Page 59 of Road Refugees

My hot breath against the barrier awakened me. My brain sent signals that I would suffocate breathing in my own carbon dioxide. Yet when all the sights and sounds of that department store back alley came rushing back to me, I knew to remain still. It was possible these cretins thought I was dead and were taking me somewhere to dump me. They had my Glock. With a couple broken ribs and fingers, I probably couldn’t even take on Stomach, much less the other complete and utter dirtbags.

Besides. Now I could listen to their discussion. And it was horrendous.

“What we got to eat back at the mill?” asked Stomach. “That hamburger from that moron’s car was disgusting. Makes me want to puke.”

I did smell cooked meat. They’d taken Heaven’s veggie burger from her car, apparently.

The Neo-Nazi said, “Riddlesberger is cooking his famous steak tonight. But first he wants us to go bury the rest of those puppies.”

“Hell to the no!” blared another lackey. “Just let the bitch eat them. Easier that way.”

Neo-Nazi said, “Yeah. Saves on corn.”

They fed the dogs corn? One can only imagine how I wanted to roar up out of the plastic and strangle those scrotums with my bare hands. It angered me unbelievably that I had no hope of overcoming them. I had always loathed feeling helpless, impotent. I had to remember I had to stay alive for Heaven. Heaven and Linus and Mickey Finn. Our dogs were keyed in to us, and we were responsible for them. And Heaven. It was always a fine line to walk with her. It was always so easy to screw her up. I had to remain a solid rock for her. Not taken out by some asshole with a swastika on his arm.

When we bumped onto Riddlesberger’s dirt driveway, I snuck a few decent breaths through an opening in the plastic. Evidently Stomach was a chain smoker, and the Camel non-riddled air wasn’t much better than the chemical smell of the tarp. Blood trickled from the searing bash in my forehead.

That sleazy weasel said, “We’ll let Byron decide what to do with this heap of trash. Maybe bury him in the lake with the others.”

The far-right dirtbag piped up. “Put him in the septic tank next to George Fell?”

George Fell’s disintegrating body was too hoity-toity for the likes of me, because Stomach snapped, “Fuck no, Dingbat! He’s got to meet a fate worse than George Fell to satisfy Byron.”

“Yeah,” goofed another one percenter, maybe the one who’d broken my fingers with his skull. “We could use the corn grinder on him again. Byron likes that.”

Stomach turned on that guy, too. “You don’t get to call him Byron, Mumbles! Only I get to call him Byron, and I’ve got the scar on my head to prove it!”

So Riddlesberger had given Stomach that excruciating scar? And he stayed with the Friends? I knew the Bare Bones were a bit rougher back in the day Ford’s dad had been Prez, but to make an eight-inch scar down your Sergeant at Arm’s skull was a step too far. And putting poor Mr. Fell into a septic tank was A-OK.

Rumbling down the road in utter darkness of course brought to my addled mind the time I’d been attacked. Crashed down a rocky road to a waiting chopper, hovering between sleep and waking. I remembered a firefight with ISIL, the incessant hammering of machine guns. Everything was instinct, discipline, and adrenaline. I could use only one of those virtues now, the discipline to stay still under the tarp without even knowing what good it did me.

I was out cold for twenty-four hours after the attack. I faded in and out strapped to an EMS spine board.

The only honor in Syria existed among troops in the field. Betrayal of our troops by their commanders is what warped our brains. Our promises to the Syrians were all broken. It was incompetent criminality, that’s what it was. Decent people died on all sides and are still dying today. My mother whined that no one would ever hire me if I told my story. I wasn’t in a military family. My mother worked in business. My father was an IT executive. Things were thoroughly intellectual, and they couldn’t parse out why I’d even want to join such an organization as the army. After a few years, I wondered myself.

Now, I had to call on all my skills, the spirits of my brothers-in-arms, to defeat these fucktards.

Eventually they picked me up, tarp and all, and bounced me along to some shady structure, another barn I presumed. From the sounds of whimpering and the overpowering odor of poo and urine, I knew it was a dog barn. They tossed me like a baseball on Sunday, luckily onto some hay. It hurt like a motherfuck just to breathe. Soon the ominous voice of Riddlesberger himself entered the scene.

“He dead?” the slimy sadist asked.

“I think so,” said Stomach. “What you want us to do with him?”

“Let’s make sure,” said Riddlesberger, kicking my broken rib for good measure.

I gritted my teeth and sweated, waiting for them to tear off the tarp and discover I was alive.

That’s exactly what happened.

Riddlesberger himself ripped off the crackling black plastic. My eyelids were trembling from the pain, the searing hot rod stuck up my spine. When he kicked me in the ribs with his engineer boots, the jig was up.

I gasped, instinctively holding my hands lightly over my ribs. I opened my eyes to assess the scene, but it wasn’t hard to play the injured victim. I barely moved.

“So,” the slimebag practically whispered, his lips like liver under his John Waters ‘stache. His bicep ink—Kill me, I’ve never died before—now called out to me. “The asswipe who stole my girlfriend is back. Fucking bleeding heart lib, all caring about the dogs.” He said this as though I was a serial killer.

“You fucker,” I gasped. “You’re growing dogs in fucking cages, never letting them out. You’re tossing fucking mothers, for Christ sake, into ditches.”

Riddlesberger sneered. “The other day we shot fifty puppies instead of taking them to the vet for vaccines.”