“Look away, everybody,” he yelled.
I know the warning was mainly for the girls, but I also looked away too and watched as Ben tried to jimmy the door open. We all jumped as a second blast rang out and the agonized yips were abruptly silenced. When it was done, I turned around with my revolver in hand as Luke pulled a blanket from one of the packs and covered the dead dog before joining us on the porch.
Luke and I both watched the rest of the dogs with our guns ready. They had retreated to the road and had formed into a pack once again, watching us as warily as we watched them.
Behind us, Ben finally gave up trying to jimmy the door and attempted to ram it open with his shoulder. Sarah began tugging at the elbow of his parka. He shrugged her off and gave the door another ineffectual charge with his shoulder. Sarah didn’t give up though.
Frustrated, Ben looked down at her.
“What?!”
She held up the shiny key she had pulled from under the corner of the welcome mat. Ben rubbed his shoulder sheepishly.
“Thanks,” he mumbled, and took the key. With my adrenalin running high, I had to suppress a crazy, inappropriate (given what had just happened to the dog) giggle.
Luke and I stood guard as the rest piled inside. The dogs still milled aimlessly, sniffing the air in our direction, but hadn’t worked up the courage to come back for more. I motioned Luke inside and without taking my eyes off the pack, I stepped in behind him.
The house was cold and there was no electricity or running water, or any sign that anybody had been there recently. Brooke made the mistake of opening the refrigerator door, discovering the moldering remains of a Christmas meal before slamming it closed again. Not before the smell escaped though.
“Brooke!” barked Ben, like a disappointed parent.
“Woops, sorry!” said Brooke and pulled a face behind his back, drawing a laugh from Sarah.
Luke started to up the stairs, but about halfway up encountered a smell that made the rotting food in the fridge smell like Potpourri. We didn’t talk about what might be causing the stench, just agreed we would stay on the ground floor.
We all traipsed into the living room. One thing the place did have going for it was a big fireplace with a dozen or so logs sitting in the box next to it.
“Can we have a fire, Isaac, please?” Sarah asked.
“Tonight, maybe, when the smoke won’t be as noticeable,” I said. “That’s if no one else objects.”
“Sounds good to me, man,” Luke said. “I feel like it’s been ages since I’ve been really warm.”
“I’m going to see if there is anything edible in this place,” Ben said, moving toward the doorway to the kitchen.
“I’ll help you,” his sister said, following him.
“Should we get our stuff from the bikes?” Luke asked.
“The dogs are still out there,” I said, peering through the aluminum venetian blinds.
They had finally gotten the gumption to come close to the house and were sniffing around their fallen pack mate. One of them, the big bristling Alsatian, sniffed at the dead pit bull, then bit into its leg.
A mutt approached and the Alsatian released the leg long enough to snap at him before chowing down again. Realizing there was food on offer, the rest of the dogs closed in and proceeded to scramble and fight over their former pack mate.
Feeling sick, I let the slats of the blind snap back into place.
“We’ll have to wait,” I said, not telling them what I’d just witnessed.
“Hopefully they don’t get into our stuff.”
“Yeah.”
In the kitchen cupboards the twins found lots of canned food, including Irish Stew and baked beans and Campbell’s soups. We all agreed that a few cans of Irish stew would make an excellent supper that night; frankly, we were all sick of baked beans in our supplies stack and knew they would be better cold than other foods while travelling.
We spent the remainder of the afternoon searching the ground floor of the big house for anything that would prove useful on our trip. Very little of what we found was actually suitable, although Sarah did uncover a box of small candy canes that we eagerly tore into.
Ben discovered an old boom box-style radio with working batteries in the kitchen and we turned it on. Running it through the FM dial, we expected to hear only static. We were shocked when we found a couple of the stations broadcasting.
Our rising hopes crashed when we realized that the stations were broadcasting in Chinese. Brooke, who had taken Mandarin in school for a year, said one was broadcasting in Mandarin and she wasn’t sure about the other, although we figured it had to be Cantonese.
