“Not good,” the Sergeant stated.
“She's coming right to us. She's not searching for anything, she's hunting.”
A thin high pitched shriek was heard, and the very ground shook with the impact of a big blast. The impact rocked the shelter, knocking a few items off of the walls.
Even the clean concrete walls of the cellar still managed to shake off some dust on its occupants. More thin shrieks followed by deafening explosions ensued. A three foot long tongue of yellowish flame erupted from the air vent pipe in the side wall which seemingly sucked back out the same pipe just as fast, followed closely by a black cloud spraying out from the pipe into the room.
“There goes my fancy carbon air filter,” Dave moaned as he choked on some carbon dust.
Another massive blast erupted, the impact so powerful that it knocked everyone off their feet. It was almost a direct hit. Another explosion slammed the shelter. The wall behind John cracked and seemed to jump out at him. With the first massive blast, he had fallen to a sitting position with his back just inches from the concrete.
With the second blast the concrete slammed in a foot, slapped John squarely in the back, and knocked him flying across the room.
John lay in a huddle at the far wall with his back bent at an odd angle, his glazed eyes staring at the ceiling. For the first time in memory, Joe saw a peaceful look on the old man's face.
“Oh hell no!” Joe screamed as he ran to his uncle.
He sat there holding his dead uncle’s hand to his chest, silently crying and not caring who saw. Sue’s face was a mask of shocked horror, her green eyes open wide and her mouth parted in shock.
The two boys looked about to cry, but Dave just looked at the Sergeant with his jaw muscles clenched. He had seen this too many times before to be easily affected. No more explosions had followed the last blast indicating that the chopper had left. Outside, it was silent as a grave.
The Sergeant tried the door, noting that the first massive blast had spent its overpressure against it.
“We've got a small situation here guy. This door may never open again,” he stated after examining the twisted and warped door with its bent locking rods jammed firmly into their respective sockets.
Dave fired up a flashlight and looked for the pick and shovel he knew were stored in the cellar. Normally the tools resided on a rack on the wall. After the wall was destroyed they were now strewn on the floor along with most of the contents of a set of storage shelves.
The Sergeant looked at the massive thick wall which had smashed inwards and killed John. He then looked at the puny pick, shovel, and a small sledgehammer which Dave had scrounged from the mess on the floor.
“Everyone, unless we plan on vacationing here we have to take out that wall,” the Sergeant rumbled.
Joe was temporarily beyond caring. He merely sat on the floor next to John, holding the hand belonging to the now dead body of his last known relative and close friend.
9. (Deafening Silence)
Joe tossed in his sleep, his bruised and bloodied flesh groaning from mere existence. Everyone he had known, everyone he had ever loved was dead. Family, friends, even acquaintances were all gone. A loud and forlorn groan rang from his fevered lips.
He had been forced to watch from hiding as Dave Littleton and his family were tortured to death before his eyes, their bodies burned afterwards like so much trash. He had watched, but could do absolutely nothing for them, or for his new military friends either as the Sergeant and his men had valiantly fired uselessly as one after another the helicopters had strafed the burning rubble of the house with their miniguns spitting death. The rapidfire guns sounded like enraged buzz saws.
They should have waited. Before the men had even managed to dig the hole to the surface, Joe had known instinctively that they should have waited. They had all paid the price for impatience.
From the belt behind Dave's house, Joe wished he had his Mosin. He wished he could take out his frustration on these faceless and nameless men causing him so much pain. He wanted to rip, tear, break, shred... but could do nothing. He had needed to take a leak, and it had saved him from discovery. After exiting the cellar, he had run back to the belt cursing Dave's lack of foresight concerning the lack of necessary toilet facilities. Too bashful to urinate in an old jar front of Sue, he had held it. After a full day he could hold it no longer.
While he was going to the bathroom he had heard the engines of vehicles, and then the sound of men running through the brush towards the house. He heard the harsh voice which his memory would not let him forget. A familiar Captain's voice, shouting orders as the men had surrounded his friends.
Joe had dropped in place, protected from sight by the evergreen he had used for privacy, the further need to urinate forgotten. He had left everything behind in his urgent need including his rifle and ammo. The only object he had on him which could be called a proper weapon was the lousy lock-back knife on his belt. The only reason he still had it was that it was mechanically attached to his body. Against the weaponry and manpower he faced, he might as well have been completely unarmed.
The Sergeant was the last to fall, still crouched and firing a M sixteen in bursts of three shots, methodically dropping men like sacks of wheat thrown to the ground. He had simply vanished, with a boom of red mist, smoke and a fireball. A small crater in the ground replaced him as if he had never existed. A thin trail of smoke trailing up into the sky pointed to a predator drone which was almost imperceptible in the distance. Then the torture had begun of the remainder who were now either injured or unarmed.
