Chapter 3.A

Hank had a plan, the plan basically boiled down to killing Eugene and therefore ending the darkness that had taken over his town. No one ever accused Hank of being a genius. Hank knew he wouldn’t be able to shoot it out with Eugene’s private security surely comprised of the best, but he could just run Eugene over with a bulldozer, and of course anyone else he saw along the way that had been corrupted by Eugene and convinced to hurt or bully the innocent. It wasn’t a great plan, it wasn’t well thought out, but Hank was pissed and it would work. Besides everyone knows if you back a dog into a corner it’s going to bite. It’s time Eugene gets bit… again.

The first thing Hank did was assess his supplies. He had basically all the tools he needed to repair the bulldozer but he needed to do more than repair it, he needed to upgrade it. He had only helped his father rarely with this side of the business, the technical side. Hank was more of a lift it or break it kind of guy, and less of a fix-it guy, but he had done some light welding and routine maintenance on some of the vehicles they used in the gravel business. His father had been the frugal type and that meant not sending their fleet or hauling vehicles to outside repair shops if they could avoid it. So his father had tried to pass down most of the basic knowledge Hank would need to keep the vehicles of the trade running. That same knowledge might help save his life now.

Hank didn’t have enough metal in the shed to make the Bulldozer bulletproof. Most people don’t realize that metal for the most part very much isn’t bulletproof. Only certain types of metal are bulletproof and they are extremely expensive and heavy, this makes them unwieldy. This is also the same reason you don’t see U.S. soldiers walking around in suits of metal armor, it’s impossible, and if you armored a person fully with traditional metals it would weight a thousand pounds. Hank had a pretty decent idea of what was bulletproof and what wasn’t. Him and his father had been shooting recreationally for years in the woods on the outskirts of their little town. Since his father was a veteran he held the ideal that all men should know how to properly own and use guns to keep their family safe.

All of the times they had gone out to the woods they had brought interesting things to shoot at and experiment with, plus target shooting is boring without targets. Hank had shot everything from car doors off of old junkers, to old water heaters. Shooting toilets and canned food was especially fun. Bullets flew pretty cleanly through all of it. Not much stopped a bullet unless it was specifically designed to. Hank remembered a story his dad had told him about a time he was hunkered down on a rocky hilltop in Vietnam, and how they had filled some sandbags with rocks since no sand or dirt was available. His father has come under fire, and to him and his squad’s delight the loose rocks and gravel had stopped all of the incoming rounds and the sandbags had done a decent job keeping the amount of shrapnel to a somewhat-safe minimum.

Hank would use gravel to make the bulldozer bulletproof, it just felt right and a little ironic. Hank the rock, who worked at the rock business, would protect himself with rocks, ironic and right... The task ahead of him still seemed overwhelming. Hank walked a few feet back and tried to picture the Bulldozer as an armored hulk. The cab would absolutely have to be armored, the engine block as well. It wouldn’t do to have one of Eugene’s lackeys get a lucky shot and snap some vital piece of his engine off. The job seemed like an uphill battle for one man, almost impossible. Hank liked doing impossible things. He grabbed a welding helmet and his welding equipment and got to work.

Hours slipped by as he welded piece after piece of scrap metal just a few inches off of the hull of the bulldozer. He had to hammer the bottoms of the pieces of scrap metal onto the bulldozer and then weld them into place, it basically made a pocket for him to pour gravel into. The welds were sloppy, the pieces of scrap metal weren’t uniform at all, it was ugly as sin, but it would hold. He lugged huge bags of gravel over each of his shoulders and carefully poured them into the pockets of metal he had created on the sides of the bulldozer. He had about half of one side finished, before he came to the conclusion that he should test his theory before continuing.

He went to the large safe his father kept hidden in the shed behind a shelf of tools. The shelf was on concealed casters so it easily slid out of the way. The safe was bolted into the very foundation of the floor Hank was standing on, beyond secure. Hank rolled the tumbler on the safe through the complex combination and turned the large six handled crank on the safe until the door popped open. Every gun his father had ever collected was inside, at least 11 rifles and over 20 handguns, and a few assorted shotguns. Hank wasn’t sure of the exact number of firearms inside, he had never counted. He grabbed his father’s prized 1911, the one he had used in Vietnam. Hank racked the slide back and inspected the chamber, it was empty. He dry fired it once after pointing the barrel safely away from himself, he felt the crisp and satisfying break of the sear as he depressed the trigger fully. The gun was in working order. Hank had always wondered how his father has smuggled this thing back to the states, but he had never had a chance to ask him. Hank grabbed a loaded magazine out of the webbing that lined the door of the safe and headed back into the main part of the large shed.

Shooting metal might mean a serious ricochet, he needed to find a way to safely do this. Hank flipped over the lone work desk that was in the warehouse and dragged it until he was at a slight angle to the bulldozer. The idea was that if it was going to ricochet then it should ricochet at an angle away from him. He worried about the sound though, he didn’t want any of the gravel yard workers to come check on him if they heard shooting. So he turned on the large industrial air compressor in the room, it began to fill its tanks which was plenty loud enough to mask a gunshot or two. Hank went behind the desk and got a good aim at one of the armored portions on the bulldozer, then he lowered his head below the edge of the desk and fired one round. He jumped up and over the desk and sprinted to the impact site on the dozer, excited to see the results of his test.

