Resonance (Marauders #4) by Lina Andersson

kid for more than a couple of weeks probably had something to do with it, but also, it wasn’t the same when they weren’t in your life the way Alma was in Mitch’s, or Joshua in Mac’s.
    There was no way of knowing how he’d have reacted if Billie’d told him immediately that she was pregnant. It was the 21 st century, so it wasn’t likely it would’ve led to a shotgun wedding, not even Clyde was that conservative, but it would’ve been different to have been there from the very beginning.
    He realized that if he’d known, it wasn’t likely that he’d have ended up in Arizona and with the Marauders, but he assumed that it wasn’t much to dwell on.
    Shit happens, and Marines make due.

CHAPTER FOUR
    You and Uncle Zach
     
    ~oOo~
     
    TOMMY HAD NOT FAILED to see the irony in the fact that ‘get some!’ was the unofficial Marine Corps cheer, and he’d left the Marines to join a biker club who had very similar cheers.
    In the Marines it was used all the time, for different things; from something yelled at guys going out to battle, to stories about whorehouses in foreign countries. But mainly, it was just an expression of excitement, no matter the situation.
    Even if ‘get some!’ wasn’t exactly used in the same way in the Marauders, it was sure as fuck something they said to each other, but there, it was exclusively about getting pussy. It was used in a variety of ways, like how someone should ‘just stop being a dick and get some, ’ or asking if it had happened. Sometimes as a suggestion, like when they decided to put a meeting to a halt, have a beer, and ‘get some’ while they thought something over until the following day.
    There were hundreds of those little things and expressions that made Tommy remember his time in the Marines, and if he thought about the Marines, he thought about Zach—every fucking time.
    They’d been prepared for a lot of things before they left for their first deployment, Zach and him. Like how the most common combat-stress reaction when taking fire is to lose control of the bladder and bowel—one in four does that—so, naturally, taking a piss or a dump as soon as opportunity arises was a priority. No one wanted to be the guy who took a dump in his MOP suit. Especially since they didn’t take that suit off for weeks and tended to freeball in it. If possible, they’d used adult diapers, just to be on the safe side.
    Besides the adult diapers, there were other details most soldiers never mentioned to their civilian families at home. Like how their gasmask bag contained a package with not only pills that are for battling things like Anthrax and skin-blistering agents, but also seven—pretty fucking big—autoinjectors. They’d been trained to use those, and six of them were, just like the pills, different antidotes to use on themselves. Always on themselves, and if they needed to help someone out, it was that guy’s package they took them from. If shit hit the fan, you didn’t want to be the guy who died just because you hadn’t taken the time to take out the other guy’s injectors before shooting him up and used your own.
    The seventh syringe contained Valium, and that one actually was for a buddy in case he was too far gone. It wasn’t even mainly to help the dying buddy, but to stop him from flopping around and stressing the other soldiers.
    It had become a thing between Tommy and Zach to, before heading out, pat the bag and inform the other that they had their ‘chill-needle’ with them. Eventually they stopped patting the bag, and in the end it was something they screamed at each other: ‘stop fucking spazzing out or I’ll stab you with the chill-needle.’
    Tommy had been the driver of the first Humvee in the convoy, and Zach had been next to him as the team leader. They’d had each other’s backs, and had been chosen to lead since they were always calm. None of them panicked easily, which was pretty fucking important, since it could mean that they