by Brian Hart
“He wants to go with you,” Roy said. “Look at him.” The dog was sitting beside the running board of the drill rig, watching Sarah.
“Stay,” Sarah said to the dog. “Keep Mama safe.” Then she shut the door and Jerzy started the rig, eased it into gear, and drove off. Roy watched them drive away into the darkness and when they were gone he squatted on his haunches in the driveway. Miller came up from behind him and caught him by the arm and lifted him up.
“They’re gonna be fine,” he said.
“We don’t know that,” Roy said. He spat in the dirt and wiped his eyes, looked at Miller. “What about you?”
Miller shook his head. “I wanna kill ’em.”
“They’re already dead.”
“There’s more.”
Roy left Miller in the driveway and went inside.
He slept in the chair beside the bed with the A3 on his lap. In the morning, Karen’s color was off. She had no energy. She couldn’t walk and he had to help her to the bathroom. He should’ve never listened to her. They could have been five hundred miles away by now. Roy took his place in the chair beside the bed and watched Karen sleep. The dog was curled up at his feet.
Miller came in later and woke him up, motioned him outside.
“I set claymores on the road, so don’t go anywhere without telling me first.”
“OK.”
“I’m taking up a position on the little knob south of the house. If you hear shooting and you decide to make a run for it, drive in the ditch to the gate, not on the road. It’ll open automatically from this side.”
“OK.”
The day passed without incident. Roy kept the dog in the house. Karen drank water and had a bowl of canned soup. The sun set and Miller didn’t return. After she fell asleep Roy used a digital thermometer to check her temperature, 102.7. He checked it again and it was even higher. The night was cold but she was sweating.
She woke him up. The moon was high and half-full and the fields were a dull silver, the color of solder, and the light came in through the broken windows on the breeze and lit Karen’s face. She looked scared. Roy knelt beside the bed.
“Get some sleep,” he said. “It’s always worse at night. Always. You’ll be OK when the sun comes up. We’ll get on the road and go. We’re not staying here another day.”
“I want to go home,” she said.
“We can’t.”
“Are they still there?”
“I haven’t checked. We can’t go back there. It’s done.”
“Do you remember the frozen waterfall?”
“What?”
“The one, when you turned from the highway, you wanted to see it, and then the van broke down and we saw it when we were in the truck with Aaron, after he picked us up. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“I used to go there after you left and watch people climb it. I’d spend all day.”
“Don’t.”
“They just went right up it, swinging their little axes. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“I need to check your temperature again.” He reached for the thermometer on the bedside table but she caught his hand and pulled it toward her, tucked it against her breast. “Leave it.”
He squinted out the window at the full moon. “I hate the moon,” he said.
Karen smiled.
“I hate the world,” he said. “I hate my blood.”
“I love your blood, dipshit. All of it.”
“Let’s get some sleep.”
At dawn they shared a cup of tea, talked a little longer. Roy cried but Karen put on a good face. She was pale and weak, sweating. Her fever had gotten worse. She said she was ready to get going.
He came back from the kitchen with a bowl of oatmeal. Her eyes were open and she wasn’t there. She was gone. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand. She hadn’t been dying. In a panic, he checked for a pulse on her wrist and her neck, listened for a heartbeat, breathing, anything. He performed CPR until he couldn’t anymore, until he could feel that the bones in her chest were broken. He held her hand and it was still warm. He couldn’t stand or scream. He tried to talk to her but ended up crying. Her skin cooled. He watched her eyes, snuck glances trying to catch her waking up. Her hand was cold and wet with his tears. After he covered her face with a sheet, he walked out Miller’s front door empty-handed and climbed the fence and crossed the field hoping to step on one of Miller’s bombs but had no such luck. They hadn’t burned the house down. Nobody was there to kill him. He crossed the yard and went into his shop and found the chisel and, after some searching, the box of books under the workbench, and set them up and chopped off his finger.