Fire is necessary to man, even considerable as highly beneficial. Joe had learned that it is also man's nemesis, horrible in its effects if misused or abused. Men have historically used fire for heat, make tools, cook... and to kill. In this instance, it was applied slowly, carefully, and methodically.
A flood of useless emotions, helplessness, impotence, horror, and rage filled Joe to the brim. Because of his earlier outbreak of stupid bashfulness, he was completely helpless now to stop what he watched. Every action he could imagine to do would end in his death in the same manner as what he watched from hiding, and he knew it.
He closed his eyes and waited, not daring to see any more, completely unable to face the events unfolding before him. Plugging his ears with his fingers as best as he could to block out the inhuman screams, Joe waited, and waited, and waited. As he sat there shuddering, he vowed silently never to be either so careless or stupid again for any reason.
A small rustling sound and a voice from nowhere, caught his attention. A ghostly voice of a dead man from his past entered his awareness, and Joe's eyes snapped open in absolute terror. Something was very wrong, as only the blackest black he had ever seen met his gaze, combined with a deafening silence.
Joe realized he was drenched in sweat. He could occasionally hear soft rhythmic breathing somewhere and distinct sounds of shuffling and scraping as sleeping bodies stretched blindly on hard concrete in a vain effort to attain a semblance of comfort. He could hear two voices mumbling.
Yet it was as if someone had switched off his sight. An eerie, inky blackness was all his brain registered. Had he been captured? Blinded? They had gotten him after all, and had blinded him. He screamed.
“Would you please shut the heck up?” the ghost voice growled, “Man I am never going to get any sleep with him making that racket all night,”
“Just shut your mouth soldier, or I will shut it for you,” the gravelly voice of the Sergeant replied with a whispered order.
“Am I blind?” Joe asked himself out loud.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” the gruff voice replied, a dead voice from the past.
“But... I watched you die!” was Joe's terrified reply.
“Am I dead?”
“Nope, but considering the racket you were making in your sleep, I can't say I wasn't tempted,” the disembodied voice of the Sergeant replied.
“You were having
a nightmare. Get some real sleep, we have a lot of work to do and we are running short of juice for the lanterns. Can't afford to run them tonight.”
“We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow to get out of this stinking hole, and we will need those lights then.”
Joe's memory kicked back into gear and he remembered that Dave, Sue, and the kids were fine. They had all been trapped in the cellar for two days now, and supplies were running low. Water especially. Busting through six inches of rebar reinforced fiber-mesh concrete, even though already somewhat broken, was proving more of a chore than originally estimated.
“I am sorry guys. Didn’t mean to wake anyone,” Joe sighed, laying down but refusing to go to sleep fearing that the horrible dream might return.
They were almost done with the job to everyone’s relief, as John's body was starting to smell under the tarp they had put over it. Even Joe did not want to lift that tarp now. He desperately wanted to get outside tomorrow. He wanted the last memory of John to be of his uncle while the man was alive, not this horrible cloying smell of death and rot.
Somehow Joe knew with absolute certainty that he would not sleep again in this hole. The nightmare had changed from the initial dream of his wife and kids pleading with him to save them as they burned alive that he had the night before, but tonight's offering was in its own right just as bad, if not worse. He felt like throwing up, as the memory of the fire and the screams were still vivid in his mind. He felt embarrassed and ashamed, and even somewhat of a coward, though it had been merely a dream.
Joe sat up, and positioned himself against the wall, and stared into the inky blackness. Excepting the small stirrings of life around him made by his sleeping friends, the darkness was filled with the utter silence only found in a cave… or the grave.
10. (Letting Go)
Everyone woke all too soon to suit Dave. However, when he lit a lantern Joe was already sitting wide awake against the far wall, as far from John's body as he could get. His eyes were deeply sunken from lack of sleep.
He badly wanted to empathize with Joe, but he had seen too much in his stint in the Middle East to feel much of anything towards dead bodies, even the corpses of friends and neighbors. Syria had been a bloodbath on both sides.
Too many bullet riddled or blast damaged trauma cases had passed by him. Too many cold bodies of those so badly wounded that he couldn't even stabilize them. He had the ability to sympathize, but empathy had been seared and torn from his soul and in its place was a hollow numbness.
Dave examined the results of the previous day’s efforts culminating in a large pile of broken concrete chunks stacked in a corner of the shelter by the ruined door. Much hard work had gone into that pile, and they were almost done.
He had almost cried when they hit the first obstacle while breaking through the busted wall. He had forgotten about using three quarter inch high quality re-bar spaced on six inch centers which laughed at their puny efforts to break them with the sledge. Until Dave had remembered he had put a hacksaw in the small toolbox which was under the shelf, they had imagined themselves trapped inside of a barred tomb.
Even with the saw it was touch and go. They busted the first blade within minutes during the first cut on the heavy re-bar. They only had three extra blades in the box, so further cutting was of necessity very careful with each blade used treated like pure gold.
