“Your maxims are proverbs of ash;

your fortress walled in clay.”

-Job 13:12

Billy stayed back with Sean as he took rear guard, using the moon-cast tree shadows as cover. Bronson and Caan were in the lead. They were all in whispered contact with one another. The ping sounded off behind him and nothing—no, not nothing, a groan escaped from a man out on the meadow. The A-Team was coming due south across the meadow on the west side of the ranch. Sean was just beyond a massive battlement of boulders, out of line of sight with the water wight.

‘Three arrows,’ he thought.

Knocking one, he walked out into the open and yelled, “Incomming from the east, belly crawl.”

He could see the A-Team staggered out across the meadow, with Dumptruck Chuck and Back Hoe Joe now rolling west towards them. Drexler was last, staggering along with Browne over his shoulders, a big target. Sean yelled, “Here, whitey!” and loosed an arching arrow over Backhoe Joe towards the weird unicycle drill head in the distance. The arrow barely made a sound. Chuck, Brenner and Badshaw were crouching and crawling. But not Drex. The steely ping of the wight sounded in the distance.

“One, drop,” and as he fell sideways a whistle of steel sounded where he had stood, the displaced air brushing his right hand, which fell last. ‘Accurate.’

Drexler was hoofing past him, so Sean bolted up and ran for the ridge, hoping the two moving targets would cause a miss. Browne was hanging off of Drexler’s back looking at Sean upside down as his back bent backward and his broken legs were draped over Drexler’s shoulders and tucked under those Cube-Iron arms. Browne’s glazed eyes regarded him below a white grin, “Hero-ass cracker!”

He did not hear the ping, but saw blood spew from Browne’s left thigh as he yelled, “Motherfucker!” and Drex staggered side ways, almost falling but stalling, not in full understanding of how well he was being targeted.

Sean ran and tackled Browne whose legs crunched when their lower portions were driven to ground over Drex’s shoulders, a bolt passing just overhead to clang on unseen rocks to the west.

“Sarge, we are dialed in by a bolt gun. We have to crawl. With that they both grabbed an NFL hall of fame foot and dragged from the crawl, a good ten yards, Browne grinding his teeth in profane pain all the way, “Do-good, cracker-ass crackers, let my black ass die.”

The men hunkered nearer than they should have, none being soldiers, all caring for each other, until Sean barked, “Now, to the treeline,” and he and Drex rose and buddy-carried Browne like a stretcher with two broken poles. Up under cover, as the machinery took its time herding them, he examined Browne under the moonlight. “Bobby didn’t provide us with a single first aid kit. We got dropped into a kill box.”

Browne smiled, “Bet dat old fat Kate wins da stakes—you know dem cucks up at Mars playin’ da real game, layin’ credit on this shit.”

Both knees had been shattered, compound fractures, bleeding not too bad. His left hip had been transfixed with a foot long steel bolt. The left leg had been skewered likewise, and here the life blood pumped out as the femoral artery was pierced where the steel bolt had hit Drex’s steel shoulder plate on his bogus viking fantasy armor and bent, snagged on the artery. Browne could see in his eyes and chuckled, “Thank the Lord I don’t live to get chewed up by whatever those Martian faɡɡots have commin’ your way—nothin’ but crackers left in the box now, Drex…”

“Well, shoot, fellas, this just isn’t fun anymore,” groused Bradshaw.

Drex was about to cry tears of anger, wanting to go after the wight. Sean nudged him, “It’s a machine taking orbital orders. We need to pass this ridge and get to the next ridge line before that thing sights us in from this one. It’s a damned unicycle on caterpillar wheels.”

Drex hauled Browne over his shoulder and growled, “South by southwest; saw a road bed in the west, with your say so, Captain,” as he brushed past Chuck Heston, who hefted his muzzle-loader and the unlucky one that had passed from Clint to Jim to him, “I have the back trail, Sarge.”

Sean agreed, “I’m with the Captain, everyone on Drex—no more splitting up.”

“Whoo-rah to that My Dude,” snarled Drex as he took the lead, Bradshaw, Bronson, Caan, Saxon and Brenner tight behind.

“Sir, lets back up together, into the treeline.”

Chuck nodded, “This is terrible. The men that run us have rarely been true, or kind. But this, son, this is gratuitous. We are being used as pawns in a game that seems to have the object of erasing our name. Imagine how mean a game, if the point of chess were only taking pawns?”

Sean held the doeskin back of the older man, guiding him towards the pressure of his hand. Chucks’ clone being about 45, Sean was reminded that he too, was an organic, original man’s copy, his hand on the back of the living copy out of a less contrived past. Heston seemed to all of them, to be the best of their number, if only for his more articulate memory installation. As he guided Heston back up into the treeline under cover of that boulder outcropping, his sharing of that regard with the others was bolstered, “Glass, Drexler is a freak—good of heart though he is. He’s been extended quite a bit; the only one of us who is not a clone raised up as a resurrection for an atavistic oligarchy, a society with but a glimmer of a soul. But you, we all agree, modeled after a humble family man, you are the most human of us. We all secretly rooted for you in every playoff game against Drex—the regular man with a rock for discipline, a man of God.”

‘Don’t make me cry, dude,’ Sean shivered slightly, and Chucked turned and patted his hand in silent understanding, and cupped it in his of a warning.

“Glass, at your three o’clock. I can’t believe my eyes, out in the meadow, please confirm.”

The ridge line they were on was low and shallow, the next meadow, a dry lake bed, opening up under a sky increasingly cloaked in clouds to the southwest, bright lit by the moon in the eastern sky. The men were moving across in good order, half way to the next ridge, one clothed in much deeper evergreen, rising up to an actual crown of rock some 1,000 yards to the southwest. Drex was leading the men southwest across the dried lake to put that eminence just on their left, to get them away from the darned machinery.

Remarkably, in a tableaux of innocence, fifty paces from the thin wood-line that bordered the rising west end of the meadow, stood two figures, simply looking on as if at a parade on game day at the men crossing the dry lake bed. He had to close his eyes and look again. His observations came unbidden to his lips, “I’ll be, a boy and his dog.”

Billy then whined slightly at his ankles, announcing his presence with a paw on his boot, looking up at his new human with eyes that glowed with moonlit concern.