Red Rover (continued)





9

 

 

Weariness wrapped itself around the cat and dog like wet, disintegrating newspaper.  The road home stretched itself out before them paved in cockleburs, mud pits and bear traps, bonded together by the thick, stifling tar of darkness.  Lightning danced an epileptic tango across the sky, followed by distant thunder.  It would be some time before the storm broke, but when it did, it would be one to remember, a levy-breaker against which to measure future storms.

Seek the owl.

Those had been the Oracle’s words, affected before the rabbits’ vanishing act.  Goldie went over it again as he tromped through prickly shadows with his nose to the ground, ever in search of traps and pitfalls, clearing his sinuses of grit and dirt-caked pollen at increasingly frequent intervals.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

They’d been walking for thirty minutes.  If not for the varying signatures of decay in the surrounding flora and fauna, the Lab would have sworn they were walking in circles.

Medusa kept pace beside him.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re not complaining.  Something on your mind?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“Get fixed.”

“Seriously.  I can smell lies.”

“You’re pulling my tail.”

Goldie held up a forepaw.  “Anubis take my scent.”

“Fine.  What do lies smell like?”

“Like sugar mixed into sour milk.”

The cat’s whiskers twitched, a scale weighing the veracity of the statement.

“And the truth?”

“Oranges.”

“And fear?  Can you smell fear like snakes can?  Like Lady Churchyard?”

Goldie did his best to hide the involuntary shiver that ran up his haunches at the mention of the python’s name.  “Snakes can’t actually smell fear.  They pick up vibrations in the air caused by an accelerated pulse.  Like putting your ear to a railroad track.”

“Doesn’t answer my question.  Can you smell fear or can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

The Black Lab’s response was to stop dead in his tracks.  Lightning scolded him for it, like it had been painting his portrait and he’d broken pose.  Thunder seemed hesitant to follow.  All was silent here.  No restless bird.  No horny toads.

They had reached the edge of a clearing.  It was broad and round, covered with broken, leafless branches.

“This place smells,” Goldie said.

“So what?”

“It smells like white roses.”

“And what do white roses smell like?”  Before she’d finished asking the question, Medusa was given her answer when the mute lightning flashed again.

The clearing was littered with bones, covered from end to end.  A porcelain-white stone monolith jutted from its center, twice as tall as Goldie.  An acre of bleached remains spread out before the lone boulder like an offering to an idol.

“Death,” Goldie said.  He addressed the clearing, the quietude suddenly explained.  No choir of nocturnal prowlers made song here because none had been left alive in this sylvan Golgotha.  This was Bottlerocket’s domain.

“Tits of Isis.”  Medusa shuddered behind the nasal rumble of her nervous purring.  “This is not possible, dog.”

“Explain.”

“I mean we shouldn’t be here.  Bottlerocket’s roost is at the very edge of the Sanctuary, which means we’re less than a mile from home.”

As if to confirm their proximity to Hope Falls, a car alarm’s high, infantile wail echoed back to them through the trees.

“Goldie, we should still be stuck in the middle of Cat’s Ass Nowhere.”

“It’s the Oracle.  They did this.  We were probably minutes from town the whole time, but they played with us.  Made us walk in circles for hours.”

Medusa took a tentative step into the clearing.  “You smell the brat anywhere?”

“No.  Baby Adam was never here.”  The Oracle had sent them to their deaths.

“But I thought you said— eeewwwww!”  The Himalayan recoiled, struggling for purchase on the carpet of bones.  “Are you pissing yourself?!”

An acrid, steaming stream of fluid ran down the canine’s legs.

“Look, dog.”  Medusa scaled the stone monolith, ears pointed at the clouds like antennae.  “I know the situation is dire, but have some decorum.”

“When one of our kind dies,” Goldie said, “if he doesn’t smell like himself, if he smells like the animal that killed him, he cannot join his ancestors in the Sky Pack.  He cannot participate in the Great Hunt.”

“You mean to tell me that everyone in Dog Heaven smells like piss?”

“I mean to tell you that I am preparing for death.  And that a smart cat would do the same.”

Moonlight glittered off the dog’s impassive eyes.  Though his face was a rictus of almost rabid aggression, the Labrador’s pupils were calm, emotionless voids.  He lowered his head and arched his back.  A cold, unseen hand stroked the fur on his back against the grain.

Good boy. . .

The first cry came from the tree line directly ahead.  A high piercing shriek that more closely resembled the tearing metal of a car crash.

Every muscle quivered along the dog’s frame, not with fright, but with a terrible, anticipatory joy.

The second cry came from the opposite end of the clearing.

“She’s circling us,” Goldie said.  “Get down from there.”

