“You’re over-hunting the area,” Mel told me. “Like what the DNR said in Michigan when we were asking Lisa’s family about hunting.”
“Yeah, probably just like that,” Jamie agreed, and then to me, “What would you use as bait?”
“Well…” I struggled for the word, to see how squeamish she was. “Rat innards sometimes. Leftover scraps of hide and fur from previous kills. Anything with the scent of blood.”
“You know, I hope you get to meet my husband someday. He’d love you,” Jamie said, giving my arm a friendly squeeze. “Where’s the next one?”
“Ok, so why are you pouring that ammonia out?” Jamie said, plugging her nose.
“Just watch, and keep the net ready,” I told them.
Angry squeaks echoed and several forms dashed out of the rat hole in the soft sand where the tunnel wall intersected with an old sub-basement of a building. The tunnels were lousy with rat holes the closer to the surface you got, and we were only about ten feet down, in an old forgotten part near the river. The wooden pilings supporting the streets above would have given city engineers heart attacks if they’d realized how much of the structures above were being supported by hundred-year-old timber.
“I hear them, but I don’t…”
Several dark forms burst from the rat hole, and both girls dove on the handle of the landing net I’d had them place over the rat hole. Two or three large rats were stuck immediately and before they could turn directions, I gave the signal. They turned the handle and lifted it, swinging the rats away from a quick escape.
“Give them here,” I said, picking up a piece of re-bar I’d brought for just this occasion.
Mel was the only one horrified when I hit them once sharply on the head, breaking their necks. I’d had to do it as a matter of protecting my food source before the EMP. Now, they were the food source of sorts.
“Ugggg,” Jamie said. “Dog is one thing, but eating rat is another.”
“I know,” I told her. “The rest of the traps were empty, though.”
They had been empty. It had been another busy day. That’s why I’d gone to this section of tunnels. It had been lousy with rats and when I’d first moved underground, I’d been driven out by their relentless numbers and the fact they wouldn’t leave my food alone. I’d had to go so far as cooking and eating somewhere else until an old hobo had told me about a hundred-ten proof ammonia to run them off. It worked, but it stank. In the end, it was easier just to go somewhere else than always fight them. Now, I was using a slight variation from what the old coot had told me.
“What do you do if the hole doesn’t go straight down?” Mel asked, after making a noise that sounded a lot like “gurk”.
“I use this,” I said, pulling out an old plumber’s snake.
“I don’t get it?”
Despite her horror, her stomach rumbled, and both me and her mother gave her an amused grin.
“That’s ok. This is the easy one.”
I unrolled the old school plumbers snake. It was a long flexible piece of metal with a curved hook on the very end. It was easily ten to twelve feet long.
“So, you put that in the hole and go fishing for them? Doesn’t that hurt them?” she asked me.
I had thought about it, but I hadn’t felt comfortable with it either. I held up the end to show her.
“Soak a rag in ammonia, stick it on the end here, and fish that down the hole. You’ll know if there’s a critter in there by the sound they make. Just fish the snake in while standing on the landing net. When they come bolting out like these three did, you bop them and Bon appetite.”
Again, she made a gagging sound and it almost looked as if she had dry heaves until she slowly straightened up.
“This is so gross,” Mel said.
“Keeps us fed,” I told her.
“I bet the ladies love you. Fine wine, some cheese, and broiled rat done medium rare,” Jamie told me, grinning.
“You’re so…” Mel ran to the side of the tunnel and started dry heaving again.
“If you finally get sick, we’ll set a trap by it,” I told her.
“Just… Stop…” she begged between some wet-sounding burps.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Jamie, half laughing. “I haven’t… I mean… I know this is bad, but I’m seeing how gross this is through her eyes and it’s…”
“None of us would be doing this if the lights were on and Speedway had Tornados, two for $2.”
“Exactly,” I told her.
“Oh God, don’t talk about food,” Mel begged.
