Eat, Prey, Decay: 7 Tales of the Apocalypse (Zombie, Dark Fantasy, Dystopian, Horror, & Post-Apocalyptic Boxed Set), page 125
The closer we came to the vehicle, the more uneasy I became. And I wasn’t the only one. Ranger was now protectively at my side, the fur on the back of his neck standing. Always trust an animal’s sense over your own. They feel things on a whole ‘nother level. Only a noob would ignore his dog.
I hadn’t realized I’d stopped walking, my body half-turned away from the vehicle. I wanted to travel back in the direction I’d come. Solitude made me safe. Being on the move made me safe. If I stopped… something would come after me. If I settled down… something would happen to me. It would be Kamdesh all over again.
Too many missions. Too many trigger-pulls. Too many orders followed.
Civilians didn’t understand. They thought the episodes were triggered by the obvious- fireworks, a truck backfiring, murder on the news. But, more often than not, it was the quiet that awoke the part of me I tried to forget. It was an invisible stimulus that triggered a memory, triggered my body to remember and react.
Shaking my head vigorously, I started walking towards the truck again. This time, I concentrated on my footfalls instead of potholes to keep myself goal-focused. Get water, get to town, get money, get the hell out. Don’t let your guard down.
Do. Not. Let. Your. Guard. Down.
The truck was only a two hundred yards away now. Nothing unusual about it- a newer Ford, maybe diesel, with rear dually wheels and a ‘Farm Use’ plate. Just a typical Texas agricultural truck. As I moved close enough to touch the bed, I noticed the driver’s side door was ajar. A length of cloth- it looked like burlap, maybe a feed sack- trailed from the bottom of the door opening.
“Hello?” My voice cracked a little; I hadn’t used it in nearly a week.
I could see the driver’s head through the rear glass. The person wasn’t moving. Sleeping? The truck was pulled over. Maybe he’d cracked the door for a breeze. I scanned the area around me out of habit. Nothing but me and the dog. There should be something. The call of a bird, the rustle of leaves as a snake slithered. But there was nothing; just a vacuum of silence interrupted occasionally by the low rumble of a warning growl.
“What is it boy?” I didn’t look down at the dog, my eyes re-trained on the truck. Ranger looked up at me with those eyes and I nodded. That was all the direction he needed. He padded away from me and toward the cloth hanging from the semi-open driver’s door. Sniffing at it, the volume of his growl increased. I knew what he smelled. Because I smelled it too now.
Death.
It had a distinctive odor. Metallic, sweet, and disturbing. Oxidizing blood and putrefaction. Urine and shit, because dying wasn’t a clean, sterile affair. It was messy, disgusting. You die and when you die, dignity goes out the window. A body, lifeless and spent. It was something I was familiar with, something from a different place and time.
Ranger’s teeth were around the material now. He began to back away and the door opened, fraction by fraction, as his efforts dislodged the prone man from his truck. This wasn’t a natural death, even from a distance I could have seen the victim’s throat… or absence of it. When the body hit the asphalt, the head lolled to the side, held on by only an inch or so of sinewy neck muscle.
The man couldn’t have been more than mid-thirties. Lean and strong, wearing text book farming gear. This guy could have defended himself, but something had taken him off guard, caught him in a moment of introversion… or he’d been killed by someone he trusted explicitly.
That’s why I didn’t trust people anymore. Explicit trust would get you dead quicker than any makeshift explosive.
So, who would this man trust?
I profiled quickly, my brain working through the possibilities.
Wife. Farm hand. Child. Dog.
Dog.
I looked down at Ranger, the only thing I believed in without qualification. He was a Belgian Malinois, a veteran soldier, one of the smartest I’d ever met. We’d worked together for years until the Army put us both out of commission. He had saved many a soldier’s life, including my own, over the course of his brief career- until that IED. Damn dog was a fighter; vet said the injuries should have killed him. But he had healed, the stress fractures eventually repairing. Nothing would bring back the fur on his front body though. The burns had been too severe and they marked him now, melding into one textured continent of scar tissue.
