Book 1: Ch 3

We watched Nick’s taillights as his truck bumped around in the dirt road west to the sunset, a dust trail rising up to the sky. Ron and I made out way around the truck toward the back, taking a lot of care not to come close to the bodies as much as we could. We then opened the truck’s covered bed and are met by the sight of dufflebags, guncases, and ammo packed in surplus military ammunition cans and in their retail boxes. Ron reached into one of the pelican hard cases lying in the bed and opened it, showing me the beauty of what I consider as one the sexiest guns in the world, the Scar-17s, civilian version of the Scar Heavy.

I gave a low whistle, admiring the sexy lines and the mismatching desert tan of the weapon system. “Damn, something that beautiful must’ve cost quite a lot, and something I wouldn’t want to know, as I’d like to keep my dreams in my somewhat in my reach.”

“Well then, dream on!” Ron said, then pulled the rifle out of its form-fitted foam and laid it on the bed, giving me a better look of the sexy thing as he rummaged around the rest of the things in the truck. The rifle looked just as the magazines, movies, and videogames had shown it, with its distinct shaped stock and upper, the AR style lower and the mismatched shade of Flat-Dark-Earth. It had an unimpressive looking scope on it, one that costs just as much as the rifle installed on top, an aftermarket flashhider and if I know Ron, a crisp trigger kit perfect for long range shooting.

He then found whatever he was looking for and took out another smaller box out of the pile and opened it, making me give another low whistle. “You must be really nice this year since Santa decided to give you something really nice so early this year.” I said at the sight of a Generation 4 night vision monocle that Ron picked up and mounted behind the sights, now it looked like it came out of a videogame.

“Don’t be such a whiner man, I got you something nice too” he said then pulled out another small case, sliding it towards me. He waited for me to open it and I gave a skeptical look toward his direction, he was grinning like the Joker, his teeth shining white in the dying light. I reached over and flipped the locks, it was another Night-Vision monocle, a Gen-3 but it was still expensive and very much sought after, and most importantly, very effective. I guess it pays to have rich friends.

With hands shaking in excitement, I reached over to the monocle lying on the case and turned it on as I held it up to my eye. The dark is now banished and replaced and washed with shades of green. I could see miles in the distance, the stars looked ever brighter than before showing me a different view of the beauty of the night sky. There was something I find strange about it though, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

“This better not be a joke man, because I’ll be really bummed out if it turned out that you’re just fucking with me.” I said as I lowered the device.

Ron shrugged “Not at all man, the shit’s yours. There’s not a lot to spend my money on considering my new found philosophy. You can only invest so much on lead, brass, and steel, and not get too much attention.”

I secured the device back to its case and took it, “No takebacks, alright?” I said and walked back towards my truck, leaving Ron as he continued to sort his stuff on the back of his truck, I have my own shit to sort too.

The desert night was cold, which is the opposite whenever you think of a desert. Surely a desert must be hot all the time right? It was called a desert after all. The answer to that is a big NO, yes a desert may be hot during the day but when the night falls and the desert finally exhausted its stored heat then you are left with a cold ass night.

Ron and I of course knew this when we decided that we relocate ourselves away from the trucks, as we wore thermal underwear and thick, padded camouflaged covers along with a Mylar coated tarp we used to cover and conceal ourselves in the arid desert. The tarp served a lot of things, two of them having to shelter us from the dry desert wind and also, to reflect back the heat we give off back to us, heating us up and also conceals us from any thermal tracking device that could be used to look for us. In short, we don’t want to get found unless we wanted to.

I looked to the direction of the trucks using the night vision device I attached on top of my rifle, my expensive AR-10 chambered for the .308 Winchester, a good rifle to be used for long range shots. It was sweet, the crisp detail it gives was such a far cry to my old Gen 1, which could only afford me to see shapes in this distance. The bodies were still there, lying in the desert deader than doornails and are stiff as boards. It had been a few hours since I defended myself from them and Nick still hasn’t returned along with the promised authority.

“Lights coming in, west.” Ron said through the radio.

I turned my night vision device on and I could see the distinct beam of headlights stabbing through the darkness bobbing up and down. “One car, and coming in fast.” I replied and Ron sent back two radio clicks in acknowledgement.

It was coming in fast, really fast and it was going for a beeline towards the trucks. Try as I might I couldn’t see the features of the vehicle through my NVG, as its headlights were messing up the picture by making the oncoming vehicle a bright white light amidst shades of green. I flicked the off the safety and tracked the ball of light as it bobbed around the arid desert hills and I knew Ron would be doing the same. We held fire, as we don’t know who the vehicle is, yet.

