All Dogs Go To Heaven

**All Dogs Go To Heaven** is a story in the The Sanhok Saga from the 'The Sanhok 4' in the lore of BATTLEGROUNDS.

## Prologue

Featured characters:

Bogdan didn’t call it the XMC-4800.

That’s what the engineers called it; the gearheads who pulled six figure salaries down in Maryland. The men who only drove the vehicle on a test track and fired at stationary targets.

And he didn’t call it an APC either; even though yes, it was armored, and yes, it did in fact carry personnel. No, Bogdan "the boogeyman" Petrovic, lieutenant commander of the Pillar Securities forces stationed on Haven, had another name for it.

He called it the Kill Truck.

And it was a marvelous piece of machinery. The thing was an absolute bullet sponge. Not too fussy.  And fast too – that is, unless it was in predator mode like it was now, cruising through darkened streets in almost complete silence. But more than anything, it was the machine gun that got Bogdan’s blood pumping. The .50 cal could shatter body armor and turn a man into mist. Bogdan often joked to his subordinates that when the grim reaper came for him, he’d like to see what the .50 cal could do. There was a part of him that thought – genuinely – that maybe this gun could destroy Death himself.

He scanned the darkened streets for movement. His AR optics were running thermal scans and the city was a calm deep blue. It felt like he was at the bottom of the ocean, all quiet save for the whispered chut-chut of their scout helicopter.

They were out here. Somewhere. Maybe hiding in a dumpster or in a stairwell. Maybe holding their breath under broken crates in one of the island’s many abandoned warehouses.

Bogdan’s targets were the remnants of a street gang. They called themselves ‘The Bridge Street Cannibals’. They’d been running meth here on Haven before Bogdan’s employers had privatized the island. Pillar Securities had been hired to do what the local police couldn’t: remove the criminal element. Most of the gangs had gotten the message quickly – they’d taken one look at the Kill Truck and packed up their spray paint and their AK47s and their amphetamines.

Not the Cannibals.

These tweakers wanted a fight. Earlier this month they’d hijacked two *Tythonic Industries* trucks and ran off with half a million in computer equipment. Shot a driver too. Then they started setting fires. More theft. These speedfreak arsonists – they couldn’t have been older than twenty – had sat there and lobbed molotovs from a rooftop.

Until Bogdan dealt with them.

Movement ahead grabbed his attention. Bogdan swiveled the heavy machine gun to track two figures sprinting out from an abandoned grocery store. The first was tall and lanky, wearing a leather jacket and track pants. He had an Uzi in his hand. The second was a woman, hair cropped short. Both of them appeared as red-hot silhouettes in his optics. Like they had been bathed in oil and set alight.

The man in leather took aim at the truck. Maybe he thought he could be a hero. Maybe he was just drawing attention from his girlfriend. It didn’t matter. Bogdan hit the trigger and the gun did its work; turned him into a splatter of gore that faded from his vision as it cooled.

The woman didn’t slow. She sprinted across the street, calling out for help. Her allies, two more tweakers with assault rifles, emerged from the abandoned Fluff-n-Fold laundromat. They fired bursts from behind the cover of washer-dryers.

The bullets hammered the kill truck but did no damage. And when the guns clicked empty and the smoke cleared, Bogdan took aim with his machine gun and opened fire…

When it was finished, they dragged the bodies out into the street. Bogdan had been specifically told by Tythonic not to string up corpses from lamp-posts – that was problematic for several reasons. But they could leave the bodies out for a few hours. The cold wind blowing in off Lake Michigan would slow decay enough. Better to let the other Cannibals know what they were up against. Maybe they could finally take the hint and pack up and leave.

These poor fools.

They thought they were the heroes of this story. They saw themselves as Robin Hoods. Stealing from the faceless conglomerate. Sticking it to the man, no doubt.

They had no idea.

No idea of the power that Bogdan’s employer wielded.

And more so, they had no idea of how important their work was. That it all was being done here. These labs. These server farms. This was the reason for the Battlegrounds. This was the reason for everything.

And of course… they had no idea just how much *pride* Bogdan took in his work.  No mistakes, no loose ends, no-

One of the bodies coughed. It was a woman. Her  Barely breathing, her eyes were closed but she was breathing now. fluttering eyes pleaded for mercy. Bogdan placed his boot on her throat and cut off her air supply.

No survivors.

Somewhere East of Colorado, while taking a piss in a Shell gas station bathroom, the man known to his friends as Lunchmeat, decided that he loved the United States.

It was big. And he liked big things. Big meals. Big women. Big guns. And the US had it all.

Sure, it had its problems. What country didn’t? But when it came down to what mattered, this massive stretch of roads and little cheeseburger-townships felt alright to him.

When it was all finished – after they tracked down the mystery men who’d marked them all for death and revealed the vast alien conspiracy to the world – he imagined he could settle down on a ranch somewhere in the middle of the great empty.

Duncan and Julie weren’t as smitten. Duncan had been in a bad mood since leaving Eddie Denim’s ranch. And Julie, she mostly slept in the backseat. When she wasn’t sleeping, he’d spy her scribbling lewd drawings across their maps. A big breasted two-headed showgirl across a map of Nevada. A fat man vomiting all across Colorado. Something that might have been a rat tying up another rat across Kansas.

“I didn’t know you were an artist,” he said. She rolled her eyes and went back to sleep. Lunchmeat shrugged. He was being genuine.

Lunchmeat didn’t let it get him down. He scanned the radio until it found something twangy and country (another discovery – he loved Country music!) and dug through a paper bag to try and find some leftover French fries. No luck – maybe Julie had eaten them all.

No matter, there’d be another restaurant in an hour or so selling hot cheeseburgers and lemonade and French fries. And there’d be little containers of barbeque sauce and bags of beef jerky at the counter.

Yeah. He could be happy here.

They just needed to drive another eight hundred and forty two miles, get to Haven, and kill some people first.

## Other Parts

* **Prologue**
* Part 1
* Part 2
* Part 3
* Part 4
* Epilogue