Miller met him in the field and settled Roy down and bound his hand with his own shirt. At the house they carried her outside and put her in the back of Roy’s truck, on the bed that her daughters had made for her. Miller put the truck in gear and drove slowly into the field and paralleled the driveway to the gate. It swung open and they were driving on the empty road, Miller’s voice was quiet and steady.
“I already had the hole dug when I remembered,” he said. “I laughed. I couldn’t help it. She never wanted to be buried. And I laughed because that was like her to tell me something important in a passing kind of way. I always thought she was trying to set me up, trick me. I’m a suspicious man by nature. She wanted to be listened to. I was just getting good at it, you know?” He started to cry and Roy had to open the window of the truck to get some air. His hand was throbbing but the bleeding had more or less stopped.
“I need to end it,” Roy said.
“You got kids.”
“Not that. We need to find them. For Ilah. For Karen. We need to find them.”
“They won’t have gone anywhere,” Miller said. “Not yet. They have everything they need up there. Food, water, fuel, weapons, vehicles, communications.”
“Let’s go, then,” Roy said.
“What about what you said about your kids, about leaving?”
“I’m choosing a side.”
They slid back the bunker’s oak cover and Miller expertly slid the catch from the hidden tripwire and opened the steel hatch. They descended one after the other into the darkness. Miller switched on a generator and two bare bulbs came on overhead. One wall was stocked with dehydrated food, another had bunk beds and a cooktop. Off to the side was a closet-sized room with a composting toilet, a shower, and an air filtration system. In the very back there was another door, already unlocked since Jerzy had been in there. Inside were Miller’s weapons.
Roy was given options but he didn’t want any of Miller’s tech military shit or his explosives. He’d take the deer rifle, identical to the one he owned. He wanted to line them up and knock them down. He wanted to harvest them. To live your whole life, he thought, looking at Miller’s excess of firepower. To love and raise children and to end up in a place like this.
“Who shot you, Miller?” he asked. “Back when we gave you the generator. Was it the same ones? The ones at the lake?”
“The ones that lost, yeah,” Miller said. “It was a mistake. As much my fault as theirs.”
Roy thought back to the weight he’d put into Miller’s shoulders to hold him down while Ilah was stitching him up, the same as Karen. “What’re we doing here, man?”
Miller put down the crate he was carrying and stood up straight and looked Roy in the eye. “You said this is what you wanted.”
“I know what I said.”
“I don’t know what else we could do,” Miller said, and went back to loading weapons and ammunition into hard cases and duffel bags.
“We should’ve left with the girls.”
“It’s too late for that. You had to stay. You would’ve put a target on them. Karen was right about that.”
“I’m sorry, man,” he said to Miller.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry for. This is best-case, right here. As bad as this is, this is the best it can be at this moment.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Roy said.
“I plan on living. My life doesn’t end up there. I’m not a kamikaze.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you were.”
“Well, I’m not.” Miller passed Roy two large black duffel bags and sent him up the ladder and then climbed up after him lugging the hard cases. Miller shut the hatch behind them and showed Roy again where the release for the tripwire was, under the handle, and warned him that it was rigged with explosives and if he just lifted it, pretty much the whole place would blow up. But Roy wasn’t listening. As they hefted the oaken cover and put it in place and spread the dirt and the stones and finally the harrow to hide it, he was thinking about Karen. Was she in the undertaker’s oven right now? Was she watching over him? The sky was hazy with smoke.
“You hear me, Roy?”
He nodded, yes, but it didn’t matter. They were going to war.
[-2]
The sound was the same as Karen dropping a book on the floor before she turned out the light and went to bed. There were no flames, not at first. The explosions were set so that the survivors would run from one building to the next just in time to be blown up there instead. Miller had a term for it but whatever. Roy held the dog. The air seemed to be drawing back on a tide and the mayhem felt far away. Neither of them moved. The sounds of falling timber, tearing plywood, and nails screeching like gulls as they were ripped from kiln dried lumber. Miller nuzzled his cheek against the .50s comb and took a deep breath.
