The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark

by Boyd Craven III

  She was still warm to the touch, and she coughed. When she spoke, her voice came out still sounding phlegmy and nasally.

  "You look like someone my mom would date," Mouse said with a grin, and Pauly started laughing from the mezzanine.

  "You know, you didn't have to get all spiffed up for me," Jamie said, and then laughed when Mel slugged her mom in the arm.

  "I wasn't doing this to impress anyone, but I feel honored you thought it was all in for you," I said with a grin, noticing the look Mel was shooting her mom. I laughed, "No, I'm just kidding."

  Jamie said, "But you had at least a few years’ worth of beard. There had to be a reason why you cut it off now?"

  "Listen, there's something I’ve been wanting to talk to everyone about here. Part of the reason we’re all still down here and not topside is because of the gangs that are topside. Some of them would snatch the women and children up right away. The other reason we’ve stayed down here so much is because half the city wants me dead."

  "Why would they want you dead?" Mel asked me.

  "Because," Danielle said, walking up towards us to get a better look at my mug, "when everyone started going crazy and hurting people, he put a stop to it. The people he killed. They deserved it, but they had friends and a lot of them have long memories."

  "Let me get this right, just because you helped other people and stopped them from hurting others, there's a lot of people in this town that don't like you?" Jamie asked.

  "Yeah… Pretty much just like that."

  Our conversation was cut off. Up to that point, the other kids had been hanging in the background looking, but they all came up now to get a good look at me. Apparently, shaving off the salt-and-pepper colored beard had transformed me into someone they didn't recognize at first. I half expected a fearful reaction like what I’d gotten with Mouse, but they were more amused or showed no fear at all. I smiled when Jeremy walked up and put an arm around Danielle's waist. She shot him a look, but she didn't move his hand.

  "So, boss, do you have a plan?" Jeremy asked me.

  "Yeah, I do have a plan. I wanted to run it by you guys because if you had the choice, would you rather stay here or would you rather live topside?"

  We sat and talked about it. Even though I’d done a lot of good for a lot of the kids, overwhelmingly, they wanted to live back among other people again. That hurt at first, but I knew it was selfish to keep them down here, just because they were associated with me. If I had to leave the area and leave them, in order for them to have a safe and happy life, I was willing to do that. And in the back of my mind, I knew that if I did leave, I would be free to go find my wife and daughter.

  I explained my plan to them and just about every one of the older kids stood up to volunteer their help. There were some things they could do to help, but not much. I might be able to use the help of Danielle, Jeremy, and Jamie, maybe even little Mel, who I’d thought was my Maggie for a time. But nothing dangerous, they wouldn't be on the front lines of anything. They would be… more like support personnel for me. Ready at entrance and extraction points, have supplies staged, overlook tricks and traps and tripwires.

  To do all of this, we needed a lot of time to prep for it, and that coincided nicely with me wanting to stay out of sight for at least a week. It would give me a week to work on little Mouse and Pauly and see if they were ready to take that next step of healing.

  As far as plans went, mine was brutally simple. I was going to watch their operations to get an idea of where everyone was set up, and what their strengths were. Then, I’d do what I could to take them out one by one. And I didn't mean just one person at a time. I meant one gang at a time. There was a plague in Chicago, and if I ever wanted to go see my daughter and wife, ex-wife that is, I needed to be able to feel good about handing the torch over to Danielle and Jeremy. They both were already doing the job in all but name. I think the only thing that was holding me back was Mouse and Pauly, who’d really understood a lot of it without the discussion. But having the discussion was something that was long overdue.

  Once everything was clear, Jamie, Mel and myself, well…we needed to plan. They wanted to get home to their father and husband. To do that, they needed to go west and a little bit south. For me to find Maggie and Mary, I needed to head west and then a lot further south to Arkansas. They'd be at the farm. They’d be at Mary’s parents farm. They had to be. I would've known in my heart if something had happened to either of them.

