Blood of the Dogs_Book I_Annihilation

by Richard Cosme

  “Back off, Stevie,” Weasel said.

  Stevie didn’t answer. We all remained silent.

  “Thanks. Now tell him how you’d handle this piece of shit.”

  “Stevie knows,” Weasel told him. “They all know. Was me, fat fuck would be sucking a shotgun barrel.”

  “Right fucking on target,” Merlin replied.

  “But it ain’t me, Merlin,” Weasel continued. “It’s you. And Stevie is right. Don’t pull the trigger. It doesn’t fit you.”

  Merlin was unnerved, confused by what he was hearing. “You been reading too many fucking books, Weasel. You don’t know shit about me. You gonna just let this garbage live? You’re fuckin’ nuts, you think I’ll let that go down.”

  “He’s not going to survive,” Weasel said. “And you shouldn’t be pulling that trigger.”

  “How can you say that?” Merlin screamed. “You’re a goddam stone killer. You’d ice him without batting an eye.”

  Weasel stepped closer to Merlin. He smiled and responded.

  “Sometimes that’s what I am,” he said, a hint of sadness in his voice. “And yes, that I would. But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you and Stevie. This isn’t right for either one of you. Stevie’s got all the guts in the world. He’d give his life for any of us. But he won’t be an executioner. And I’d never ask him to. It would change him. Move him in a direction he wouldn’t like. One he couldn’t come back from. He’d never forget it, Merlin. Neither would you.”

  Stevie stepped forward, moving away from Sarah, closer to Merlin, The Babe still skulking on the floor between them.

  “Look at him, Merlin,” Stevie said, pointing down to The Babe. “He’s already dead. He’s useless and helpless in his world. I know he’s garbage. I know it better than anyone here. You heard him tryin to buy his life from Mac. If Mac bit on that, he’d be dead the minute he turned his back on The Babe. I can’t do it Merlin. I wouldn’t want Weasel too either. But Weasel is the hardest man we have. We need that as much as we need Sarah’s conscience. And Mac’s courage.”

  “What do you bring to the table, Stevie?” Merlin asked softly.

  “He brings loyalty and love,” Weasel told Merlin. “And the ability to see all of us for what we are. And accept us. That’s why he doesn’t want you to do it, Merlin. Stevie sees some of himself in you.”

  Merlin’s shoulders dropped a little. Some of the venom seemed to drain from him. He recognized Stevie as a fellow victim. Was compelled to listen to a member of the same club.

  “Whatta we do with him?” His voice was weak.

  He was giving it all over to Stevie. The decision was his.

  Stevie grabbed the decision, made it for the group.

  “All of us recycle organic garbage,” Stevie said. “That’s what he is—a sludge heap. We’ll give him back to the land. But I won’t execute him. Neither should you. I’ll defend myself. Help others. Fight someone who can fight back.”

  The boy, man now, but he was still a boy in our hearts, looked down at the man who had been the dominant male figure for his first nine years—now silent, groveling, mortally wounded, so dangerous that no one approached within reach of his beefy arms—and dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

  “Let his own kind do it,” Stevie said. “And Merlin pushes the button.”

  We left then. All of us. Retrieved the weapons, ours and The Babe’s. Told Roberto and James we were leaving and picked up the Cobras and Disciples on the way and carefully worked back to the basement, sneaking through our back doors and secret tunnels, avoiding the remaining Messengers.

  Roberto and had located the three Cobras who had been silent for so long. They were dead, had succumbed to the Messengers superior numbers. Their bodies were carried back by their clan mates. James, too, has lost soldiers. Our numbers were now seventeen. Sixteen humans, one dog.

  The Babe’s screams and curses accompanied us part of the way. Filled with anger and fear and panic and disbelief, eventually they subsided as we put enough walls between us and him.

  • • • •

  In the corner of the basement, behind one of the gargantuan furnaces, there is a large room, combination machine shop and locker area for the workers who tended the complex physical plant in the 21st. It had a good, solid steel door which was rigged by Weasel and Stevie with a two minute delay to blow open when we were safely out of the building complex.