“I can’t see her.  Where is she?”

“Get down, cat!”

What happened next had the muffled, weightless nature of a dream.  Silent as poison, Bottlerocket dropped out of the clouds, wings spread, talons splayed.

Medusa did not see the bird.

“Goldie?” she said.  “Where—”

With a slight shift of her wings, the owl dropped straight down.

“Get down!” Goldie barked, loud and coarse, a verbal slap that made the cat cringe.

The owl’s talons clacked against themselves as it reared up, passing an inch over the cat’s shrunken, bristled body.  A shriek of starved ire carried the bird back into the air.  Medusa clung to the rock, nailed to it by terror.

The owl hadn’t risen twenty feet before she turned abruptly, and fell once more.  She came in low for her second pass, level with the petrified cat.  As she sailed over him, one of Bottlerocket’s vacant, cobalt eyes met Goldie’s.

I will enjoy killing your friend, the eye said.  I will enjoy killing you s—

He caught her by the neck.

Sprang up and plucked the winged demon from the air.  Brought it down like a possessed Frisbee.

Claws stabbed deep into Goldie’s side as they crashed to the ground, a frenzied mass of fur and feathers, claws and talons, beak and fangs.  The smell of the Labrador’s own blood flooded his nostrils.  Black canine lips curled into a grin.  If he died now, he would do it covered in his own blood, in his own scent.  He would meet his fathers in the Sky Pack to join in the Great Hunt.  With this knowledge, Goldie shook the beast with grim joy, sensed its anger melt to hapless terror, until at last the bell clap of the owl’s snapping neck tolled in his ears.

It was only to catch his breath that the killer released his prize.  Welcoming the frosty bite of the night chill in his burning lungs, Goldie tasted the dead bird’s bittersweet fluids as they coated his throat. 

Good boy. . .

The limp heap of blood and feathers lay sprawled at his feet.  She was smaller than he’d expected.  Less than two tails in length.

He vomited on it.  As quickly as the killing joy had swept over him, it fled, turning the blood on Goldie’s tongue to a drizzle of scat.  Goldie’s heart clenched itself into a fist.  His stomach wretched again, and emptied what little remained inside it.

He did not hear the second owl.

He sensed it though— felt a faint stirring of air as the creature fell on him.  There was enough time to turn and see it, to pick out each individual talon as they reached out to him.  But there was no time to act.

What came out of the cat couldn’t rightly be called a roar.  Her breed could not muster such a sound; it was impossible for them to achieve.

Still. . .

Medusa leapt from the monolith, teeth bared, claws splayed, a low vibrato yowl scraped from her gullet as a warning to Horus himself to yield or die.  The Himalayan did not weigh enough to pull the bird of prey from the sky, could barely manage to hit it with enough force to alter its path.  Locked together, they veered past Goldie like a drunken comet and plowed into the earth, a screeching mass of flashing claws.

By the time Goldie reached the fight, it was over.  Medusa stood atop her prize, licking blood from her paw.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“Fix me!  Are you okay?  Is any of that your blood?”

“Don’t insult me,” said the cat.  Medusa stepped down into the bone yard as though from a gilded carriage, head held high.  She fought a limp which Goldie pretended not to notice.

“I thought for sure my bone was buried.”  Goldie’s muscles shook with adrenaline.  He scratched furiously at his collar just to give the live wires under his skin something to plug into, to burn off some of the energy that coursed through them.

Medusa sniffed.  “Guess that means you pissed yourself for nothing.  Good one, dog.  Does your kind actively go looking for new ways to stink?”

“No, it’s just a talent.  I mean it, though.  Thank you, cat.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want any homeless fleas thinking they could shack up with me if you died.”

Goldie smiled.  It didn’t last.  Something was still wrong.  The smell of white roses was stronger than ever.

“We should go,” he said.

“Ease up, Krypto.  Some of us had to forego an eighteen hour nap to come on this wild goose chase.  Bottlerocket’s dead.  So’s her husband, or whatever that thing was.”

“That’s just it, cat.  I don’t think either of those things were Bottlerocket.”

“If that’s a joke, you should know that cats can’t laugh.”

“I think those were her kids.”

“Like I was saying, the faster we run, the quicker we’ll get home.  How many kids did you say she had?”

“Oh, I’d say at least five.”

“Really?  That’s pretty specific.”  Medusa turned toward town.  Three more owls stood at attention atop the monolith.  “Well.  We’re fixed.”

Goldie sniffed at the cat.  “You pissing yourself on purpose?”

“I wish.”

10

 

 

“That’s Bottlerocket?!”

