over the man, both staring at each other over the sound of the paratrooper breathing rapidly after being badly wounded. The man flinched, and Trouble sent a single round center mass of the downed soldier’s face. He immediately brought the carbine in line with the hopping foot injury guy, finishing him off with a series of quick staccato shots administered with cold brutality and efficiency.

            Weapon up.

            Bang bang bang.

            Weapon low and ready, scanning dark eyes for who else wants to die next.

            “You good?” Hardy asked over the net in the silence that followed.

            “Yeah. Guy on his butt was gonna try for the grenade he had on his kit. No sense in both of us dying.”

            “Give me a minute to scoop up their EUDs. Maybe the I&R guys can pull something off them,” Hardy said.

            “I’ll scoop some of these rifles and this sweet, sweet ammo, my brother-man,” Trouble said, holding the Chinese carbine. “Might as well take their NODs too. Haul like this and we could be into some serious cash if we sell it all at the general store.”

            “I’ll help you take some of it,” Hardy said as they both fell into the work of battlefield scavenging and asset management. “But hey, I ain’t carrying a backpack full of rifles looking like a walking Middle East bazaar.”

            Trouble laughed and made a cat’s low owwwwwwww like he was some rock singer hamming it up just before the bridge in some long-lost metal anthem.

            “Recycled due to lack of motivation,” announced Trouble. Both had been graduates of the Darby Queen and Robert Rogers school for wayward boys.

            Hardy had already grabbed several of the soldiers’ battle boards when his own piped off from inside his jacket.

Hardy checked the sitrep from the observers. Then… “Hey. More troops coming in. Gotta rabbit.”

            “But, but, all the gear,” whined Trouble. “I can do some stuff with this, Brother.”

            “Fine,” Hardy quipped. “You stay and get all the shwag. I’m avoiding the Chinese infantry platoon and jumping back into the water. Discuss division of assets with them and whatever indirect and air support that’s all hot and bothered right now at oh-two hundred.”

            Trouble scooped up a few more rifles, then fell in step with his partner, catching up swiftly, eyes roving across all sectors each knew was their own. In moments consumed by fog and shadows, just two down and out tramps on the hump to the next refugee camp, work-gang project, handout, UN FEMA camp for indoc and digital ID assignment.

Just two shadows in the night.

“Time to get wet,” muttered one.

 “Well, when you put it like that,” hissed the other, each laboring under a huge pack, stepping it out like they were late for a better tomorrow that might just happen. “I am a bit swampy after all that work we just did. Maybe the right thing here is a nice dip in the ocean to cool a man off. Even if it is late.”

Sirens began to sound in the distance. Doomsday and mournful. The music of a fallen America.

A gunship could be heard in the swamps to the west. Coming in fast. Its echo thundering and reverberating off the bayous and swampy hills.

“Got some blood on my hands.”

“Bummer, dude.”

And then they were gone.

For those that wanna buy us a coffee until the next chapter drops. Thank you.

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We love the SOCOM M1 “The B*****d” because it sure shoots like one.

Today’s podcast is for everyone!

We’re ready to talk assassination w/ special guest Walt Robillard!

Free fir er’body!

After last night’s debate, Nick and the Medusa think they have found a way to destroy all our enemies.

Special Guest today… Hutch (Walt Robillard) Simmons!

we talk the truth about what’s really going on. Maybe!

Nick and the Medusa are dropping a free show for you to listen to this week.

Today’s podcast is Free. Please consider subscribing!

Today is the last day to back the SGT THOR KICKSTARTER!!!

And we talk about France, Supreme Court Smackdowns and Medusa Acting Stories

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New Book launch this week! Please pick this one up and help launch our newest GE star!!!

Nick and the Medusa are back after being banned on Facebook for a couple of weeks.

Todays podcast will be Free for everyone just to give some information regarding the ban and my future plans.

Check out this crazy insane video from a few years back! Talk about Conspiracy Theories…

Nick and the Medusa deliver a report on what they’ve been up to and what the hell they think is going on.