They had removed the crosshatched web of re-bar, and then removed the remaining fragments of concrete, stacking the debris in the current pile. Now they faced the daunting task of digging to the surface, and all of the men were dreadfully exhausted.
The exhaustion was not just the backbreaking work. If it hadn't been the last two days of hard work and worry, it was the racket Joe had been making. In his sleep, the nightmares Joe was suffering were keeping everyone awake. Sudden outbursts of tear-filled crying, horrifying screams, and shrieks ending in sudden silence had everyone’s nerves on edge.
The noise of his nightmares had kept everyone awake most of the first night, then was lessened slightly on the second... but not much. Dave estimated he had managed six hours sleep in the last two nights, and felt dead on his feet. Nobody but Joe had gotten enough sleep to dream, and no-one wanted to know what horrid visions were tearing at the soul of their friend and neighbor in his sleep. Their subconscious minds instinctually shied away from the thought.
The only one looking halfway decent was the Sergeant. His grizzled face merely looked more determined than it had initially, if you can call a few extra lines in a washboard determination. However, a softness, a sort of knowing crept into his gaze when he looked at Joe. The Sergeant could empathize and that gave Dave a mental pause. What the old vet had seen to allow him this empathy only Dave himself could guess, and he didn't want to.
He put on his gloves, grabbed a pick, and went to work on the hole chopping at the hard clay dirt, knocking clods down to the floor at his feet. The other men grabbed tools, most of which were improvised. A small D-handled shovel and a two foot square piece of paneling which had formerly been the divider of a shelving unit made for clumsy, though workable material removal.
The Sergeant preferred to man the shovel and so did Joe, but only enough room was available for one man to dig at a time while another swung the pick. The Sergeant scraped the clods off of the floor using the shovel, and finally Joe relieved him. Joe preferred anything to sleep, and he willingly worked until he would almost collapse, even when the others were forced to stop by exhaustion.
They were gaining ground rapidly, and Dave took a break. Joe kept working like a madman, alternating between the pick and the shovel, then switching to the shovel as he hit softer dirt. A tunnel was forming and Joe knew the open sky was only a foot or two above, so he started digging at the ceiling area of the tunnel.
Suddenly the roof gave loose, and a big pile of dirt cascaded down on top of Joe in a crash, dust sailing into the shelter causing a coughing fit from everyone present. He had been wrong, the dirt layer above him had been only six inches thick. The men had been tunneling slightly upwards the whole time without realizing it. With the prodding of Joe’s shovel, the thinnest section of the tunnel had collapsed. Joe barely pushed himself up from the floor of the tunnel through the relatively thin but surprisingly heavy covering of dirt, sputtering and coughing.
“I think I can safely say we are out,” Joe sarcastically stated after the bout of coughing subsided, spitting out a big wad of dirt from his mouth.
“I think you might be right about that,” the Sergeant said with a grin, staring at the beauty of midmorning sunlight.
Joe looked up but the light seemed far too bright and hurt his eyes now accustomed to darkness. The smell of fresh and untainted air with a heavy earthy overtone was welcome to all, and everyone rushed to the tunnel area to get a lung-full. Sue looked positively excited as she breathed through her nose. Only a hint of the smell behind them in the shelter marred the beautiful and much appreciated clean air.
Dave's two boys climbed out, and assisted their father out of the hole. All three then helped Joe climb out. The military men climbed out without need of help, including the Sergeant. Joe and Dave both grabbed Sue's hands and pulled her up and out of the hole. They all turned to view an ugly torn landscape which bore little resemblance to the organized and beautiful farm it had been mere days ago.
The belt was mostly stumps, its trees flattened and twisted with only a few remaining standing from the pounding the area had received. Neither the house, nor even one outbuilding remained standing. The craters where the structures had previously stood were still puffing small wisps of smoke from the few burnt remains.
What the choppers had left, the fires ignited by the explosions had taken care of. Even the garden was a mess of ash, the hay used as ground cover between rows having caught fire when the garden shed was hit by a missile.
Dave was pissed. He was not merely angry, or even slightly infuriated, but was instead bone deep mad. He was looking at every penny he
had been able to scrape together gone, with little left to even show that he had spent years designing and building the farm, his dream home for retirement. Joe looked around wonderingly at the scene. Nothing he had seen yet had been comparable to this level of devastation.
“Makes you feel right important to have someone spend this much cost and effort to get you doesn't it?” Joe asked.
“We must have urinated in someone’s cheerios to rate this kind of attention.”
“Yep, does at that doesn't it!” the Sergeant replied with a grin.
“Does at that.”.
To the Sergeant, it was practically a badge of honor from the twinkle in his eyes and the grin on his grizzled face.
“We sure flipped someone's switch. That's for sure and for certain.”
“Hate to rain on the parade, but that body downstairs won't keep much longer,” a tall private said to the Sergeant.
Surviving in America: Under Siege 2nd Edition Page 6
