The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark

by Boyd Craven III

  I ended up going for rest, so the next large cargo van I saw, I opened the side door. Whatever shipping company this guy drove for, he’d left empty boxes and cardboard all over. Still, it would work for my purposes. No windows, and I could lock it from the inside and stay out of sight. Speaking of out of sight, I’d pretty much be cut off from seeing what was coming as well, so I found a spot in the middle about three feet behind the driver’s seat, and I could sort of see the mirrors. I dropped my bag and pulled some cardboard over, laying it all around me.

  I wanted a nap, but I forced myself to get a pasta with marinara sauce MRE down and topped it off with a drink of water when I was done to wash the shit taste out of my mouth. I laid my head back, put the shotgun across my lap, and closed my eyes.

  I woke with the wind blowing. I sat up, surprised that I wasn’t still dying of soreness, but it was no worse than when I’d been sleeping in the tunnels under downtown Chicago. I tried looking out the driver’s side window and then got a look out the passenger’s side window. The sun was almost down, so I really couldn’t make out too much farther than the van’s white sides. I pulled my pack on and crawled between the two front seats and got a good look. Ahead of me and behind me were clear. Whoever had been shouting earlier was long gone, miles behind me.

  Not wanting to head out just yet but feeling the urge to move, I debated my options. I studied the town or edge of the city in front of me and realized I hadn’t been paying attention to things. Until I saw a sign or a mile marker, I would have to continue going 30 West until I hit 88 again… and I didn’t know how long it was going to take to catch up—

  A loud motor filled the air, and it rose in volume so quickly that when I felt the van shake by its passing, and I could only guess the speed it must have been traveling. I backed up in the van a little bit but saw that it was a motorcycle with two figures on it, driving at breakneck speed, weaving in and out of traffic. Its unmuffled pipes would make it an easy target if they were going slow. I marveled at that. A motorcycle was something I didn’t have enough jack to trade for; something like that would be almost priceless. Still, it was something I appreciated.

  It was as small and maneuverable as the bicycles, but ate the distance like nothing else nowadays. In a way, it was more desirable than a truck for going places. In the end, though, I waited another hour until full dark to see if anybody came out to investigate the old bike’s passage. No-one did, so I got going. The side door opened, and I cringed at how loud and rusty the beast sounded. Surely it hadn’t been that horrible earlier. Still, not wanting to chance it happening again, I left the side door open. I walked into the stalled traffic for three or four hours, using every bit of cover that I could, until I made it past all the buildings and to the outskirts of the small city.

  I prayed the others were ok, and I was ready to pull my pack off when I noticed something. Of all things, in what had to be a dark lipstick, two words were written on the driver’s side window of a car. ‘Devil Dog’. I stopped dead and stared at it dumbly, knowing that it was a message, and a message for me. I dropped my pack and looked in the car. I hadn’t been wearing my NVGs except for short-term peeks to make sure I wasn’t going to run into a roadblock or ambush, but I turned them on now to look inside the car.

  The car was an absolute pigsty. Old fast food wrappers and bags, empty twenty-ounce bottles of pop, and sun-faded mail littered the front seats. I debated it, and then opened the driver’s side door slowly, looking for any tricks and traps. There were none, so I opened it wide and tried to take everything in. The only thing clean in this car that didn’t smell like a litter box used by nine cats was the driver’s side mat that had a gum wrapper near the brake pedal… Then I noticed a large smear of dark across half of it. I picked it up, and the smear came off on my fingers. Lipstick.

  I turned it over and then smiled. The spelling was hard to read, and the letters very faint on the wax-coated wrapper, but I made out: “14 up, red, under tarp. Catch up.”

  “Fourteen up?” I asked aloud and then crumpled the wrapper and threw it in the backseat.