Fires were burning in the big house, spreading to the guesthouses, barns, and outbuildings. Roy sat up with the A3 to watch. Someone stumbled from the smoke, then a few others. Miller fired and kept firing until he was empty. Nobody shot back at them.
“Don’t think that was it,” Miller said. “Load that mag for me.”
Roy did as he was asked and was oddly grateful for the task. He hadn’t touched the trigger on his weapon. He couldn’t remember if he’d switched the safety off or not.
When they came, they came from the south. Not from the compound as Miller assumed they would and they must’ve already spotted them because the shooting started and Miller turned to return fire and Roy felt the slick of his blood and his brains and what must’ve been a piece of his skull or bullet fragment cut into his cheek.
Roy held on to the dog with one hand and shoved ammunition for the A3 and the 700 into his bag with the other and threw it on his shoulder. He picked up the two rifles and hauled the dog toward the spillway. Miller was draped over the Bushmaster. His hat was gone and the shattered bones in his skull looked loose and sagged where they weren’t missing altogether.
Roy and the dog hunkered in the spillway. The shooting didn’t stop. Concrete dust burned his eyes and the dog looked almost happy but if he let it go it’d be gone. He considered letting it go. A propane tank exploded at the compound and he thought he heard children scream. They’d move around to get to him. Circle the dam. A firing squad. It wouldn’t take long. More than he didn’t want to die he didn’t want to die scared. No point in that. The dog pissed on his boot and began leaping and trying to break Roy’s grip. The outcome would be the same. Death.
Sadni. The good dog sat and looked up at him with depthless eyes and a wild canine grimace. Yer a good boy.
Hugging the concrete of the dam he climbed the steel rungs with the A3. With his leg braced against the broken timber of the floodgate he unbelievably found a militiaman crouching beside a stump twenty yards in front of him, glassing Miller’s body. Rifle up, targeted, trigger pulled, dropped. Not scared, killing. Easy killing. Easier than dying. Two SUVs on the road. Men shooting at the dam but they were running, not aiming. Roy waited until they were behind the vehicles and emptied his clip into the tires and under the running boards hoping to hit their feet and legs. Shot up their motors, window glass.
When he dropped back down he put in a fresh clip and picked up the 700 and his bag and ran by Miller and touched him on the back and with the dog on his heels kept running across the lake into the burned forest. This wasn’t about getting away but how many would come with him. Shadows were fading and he could see well enough. The burnt trees were spikes and cracks in the blue-gray morning.
As he ran the dust and ash erupted from his footfalls and coated his clothes in powder and formed a paste on his skin. The dog made the ridge first. Roy knelt in the dust to rest. He put his face to the dog’s neck and pulled him close. Miller’s head. Didn’t matter how smart you were. Didn’t matter if you were good or kind. Had connections and powerful friends. You go looking for it and God help you.
A sound like a fast-food plastic straw twisted and flicked—snap—beside his ear and a plume of dust shot into the air beside him. Crawled to his feet, weapons, bag, dog. Find higher ground. He kept climbing. More shots, some close. At the next false summit he pushed the dog over the other side into the rocks and turned to face his attackers. The dust burned red in the rising sun and with his scope he focused beneath the cloud into the trees.
The first man edged into the clearing. Soon his comrades appeared behind him, fifty yards apart, spread along the base of the ridge. They started slowly toward him in a picket line. When the lead man was clear of cover, Roy touched the trigger and his target fell with a cry and squirmed on the ground. The others fired and got low, ran for the trees. Roy shot into their dust clouds. He yelled at them to come out but they wouldn’t. He shot the trees they hid behind and the burnt alder canes snapped and danced. All at once they came out and fired and Roy and the dog turned and slid down the steep side of the ridge. Blinding cloud of dust. Rocks thudding into his boots, cutting his leg. A root snagged his bag and ripped it out of his hand. Not going back. When he finally stopped sliding he caught the dog by the scruff and they turned north and back uphill to try to flank the militiamen, to catch them as they followed. When he checked, the A3 was empty so he shoved it in the dirt and heaped ash over it.
