“There’s a song,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” he laughed. “The Runt. Gotta Get You a Woman. Have one of his shirts. Maybe someday.”
Tonight he was wearing a Son Volt shirt. Nice alt-country band. Black shirts were mandatory for night work. We moved through the tunnel, Weasel accompanying us down the length of the shaft to secure the outlet behind me. This particular passageway exited in the basement of a burnt out Tudor about 100 meters West of our compound. When I come to the door to the Tudor’s basement, I located the oil can and lubricated the hinges.
The door was Weasel’s invention. From the inside of the Tudor’s basement, the door appeared to be part of the paneled wall—complete with burn marks from the fire that had destroyed the suburban home. In the highly unlikely circumstance that someone found entry into the Tudor’s basement, they would see only scorched and scarred redwood paneling. Behind the paneling we had inserted our new door.
Weasel had found an old solid steel warehouse door and enlisted Sarah, Stevie and me to haul the thing back to the compound, the three of us pulling its three hundred plus pounds on a contraption Weasel had made out of wheel barrow wheels and a pick-up truck bed. The trip was five miles but wasn’t backbreaking, thanks to the way he had rigged the vehicle. Sarah commented that in a past life Weasel was an engineer in the Roman Empire.
The door was fastened to 4 X 4’s and we brought the entire set-up with us plus some Weasel pickings that looked totally useless to me. But Weasel’s particular genius was visualizing his environs in a way that no one else could. I have never seen him throw anything away. We had to remove the door from the frame to get it down the tunnel and then set up the 4 X 4’s again to rehang the door.
After I oiled the door and four heavy duty locks, I slipped the bolts and cracked the door open about four inches and sat for five minutes and listened.
Three a.m. The predators, both human and animal, were winding down their night’s work as their circadian rhythms began preparing for the next cycle. In the thirty plus years since the collapse, timber wolves and cougar have worked their way down from Canada and Minnesota, Wisconsin and upper Michigan to take advantage of the proliferation of deer, farm animals, horses, and house pets that have returned to the wild. Brown bear also flourish. Noisy and generally ill-tempered, they are solitary vegetarians and have no interest in meat from my bones. But the biggest danger to me and Duke, excluding human predators, are the roaming wild dog packs.
Wolves never seem to come near a human, unless the animal senses an injury. But the dogs, which in the last thirty years have transformed from loving pets to fierce predators and bred themselves into a position of power, seem to have no fear or respect for humans. To them, we are meat.
I didn’t hear or sense any threat, so I turned to Weasel and gave him a nod, slipped through the door with Duke, closed it and listened as it locked it behind us. I would return by the front door.
Working my way silently through the Tudor’s basement, I found the stairs and entered the first floor. I paused to appreciate the star dance through the rafters of the roofless house, a million tiny beacons providing enough light for me to see obstacles in my path. I loved the night and when I scheduled night missions I adjusted my internal clock a few days before and after the trip so that I was always awake when it was dark, usually retiring to catch five or six hours of sleep in mid-morning.
It was a gentle summer night, about 60 degrees. A south breeze carried the gifts of lilacs. Our destination was a house in a neighboring suburb where Weasel had found a survivalist cache, watched over by four skeletons in the burned out shell of a two bedroom ranch. Probably the family, thinking they were safely ensconced in their basement shelter, safe from all human harm, had been deprived of oxygen when their house went up in flames. It was a slow, horrible ironic death to be killed by the very structure they had built to ensure their safety.
Weasel brought back a shotgun, a Baretta 70-223 assault rifle with twenty-five extra 30 round clips, a Ruger P-85 semi-auto 9mm pistol and an old .38 special along with several hundred rounds of .38 magnum ammo. He had left behind various knives and utensils as well as a prodigious supply of canned pop, magazines, how-to books and—most valuable of all—nearly a hundred cans of coffee and more than 30 bags of sugar. My empty backpack could carry 30 kilos. Duke could carry another 10K’s on kevlar III side saddles. Weasel figured we’d need at least three trips.