“You want to try the snake out?” I asked Jamie.
She nodded, and after a bit, her daughter joined her. In a couple of days, we’d be scouting soon, and I’d need everyone’s help to do it.
7
Jeremy made it, but I was almost dancing with worry. I could see Danielle shooting me death glares, but just as I was loading my shotgun, one of the girls came running down the tunnel to announce his arrival, shouting that we’d have a big meal tonight. That brought smiles to everybody’s faces. Sure, we’d brought in meat, but nothing excited the kids like a big meal. I held back the urge to go look and see what he’d caught, but when he stepped through the doorway my eyes widened in shock.
A small deer was over his shoulder and he was sweating with the weight of it. Where or how he’d found one, let alone killed it without a gun, boggled the mind. No matter what though, it was a meat that I craved and I could do a lot with it.
“Is that… Oh, wow,” Danielle said as he dropped the deer on the concrete near the mez.
“How did you get that?” I asked him, unable to hold back any longer. “And where’s the stuff? No luck trading?”
“Oh yeah, I got it all. I just couldn’t carry everything at once, so I had to cache some and bring this. I figured the sooner Danielle got cooking…”
She slugged him on the shoulder, but she was smiling at him, “Where did you get it?” she asked.
“I was going through an old house at the edge of town. I was looking for the usual; medicines we could use, more shells… and I saw something flash by me. I figured the house had already been pretty much tossed, cuz I found the door open… so I didn’t know if I should bolt out of there or hide, until this one darted past me. It had gotten into the house, so I just closed the door and… I mean, it’s here.”
I looked at it and didn’t see any obvious punctures or shots, so he had to have clubbed it or something else. I looked around, and the kids were staring at it hungrily, so I understood why he didn’t just come right out and say it.
“You did good,” I told him. “What about the other stuff on the wish list?”
“The bathroom supplies? Yeah, those I got, but I don’t know why you want them.”
“That’s ok,” I told him. “As long as you got them.”
“Ok, cool. I got them. Hey, I gave the Doc your note. She told me she’s ready whenever you are and said she can come down and visit if it would help.”
I nodded. I knew it had to be done, and if she were willing to swallow her fears and come down here, I could do the same. I had to do it for Mouse’s sake.
“What was in the note?” Danielle asked.
“I told her I talked to Mouse about it, and that she’d like to meet the Doc someday.”
“That’s what the little squirt was talking about?” Danielle asked, ruffling the kid’s tousled hair.
“Don’t make me get the brush out!” Mouse told her sternly and I bust up laughing.
I knew the diminutive six-year-old wasn’t talking about spanking the almost nineteen-year-old Danielle with it, rather she was mad about her hair… but once the mental image was locked into place, I couldn’t hold back. Everyone else except Danielle, was in the same boat, Jeremy included.
“That isn’t that funny,” Danielle told him.
“It kind of is,” he said, rolling his shoulders to loosen the tension.
“Whatever we don’t eat tonight, we’ll h
ave to get it prepared to save,” I told everyone.
“That sounds awesome,” Mel said, “What are you going to do? Can it, smoke it, salt it? My dad likes to do a lot of that stuff and he makes some really good jerky…” her words petered out and tears filled her eyes.
We all fell silent at that.
“I’ll get going on the deer if you guys want to get the cook fire and the smoker fired up down the tunnel,” I told them.
“You have a smoker down here?” Mel asked, trying to change the subject.
“Yeah,” I said smiling, “It’s pretty crude, but it works. Want to see it after I butcher the deer and the…?” I motioned to the vermin we had trapped.
“Yeah, I just don’t know if I can watch… you know...” she said.
“Did she puke?” Danielle asked wickedly. “When you bopped them?”
“Almost, but it was when her mom started talking about wine, cheese and braised…”
The kid turned green and ran towards the back of the mez with her hands over her ears.
“She’s new at this,” Jamie admonished me. “She can survive, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t get grossed out.”
