Rick
I woke up in the middle of the night to hear something howling in the distance. I had to pee because, when it had gotten cool, Tina had used my bladder to curl up on and Opus was laying on my feet. I had found out on our first unofficial date that she was a heavy sleeper. A few beers had relaxed her enough back then to make her zonk, and as long as I took it easy now, I wouldn’t wake her. I found the edge of the zipper and opened it slowly, feeling like I was a balloon that was about to burst.
I felt Opus stir as I slowly extricated myself from the sleeping bag and crawled to the front of the tent and unzipped the door.
“I have to pee,” I told Opus. “You want to go outside?” I asked, hoping that he did so I wouldn’t get a cold nose to the ear in another couple hours, waking me again so he could leave his mark all over.
He got up and stretched and followed me out. The desert air was cooler than it had been in the evening, I'd been expecting it, but it was worse than I thought it would be. Opus ran off immediately and began marking bushes all around the campsite. I stretched, again. I found a likely spot, and while I was standing there, I heard Opus let out a strange warning growl. I’d heard that growl on two different occasions now, and both times had not understood what it meant. I couldn't see him in the dark, but I knew he was really close. I walked toward the sound of his growl.
He'd come to a stop between two bushes looking downhill in the general direction of where I’d parked the big van. His growl seemed to soften and went down in volume when I put my hand on the back of his fur. He looked up at me for a second and then cut the growl off completely.
"What is it, boy?" I whispered softly.
Opus looked out into the night. I had to wonder how much better his sight was than mine. Out there in the darkness, everything was vague, and at some point, clouds had rolled in covering any moonlight that might've lit the area around me. I could barely make out anything more than 10 feet away, but I knew Opus had either heard, smelled, or saw something that had put him on edge.
"Let's go, buddy," I told him, patting him on the flank and turned to go toward the tent. I got about eight steps before I realized he wasn't coming with me, I turned, and I could see that he was still standing in the same spot, but he'd sat down as if to stand guard.
“Opus," I hissed quietly. "If there's something out there, we gotta go tell your mom."
Opus turned his head and looked back at me, then reluctantly got up and headed on silent feet to me. We both walked back to the tent, and my night vision was destroyed when a flashlight turned on.
"What are you two doing?" Tina asked, with the flap of the tent open.
She was sitting up with the sleeping bag wrapped around her body twice, trembling and shaking.
"We went out to go use the bathroom, but Opus is warning me about something. He's doing that strange growl again."
"We don't know what that is. He's probably just being a goofball."
“He might be being a goofball, but I don't think he's ever told us wrong," I whispered softly, standing just outside the tent.
"Opus, what is it, boy?" Tina asked him. Opus stuck his nose inside the tent, where Tina pet his face. He made the odd growling sound again and then backed up and turned around, facing downslope.
“What's got you up so early?” I asked Tina.
"You weren’t here, and it's cold outside. I lost my heating pad. And then my feet got cold because the little furry traitor would rather be with you."
That sounded a little bit like sore at me, and it wasn't something I wanted to get into while I was only half awake. Still, what Opus had alerted on was still a puzzle to me, and he was still tense. We could both see it in the way he was holding himself, and he was vocalizing that there was something going on.
I knew that, over the past year or so, I'd come to understand the dog's body language and his vocalizations. If I had kids, it was how I would imagine how a parent learns what their toddlers are saying through their gibberish before they learn to speak proper English. I could usually tell with a head tilt, a chuff or even his body language what he was trying to say, or the general idea of what he was thinking. I had read once that German Shepherds were capable of understanding over two hundred commands. That was just two hundred actions they're supposed to be memorizing. What happens though, is that I think dogs like him also understand normal speech. As a writer, I'm used to feeling like I'm a little bit crazy sometimes, but on this, I was fairly certain that I wasn't. Something was wrong, and I needed to find out and make sure we were all safe.
“Tina, would you slide me my holster," I asked her softly.
Tina turned and reached into the front of my day pack and unzipped it and then handed me my Beretta still in the holster. I couldn't make her features out, but as soon as I tucked the holster to the side of my pajama pants, she shrugged the blanket off and crawled out, grabbing both her shoes and mine.
“Put these on," she said quietly.
When I’d taken my shoes off earlier, I’d rolled the socks up in each shoe so I wouldn't lose track of them. When I'd gone out, I did what any Michigan boy would have done. I’d gone out barefoot, and from not wearing shoes for a large chunk of the season, my feet were tough like well… old shoe leather. It was mostly sand here, but there were rocks. If I hadn’t been such an idiot before, I sure felt like one now. How many different types of snake, scorpion, spiders or any other creepy crawly creatures could I have stepped on in the dark? Unlike Michigan, where there's only a couple of venomous creatures, my Google research had told me that the further south we went the more venomous things were.
I brushed sand off of my feet and put on my socks one foot at a time while trying not to fall over. When I got those on, I stood up straight because I realized in the middle of all of that, Opus had walked away from Tina and me. I could only see about six to eight feet away now that the flashlight was off, and he wasn't within the cone of my sight.
"Where did he go?" I asked Tina softly.
Tina whispered, “He went in the direction you two had come from.”
