“Like your ex-wife?” Jamie asked, probably trying to lighten the mood.
“Mary wasn’t… I mean… we fought. Mostly about how I’d sign up for another tour somewhere, but that’s because I was avoiding her.”
“Why?” she asked and then her hand came up to cover her mouth. “I’m sorry, that’s too personal. I just… Don’t think I’m asking because you’re here and my husband isn’t…”
“Oh no!” I said starting to laugh. “I didn’t think that.”
“Oh? You didn’t take it well when I teased you the other day.”
“I think it surprised me, actually. I’m always surrounded by people a third to only half my age,” I said.
She let out a soft laugh herself, “That’s why I’m trying to get to know you,” she said. “I’ve lacked adult conversation lately.”
“Hey, I welcome the friendship,” I told her, watching Mel stop and turn around to see what was taking us so long. “We’re the only grownups on the bus. You know?”
“I do,” she said. “So, you think that, of the people who’ve survived, most of them are shitheads, evil, or too scared to act?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I told her.
“Wow, that’s… cynical.”
“Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, I think it’s rubbed off on Danielle.”
“What’s her story?” she asked me.
“You’ll have to ask her. That’s not mine to tell.”
“Fair enough. Are her and Jeremy… I mean, is the doctor supplying birth control or…?”
“As far as I know,” I said, grossed out, “they’ve just started showing affection for each other. I think Danielle spent half the time she’s been down here, trying to hate him. I think it was the day we brought you two back that she actually started being nice to him.”
“It’s a girl’s tactic. If he can take her at her worst and keep coming back, he’s a keeper,” she said, grinning.
“Well, shit,” I said, slowing down more.
She stopped and turned to face me.
“What?” She asked.
“That’s where I screwed up with Mary. I ran.”
“How so?” she asked.
“Hey, guys, you coming?” Mel called to us, her voice echoing on the tunnel walls.
“I kept leaving. I could have taken a promotion, got a desk job stateside. I just… I couldn’t do it.”
“Because you aren’t a desk job sort of guy?” she asked me.
“Yeah, war was all I knew. It is… was… what I knew how to do. A wife and daughter? I didn’t know what I was doing there. Every time I’d come back, they were a little older and I was more of a stranger to them. It was easier to stay gone,” I admitted.
What the hell was happening to me? In the last hour, I’d just figured out the truth. Maybe all it took was a kind ear and time.
“Well, we can always hope that we’re not too late to fix things then, right?”
“Lady,” I told her starting to walk again. “I can’t wait to meet your husband and tell him what a good choice he made in his woman.”
“Who said he chose me?” she said and then laughed when my mouth dropped open.
Well, shit, that didn’t leave me any words left to use, so I shut my mouth and raised my lantern up a bit and started walking again. I’d have one of the kids run back and keep the fire tended off and on for a couple of days, but other than that… I had some recon to do.
8
“What you see?" Danielle asked me.
"I see six inside and…. at least three that have left sight. How long have you had eyes on this group?” I asked Danielle.
Yeah, I know. I said I wasn't going to use them but we found a spot where we could come out of the tunnel and escape quickly. It didn't look directly at the old bank building, but it was close enough and a little further down the street than the theater was. It was an area of the underground I was familiar with, and it was one that Danielle and Jeremy had started exploring as well. We were holed up in an old apartment building.
One of the first things we’d done was to go door to door with my lock-pick gun and make sure that very apartment was unoccupied. The fact that half of the building had been cleaved open from a plane’s impact would have scared off some, but a safe place was a safe place. The reason I wanted to make sure that the building was empty was simply because I was planning to drop it and burn it down. If it had been occupied, I would have found something very similar to it somewhere else.
The thing that the building had going for it, its greatest asset, was its almost unobstructed view of the street heading towards the old bank where the gang was holed up. It would take a few days to get things set up and we had already started, but if things went down the way I hoped they would, this neck of the neighborhood would be safe at least. We just wanted to make sure that we knew exactly how many there were, and who they were, so we could make sure that we got almost all of them - if not all of them - at once.
Obviously, if they'd snatched someone else, I would've moved a lot faster, but I thought the biggest thing going for me was that they liked to drink. They liked to cause trouble and if they could pick up some extra collateral, they would do so. They were opportunistic predators, and just because they didn't make their entire living kidnapping and subjugating others for their dark carnal lusts, it didn't mean they were innocent. I'd seen with my own eyes what they’d done and what they were willing to do. In my eyes, that made them the perfect target to start with.
After two more days of careful observation, I'd had everything nailed down. There were nine men left in the gang. We (Danielle, Jeremy and I) saw no evidence of any kidnapped victims. It probably would've been classy to give them target designations, but I wasn't into classy, I just wanted them dead. One thing that was confusing, though, was that during close to four to five days of observation, we hadn't seen any food being brought in or out of there. Since neither of the O'Sullivan women, Jamie and Mel, had been inside of there, we’d been unable to get any sort of idea about the interior layout.