If it had been the farmer’s dog, suddenly gone feral or rabid, I wouldn’t want to put Ranger in peril. At forty pounds, he could probably take down most larger breeds on skill and speed, but if something happened… rabies or worse… I shook my head to dislodge the disturbing thought.
No. I wouldn’t lose the dog. I considered myself alone, because Ranger was part of me, part of my makeup. I couldn’t even sleep without the damn dog across my body- like we were still in Central Asia, like there was still the chance we’d be assaulted in the middle of the night. Ranger was at my side again, pushing into my leg as if he sensed my uneasiness. “It’s alright, Boy. I’m alright.” His head roughly pushed into my hand and his tongue licked my palm affectionately. “It’s alright.”
But it wasn’t alright. Ranger had smelled something. A breeze had brought it to him, something that I couldn’t smell. Something different than Ranger had ever encountered. Something deadly. Ranger turned to face the bed of the truck, putting himself between me and the unknown threat; the front of his body lowered to the ground and his lips retracting from bared teeth.
At once, I realized what had made me so wary of the truck before I’d known the driver was mutilated and lounging in the front seat. The large expanse of tarp in the bed was lumpy, pulled hastily over a mound that I could not place. It wasn’t a hay bale, farm tools, produce. Just a mountain range of smallish peaks.
The hairs on the back of my stood up and my pulse quickened. I breathed deeply several times, forcing my heart rate to slow. Gross motor skills took over as I dropped my pack and deftly pulled out a tan spray-painted pistol. Chambering a round, I motioned for Ranger to move back and I began to inch towards the tailgate. Fear was there, like a sour taste in my mouth; fear was always there, but I’d learned to channel it through years of training and experience. I also wanted to stay alive. Mortality was a fierce motivator.
The tarp in the back of the truck moved minutely. If I hadn’t been focusing on the dark green material, I would have missed it. I didn’t know what waited for me beneath, but my gut said it was bad news.
My trigger finger itched, but I knew from experience- confirm before the kill. I’d watched innocents fall too many times. Finding the tailgate latch, I pulled upwards and was greeted by a click. I let the gate fall noisily downwards, wanting to startle whatever was in the truck bed. I expected the farmer’s dog, or a full-grown murderer, or an animal. I expected something that made sense. So I brought my right arm up to take the brunt of the assault I knew was coming, gun ready in my hand, mind ready to see details quickly and be decisive.
It came at me in a flash. A blur of motion that made my mind fill in the blanks.
The teeth of the beast- its fur a golden blonde like a retriever- snapped at the loose fabric of my canvas jacket and gained purchase. Without hesitation, I laid my pistol against my arm and fired directly into the animal’s face. Somewhere, beneath the layer of action, I heard a subconscious scream. Nooooo!
The .45 recoiled into my palm and the beast’s teeth loosed as it fell to the ground in an explosion of gore. It took several moments for me to realize… to let the adrenaline surge wane and look past the crimson-turned-black Rorschach print on the pavement. The 180 grain hollow point destroyed all it came into contact with and today was no different. My victim was motionless on the ground.
I stared at what I had done.
In front of me, prone and lifeless, was a kid. A child. An innocent. I lived the life I did, because of moments like this. Because I couldn’t handle being the executioner anymore. Yet, today, my past had visited me in haunting, blood-soaked reality.
Falling to my knees, I began to sob. My .45, normally so familiar- an extension of my own body- seemed strange now. It was an anvil in my hand, ready to fall and crush. Ranger’s body pushed up against me, but I ignored him. I didn’t deserve his comfort. I had just shot a kid. Not more than six years old. A child dressed in little overalls and shiny red boots. My body was shaking, the remaining adrenaline trying to find an outlet. The tears continued to fall- hot, uncontrollable rivulets down my face.