  While my back was sore, the pre-positioning of goods and materials was going to be a little dicey. I actually wouldn't be moving a lot of stuff until I got a pretty good idea about the gang activity topside. I already knew pretty well where one gang was; underneath the theater roughly. The trick was going to be getting in and out.

  Jeremy offered to climb up the coal chute and then set up some sort of watch. I nixed that idea right away because he wasn't trained, he wasn't disciplined, and he wasn't ready for that. Besides, I needed supplies. Guns, ammo, and any kind of grenades or explosives. I wasn't going to go after the biggest gang to start, not with only fifty shotgun shells in an old, beat-up tactical shotgun.

  It was time to get ready. I just hoped that I was ready enough when the time came.

  6

  Mouse’s jump into my arms had not, in fact, helped my back as I’d hoped. I spent two days sweating and trying not to ask for the codeine that I knew Jamie had. I took ibuprofen that I’d sent Jeremy topside to barter for with a handwritten note. I’d sent along a small handful of ammunition as payment, and as something to trade for the supplies we were going to be needing. I had a lot of things down here, but there was a ton of things I didn’t have.

  I had my shotgun, a pistol, and a small stash of supplies that I hadn’t ever told anybody about. Other than that, what everyone saw in the chamber with the mezzanine was all of my worldly possessions. The men who had grabbed the ladies was by far the smallest gang, so taking them down was the first thing on my agenda. Having a plan in place to loot their supplies or finding a way to lock them in the vault of the bank for later use was next.

  I’d reasoned that they had to have been using the vault as a storage and safe room. It was an ancient bank, a historic landmark, so I was ninety-nine percent sure that the vault had the old cipher style or key style lock. No electronic locking mechanisms. It was brilliant, but if I did things correctly, I would be using their smart idea to further my own goals.

  “So, what did you send Jeremy topside to get today?” Danielle asked me, one hand cocked on her hip.

  “I need him to scavenge some alcohol or gas, Styrofoam, nails, mouse traps, more wire cable or electrical wire… stuff like that.”

  “Junk,” she said disgustedly. “You sent him topside to get junk? Is it worth the risk?” she asked.

  I was a little shocked. She’d always been the short, prickly attitude type of girl, but lately, she’d been warming to me. Somehow, I must have done or said something. Maybe I was leaning on Jeremy for help too much or wasn’t appreciative enough… or—

  “It’s not junk,” Pauly said, pulling Mouse with him.

  They had just woken up and although the lanterns were on low, I could tell the difference in the way Mouse looked, that the three days’ worth of medication had helped tremendously.

  “Oh yeah? What is it?” Danielle asked.

  “I heard him telling Miss O’Sullivan that he’s making grape napalm,” one of the younger boys said proudly.

  “Grape?” Mouse asked hopefully.

  “Not grape napalm,” I told him. “Jellied Napalm,” I finished, looking back at Danielle.

  Her face had been scrunched up in anger or annoyance, but it smoothed out as she started thinking.

  “How does that work?” she asked me.

  “Not in front of the little kids,” I told her. “Besides, I need to send the little rats into the nearby tunnels to get as many glass bottles as possible today. Not far, just the side tunnel towards the washroom where all the j
unk washed through the storm drains.”

  “What about the other stuff?” she asked, “Nails, rat traps, wire?”

  “More MacGyver stuff,” I told her. “Trust me, if it weren't important for the plan, I wouldn’t be sending him up there. Besides, I’ve been talking with Mouse.”

  The little girl looked up at me, tears forming in her eyes.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Mouse said, and Pauly nodded.

  “I’m not going to be gone forever and ever,” I told her, “I’m just taking care of some bad guys and running them out of town.”

  “I meant later. When I go and live with Miss Salina.”

  My heart clenched, and Danielle looked shocked.

  “Hey, little one,” I said kneeling down. “You know the tunnels down here make you sick. They’ll probably make all of us sick someday. I can’t live topside and stay in Chicago.”