She was able to make out some of the words in the Mandarin broadcast, enough to tell that it was repeating the same few sentences over and over again but couldn’t tell us what the message was.
“Sorry, I only took the subject because my mates did.”
We flicked to AM stations, and after some frustration, we were able to find the coded message about the safe haven again, although it was now on a different frequency. Smart. It renewed my hope that if we did find this place, it would be well-organized and offer real safety. To my untrained ears, the series of beeps sounded the same as before, so after a while we shut it off.
“We should take the batteries when we leave, who can say when we’ll come across more with juice in them,” Luke said.
By then it was getting dark, so we decided to go ahead and light the fire. I wanted to wait until it was fully dark, but the others were impatient and the look of longing on Sarah’s face melted my resistance.
We lit the fire just as dusk fell.
As the stew simmered over the fire, Sarah pulled out some old board games she had found under the sofa in the living room.
“We should play one,” she said.
“What have you got there?” Luke asked.
“Let’s see, Backgammon, Monopoly, Trouble and ... Chinese Checkers,” she said, reading off the boxes. We were all thinking it but, as usual, it was Luke who made the move. He picked up the Chinese Checkers box and tossed it onto the fire.
“Screw the Chinese!”
We watched silently as the flames licked the edge of the worn box before it caught alight and burned. It was a childish gesture of defiance, but somehow it made me feel better, and I could tell from the faces of the others that they felt the same.
“So, I guess it’ll have to be Monopoly ... or Trouble, if one of us sits out,” Brooke said.
“If you guys want to play Trouble, go ahead,” I said. “I can watch the stew.”
“No,” Sarah shook her head. “We all have to play. Let’s play Monopoly.”
So that’s what we did. It was like there was an unspoken agreement to give her everything she wanted that night.
We played, and talked, and laughed, and had fun, truly enjoying ourselves for the first time since we had all come together. For that few hours we managed to forget the horrors of the previous few weeks and simply be kids.
The stew was delicious after days of cold food and we all slept well that night, warm and comfortable in front of the fire. I wished we could have stayed there a few more days, or even permanently, but I knew that was not going to be possible.
Luke and I decided that we were going to have to move on the next morning and travel hard before we found a place to hole up for a few hours before making a night time dash across Worcester.
As I nodded off, I hoped that the dead pit bull had provided the pack with enough food to lose interest in us, otherwise our passage out of there and to the city would be even more dangerous.
After what happened the next morning, I stopped putting so much faith in hope.
14
I was in the kitchen gathering cans to take with us when it happened. A single piercing scream that transformed into shrieks of pain. I rushed into the living room, pulling my revolver from my pocket as I ran.
The front door was open and I burst through to find Sarah, su
rrounded by dogs on the lawn about near where we’d left the bikes. Luke was already on the porch with the shotgun in his hands, but I could tell he was hesitant to shoot for fear of hitting Sarah.
I brought the .38 up and pulled the trigger. It jumped in my hand as the report rang out. My aim was purposefully over the heads of the dogs and Sarah to scare them away; it didn’t work. Some of the dogs shrank away but others continued tearing at her. Her bloodcurdling screams were muffled as she had been pushed face down into the snow by their assault.
At the sound of my shot, Luke’s hesitation broke and he too leveled his gun, aiming at one of the dogs furthest away from Sarah. He squeezed the trigger and the shotgun boomed. The Alsatian pitched over and lay twitching in the snow.
The pack took more notice of us then, with all but one, a heavy American bulldog, forgetting Sarah and watching us warily, torn between food and self-preservation. The bulldog continued ripping at Sarah’s shoulder and she screamed in agony.
I had a clean shot at a cadaverously thin Doberman and hit it in the head.
From behind me there was a shout and Ben rushed past us, charging at the dogs. He had the poker from the fireplace and swung it like a mad man.