I set out at a ten minute mile jog, giving myself a couple of hours to cover the five miles and an hour to stock up before the sun started to rise. On day trips I would usually take the ten-speed mountain bike, but it wasn’t safe for night travel—too many obstacles to spill me from the bike. We would sleep there during the day, spend some time scoping the area and return the following night. It’s nice to have plans—even when they don’t pan out.
I was wearing a lightweight long sleeve night camo sweater over a KevlarIII vest. My pants were army issue with plenty of pockets. On my feet were a Reebok light all purpose trainer type shoe—all black, no reflector tape. They were light, comfortable, moisture wicking and silent.
In my holster nestled the Glock 17L. In each of four of my pants pockets I carried two extra clips, taped together so they would make no noise as I ran. The Glock rested horizontally on my left side in a reinforced nylon holster, which was much lighter than leather. The whole rig was about a kilogram, and I hardly noticed the gun until I needed it.
In my backpack was a Wesson double action Alaskan Guide .445 Super Mag. I carried six extra speed loaders for the Wesson. The gun was big and heavy and when it was fired it could be heard for miles around. But in the 20th it was used as a hunting pistol and if I needed to stop a man or animal with one shot, this was the pistol to do it. Weasel tutored Stevie and me in adjusting the single action pull to 2.5 pounds to enhance long range accuracy. The double action feature allowed me to fire the gun almost as rapidly as a clip gun, even though the pull, at eleven pounds was much heavier.
On my belt was a clip knife, a buck knife in a pants pocket, and an Australian combat knife sheathed to my right leg. Across my back was a SIG SG-541 assault rifle, which fired 5.56mm rounds from 30 round clips.
Jogging through the former suburbs at night was always and forever an unnerving ordeal. On a clear night, even if the moon wasn’t in phase to provide light, the millions of stars provided enough illumination to amplify the unearthly presence of abandoned and sometimes burned out homes, duplexes, apartment buildings, businesses, and schools. I was running through miles and miles of cemetery, the tombstones flanking me right and left, many of them two or more stories in height, each a silent testament to the ultimate cost of America’s greed and consumption.
Having Duke by my side eased the eeriness. The follies of my forefathers have no place in his dog world. We are his life. He is our protector.
The flora and fauna of the American midwest did not mourn the passing of millions of the planet’s dominant mammal. They thrived in ever increasing numbers, culling themselves in their own cruel way when one species became too abundant. The maple trees seemed particularly pleased with our passing. Every spring for the last thirty years, millions of their ubiquitous little helicopter seeds took root and our maple syrup harvest was an annual spring ritual.
A common sight is a maple towering twenty or thirty feet over a house, having taken root in a living room or kitchen and burrowed its way year by year through floor and foundation until it was firmly planted right in the middle of the of a suburban ranch house.
As Duke and I ran, we often disturbed the night hunters and their prey—horned owls, field mice, rabbits, red foxes, coyote, raccoons, deer, possum, woodchucks. The wolves usually stayed away from the areas that weren’t heavily wooded, but the dog packs preferred their existence to be closer in to the remnants of civilization. Duke never pulled away from my side, even when tempted by rabbits or other small prey.
It was he, on this night, who sounded the warning, a low rumble
in his chest, a change in his pace. We slowed. I kept him on heel and looked to see what direction he was sighting on. It was straight ahead. We were coming up to a junior college. I was familiar with the area. We had pulled hundreds books, disks and hard drives from its library when Sarah started researching the collapse.
The campus buildings stretched ahead of us on the right for about a kilometer. On our left were apartments, burned out shells that once housed young students and families in a town called Glen Ellyn. Between the road which we traveled and the college were huge expanses of parking lot, several acres of weed infested blacktop, complete with thirty or forty rusting vehicles. It was on the parking area that Duke focused.
As we crept closer, crawling to within twenty meters of the spot Duke was focused upon, sounds filtered to us—clangs of metal on metal, grunts, screams. I began to pick out figures in the dim light of the stars. Men grappling and parting; charging and being repelled; standing over prostrate figures and kicking or clubbing their downed adversaries.
