The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark

by Boyd Craven III

“Yeah, and try not to get it into your mouth,” I told her, unscrewing the cap off the small gas can and setting it next to the rear wheel.

  “Do your thing,” she told me. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  I did, and I was surprised when it didn’t take much suction to get the gas flowing. I caught half a mouthful and spit it out as I was working to quickly get the hose end into the small red can. The taste and fumes were enough for me to dry heave once, and with my eyes watering, I almost let the gas can overflow. I pulled the hose out and held it up with my thumb over it. Once I had it to where I judged the hose end to be higher than the gas tank, I removed my thumb and let air in. After a few moments, I laid the hose back down on the tire like I had before. No gas rushed out, so I was safe.

  “Now you just fill the truck up?” she asked.

  “Yeah, as many times as it takes,” I told her.

  “God, that has to suck.”

  “Lady, you have no idea,” I told her, thinking the only thing worse than the MRE breakfasts, was the taste of gasoline.

  “Come on, we have a while. I’m sure we can heat up some water with the MRE heaters, get you some coffee.”

  With the hard work of finding a hose and getting the end of the siphon in completed, it would be easy now to fill subsequent cans. I could only hope. I grabbed my vest and the gas can, and followed her back to camp.

  “This coffee tastes like ass,” Mel told us.

  “Language!” Jamie said automatically.

  “Besides kid, how do you know what ass tastes like?” I asked her and smiled when her jaw dropped open in surprise.

  “You’re not funny,” she said indignantly, but I was chuckling as quietly as I could.

  Jamie joined in, and Mel was starting to get red in the face when Luis snorted in his sleep and rolled over, shutting us up. I’d gotten about six gallons of gas in the old truck so far and was going to make a few more trips in the next hour. The truck must not have had a large tank because it was already creeping towards three-fourths full. I’d taken a break when Jamie had told me the water was hot, and despite Mel’s protests, the coffee tasted like heaven on Earth.

  “I thought it was funny,” Jamie whispered.

  I pulled out an MRE breakfast and tore it open with my teeth. I was shocked to find what looked like a sticky bun. I dug through it more and came across another packet labeled “French Vanilla Cappuccino.” Mel saw that, and her eyes got huge.

  “Hey Dick, do you want to trade for…”

  “Give me the coffee, I’ll trade ya,” I said, grinning and tossing her the packet.

  “Hey, that’s my coffee you’re trading,” Jamie said just as I was taking the kiddo’s cup.

  “Split it?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, resigned.

  Since I was holding two cups, I took a large drink from my cup. The bitter brew was a little more than lukewarm, and did I mention it tasted heavenly? I refilled my own cup with Mel’s and handed the remainder to Jamie.

  “Get some water heating, kiddo,” Jamie told her, and I tossed her a ration heater and hot beverage bag from my kit.

  These MREs must have come from a newer supply. I’d been eating mostly cardboard-flavored meals back in the sandpit and even here. I’d have to keep an eye out on the packaging. Maybe I had more. Still, when I tore into the cinnamon-flavored bun, I almost felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. It was easily the best MRE I’d ever had, and in a world with little to no sugar going around, it was a luxury.

  “So uh… Dick…” Mel said, and I could almost see her mean-mugging my bun. I turned halfway, chugging my coffee and pretending to shield my food with my body.

  “Nope,” I said, grinning.

  “You’re going to hand over the donut, mister.”

  “It’s not a donut,” I told her. “It’s a cinnamon bun.”

  I knew it was coming, but couldn’t move fast enough as Mel launched herself towards me, her hands making a desperate grab for it. I held it up out of the way, but my right hand was occupied with not dumping my precious coffee on her head. She let out a sound of frustration when she missed, and I curled my left arm around her and shoved the rest of it into my mouth. She grunted and pushed herself away.

  “I’ll remember that!” she mock-whispered.

  “You do that. Never get between a dog and his food,” I said, feeling safe enough to take another long drink of coffee to wash down the hastily eaten pastry.