The sun lit the forest. The shadows were long. All the way to the top and Roy was gagging, spitting mud. The dog had tear streaks on his muzzle, dull as a burnt log. In the distance an estuary of black smoke darkened the sky above the compound. They moved slowly through the forest. Roy picked up a pebble and popped it in his mouth. They waited above the spillway in a clump of trees. They hadn’t found his tracks yet but they would. No hiding. They’d screw down their courage and follow him, were following him, and they’d radio ahead and that would be that. He looked through his scope for Miller’s body and it was there. The SUVs on the road hadn’t moved.
He spat out his pebble and fuck it, good a time as any, he and the dog ran and ducked through the spillway gate and down they went, sliding, running a few steps, falling, sliding again to the bottom, where they crunched and tumbled into the hard gravel. They couldn’t track him here, not without dogs. The ground was too hard.
His truck was where he’d left it. The two of them lay down among a heap of deadfall and waited to see if anyone was waiting for them. The sun was high and red. The dog nipped at the ants that were climbing on him.
As the sun lowered, he found them by their scope flash. They were across from him on the hillside, watching the truck. He took his time with his first shot but the second was rushed and he couldn’t be sure if he’d missed or not. A man stood up and threw something toward the road. Grenade. A moment later the truck rocked sideways and burst into flames. They kept shooting but they weren’t aiming. They hadn’t seen him. Man and dog returned to the riverbed and ran. Out of breath, he set up behind a boulder, ready, he had them in a bottleneck. He’d get at least one more. He wanted one more. They never came. He hated them most for their cowardice. When it was dark they left the river bottom and climbed higher and hid in the rocks.
During the night the militiamen passed on either side of them. They’d have night vision. If not goggles, then rifle scopes. Roy’s whole body throbbed with eye-rolling, rabbit fear. Where he was blind they could see. If it wasn’t for the dog, he might’v
e surrendered. He held his breath for as long as he could but it was a trade-off because, the longer he did, the bigger the exhalation, and even if they didn’t hear that he was sure they’d hear the hammering of his frantic heart. Blood pounding in his ears like footsteps. Whispers. Gear rattle. Footsteps. Any second they’d open up and rip him to pieces. High calibers at close range. Limb from limb. He wanted to keep his hands and his heart. The dog. He shouldn’t have brought the dog. Either way, it was coming. Death was coming. Then, without thinking I’m tired or I could close my eyes for a minute, he fell asleep.
Pecos watched the slot in the rocks where the militiamen had passed. For him it was a matter of sensation, of predation, a path clear, a path blocked. Near dawn he woke Roy with his nose and they stood in the dry riverbed and looked down on the pale, wasted valley. Smoke smudged the hills and the mountains beyond. The dog went first.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program for their generous support. He would also like to thank Joseph Gioielli and Barry Mathias. Any inaccuracies regarding military working dogs are the author’s alone and should not reflect on the expertise of Mr. Gioielli.
About the Author
BRIAN HART is the author of the novels The Bully of Order and Then Came the Evening. Hart lives in central Idaho with his wife and two children.
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Endorsements
Praise for The Bully of Order
“This crackling, lightning-bolt energy and patient attention to even the lowest of characters recalls the work of Denis Johnson. [H]elped along by an energizing sense of humor and a virtuosic control of plot . . . Hart has created a Dickensian portrait of the barely settled Pacific Northwest.”
—New York Times Book Review
“An ambitious and beautifully harsh chronicle of family, love, and deception. . . . A brilliant novel. Its huge scope and panoramic sympathies make it compelling and immersive . . . Hart’s echoes of Cormac McCarthy—the brutality of landscape and character, the unrelenting hardship—are just a fraction of his original successes here in scope, character, and emotional magnitude.”
