It was nice on the ground: cool and solid, and it smelled fresh. Not like up in the air where it smelled like battle and growls rent the air in the gaps between shouts and gunshots. Steve liked the ground, Steve decided, and snuggled closer to it. His shoulder hurt a little, and by ‘a little’ he meant ‘a LOT’, more than most things he had felt hurt in his lifetime. He pressed that against the cool earth as well, though it didn’t have nearly the same effect on his shoulder that it had on his face. His face, though, he did not observe to be in any particular sort of pain, so maybe that was where the difference lay. Something thumped him and he let out a groan.
Above him, had he been able to tear his face away from the soft compress of forest loam into which he was retreating, he would have seen a battle for the ages. A wolf, both heads snarling in an abundance of teeth not seen outside the nightmares of a particularly repressed dentist’s apprentice, stood, glaring across the body of our hero at the schnauzer who, having risen from its perch, now unfolded its bearded lips in a full display of military glory and launched across the body of the wounded, kicking him as it did so and resulting in the thump aforementioned.
Ten powerful legs ripped and tore in a whirlwind of fury, and spurts of blood fired thick and fast from within the center at periodic intervals. Steve did not watch, focusing instead on the ripples of pain that washed up on the beach of his shoulder, through the brackish waters of his nervous system, and into the marsh of his brain, where alarms sounded in a muted panic that reminded him of sea birds. Ah, well, he thought. At least the sunset will be nice.
A whimper resonated through the combat zone, followed by a snarl and a loud crack from somewhere in the distance. Steve felt the wind of something slumping, hard, in his general vicinity and then a firm- but gentle- nudge against his uninjured shoulder. He turned and started, before remembering that the skull of the schnauzer was, while capable of blotting out the sun and inspiring Baskervillian nightmares, a generally friendly omen where he was concerned. He turned to the left and saw the mangled corpse of the wolf, one of its throats shredded and a hole in the other head. He remembered the crack and followed it backwards in his mind through to what must necessarily have created it, remembered where he was and what he had been doing, and rocketed upwards much to fast for the amount of blood left in his body to handle properly. He swooned and the schnauzer leaned against him, catching him before he fell and helping him stabilize. Steve patted the dog on the head and together they made their way- in a brisk but orderly fashion- back to the truck.
He opened the door and flailed inside, using his good arm to drag the rest of him in. He wasn’t sitting but he decided he would deal with that when the time came. Objective one was getting in at all, and when he finally did it occurred to him that without the schnauzer having used its head as a battering ram he probably would never have managed it. A well of gratitude sprung up for the dog. He wondered whether this counted as three savings of his life or if circumstances rolled it all into one. He wasn’t at all sure how the accounting worked on something like that. Then he felt the truck shift and he rolled backwards a bit, until he was rotated against the seatback with his face pointed at the roof, and a long, slimy patch of wet sandpaper dragged itself across his closed and delicate eyelids. It only counts as one, he told himself, before pulling himself into a sitting position and situating his aching body behind the wheel.
The sight that greeted him through the windshield of the truck was less than amenable. Two men, a distance away but by no means out of eyeshot, peered through the growth in what appeared to be a particularly straight-at-him manner. One of them pointed, finger stretching in the direction of Steve, and the other slowly- though steadily it must be mentioned, and without any apparent hesitation- raised a rifle and aimed it at the place the finger pointed, forming an unpleasant triangle with Steve at its vertex. Steve ducked, turned the key in the truck’s ignition, and pulled the truck into reverse, turning as he did and bringing his side window into a presentation profile for the two men. A crack and a brief wind, unaccompanied by glass or the onset of eternal darkness, made him grateful for the challenge of distance shooting and the pleasant afternoon air that had inspired him to roll his windows down. He turned the truck again and pulled into the track he’d followed in, remembering how the schnauzer in the back was now straight ahead of the gunning man and fishtailing a bit to try and throw them off and change their angle. Another crack sounded and Steve cranked the wheel right- no glass, no death, no whimpering, and he floored the gas pedal and rocketed forward through the undergrowth toward the road.
He could hear muffled shouts over the roar of the engine and the creak of the old truck as it rumbled through zones it was never designed to influence, but when it shot out from the treeline, bounced through the massive drainage ditch, and flopped onto the road with a dissatisfied thump, everything turned to silence. He looked to his right, expecting to see a horde of armed and angry pseudo-soldiers traipsing after him with murder in their eyes. A bird flitted to the ground, ripped a worm from the soft, grassy earth, and flitted back up into the tree. Point, world, he thought, and shifted in his seat to glance behind him. The road stretched, into infinity. No followers there. Satisfied, he leaned back in the seat. His injured shoulder touched the supportive back and flared with the intense pain of a thousand injections. His vision narrowed to a cone and he realized he shouldn’t have been able to see the road behind him. It cleared and he spent a few seconds attempting to figure out why, but nothing came to him. He could feel a haze settling back over his consciousness, a dim gauze filming his ability to think, and he slammed his shoulder backwards to try and force it up. The pinprick of road which escaped into his optic nerves during this second self-flagellation didn’t do much for him, but the evaporation into fiery oblivion that the gauze underwent did: the schnauzer wasn’t there.
He turned his head to the left, hoping perhaps to see the dog standing there, at rest but with its head still at window height. He was disappointed. All he saw were trees, and not even the trees he’d come through. The schnauzer was a schnauzer but he was pretty sure it was smart enough to have stayed in the truck bed once they’d hit the pavement. At any rate the question was moot because it wasn’t to his left. He turned back to his right and saw nothing but the worm dangling from the saliva lure the bird had set and now watched with the intensity, from a nearby larch, of some brand of hawk it definitely was not. Concern mounted.
Steve sat for a moment, considering the situation. He was bleeding, possibly out, in his truck on a rural road in the vicinity of people, with guns, who very clearly didn’t want him there. He very much needed to make his exeunt quick, fast, and in the proverbial hurry. The schnauzer, not present, was important to him as a companion and defensive strategy and their current balance sheet regarding life-saving activity was not in Steve’s favor. He tested his shoulder and found that it was beginning to stick, sludgily, to the seatback in his truck. He did not look forward to cleaning it later, but, he reasoned, it was going to have to happen because having your truck smell like your own blood was one of those things you just didn’t let happen for longer than necessary. He pursed his lips.
The schnauzer roared out of the bushes, followed by two men in a go-cart which had clearly, and with maximum irresponsibility, had its governor removed. Steve watched as the man not driving leveled a rifle at the schnauzer, saw Steve, widened his eyes, re-aimed his rifle, and the flailed helplessly as the go-cart bounced through he ditch and up onto the road. The schnauzer bounded over the ditch in one leap, made it to the truck in a second, and left inside. The truck’s suspension squeaked and squared and Steve slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and shot, slowly but increasingly less so, down the road.