The hardest part of the op was the fact that everyone wanted to help. Everyone over the age of fifteen, and I’d really fought against letting any of them help. But the truth of the matter was, I could do the main part, but I couldn't pull everything off by myself. Yeah, I could've been the one to set the entire trap, but it would've taken a lot longer and there would have been more risk of exposure… But to use the girls as bait? I didn't know if I liked that part of the plan. Danielle insisted that she was the fastest runner out of all of us. If she got them running close enough and they caught sight of me…
"Are you sure I can’t talk you out of this?" I asked Danielle.
"Yeah, I'm sure. I know what these guys have probably done, and I know that they're going to keep doing it unless someone stops them. I'm glad you're not too stupid to tell me that I can't help," Danielle told me, with a defiant look in her eye.
"Yeah, as long as you get back to the tunnel safely, and make sure that Jamie and Mel are ready to go."
"Oh, don't worry about me. As soon as I can get them chasing me, I'll be off like the wind. Once I hear the gunfire and the fireworks, we’ll all be ready at different exit points, just in case," Danielle said with a grin.
Danielle had done more than her usual scrub and wash. She'd been holding back some beauty supplies for a special occasion and for once, she was using them to their full effect. Gone was the grubby teenaged girl, the eighteen-year-old teenage girl, and what stood before me was a beautiful young woman. She’d taken the chance to wash and condition her hair, her makeup was applied to effect and from somewhere, someone had found her fresh clothes that had hardly ever been used or worn. What topped off the ensemble, and what made me the most worried, was the four-inch heels she was wearing. I’d never imagined her for the girly girl type. Instead, I always imagined she would be the type to dress in all black and sport Chuck Taylors, but it seemed I was wrong.
Instead, she’d transformed herself
into the perfect bait for this crew, and have I mentioned that I hated this part of the plan?
"There's no way you're gonna be able to run in those shoes. Just change out of them, that part’s ridiculous," I told her, exasperated, trying to find anything to keep her from getting involved or getting hurt.
I shouldn't have even tried. My efforts were about as useful as trying to herd cats.
"As soon as they start chasing me, I'm gonna kick them off and I'm gonna run like hell," Danielle told me, with a pouty look.
"There’s debris and glass and sharp chunks of concrete everywhere. You could get yourself torn up."
Danielle looked at me for a second and smirked, "You know… I know you think you're all broken and fucked up, but I think you're going to be a really great dad. I think your daughter Maggie is going to appreciate it someday soon."
Part of me smiled, the other part of me kind of felt that one low in the gut, kind of like getting kicked in the nut sack. It hurt, but not in the purely physical I-want-to-puke way. It hurt because maybe she was right, maybe I would've been a great dad. I wanted the chance to find out, and if it meant going through with the plan, which would not only help everyone in the area, but it would also help out with one less group targeting women and children, I would be all for it.
"You're just stalling for time," Danielle told me.
I considered that, and then said, "You know? You might be right, but I don't want anything to happen to you."
"Then, before you say something stupid and get all choked up, let me go do my job. I'll be waiting for you down below when you're done playing around with these assholes," Danielle said with a smirk.
"All right, give me two minutes to get into position and then you go do your thing… don't even enter this building here."
"You just do your thing and you come back to us alive, you got me?" Danielle said and then made a shooing gesture with her hands.
What could I say to that? I gave her a nod and I started walking. I used the shadows made from the afternoon’s remaining light until I was in a darkened doorway, just around the corner from the bank. My Keltec KSG had a mixture of rounds in it. The first three rounds were slugs for more long-distance shots. After that, it was an alternating mixture of buckshot and slugs. What made the shotgun different was its capacity and how it held the shells. It was a pump action shotgun that held one in the chamber and six more on each side of the barrel. It was a funny looking space-age type of shotgun, but before the world had gone to shit, and when I was feeling low and trying to cheer myself up, I’d bought one to play with.
On more than one occasion, people would simply think I'd run out of ammunition and pop their head up, only to be plugged, because what shotgun holds more than six or eight rounds? Even the tactical Remington 870 shotguns that the police department used to use didn't hold as many as my Keltec did. The gun had probably been illegal in California and many liberal states, but after the lights went out and the world turned dark around me, who was there to give a shit?
Now that I was in position, all I had to do was wait. On cue, Danielle came walking by, without even looking in my direction. I’d coached her to be very careful not to look at me, or even acknowledge my presence. There was no way I wanted to tip the men off because my hope was that the entire crew wouldn't come right after her at once. I only wanted a few of them to come after her. At the very most. Once my part of the plan kicked off, everyone would come out to play.
"Hey boys," Danielle called. "Do y’all got any food to share?"
"… Don't you come here? … You doing by yourself…" Some voices called out from the distance.
"Just trying to meet all the new neighbors and seeing what a girl's got to do to get a little food in me."
I tensed, as I could see the fake smile on her face start to falter and she lifted one leg pulling off the strap of the heeled shoe and then stepped down. She repeated the process on the other side. You'd have to be as close as I was to see it, but her entire body tensed. I could hear shouts… I'm sure there were words, but I couldn't make them out over the noise of pounding feet. With both shoes in her right hand, Danielle held up three fingers on her left, turned and sprinted. I could hear screams of frustration and anger and I waited, peeking around the corner.
