Authors: Amber Green
The third place had no doorboy. Worse, it didn't smell right. I did an about-face and elbowed past Echo. The others faded out of my way.
Another truck passed: yet another crew cab Toyota pickup with yet another plywood machine-gun mount behind the cab. If you piled all the Toyota crew cab trucks we'd seen in one field and every other motor vehicle in the next field, the Toyota truck pile would be bigger. In this one, the gun had been dismounted and was cradled in the arms of a beefy man in black with a coyote-and-black shemagh scarf. CIA. Or, as they were called here, OGA. Anyone else would be wearing camo.
He'd probably paid twenty bucks for a three-dollar shemagh. Unless he'd taken it as a trophy from a corpse.
Across the street and up one building, a doorboy bowed eagerly, entreating us to come to eat clean, fresh, delicious food. I eyed his neatly ironed clothes and smiled. He opened the door and invited us to smell.
Mutton, dal, ginger, cardamom, cashews, onions, and pistachios tantalized me...and naan. Fresh naan. My stomach growled, and mine wasn't the only one. Inside, an old man threw up his one arm and called out an enthusiastic greeting.
Mike sighed happily. “Even I know that
pick-hair
means we're welcome here."
Privately, I'd bet he knew a whole lot more than that.
"Or our money is,” Echo muttered.
Certainly.
At the other end of the room, a lithe young man—or man-tall boy—with heavily lined eyes danced for a group of men. They clapped and cheered for him.
The half-dozen men crouched around the largest table drew their chooras—each with a blade half again as long as my knife—and laid them among the dishes and cups on their table. They muttered in Dari. I couldn't quite pick out what they were saying, but it didn't sound friendly, and it didn't sound local.
The men at the far table kept their weapons on their backs, but their clapping and cheering lost some of its enthusiasm.
Three Kalashnikovs, an M16, something shotgun-like that I couldn't see well, and a PSL rifle with a beautifully cut-out wooden stock joined the chooras.
The proprietor pretended to see nothing untoward and waved us to take a nice table in the back. We pretended not to understand him. If we had to fight our way out from that table, it would be ugly. We settled at the smallest table, closest to the door.
The Dari speakers raised another round of muttering, but the set of their shoulders lost some tension. I knew taking the seat by the door was a sign we considered ourselves lower in status than the other inhabitants of the room, and they knew it. For all I knew, even Echo knew it. But we were here to eat, not to establish our status.
Oscar grabbed the seat that put his back to the wall. I put my back to the door simply because that would let me get out of here in exactly three steps. Echo and Mike put their backs to the room.
Oscar casually unslung his rifle and laid it on the table, not exactly pointing at the Dari table, made two minute adjustments with a small screwdriver, then reslung it and laid a scarred KA-BAR on the table. Considering how he'd sized up the blade market, I'd have expected something put out by Strider or Randall, or a fixed-blade Hissatsu. But maybe the custom rifle and the no-nonsense blade together conveyed a message he found useful.
Echo to my left had his SAW across his lap; his blade stayed sheathed. Mike's rifle stayed on his back, though he laid a wicked chisel-tipped tanto on the table. I followed Mike's example, though my M4 was a lot handier in close quarters than his sniper rifle, and laid my choora on the table, accessible but discreet.
Or as discreet as a seven-inch blade can be.
Oscar produced a small diamond sharpener and made some methodical passes over the edge of his blade. The faint
shing! shing
! probably scraped my nerves harder than the steel scraped that diamond matrix.
Tension crackled in the room. The proprietor spoke quietly, pleadingly to the Dari table. They returned to eating, though their weapons remained on the table.
Oscar offered the sharpener to me. I took it, surprised and pleased to feel a rather coarser grit on the other side, and set to the work of producing a beautiful edge.
Gunfire rattled in the near distance. My guts clenched, but I forced myself to echo the steady
shing! shing
! that had so bothered me when Oscar did it. From under my lashes, I saw the Dari table finger their weapons, then return to eating. I didn't hear the Kalashnikov
clack
, that distinctive sound an AK-47 makes when taken off safety.
Mike leaned forward. “You know, in most parts of the world, smart people hearing gunfire would be diving for the floor, and everyone else would be rushing the door."
