7 The Texas Hill Country.  August 1st.

Evans and Kyle spent all morning working on the yard, and they didn't talk much. The Vanguard was active in Texas now. One group seemed to be centered around Dallas. A second group around Houston. A third group was operating out of Austin. That group had hit Neuheim the night before and Esperanza del Rio the night before that. Neither was far from where they stood now.

In the middle of the day, when the heat was up, they stopped for lunch. After lunch, Kyle lounged in his room while Evans went to his workshop.

When afternoon ended and the evening began, and the air cooled and the sun began its descent, they returned to the yard, clearing brush and scraping clean tracts of dirt around the house. And when the sun was nothing more than an orange semi-circle on the western horizon, they stopped for the day. Evans stood and surveyed the work they'd done. Kyle surveyed his uncle.

"That's what a pile of brush looks like," Evans said. Kyle nodded. The brush pile of dead wood was as high as a man at the shoulder and over 100 feet long from end to end. It flanked a long section of the driveway that ran up to the house.

"Are we going to burn it?" Kyle asked.

"Not now. Not with a burn ban in effect. I think we'd be alright if we did though. Nothing around that brush pile in any direction but twenty feet of bare dirt. Unlikely a fire there would do anything but burn itself out."

"Let's check out the hole," Kyle said.

Evans said, "Okay."

They walked over to the hole they began earlier that summer. The hole was bigger now. Deeper and longer but not wider. The sides were shored up with used pallets and plywood. Kyle and Evans had piled up the broken rocks and loose dirt outside the hole and formed them into a parapet with embrasures. Kyle stood at the edge for a moment, then jumped down inside. He leaned against the edge of the hole. A spied a hunk of limestone. It was one of the pieces they broke apart with the expanding grout. Kyle spotted the seam of one of the boreholes and traced his finger along it. Bits of grout flaked off. Then Kyle sighted through one of the embrasures towards the long driveway.

"This ain't for brushfires, is it?" Kyle asked.

"It is not," his uncle said. He dropped into the hole beside Kyle.

"From here, we can observe the entire length of the driveway. The slope of the ground and the way we formed the dirt outside the hole make it hard for anybody on the driveway to tell this is more than just another piece of Texas. If somebody on the road were to take a knee or drop down completely, a man up here could still see them. Anybody caught on the drive wouldn't have a good way to run. They could keep going up to the house. They could go back the way they came. Or they could try charging up the hill towards us. Not much between here and there except bare ground. No cover. Nowhere to hide."

Kyle looked over the ground, seeing everything his uncle just pointed out. There was a direct line from their hole to the driveway to the brush pile on the opposite side.

"You planned this all out when I got here? Before maybe?" Kyle asked. Evans didn't answer that question either.

"We're close enough to the house that a man could get from the house into here pretty damn quick. But we're far enough away that somebody focused on the house wouldn't necessarily spot this hole."

"What were you doing in the workshop?" Kyle asked.

"The next step here is to build overhead cover. Run some logs or some railroad ties over the top, then cover that with a few feet of dirt. It doesn't look like the PVD have grenades. At least, they don't yet. They just got those choppers, as you call them. But there is still another month of summer. Ninety days until the election."

"You make forts like this before?" Kyle asked.

"I did when I was a combat engineer. That was before I went EOD and started playing with bombs."

"What were you working on after lunch? Something for this?" Kyle asked again. Evans looked at his watch. The shadows had gotten long. He looked back over his shoulder to the trail Kyle still ran down every morning.

"Let's check the laser."

The dazzler they mounted on the roof came on just like it was supposed to, and when they used the remote control to swing and pitch the repurposed camera system, everything worked as it should have. It was twilight now, and the beams of green laser light pulsed across the hills and danced amongst the oaks and the elms and the cedars.

"It won't work," Kyle said.

"What won't work?" Evans asked.

"The dazzler. It won't work. This isn't the Middle East."

"Don't I know it," Evans said.

Kyle looked at his uncle in frustration. He was tired of more of his uncle's evasions and non-answers. Kyle went on.

"It won't work. That dazzler isn't going to see the scare the vanguard off."

"It'll work," Evans said. Kyle shook his head.

"Once the PVD see the laser show, they're going to come marching right up the driveway. It isn't going to work."

"It'll work," Evans repeated. He checked his watch. "Let's go inside and get some dinner before the bugs get us."

"You want to watch the live streams after dinner?" Kyle asked.

"I don't want to, but we will," Evans replied.