High had waltzed in behind the storm, cleansing the sky and dropping the temperature precipitously, rendering the snow cover into a blanket of light-refracting crystals. Mine were the first footsteps across the snow cover as I walked over to check on the pigs, goats, chicken and cattle. Their only concern was nuzzling away the snow to get at their feed.
Duke bounded past me, his nose plowing up the snow as he ran. He stopped, did a 180, stood stiff legged and barked four times. I agreed with him that it was time to play and charged him, wrestling him to the ground and forcing his muzzle into the snow. He leapt away, spun and charged. Try it again, he said.
I did. He was a real pushover even though he weighed in at a hundred and twenty pounds of wheat-colored golden lab. I’m pretty sure he lets me win our little battles.
Our match was interrupted by three dull thuds. Sounded like one of King Arthur’s knights pounding on the castle door. Duke and I both froze. My glove came off and I pulled a .357 magnum from inside my parka, looking around the compound. Duke’s hackles rose and he stared at the compound doors. A deep, almost subsonic growl rattled in his chest.
I put Duke on heel as I approached the doors and quietly climbed the ladder over the rolls of barbed wire to ascend the wall encircling our small compound and have a peek at the source of the intrusive sounds.
A three-foot platform ran across the top of the wall, just like the old forts in the cavalry and Indian books. Through a peephole I could see one set of footsteps in the snow leading across the vacant land surrounding the compound and running in a true line straight to our door. Slightly to one side of the footsteps there were what appeared to be two sets of thin parallel tire tracks. The snow between the parallel tracks was somewhat compressed, as if something had been dragged along. I was unable to see what kind of person and contraption had made these marks in the snow without sticking my head above the protection of the wall. The interloper had to be about twelve feet below me and slightly to my left, standing in front of the door.
Three more deep thuds rattled the door. I could feel their reverberations from where I crouched. Duke went nuclear, barking and snarling ferociously, charging the barbed wire which blocked his access to the door and backing away.
“If I let that dog loose, he’ll tear your guts out and have them for breakfast,” I hollered.
A somewhat high pitched voice with a Southern accent floated up in reply, “I don’t want to cause no trouble and I don’t want to kill no dog. I like animals.”
“That dog would be at your throat in a heartbeat. I suggest you get the hell out of here. I don’t have any spare food or supplies,” I replied.
“I ain’t hungry and I got plenty of supplies. Killing the dog would be no problem. But it would surely make me feel real bad. I suggest you take a peek over this pitiful little wall you got here.”
Insulting my workmanship was not a way to get on my better side. Hurt feelings notwithstanding, I decided to take a look at the man with the big mouth and squeaky voice. I took a quick glance over the wall and pulled back to the shelter. Having ascertained that he didn’t have a bazooka aimed in my direction, I stood up and looked down at my tormentor, allowing myself the time for a better evaluation.
What I saw made me on one hand want to laugh and on the other hand, shrink back again behind the safety of the wall. Beneath me was a spritely little gnome of a man bulked up by army issue winter camouflage gear and adorned with at least seven very high powered weapons, only three of which I recognized. At least half of them looked as if they could pulverize our walls in short order, not to mention what they could do to the three of us inside.
The man at my gate gazed up at me with eyes so green most women would have killed to have them.
“Howdedoo Mr. McCall. Name’s Wendell Worthington Washington and I been your neighbor for about six months now. Thought it was about time I paid a social visit.”
The way I had it figured, Wendell whatever-his-name was a complete lunatic. Whether he was a danger to us or not, I had yet to decide. But his weaponry made him a force to be reckoned with so I pushed a little button in the wall twice. The button was one end of a Radio Shack battery-powered home security and intercom system. The batteries were rechargeable on a solar charger. That sent lights flashing and bells ringing inside the house and put Sarah on red alert. Three pushes would have brought her out with the M 16 or 12 gage pump.
“Well Mr. Washington,” I said in my best dealing with completely insane people voice, “it’s real nice of you to finally drop by. We’ve really been looking forward to meeting you. And just how in the hell do you know my name? I haven’t gotten around to putting up the mailbox yet.”
Wendell looked up at me, looked down and sighed the sigh of a very disappointed man. Then he looked up again, a hard intelligence shining in his green eyes.
“Cut the shit, McCall,” he shot back at me. “I ain’t crazy. I ain’t stupid. And I surely ain’t no child to be talked at like that. I come here with some serious business to talk about. I never figured you for an idiot, but I’m rapidly changing my mind.”
He took two steps back, revealing the source of the parallel tracks in the snow. It was a little red wagon, a kid’s plaything with a long, black handle to pull it along behind you. Painted on its side in black script were the words, RADIO FLYER.
I could picture a little boy 60 or 70 years ago pulling it down a suburban sidewalk heading for his best friend’s house all stocked up with plastic guns and toy soldiers. The wagon looked brand new. Its paint was a deep red, shiny and glossy in the early morning sun. Its contents were hidden from my sight by a neatly folded army blanket.
“Where I come from, Mr. McCall, it’s good manners to bring gifts when you’re calling on your neighbors for the first time.”
