“How many shooters?” I asked Luis as I started fumbling in the pouch on my belt that held shells. I started feeding them into the tubes, topping them off.
“At least two,” Luis said.
It was Courtney who held the AK, so she must have been the one shooting.
“Dad, they killed the dogs,” a voice shouted.
“Take the quad and go get Don and his boys out here,” the man screamed back.
Pinpointing the voice, I rose up and fired the shotgun in that general direction, pumping the handle and going back towards the pouch with my left hand, getting one more shell out and feeding it in.
I saw a flash of the man’s discharge, and a bullet hit the body of the car and made an odd sound as it must have punched the engine block of the car. Still, knowing where that last flash was, I fired back and dropped down out of sight. I heard the quad start up and take off, and Courtney rose and fired off a long streamer of bullets at the fleeing quad.
“Get down,” Luis said, pulling on her left leg. She dropped down to a crouch.
“You’re burning through the ammo,” I told her.
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, and I knew she must have gone through at least two mags’ worth now.
With our bikes and packs out front, I didn’t know how much more she had, and I wanted her to be cautious.
“You guys clear out of here, and we won’t kill you for killing off my dogs.”
The voice floated out of the darkness, and I tried to get a bead on it. It had moved, and I dropped to the ground, crawling towards the front. I was able to look around the front bumper, but I couldn’t see anything.
“I remember hearing you say, ‘Get ‘em, Rocky,’” Jamie shouted back. “You brought this on yourself. We’re just trying to get home.”
“You can get yourself home once you head out. Leave your stuff and walk away, or you’re all dead.”
Why was he suddenly talkative? He knew we had him outnumbered, but they’d still run the ambush. Was he stalling for time for his son to come back with help, or was he out of ammo? Both? That was what I was wondering. Judging by the gunfire, he was shooting a deer gun of some sort, probably a .308 or 30/06. Civilian guns didn’t hold more than five rounds for hunting magazines, but I didn’t want to count on what normal and civilian standard was when making assumptions.
“We’re not leaving our stuff,” Courtney yelled back.
“So this is mostly a pack of women I’m dealing with? No wonder the dogs alerted us,” the voice called back, but there was no lust or greed in it.
I motioned to Luis to get his attention. Finally, he looked over, and I pointed at myself and then made a looping gesture 180 degrees towards the left. I pointed to him and made the opposite gesture. He nodded. As soon as he moved, a gunshot rang out. We all dropped to the ground again, and I looked. I couldn’t see the shooter, but I didn’t hear any impacts anywhere around me. I peeked around the corner, head following my sight picture of the shotgun. Holding my breath, I scanned the dark.
I couldn’t tell for sure where the shot had gone or where it was aimed at, but I was ready to move again. I slowly worked my arms out of the straps of my big pack and then started belly crawling towards the guardrail. My shoulders itched, waiting for the bullet that would kill me, but I cleared the two some odd feet. Luckily the road was the high ground, otherwise, I never would have tried it. Either the guy didn’t see me or couldn’t see me.
“When my boy gets back, you’re all fucking dead men. You hear me?” the man yelled. It confirmed his location; he hadn’t moved much since the last shot.
I was thinking about how to get over the guardrail when Mel yelled, “Hey mister, I’m just trying to get home to my daddy. Why are you trying to kill us?”
“Shit…” floated up out of the darkness.
The girl was playing the role right, and it shocked me how young and how scared Mel’s voice sounded. What it’d done, though, was focus the guy’s attention in another direction, and I was able to move to where the guardrail ended. I looked around with the NVGs and saw Luis about thirty yards east of me. He had his eyes on also and was looking to me. Courtney had given him the AK, so I motioned for him to pop up, shoot, and then get down. It took a couple of pantomimes, but he got the idea, and I waited. As soon as he started shooting, I got around the guardrail and into the tall grass just as gunfire lit up the darkness twenty-five feet ahead of me.