Echo grinned. “The front wall is more than a foot thick, the sound was from farther away than this street is wide, and if something happened to come down the street at the perfect angle to penetrate the door, Zulu would catch it before I would."
Shing! Shing
! “Any of you good enough to identify that weapon by sound?"
"Those weapons,” Echo corrected. “Nope."
The Dari table finished eating and gathered their weapons. I turned slightly, unable to keep my back to the door as it opened, and watched them leave. Outside, two small children had a mangy goat on a leash and were struggling to drag her down the street. A Toyota behind them blasted its horn. The goat jumped and bucked, jerking the kids one way and then the other. A Special Ops guy with a bushy beard yelled at them in Pashto, offering to shoot the goat if they didn't get it out of the way. The door closed.
Echo shook his head. “Welcome to Afghanistan, where goat-pulling is not a figure of speech."
Mike took delivery of a bowl of hot, scented water and washed his hands thoroughly. “You know, those of us who were kids in the eighties knew for a fact that we'd grow up to a Mad Max world. My brother and I probably watched
The Road Warrior
over a hundred times. Wore out two tapes, I know. Back home, that reality faded. The next decade's kids knew for a fact their apocalypse would involve hordes of faceless zombies. Or worse, zombies with known faces."
He passed the bowl to Echo, then tore open a foil packet and recleaned his hands with an antiseptic wipe. “Here, we who have access to electronics and first-world medical care are like tourists in the eighties-style apocalypse vision. Like gamers in a fully immersive game. Maybe that's why so many of these guys act like children. Picture it. Within a few miles of where we sit, there's probably two thousand soldiers or semisoldiers like the OGA and psyops. Yet probably not two hundred of them could pass uniform inspection. Those Special Ops guys, now. You got to wonder how many times a loyal Talib has been shot because someone thought he was a Bearded American."
Echo passed the bowl to Oscar, then pulled out his own foil packet and antiseptic wipe. “Or how many of the Special Ops have been shot for Taliban?"
Oscar passed me the bowl. I washed, then cleaned my hands with a wipe as they had. I'd heard of cooks introducing interesting strains of
E. coli
to the wash water, low-tech bacteriological warfare, but given the fact we were going to be eating food prepared by the same folks who'd had an opportunity to contaminate this, poisoned wash water didn't seem worth worrying about. On the other hand, I'd seen some of the things these guys had touched in the bazaar, and frankly I didn't want to eat with hands that had washed behind theirs.
Oscar took back his sharpener with a polite nod.
Echo rearranged his shemagh as a bib. “Reckon the Zombie Hunters in the 122nd know they're geographically in the wrong century's apocalypse? That they bought into the wrong live-action game?"
Mike snorted. “Have they? Groups that large carry their reality with them. Faceless, implacable hordes of hungry foes who don't stop for hunger or pain or fear? Individuals that get knocked down easily, but then there's two or ten replacements? The nerve-shredding awareness that infected people look perfectly safe until after they've gotten inside your personal defenses and killed you? Does this sound familiar yet?"
Our dish came, fragrant rice topped with a generous pile of curried mutton.
A dancer came to our table too. He wasn't as young as the one at the far table, which suited me just fine. Little boys don't do a damned thing for me. This one did.
His heavily made-up eyes met mine. He smiled in recognition, and he danced for me. I leaned back to ease my hardening cock and to watch his flowing, deliberately seductive movements. He smelled and looked and moved like a healthy man. None of that was any guarantee, of course.
It's been a long time since I insisted on a guarantee. That's what condoms are for.
My cock ached for a good, hot ass. There were plenty on shipboard, plenty of them anonymous, even. But I didn't like the idea of one of them following me afterward, learning my name, maybe talking about me. So mostly I'd lain in my rack, hand curled tight around my rod, jerking hard enough my nuts bounced, imagining a warm pair of hairy buns rubbing against me.
"He probably has six kinds of clap."
The sneer snapped me awake, tightened the skin on my face.
Mike rolled naan to make a curry burrito. “Shut up, Echo."
"Seriously, I bet he does. Four incurable, and two that don't even have names."
Mike looked through his eyebrows at Echo.
