Quota: A Mercenary and His Dogs

By J. D. Melvin

It is dire times for mankind. Population growth and the pollution of our environment was just the start. There seemed to be little chance for our continued survival until a new mineral called The Resource is discovered that could provide us with a new future. But were not alone. An alien race has also discovered the value of The Resource.

The Conglomerate is now Earths only remaining corporation. To control The Resource, they now hire mercenaries to protect against any threat that might hinder the Conglomerates mining process.

Our hero, now a mercenary and a recently wounded and discharged military veteran, is hired on with the mission of protecting The Resource against outside invaders. But the Conglomerate has a secret and dark agenda.

Eventually our hero has only a few unlikely partners to help him fight the battle for his own survival. And they are dogs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480850545

J. D. Melvin

J. D. Melvin has over two decades of experience as a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces and the United States Special Operations Command. While training with an USMC Military Working Dog Team in preparation for a combat deployment to Iraq, J.D. quickly learned of the dedication and sacrifice displayed by the human handlers and the selfless service of their working dogs. This was the inspiration for his novel. After his military career, J.D. has served as a law enforcement officer, EMT and military paramedic instructor. He now lives in the mountains of Colorado with his wife Kim and their dog Ronin.

Book preview

ONE

Y ou know, in the beginning I never really cared for dogs. Growing up I had never owned one, as they were considered a luxury to feed and care for in the twenty-second century. Sure, I’d see one every now and then, formally trained and working as service dogs for the local border police, but I mostly saw them around the massive and stinking garbage piles near my prefectures outer boundaries. They were wild looking, skinny and filth ridden with dried shit staining their rear flanks. To me they seemed to be always sneaking and darting around with their tails between their legs.

I was cornered by a small pack of wild dogs while walking back from work one day. I was tired after a long day of work and was taking a short cut across the canal zones to get home. The dogs almost ran me down, snarling and frothing at the mouth. I got away by jumping over a nearby security fence, but only after losing my backpack that contained job-related diagnostic tools and the last of my month’s food credit vouchers. I could hear them tearing away at my pack on the other side of the fence. I couldn’t figure why. There wasn’t even so much as a protein cracker inside it for them to chow down on. So that didn’t do anything to further my opinions about dogs.

One day while my girlfriend was driving me to work, a dog suddenly ran out in front of us. She swerved so hard to miss it that we ran off the road and just barely missed hitting a steel refuse Dumpster. Idiot, I thought. The girl, not the dog. At least the dog had the sense to keep running away through the nearby marshland, while my girl and I were left stuck off the side of the road with hung airbrakes on our conveyance shuttle. They’d jammed after she slammed on the brakes.

It wasn’t until years later during my first tour as a soldier in the old Department of Defense that I had a chance to be closer with dogs, and I still didn’t like them. Whenever we would deploy in combat with a dog team, they smelled bad, both the dogs and their human handlers. The stink was stifling in the tight and hot confines of the transports or armored-up combat shuttles that we would patrol in while looking for the bad guys. And the dogs would bark and growl the entire time. I guess the shuttles’ engine harmonics hurt their ears. Who knows? And sure enough, eventually the dogs would shit or puke in their cages during the trip, just making matters worse. They would bark even more at anyone who wasn’t their handlers like their tails were on fire. Man’s best friend. It didn’t figure out to me.

And the dog handlers. I didn’t get them either. They were all volunteers for the specialty. Those soldiers would live, sleep and eat with their dogs. They seemed to never spend any time away from them. You would’ve thought that the dogs ran the show. The dogs were always fed, cleaned and cared for before their human handlers could even think about caring for themselves.

Some of the handlers would cry like babies when their charges were killed while either sniffing out an IED or during an ambush. Or when the dogs were euthanized because of the severity of their wounds. Sometimes a dog would be diagnosed with a case of PTSD so severe that it couldn’t function anymore in the job, so off to doggy heaven it went. It was mandatory that the dog be euthanized once labeled as combat ineffective.

