Free Hard Target by James Rouch

temporary section leader to rise to his clumsy bait, Dooley sought other fish. He cast round and found Burke. ‘How’d your sergeant manage to barbecue himself like that, was he too slow backing off the heat and friction caused by you rushing about?’
    ‘Could be.’ Burke stretched slowly, and when he’d finished went back to dreamily gazing at the banded green landscape on the driver’s screen.
    Though he wasn’t achieving what he’d hoped, Dooley persisted. ‘Don’t you do anything that might strain you, wouldn’t like you to wear yourself out before your time.’
‘No danger, mate, no danger.’ Between yawns Burke looked at his watch, shook it, held it to his ear and then, finding his arm made an adequate pillow on the bulkhead, went to sleep.
    ‘Give up, man. You ain’t gonna get any of this crowd going, you’ll have to work it off some other way.’
‘Piss off.’ Ignoring the black, Dooley tried willing the pain in his back to go away, it wouldn’t. Shit, it was always the same. The doc had said it was just tension, fuck him, what did he know. There was only one way to ease it, beside going into action. Had they been anywhere but in the centre of a minefield he’d have gone out and smashed to pieces the first inanimate object he encountered. That had worked before. He couldn’t do that here, instead he roughly barged to the front of the compartment, and stepped out on to the ramp.
    Collins heard the massive roaring bellow, and shivered. -Long ago he’d come to the conclusion that the world must be mad to permit such an insanely dangerous conflict; now he felt he was fighting it with men who were dangerously insane.
    The war had taken them all, and turned them inside out. It was as though every last human trait in them, whether for good or evil, was being forced to the fore as their only remaining defence against the totally dehumanising effect of the Zone.
    As Dooley’s shout was first caught then mercifully smothered by the dense trees, it occurred to Collins, to wonder how long it would be before he became a shell, a husk, labelled only by extremes of mood as human. When Libby had been chosen to go with Hyde and Revell he’d thought himself lucky to be left behind. Now, as he watched Clarence’s legs continually circling as he laboriously hand cranked the turret round in a perpetual search of a target, he reconsidered.
    The sun had been up an hour before the trio finally extricated themselves from the wooded graveyard of men and machines that hid their transport. Tracks that Hyde remembered had ceased to exist, reclaimed by the unchecked growth that also sought to conceal the wrecked and gutted remains of forty or more Russian armoured personnel carriers. Here and there, beside a trackless rusted hulk, the dull white bone dome of a fox-gnawed skull showed among the rank grass and weeds.
    Close to the perimeter of the woods there was more recent evidence of violence. The rotting remains of bodies still bearing traces of civilian clothes lay inside the flimsy barricade that girded the lethal area.
    There were already a few refugees about, some working in small groups gleaning missed corners of fields for a few ears of half-ripened barley: others, in twos and threes, staggered along under the weight of ill-trimmed logs. It was like viewing the periphery of a bizarre human ants’ nest, the object of whose workers was obscure and the result of whose labours were pathetic.
    No one looked at the three men who trudged along the dusty well-worn path towards the camp, even though they passed quite close to some of the later risers.
    The dress of most was as incongruous and ill matched as that of Revell and his companions. Among a group of middle-aged men squabbling and coming near to blows over a wormy sugar-beet, one wore a tattered raincoat over shorts and roll- neck jumper, another sported a paint-daubed pair of overalls and golf cap and a third, shoeless and carrying a rolled-up plastic cycle cape,