"Oh shit," I yelled in a faux, afraid voice and started running up the stairs as loud as I could.
“My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will.”
The stairs didn't go straight up. They went more into a spiral with a left-hand curve about every fifteen feet for every story level. I ran all the way up to the third level, where a plastic milk crate full of Molotov cocktails were ready to throw. These weren't your average gasoline and soap bubble cocktails. We’d taken gasoline and put chunks of Styrofoam in it, making more of a jellied napalm. To me, I thought it was a little more stable and a little safer for transport, but I wasn't going to be using them all at once.
Actually, I wanted them to follow me all the way into the building, so I could keep picking them off… if I had to blow it, so be it. By my count, there were still five men left, six, if you counted the guy who was busted up in the basement. No matter what happened, though, he wouldn't survive long anyway. Footsteps pounded up the stairs in pursuit. I got a Bic lighter out and I was ready to light one of the fuses that had been wetted with gasoline. When I thought someone was getting close to the second landing, I heard a crash and screams and curses.
We’d pulled the carpet back on those stairs and cut through the threads. As quietly as we could, we’d pulled out the nails holding the treads in place and had replaced them with shorter nails. That way, it would take some weight - but not the weight of a couple men thumping up the stairs. At least one of them had just fallen through. Hopefully, breaking them up and slowing them down some, so that they would have to take a second to get their friends out, or that’s what I was counting on.
Still, I heard more footsteps coming. I lit the fuse and I threw it. I heard angry shouts, but no screams of pain. I tore off like my ass was on fire and ran across the third floor, coming to the second apartment on my left. The devastation from the plane crash, shearing off the building was absolute and the debris crunched under my heavy footsteps. The shotgun was now in a sling over my shoulder as my hands were full of the Molotov cocktails in the plastic milk crate. From where I was now, I could see down to the front of the building, and I quickly lit the fuses on several of them and started throwing them down at the front door. They exploded, spewing flames all over. No one would be going out through the main doors anytime soon.
More angry shouts greeted the firebombs, but I had managed to thin the gang out as much as I'd wanted to. Footsteps pounded the hallway behind me and I knew that it was just a matter of seconds. I’d known that I might get trapped in this room, so that's why I had peeled away the sheet rock between this apartment and the one next to it. I'd left the door open to the apartment I was in, to give them a pretty good idea of where I'd gone. I wanted them to come in here. I took a quick look and one figure came running through the doorway. I took a snapshot and the heavy buckshot tore into the man. It wasn't a fatal wound, but it hit him low in the hip and upper leg. The man staggered and fell, but there were still more in the hallway.
Gunfire had me ducking as wood and drywall exploded next to my head. I racked another set of shells into the chamber and kept going. I ran through the abandoned apartment and into the bathroom, slamming the door. Another hole awaited me and I could already hear them trying to crash through the doors of the apartment I had just left.
It would take them just a few moments to figure out what I had just done, but hopefully they were all upstairs now and in those rooms because I ran out of the second apartment's main door and sprinted down the hallway. I grabbed one last Molotov, leaving the rest where they were, not wanting to be burdened, and lit it. I paused for a minute, turned and threw it as hard as I could towards the end of the hallway where the stairs were. It exploded against the wall, painting everything with flames.
“He's out here!" someone shouted.
I ran all the way to the end of the hallway, to the last apartment on the right. I nearly burst through the doorway. Before things had gone south, this apartment had been getting remodeled. Being on the third floor, the apartment had been gutted and a garbage chute had been affixed to the window. That was my quick escape route. I pulled the shotgun around on the drop sling, so it would be in front of me and I jumped in the tube feet first. It was like no slide I’d ever been on, and about a thousand times scarier than the water parks I’d tried over in Dubai, a million years ago in the sandbox.
I dropped three stories faster than was humanly sane. Although the chute didn't let me reach terminal velocity, I was going faster than I’d ever felt comfortable with. But the wild ride down the chute was enough to slow me down, so that when I hit the stacks of mattresses at the bottom, I didn't die. That was one last thing we’d done. We’d carried some mattresses out and lined up my landing area. The men would have to be idiots to follow me out. If they did, I could pick them off as they came out of the chute. If they started shooting from the windows, they would make themselves an easy target as well, but I wasn't going to let them get that opportunity.
If it hadn't been for the mattresses, I would have had worse than the wind knocked out of me. I would have had all of the sense knocked out of me, too. Maybe even my life knocked out of me, but they had worked. Still, it was no easy task to drag myself to my feet and use the wheel to spark the Bic lighter one last time. I knelt by a small casement window that led into the basement. We’d left a half-full drum down there and the fumes had to have been getting to the man that was lying in the basement with his leg too badly broken to move.