  “Cuz of the wicked men…” she said.

  Yeah, we’d explained that over and over. As far as she was concerned, she wanted to be wherever Pauly was first, or me second. She’d kind of brightened up when I’d told her that the Doc wanted a daughter and they’d have a mother again. Not much, but she had half smiled like she would be happy, if she’d not been feeling guilty about being happy.

  “Yeah, not just them. I have to find Maggie.”

  Both Danielle and Mouse looked at me and smiled crookedly. Pauly grinned, and two of the older boys, Steve, and Patrick, came up behind him. They were a little older than Pauly, maybe ten years old. Twins. Something that was rare before the power went out, even rarer now.

  “The real Maggie this time,” Mouse scolded me, then coughed.

  “I’m sure that’ll help you out a bit,” Mel said, walking up as well with her mom following close behind.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her, looking at the growing group of humanity now surrounding me.

  “With your… I don’t know…” she made a circular motion with her finger at her temple.

  That might be insulting to some people, but I wasn’t insulted. I understood the gesture. It’s wasn’t that I was actually loony, though. It was that something inside of me was broken and when I was stressed, my wires crossed. That wasn’t why I wanted to find my daughter, though, I wanted to find her because I wanted to make things right again. I wanted to do everything I could for her.

  “Well, I won’t be rescuing ladies and be convinced that they’re my Maggie if I have her at my side, now will I?”

  “Yeah, my mom was kinda freaked,” Mel said, and Jamie let out an exasperated sound.

  “Well, you were,” she said.

  “Ok,” I said, redirecting the conversation, “After breakfast, I need you little ones to go on a bottle hunt with Miss Danielle. I need all the glass bottles you can find. We’ll need them rinsed out. Can you do that?”

  None of them spoke, but Mouse let go of her brother’s hand and walked up and hugged my leg, “Ok, Uncle Dick.”

  The other kids were smiling and nodding.

  “If I’m doing the cooking and the scavenger hunt, who’s going to do the trap-line?” Danielle asked.

  “I’ll do it,” I told her.

  “Can we come along?” Jamie asked, “I don’t know these tunnels well enough to go exploring and I don’t want to sit here alone when they leave…”

  “It’s up to you two,” I told them. “I’m heading down a different branch, where the storm drains intersect with an old sewer tunnel. Some of it is stinky to get to where we’re going.”

  “It all stinks down here,” Mel snarked, and I had to smile at that.

  “Besides,” I patted her on the shoulder, “My back isn’t healed up yet, I need some young arms to do all the hauling for me.”

  The kid’s eyes blazed for a moment and then she just nodded. God, she was fourteen or fifteen going on twenty. It just amazed me that they’d crossed such a distance alone and on foot. Jamie’s husband might have been a crazy prepper like she’d insisted, but he’d obviously trained them well. The thing is when it comes to survival, it is more of the mental game than the physical. Sure, physical training is tough to beat, but if the will to live isn’t ingrained in your gray matter, it doesn’t matter how strong you are, or how much endurance or skilled at hand to hand you are… If you aren’t ready or willing to do what it takes, you don’t make it.

  “Ok,” she said, “but you handle any of the gross stuff. I’m still a girl, you know.”

  “I know it all too well,” Jamie said. “Go get your pack, in case we need any of it while we’re with Dick.”

  The small gathering broke up, with the younger kids heading up to the cooking platform on the mez. Danielle, Jeremy, and I all had our own trap lines that provided meat for the group. Jeremy would take care of his on the way back in, while I had promised to do mine and Danielle’s.

  “So,” Jamie said, “I guess this is nothing like hunting and trapping that normal people do.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I told her. “I was surprised to find you weren’t grossed out that first night here.”

  I had expected them to vomit or run away from us, but apparently eating a snared dog hadn’t been horrible to them.

  “Oh no,” Jamie said, “Protein’s protein. Once you get past that mental block, it isn’t that bad. What did it for you?”