I moved slowly, watching the ground and following my own footsteps. It didn't take very long for me to find where Furface had gone to. He was sitting in the same spot he had been before, and Tina and I moved up to him slowly. Tina was looking left and right, but I was trying to look in the direction that Opus was staring. All I saw was darkness.
“Let's move toward the van," Tina whispered.
I nodded. That was my thought as well. Tina whispered a command to Opus and, when I moved past him toward the van, he stayed right at my side with Tina behind us. We’d talked about this once, in a situation where there might be something dangerous happening. It wasn't that she was a girl, and it wasn't that she was almost a hundred pounds lighter than me, and it also wasn't because she didn't have a gun. She did, but just not on her. She did this because she knew that no matter what happened Opus and I would get in the way first.
Besides, of everyone here, Opus was the one with the best training. He'd be our first line of defense if something happened. We made our way as quietly as we could, and Opus hadn't repeated the low growl that he’d been using.
A big shape loomed near the roadway, and for a second my heart stopped.
When I realized it was the van, my heart stopped stuttering and started to work properly again. I let out a deep breath and motioned Tina to come forward.
"I can't see anything," I told her. "How's your night vision?"
"I can't see anything in the van. Your tinting is too dark in the back windows." She turned and gave Opus a command I hadn't heard before.
It was two short words, that sounded low and guttural coming out of her mouth. Opus seemed to stand at attention, and then his nose went to the ground, and he worked in a semi-circle around the van. I kept my hand close to my side where the gun was holstered and followed along as softly as I could. Opus began at the driver's side door and then walked around the back toward the rear end. He'd first smell
the ground, and then he'd lift his head and sniff near the doors before taking another step in moving around again.
When he got around to the passenger side, he lifted a leg near the rear wheel after he sniffed it, and sprayed it with a trickle of urine. That had me wondering, and when he got to the passenger door where Tina always rode, he lifted his head and sniffed the air again. He let out a weird low growl, the one I'd heard before.
"What does is it mean?" I asked no one in particular.
"I don't know,” she whispered. “I've only heard that one other time, at the Great Salt Lake. I think it meant he was nervous."
Somewhere in the darkness further away than either of us could see, we both turned as we heard a car door shut. Opus ran back around to the side of the van and stood in front of Tina. As quietly as I could, I walked to him.
"Do you remember anyone parking near us?" I asked Tina.
"No. I picked a spot because there was no one around and I saw the spot where we could get some sleep without disturbing anyone."
I thought about that and decided I felt naked with only one gun and no spare magazines.
"Hold on, I'm going to get something. Don't look at the light. It'll kill your night vision. Opus, watch my back." I told them.
I hadn't locked my van, something I should have done. I had my preps in there, but there was no one out here, and after I'd gotten that kiss from Tina, I hadn’t thought about it. At least I wouldn't have to go back up the slope in the dark to find my keys, so I walked around of the driver's side door and opened it up. I reached under the seat and pulled out the small fire-safe that I used to lock my gun in when I went into a store or place that had a no-gun policy. I thumbed in the code and slid the case open slowly. I grabbed the two spare magazines and closed it and slid it back under the driver's seat.
"I thought you said the light was going to come on?" Tina asked me softly.
That was when it hit me. The dome light had never come on. That was strange, strange enough for me to pull the Beretta out of the holster and take a step into the driver's side of the old Dodge.
The dark was absolute, unlike what little light had filtered outside. It was dark outside, but it was more about the lack of anything light on the inside that made it so dark. When I'd first gotten the van, all of the windows had been heavily tinted with the exception of the front and the two side windows. Everything from the driver's section back was limo-black. That made it great for camping, but it really sucked when suddenly your guard dog is nervous, and things aren't working right.
I couldn't see anything, and I tried to remember if I'd left a flashlight anywhere. My van didn't have one of those variable switches where I could turn the light off and on. If the door was open, the light simply came on. Very old-school, but very effective. That was when I got the thought. I reached for the knob and pulled it back, expecting my headlights to come on. The wash of light that would come through the un-tinted front window would be enough for me to make sure nothing was sneaking up on me in the dark of the van. It was a silly thought to feel that paranoid, but that's exactly what I did.
When, to my shock, the headlights didn’t come on, a bead of sweat rolled down the back of my neck and down between my shoulder blades. It felt like an ice cube making a slow journey, and I couldn't help but shiver.
I pressed the horn on the steering wheel. Nothing. I pressed on both sides, activating both horn switches. Nothing. I scrambled out of the van and remembered to hit the light switch before I closed the door.
Adrenaline started dumping, my breath came out in small gasps.
"Rick!” Tina whispered loudly. “Calm down. What's going on?"
“Something's wrong with the battery in the van. It won't… hell, the lights aren't working, the horn isn't working, and the dome light's out. Something happened to the battery and we’re too far away from civilization."
"Let's just go back to the tent, if anything comes around Opus will let us know," Tina said tensely.
"If I have to fix, this I'd rather do it while it's cool."
Opus chuffed, but very quietly.