“Bloody bastards! Leave her alone!”
The remaining dogs yelped and gave ground before him, but not quickly enough. Ben brought the bar of the poker down hard upon the muscled back of the bulldog and it squealed, turning to snarl at its attacker. Ben swung again, striking it on the side of its thick skull. It yelped before stumbling off in a weird drunken manner.
The last three dogs watched him just out of reach, their hackles raised, but not backing off. Ben picked Sarah up, hoisting her small, bleeding form over his shoulder.
He ran toward the porch with her and had almost made it when an emaciated mutt sank its teeth into the backside of his ski pants. Ben screamed in agony and dropped Sarah onto the steps, while swinging behind him with the poker in a desperate attempt to dislodge the dog’s jaw.
Luke and I stepped forward at the same time. I grabbed Sarah under the arms and heaved her up onto the porch before picking her up. Just before I turned I saw Luke place the shotgun against the mutt’s chest and pulled the trigger. The last of the dogs scattered, and I heard Luke firing off more shots as I took Sarah inside.
Placing Sarah gently in front of the fireplace, I looked her over as the others gathered around. She was unconscious, for which I was thankful. Her wounds were horrific.
Her right arm and shoulder were mangled, and she had multiple bites on her other arm and on both legs. She was bleeding profusely from the shoulder and, even as a 15-year old with no medical training, I knew that was not a good thing. Luke came in, helping Ben over to us; Ben was limping a little, white fluff protruding from the rips in his ski pants. He seemed to be angry rather than hurt.
Brooke stood frozen in the kitchen, her face pale with shock.
“Is she okay?” Luke asked.
“Does she look okay?” I snapped. “What the hell was she doing out there?”
“She went out to get something from her bike basket. I told her not to go, but she snuck out.”
“We ... I ... said that we’d protect her,” I said, as rage and anguish fought for control of my emotions, only realizing later that it was the first time I had felt those things since the death of my parents and sister. “Brooke, go to the bathroom, see if there are some clean towels. We need to try to stop the bleeding.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get to her faster, Isaac,” Ben said, sitting awkwardly on a living room chair with his wounded backside half off the chair. “If I’d been faster maybe ...”
“No blame is going to be passed around here today,” I said, my voice cracking. “We need to look out for each other, but we also all need to be responsible for ourselves.”
“Fuck!”
It was the first time I had ever heard Luke use an obscenity stronger than ‘crap’ and I heard anguish, anger and, perhaps, regret in it.
We did what we could to staunch the bleeding and I made the call to build a fire in the fireplace to keep her warm. While it was dangerous to light a fire in the day, it seemed important to keep her comfortable.
Brooke sat with Sarah’s head in her lap in front of the fire, while I pressed towels to the wounds. Brooke had also found some peroxide and I used it as a disinfectant. Luke disappeared and came back with an old power cord which he tried without much success to use as a tourniquet on her mangled shoulder.
We sat like that for an hour, changing the towels as they became soaked. Eventually Sarah stopped bleeding. I was relieved at first, until I realized that her chest wasn’t moving.
Her pale face was as peaceful and calm as I’d ever seen it.
“At least she’s stopped bleeding,” Brooke said, using her finger to wipe a strand of hair from Sarah’s brow. “Maybe now she can start getting better.”
Luke, his face serious, looked at me and shook his head. I remembered a line from a book I’d read a long time ago: ‘The dead don’t bleed.’
Brooke continued to hold Sarah’s head while I stood up and went to her brother.
Ben was standing at the front window, leaning against the sill and looking out at the bloody snow and dead dogs scattered over the ground.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I must say I’ve been better,” Ben said with a grimace. “But after looking it over in the bathroom mirror, the bite on my bum isn’t nearly as bad as it feels. I might be limping for a couple of days, but I’ll live. Lucky I had jeans on under my snow pants; his teeth didn’t break the skin, but it’s pretty bruised.” He looked at me, perhaps sensing that I wasn’t only there to check up on him. “Sarah?”