I immediately recognized the macabre dance for what it was—a clan battle. Like most of the clashes I had witnessed, this one was hand-to-hand. They loved to fight, but most of the time held back the use of pistols and rifles. More survivors that way. Wouldn’t want to fuck up your favorite hobby by getting everyone killed.
The rule was: Once you started fighting hand-to-hand, you kept it that way. Knives, bats, spears, machetes, golf clubs, nunchuks—no problem. Get the football equipment on, paint your face, gobble some Slammer or Fuck-U-Up, a combination of dirty meth and acid, and lets have at it. But no guns for close in work. Takes the fun away.
One of the figures stood out from the others by reason of his height and girth. He was in the middle of the melee swinging what I knew to be a thirty-four ounce Louisville Slugger. My ears registered the sickening thuds as his club impacted upon ribs, arms or an opponent’s head.
This was my third glimpse of The Babe. I had a rush of fury when I realized it was him. Stevie’s story of what that fat beast had done to him and Eric, flashed through my mind. Unbidden, the mental picture of the corpulent, smelly psychopath terrorizing Eric and Stevie played like a vid behind my eyes. I could see poor Eric’s body crumpled against the wall.
I momentarily fantasized having the Mauser sniper rifle with night scope in my hands, the cross-hairs centered on one of his knees. I wouldn’t kill him; I’d cripple the bastard. Shatter his fucking knees with dum-dum rounds. Let him spend the rest of his sick life crawling in the filth he created.
The sounds of hand to hand combat were suddenly stilled by three pistol shots, the deep reverberation of an army issue Colt .45, a favorite clan weapon because of its abundance and reliability. The flashes of the weapon’s discharge briefly shattered the dim starlight over the parking lot/battle ground. Five more shots followed, spaced out with three or four seconds between each one, emptying the clip.
Someone was breaking the unwritten rules of clan combat.
Then complete, total silence. No sounds of battle, no breeze rustling the leaves, no night birds, no animals scurrying to their warrens. Nothing.
By the light of the stars, I could see the vague outlines of about a dozen figures grouped around the huge bulk of The Babe. Then they separated, moving across the battle ground in disparate directions, occasionally squatting down, as if looking for something lost or inspecting their fallen comrades and foes for signs of life. I put a hand of reassurance on Duke’s flank. He was quivering, spooked by the ominous silence.
Then the screams started—horrible, God awful, nauseating, gut wrenching, agony-filled shrieks of fear and despair. A chill crept up my spine. The hair on the back of my head tingled. I shivered involuntarily and was very much afraid, fighting the primitive part of my brain’s command to cut and run. Duke’s hackles rose. He whimpered and I pulled him close to me. We remained in hiding to wait out the two hours until sunrise.
Individual words were discernible within the wall of screams, their meaning an assault on my mind as the sounds hurtled across the parking lot and were processed by my brain. “NO!” “OH, MY GOD!” “PLEASE, NO MORE!” The abhorrent noise, the shrieks of eight or ten men, eventually tapered off. But as the vanquished soldiers succumbed one by one, the impact of the shrieks, and pleas, and moans became more intense as the wails of agony became the death knells of two individuals, each terror-filled voice distinguishable from the other. Two men, distinct individuals, being tortured, dying slowly, each second a year of pain. Two men whom I could not help.
Then, finally, silence again.
The remaining figures in the parking lot moved off to the East, following the big man. I could hear them laughing, celebrating a job well done, glorifying a game well played.
I curled up in a fetal ball, awaiting the dawn, my mind filled with hate, dreading what I would find when sun pushed back the night.
• • • •
Before the eastern sky lightened, the birds sang in the sunrise. An hour had passed since the slaughter’s end. I uncurled and stretched, preparing myself for the ghastly task that awaited us. I pulled some rations for the two of us from the back pack—fruit and rice for me, biscuits and raccoon jerky for Duke.
