Silent Creed

15

As soon as he was out of the hole, someone shoved an oxygen mask on his face. Creed fought to pull it off. He wanted to smell the fresh air, not something out of a can. The medic tried to put it on again and Creed pushed it away.

“Let him be,” he heard someone say.

He gulped in air and ignored the stab of pain in his chest. He yanked off his helmet and instantly felt the cool breeze against his sweat-drenched hair.

“Bolo.”

He struggled to look around. Hands came down on his shoulders to keep him still and he shoved at them, too.

“Hell, let him see his dog. If it wasn’t for the dog, we wouldn’t have found him.”

Creed glanced up to look at the speaker, but his vision was still fuzzy. He thought he recognized the man’s voice but he couldn’t remember his name. Then Creed felt another shove at his shoulder. Before he could bat it away, he felt the lick on his cheek. Ignoring the aches, he reached up and wrapped his arm around the big dog’s neck, pulling him close. Bolo licked his mud-stained face.

The man squatted in front of Creed and waited for his eyes to focus on him.

“Can you tell me who I am?”

Bushy gray eyebrows stuck out from under the brim of a yellow hard hat. An equally bushy gray mustache hung over the man’s mouth.

Creed blinked hard a couple of times and he let his fingers caress Bolo’s head, running them over the dog’s ears then neck. Other than mud, he couldn’t feel any wounds or cuts on the dog.

The man looked disappointed and his eyes started searching for the medic.

“Vance,” Creed said.

The man’s eyes returned to Creed’s.

“But you like to be called Ollie.”

“Son of a bitch!” Then over his shoulder he yelled, “I think he’s okay.” To Creed he said, “We’re still gonna take you down to our triage center. They’re letting us use the high school gymnasium. Medic thinks you have some busted ribs. They’ll fix you up and find you a nice soft cot where you can get some rest.”

“What about Bolo?”

“He’ll go with you.”

“Is he okay?”

“As far as I can tell. I gotta tell you, though, that dog was possessed. We were looking for you up higher, where the edge gave out and the slide began. He kept insisting you were all the way down here. You traveled a good long ways, my friend.”

“What about the other dog?”

Vance scrunched up his face in question.

“The vehicle underground.”

And now the man hung his head and his eyes went down as well. When they returned, Creed knew the results.

“Driver and two passengers were dead. They were pretty bloodied up. I don’t think they survived the impact. So at least they weren’t down there suffering.”

Vance stood up and waved for the medics to come back over.

“What about the dog?”

“I think she’ll be okay.”

“She’s a scrappy thing,” the medic said, keeping his distance from Creed as if to make sure it was safe to approach him.

“She was cushioned between the seat back and one of the passengers. Probably protected her from serious injury,” Vance said.

“She didn’t try to bite anyone,” the medic told him. “She’s back in the ambulance. We’ve got her subdued on pain meds. You and Bolo mind riding along with her?”

“Not at all.”

Creed let the medic help him to his feet. It took more effort than he expected and Vance came on the other side to assist. His legs felt like spaghetti. He couldn’t get his knees to hold. His head started swirling and suddenly he was struggling to catch his breath again. This time when the medic offered the oxygen mask, Creed didn’t fight him.

“Let’s sit you back down,” the medic told him, easing him back to the ground. Then into his shoulder radio he said, “Bring up that stretcher.”

“Hey, Ollie, we’ve got something here,” one of Vance’s men yelled to him, even though he was close by, less than twenty feet away. “Smells bad.”

Creed watched them pull and tug at something buried under the mud, digging around the edges. They were being careful. It didn’t take long to realize it was a body. He saw the urgency slip away from their shoulders and hands when they realized the victim was dead.

“Looks like there’s more than one.”

But even this revelation didn’t bring with it a sense of urgency.

Vance helped lift a body out from the hole. They turned it to lie faceup.

“Holy crap!”

Creed craned his neck to see but the men were standing too close around the body, staring down at it.

“What’s wrong?” he finally asked the medic who returned to Creed’s side. “They’re dead, right?”

“Oh yeah, they’re dead all right. But not from the landslide. One has a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.”