“She’s gone,” I said quietly. “Brooke doesn’t realize it yet, but she went a few minutes ago.”
“Damn it,” Ben said, shaking his head. “CPR? Shouldn’t we try…?”
“It would’ve been no use. We couldn’t stop the bleeding from her shoulder, it must have been an artery.”
He looked like he wanted to cry.
“Poor Sarah ... do you want me to talk to Brooke?”
“If you could, I just don’t know what to say.”
He nodded and pushed himself back from the wall.
“I can’t say I know what to say either,” he said and started limping to where his sister sat by the fireplace, still holding Sarah, and smoothing down her hair.
I walked out onto the front porch, hand on the revolver in my pocket in case the dogs had returned. They were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t know what to do. Should we try to bury Sarah? Just leave her body behind? I walked down the porch steps and gave the stiffening body of the Doberman a kick to the side.
Tears spilled from my eyes, but this time rage won out and I began kicking the dead animal over and over, again and again, as I let out a muttered string of obscenities.
Finally, I sat down on the steps, breathing heavily, the tears now cold on my cheeks.
“Isaac?” Luke said from the doorway. “Isaac, I think we need to get out of here.”
I wiped the tears from my face and stood up to look at him. He pointed into the sky without looking up and it was then I heard the faint rumble of a helicopter in the distance.
I looked up. The smoke from our chimney was rising, stark white against the slate gray sky.
“Quick, let’s grab what we can and go,” I said, springing into action. “We’ll have to go on foot and try to stay in the trees.”
Luckily, much of the land on either side of the road we’d followed to this point had been lightly forested.
“What about Sarah?” he asked, as I rushed to the bikes and started pulling out anything useful and light enough to carry on foot.
“We’ll have to leave her here,” I said, although the very thought of it pained me. “We can’t take her with us and we don’t have any time to bury her ...”
“No. We can’t leave her like that,” he said, defiantly.
“How about we set the house alight and cremate her, so she isn’t eaten by animals or left rotting like the people upstairs?” he suggested. “It might also distract the helicopter.”
“Yes, yes, alright, do it quick while I get the others out.”
Ben stood helplessly over Brooke as she held Sarah close, crying silently.
“We have to go, quickly!” I shouted. “The Chinese will be here soon.”
Ben attempted to pull Brooke’s hand, but she resisted and went back to stroking Sarah’s hair. I ran to Ben and handed him the pack I’d hurriedly loaded.
“Go!”
I knelt beside Brooke and grasped her chin, gently tilting her face to meet my gaze.
“Brooke, Sarah’s gone.” I said. Looking in her eyes. “If we don’t go now, right now, we’ll be killed too.”
The message seemed to get through and, still weeping, she slowly slid her legs out from under Sarah and eased her head onto the blanket.
“Hurry! They’re getting closer!”
Ben, Brooke and I ran around like maniacs gathering what belongings we could as quickly as possible as Luke began splashing kerosene over the sitting room floor and furniture.
“Enough, go!” I yelled, stopping the twins after a minute. The choppers were too close.
Luke bent over Sarah and placed a sheet over her before kissing her shrouded forehead. That small heartfelt gesture was what amounted to her funeral and, as the noise of the chopper blades got louder, he poured kerosene over her before placing the tin to the side and striking a match. Whump! The fuel ignited and we ran out into the cold.
We hid in the cover of the trees a quarter mile away and watched the oily smoke rise into the sky as two helicopters circled like vultures over a carcass. Brooke’s wracking sobs were the only sound that interrupted the heavy chop, chop, chop of the rotor blades.
15
The bare, dead branches of the deciduous trees, the most common in that area, didn’t provide much cover, but luckily we had found a copse of spruce trees to crouch under as we watched. Thankfully, the helicopters didn’t land and after ten or so minutes, they finished circling and departed.
America Falls (Book 1): Hell Week Page 8