Why the hell had he attacked me? Was he just scared? Had I just murdered a child for being scared? Shit. Shit. Shit… I killed a kid. The words were an evil mantra in my head, a marching chant sung over and over again during boot camp so many eons ago.
Regaining my composure was a challenge. Tucking the .45 away into my pack helped. I needed it out of sight.
No one around these parts, not a cop to arrest me. I could just walk away if I wanted. I stood in a veritable no man’s land and it was just me, a dead adult male, and a dead… boy. A boy whose hair used to be the color of golden fields.
Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…
The brittle surface of my composure, so recently mended, threatened to crack again, crack into a million little pieces, much like the brain of the child I’d slaughtered. I looked down at the boy’s body. I couldn’t look at what was left of his face. I just stared at him. He wasn’t right, Yes. There was something abnormal about him. The thought calmed me slightly… as if the child being ‘not normal’ could assuage some of my guilt. His body was pale, the green-blue of veins peeking at the surface, and gray-purple bruises beneath his eyes. And his eyes… rather his ‘eye’ (the left eye, the only thing left somewhat intact from the .45 round) was filmy, a thick opaque mucous obscuring the iris’ color. That eye, that left eye, lolled out of the boy’s mutilated face. It lay against the pavement, an unsettling, unseeing thing.
Ranger pushed against me again. This time, my hand found his soft head and I rubbed it, more for his comfort than my own.
Maybe for a minute, maybe for an hour, I wasn’t sure how long my eyes were fixated on my victim, but at some point my eyes moved from child to adult. And I noticed the bite marks; dozens and dozens of symmetrical wounds on his arms, face, everywhere. These weren’t from an animal. Most predatory animals create ragged, ripped wounds- harder to repair, harder to heal. These were human, two distinctive semi-circles of multiple impressions.
A mixture of primary and permanent teeth, not quite a full set yet. A child’s mouth had made these injuries.
I glanced around the immediate area once again, making sure there were no more threats and then I moved closer to the adult male. Ranger followed closely, his ears perked. If anything was coming for us, he’d warn me.
Standing over the man now, I ingested details, nuances of the man’s body, as my eyes roved over him. Glass shrapnel embedded in his cheeks and forehead. The line of bites along his forearms. The gaping hole in the throat was smaller than I’d originally thought; the dried blood and loose skin flapped around the unnatural orifice, unholy flesh curtains revealing the truth about the adult’s fate. It was just big enough to rip away the windpipe and severe a bleeder. An efficient way to kill, no unnecessary effort. And what about all the other bites? Idle fun,
This was a child’s work. A cat playing with a vole, batting it around until it tired of the game and was ready for a snack. The poor fellow hadn’t gone down without fighting though.
Inside the truck, I found a single-action revolver, a six shooter… only one shot missing. But there had been no bullet wounds on the body of the boy; I would have noticed. I had stared at his slight form for what felt like hours, digesting the consequences of my own instinctual actions.
Holding the revolver in my hand, I studied the rest of the vehicle’s interior. A rifle with a scope was hung in the back glass, a classic Texan truck decoration. I hadn’t seen it before, placed so low it was almost hidden behind the seats.
There wasn’t a single surface inside the vehicle that wasn’t touched by death. A splatter on the roof lining resembled a rabbit. Indeed, I could have stood all day playing ‘name that cloud’. Except it wasn’t puffy white cumulus and lacey strata forming peace signs and ponies.
Where had the bullet ended up?
After a moment I saw it- the driver’s rearview mirror was shattered, the bullet’s exit point easy to see at the edge of the roof. That explained the shrapnel in the man’s face.
In my head, I formed a complete picture of what had happened. It was a scenario that did not sit easily with my rational mind. But I knew, from experience, that sometimes the most unlikely possibility proves to be the truth. That’s just fact, plain and fucking simple. And the fact I knew now was- the kid had murdered the man in a way that was more akin to a full-grown serial killer with intense internal motive and a distinctive modus operandi.
My eyes moved once again to the dead child.
You a killer, Boy?