  Fourteen up… I grabbed my pack and started walking west again. Ever west. Fourteen vehicles up, I found a red Silverado with a tonneau cover that was ripped and shredded in one corner. Other than that, it looked like every abandoned newer car I saw on the road. I dropped the tailgate, and with it my jaw. An old BMX sat there, its rear wheel at the edge of the bed of the truck. I pulled it out and looked at it, slack-jawed.

  They’d found me a bike somehow, and stashed it for me. They must not have felt safe enough stopping here, and truth be told, I didn’t either. It was too close to the town. Still, I sat on the seat, expecting the tires to be flat. They weren’t, but they didn’t have a lot of give to them. I bounced a couple of times, and they didn’t move. That kind of puzzled me. Wondering if they’d left me anything else, I used the infrared flashlight and the goggles to look inside the bed. I found a used can of Fix-A-Flat and a note taped to the underside of the truck.

  I pulled it off and found that tape was the wrong word; they’d used old bubblegum in a wad to hold the piece of paper to the underside. I could read it with the flashlight once I got it loose.

  Dick, we found two bikes. One had a flat, so we used the Fix-A-Flat. Mel rode it until the foam hardened. We’re going half a day further and then will wait in the road until we see you. We’re going to camp and rest until you catch up. - Jamie

  I smiled. Really smiled. The bike seat was too low, and I was going to have to resign myself to hitting my chin with my knees until I saw the bike had all hand-turnable knobs. You pulled the lever back and then twisted it. Marvel upon marvels. I did that with the seat, and it came up easily. I took a moment to get the adjustment right and then sat back down and pedaled experimentally. The chain squeaked, but not horribly. I set the bike to the side and went back to the bed of the truck. There wasn’t anything in there, so I let myself open the back door of the crew cab.

  The back of the truck wasn’t much better than the car where they had stashed the note for me, but almost immediately I found what I wanted in a crate on the floor of the truck. I was hoping for WD-40 but found something else that would work. I uncapped the partially used yellow bottle of Valvoline and poured it on the chain, liberally dousing the sprocket. I knew when I took off it was going to fling off excess oil, but I wasn’t too worried; half of the chain guard was attached, and it would coat one pant leg at worst. Or I could just walk the bike for a while and then climb on…

  That’s what I ended up doing. Within a minute, the bike’s squeaks were squashed, and when I didn’t see the oil flinging everywhere, I hopped on and started riding. I found out fast the bike had one speed, but that was fine by me. Slowly, my sore legs warmed up, and after a while I didn’t even feel them. Still, my newfound wheels didn’t make me forget my security; if anything, I was more vigilant. Using my NVGs for short periods of time, I scoped things out ahead. It was almost dawn when I saw a figure walking a bike out of the middle of the road and towards the tall grass. Its head was shaped funny, and I dropped my goggles down and turned them on. I whistled, and the figure whipped around, hearing me from a distance and leveling an AK-47 in my general direction before flipping their own goggles up.

  It was probably Courtney or Jamie. I could tell from a distance it was a woman now that she’d turned to me and, when the gun lowered, I knew for sure she’d recognized me too. I started pedaling faster, watching my sides as well as over my back once. The harder I pedaled, the quicker I’d get there. My lungs and legs were burning as I finally hit the brake, coming to a stop next to Mel. She was sitting on the bike I’d left her for her mom but was carrying Luis’s AK-47.

  “Dick—”

  “Hey, kiddo, where’s everyone? Why’d they have you stand guard out here—”

  “They captured them,” she said and started crying.

  I made my way to the side of the road, where she’d set up a temporary camp. She had her and her mother�
�s packs and a pouch full of mags for the gun. Nobody else was there.

  “I’ve been waiting for about a day now,” she told me.

  “We’ve only been apart going on two days, kiddo. What happened?” I asked her once she was calm enough to talk.

  She’d gone to pieces twice now.

  “Mom didn’t believe me that my BMX was a pain to ride, so I was on her bike when they popped up. With both packs, it was hard to keep up. I was trying to figure out the gears and Luis dropped back to show me… Mom rode ahead to show me how easy it was and then these people ambushed us. They came out of a drainage ditch.”