I fired at the muzzle flash and heard the man let out a surprised sound. I stood slowly, ready to pop back down, and started moving slowly through the grass. I’d been smelling the coppery scent of blood and the excrement of the dead dogs, but I smelled something else, something worse. It was almost a swamp gas smell, nauseating. It was coming from the direction of something thrashing in the grass.
“Don’t move,” I told the man I’d walked up on.
He was lying on the ground, his legs kicking as both hands were pulling something into an open wound in his stomach.
“Dear Jesus, Jesus. Oh, my God…” the man blubbered.
With a start, I realized he was putting his own grass-covered intestines back inside his body. About four feet away was an old bolt rifle. It was out of his reach, so I walked up on him slowly.
“What’s your name?” It was more than a question, it was a demand for information.
“Who the fuck?” he asked, looking all around in the darkness.
“There’s enough moonlight for you to make me out. What’s your name?”
“Why?” he asked between pained gasps. “You’ve killed me anyways.”
“Do you want to suffer?” I asked him. “Or do you want the pain to be over?”
He moaned, and a sob broke the air. “My son Ben… He won’t have anybody.”
“What’s your name, asshole?” Luis said, walking up with the AK shouldered and at the ready.
“Andrew,” the man gasped.
“Andrew, why did you and your son set a pack of dogs on us?”
“Was trying to get you to stop,” he said after a second.
“Looked like they wanted to attack us today,” I told him quietly.
“They wouldn’t have. They would have just… oh God, the pain,” he said, rocking.
In the green gloom, I could see his hands and arms were covered in gore. I’d hit him in the stomach, and somehow it left enough of a gap for him to disembowel himself.
“So you were trying to stop us why?” I asked him again.
“Needed supplies,” he said finally.
“So you’ve been robbing people, maybe killing them for supplies?” Luis asked.
He stared back at the two of us, probably trying to be defiant, but only showing his guilt by not saying anything. If he were innocent, he wouldn’t have shut up.
“Easy, or quick?” I asked him. “Your choice. One last question.”
“Su… sure…” Andrew said, starting to shake as if he were cold.
“How many men is your son bringing back?”
He looked at me.
“You’ll kill my son. If I tell you, he’s dead too.”
“I don’t want to kill your son, but I want to know what I’ll be facing. If you tell me, I’ll put you down so your son doesn’t have to find you blubbering like a fucking woman.” My words were cold, but I wanted him to man up.
“There’s twenty in our group by the toll road. Please, don’t hurt Ben.”
The gunshot made Luis jerk in surprise. I’d kept my promise.
“Let’s go. We can’t outrun twenty men who have a truck and a quad. I don’t know why they haven’t already…”
The roar of a motor revving caught my attention again, and I started running towards our bikes and the women.
“Oh God, we don’t have much time,” Luis said, looking over his shoulder.
I flipped up the NVGs as I ran towards the car, and Courtney and Jamie popped up with pistols in their hands. I put my hands up in the “I surrender” motion, and it took them half a heartbea
t, but they recognized us at the last second.
“It’s just us,” Luis said. “We gotta get out of here.”
“Mom?” I heard Mel call out.
“They’re both ok. Looks like Dick got a cut on the side of his head,” Jamie said, holstering her pistol.
I shouldered my pack and picked my bike up as everyone came over.
“Oh shit,” Courtney said, looking at my front tire.
Of all the Murphyness and bad timing, my front tire had caught a bullet, tearing most of the tire off and mangling the front rim.
“You guys go, I’ll slow them down,” I said.
“But Dick—”
“Fucking go,” I snapped, dropping my bike and pack to the ground. “I’ll catch up to you where 30 West and 88 come back together, if I don’t catch up to you on the road first.”
Behind me I heard squealing tires as the truck took the onramp. We had just moments now.
“You need anything?” Jamie asked.
“No, get that girl to safety. I got this,” I told her, feeling about one-tenth as confident as I was making myself seem.
