Mike thought to himself “This town is not what it used to be.” They were lying on their stomachs on the cold damp ground where the tree line met the back yard. The Mayor's house was a mile at most from any of one of their houses but they had hiked eight miles through the woods to avoid being seen. Stacey took everything deadly serious now and had them wear corsets and tie pieces of wood to different parts of their bodies so they were forced to change the way they moved, they added padding underneath their clothes to change the shapes of their bodies, and each had on a mask.. With curfew and all it was hard to imagine who would see them but there were at least eight people who lived in the neighborhood who had seen him almost every dy of his life and could spot him from a mile off. He could recognize most of them at a distance just by how they ran their finger’s through their hair or stepped off the sidewalk. “There is nothing more difficult than trying to go unrecognized amongst your neighbors. ?”
Stacy had gone from being a buddy to constantly correcting them and showing them what they were doing wrong. Somehow he had made contact with the resistance or they had made contact with him; he wouldn't talk about it much. He hadn't even asked them if they wanted to join, he just drafted them. “This is the way it is” he had said. For a second they weren't sure if he was being serious, but only for a second, Stacey wasn't really a guy to joke that way. Everyone knew he was a fair guy, a serious guy. He had tried to join up at the start of the war but they wouldn’t take him, what with his mom and all his sisters depending on him. Mike had always known that something like this would happen, things couldn't go on the way they were forever.
During their second debrief for the action Stacey’s he had told them that above everything else they had to hide their identities. He drilled it into them, “Once we get moving we can not talk.” To do that they had to follow plans and timetables exactly; plus they had to learn a bunch of military sign language. Mike had struggled with it. They were all out of their element but Stacey was not fucking around, He said that if they were in danger of being found out, and somebody spoke or worst, used a name he would kill them. At first he and Joe and Slim and Rick had half smirked and looked at each other, like “What's this guy talking about?” but they realized he wan't kidding and the room became heavy and tense. “We aren’t friends anymore. Understand? You are a soldier now. I’m your commanding officer and if you disobey order’s, those are all grounds for punishmen. And right now we don’t have any jails so we don’t have many options for types of punishment.” Mike couldn’t have been more relieved when Marge knocked on the garage door and poked her head in to ask if anybody wanted a ham sandwich. They were all sitting on lawn chairs in a half circle looking out on the driveway, the garage door was open and it was a balmy Summer Georgia night; they each had a beer in their hands and they all looked up at her with shocked confused looks. “Ham sandwiched boys. You’ve heard of ham sandwiches, right?”
“Yes, ma’am”. He felt guilty that they were hiding things from her, so he turned awkwardly away and realized that he was going to start lying a lot more. Stacey was easy as day, “That sounds great honey. Can you give us maybe half an hour. We’ll come in the house. That way the boy’s can visit some with the kids.” She smiled and closed the door. Stacey came right back to it, “These aren’t nice things to talk about but this is how it is now. We have only a couple of things on our side and one of them is that we know each other and we trust each other but that’s our weakness too. We’ve got habits, we let things slide. We argue. That’s all over now, see. You think you can just go back to your regular life because your at home, but you can't. I have orders and so do you. There's no army without discipline. This isn't our home anymore anyway, it belongs to them until we take it back. “It’ll all be different after we do this mission. After this we’ll all be different. Alright, let’s go over it again.”