  I thought about it a second, “The world turned into a three day, just in time, supply and demand type of thing. It was all scheduled and computerized. I told you about the jets crashing topside, yeah?”

  “Yeah, we saw there had been some big fires coming in towards town, but we hadn’t been sure what’d caused them until you told us about the crashes.”

  “Well, the first big die-off topside was from the fires. Then, over the course of two months, deaths were mostly due to starvation, with human predation coming in at a third. All of the food in the city was seemingly consumed within a week. With no more trucks running, food and ammunition became the hottest commodity next to medicines. It was hard to believe how many dogs and cats were just turned loose when their owners couldn’t feed them anymore. We were… hungry. I’ve traveled all over the world and some countries don’t have the same taboos about food like Americans do.”

  “Yeah. My trigger was pretty close to the same. Mel and I hadn’t eaten in a few days. We were on the road, just getting near the border in Michigan when we came to a small town. It was dead like, literally. Whoever was left was laying in the middle of the road, and a group of dogs were surrounding the corpse. We couldn’t tell what they were doing at first, and when we got close enough to see, we were too close to run far.”

  “Did you get hurt?” I asked as Mel came back with her pack.

  “No, I had Mom climb on top of a semi’s hood with me, then we sat up on the box for a long time. Those stupid dogs kept circling it and growling, from the time they’d quit eating to when the sun went down. They all went somewhere, and we got out of there.”

  “So them eating people, put you onto eating dog?” I asked her, unbelievingly.

  “No,” Jamie answered. “It showed us that even household pets can turn into predators and that we shouldn’t trust them like we would have in earlier times. It was the day after, in another town when we ran across another small pack of them. They’d chased down a deer.”

  “Mom dropped a rock on the head of one of them,” Mel said. “We were so hungry…” She looked at me with a guilty expression.

  “Hey kid, I know hunger,” I said pointing to my stomach. “Everything looks good when it’s sprinkled with starvation. People in our old lives didn’t even have a clue what real starvation was like. Now…”

  “Everything's different,” Jamie finished. “That’s why we want to see your trap line. I need to make it home to my husband and if I can help and pick up on some skills while you’re healing up…”

  “No, it’s fine. I just wish I wasn’t such a dickhead that they’re going to be hunting and gunning for me.”

  “That’s
your name, isn’t it? Dickhead?” Mel snickered.

  “Richard actually, but you can call me Dick, if’n you please,” I said with a mock bow.

  The move set off a twinge in my back and when I straightened up, I winced in pain.

  “Sorry,” Mel said.

  “It’s not your fault,” I told her. “I’m just getting old.”

  “The trick with rats and dogs is to get the snare set up in the right spot. Dogs down here usually have their noses to the ground, smelling out something to eat. So you put the big part of the loop about three to six inches from the floor.” I showed them.

  I’d constructed the simple snares from stripped copper cable and an old penny.

  “What’s that for?” Mel asked, pointing to the penny.

  “That’s what keeps the animal from backing out,” I told her.

  “How does that work?” Jamie asked as we were standing in front of the first trap.

  I showed them. I’d taken a penny and put it in a vice, hammered one end over at a ninety-degree angle, then put the half bent penny on a piece of wood. I’d punched a small hole on one side with a punch I’d traded for at the market. I made it just large enough so that the stripped wire could move through it. Then, I’d made one on the other side, across from the first hole. I ran the end of a piece of wire into it and then twisted and tied it closed. It made a loop, and when I pulled it tight around Jamie’s arm, it didn’t let go.

  “Huh, that’s pretty cool, I guess,” Mel told me. “But why don’t they just back it off like this?” she asked, taking the penny in her hand and sliding it back, freeing her mother's arm.

  “The same reason that humans are top of the food chain, kid.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that mean?” she asked.

  “Opposable thumbs,” I said grinning.

  “So, do you ever bait these?” Jamie asked me.

  “Sometimes, it’s just that lately, things have been pretty tight. Not as many animals coming and going.”