I mentally paused, as if expecting a response. I wanted answers. And I sure as hell wasn’t waltzing into a strange town without them.
I didn’t want to look at the boy and man any longer. I dragged them closer together roughly and without respect; it was an unceremonious affair, but I’d lost my hesitations around dead bodies a long time ago. I’d quelled my self-pity, horror, and grief. They were dangerous emotions I simply didn’t deserve them. The kid was an animal and I was forced to put it down. When people are dead, they are dead. Plain and simple. The body was just a shell then, fertilizer and vulture feed. That belief wavered slightly once I saw the tall and slight forms next to one another. In that moment, I saw a father and son. I hadn’t noticed before, but they both had the same hair, golden and shiny.
Grabbing the dark tarp from the truck bed, I covered them. And then they were gone; it was done; I could breathe again. The world came rushing back, everything that existed outside of the carnage now hidden. Ranger was my companion again, not just a fixture at my side, a head to rub absently.
“Well, Ranger, today is one of those days, the kind we don’t really care for much. The kind of day we wish we were back in the shit rather than living free.” The dog looked at me, his head cocked to one side. He understood my words; he always did.
***
I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck now, my pack hung over the top of the open driver’s door; Ranger was in the bed of the truck, resting, but also playing sentinel. There had been water, like I thought. The container was heavily splattered with blood and fluids. We were thirsty, damn thirsty, but… maybe not that thirsty. I had also found a second, smaller blue tarp in the bed of the truck. I wanted a barrier between myself and the blood and fluids on the bench seat. There could be a contagion factor- like Ebola.
The truck keys were in the ignition, hanging at an angle like the man had shut the truck off in a hurry, but hadn’t had time to finish the job and take the starter key full out. Before cranking the engine, I pointed the A/C vents downward; they sported drying blood- some of it oxidized pitch black. Last thing I needed was that shit blowing in my face. A tarp barrier under my ass wouldn’t do me a bit of good if that happened.
Once cranked, the feel of cool air was refreshing, even if I could only feel it against my lower waist and upper thighs. My fingers thrummed against the steering wheel absentmindedly and I pulled them away quickly, feeling a dampness there that was likely more bodily fluids. Sitting in the truck was like walking into a Biohazard 3 without gear, you may as well French kiss a meningitis patient.
Sitting still, my mind wandered.
Even if the kid had killed his father, no one would buy a self-defense plea. They’ll say I could have restrained him. And maybe I could have… but I thought he was a dog, I swear to god I thought he was a dog. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want this shit anymore.
To drown out the voice in my head, I switched on the radio, and fiddled with the dials until I heard a voice- alto, his tone slightly alarmist.
“The best advice we can give you at this time is to stay indoors and…”
Even if the kid was rabid and crazy, I still shot him in the head; a good DA will just ask one question: “Why didn’t you just restrain the child?”
I told my head to shut the hell up.
“The CDC is still working on an answer for the sudden outbreak of psychosis infecting the children…”
Maybe the radio should shut the hell up instead.
I’ll just tell them I had a PTSD moment; after all, that’s what my lawyer will recommend. But it wasn’t PTSD. It was training. People don’t understand that there’s a difference. You can’t just shut down training, become civil again. That’s not how it works.
“In cooperation with local and national…”
“God damn radio, just shut the hell up already!” I reached for the off button, but my brain stopped me and forced my ears to listen.
“We repeat. This is not a test. This is an actual National emergency. The President of the United States is warning all citizens to remain calm and stay inside their homes. If you have small children under the age of ten, lock them in a safe room and call the authorities. More information will be available at a later time. For now, the best advice we can give is to follow the President’s directive: Stay indoors and lock up!
“The military in conjunction with the CDC is still working on an answer for the sudden outbreak of psychosis infecting children. These children are extremely dangerous and will attack without provocation. If you are bitten, report immediately to the nearest hospital. The World Health Organization is also working in cooperation with local and national medical experts to contain the problem.