“Yeah, it’s a girl thing,” Danielle said after a second. “I’ll go talk to her.”
“Thanks,” her mom said and watched as she left. “So Dick, you want a hand with this?”
“This is the smoker?” Mel asked in disbelief.
“Yup. Beauty, isn’t she?”
“It’s just a room with coat hangers.” The disappointment in her voice was apparent.
“It’s not that bad. See? There, we use the coals and wet wood to make the smoke.”
“I see that, but… It’s not a little box. How is this even… I mean, doesn’t it need to be warm to cook the meat?”
“No, with a room this size, it’s more like cold smoking,” I told her.
The room was about six feet in diameter and eight feet long. It had watertight access doors on either end. I thought it had been a double fail-safe measure put in, so if major flooding happened, it would stop the water before it hit the critical utilities in the section we were in. It was in an older part of the tunnel system, where the construction crews would drill a hole from the street down to make sure the tunnels went in a straight line. This was such a section.
“Look, see that?” I told her pointing out the three-inch diameter hole in the ceiling.
“Yeah?”
“That’s one of the holes that was drilled to keep the tunnels straight when they were digging out down here. They left some of them open, so they could get fresh air down here and the air didn’t get so bad.”
“So that one opens up somewhere?” she asked, looking up.
“Yeah, I think into a sub-basement. There’d be no way for anybody to find us, though. So, it’s perfect.”
“So… how does the air get in?” Jamie asked, looking in.
“Remember those flood valves under the door hatch?” I asked, thinking I had shown her them.
“Sure, they’re kept closed and the door shut. You’re supposed to open the small valves to see if the room is flooded, right?” she asked me.
“Yeah. So, what we’re going to do, since they are close to the ground, is open up one side of them up, so the air can flow in. Since it’s low to the ground, the smoke doesn’t escape all that well.”
“Is that a smudge pot?” Jamie asked, pointing to the metal container full of ash.
“I’m not really sure. We’ve used it, though. It must have been a part of something down here. It’s too big and heavy to do more than nudge it around. We let the coals build up and then start adding wood that’s been soaked in clean water for our smoke. As long as we don’t add too much at once, we can keep it going for a long time.”
“And this is where you make your BBQ rat? Who knew that there’d be a gourmet BBQ man living under Chicago,” Mel told me, smirking.
“I don’t know about all of that, Maggie,” I told her “But we load the meat up on the hangers, hang them off the old conduit and get the fire going…”
They were looking at me funny and I had to stop myself.
“I’m sorry,” I told them. “I did it again, didn’t I, I slipped up. I know you’re not Maggie, it’s just that…”
God, I felt so stupid. It was bad enough to feel like I’d got a screw loose, but when I acted like it over and over, I started to wonder that maybe I really did have a screw loose. Plus, they both were looking at me in a pitying way. I didn’t want their pity. I didn’t mean—
“Hey, it’s ok,” Mel said walking over to me. “If you slip up and call me Maggie, that’s cool. You saved us from those guys. I just look at it like, I remind you of your daughter. It doesn’t creep me out or anything.”
I felt about three-feet tall.
“I know you aren’t really Maggie. It was just a slip of the tongue. It wasn’t before when I ‘knew’ you were my daughter, but I was wrong. I was just…”
“Is it PTSD?” Jamie asked me suddenly.
I nodded. It was that and a whole ball of guilt and bottled emotions battling around inside of me, all at once. I felt like I had exposed wiring some days and when I got stressed out... some of the bare wires shorted out on each other. I was never violent, more… confused.
“Didn’t the VA try to help you?” Mel’s mother asked me again.
“Well, yeah, but getting appointments sucked. I couldn’t get in often enough to get my medicine refilled before I’d run out of it. I was already in the process of a divorce and after a while, I stopped caring, I guess,” I admitted. “I was too stuck inside of my own head.”
“Well, at least some good came out of it,” Mel told me brightly and took one of the big platters of meat we’d brought with us.
