Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [116]
Cray kicked at the attached dog with his free foot, first in the head, to no visible effect, then to its lungs. The Doberman grunted, but held on. Cray kicked again, viciously, using the heel of his boot, and it sank into the animal. Again and again he kicked. The dog loosened its grip, and Cray lashed into it again. The animal slipped off, crashing to the ground near its partner. The Doberman instantly leaped again. Both dogs lunged upward, snapping their jaws, Cray's blood dripping down on them.
Pulling himself up, Cray lifted a leg over the bar, then slid down the inside of the fence. The dogs—inches from him but separated by steel strands—pressed against the links on their back legs, their fangs working furiously. One of the dogs had blood on its dewlaps, Cray's blood.
Cray drew his pistol and put it at that dog's head, aiming through the fence. Then he thought better of it and glanced up and down the dog run. Still no sentries.
Shuddering, he glared at the dogs. He whispered, "You two need a little work on your manners."
When he limped away from the fence, his ankle felt as if it were a bag of broken bones, pumping pain up his leg with each step.
He lowered himself to the ground fifty yards from the fence, in tall damp grass behind a tree. The wind was blowing idly from the direction of the dogs, so his scent would not continue to rile them. The Dober- mans barked and paced, staring in Cray's direction with their villainous eyes. Cray suspected the dogs had not been on guards' leads, and that no sentries were approaching. But he waited, his pistol in front of him. The dogs simmered and barked.
The night began to lift, pale blue light seeping across the land from the east. Cray gingerly touched his ankle. The sock was wet and warm. Puncture wounds. Cray didn't know how many. He rotated his foot. The pain was sharp, as if the dog was still latched onto him, but the ankle worked well enough. The Dobermans glared one last time, then drifted away, back the way they had come. Still no sentries.
Cray rose from the ground and started north again, traveling between fir and oak trees, and over damp ground made soft by moss and decomposing leaves. He pushed through banks of holly and juniper that dampened his pants. He was moving well, and the pain in his chewed foot settled to a low throb, hardly causing him to limp. His boots had absorbed most of the dog's fury, he decided.
The woods ended abruptly. Cray stepped onto a field that had a double horizon. The lower one was grass, acres of it, surrounded on all sides by forest. A second horizon drifted above the first, this one white and geometric, forming perfect grids. They were crosses, ranging off in all directions, marking dead soldiers in the ground below. Cray walked between rows of grave markers, his damaged foot squishing in his boot. Flagpoles at the center of the military cemetery were bare.
As he crossed the graveyard, the carefully arranged wooden crosses and stone markers gave way to rows of unpainted crosses, many leaning in the soft ground, and many with crude lettering. These were the more recently dead. Then Cray passed several long berms, where dead soldiers had been buried together in shallow rows, without coffins or ceremony. Sacks of quicklime were piled nearby, several broken open, coloring the morbid ground with patches of shocking white. A horse cart contained a load of picks and shovels. The rot of corroded flesh percolated up from the ground.
Cray left the cemetery to enter the woods again, paralleling a service road. He came to the base's motor pool, four buildings that had been blown apart. Nothing remained but concrete foundations covered with blistered truck parts. Poles were at each corner of the foundations, and fragments of failed camouflage netting hung from them, idly swaying in the soft