  Inside the room were the remnants of three dog packs, over thirty wild dogs, all males, lured into the truck and coaxed into the room by the compelling primal scents of the three bitches in heat that Roberto had given to Weasel.

  Behind the door, the dogs inside, having made a tenuous peace in their confinement, were clamoring for their freedom, hungry and enraged by their common enemy.

  We packed our equipment, shouldered our weapons and quickly exited via a Byzantine series of newly constructed mouse holes through the lower level service truck entrance of Sears. We returned to the truck, rigged it for defense and all took our positions.

  It was then that Merlin returned to the basement, climbed high to the top of an air conditioning unit, and triggered the charges that would blow the door that separated the dogs from the Messengers who remained in the mall. Over the comm sets, it told us all to get clear and we heard and felt a muffled thump. Merlin observed through his night vision goggles the newly formed pack’s reaction when the barrier to their freedom was removed.

  At first, frightened by the explosion, they cowered in the back of the room, backs down, tails tucked. Then two of them, potential alpha males of the new pack, broke for the opening, barking loudly. The others followed, and the group milled in the furnace room for a few minutes sampling scents left by all of us, looking for danger, searching for a food source. Long time between meals.

  It took only a couple of minutes for a few of them to pick up the blood scent from inside the mall. They barked and whirled and communicated their discovery to the others. It took only seconds for the remainder of the pack to grasp the scent. All of them rushed to the open door that led from the basement into the main part of the mall. Nipping at each other’s flanks in their frenzy to feed, howling and barking in their furor and rage, they followed the trails of blood, and burst into the mall, chasing out the survivors Messengers, feeding on the dead…

  …and eventually working their way to dark hallway where I had cut the tendons in The Babe’s fat leg with my little knife.

  • • • •

  We were never sure just how many of the Messengers made it out of the mall alive. Over a dozen exited from the Lord and Taylor doors, the ones near the truck. In the diminishing darkness of predawn, they moved to the truck, an oasis of safety from the dogs, not realizing the vehicle was already occupied.

  After we shot the first few resisters to our demand they disarm, the rest of them surrendered to us. We locked the prisoners in the rear of the truck while we decided what to do with them.

  “The place is full of dog shit,” complained one of the men, a skin and bones, multiple-tattooed, herpes-sored scum bag whom I recognized from our visit to the Messenger camp. They were all coming down from the drugs and adrenaline rush and were as jumpy as indies at a square dance. I had my own coming down to do and didn’t want to mess with him.

  “Be glad to leave you here,” I said, matter-of-factly. “Of course I can’t offer you any weapons. Make a choice. In the truck with the shit or out here with the dogs.”

  He remained in the truck.

  We replenished the crank case oil, fueled the gas tank, ate, and bandaged up and discussed what to do next for about two hours, talking quietly, tired to the bone. When daylight returned, I noticed one of the Messenger prisoners carried a blood stained WWII Nazi helmet. I pulled him from the truck and sat him in front of the seventeen of us who had made it out alive—a jury of fifteen men, one woman and a dog—sitting cross-legged in front of him.

  Like us, the man was weary. Stripped of his sports gear and w
eapons, denied his drugs, he was clearly intimidated by the group before him. His bravado had been leeched from him, like soil from a rain soaked field, by the Messengers’ recent defeats. Without the regalia of his decimated clan and the accouterments of war, the Messenger soldier was of normal stature, small hearted—a man few would want to call friend and fewer still would fear.

  “How’d you get the helmet?” I asked, pointing to the head gear that sat between us and him like a large soup pot.

  The man’s eyes kept wandering over to Duke who was laying by Sarah, head in her lap, alert to the prisoner’s presence among us despite the fact Sarah was gently stroking his head with her good hand.

  Roberto laughed. “Dog’s got a bigger rep than any of us,” he commented.

  I called Duke over to me, closer to the prisoner. He limped over and rested his head on my leg. I felt him relax. He was comforted by the return of Sarah. His eyes bore into the prisoner.

  “The helmet,” I repeated.

