Battle Lines (The Survivalist Book 5) (21 page)

“But not with you, right?”

He winked. “I never said that.”

Leila awoke to find Bowie nuzzling against her neck. She reached up to push him away only to discover that her entire collar was soaked with dog slobber.

“Gross,” she said, sitting up.

Mason was a few feet away, kneeling next to the injured soldier.

“How is he?”

He shook his head. “Not good. If we don’t get him some medical attention pretty soon, he’s going to die.”

She slid Bowie over a little and stretched.

“What should we do?” She glanced over at the small service door leading out into the plant. “We can’t very well navigate the dark halls carrying him.”

While she was sleeping, Mason had worked through the various options. The easiest choice would have been for them to leave the soldier. He would die, but then again, people were dying every day. Still, something didn’t sit right with Mason about leaving a fellow soldier to die alone in a dark room. On the other hand, they had no supplies and couldn’t very well hang around hoping that the man recovered.

“I’ll make my way out to their helicopter and get their trauma kit.”

“And then what?”

“I’ll come back, and we’ll see if we can stabilize him. If it looks like he’s going to pull through, we can craft some kind of gurney. But we can’t do that until we have a clear path out.”

Leila weighed his plan. “What you’re saying makes sense, but I don’t like the idea of being left here alone.”

“Bowie will stay and protect you.”

Still sleeping, Bowie rolled onto his back and poked his legs up into the air.

“Yes, I can see that he’s taking his job very seriously.”

“He’ll come through when you need him.” Mason slipped his jacket back on and adjusted his holster. “The sooner I get going, the sooner I’ll be back.”

“Here,” she said, standing up and handing him the M4. “You’ll need this.”

What Leila said made sense, but it would leave her almost defenseless. A rifle could be propped on something and fired with a bum hand fairly easily. Not so with the Beretta semi-automatic handgun.

“You keep it for now.”

“Are you sure?”

He patted the Supergrade. “This should be enough for finding a way out.” Mason looked down at the soldier. “There is one thing that would make it easier.”

He bent over and gently pulled the optics harness off the man’s head. The unit was a standard military-issue PVS-14 night vision monocular. The PVS-14 had been around for more than a decade and was considered both reliable and functional. Like other night vision devices, it performed image intensification using both ambient visible and infrared light.

Mason slipped the harness over his head and adjusted the straps until everything felt snug. The monocular hung down in front of his left eye, leaving his dominant eye free to aim the Supergrade. Having used the PVS-14 numerous times as an Army Ranger, he was sufficiently familiar with its controls and operation.

He clicked the unit on, adjusted its gain, and watched as the ghostly green image slowly materialized. Leaving both eyes open, he scanned the room. The chemlight still glowed dimly from the center of the room, and his brain had to sort the visible and enhanced images. Similar to hearing a foreign language in one ear and a translation in the other, he quickly adapted to extract and combine the most important aspects from each image.

“Is it working?” she asked.

“Perfectly.”

“You’re not going to have any moon or starlight. Does it have some sort of light?”

“It does.” Mason pulled the power button, and the infrared illuminator turned on. The image grew brighter, and he could now see into the furthest corners of the room. “The infected have their black eyes, and I’ve got this. I’d say that puts us about even.”

Bowie started to snore, and both of them turned to look.

“My guard dog,” she snickered.

Mason walked over and squatted down next to the dog. Bowie jerked awake and rolled to his feet. Mason reached out and held the dog’s head with both hands, partly to make him feel loved but mostly to keep him from licking the optics.

“You stay here and watch Leila,” he said softly.

Seeming to understand the message perfectly, Bowie whined.

“She needs you. Besides, you don’t like the dark, and Leila has our only flashlight.”

Bowie looked over at Leila, and she flicked the flashlight on and off a few times. Mason gave Bowie one final pat and stood back up. Seeing that the decision was firm, Bowie hung his head and wandered over to stand beside her.

Mason shook his head. Bowie was never above milking a situation for all it was worth.

Leila stepped toward Mason. She ended up a little closer than she had intended, but neither of them retreated.

“You’re a decent man, Marshal Raines.”

“Why? Because I didn’t try to sleep with you?”

She blushed. “That too. But I was referring to what you’re doing for this soldier. Not many men would go to this kind of trouble to save a stranger. Especially one they might have to shoot tomorrow.”

He shrugged. “I guess I’ve seen too many men left behind.”

As he turned and started toward the door, she called out, “By the way, the answer is maybe.”

“What?”

“You asked me if I’d ever wanted to make out in a peanut butter plant.” She smiled. “The answer is maybe.”

He grinned. “Good to know.”

Mason walked down the long hallway, the heel of his boots thudding softly against the tile floor. The hallway had doors along each side but was without windows, making the passage as dark as any underground cavern. The total darkness, as it turned out, actually made it easier. One eye saw the green image from the intensifier, while the other was completely blind.

Papers, chairs, and overturned carts littered the hallway. There were plenty of dead bodies too, clumps of dried skin, bones, and hair shriveled on dark cadaver stains. Dark bloody smears led away from some of the corpses, the result of pieces being dragged off by scavengers. There were, however, no signs of life.

