Involentary Soilder: by Aaron Dodson

The leaves crinkled beneath his feet as he moved silently among the trees and the slowly sinking sun gave every thing a sharp focus. Charles Mossberg was a go with the flow kind of guy and you didn’t get many days like this. It had been spring for about two months and his family needed the meat badly. For the raids had been coming more and more often with the passing time, with a dismissive shrug he walked along looking for the deer that he had been tracking since the mouth of the valley. A branch snapped to his right and Charles whipped his head around and dropped down into a half crouch. The deer cautiously crept along at the tree line of a meadow and its ears twitching with alertness. Charles inhaled sharply as the deer turned broad side to him and began to graze. Charles took from his warm hunting coat a bullet and with a practiced movement deftly put into the chamber and brought his rifle to his shoulder and took careful aim. The deer was a perfect specimen it looked to him to be about it a 12 point and it was rippling with fat of the bounty of the forest being in full bloom. It lowered its head slowly all the while its ears twitching alert for the slightest sound of danger to send it bounding away. Charles took this all in within a matter of seconds and with sure eyes aimed right behind the front leg and fired. A sharp retort filled the otherwise quite valley and the deer sprang up as a cloud of crimson erupted out of its torso and it ran ten yards and fell with a crash and a cloud of dust billowed out around its now dead body.

         Charles smiled, glad that his superb shooting skills finally came to some use.  He sprang up and exhaled his pent of breath and walked briskly over to the deer and began field dressing it. As he was working at his task he started hearing a series of yips and barking and he knew to be a roaming pack of feral dogs. Ever since the war started no one kept dogs for fear they might have caught something from the radiation. There had been reports of mutant dogs from the other villages so Charles swiftly laid out the deer’s organs and took up the meat and began to hurry to his village. As he entered the trees there was a crash and much snarling as the dogs came upon the remains of his kill. Charles quickened his pace not wanting to see if the rumors of mutant dogs were true.

         

  As he came to the mouth of the valley he stopped by the river for a drink. The river was slowly gurgling along and Charles bent down and took a drink, taking in his reflection as he did. Charles was a naïve looking man just barely past being called a boy. He saw brown hair that was slightly overgrown going slightly past his ears. He hadn’t seen scissors for a long time. His face was hawk like and very expressive and he stood to about 5-10 and wasn’t what you would call muscular but he wasn’t scrawny neither.

         Charles drank his fill and as he stood up, a dog was staring at him across the river, or at least what he thought was a dog for its snout was about twice as long as a normal dogs and it was twice a dog’s size and was midnight blue with out any fur that he could see. It looked at Charles with bright eyes that bespoke of a mind that was just starting to register the world almost as if it was just really seeing things for the first time with its new found brain. Its nose quivered as it smelled the meat in his pack. Charles franticly realized with a jerk that it was one of the mutant dogs that where rumored to be about. Charles quickly loaded his gun and the dog’s serine features transformed into a mask of fury and with a snarl launched itself into the water at Charles. He quickly dug into his pocket while running to his left hoping the dog would be swept away with the current. The mutant sliced through the water as some monstrous sea lion and then it clawed its way up to the bank. Charles deftly put a bullet in the chamber and fired blindly. The bullet struck a yard away from the mutant causing it yelp and bound into the forest away from the mad man with the boom stick. Charles was so relived that he almost slumped to the ground. Deciding against a quick rest to gather his wits, he ran towards the bridge that went across the river and ran up the path that led to his village.

         Upon leaving the valley he slowed to a walk and looking behind him to the forest that now held a new fear for him. Resolving to tell his father about the mutant dog he walked along the paved road that had once been a highway before the civil war but now served as a goat path to the grasslands beyond. Charles looked up the road and beheld his shabby village. It had the look of a place that at a moments notice could either be welcoming or forbidding, depending on who was looking at it. To the causal observer it was a shabby place with small cabins and honest gardens and with grim eye’d people that looked to be on the verge of tearing their hair out or jumping for joy, but to the more practiced eye, one would see the readiness of the people. Ready to scamper to their houses at a moments notice. The men carried knives at their waists and pistols at their hips.

    The woman ambled about as if they held some great inner pain, and the children played and yelled, for this life was the only one that they knew but even when they smiled the smiled never quite reached their eyes. The children looked up and saw Charles walking down the road and they smiled at him and this time the smile really did reach their eyes, they ran at Charles and screaming their joy the jumped on him and begged him to tell them stories of the hunt. Then a boy with bright eyes by the name of John asked “are the rumors true Charles?” Charles looked down at the boy and asked “why, what rumors is that John?”  John looked up at him with scared eyes and said “About the mutant dogs that eat your brains and make you a ghost!” the other kids nodded along with him and some shouted “Is it true that they eat little kids?” Charles chuckled and said “yes the rumors are true but honestly who told you that they eat little kids? I think if we leave them alone they will leave us alone don’t you guys think?” the children all pointed at john and said “he’s the one that told us!” and then they all started putting there input in and saying that they are going to have to hunt down the dogs and kill them all because even if we leave them alone they are still going to come and try and eat us all!