Danielle waited until she'd crossed two buildings in front of me and then darted down an alleyway in front of the trap building. I stepped out of the doorway of the building I’d been hiding in and looked around the corner. To say these guys looked even more homeless than me would've been kind. Their clothing was a mismatched garble of put-together outfits and clothing that had half rotted or fallen apart.
Their hair was long and unwashed, some of it matted. One thing I didn't see was any emaciated bellies. If anything, these guys looked well fed and healthy, judging by how quickly they were covering the ground. They were in pretty decent shape, all things considered. The apocalypse diet was something I'd learned about a long time before the EMP had taken out the power grid.
Danielle had a pretty good head start on them, and they’d probably expected her to keep running straight down the road, but she was already out of sight and probably less than thirty seconds away from hitting the first entrance to the underground tunnels. I stepped out into the open with a shotgun raised.
I could hear my DI’s voice echoing in my head, “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.”
Two of them kept running while pulling at their sides for the handguns they had holstered there. The third one stuttered to a stop and he started pulling for a long gun that he’d had strapped over his shoulder. Two running men with handguns… fifty yards away… A stationary man with a rifle, he was my first and most dangerous opponent. The boom of shotgun surprised me almost as much is it surprised them, and the man who was holding the rifle flew backward when the heavy twelve-gauge slug tore into his left midsection. I quickly chambered a new shell and fired it. The two men started chasing me.
It should've been an easy shot. It should've been something that I could've done in my sleep. But the adrenaline was kicking in, my heart was racing and my body was acting faster than my brain could react to. It's a weird sort of tunnel vision and I fought against it, so I wouldn't lose perspective. I racked another shell and fired, and one of the men who’d been pulling out a revolver went down in a spray of blood as the flesh of his leg disintegrated from the heavy impact.
“Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will.” Echoed in my memory.
I started to turn to run just as the last man recognized me, despite my new look. It must have been the shotgun, which was pretty distinctive.
"It's the devil dog!" he screamed as he pulled a 1911 and started firing at me.
There'd been shouts before, but they’d been further off. When I’d started firing, I had tuned all of that out and had focused on the three men, but by the returning shouts and yells, I realized that the rest of the crew had heard him and they were following hot on his heels. I didn't have time, and I knew I would be taking a risk by showing him my back, but I turned and fled. Sparks and chips flew from the asphalt as bullets impacted around my feet and off the stone buildings as I ran past.
My back itched in anticipation of a bullet that never found me. I ran through the front door of the old apartment building and slammed it shut. I kicked a small wedge into the stopped door and then kicked another wooden pole that had been set on the floor. It was holding another wedge in place but from underneath of the floor. The only thing holding up a four-by-four section of the floor underneath the tattered remains of carpet were now three small shims. I'd been careful to run around that. I hazarded a glance out of the side window to make sure that it was all of the men in the gang who were hot on my heels.
“My ri
fle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit.”
Instead of staying on the first floor, I took to the stairs. I skipped the third, fourth and fifth stair, leaping well over them. It wasn't a lethal trap, but it was something I’d hoped would slow them down. I must admit, watching the movie Home Alone was a pretty big inspiration here. Hopefully, these guys weren't any better than the Wet Bandits in the movie. By my mental count, I’d downed two of them with the shotgun, leaving me with seven left to go. My quick glance had shown me that at least six or seven of them were headed my way - posthaste.
One of the men crashed into the front door, finding it locked. I smiled before heading to the second floor. I crouched at the top of the landing where I could just see where the men would come in.
"It's locked! Help me kick it in!" a man screamed to one of his companions behind him.
Two loud booms shook the door frame and when the third one sounded, I heard the cracking of the jam. Then a fourth boom. The door fell flat as the wooden jam let go. One man fell onto his face as the door came in and the other almost followed suit, but his momentum kept him going and he ran right over the patch where I had kicked the wedge out of place. It was like Wile E Coyote falling into one of his own traps. It didn't even make a sound. The squared section of flooring we'd spent a day cutting out quietly fell away, dropping the man a dozen feet into the basement.
He started shrieking, yelling about his leg. The man who had fallen on his face quickly rolled to the side out of my sight and I could hear him yelling down into the hole below. He turned and fired up towards me and I ducked out of sight.
"… Is your leg broken?"
"Busted pretty bad, get me out of here!"
I peeked again when the firing had stopped. Two more men entered the doorway cautiously, their guns up and scanning. I could barely make him out, but as soon as the first one crossed the threshold I let him have it with the shotgun. The man next to him was shrouded in a pink mist as his buddy’s head exploded. I had been aiming for the top of his chest so I couldn't claim any great credit there. I just got excited and hadn't been thinking straight. I pumped a fresh shell of the shotgun, took another shot. I missed, hitting the door frame, and sending a shower of wood and splinters into the other men who been massing at the door.
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 8