  “Wow,” Jamie said, sitting down next to me. “She’s gotten all kinds of playful lately,” she told me softly as Mel walked back towards her sleeping mat with the cappuccino fixings.

  “Yeah, I’m glad this,” I said, making a circular motion over my head, “hasn’t bogged her down.”

  “Me too,” she told me, and we both sipped coffee.

  The sun was warm, and although leaning against the truck wasn’t the most comfortable, it wasn’t horrible. Jamie’s shoulder touched mine, and I looked over. She’d fallen back to sleep. Her coffee cup was empty, so I didn’t move. I just tilted my head back and rested it against the truck, not wanting to move. She’d been cutting sleep short lately for watches and was probably more in a sleep debt than I was, with my talking and yelling keeping people awake around me while I slept. Since I figured I was the cause of all the sleeplessness, I just stared at the sky.

  “Hey Dick,” I heard Courtney’s voice. She’d kicked my foot.

  I opened my eyes, and she and Mel were looking at me, crooked grins on their faces.

  “What’s up?” I asked them.

  “It’s going to be dark soon. Do you want to get moving now to save the NVGs or wait?”

  I looked to my right. Jamie had awoken at some point and moved off. I looked around and didn’t see her.

  “We can get going if it looks good. Where’s Luis and Jamie?”

  “I’m over here,” Luis called from somewhere behind me.

  “Mom will be right back,” Mel said. “Do you have any more cappuccino?” she asked.

  “If I find out I do, you’ll be the first to get it, kiddo,” I said.

  “So you got dibs on coffee?”

  “Coffee?” Courtney cut in.

  “We found some instant coffee packets,” I admitted.

  “You’re so dead to me,” Courtney said, but she didn’t look angry.

  I stood, and everything popped as I stretched.

  “I’ll be right back. I’m going to find Mom,” Mel said and bounded off into the corn.

  Courtney waited a moment and then got in close to me, so only I could hear her.

  “So you and Jamie…?”

  “No,” I told her. “It’s still a no.”

  “You two looked pretty cozy there.” She grinned at me.

  “I figure I keep you guys up when I sleep, so when she zonked out on my shoulder, I didn’t want to move,” I said.

  “Then you fell asleep?” Luis said, putting a pack into the bed of the truck.

  “Yeah, I was out cold.”

  “That happens to me too. Sleeping baby, sleeping dog, my girlfriend snoring softly in my arms…”

  “Wait, so you put me in the same sentence as a sleeping dog?!” Courtney rounded on him with a raised voice.

  “No, it’s a guy thing, I swear. Sleeping babies or dogs in our lap make us nod off. Am I right, Dick?” he asked, knowing how fiery her temper could be.

  “Yeah, and the same thing happens when a woman falls asleep next to you quite often,” I told Courtney.

  She looked between us, probably deciding if she wanted to continue arguing or teasing me when I heard two sets of footsteps coming our way through the corn. Courtney looked over, and Jamie and Mel came out. Corn silk covered their clothing. Jamie had changed, and I noticed that Mel had too.

  “You think it’s safe to get moving?” Jamie asked me.

  I looked around. My KSG was leaned up in the bed of the truck, and I snagged it as I was walking past and stepped out toward the road. As far as I could see, it
was corn and dead cars. Not many, but enough that we would have to weave back and forth. In the horizon, the sun was nearly down, and the sky had a magical quality to it. No more factories and power plants spilling toxic chemicals into the air. No more jets screaming across the sky. Right now, it was a blue so dark, it almost looked purple.

  I looked back and forth again and judged we had another forty minutes until complete sundown. That was forty minutes less we didn’t have to use the NVGs or the headlights. I walked back to the truck.

  “Yeah, let’s go. We’ll make up as much ground as we can as long as we’re in the middle of nowhere. I doubt there were many people here before the EMP, and now…”

  I let the words trail off, but everybody nodded. I went to my sleeping mat and rolled it up, disconnected the small solar charger from the NVGs, and gave them to Jamie. Luis looked at me questioningly, but then he nodded in understanding.