There was a very clear puncture in the thin metal he had welded to the side of the bulldozer. The gravel was so tightly packed between the layers of metal, and the entrance hole was so small that none was spilling out. The round had actually landed on the bottom half of the door to the cab, so all he had to do was pop open the door and look for an exit hole inside to see if the armor had failed. Hank felt all around the inside of the door and checked every part of the interior cabin in case the bullet had traveled an irregular path. He couldn’t find anything. So he went back to the exterior of the dozer where the bullet had landed. He got some pliers and started pulling out gravel until he saw the shine of copper. He dug the mangled slug right out of his impromptu armor, It had worked. He would have to test a rifle on it still, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t go through either. This was going to work. Seeing the success of his new armor gave him more motivation to get back to work. Hank hauled in a few more giant bags of gravel and set them on the side of the shed so he could fill the metal pockets he was making as he moved the project forward. He didn’t want to have to leave the warehouse again.

Hank slapped on the welding helmet once again and refused to stop working. He could feel his stomach rumbling with hunger while the hours flew by. He welded piece after piece on ever so carefully folding them into the metal pockets on each side of them. His work became sloppier but he always made sure it was structurally sound. Soon he became dizzy and he assumed it was from being around the hot welding equipment with no water. So he chugged an old gallon of water that someone had left in the shed and kept working. His shirt was absolutely drenched in sweat and soon even his pants and socks were drenched as well, he had completely lost track of time.

At some point he woke up in the lone office chair in the large shed, he must have sat down for a second and fallen asleep. His stomach rumbled something fierce. He decided it would be worth it to head back to his house and get a snack before continuing his work. When Hank walked outside he noticed the sun was setting, what time was it? His clock read 6pm. He must have worked the entire day before, all of last night, and well into the next day with little to no food or water. No wonder he had crashed so hard, he had worked more than a 24-hour shift of hard manual labor. The first thing he did was storm inside of his house and get out of his sweat encrusted clothing. Once he was stark naked he ripped open his fridge and grabbed a fresh 2-gallon jug of milk. He chugged the entire thing without stopping. He needed more food, sleep, he needed to finish his work on the bulldozer, and he needed to refine his plan, in that order.

Hank didn’t want to get dizzy or lightheaded from something as simple and avoidable of lack of calories or malnutrition. So he grabbed a couple of steaks from his fridge, some carrots, cucumbers, and potatoes and took them all out back to his grill. He poured beer over all of them and threw on some random seasonings that he kept in an empty cooler next to his grill to keep them out of the elements. Then he cranked his grill on high and lit it up. It wasn’t going to be a culinary masterpiece but it would taste alright. Besides Hank wasn’t really thinking about food right now anyway, beyond the fact that he needed it. His mind was preoccupied with the minute details of what could go wrong with his plan. So he stood there, still stark naked, on his back porch, while his meat and vegetables were seared to perfection. He was watching the sun go down, trying to plan for everything.

After he ate, he set a six-hour timer on his cell phone and crashed out hard in his bed. He slept like the dead in a deep dreamless sleep. Quicker than he would have liked his cellphone’s alarm was going off and he knew it was time to get back to work. He thought about taking a quick rinse through the shower, but there would be no point since he was going right back out to work and inevitably get drenched in sweat again. It was about 1 in the morning now, the gravel yard would be completely empty, so he didn't even bother finding a shirt. He just grabbed another pair of work pants and his steel-toed boots. He also grabbed two 24-packs of a local beer that was known for having a higher than average alcohol content, one in each arm. In case he didn’t make it tomorrow he wanted this to be a good night.

When Hank got back into the shed he looked up at the partially armored bulldozer, and again he felt his father’s presence with him. He cracked open his first beer and poured some on the ground.

“That’s for you dad!” Then once again he got to work. He basically had the concept of what he wanted finished in his mind and he had done the bulk of the work before he had rested, but that had been on the easy to armor areas. Armoring the sharp contours of the cab would be much harder. For one he needed to leave slots for himself to see through but he also didn't want to get shot in the face. So he needed to find some happy medium that would leave him enough vision to maneuver correctly, while simultaneously keeping the slots small enough that they would be hard to shoot through. He thought he might be able to rig up an old security camera on the exterior for vision but he wanted that to be a secondary option, not something that he would have to rely on.

This armor would also be ridiculously heavy and while the cab was somewhat load-bearing he didn’t want to overload it and have it fall apart, or even worse have the armor be so heavy that it fell inward and crushed him. So he decided to weld on a rebar support network before he added any more armor. It was easier than he thought it was going to be since he was decently proficient at welding. Sure, an actual engineer would balk at the design, but it would still work as intended. Honestly the rebar cage he had installed looked like a mechanical crackhead spider had shot metal web all over the bulldozer’s cab. That, or maybe some kind of fancy-pants nonsense modern art, it could go either way. Hank noticed this as well, and because modern art offended him on a primal level he had to chug a beer to get the thought out of his head.

Once he was sure the cab would hold the weight of the armor he threw himself back into the work. Welding on the metal “pockets” and filling them with gravel before sealing them and laying the next one on in line slightly overlapping the last, almost like a dragon’s scales. He made sure to take a break every 10 minutes or so and chug a beer and a little bit of water. He didn’t want to wear himself out like he had before, especially if he wanted to kick off his plan sometime tomorrow morning. As he worked he got better at the small details, the quality and speed of his work improved, and before he knew it he had finished welding on the last gravel filled plates. He jumped off the bulldozer and walked backwards once again to get a better view of his creation. It was… monstrous, devious and evil looking. This was the bulldozer from Wes Craven’s nightmares… This was… The Killdozer.