My Dog Of War

Part 1

You could see the flames. Even in the middle of the afternoon, when the hot outback desert sun singed everything bright and skylit, the flames shot up like spouts from hell on the horizon. The cities were burning. And Officer Weston knew it.

His police scanner was dying. It crackled, desperately spitting out garbled, squawked chunks of mayhem as the airwaves jammed with electromagnetic interference. Murders. Rapes. Cannibalism. The choked voices didn't bother to mention arson or robbery or assault. In this new order they were petty crimes, less than loitering. The continued litany of horror broadcast by their numbed words lacked the urgency of a cry for backup. The flat, pithed timbre of their voice was indication they knew no help was arriving. Weston recognized the voices of his squadmates – Paton and Pearce, Johnson and Aspland. Methodically, they bore witness to the horror, the voices of condemned men desperately scratching a final proof that they once existed on the impassive face of time. Then the pop of gunfire, boots on bone, the thump of bodies beaten to pulp. Then silence. That flat, white noise of empty static, like the crackle of a roaring fire, far in the distance and inching closer.

The speedometer's needle jittered in the straining red at the very bottom of the gauge as Weston hammered on the gas pedal. His cruiser's frantically spinning wheels kicked up the clay. The airborne motes of dust stung his nostrils like pepper spray and battered his eyes raw. His throat constricted and his eyes welled with tears. It's the dust, he lied to himself, and sped on.

He willed his battered eyes to focus on the road. The blank, desolate outback extended in every direction. The horizon shimmied in the heat. A glint at the bottom of his peripheral vision distracted him. He glanced down.

His badge was still pinned to his chest. In the flat, insistent noon light it sparkled with eye-gouging brilliance. A jolt of shame cut through him. The scanner was silent now, its white noise mute testimony to a squadron devoured by anarchy. Except for him. Officer Weston, the coward who turned tail and ran when the shit hit the fan.

"I was the only mate still at headquarters," he said aloud to the empty car, in a voice choked with apology. "Today was my desk day. They was on patrol and I was right where I should have been." And so when civilization came toppling down the force's lone man left standing -- the only man on the force without a wife or family who would mourn him -- grabbed a box of ammo and the cruiser with the most petrol in the tank and headed for the hills. It would have been suicide, a 50-minute, gas-squandering drive, followed by certain death, if he'd headed into the fray. He knew that. Any man with half a brain knew that. His badge twinkled with blinding, demanding insistence at the rim of his vision.

He grabbed at his chest. The pin was stuck. Normally it took an unconscious second to fasten it proudly to his uniform each morning but his hands shook with remorse and the bone-jarring rattle of the speeding car. He struggled one-handed for a few furious seconds, then took his eyes off the road and wrenched it from his chest, hurling it out the window, watching it spin like a mote of golden light and disappear –

WHAM!

The collision blind-sided him from the right front corner and spun him around in a spray of glass. That horrible, dying animal sound of tortured metal let him know this was a bad one. His thoughts were ominously, bizarrely clear as the car spun in angry, bruising circles, etching wet looping streaks of burned rubber on the hot tarmac as he bounced around the car's battered interior like a rat shaken by a dog.

The hiss of the fractured radiator let him know the collision was over. It took his head a moment longer to acknowledge the spinning had stopped. He was staring out the window, at an entirely new patch of forsaken desert. The vista was separated into stained-glass panels by the spider web cracks that spanned the windshield glass. Water vapor and grey smoke steamed in angry geysers from the crumpled front hood.