  “Are we going to push through tonight?” Mel asked me.

  “We’ll have to see what the road is like,” I answered.

  “Let me get these adjusted,” Jamie said, pulling her hair back into a rough ponytail and dropping the goggles over her head to adjust the straps.

  Courtney bumped my hip with hers when she noticed me watching. “You sure nothing is going on?”

  “Promise,” I told her, not even embarrassed.

  In truth, I was getting used to her ribbing. Jamie was the easiest thing for her to use against me, but I knew if it wasn’t Jamie, it would be something else. It’s just how it was.

  “Just making sure. It can’t be easy, being around her,” Courtney whispered.

  “What’s that?” Jamie asked, and Courtney twitched and flushed in the embarrassment of being caught.

  “Nothing,” Luis said. “She’s picking on Dick again.”

  “Oh, well I got these all set. Are we ready?” she asked, pulling them off and reaching in to put them on the dash in front of the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” I said, grabbing the top edge of the bed of the truck and using the wheel to get a step up.

  It was like a clown car loading up, and in truth, I think everyone was more than a little anxious to get on the road. I hadn’t filled the tank, but we could take care of that on our next stop. We had enough to travel at least another hundred to a hundred and fifty miles.

  “Let’s roll down the Devil’s Road,” Mel’s voice drifted out of the center back window.

  I broke out into gooseflesh. I’d thought that at one point, but hearing it aloud hit every nerve ending and put me on edge.

  32

  “Why did those creeps freak you out so bad?” Courtney asked me, leaning close so I could hear her over the whipping sound of the wind.

  It had been an uneventful night of driving. The heat had dropped as the night overtook the land, and it was easy to lose your edge and nod off.

  “I don’t know if I can say,” I told her.

  “Can’t, won’t, or don’t want to?” she asked me.

  “Don’t want to,” I told her.

  “Well then don’t. I’ve just… Even when I had a gun to your head, you weren’t afraid. Not of anything. Even half dead, nothing bothered you. I don’t know if I’ve built you up in my mind as an anti-boogeyman, but if there’s something that scares you, it probably would terrify me. I’d rather not wonder about it, have nightmares. If you can’t or don’t want to, I won’t push…”

  I took a deep breath. Just like Mel had sort of latched to me like a brother or father figure, I felt the same bond with Courtney that I had with any of my kids I’d rescued. You can’t go through what we did together and not feel that bond. It was a special kind of trust and love, something so intangible that it was hard to describe. So the fact it really bothered her, and she was still pushing, meant that she really needed to know.

  I took a deep breath. “There were three of us that all went through boot together. Me, Mike, and James. Over the course of a career, we got separated by jobs and deployments, but we were still friends. Sometimes I think they were the only friends I truly had… Anyways, I was in Afghanistan when I got the call that James’s helicopter was shot down. SAR couldn’t find four of them, James included. I knew I shouldn’t have but…”

  “You went to find him.” It was a statement and not a question. I nodded in agreement.

  “He’d been the sole survivor of the crash. At first, two other men had been alive, but they succumbed to their injuries. They kept moving around because there was a roving patrol of Afghani insurgents, and they were running low on ammo. They missed all the search parties…”

  “But you found them?”

  “I did,” I told her, shuddering despite the warm air. “He’d hit his head on the way down, and he came to with one of the men dragging him to an outcropping. One of our men. Anyways, that was his worst injury. One by one, the others died. When I found him, I was with one of his friends named Martin. James had… he… he had started eating the dead.”

  “No!”

  “Yeah. He had no idea how long he’d been out there because he was unconscious, confused, and had a head injury. Something broke inside of him. I don’t know what else to say. When he stood up, he had gore streaking down his front, just like those creeps had.”

  “Did he have those sharp pointy teeth?” Courtney asked, her voice low, the fear evident.

  “No, but what I saw running out of the dark at me was like a living nightmare. It reminded me of what happened to James.”