They started pedaling, and I looked around for half a second. I was stuck at the island of cars with a shotgun, and I had about three hundred feet to figure out what I was going to do. Making my decision, I cocked the shotgun, ejecting a couple of good shells that I dumped in my pouch, as well as the two that were going to be reloaded when I closed the breach. Instead, I felt in the pouch and by hand found two rounds with lead slugs sticking out the front of the shell. I loaded them by the light of the moon and closed the action. I brought the gun up, thankful that the truck’s helpful lights made the sights easier to see and aimed towards the driver’s side.
The first shot grazed the windshield, and the truck started swerving left to right, cutting across two lanes. My next shot hit the driver’s side tire, a miracle of all miracles, and the truck started skidding, the bed of the truck fighting to come to the front and spinning the vehicle in a 180. I kept pumping and firing into the truck, and when the front bumper of the driver's side clipped the guardrail, the truck flipped and rolled a few times.
My heart was hammering. I’d been aiming at the hood and cab of the truck, and then the bed, but I hadn’t realized that there was a ton of people in the bed until a sizable portion of them were airborne. The first roll crushed the cab of the truck and smashed whoever wasn’t thrown out of the bed. The second and third roll took the truck past me, coming to stop on its roof.
It’d left a trail of sparks, but I could also hear moans and screams. From my pouch, I reloaded my normal friendly buckshot and made sure I had topped off the internal magazine. Sadly, the pouch was getting mostly empty now… I started walking slowly and lowered the NVGs. One man who’d been thrown from the truck was holding a very broken leg with his only unbroken arm. Another was lying there with his neck at an odd angle. I put a round into the live man, who became not living rather fast. Then I advanced on the truck, putting men down as they started moving or screaming.
I could hear cries and whimpers from at least one survivor, but I couldn’t see either in the bed or the cab. I pulled open the driver’s side door, and the corpse that rolled out was missing his face from the nose up. Despite my bad luck, I must have made a lucky shot… On top of the corpse fell a young man or a young boy. He was holding a broken wrist and was unarmed. I turned on my infrared flashlight and saw another corpse, hanging upside down by his seatbelt, most of the head crushed, probably from the truck rolling.
“Ben?” I asked, my voice low and the adrenaline making me shake with the aftereffects of the battle.
“Ye-yes…” he said, crawling over the body as quick as he could.
For a second it puzzled me, but then I realized he must not have been wearing his seat belt. If he had, his head or neck would be broken much like what happened with the guy on his right. He’d rather get out of the truck and face a man with a gun than deal with the dead around him. Speaking of dead, the smell of blood and shit was almost overwhelming. I motioned the boy to move towards the road, and he did so woodenly. In truth, I needed to get away from the smell or I was going to puke.
In the middle of the road, I called for him to stop. He did, and he didn’t put up a fight when I frisked him. I took an old Ruger .44 magnum he had in a shoulder holster and a bowie knife he had hidden at the small of his back before I made him turn around and face me.
“You going to kill me now, mister?” he asked.
It was then I realized that even though I’d been calling him boy in my head, he really was, or close to it. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen, the same age as Mel. I turned off the NVGs and flipped them out of the way.
“No, I’m not, not if you leave us alone,” I told him, keeping the shotgun at the ready. “Why were you after us?” I asked him, already knowing the truth.
“It’s what we do now,” he whispered, his face white with pain.
White… then I realized that it must be close to dawn because the dark was slowly draining and my field of vision was opening.
“How many more of them are coming?” I asked him, putting the shotgun under his chin.
“I don’t know,” he stammered. “Doc and a few stayed back. That was our only working truck.” Then he broke down and sobbed, “What’d you do to my dad?”
“I’m sorry, kid. You need to find a new line of work, and if you really have a doc, get him to fix up your hand. Stay away from my group, and I won’t go on a hunting trip. Remember all that fast shooting?” I asked.
He nodded.
“We’ve got automatic rifles. We aren’t messing around, kid. We put down every one of your hounds, and the only thing your team has to show for it is a scratch on my head, and you busted my bike. Get a new life, kid, and leave us alone. I’m going to let you go now.” I lowered the shotgun but kept it at the low ready position.