He carefully stepped over a corpse, instinctively putting his hand on the grip of his Supergrade as if expecting it to suddenly reach up and grab his ankle. While some lawmen might have questioned his decision to keep the weapon holstered, Mason believed that it not only helped to reduce the chance of an accidental shooting, it also kept him from inadvertently thinking that everything should be solved with a gun—the classic hammer-and-nail syndrome.

He continued along the hallway until he came to an intersection that split left and right. He was pretty sure that if he turned left, he would end up back in the main factory—somewhere he most definitely did not want to be. Whether or not the pishtacos were willing to come out into the smaller hallways was not something he could say for sure. So far, it was just him and the dead bodies, and that was how he preferred to keep it.

Mason turned right and continued down the dark hallway. After a few steps, he found an open door on his left. He moved to the edge of the doorway and leaned around, sweeping the optics over the room. The PVS-14 only offered a forty-degree field of view, which when compared to his normal nearly one-hundred-and-eighty-degree field was a bit like looking through a toilet paper tube.

The room was filled with several standup desks, a cabinet, and a tabletop covered in radios and rechargers. It was obviously some kind of operator station. While a set of radios might be useful to stay in touch with Leila, finding a pair with working batteries, as well as having to backtrack, hardly seemed worth the hassle.

He continued on.

The next open door led to a break room filled with vending machines and small circular tables. A coffee machine dangled off one of the counters, supported only by its power cord. The glass pot lay shattered on the floor below. The vending machines were also smashed, although a few candy bars and potato chips remained. The body of a woman lay near the back wall. It was hard to say when she had died or what had killed her because much of her body had been torn apart. Arms, legs, and guts were strewn in every direction. Whatever had gotten to her had been determined to make a mess of things.

A deep growl sounded from up ahead. Mason drew his Supergrade and held it at the neutral ready position. The hallway remained clear, but he could only see about twenty feet before it took a sharp turn. Another growl rumbled, this one even louder than the first. Something was coming.

Figuring that he could use the doorway to funnel the enemy, Mason quickly ducked into the break room. The small tables wouldn’t stop much of anything, and barricading himself in the room would only delay the inevitable. What he needed was a vantage point from which to fight. The only things that offered any real protection were the vending machines.

He raced across the room and squirmed his way between two of them. The gap was extremely narrow, and he found himself unable to bring his pistol up. Hoping to create a little breathing room, he leaned forward and pressed his shoulder against one machine, while placing a boot against the other. The small metal casters creaked and moaned as the seven-hundred-pound vending machines slowly edged apart.

The growling grew louder, and he turned to look, still struggling in the tight space. Two Doberman Pinschers stood in the doorway, each easily weighing eighty pounds—not enormous but plenty big enough to take a man down. They paused only for an instant and then turned toward him. What they lacked in eyesight, they more than made up with their sense of smell.

Mason fought to bring the pistol up, but the gap was still so tight that he couldn’t get his arm high enough for a conventional shot. The dogs started toward him, their claws skittering across the floor.

Before the second dog could enter the room, a huge shape darted across the doorway, tackling him and disappearing out of sight.

Mason had no time to make sense of what had just happened, instead focusing on the beast racing toward him. He fired. The flash from the muzzle blinded his night vision monocular, and he suddenly felt dizzy as his right eye stared into darkness and his left into a bright green haze. Figuring that it was better to fight blind than disoriented, he squeezed both eyes shut.

The growling drew closer, confirming what he already knew.

He had missed.

Claws scratched the floor, and teeth snapped as the animal fought to squeeze into the narrow gap. Mason kicked sideways, his heel catching the dog squarely in the face. It yelped but made no effort to retreat. With his eyes still closed, Mason leaned over and pressed the muzzle of the .45 against the back of the animal. He squeezed the trigger. It yelped again, this time much louder. He fired again and heard the animal drop to the floor.

Mason opened his eyes. The PVS-14 was slowly coming back into range, and he could begin to make out details of the room. He inched forward to the edge of the vending machines and freed his gun arm. There was no sight of the second Doberman or the creature that had attacked it.

He wriggled his way out from between the machines and stepped over the dead dog. With his Supergrade trained on the door, he waited. Almost immediately, the creature reappeared, carrying something heavy in its mouth. It took Mason a moment to understand what he was seeing, but when he did, he smiled and holstered the gun.

“Is that you, boy?”

Bowie dropped the Doberman and hurried over to him. Mason squatted down and gave the dog a proper greeting.

“How did you get here?”

Footsteps sounded from the hallway, followed by the shine of a flashlight.

“Bowie! Come back here!” Leila’s voice was hushed but also urgent.

“In here!” bellowed Mason.

A few seconds later, Leila poked her head around the door. She swept the flashlight over both of them.

“I see he found you.”

“What are you doing here? I thought you were watching the soldier.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. He… he didn’t make it.”

Mason said nothing. They had tried, and that was all the man could have asked for.

“After he passed, things got a little creepy, and Bowie convinced me to come looking for you.”