  “Did they get shot?” I asked him.

  “No. At first they were trying to act all nice, but Luis handed back the goggles and Courtney’s gun. I don’t think they saw me at first… so when they grabbed my mom, Luis screamed for me to run. I took off back this way, hoping you would be here, and you weren’t, but now you are…”

  She broke down into sobs, and I held on to her as she made incoherent sounds into my chest. I rubbed her hair absently, thinking of Mouse and how she would have been handing me a silver hairbrush. After a few minutes, I was able to get her calm enough to start talking to me again.

  “Did you see where they were taken?” I asked her.

  “No, I just know there were a lot of them, and they were all armed. I think they never really got a good look at me until Luis screamed for me to run. I biked, I got out of there, but I don’t know what to do, Dick. My mom… Courtney, Luis…”

  “Can you show me where they were taken? I want to move out now.”

  “Yes…” After a moment she said, “Do you think you can get them back?” Her voice shook.

  “I hope so. If anybody hurt them, I’m going to…” I ground my teeth. Things had gone to shit, then they went to hell in a handbasket… and now the handbasket was on fucking fire. So was I.

  Mel must have inferred what I was thinking as my knuckles popped, because she stepped back for a moment, fear running across her face.

  “I’m not going to let them hurt your mother if I can help it. We have to hurry. How far up is it?” I asked her.

  “Six mile markers, just past the big sign for I30 West,” she said.

  “You have water?” I asked her, and she shook her head.

  I handed over a canteen, and she followed me out to the highway. I considered taking the bigger bike from her, but she’d already gotten on it. Six miles would be nothing, and with the sun coming up, I had to hurry. Maybe I could catch up to these guys before it was too late.

  I’d stashed Mel and the packs and bikes about half a mile back. The rest was going to be all on me. I’d painted my face with earth-tone grease paints and left all my gear but my shotgun, pouch knife, and a pocket full of lethal goodies. I’d found the drainage ditch easily from a distance. It was a storm drain opening, made to keep a nearby river from flooding a community that had been built on the other side. I headed off into the tall grass and made a semi-circle around it, trying to see if they had any sentries roaming. Finding none, I got close enough to see inside.

  The sun was coming up and, with the binoculars, I could make out movement inside of the eight-foot-diameter tubes. In a moment, a figure walked to the outer edge and looked around at the outside in both directions before heading back inside. I was maybe twenty yards away, and I swear he could hear my heartbeat. Still, I kept the shotgun in front of me and started crawling slowly. Luckily I hadn’t changed yet, and the earth-tone clothing blended in well with the tall grass and brush that lined this side.

  I kept crawling until something slithered across the leaf and grass litter right in front of me. I didn’t physically recoil, but my inner child started shrieking like a little girl. I held still until it was almost past and saw nothing resembling a rattle. It had a weird coloring and a somewhat bulky-shaped head, so I decided at the last minute to shut the inner bitch up, and I grabbed the snake by the fucking tail and threw it as hard as I could while lying mostly prone.

  Luck was with me; the snake had immediately tried to strike at my hand, but the throw had whipped its head away from my hand and arm, and it landed just inside the entrance of the tube. The girlish shrieks of terror that ensued matched my inner child’s, and I rose up, bringing my shotgun to bear as two men fled the pipes and barely stopped when they saw me.

  “What’s up, guys?” I asked them, looking over their shoulder and making sure there weren’t more coming.

  “Who the fuck?” one yelled. “How did you…”

  “Voices down, boys, or I’ll blow your heads off,” I said. “How many more are in here with you?” I asked him.

  “Nobody.”

  “Ten men.”

  They spoke at the exact same time, contradicting each other.

  I flicked the safety off and started putting pressure on the trigger, aiming at the first man standing closest and slightly to my right. He gulped.

  “Want to try that again?” I asked.

  “It’s just us, man,” he said.