The car neared the trucks and started honking its horn, where I finally saw that it was Nick’s truck coming back. It skidded to a halt in front of our trucks and he turned off the highbeams and I could now see that the truck had been somehow beaten up. Bumps, scratches and bulletholes covered the truck, steam rose out the hood and the windshield, along with the windows, were covered with spiderweb cracks.

“It’s Nick. Cover me, I’m going down there.” I said through the radio, to which Ron sent back another pair of clicks.

I immediately shed my cover and ran down the hill with the best speed I could afford without risking breaking my ankle on the rough terrain. With my rifle held at port arms, “Adrian coming in, don’t shoot!” I yelled as I came close to the truck. I let the rifle hang off its straps and pulled out a light, shining it to the driver’s side. Nick was there sitting with his eyes closed and wearing a pained face, his shoulder was all red, covered with blood.

His breathing is a little ragged, pulse a little weak but steady. I peeled the bloody bandage on his upper shoulder and found a round wound with the blood scabbed all over, it went clean through his right trap. If the round went just two inches left, it would have hit his neck, bursting his jugular and crushing his windpipe, he would have been dead.

Running over to Ron’s truck, I reached down under the left rear fender and probed around, I felt a firm object that wasn’t supposed to be there and yanked. It was a medium sized medkit secured with a roll of ducttape, it was filled with bandages, sutures, antiseptics, the whole shebang and ran back towards Nick as I’d have to still clean and close up that wound.

“You’ll be fine Nick, I’ll take good care of you and you’ll have your very own cool scar to show off to ladies. Maybe then you’ll at least get a chance to fuck some of them.” I said as I wrapped a space blanket around him to keep him warm and moved on to clean his wounds with a saline solution.

“Adrian, I couldn’t find the road back to town man. It just wasn’t there man. I didn’t know what to do so I came back and saw some guys hiding in the bushes or something.” He said weakly.

“Tell me what you saw man, it must be a really cool story on how you got yourself shot.” I replied, Nick needed a hospital, but that is miles away and we couldn’t call an ambulance, he needed care now. He kept mumbling even more but what he says doesn’t matter, I just need him to keep talking to keep him awake. After cleaning the wound with the saline solution and probing around it for any foreign objects I then spread a generous amount of antiseptic gel and used butterfly bandages to close the wounds on both side, as even more qualified people might want to take a look at the wound and a stitch would be an inconvenience to both the patient and the doctor. After that, I gave Nick something to help him sleep.

After cranking up the heater and closing the door of the truck, I keyed and spoke to the radio. “Nick’s shot in the shoulder and bled out some. He’s fine, all bandaged up and warming up in the truck. Got anything?”

A pause “Nothing down the road from where he came from…. Shit. Get your rifle and get inside the car, you got three huge ass wolves stalking up your direction. They must’ve smelled the blood.” Or the bodies.

Great, wolves, I did what I was told and picked up my rifle on the truck’s hood and ran in the back of Nick’s truck. With a 20 inch barrel length, it would be easy to assume that it would be very awkward moving the thing around in an enclosed space such as a truck’s cabin. I looked out the windows to try to see the reported animals but couldn’t see past the pitch black darkness, so I tried to put my rifle to bear only to smack Nick on the head with the barrel.

He groaned and I whispered a sorry to his unconscious figure. I then turned on the NVG attached on the top of the rifle and looked out the spidercracked windows and was met with three pairs of reflective eyes staring back at me. A drop of cold sweat trickled down my back, I could see that they were all looking at me and were waiting patiently at a distance, and the space between their eyes also suggest that these wolves were big, very big.

“Hey man, you got a shot on these badboys? I would really appreciate if you did, these wolves almost look to be the size of bears man.” I said to the radio. A .308 Winchester may be enough to hunt a bear at some states but that would require excellent shot placement, something I would be very hard pressed to do with a cramped quarters giving me a very uncomfortable shooting position.

“I got a line, but they’re a little too close to you guys for comfort, a miss could mean me accidentally hitting you guys.” He said, I swear I could catch shaking on his voice. I couldn’t be really sure though, as the radio might be messing the voices up.

“You got this shit bro,” I said “I’ve seen you shoot targets five times the distance. Besides, you’re not gonna let a brother down now do you?”