  “Souvenir,” he replied.

  “Bed pan,” Merlin countered.

  “What happened to the head it usually rested upon?” I asked.

  The man shrugged. “I heard the screams and growls from behind a door and went in to see. Figured it coulda been one of my mates. The Babe was in a hallway on his hands and knees. No goggles. No guns. Had a big knife, but it wasn’t enough. There was about five dogs in front of him and five in back. They jumped in and out, trying to get a hand or leg. He got a couple, I’ll give that to him. But on one swing with the knife, one of the dogs got his other hand and pulled him down on his face. It was over then,” he said, looking at all of us. “You know how them dogs are when they get something grounded.”

  Sarah looked at me, remembering. I knew, all right.

  Eleven years ago. Last sensations before I died were the snarls of the pack in my ears and pain of their teeth ripping at my arms, trying to get beneath them to the soft flesh of my throat, guardian of the jugular.

  But I didn’t die. A perfect stranger helped. I thought Sarah was an angel and I was in heaven when I came out of it.

  “You didn’t try to save him?” James asked the Messenger.

  The man looked at James like, what’re you, fucking nuts?

  “He was screaming like a stuck pig,” the Messenger said. “All girly like. I didn’t owe the man shit. He’s the one got us into this fucking mess.”

  All of us stared at the man, silent, nothing to say.

  “The helmet rolled free and I took it while the dogs was eating,” said the ex-soldier. “They didn’t even notice me. It was a big fucking meal for them.”

  • • • •

  We sent the man back to the stench of the truck bed. He had helped us make our decision. Our prisoners didn’t like it. But they did the work. It took them two hours of back breaking labor…after we shooed the dogs away.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  On the way back to the Wheaton College Messenger compound in the truck, Sarah told me that Billy Graham had been the only big 20th cen preacher that she had known of that hadn’t been touched by some kind of financial or moral scandal.

  “So what’s that make him?” I asked.

  “Unique,” she replied. “So let’s try not to destroy his college any more than the Messengers have already done.”

  I was driving. Sarah, Merlin and Duke were in the cab with me. Our armor was up. As the truck moved north along 59, it created a gentle breeze that cooled our skins.

  The Messengers were in the back with the dog shit and other garbage from the battle at the mall. Stevie, Roberto, James, and our new allies from the Cobras and Disciples were draped across the roof, running boards and the hood. Weasel was in the gun turret, tending to the machine gun. All of them were screaming for me to go faster, even the generally dignified leader of the Insane Cobra Nation. But I kept it slow.

  A mile before we entered the Messenger camp, I stopped the truck and we returned the armor to a combat status. Just in case. All of us draped ourselves with weapons. Weasel cocked the HK belt-fed machine gun.

  I pulled the black, scarred, malevolent-looking truck to the area where we had met The Babe to negotiate for Sarah’s release. Three point turned it so the ass end faced the hill. On the truck’s cab and running boards, assault rifles in everyone’s hands and another across their chests, all of our survivors except Merlin and I were poised. Sarah had insisted on being up there with the men who had helped in her rescue.

  We looked nasty as hell. Planned it that way.

  In the midday sun, about fifty or sixty Messengers dotted the hill, sunning themselves, napping off their lunch, reposing in the grass or crooks of the fallen oaks. A bucolic scene. Tough life being a clan soldier.

  No guards had picked up our entrance. No soldiers rushed for their weapons. On the hill, the remaining Messengers silently watched our little drama unfold.

  Stragglers began to wander up, cautiously observing, willing to wait for us to make the first move. I engaged the mechanism for the truck to dump its contents and climbed on to the roof of the cab, assault rifle draped across my chest. As the bed slowly tipped, the gate opened with a loud clatter, spilling out the truck’s contents.

  Several pounds of dog shit, a couple dozen living men who smelled bad enough to lose any friends they might have had and two score Messenger corpses slid out, spilling onto the lawn, a gory smorgasbord of blood and bones and canine excrement.

  We had made one of the prisoners, the one who complained about the smell, place the WWII Nazi helmet on the skull of The Babe’s ravaged remains. The dogs hadn’t left much. Nothing to indicate it was their former leader among the raw, bloody flesh and bones.

