The Battle of Gwinnett County (1)
My unit pulled into Norcross on July 8. This was pretty good time, considering that no cylinder patrol had mobilized in a dozen years, not counting what was going on in Minnesota. There was a sense of urgency but not worry, not yet. The brass decided to stage out of Norcross ’cause it was the last stop on the Southern Railroad before you reached Atlanta. According to scuttlebutt, the governor of Georgia had appealed to the President direct that we roll into Atlanta and “save the city”. Lucky for us that Prescott had been a CP man back when that meant something. He knew better than to run headlong into those things, and that carried down the line.
Anyway, with all respect for the position of the governor, it wasn’t our city and we knew we had time on our side. It’d probably be bad in Atlanta, proper, but we could just wait it out, track the walkers while they scouted the area. Wait for Grace, just like the handbook said. We were about to discover, the handbook needed rewriting.
I’d only been in the Army for a little under a year, but I’d already done my share of walker drills. ‘Course, they were only drills. No one in the States had seen a walker in a dozen years, maybe more. We had it all down on paper, but it was a little comical, really. We go out to the corn fields or wherever and chase around a pickup truck with a telephone pole sticking straight up and a sign in red, “Walker”. The officers were always trying to innovate new tactics to go with the new weaponry that’s been developed, but we only practiced “live” once, and the gear hardly worked then. Sometimes we didn’t even get Springfields and practiced with broomsticks.
In the event, the one was about as useful as the other, compared to heat rays and black clouds.