Deliver Us From Evil

97

ALAN RICE screamed and grabbed his leg where the heavy-caliber round had ripped into his flesh and shattered his femur. He fell hard, rolled, and came to a stop against a small boulder. Shaw grabbed Katie and threw her facedown behind an elevated stretch of ground. Whit and Reggie took cover too. Shaw peered over the top of the mound.

“Anybody see the muzzle flash?” he called out.

Nobody had.

“Rice,” he shouted. “Get behind that chunk of rock.”

“My damn leg is broken,” he screamed back.

“You’ll have more broken if you don’t get behind that rock.”

Crawling on his belly, Rice had almost made it to the rock when another round slammed into his shoulder.

“Shit!” Shaw jumped up and ran in zigzags to Rice and pulled him behind the rock. The man was bleeding heavily from both wounds and drifting in and out of consciousness from the pain. The break was a compound one, the pale snapped bone sticking out of his thigh. If it had ripped the femoral artery on the way out, Rice was dead, Shaw knew. Using his knife he tore a length of cloth off his jumpsuit and made a crude tourniquet for Rice’s leg, cranking it down just above the thigh. The blood flow ebbed a bit. But only a bit.

“Am I going to die?” gasped Rice as he came to.

“Look, I’m going to try and get you out of here. Can you stand?”

“He’ll just shoot us,” yelled Rice. “He’ll just shoot us both dead.”

Shaw looked down at him. The man was going into shock and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He froze with the sound of the dogs. Only this time it wasn’t baying. It was snarls and paralyzing growls that made every hair on the back of Shaw’s neck go vertical. He eased his head over the top of the boulder to see.

“Shaw!” screamed Katie and Reggie together.

Two of the largest, fiercest dogs Shaw had ever seen were bearing down on his location at speed. They bounded over the rough terrain like it was level high-pile carpet.

“Shaw, run!” yelled Reggie.

Shaw held his knife tightly, processing through the possible scenarios as fast as he could. He stood but kept in a squat because he didn’t know if the dogs were a ploy to get him in range for a killing round. He looked over the rock again in time to see the first dog leap. Shaw slashed with the knife, catching the two-hundred-pound beast across its massive chest and opening a gaping but unfortunately largely superficial wound. He used his free hand to lever the airborne animal into a tight arc, and it hit the ground hard, but didn’t stay down.

With a speed and agility that no human could match, the dog rolled, gained purchase on the rocky dirt, turned in a split second, accelerated on its four legs, and collided with Shaw, chest to chest. He went down, his own blood from one of the dog’s canines ripping into his arm mingled with the blood from the dog’s chest wound. Shaw was up again in an instant because lying on the ground he had no chance. His fist collided with the animal’s snout once and then twice, momentarily stunning it. The impacts sent stingers all the way up Shaw’s arm and into the tight mass of muscles on his shoulder. He cut with the knife one more time, the beast let out a whine, and then Shaw jumped over the boulder and ran, his feet slipping in the loose dirt.

He tensed for the rifle round hitting him in the back or else the dog attacking him from behind. In his mind he saw it pulling him down, the jaws, the stench of breath in his face as the dog bit into his neck, following an ages-old instinctual tactic it knew would rip the big blood vessels and kill the prey. None of it would be less than a nightmare.

But it didn’t happen. He understood a second later why.

Rice screamed louder than Shaw had ever heard anyone do before. It was like he had ripped his lungs from his chest and inflated them with a ton of oxygen, producing a sound that froze Shaw to his core. He looked back and wished he hadn’t. Shaw had seen a lot of violence in his life, more than most people. But he had never seen anything like this.

One dog had Rice’s arm in its mouth. The other had just torn through most of the doomed man’s chest as freed blood sprayed everywhere. Shaw had a fleeting image of the Goya painting he’d seen of the monster eating the man. Nothing as feeble as oils and canvas, even powered by the imagination of a genius, could match the horror of the real spectacle. It was only at this point, his body perhaps more gone than not, that Alan Rice finally died.

Shaw reached the others and they ran as fast and as far as they could. Shaw half-carried Katie as they slipped and slid and rolled across ground that, at best, should have been traveled over at a measured, cautious pace.

Two miles later they collapsed, flat on the ground, their breaths coming so hard that it sounded like they were sucking on their last bits of oxygen.

“How?” Whit finally said as he sat up, his chest still heaving.

“I don’t know how,” answered Shaw. “He outmaneuvered us.”

Reggie slowly sat up. “We have to keep going. If we have to jump in the Belle Strait and swim to a boat, that’s what we have to do. We stay here we die.”

Whit punched his knife into the dirt. “Get a clue. We are dead. It’ll be the dogs on us next. We’ve got no chance, Reggie.”

Shaw stood, helping Katie up with him. “Reggie’s right. We have to keep moving.”

Whit looked up at him. “You really think that will make any difference?”

“No, but I’m going to make that son of a bitch work a little bit more for it. How about you?”

Reinvigorated, Whit slipped the knife in his pocket and jumped to his feet. They ran as hard as they could to the water.