  “You said what happened, as in past tense?”

  I nodded, trying not to meet her gaze.

  “What happened?” she prodded.

  “When he tried to make a snack out of Martin, I mean, I had to get him off,” I explained.

  “You shot him?” she asked.

  “No, we had too many Afghanis close to us. The screams Martin was making were horrible. The sound of Martin’s screams and James’s neck snapping haunt my dreams. I usually wake up screaming.”

  I brushed some moisture that had collected off my cheek and stood up in the wind over the cab. It would drown out more questions unless she…

  She stood up and put her elbows over the cab, same as me. In the distance, the sun was starting to come up behind us. The road ahead of us was relatively clear, and we’d made great time. We would have to stop for gas soon, and maybe if we kept pushing, we could keep going for a little while longer and find some water.

  “You blame yourself.” It wasn’t a question, so I said nothing. After a moment, she leaned in close and repeated, “You blame yourself. What would have happened if you’d got caught by a roving patrol?” she asked.

  “We all would have died,” I admitted. “I didn’t have orders to go out there. I was on my own time in the middle of someplace I had no business being. They would have written me off as a deserter if I hadn’t come back in.”

  “But you found them, you came back in.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “So you shouldn’t carry all this guilt around,” she told me. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It’s my fault,” I told her. “Both of my best friends are dead. I killed them.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Mike too?” she asked.

  “I didn’t pull the trigger on Mike, but if I’d been on my game, I could have staunched the flow of blood instead of getting a little revenge… he bled out less than four feet away from me.”

  “This is why you’re broken,” she said, her left arm snaking out and pulling me into a one-armed hug.

  I could have broken the hug easily. I outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, but suddenly I needed that hug, and I let the emotions flow. It was horrible, the memories, the telling, but it was like a lanced boil. All the infection of the soul spilling out in an emotional flow. Luckily the wind on my cheeks blew away the tears. Still, I felt better after a long while. Somehow the hollowed-out feeling I always had inside of me seemed to have been scraped clean. I held on to the ca
b and hugged her back for a second, and then turned around to get a look behind us. It’d been a few minutes at least since I’d checked our six, the reason for the two of us to be back there.

  “Oh shit,” I said.

  “Wha—”

  “Step on it,” I screamed to Jamie.

  Startled by the yelling, Jamie checked the side mirrors and saw what had caused me alarm. Two military Hummers with machine gun turrets were a quarter mile behind us, and closing fast.

  “You have to go faster,” I yelled to her. “Over fifty-five for sure,” I screamed.

  “I’ll try,” she yelled back.

  “Ride the shoulder,” I heard Luis shout, and my whole body vibrated as we rolled over the rumble strips.

  Slowly we were gaining distance on them. Being much larger vehicles, they couldn’t ride the left shoulder the way we were; they still had to weave in and out of stalled traffic, sometimes using the median instead of pavement. Still, they were too close for comfort, and I knew we were in the range of the .50s if that’s what they had mounted. I was looking behind, waiting for a warning shot, when the road in front of the truck erupted a hundred feet in front of us.

  I was almost thrown over the cab, Jamie had to brake so hard, and I had to grab the top of the window and snag her belt to keep her from being launched over. The tires were squealing, and the side of the truck started creeping sideways, threatening to go into the grassy median. For the first time in a long time, I prayed. None of us could survive that if we rolled. The acrid smell of rubber and the sounds of Mel crying out in alarm were all I could take, and I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable.

  It was over much sooner than I thought, the truck coming to rest with the rear tires still on the pavement, but the bed over the median. I looked back and saw that the Hummers were closing the distance fast. I’d never seen or heard the shot, but I glanced to the wreckage in front of us, and I knew it wasn’t them. It looked like the crater an HE mortar round would make. It’d torn the asphalt up, cratering the road. Even worse, it had torn into the nearby car, which had come to rest on its roof, blocking half the road. I turned back to see the turrets lowering in on us.