I had my seventeenth birthday on the road. I hadn’t given it much thought, but when we stopped for the night, the guys all gave me a bottle of moonshine and insisted on getting me drunk. I don’t really remember much of the party, but I’m told I made an utter ass of myself and everyone else had fun ughing at me.

  So yeah, I guess I was starting to become one of the guys.

  I do remember the hangover the next morning, and for the first time I was grateful for the ration of coffee that I got each morning. Someone else drove my truck until I was feeling a bit better, and I took over after our noon-break so that the guard could go back to his post.

  Yeah, I figured out what that meant. Just because they were putting me to work didn’t mean that I wasn’t expendable. Probably everyone on the caravan could drive, but although they had no issue with me carrying the Ruger I brought with me doesn’t mean they trusted me with one of their rifles or my judgment as a guard.

  They probably only trusted me with a truck because I proved I could handle it during the attack. And because the deaths meant that we were shorthanded. I couldn’t bme them; I’d never been trained to handle a rifle and they knew it.

  Bullets weren’t cheap enough to go around letting any dumbshit like me practice target shooting.

  For that matter, I barely knew how to use the Ruger. I doubted I could hit anything with it that was further than ten feet away. I practiced holding, aiming, and dry-firing it, sure, but I had no idea what my actual accuracy with it was.

  In the Bends, that was fine. The chances of me having to defend myself back home were slim.

  On the road? It made me worried that the next time I had to defend myself, I’d waste more than two bullets doing so.

  About three weeks passed. We made our meandering way through the midwest without much happening, stopping a few times like we had before to de-stress and also do our bit for the survival of the human race visa vi procreation. I was approached a couple of times like before, and like before it’s nobody’s damn business where those conversations went.

  Then it happened.

  I got up in the middle of the night to piss. It was only by chance that I put my gun belt on as I stumbled out of the circle of wagons. I had just finished and was turning back when I saw movement.

  I don’t remember drawing my gun, but it was in my hand.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  My answer was a deep growling sound.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  A yelp.

  Then the spotlights were on me and the beast, and a few seconds ter all the guards were shouting and shooting.

  I was lucky, because the first bullet caught it right in its forehead as it was about to leap. The next five ripped it apart. I only caught a fsh of what it looked like before its destruction, and the image of the canine monstrosity haunts me.

  A ripper, they call it.

  Used to be a coyote, we think. Before the curse got to it and made it twice as big and five times as mean.

  I was lucky it was alone. I was also lucky that I’d just pissed because if I hadn’t I would have walked back into the camp after humiliating myself.

  The others went out and tossed some kerosene on the body and lit it on fire, and the rest of us got our asses in gear. We broke camp at three AM and drove until dark the next day.

  Nobody said a word to me about how lucky I was to have not gotten my throat ripped out.

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