Shit, more than one handler that I had observed back then committed suicide because he had lost his dog during a combat mission. Myself, I didn’t get it. The dogs weren’t human after all. And they were only good for about three or four years of total mission use before they lost their minds to the stress of the job. That short timeframe also included the year that it took for the dogs to mature to the point that they could even start being trained in the first place.

When the old Department of Defense was eventually disbanded and the Conglomerate owned Special Operations Branch was formed as its replacement, the new bosses decided that working dogs weren’t needed anymore. It was now seen that current technology in the form of super-enhanced satellite imagery and low-altitude hunter/seeker-drones could now fill in the duties that the dogs used to perform.

As the world’s population reached ten billion and our economy reached a critical low point, it became an extreme luxury to own any animal, to include dogs. Food was a resource, and as with so many other resources nowadays, it was both expensive and getting hard to find. Eventually animals no longer provided us protein as a source of food. Our environment had become so polluted, and our population had grown so dense, that there was no longer grazing and breeding ground space for any of the species of animals that had once fed the human population, such as cattle, pigs, chickens and even horses.

Eventually the animals that had once been part of our diet just disappeared due to world population growth. By then, the associated damage to our ecosystem had already been done. Methane gases and waste run-offs naturally produced by farm animals just made humanity’s air and water pollution crises even worse. Synthetic generation meats eventually replaced the dependency upon livestock for protein. Veterinary medical care disappeared completely as they went by the way of, if you’ll excuse the pun, the do-do bird.

It was to follow that the few remaining animals left being used as pets by the super-rich were to be eventually outlawed. Then the Rabies Mutation Outbreak of 2229 finally sealed animal fate. Initially spread only by direct contact, it eventually mutated and became airborne. Thank God it was passed only among animals. Once an animal contracted the disease it proved 98.3 percent fatal.

The few animals that were left after the outbreak were naturally immune from the disease. The remaining animals that now survived scavenged for survival and hid in what was left of the wild. The wild was considered the sewer canal zones, remote landfill waste-stations, and the like.

But man had kept a biological record of all life examples that were suspect of becoming extinct during the outbreak. Their sperm and eggs were kept in preservation bunkers in the hopes that one day, somewhere off-world, the specimens could actually be brought back to life to thrive on their own once again. And the dog, aka, Canine familiaris in Latin, was one of the many species that had become preserved. Little did I know that this particular species would eventually become both my savior and best friend.

TWO

I felt my nose crack. I could barely see as stinging tears immediately welled up in my eyes and clouded my vision. I lashed out blindly with my right leg and felt my foot connect hard with one of my three assailants. I then twisted hard to my left and broke free of the grip from one of the others who was behind me and still holding my arms. I kicked out hard again to my right and broke the knee of the one that was still holding me. He went down hard, screaming and holding his left knee as he fell.

I then turned hard back to my left and hit the person that I had just broke free from with an elbow strike to the right side of his jaw as he rushed me. His momentum did most of the work as he went down cold. The attacker to my front was now leaning forward, holding his stomach from mostly a lucky punch that I got in next. I kneed him in the face as he continued downward and he collapsed. I didn’t hang around to see what was left as I turned and ran.

It was like that, on and off, for most of my teenager years. I didn’t fit in with my family’s assigned residence blocks as I grew up, so I spent most of my time alone and that suited me just fine. Trust didn’t come easy to me and taking care of myself just seemed like the logical thing to do.

I had moved to my current location just a few months back as my father had accepted a job as an aerospace engineer on the flight platforms that were being built for the new wave of inter-planetary mining and exploration flights. There was no room for arriving families in New Denver where my father now worked, so he left me with my uncle in New Carolina. That was a thirty-minute shuttle flight away from the east coast where I had been born.

