Free The Last Infidel by Spikes Donovan

friend,” Jose said, “and you will wash her away, just like that!”
    “I was that close,” Cody said, holding his hands a foot apart in front of him.  “That close to getting out of here.  That checkpoint to the south wouldn’t have had chance against me.  It would’ve gone sky high and twice as wide and taken out the whole regiment camped there.”
    Jose drained his mug of whiskey and waved for another.  Then he leaned forward and looked closely at Cody’s face.  “Sky high?  What are you talking about?”
    “You don’t need to know,” Cody said.
    “Are you talking about a bomb?”
    “I told you I don’t want to talk about it, and I mean it.”
    “You’re just a little drunk, that’s all.  But you’d feel better if you had a few more drinks – so bottoms up!”
    “Why?  So you can get information from me?  That’s not going to happen.  I told you no already, so just die, Jose – okay?”
    “We can split it, seventy-thirty,” Jose said.  He sat up and leaned back, moving himself out of the way of the café’s proprietor, who poured a clear, sparkling liquid into Jose’s empty mug.
    The man started to top off Cody’s mug as well, but Cody placed his hand over it.  “And then she decides she wants to fight me,” he said.  “And that’s something we never did.”
    “Look,” Jose said.  “You don’t want to go getting mixed up with her again.  You just keep away from her.”
    “Why don’t you come with me?” Cody suggested.  “We’ll end up killing a couple hundred of those Muslim bastards, and we’ll tell everyone we did more than our fair share.  We go south, cross into Georgia, and I’ll live happily ever after without Tracy by my side.”
    “What did you tell Bashar’s men about your truck sitting there on the side of the road?”
    “I’m still working on that,” Cody said with a smirk on his face.  “But the bullet holes in the tailgate tell the story.  They chased me, I ran, and that was that.”
    “Do you think they’ll buy it?”
    “Only if they were buying it from you, Jose,” Cody said.  “Some of Bashar’s idiots are towing it in right now.”  He took a sip of his much-celebrated, Cannon County moonshine and looked around the old café.  The place was barely lit, even at noon.  Ten or so oil lamps, salvaged from the old antique store on Church Street, burning what was probably the last kerosene left to mankind, left a sweet smell in the air.
    Because he wanted to distract himself, Cody looked at the people sitting around him.  Men, every single last one of them.  Men whose wives and daughters, if they hadn’t escaped south when Murfreesboro fell, were now Islamic wives, whores, or dead.  But Bashar had kept these men alive.  These were the mechanics, carpenters, brick layers, plumbers – every tradesman needed to get the mosque finished by July fifth.  Every one of them, to the last man, were quartered in what was left of the old hardware store, sleeping in bunks and hammocks, eating breakfast from the same, long table on the bottom floor, pissing in the same rusty bucket that leaked and splashed and left a trail across the floor on the way to the gutter in the street.  Cody knew them all by name, had known them for years – some of them as classmates, some from church, others he’d locked up for one thing or another.
    The door to the café swung open with a bang and everyone in the room jumped.  Cody turned around, as did Jose beside him.  Others, acting is if they’d been expecting Jadhari, or some other Bashar lackey, rose to their feet before Jadhari, who in fact had just entered the café, uttered the words: “Everybody out on the street.”
    Cody and Jose got up and, through the front widows, they saw a farm wagon being pulled along by Cody’s blue F-150.  On the wagon sat a short cage, and in that cage were four young girls, all dressed in white.
    “I guess we know where your truck is,” Jose said, his face turning