         Charles looked up as his father looked from his work and hailed his son to him. With an apologetic look to the children Charles swept away from them and went over to their cabin. It was a small cabin made of pine and not painted and its chimney was blowing out smoke which told him that his mother and sisters where cooking supper. Charles went over to his father who was harvesting corn from their garden that was in their back yard and his father came over to him and with a self satisfied smirk Charles told him his father of how he had made a great shot on the deer. His father looked at him with grim eyes, as a man that had seen to much death and had never really gotten over it, and he said “well that’s all well and good but do tell, why does it look like you wet your self?” with a start Charles looked down at him self and saw a wet spot on his pants and realized that’s what must of happened when the mutant dog almost attacked him, and looking down at the ground Charles said “its not from me wetting my self, it’s the blood from the deer that I shot!” his father nodded absent minded kind of way and asked Charles “what was all that barking down in the valley? Did you scare up some coyotes or was that you screaming because you actually killed something?” Charles gave his father a angry look and said “no, I came upon a pack of dogs and they are mutated I’m not sure to what extent but they are sure scary looking” and to that his father jerked back into focus and starting asking questions just as Charles’s mother came around the front of the house carrying a pan of bread. Charles’s father turned to his wife and said “we are going to have to start watching where the girls go now you know Sarah because Charles just told me that there is a new mutant running around” Charles’s mother looked back at the two little girls peeking around her legs and ushered them inside and asked “is it just a single mutant or what Bill?” Charles’s father looked at her and in a self resigned way said “a pack and by the sounds of it, a lot of them” Bill looked over at his son and asked “did anything happen between you and the dogs?”


  Charles told his father of the encounter with the mutant dog at the river and with a shudder said “it almost seemed like it was sizing me up dad, as if it was wondering if I was worth its time and it seemed I don’t know… almost intelligent!”  Charles’s father looked at his son and replied “well I suppose that we are just going to have to see what happens and I hope they don’t catch the scent of the village, because if they do we are in a lot of trouble.” Charles looked at his father and wondered what would happen if the mutants did find their village. As he was thinking to him self a loud scream ripped him out of his reverie and he and his father looked at each other and with a muffled oath his father threw down his rake and motioning his son to follow they tore around the front of the house and pelted up the path to the front door and swung it open and saw          

         two little girls playing with corn stalk dolls that they had made and with a obvious sigh of relief his father sagged against the door way and Charles went over to his sisters and said “listen girls I need you guys to listen real good now ya hear?” they looked at him with bright eyes and the elder of the two asked “listen to what?” she had a real naughty look on her face like if your parents had just caught you sneaking a cookie from the pan before dinner. Charles gave his sister a look and said “you know what I mean missy, you had better listen to mom and dad if they tell you any thing ok?” his sisters nodded solemnly and his mother called “dinners ready!” and Charles’s sisters jumped up and grabbed their spots at the table. Charles stood up and went over and was about to sit down when he remembered the meat still strapped to his back. Charles went over to the side of their small one room cabin and went over to the metal door that dominated the room. His father had built it when he built the house because of the ever present need to hide because of the war. They used it as a store room as well as a panic room and Charles swung the door open and went into the darkness within the room.

         The first thing he noticed was the musky smell. His father had been storing all of his supplies down there as of late, for fear of losing them and he had an odd assortment of guns and ammo also the occasional first aid kit and his things from before the second civil war. Charles had been born a year before the war and there for didn’t remember how it started. His father had fought in the war on this side of democrats and after a while his father couldn’t take the killing so he abandoned the democrats and the republicans to their senseless killing of each other and his father formed the first militia colony free of either political party. Since then the militia formed its army and had offered Charles’s dad high rank to join the army but his father declined on the account that he had a family to look after. 

         As Charles was sifting through the remnants of his fathers past he came across a old faded photo of a man with long wavy blonde hair and the man had a almost hungry look in his ice blue eyes a look that made you inwardly cringe to look at. Next to the hungry looking man stood his father tall and balding with his breezy brown hair and a permanently harassed look about him with an internal glow in his eyes almost a fiery passion that Charles had never seen his father with until now. Both the men had white coats and on the coats they both bore the insignia of a donkey which puzzled Charles. What kind of scientist worked on donkeys? Underneath the photo Charles saw the words Mossberg and Slater 3010 Radiology and Geno Unit research team. Charles heard a faint scuffling and the metal door open behind him and came in Bill Mossberg. Charles’s father saw the photo in his son’s hands and his skin paled and he ran over and snatched the photo from Charles and said in a raspy voice “they never told us what the research was being used for.”          

         Charles looked at his father with a shocked expression and asked “you’re a scientist…but how! I grew up with you!” and with that Charles turns away unsure of who his father was any more; but his father snatches the hood of his hunting coat and with a haunted expression said “give me a chance to explain not every thing is as it seems” and Charles looked at his father and with a hand brushed him off and said “fine explain”. His father looked at his son and said “I’ll tell you Charles but I must tell you first, your not going to like this” Charles looked at his father with a troubled conscious followed his father out of the steel door and into the light of realization.