My uncle treated me well, but he didn’t dote on me. That was for sure. The School of Hard Knocks was his educational system of choice. Don’t get me wrong. He believed that formal education was critical to one succeeding in the world, but he also believed that one shouldn’t take any undue shit.

My current troubles with the locals pretty much started because I didn’t look like the other kids who were native to the area, so it was easy to pick me out in a crowd. I had light-blond hair and somewhat fair skin. The locals here were all dark-haired and olive-skinned, descendants from the old Choctaw/Cherokee Reservation that had contained them in this area decades ago.

I skipped a lot of school. It was mostly because I felt that the classes were boring, but it was also to avoid getting jumped or chased through the hallways between classes, or in the back alleys that led from the school grounds to my block.

But I learned early on, on my own, to not be scared of my attackers. I didn’t avoid the bullies because I was scared. I simply avoided them until I had a chance to come out even in the fight that was sure to follow if I was chased down. I never gave up my food ration cards as so many other kids did when they were cornered.

Not long after I had moved on with my uncle, he caught me crying in my room after being caught after school and receiving a beating by some of my classmates. His reaction was stern but not unsympathetic. He taught me that fear was a choice, and that choice was mine alone to make. I could either fall to fear and retreat, to be eventually caught and beaten anyways, or I could learn to stand on the ground of my choice and how to defeat my attackers.

My uncle was a warrior but not in a soldier type of way. He was soft spoken and a hard worker. He worked himself up from a ground laborers position at the local wind farm construction project and eventually became the local operations security manager. And he had the scars to prove it. He had been one of the first hired ground laborers from out-of-boundary to work here, erecting wind machine foundations, soon after all the Native American Indian reservation lands were sold to the highest corporate bidders as a result of the Land Relocation Act of 2028.

My uncle didn’t look like a local either. But he and a few of the locally hired laborers wanted to make a difference, if not for the local populace as a whole, at least for their immediate families whose corporate sponsored credit vouchers paid their bills. My uncle and some of the local laborers that he could trust would voluntarily stay behind and guard the construction sites at night, protecting the grounds against the locals who would raid the sites after sundown, sometimes dressed out in old Indian face-paint color or clothes.

When the raids became focused on the incoming transports that contained the huge polycarbonate blades and metal turbines of the wind machines that were erected to provide provincial power to the old Tennessee Valley Authority Region, he was soon given the head position of transport security. His new responsibilities would take him all the way to where he would first assume responsibility for all security actions concerning the incoming transports, located almost 400 miles away. During the summer and winter breaks at school my uncle would take me on his travels. And that’s where I first learned how to defend myself.

I learned to love the travel. I would pass the time by looking thru the different railcar portholes at the passing landscape or while walking on top of the long scaffolding that secured the various wind machine parts on the mag-rail car platforms beneath my feet. And it was exciting. I remember on my third or forth trip out when we made an unscheduled stop, the tunnel entrance ahead being blocked by a landslide, of how exciting it could get.

When the train slowed to a stop I jumped down into the soft and tall grass just off to the side of the rail line. It was quiet except for the security officers tromping out and away into the nearby bush, looking for possible ambushers. I eventually walked down the steep side of the railway berm. At the bottom I stopped and looked back. We were parked on a high ridgeline. I heard a deep thump as the rail cars de-magged and settled onto the hard rails in order to conserve power until the landslide ahead was cleared.

I walked into the wood line, entranced by the solitude and smell of the forest. We were near Mt. Mitchell, maybe two miles away in the distance. On the summit, the old and now derelict oil recovery platform arms stuck out against the sky like giant stick figures. Farther and farther behind me I could hear our rail crews removing rock from the tunnel entrance. There was a small grass clearing below me, the grass turning brown from the late fall air.

I spotted sudden movement in the bush beyond as a small deer approached. It was a rare sight. Population growth had almost made deer extinct as the population invaded ever deeper into their natural territory. The deer stopped in the clearing, breathing heavily. I could see its nostrils flaring as it looked around in fear. The bushes around the clearing moved again as a group of wild dogs appeared, soon encircling the panicked deer.