I heard him take a deep breath through the radio, “Shit, not that you make it look like that, I guess I don’t have much of a choice now do I? Alright they’re staying put for now, so I guess I could make a clean shot on one, leaving you the other two in case they make a run for you guys. Also, don’t worry about the legal consequences, I got you boys covered if we ever do get into trouble. I’ll call out when I send my shot, you might not hear the gunfire since I put a can on my rifle.”

Shit, I guess Ron really went all out this time, a suppressor would cost someone a grand at least. And by judging on his tastes, it would be safe to assume that it would cost at least a couple giving him almost perfect report suppression. It wouldn’t suppress the bullet crack though, you’ll need a subsonic round for that. “Got it, just call it out and I’ll follow. If we’re lucky they’ll bolt away after the first shot, if we’re not, maybe a full magazine getting unloaded their direction might convince them to.”

After noticing that Nick didn’t have ear protection on, I remedied it using one of my spares out of my kit, since it wouldn’t be right if he wakes up discovering that he has hearing damage atop being shot in the shoulder and nearly bleeding to death. I then poked the barrel out the spidercracked windows and took aim at the pairs of glowing eyes. The muzzle being outside the car would drastically reduce the sound heard inside the vehicle while maximizing its loudness for the wolves outside to hear. “Ready.” I whispered.

“I’ll take the one on the left. Firing in three. Three, two one.” I heard the bullet whizz by overhead followed by the leftmost one yelping and falling to the ground. The other two simultaneously crouched down and looked at their unmoving comrade. And as if an order has been issued, the two immediately sprang up and charged at the truck with impressive speeds.

I have prepared for such a situation to develop but I never expected them to be able to cover around fifty yards of open space in such a short time. In just an instant, the last pair managed to cover the distance between us, but not before I got a shot out to hit one right on the chest, dropping the oversized wolf on its tracks. The truck shook from the hit and risked going on its side from the impact, the already cracked windows were now shattered and the door bent in on itself.

I pulled myself back, just in time for the impact and withdrew my rifle before it was snatched away by the wolf’s jaws. I was thrown back to the other side of the truck and saw lightning on my vision as I hit the back of my head on something hard. The truck went back to its four wheels, and my sight is coming back from being black when I felt another impact. I then felt the warm breath of the last wolf as it shoved its head through the shattered window, its neck only allowing its jaws to reach just shy of me and Nick, who is still out cold and is strapped into his seat.

If I were to look back on that moment, sitting comfortable on a rocking chair and nursing a cold beer on my hands, it would have been the easiest thing to reach to my chest, pull out my sidearm and shoot the thing on the eye. My self defense load would have entered its brain cavity and turn everything in there into mush, that would have been the most pragmatic and efficient solution. The problem is, at that moment, all that I was only able to do is to keep my arms wrapped around my body and pull my legs back as I was covered with an unexplainable amount of fear. I froze, flashes of my past came up and I felt terrified. The wolf tried snapping at me multiple times and I could smell its breath, its stink, its lust to dig those sets of teeth into my flesh, rending me open, mutilating me, and then killing me.

Like a kid, like a dumb kid, I shut my eyes, as if just because I couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see me, if I shut myself in my own shell of a world, it would protect me. I didn’t know how long I kept myself in that state of denial but when I opened my eyes again, the wolf wasn’t there anymore, all I could see in the dim glow of the cabin light was the scattered broken glass. Nick was fine in his seat, still out cold and none the wiser.

Now in a clearer state of mind, I cursed at myself for choking up right when the moment counted, I let my brothers down. It was then that I heard the radio squawk, “Adrian, Nick, if any of you are okay in there, let me know, over.”

I pressed the send button “I’m fine, and so is Nick. I don’t see the last wolf, did you get it?”

There was a considerable pause as I waited for Ron to reply, “Yeah I got it, and I don’t see any more of them. You two really got me worried for a minute there, you sure you’re okay man?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine… just a little shaken up.”I said, then chuckled, I might suffer bouts of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but at least I get to live long enough.

“Well, how about you stay there for the rest of the night, get yourself warm and comfortable. That way we’ll at least have someone with a few hours’ sleep tomorrow.”

At the mention of sleep, I noticed my eyelids getting heavier, my body crashing down much that I think I could fall asleep in just about anywhere. Stifling a yawn I replied. “Thanks man, I appreciate it….. What a day huh?”

Ron chuckled “Yeah, what a day.”

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