I stared at her for a second, trying to figure out if she was making fun of me or not. She took down a hanger and started laying the thinly cut strips of meat across them. When she’d finished, she replaced the hanger and got another one. I just stared.
“What?” she asked.
“What good came out of it?” I asked her.
“Well, for whatever reason, God led us to you, for better or worse. When we needed help, you saved us. By the look of it, you saved a lot of others, too. There were people on the street when we were taken. They scattered and ran away. My mom says when she first saw you, you were running right at the fight and didn’t let up until we were safe. So, that might be a little selfish of me, but thank you for being you, no matter what.”
In one simple breath of air and a handful of words, the girl had totally disarmed me. I looked her over, cocking my head and considering her words. She was only fourteen or fifteen, but she was way too wise for most kids her age. Hell, that was something I’d never heard from most grown men. One of the psychologists at the VA had gotten through to me and had totally disarmed me the way this young girl had just done, but he’d gotten transferred to Germany and I’d had to start over with a new guy.
“I don’t know if I should say thank you or just…” I pulled her close and crushed her with a one-armed hug. “And I’ll try not to slip up. I know you aren’t my Maggie, just like I know the others aren’t. It’s just that when I get stressed, I sometimes get my wires crossed.”
“I can understand some of that,” Jamie said, grabbing a wire hanger and starting to fill it the same as her daughter. “But I can’t say that I can understand all of it. It sounds like you’ve been through a lot in your life.”
“Yeah, real life is stranger than fiction sometimes,” I told them and started hanging pieces of meat myself.
As a habit, a stack of firewood had been laid out for the next batch of meat. It was pallet wood. I’d found a few junk pallets made out of rough-hewn hickory. When all the meat was hung, I started the fire using a small pile of shavings I’d cut off of a plank. Soon, I was feeding the flames with larger slivers and then as that got going, the planks. The ladies watched with the door mostly closed. In twenty minutes, I had a
pretty good fire going. I pulled a piece of scrap metal over three-fourths of the fire and let it go.
“Now what?” Mel asked.
“Now, we have to go get the wood that is soaking and add it to the fire when it dies down a little bit. We’ll close off the doors, though. There’s some smoke now, but it’s going to be more than triple soon.”
“Ok, that sounds good to me!” Mel said with a bounce.
I marveled at the kid’s resiliency. An hour or two ago, she had been gagging at the thought of the survival meat we’d been fixing to cook up, and now she was hanging it and was ready for whatever else came her way. Jamie must have inferred my thoughts and nodded.
“She’s a good kid, strong. She misses her dad, though.”
“I’m not holding you two here,” I told her, as we started walking.
“Oh, I know, but I agree. If you’ve caused as much hell ‘topside’, as you call it, as you’re saying you have, it would make sense that they are going to be stirred up. I’m just surprised that you let Jeremy go up so soon.”
“They don’t know he’s with me,” I told her. “Just Salina and her son, Jerome, know that.”
“Oh, so he’s like, your secret spy for topside,” she said, grinning.
“Yeah, sometimes. He’ll go up sometimes and see who’s trying to recruit. Gives us an idea of who to look at.”
“You know where all of the gangs are?” she asked, surprised.
“Oh hell, no,” I said. “But I know where most of the ones that are into human trafficking are.
I saw her shudder and I looked to see gooseflesh covering her arms.
“You ok?” I asked her, watching her rub her hands over her arms, smoothing the skin back down.
“Yeah, goose walked over my grave. Since when did people turn into such utterly horribly, ugly creatures?”
I paused to see if Mel was far enough ahead and I slowed my pace slightly. Jamie followed suit.
“I think, deep down, more than half of the people out there never think about anybody else other than themselves. When you take away rules and consequences, those half have the great capacity to be evil fucks. It isn’t just guys either though it seems like most of the truly evil ones are men by the majority. I’ve run across some bad women, too.”
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 7