“Where’s my dad’s body?” he said, his voice quavering.
I pointed with my left hand to more or less where I’d left the corpse.
“Have someone else do it, kid. It’s not pretty. I didn’t have a good shot at him and lined up my sights with his muzzle flashes. You don’t need those kinds of nightmares in your life. Let Doc or whomever get your dad for you.”
“You’re going to… You’ve killed us, you know that you’ve killed us!” he started screaming.
Grief to anger. I knew what that was like.
“Get out of here, kid. I told your dad I wasn’t going to kill you… and after that accident, you should have more than a few scrapes and a broken wrist. Now get, before I change my mind.”
He shot me a look of pure hate and slapped the side of his pants where he’d been carrying the Ruger. He was so emotional and physically wrecked he forgot I’d already disarmed him.
“One… two…” A dawning realization of what happened at three lit his features up in surprise, and he turned and fled.
I watched him for a minute, listening for the sound of the quad. I left my pack by the cars and went over and started poking through the corpses on the ground, finding their weapons. I couldn’t take much weight on foot, but I could make sure nobody shot me in the back with it. As quick as I could, I stripped the weapons and corpses of ammo. Other than the Ruger, I didn’t keep any guns, just ammo. One of the guys had a mixed bag of “Jack”, to use a new term I’d just learned days ago, and it was full of mismatched ammo.
I took it after pulling half a dozen .44s out, and pocketed those. It took me two minutes to do all of that, skipping the men inside the cab and whoever was stuck and dead in the bed of the truck. I put the NVGs in my bag, shouldered it, and started walking. I checked my six almost religiously, but after an hour, I figured my warning of machine guns might have scared them off, especially after killing their dogs and men.
Death seemed to follow me everywhere, and the faces of those I’d ended always came back to me in my dreams. Laughing at me, taunting me. Making me feel guilty. As I w
alked towards a new morning, I wondered if I would be considered a serial killer or a mass murderer by our old society’s standards. In the end, I found a spot to stop and camp and decided that I was too spent and exhausted to care. I’d passed several sets of houses that butted up to the highway, but I’d always kept myself between the median and the guardrails, and hopefully out of sight.
I found a spot in an old parking lot, between a car with no tires and an old garbage can. The trash had been gone through thoroughly, and it didn’t take me long to stretch the camo netting between the back door of the car and the fork hole at the edge of the dumpster. I littered old trash on top of the netting, making a hide that looked like a collection of trash that had blown into a tight spot. It was cramped, but I stretched my legs out underneath the car and fell asleep deciding I wasn’t going to be judged by any but God. Yes, I had blood on my hands, but I’d never killed anybody who wasn’t out to kill me first.
6
I awoke with a start. The dream faded almost as quickly as I came back to the realization that I was alone, and for once my mind was clear as to who I was and the situation I was in. I lay flat on my back and looked under the car. For as far as I could see, there wasn’t anybody nearby, and there was no way for me to see past the dumpster, so with care, I started stretching and moving slowly, trying not to make a ton of noise.
I sat up slowly, every joint in my body protesting from sleeping on the cold hard ground. My muscles ached, and my back was twinging from the abuse I’d put it through humping that pack. I knew I was mentally bitching, so I told myself to man up and deal with it. Oorah! I pulled the top of the netting aside and looked around before coming to my feet. I was still alone, but I could hear shouts in the distance. Looking at the sun, I judged I’d slept from morning to afternoon. Evening would be coming soon.
Was it the shouts that had awakened me, or was it just the time? The yelling continued on, unintelligible, so I packed quickly, shaking the trash free from my camo netting. After rolling that up, I pulled out some more shotgun shells from several boxes that were plastic-wrapped in my pack to make sure they stayed waterproof. I refilled my pouch and hesitated. After a moment, I added an MRE snack to the top of it and got everything ready to move.
The Devil's Road: Devil Dog Book 2 (Out Of The Dark) Page 6