I watched as the dogs formed a circle around the deer. One eventually jumped forward and nipped at the deer’s heel. The dog was kicked in the snout by the now panicking deer and the offender rolled away yelping. But by this time another dog jumped up and grabbed the deer by the throat. As the deer angled downwards the others jumped in. The deer emitted a high and eerie cry as it was taken down and drug away into the deep grass.

I had just turned around to head back to the rail line when I was jumped from behind. Rough hands wrapped around my neck as I was taken down to the ground. I screamed for help as a high-pitched and yipping yell came from the man behind me. We rolled in the grass as we fought for who would be on top. This was my first real fight. Before now I had never fought with another human with a real fear for my own life. I was now just reacting, trying to break my attackers grip so that I could run away. My attacker had much more purpose. He wanted to take my life.

I looked into my attackers face when we rolled to stop. He had on painted face with feathers in his hair. His face was full of hatred as he held my neck pinned down on the ground with one hand, while reaching for the knife strapped at his waist with the other. I was scared and panicked. I was about to give up when a shot rang out. The man fell against me. I heard boots run up to my side and then the man’s body was drug off of me. Two rail security guards helped me up.

The guards took me back to the rail line. I was escorted inside one of the cars and told to wait there. As I did I went into the lavatory to wash my face. There was blood on my face and it didn’t appear to be mine. As I cleaned myself off I heard more shots outside, some close, some farther away in the distance. Eventually it became quiet. I was still scared as I lay down on a nearby cot. My uncle came by later that afternoon. His face was one of concern as he asked if I was all right.

My uncle then told me of the circumstances of the day, of how the tunnel had been blocked as part of an ambush, and how the raiders had planned to overcome the rail crew and kill everyone on board. But this time we had been ready to counter-attack. My yells had alerted the rail security guards before the raiders could fully execute their ambush. So we had a chance to turn the tables. We killed three raiders and had captured two. My attacker was not among the prisoners taken alive that day.

My uncle asked me for details of my attack. When finished he asked me how I felt during the fight. I was honest. I told him that I was scared and about to give up the fight and surrender right before the security guards got to me. He smiled and said it was good that I didn’t because raiders never took prisoners. His only other comment was that if ever in a fight, to never, ever give up. I replied that I didn’t know how to fight, how to react. He said that he would help me but until then, did I understand that I would never give up in a fight. I nodded.

The rest of the nights, or whenever we came to security or refit stops, I spent time with the rail security guards learning first how to fight with my bare hands, and then with a knife. When I first started sparring, if I got hit, I would get mad and frustrated. But eventually I turned that anger into productive aggression. My peers eventually said that I was fast and that it seemed that I could almost predict their movements while grappling.

One night during a knife fighting practice session, my sparring partner accidentally slashed me. The scenario was that I was unarmed and attacked by a knife wielder. When my partner paused at the sight of my wound and thinking that I would do the same, I instead stepped quick and hard inside him and leveraged him down to the ground in an arm-bar lock until he dropped the knife.

The blood from my minor wound pattered down onto to both of us as he eventually tapped the ground, signaling his surrender.

The other men that had been watching our sparring match immediately broke out into applause and gathered around us. The loser, a big and tall man, stood up and patted me on the back while handing me his bandana to staunch my wounds blood flow.

As I wrapped up the wound my uncle walked toward me. The crowd parted as I saw him reach down and stick a finger into the small pool of my blood that was congealing in the dirt. He stood back up and wiped the muddied blood into two long smears along my cheekbones. He was smiling. I didn’t understand as the crowd collapsed back in and everyone was congratulating and slapping me on the back.

Later that night after I had my wound washed and bandaged, the big man that had lost the fight came to my door. He was smiling as I asked him in, but he shook his head. He reached forward with a package in his hand. I took it and thanked him as he turned around and walked away. I was still