  “That’s better. I had friends come through here a day ago. Seems ya’ll nabbed them. Know anything about that?”

  The man’s eyes flicked to his friend’s, but they didn’t say anything.

  “If something’s happened to them, I’m going to paint the highway with your guts…”

  I was starting to get tunnel vision, and I started taking in more of the slack in the stiff trigger when the man behind him spoke up.

  “The guy fought his way off a few of our guys. They beat him and locked him up. The ladies should be fine.”

  “Should be?” I asked, taking a breath after realizing I’d been holding mine, expecting to hear the worst.

  “My wife wouldn’t let the guys do anything to hurt them,” the man I had dead to rights answered.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “We just need the food, man, and the guys lost it after that Luis asshole half killed Rodney’s brother. My wife’s sitting on the ladies until we find out if he’s going to make it.”

  “What do you mean, if he’s going to make it?” I asked.

  “Well, he was kicked pretty badly by the boys when Rodney lost it. I mean, it was his brother…”

  “Why? Why did you ambush our group?” I demanded.

  “We were just asking for a toll, you know,” the one behind said, kicking at something on the ground without looking.

  “On your knees, keep your hands up. Cross your right ankle over your left,” I instructed.

  Their eyes got wide with fear, but they complied after half a second. I went to the man in the back and pulled first one arm and then another behind his back. I’d already fished out the snare wire from my pocket. I had brought a couple to use as a garrote or two, but instead, I was using it to bind the men’s wrists. I made it so tight it almost cut into the flesh. Then I moved on to the next one and did the same. It left me about a three-foot loop of wire hanging behind them like a tail. I grabbed a stick and ran it through the eyelets of both men’s restraints and then held it in my left hand.

  “Stand up, assholes,” I growled.

  “Where are we going?” the man whose wife was looking after the ladies asked.

  “Well, we’re going to pay your wife a visit and find out if my friend is hurt. You better hope he’s not, or I’m going to burn the community down around you.”

  My words were hard and cold. Somewhere, he must have believed me, because he nodded. The shotgun was getting heavy to hold with one hand, so I laid the barrel across my left wrist holding the stick, and we started walking. I’d promised Mel to get her family and friends back, and I told her if I wasn’t back by dark, it probably meant I was dead. I just hoped I wasn’t walking into a community of hundreds, because I didn’t have enough shells, and I hoped I could make people see the light without killing them.

  “The wire’s too tight,” the idiot on the left said in a whiny voice, so I smacked his left ear with the barrel of the KSG and really made him whim
per.

  “You’re not going to kill us?” the one on the right asked me.

  “Let’s get my friends first. You boys can live through this as long as they’re unharmed, and you don’t give me away. First one of you raises the alarm, and I blow a hole big enough for a basketball to go through. You feel me?” I poked him in the back with the barrel of the shotgun.

  “I feel you… just don’t hurt my family,” the man begged.

  “I’m not normally one for killing women and children,” I told him. “Don’t make me make an exception.”

  I knew it for the lie it was, but judging by their reactions, neither of them wanted to call my bluff and find out.

  24

  We stayed off the well-worn path between the highway and the community. A lot of feet had been traveling through there lately. Surprisingly, the men led me to the back fence of a property in total silence. The lawn was overgrown like everything else, and at the opposite corner from where I was standing was a tarp sectioned off into a square shape with no roof. It gave off odors that led me to believe it’d been an open air latrine for a while now. I was also surprised to see the back corner of the fence had already had its ties cut three-fourths of the way down. Apparently somebody had liked getting in and out of the backyard that way as I saw no other gate or way in.

  “This the one?” I asked him.

  He nodded, not wanting to make a sound, as I’d reminded him twice now. We stepped over the chain link that still held on to the bottom of the post, and I kept the men close to me and in front of me with the stick. One hard pull on that would put a ton of cutting pressure on their wrists, and both were already leaving small crimson droplets from a stumble early on. I hadn’t meant for these to be so effective, but it worked far better than I’d anticipated.