Again, this was something that I hadn't quite thought up entirely myself, but being in the Marines, I knew a lot more about IEDs than your average civilian or even militia member. What I was doing, though, was straight out of Timothy McVeigh's playbook. You would think in a city the size of Chicago, it would’ve been hard to find industrial fertilizer, but you'd be wrong. Chicago was a port city, and the Great Lakes had still been a big waterway and source for shipping. It might’ve been in the city, but there was farmland all over Illinois. All it had taken was two bags of the dry fertilizer, eight gallons of diesel fuel, and three and a half sticks of dynamite pushed into the mixed slurry.
I ran. I ran like hell. I ran as if my very life depended on it. I had no idea what the blast was going to do to the tunnels below, and that was why I’d made sure to tell Danielle, Jamie, Mel, and Jeremy to be at least a half a mile away from the theater entrance down below. I had no idea how quick the fuse was going to burn, but I guessed it’d been at least twenty seconds from when I’d lit the fuse. When I'd counted up to fifteen, I dove into an alleyway and wedged myself in behind a dumpster.
My DI Matroka’s words haunted me, “Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but peace!”
The explosion sounded like… like the roaring of an angry God. The noise was almost too big to even describe, as flaming debris was flung hundreds of feet into the air. I struggled for my breath, as the explosion sucked in all of the available oxygen it needed for that moment.
When the pressure wave hit half a heartbeat later, I wasn't surprised. I'd been ready, as a matter of fact. I had closed my eyes and opened my mouth. I cringed and protected my head with my arms and although several things hit the dumpster I was hiding behind, nothing hit me. I only waited ten seconds before peeking my head out and starting to run.
“We are the saviors of my life,” I repeated aloud as I looked around. “Oorah,” I whispered to myself and started moving.
I did a half a circle around the block until I could get the old apartment building in view. It had simply collapsed in on itself. What was left standing was on fire, and it looked like even that was starting to crumble. There was
no one in pursuit - not that I’d expected anyone to be. I slung my shotgun over my shoulder and started walking towards the burning building slowly. I wasn't surprised to see the cracks in the cement a hundred yards away from the apartment building. I needed to be sure I’d gotten all of them, though, not just the ones inside the apartment building, but any left hiding the bank.
I worked my way back to my original hiding position and peeked around the corner at the bank. The only sound I could hear was the stone and brickwork falling in the fire, greedily consuming everything combustible. The bank looked quiet and dark inside. I broke cover slowly because there was no good cover around it. That was one of the good things, not good exactly… bad choice of words… one of the smart things that gang had done. They’d cleared out a field of fire around the bank. Today, it was their greed and their lust that had been their downfall.
I took the safety back off the shotgun and held it in the ready position, knowing that the next round there would be a slug. I’d let off four rounds and I briefly thought of putting four more in, but I didn't want to lose my focus. Step-by-step, my fear grew. I’d entered buildings like this before. My mind flashed back to one such a time, just briefly.
We'd been going house to house, looking for Al Qaeda fighters and had taken fire by a sniper. We'd sheltered in an old bank, not knowing that right behind the counter, there’d been three men lying in wait for us. We had walked right into their trap, right into another killing funnel. We had taken half a second to look around and started clearing the bank when they’d popped up from behind the counter, firing as they rose. We’d reacted immediately, returning fire. I lost a good friend that day and I'd never had a deep-seated urge to go banking after that. We’d sheltered in the bank until we were able to call in mortar fire to the rooftop sniper.
… But that was in Fallujah. This was just an old rundown shitty bank in Chicago. I approached the door anyway, at an oblique angle. When I didn't see anyone, I started moving into the doorway with the shotgun at the ready. Everything appeared empty, if you wanted to call the mess and debris they’d left behind empty. I'd already passed the burn barrel in the front of the building, but the inside was trashed. Discarded clothing and blankets were arranged into makeshift sleeping pallets. Empty beer and booze bottles and cans littered the floor and on the counter, was a variety of guns and ammunition.
It was a lot less than I'd hoped for, but it was a lot more than I’d expected. I just couldn't believe that they'd left it all out in the open…
I paused, suddenly real wary. This was wealth beyond means, and it was just laid out like it was on display. My first instinct had been to go over and claim it as my own, right away. This had been part of the reason I’d hit the smaller group first. To get the easy one out of the way first and then, gear up to go after the others. I carefully worked my way back to the counter where the tellers would normally walk through, looking for any tricks or traps.
Part of the counter swung up to allow entrance and before I just grabbed it and pushed it up, I looked at it. An eyelet had been screwed into the bottom and a thin black wire ran back and out of sight. I crawled on my hands and knees looking and when I saw what the black wire was attached to, I froze. Somehow, those assclowns had found a grenade and the wire was attached to the pin of it. Anyone who just opened up the swinging section would've dislodged it, and would’ve been blown to hell a second later.