The blond scowled but subsided.
I waved the dancer away. He pouted, but went. Probably did have clap, at that. And I didn't have a condom.
Besides, it was broad daylight. If I was going to lighten my load, I'd rather do it in the dark. Or at least without three marines knowing what I was doing. Probably insisting on watching my back. Laying bets. Making comments, or storing up ideas for comments to make later.
Four soldiers, US Army, came in, nodded to us, and sat around the larger unoccupied table. Not filling it, just taking it up. The dancer swam to them and took up a new dance, this one less a sensuous delight than an open invitation to carnality.
One of the army men gulped. And gulped again. He was all but drooling. Now that one would be clean, or as clean as the army could keep him, and he sure looked willing. Better, he'd have his own supply of rubbers.
No, the idiot was waving money at the dancer. The one-armed man came over to negotiate. Oscar watched them intently. Echo rolled his own curry burrito, his eyes flicking sideways on them. I felt eyes on me, though. Not Mike's. He also pointedly ignored the negotiations behind his left shoulder.
I focused on another man at the gulper's table. Yeah, he was the one watching me, all right. He was blond, with a thin mustache that was probably a lot more of a pain to keep manicured than it was worth.
I pushed myself to my feet, my gaze locked on his. “I need to use the head."
Mike rolled another burrito. “Watch his back, Oscar."
"No-go. I know where all my own parts are. I've been doing this without supervision for a good while now."
Mike gave a look I couldn't read, but Oscar sat back down. I looked at Mustache and stepped outside. The cold hit instantly, but didn't do a thing to cool my throbbing dick.
Mustache came out behind me. Looked like he'd shoved a cucumber under his fly. “Where?"
I jerked my head at a collapsed building across the street. Earthquake damage, and unless I missed my guess, there'd be a hollow space behind it, the remnants of a room. Unstable as hell, or it would be under repair by now. Then again, I was no longer the kid-goat who felt compelled to climb every building, tree, and pile of rocks in sight. The gaps in the foot-thick walls wouldn't block the wind but should give a couple of minutes of privacy.
Fuck
. A hunched figure crouched there, swathed in a soiled burqa, too wrinkled to show whether it had ever been pleated.
Mustache threw her a handful of coins. “Scram, Gramma."
I translated, giving a polite twist to his words.
A hand far too smooth to be a grandmother's gathered the coins. She limped away without a word.
Mustache opened his pants, shoved them to knee level, and turned to plant his hands on the cold rock of the broken wall, near a shard of blue tile. “You got all day, or what?"
My own mouth watered at the tight pair of buns he bared. But... “Got a rubber?"
He dug impatiently in a pocket and shoved the square packet at me. Lubed, of course. At least the lube gel would be warm, body temp. My job was to not let it get cold.
I rolled it on fast, my chest as tight as the fit. Then I grabbed his buns, spreading them so my thumbs pressed to either side of his asshole. It opened and winked at me, not quite closing. Oh, yeah, he was ready. More than ready. He pushed his feet farther apart, lifting his ass toward me.
I leaned forward, pressing my cockhead against that puckered little asshole.
"Do it.” He hissed. “
Do
it."
I pulled his hips back and pushed my thighs against his.
Oh, hot! Tight
! And yeah, the word was hot. I reached around to grab his cock, made a fist for him to fuck.
He grunted, swiveling his ass. “Harder!"
I set to fucking him. I pumped his ass hard, driving my rod in and out of that hot hole, feeling my balls swing. He slammed his ass back at me and forward to drive that cock into my fist. His balls brushed my wrist.
My own balls pulled up tight against me. Seething jizz hit the boiling point and scalded into my dick, hardening it. Felt like it was filling, packing in more jizz to let it spurt free in three, two—now!
My knees unlocked. I nearly fell, but held on to Mustache with one hand on his hip and one planted on the broken wall in front of him.
He bucked me off his back without a word, but continued humping my fist. I kneaded his rod, encouraging him, a wordless apology for my obvious failure to hit his sweet nut. After a few more thrusts, he stiffened and gasped and came in heated jets over my fingers and the stone wall.
I pulled up my pants quickly and waited, guarding his back, for the few seconds it would take for him to pull himself together.