“Where I come from, Mr. Washington, it is considered bad form to call on people you have never met carrying so much firepower. If I tried to visit any of the clans with so many weapons showing, they would shoot me full of holes, strip my corpse and feed it to the dogs.”
Washington began removing some of the rifles and automatics strapped to his body. He laid them carefully on the wagon, saying, “Well sir, I apologize for putting a scare into you and your loved ones, but I intended most of these here weapons as part of my gifts to you…”
That definitely got my attention.
“And,” he continued, “I’d be very happy to show you some of the very special features of these weapons. But you are surely making this a mighty difficult task.”
I began to reassess my initial trepidation concerning WWW, but in the back of my mind I worried that his wondrous array of gifts could be blinding me to the potential threat he posed to our semi-safe existence. It had taken Sarah and me five years to build what we had and paranoia was a way of life for us.
I had at my doorstep a charming little man, spouting good neighbor platitudes and generally behaving in a most non-threatening demeanor. He was bearing gifts the value of which was incalculable in the world in which we lived. His weaponry could greatly enhance our chances for survival.
But to ignore the damage he could unleash upon the compound with the arsenal he had draped across his shoulders and nestled in the little red wagon would be pure avarice on my part. One of the automatics had what I recognized as a grenade launcher on it, and I had no doubt that he could blow a hole through our wall with one shot if he so chose. And what in the hell was under the blanket in the wagon? Plastique and a timer? Grenades? I hadn’t seen a real grenade since I was six.
Paranoia won out over greed. As I looked down upon him from my perch on the wall, I tried to choose my words carefully. Pissing him off didn’t look like a good plan.
“Mr. Washington, Before I say what I’ve got to say, I warn you that I’ve got a .357 in my right hand and if you make any quick movements I’m gonna shoot you. No matter where I hit you, you’re probably gonna die.”
To his credit the little man didn’t bat an eye.
“Th
is is a nasty world we live in,” I began. “It makes me very sad to see the suffering and depravity beyond these walls. But here, inside these walls, we’ve got kindness and love and even education. And we’ve got respect. Outside there’s killing and rape and mayhem and sodomy and even cannibalism. But in here the only violence we know is in books. And we know that the real world is far worse than any book we can read. In here it’s a new, clean world.”
I paused for a moment, then asked if he was still with me.
“Speak your piece, Mr. McCall,” he said.
“We can’t trust anyone but the two of us. Make that three. The dog is part of our family. We’ve seen too much. There’s only two people and one dog in this world I know I can rely on. And you’re not one of them.”
His attention stayed on me, the expression on his face one of neutrality. A man pondering an issue.
“It’s a pitiful situation, Mr. Washington,” I continued. “God knows both of us dream of the day we could talk to another human being without pointing a weapon at them. We talk about having kids. But we’re scared shit to try. I can’t even count the number of corpses and skeletons of children and little babies we’ve found out there. It’s so fucking bad that we don’t even cry any more when we come across them. If you’re not family, you are a threat to our existence.”
I paused again to assess the impact of my message on the little man. There seemed to be a sadness in his eyes as he nodded for me to continue.
“So…Mr. Washington, me and you have got a problem. I can respect you, but I cannot trust you. And I can’t endanger my wife. She’s all I’ve got. Plus, she’d kick my ass. Right now she’s sitting in the house, looking out the window, watching, waiting for a sign. She’s holding a 12 gauge pump with the safety off. We have our rules and values. She trusts me not to forget, not to slip up. The only thing that worries her is that whoever I’m talking to might do me harm.”
WWW sensed that I had finished with my spiel. He shifted his feet and cleared his throat, then began to speak in his distinctive high register twang.
“Well, Mr. McCall,” he began, “that was an impressive piece of speechifyin’. I sure wish I could talk as good as you. People that talk as good as you got a better chance of gettin’ listened to. Now me…I got this squeaky voice and don’t know a lot of different words and most of the time people think I’m stupid so they don’t pay much attention to what I got to say.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid, Mr. Washington,” I said.
“I know you don’t,” he replied. “That’s why I”m gonna say my piece. The way I see it, is we got a bunch of different ways to go from here. I could take my stuff and go on home. Or I could leave my stuff here and go home. Or…I could take my stuff back about a hundred meters and start blowing holes in your fucking wall.”
He paused to let that little option sink in.
“Now what you can do,” Wendell continued, “is shoot me and take my stuff or let me go without my stuff. Or…we could both talk some more.”
He paused, looking up at me, offering me the next move.
“What I think, Mr. McCall, is that you and me got more to say to each other. What’s it gonna be? It’s your call.”
As Wendell finished, a strange realization came over me…This was the longest conversation I had ever had—except for my talks with Sarah—with another person during my life as an adult. I had read hundreds of books where people talked to each other at length. Seemed like they could go on for hours. But this was a first for me…Sharing ideas with a person who wasn’t a family member. This little man was weaving a spell over me. I didn’t want to quit. I didn’t want to banish him without learning more.
So I thought about it. Mulled over the pros and cons. Played with the options. Not going to shoot him and take his equipment. Didn’t think he would withdraw a hundred meters and start lobbing missiles at us. Not in his make-up. If I asked him to go, he would go peacefully, I believed. If he stayed, we would talk some more. Certainly no harm in that.