I pulled my Leatherman out of the pouch on my belt, flipped it open and cut the wire as close as I could to the grenade. I let out a sigh of relief and pulled it loose from the duct tape. I thought about leaving it at that, but I decided if there was one trap there was bound to be more. And oh boy, was I right. The next one wasn’t a tripwire. It was worse, because of what it would've done to me. If I’d missed the grenade, it would've been hard to miss the nails sticking up out of the debris on the floor. I kicked the debris aside, exposing a simple, yet effective trap. A one-by-six had been filled full of nails, their sharpened points sticking up, and then debris had been laid over the top of it. I slowed down and worked my way further, noticing that the door to the vault was already open. It wasn’t opened all the way, but just enough to see the crack that was there. However, I wanted to clear the teller area first before I got into any of that.
On the back counter, where the tellers often counted out large sums of money, was a variety of trophies or trading goods. I couldn't tell which. Jewelry and personal belongings of all sorts littered the counter. Rings, necklaces, earrings, watches… anything with precious metal in it was laid out there. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. It was all the jewelry from their robberies or their kidnapped victims.
It still didn't answer the question that had been bothering me for a couple days now, what had they been eating? I’d already observed that other than the booze and the beer, I hadn’t seen any evidence of them really bringing some sort of food in any kind of quantity inside. I decided that after one more quick look in here, I would go look inside the vault and make sure that no one was hiding out. The door looked to be at least a few hundred pounds. It wouldn’t be something that could just be opened quickly, so I needed to make sure that there were no other traps waiting for me.
I was lucky. There wasn't anything else. A quick look around showed that there'd been three .45 Colts, a revolver, and an AR platform rifle laid out, with all sorts of ammunition for all different calibers. I could use those to barter and get what I really wanted. All I had to do was survive this encounter and get the hell out of here. So, there was only one place left to check. The vault.
I grabbed the handle on the vault, already feeling dread building up inside of me. This whole place smelled bad. The smell of unwashed bodies filling the small lobby of the old bank. The smell became worse as soon as I started pulling the handle back. I could smell the unmistakable funk of death. With the door fully open, I stood there for a second. I'd seen a lot of shit during my almost twenty years of fighting wars all across the world, but I'd never seen cannibalism, real cannibalism, up close.
The carcasses, for lack of a better word, had been hung from the ceiling. I could already feel it taking me back to a darker place in my mind. I saw there was nothing I wanted in the vault, so I quickly shut the door. I recognized Curtis hanging on a hook and I spit disgustedly, trying to get the foul taste of the air out of my mouth.
I noticed a small backpack sitting in a corner near where the hand grenade had been. I walked over to it slowly, still checking for traps, and made sure it wasn't sitting on a grenade with the pin pulled. It wasn't. I picked the backpack up, felt the weight of it, and looked inside.
Three grenades with black electrical tape were waiting in the bottom, along with some rope and a knife. I took the one that I’d disarmed earlier out of my pocket and added it to the backpack. Then, I went and grabbed an old T-shirt that’d been lying in a pile on the floor to separate things out. I put each .45 pistol into the bag, wrapped part of the shirt over the revolver, and then added the ammunition. I hefted the pack over my shoulder and I could feel the straps straining from the weight. I had at least a few hundred rounds of ammunition, judging by how many boxes I’d put in, but I had no way of knowing if they’d been full or not.
Then, my eyes turned and settled on all the jewelry. If I left it behind, my conscience would be clear, but if I took it… I could use it for barter and trade. Precious metals were still a hot commodity, but not as much as food, ammunition, and medication. If I left everything here, the next person to come into the bank would find it and use it for their own purposes. I decided not to decide, so I took the backpack off and held it open. I swept all of it into the backpack. I would let the women and children decide what to do with it.
Someday, I would be leaving them to go look for my wife and daughter. This might give them the edge they needed, that extra little bit to survive. I knew I was running tight on time and people would start to worry that the worst had happened to me. This trick had worked once, and
as long as the tunnel wasn't damaged, it should work again. I was going to use the coal chute from the old theater to get back down to the family.
9
By the time I got to the back utility room of the theater and had pulled the trapdoor, my back was killing me. I fished the length of rope from the bottom of the backpack and tied one end off to the backpack handles. The weight of the guns, ammo, and the jewelry would've been too much for me to go down with it, and with the grenades in there too, I didn't want to just let it slide down unattended.
Instead, I lowered it down, foot by foot, hand over hand, with the rope until it had gone the forty to fifty feet to hit the bottom. I thought about tying the rope off and using it to slow my descent because my back was killing me, but I didn't want to leave any sort of clear evidence that I'd been down here recently. So, I let the end of the rope go and crawled in.
I was able to control my descent a lot better than I’d been able to when I’d been carrying Maggie’s, I mean Mel's, unconscious form. I took it slow and when I needed a break, I took it. When I got close to the end, I felt for the indented lip. It was probably someplace where they clipped the work light almost a hundred years ago. Finding it with my hands, I pulled myself out and lowered myself to the ground. I fumbled around in the darkness, patting my pockets, trying to find either the Bic lighter or the flashlight, but I couldn't find either one.
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 9