19
Rick
I popped the latch on the hood and winced at the loud sound. I was going for quiet because I had a really bad feeling. I knew that the feeling had probably very little to do with reality, but all of this had been making me a little bit paranoid.
The other times I’d had a freakout moment it hadn’t turned into anything. Still, it felt like somebody had been messing with me, and whether or not I liked it, I felt like I was playing their game with their rules. To what end, I didn’t know. I was about to pull my cell phone out of my pocket to use it as a flashlight when I realized it was still back at the tent.
“What do you need?” Tina whispered at my side, both arms wrapped around herself as she shivered.
“I can’t find my phone, I need the light—”
She interrupted me by pulling out the flashlight she’d been using earlier. I mentally cursed myself for getting all worked up in the dark of the van. I’d forgotten she’d had that. Of course she had it; she was better prepared than I was. All I could think was ‘get a gun’ and check on my soon-to-be wife. Understandable, but what am I going to shoot at in the dark when I can’t see?
“Thanks,” I told her and then for laughs and giggles turned the flashlight on quickly, checking the van out.
It was empty.
There was nothing and nobody lurking, waiting to eat the top of my head off. Nothing hideous with long arching claws to shred and render flesh. Even feeling foolish, this put me at ease. Light, something so simple and fundamental. It took away the uncertainty, the unknown.
Feeling relieved, I got out and shut the door and finished putting the hood up with the assistance of the light. Right away I could see the problem.
The battery was gone. The wires were disconnected and dangled uselessly.
“Omigod. We need to go,” Tina hissed, having seen it too. “Let’s take our phones and walk somewhere we have reception to call for help.”
Her voice turned into a quiver at the end, and I understood the feeling entirely. Somebody had done this. You don’t accidentally lose a battery.
“Opus, with me,” Tina said in a more forceful tone.
I clicked off the flashlight and waited half a second. Tina put her hand in mine, and I walked back the direction the tent was in. I didn’t want to use the light to make things easier. I think I’d used it too much already. In the distance, a howl went up, and Opus stopped, stiff-legged. He barked loud and aggressively.
“Opus, nein,” Tina said and let go of my hand to grab his collar.
He’d already moved toward her, so she didn’t have to latch onto him.
For a second, I had wondered if he was going to run after something. We began moving again, slowly. I had no idea what time it was, but surely it must be close to morning. We went agonizingly slowly, trying to not make a sound. Since Tina had told Opus to knock off the barking, we’d not said a word. Instinctively, we all knew we weren’t alone out here and we were trying not to make any sort of sound. Were we being hunted? My mind was pregnant with ideas, and none of them were good.
“I know you’re out here,” a male voice shouted as the wind picked up.
We jerked to a stop.
“Who’s that?” I stupidly asked Tina in a whisper.
Opus growled quietly.
“I don’t know,” Tina hissed back.
Gunshots rang out, barking loudly in the quiet night.
The dirt kicked up to our right. I pulled Tina to the ground as what sounded like an entire magazine was emptied in our direction. None of the shots really came close, so the person doing the shooting was firing at noises. We held our breath and tried not to move.
How Opus kept silent at that moment was a mystery to me. I wanted to yell back. I’d drawn my gun, but without being able to see the muzzle flashes, I didn’t know where the shots were coming from, other than near our van.
&n
bsp; Tina broke away from me and crawled toward the tent with Opus still at her side, belly crawling as well. Another dog let out an excited bark, but it wasn’t ours. It was somewhere downhill.
“I’ll make it quick if you come out. Make me track you, I’ll kill you both slowly.” The voice was full of rage, the words nearly unrecognizable.
“Got the packs,” Tina said, pushing my big one to me.
“Get yours on, but stay low. He’s shooting at sound, and I think he’s got a dog tracking us.”
I didn’t have much time, but I didn’t want to run through the darkness with my large bag. Almost everything I needed was in my smaller pack, including two quart-sized jugs of water. I unclipped my daypack and was shrugging mine on when Opus growled. I turned to see him focused behind us. Out of time, I put mine on as well, trying to get a fix on whoever was shooting.
“Last chance,” the voice screamed. “Ten, nine, eight…”
“Hurry!” Tina said. I was all too glad to follow her as she moved out at a brisk pace.
Leaving the van, the tent and almost everything behind, we hurried away, alternating between walking and jogging. There was no time for talk... only time to get away. We’d stop and talk when we felt safer.
In the last year, year and a half, I’d been reaching levels of fitness I hadn’t been in since I was a kid. The jogging at the gym or with Tina and Opus had done a lot for my endurance, and I’d started lifting, though not heavily as I wasn’t trying to bulk up. I had just wanted to turn myself into an efficient writer in good health. One thing most full-time writers seem to suffer is poor health, because of lack of exercise. I’d changed things, but what it hadn’t prepared me for was doing this while terrified, and having a pack on my back.
At first, it was difficult to see, but Tina had taken the lead. When Opus went ahead of her a few steps, I followed behind them closely. I didn’t know if he knew where we were going because I didn’t, but he led us around and past large rock outcroppings that might have tripped us if we had been running full tilt. He was starting to pant, and I had been for some time now.
Opus Odyssey_A Survival and Preparedness Story Page 13