  There were many, many more Messenger bodies back at the mall, dragged out into the parking lot for the scavengers. Also probably a few dozen stragglers roaming indie country—whipped, hungry, low on ammo. We transported enough of their dead back with us to make our point.

  The men and women on the lawn began to wander down to get a better look at the entertainment. None of them seemed angered by our offering. Perhaps they were tired of being soldiers during war time. It was a career that could get you killed.

  On the truck, we kept our weapons up, non-threatening. We sought no fight.

  I jumped down from the roof and banged on the cab door. Merlin handed me the bat.

  “Give me a hand,” he said. “I want to see this.”

  Merlin helped Duke out and leaned on the side of the truck, Duke beside him, while I climbed up to the roof of the cab. I stood and surveyed the group of Messengers below us, mostly men, some of their women. No children to be seen. I searched for the toughest looking soldier among the growing audience. He was in the front row, observing impassively, arms across his chest. He carried only a knife and a pistol, but looked mean enough to bite off a rat’s head.

  I caught his eyes with mine and tossed him the bat. He snapped it out of the air, catching it high up on the barrel and bringing it down to inspect it. Finished, he passed it along. It slowly made its way through the crowd, eventually passing through forty or fifty pairs of hands.

  When it reached the back of the crowd, it disappeared for a few minutes and suddenly appeared in the air, transcribing a graceful arc over the crowd, from back to front, spinning slowly end-to-end and landing in the pile of corpses with a wet plop.

  The gathering dissipated then, slowly dissolving into groups of two or three, losing its mass and identity like a single drop of blood in crystal clear spring water.

  • • • •

  Roberto jumped from the hood, signaling Jose’ and Flint and all of his remaining Cobras to follow. James and his Disciples disembarked from the sides of the truck. As the two groups of soldiers strode purposefully up the hill behind the remnants of Satan’s Messengers, Merlin shot me a questioning look.

  “The prisoners,” I said. “Especially the children. Both clans are taking the ones that need help back to their camps.”

  “I’ll be dam
ned,” Merlin said.

  “Sarah talked to Roberto and James about it,” I said.

  “They didn’t need much persuading,” Sarah offered.

  We stayed with the truck while the Cobras and Disciples climbed the hill. In twenty minutes we saw them crest the hill, begin the trek down with thirty former Messenger prisoners in tow. They were a rag-tag mixture of bewildered, hairless women and big-eyed children. Many of the children were being carried by soldiers.

  While Merlin manned the gun turret, Stevie, Sarah and I rushed to help. We grouped them around the truck and rushed to find food and water from the Messenger supplies. Duke wandered among the children, accepting a pet from those who weren’t afraid, licking every little face that was offered.

  For two hours we fed and bathed them in the warm afternoon sun, cleaned the filthy truck bed with clear water from a creek that meandered west of the campus. Soon some of the children began to jabber and the women talked softly among themselves.

  • • • •

  Before sunset, we loaded them all into the newly cleaned truck bed. Weasel climbed from his turret into the cab, helping Merlin and Duke back inside with him. He started the truck and pointed us in the direction of Roberto’s home turf, driving slowly so as not to frighten the children. From there we drove to the James’ turf in the city.

  Except for the three in the cab and Sarah in the back with the women and children, we all sat quietly on the top of the truck—a warm, cleansing breeze rustling our clothes, pushing the stench of death behind us—satisfied in our minds that Satan’s Messengers had ceased to exist.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “Now that we’ve been here awhile,” Sarah asked, “how do you feel about our new home?”

  I put my book aside and straightened her covers, pulling them down so that the top half of her body was exposed to the air…and my eyes. I could handle the distraction.

  “You mean living in a place that used to be a pizza restaurant?” I asked.

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, the kitchen isn’t bad. And there’s plenty of bathroom space. And the neighbors,” I said pointing my head in the direction where Stevie and Weasel had carved themselves a cave in the old generator room of the mall, “are certainly nice.”