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The Dream Camps

by Dillon Mullenix

March 2011

THE low-slung man, hunched beneath pack, made a fast ascent of a hill he felt had beckoned him. All trails led to a seeming darker light. The chaparral, like a maze, surrounded him, and for a moment, the world was large again, this wilderness empty and desolate, except for that one threat, which seemed inescapable despite the hugeness of the place.

At the top of hill he saw the endless flow of the high desert, undulating, dotted by staunch oaks and tired water starved pines. Leftovers from fires sixty years ago. Some bore signs, carbonized reminders of thunderous crackling flame hundred foot tall, emotionless, and sensational. God on earth.

“Shit, where the fuck is the road,” the man said to himself, between deep intentional breaths. “I know it is over this way.” He knew he wasn’t turned around.

“What do you see?” a voice said from behind him. It was Trent. His brother was behind him.

“You two need to hurry up,” Damien said.

“There was so much pot back there!” exclaimed Trent’s brother, Sam.

“I know,” said Trent. “Good thing we have guns.”

Damien gripped his pistol tighter. He’d had the gun for a while. It felt good in his hands. When he bought it new it came with two magazines, a holster for the pistol and magazines, and a lock. Everything but the lock and key were with him now. One magazine was in the pistol, which was a forty-caliber Springfield XD. The bullets were hollow points, and there were twenty-one in total between the two clips and the one he had chambered long before the hike had began, at home. Trent had some old 30-30 lever-action Winchester that had a few of the bolts missing. It fired, but sometimes it jammed, and in a clench, Damien would have rather had a good K-BAR. Sam didn’t have anything. And earlier he had just stood in the riverbed looking at these fresh boot prints running away from them. Damien, seeing that, had gone up into the bushes, he’d seen drag marks earlier, and heard of people getting killed for finding things like this.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Damien.

“It’s that way,” said Trent, pointing in the direction of where he parked his small truck.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, let’s go.”

All three began to run through the red shank, shrub oak, foxtails, desert sage, insects, and dry grasses. Red rocks jutted from the ground, sharp edges begging for a good fall. One of their few ways of fighting back. Decomposing granite made sharp turns hard to make in precarious places. Through a few washes, dry and slightly streaming, came and went, sand spread and grew tough and into rocks slabs and talus slopes and soft black dirt beneath shade trees and in stinging nettle and briars, mud and more insects, all in sweat dripping heat of midsummer.

“Holy shit, I didn’t think the fucking truck was this far away,” said Damien.

“The desert plays tricks on the eyes and mind, don’t worry, I know where we are.”

“We grew up out here,” added Sam.

Damien’s adrenaline was going strong. He felt his hands shake. They moved on through the heat. Through the trees and brush and around the poisonous reptiles and arachnids. Maybe this was what war is like, Damien thought. Everything began to look like a person hiding in the shadows.

As Trent had predicted the road soon showed itself and they could see the little truck. The sun glared off the crack in the windshield like a cry for help. Damien eyed the road, trying to see as far down the deserted dirt as he could, nothing, not even a plume of dust or the howl of an engine.

“Looks clear,” says Sam, and walks out onto the road.

Trent followed, lowering the rifle to his side and letting it swing like a brief case.

“Put the gun up, we’re not safe yet,” said Damien in a low voice.

It was June 11, 2009.

“What’s that?” Sam asked.

Damien and Trent followed his gaze, and it fell upon a man in cowboy boots and jeans, wearing a dirty camouflaged shirt, beanie, and sneer. His skin was fair. His hair long and oily, bearded and uncombed. The man shifted his weight into a better stance to shoot. He had a semi-automatic carbine. Trent dove into the bushes near a little culvert made of earth and let out a wild round. The man fired several times, unmoved by the gasp of the 30-30. Damien barked back with his pistol, and was met with a small hailstorm of acorn-sized lead. Other men could be seen bounding through the low chaparral behind their carbine toting compañero.

Suddenly the man fell. A loud report was heard and then nothing more. The other men were hiding. Damien dropped a few more rounds down range and then scrambled over to the truck and jumped in the bed. Sam was lying on the ground, blood coming from his half-open mouth. His chest was also bloodied.

“Get the fuck over here! They shot Sam.”

Damien jumped from the truck and easily tossed Sam into the bed of the truck. Trent emerged from the brush and climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Go!” Damien demanded. “Get the fuck out of here.”

He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling. It was white.

His first thought, in his cold sweat, was: It could have been so much worse.

The man’s heart rhythms ran steady after ten minutes on his back coming to grips with his new reality.

“What a fucking trip…” he garbled forth to the empty white room and strangling heat of woolen blankets. “I hope that isn’t a premonition to death by gunfire.” He hacked and then spat green–black slime on the floor near his bed.

Dillon Mullenix lives and writes in the high desert.  He has been published in Seahorse Rodeo Folk Review, PenSpark, Haggard & Halloo, Autumn Letters, and in four anthologies.  As a Gemini he likes to argue with himself.