But the problem of his having more armament at his fingertips than Sarah and I had in our entire house persisted. I decided that if we could solve the dilemma that WWW posed by being a one man armory, we would be able to resume our exploration.
“Mr. Washington,” I said, “if we’re going to continue this conversation, I feel the need to lay some ground rules to ensure our safety. But first, I’m asking you to call me `McCall.’ This `Mister’ stuff just doesn’t feel right to me. Just plain old `McCall’ or `Mac’ sounds a lot friendlier to me and that’s what my old family used to call me and what Sarah calls me now.”
Wendell broke eye contact with me and looked to the ground, shuffling his feet in the snow. When he looked back up, there was a softer cast to his expression. I had stumbled my way to a crossroad and taken the correct turn. We would talk awhile longer.
“That is a most neighborly gesture,” he said. “I’m honored to call you `Mac.’ And if I do, you’re gonna have to call me by the name that most people have given me. Most folks call me `Weasel.’ I’ve never had what you would call a friend, and I know that most of the time folks are makin’ fun of the way I look and talk. But I’ve grown fond of the name, and since I’ve studied on it, I learned the weasel’s a pretty smart animal—ornery, wise and sneaky. He’s a real survivor. The name suits me just fine.”
The next part was going to be real tricky, because I was going to have to put Weasel through a whole bunch of hoops. I couldn’t guess his reaction, but I hoped he would comply. In my mind was the feeling that Sarah and I might possibly be encountering something that had eluded both of us since the time she saved me—someone besides each other we could call friend.
“If we’re going to continue, Weasel, you’re going to have to put up with some, uh, … unpleasantness. I’ll try to make is short and painless, but I’ve got to check you out. No one besides Sarah and me has ever been inside these walls. If you are to be the first, I’m going to inspect everything but your asshole…And I may just have to check that out too.”
“McCall,” the little man replied, “I been watchin’ you two for a long time now. I know you ain’t dumb.” He lowered his voice and added, “You ain’t as smart as me yet, but maybe that can be fixed. I wouldn’t expect anything less than best from you. Do what you gotta do.”
I pressed the signal to the house once. The barrel of the shotgun preceded Sarah’s head out the door. I turned my attention back to Weasel. “How do you take your coffee?” I asked.
“Cream and Sugar. Lots of both.”
I turned back to the house and hollered across, “Bring me two cups of coffee the way I like it and an army blanket.”
Sarah held up one finger, not the middle one, and disappeared back into the house. Two minutes later she reappeared at the door, standing there, two cups of steaming coffee held by their handles in her left hand and the shotgun cradled in the crook of her right arm, her finger on the trigger housing.
She stood there for a full sixty seconds, looking, feeling, sensing, sniffing the air like a dog. Satisfied, she high stepped through the snow to the base of my ladder. I never tired of seeing her, and as she advanced, I felt better with each approaching step.
We had each been alone for several years before we met. She had saved my life and nursed me back. When I awoke, the first thing I saw was her face. My left hand was sandwiched between her two. The first words I heard from her lips were, “It’s about fucking time.”
Since that moment, the closer she gets, the better I feel.
She was wearing a light sweater, jeans and leather hikers. A 9mm Taurus semi was holstered beneath her left arm pit. The cold never seemed to bother her. She said it was a matter of thinking warm. Mind over matter. I think it’s a body fat thing, but I’ve never said it out loud. Her auburn hair was winter length. At 5’9” she is what the 19th cen cowboys would have called a handsome woman. That means she’s attractive, big boned, curvy and unafraid of anyone or anything. All of that h
ad nothing to do with why I loved her, although the soft slopes and curves were an added bonus.
I loved her because she was there each time I awakened, back when we first met, gently holding my hand in hers. I passed out again before I could ask her who she was and what had happened. When I came to again she was still there holding my hand. She didn’t say anything that second awakening. Just smiled. That’s when I started to love her, when I saw that generous smile…Then I passed out again.
As she approached the ladder, I told Weasel to take three steps away from the door. I told her to put one cup right outside the door, which took a while, because she had to negotiate through the little access area we had hidden in the barbed wire barricade. I covered Weasel while she did so, even though I felt he had no subterfuge in mind. When she secured the door and returned to the safe side of the wire, I invited Weasel to get his coffee.
“It’s all right to leave the 12 gage down there,” I said, and she climbed up with my coffee.
She looked at me questioningly, shrugging her shoulders and cocking her head to one side, silently asking what was going on.
I smiled at her. “Take a peek.”
She took a quick look. Weasel was warming his hands with the cup as he sipped contentedly at the steaming coffee.
“What in the fuck is that?” she asked.
“That,” I replied “is Mr. Wendell Worthington Washington, commonly known as Weasel to his friends, of which he has none, with the possible exception of me. I kinda like the little guy.”
“What’s with the arsenal?”
“They’re mostly gifts.”
She was astounded. I could tell by the way her mouth hung open.
“Very attractive face you’re making,” I offered. “Makes me want to take you inside and take advantage of your dimwittedness.”
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 2