As we broke our fast together, we both heard the barking and yipping to our north, becoming louder as they moved closer. There was a breeze from the south, carrying the smell of the battle blood northward, toward the dog pack which had picked up the blood scent and was rushing to investigate. I wasn’t worried about danger to us. The pack would be completely focused on the parking lot and we were far enough away to be no distraction to them. But I was concerned that the pack would destroy information that I sought as they ravaged the corpses in the parking lot.
Our survival depended on accurate knowledge of what was occurring in our immediate environment. Who is up? Who is down? Who’s migrating? And in what direction?
A pack is dangerous under three circumstances. If they catch you by surprise, you’re dead. But this is unusual, because they are generally noisy lots when prey is in sight. If you are injured, you are dead. Even if you can defend, they won’t give up or back down when they sense a kill. If the pack is starving, you are dead. Its members will behave with extraordinary ferocity. They will not try to conserve energy for another attempt. The attack will be all out…do or die.
None of these three criteria applied to the situation Duke and I were in. The last time I saw a starving pack was at least 10 years ago, during the two month drought. Predators and prey had, for the most part, either died of thirst or starvation or moved out to seek better food sources. When the bottom of the food chain left the area, those predators above followed.
Since I wasn’t injured, and knew the pack was not starving and was fully aware of their exact location, my decision was to face them straight on, diminish their number and get on with my business. I had to check the battleground, and the pack wanted to feed. Mutually exclusive objectives.
I checked the loads for both pistols, choosing the .445 Magnum for my primary weapon, planning to pick off several of the attackers at long range before they could get organized. The assault rifle didn’t pack the punch or provide the long range accuracy I needed.
The sun was a semicircle on the eastern horizon when Duke and I moved twenty meters east, found a position approximately ten meters in front of last night’s victims and faced to the north to await the pack’s arrival. As its members picked up Duke’s scent, the pack increased its clamor, each bark and yip provoking more of the same as they whipped themselves into killing frenzy.
They broke through, nine of them, almost in unison, between two apartment buildings about sixty meters in front of us, halting abruptly about ten meters later when they saw us positioned directly in front of them. Having prey take a stand was not something they had experienced before. The pack did not know that Duke and I were not prey.
The leader was mixed shepherd and black lab, big crested and long haired, unafraid but cautious in this new
situation. He approached slowly, fangs bared, hackles up, growling a threat. Duke growled in response, wanting a piece of this interloper, but he stayed on my right flank.
I brought the .445 up, sighted and took out the big male with a chest shot. Before the others could react, I got off five more rounds, snapped the revolver open, dropped in a speed loader.
Surveying the scene, I saw that with the six shots I had taken down five of the pack, three clean kills and two crippling shots. The wounded dogs were whining and trying to pull themselves to some spot away from the danger. The four remaining animals had taken flight. A pack’s courage is always positively correlated to its number of healthy members.
I returned the .445 to the backpack and unholstered the Glock as I walked toward the wounded animals. I put each away with a head shot and returned to where Duke waited and sat next to him, talking him down and keeping my back to the parking lot and the grizzly business of investigating the horror we had witnessed in the night.
• • • •
Everybody has them. Can’t operate without them. Neanderthal, wolves, deer, Australopithecus, lions, hyenas. We had them too. Rules, sanctions, norms, limits. Without them we would be expelled from the gene pool.
Before the collapse, the industrialized countries broke one of the rules. The one about shitting where you live. As a result, about 100,000 of us now live in an area that supported nearly seven million people just thirty-five years ago. There are now hundreds of clans, primitive tribes existing in the empty shell that once represented humanity’s highest technological achievement. Each clan consists of from fifty or so to several hundred members.
About eight or nine years ago Sarah and I sat down and tried to figure out how many people live in the area and how many are members of clans. It was all guess work, based on our travels, observations and information from each of our families—before they were lost to us. Our best guess was that 4000 are clan members. Meaning that, at most, less than four per cent of our population lives the clan life. So most people are like us, Sarah, Weasel, Stevie, Duke and I, in that they are NOT clan members.
Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation Page 17