Careening through the woods with lightning as their guide.  Napalm burned Goldie’s lungs.  The cat was a white streak beside him.  Bottlerocket crashed through the trees at their heels, beating at the air with her mastodon’s wings, unable to maintain flight in such cramped quarters.

“It’s bigger than you!” Medusa yowled.

Goldie stumbled over the desiccated remains of a human corpse.  Not much left, save a few picked over bones and a shattered motorcycle helmet.

“AAAAAWWWWWK!”

Goldie cringed at the bird’s furious cry.  Slaughterhouse breath washed over him as he hurdled a felled tree.

Ironically, it was Bottlerocket who’d been responsible for their escape.  The cat and dog would never have made it to the tree line if Bottlerocket hadn’t dropped down out of the storm to snatch up one of her own kin.  Logic would indicate that the owl must have to be starving, else it would never have gone after its own young.  But Goldie had a feeling.  Something told the Lab that Bottlerocket had recognized the dog and cat from the incident in the road, and would let nothing, not even its own hatchlings, get in the way of its vengeance.

SNAP!

Bottlerocket’s beak clacked shut behind him.  Goldie howled, a thin trail of blood spattering in his wake where the tip of his tail had been bitten off.  Medusa bolted into the glare of the street lamps a hundred paws ahead.

SNAP!

Cold wind bit Goldie’s haunch as a mouthful of fur was ripped away.  The next bite would take his leg off.  He knew it like he knew the taste of his own crotch.

Please.  Not this way.  Don’t let me meet my fathers reeking of this monster’s intestinal track.

“AAAAAWWWWWK!”

The owl reached out for him.

He never stopped running.

SNAP!

The cry of an angry god rose up behind the dog.  Goldie opened his eyes to find he was still running.  Still alive.  All five limbs still attached, save that hunk of his tail.  Bottlerocket’s cries shrank into the distance, the last snap! of jaws being of an inorganic but no less hungry variety.  The owl had been snared by one of Edgar Fergut’s bear traps.

The lights of Leafstorm Lane appeared beyond the next stand of trees.  Goldie huffed a prayer of thanks to the Sky Pack.

Could have sworn he heard a reply.  A canine voice calling out to him.  Not one, but a dozen, howling the same thing over and over— a single word rendered unintelligible by Goldie’s own panted breath until he was clear of the woods.

He slid to a stop at the Hope Falls town line.  Tried to turn tail and run back.  Back to Bottlerocket.

The choke leader slipped itself over Goldie’s neck before he had time to avoid it.  The phantom dogs’ bark still rang in the Lab’s ears as he was hoisted into the air, then shoved into the cage with the rest of them, those unlucky souls who had heard him coming and tried to warn him, shouting that one word, over and over:

Fergut.

11

 

 

The Beagle couldn’t stop scratching behind his ear.

“It’s driving me crazy,” he said.  “I’ve got this tick, but I can’t reach it.  I know it’s there.  I can feel it digging deeper.  I can feel it right here.”

The Beagle’s cage shared a common wall with Goldie’s.  He turned to show the Labrador the pink nub of bloodied flesh where his ear had been flayed away a piece at a time.  A few ragged strips of skin hung limp from a raw coil of muscle.

“It’s like, I can feel it in my brain, you know?”  The Beagle scratched vigorously at the nugget of skin.  A tear of puss formed on the surface.  A glimpse of bone.  “It wants to get in my eyes.  It wants to see what I see!”

The dirt floor of the chain link enclosure was cold under the Lab’s belly.

“I’m gonna mount you, boy.”

Angling his head to the right, Goldie turned to face his other neighbor, its muzzle pressed flat against the aluminum divider.

“I’m gonna mount you so good!  You’re my bitch now.  You belong to me.  You’re mine, got it?”

“Yeah.  I got it,” Goldie assured the Toy Poodle.  “You planning on tunneling under the fence to get me, or are you just gonna bite right through it?”

“Bitch, I can bust outta this place any time I want!  Only reason I’m here is to eat up little chew toys like you.  You ain’t got a prayer.  No one’s coming to get you.  No one knows you’re here ‘cept me and Cerberus, and he’s down in Hell sharpening his teeth for you.  Can you hear him?  Can you, bitch?”

Goldie nodded, and lowered his head to the bald earth between his forepaws.  More threats and prayers echoed down to him from the other dogs along the row.  Wished that was all he could hear.  Every few minutes, a shrill yowl would rise above the hoarse, snaggle-toothed din from the end of the corridor.  It was the sound of Fergut and Grimes tossing stray cats into a pen for Torque and Ratchet to tear apart.

Chain link cages lined both sides of the long room.  One dog per cage.  Fergut didn’t bother to separate the cats.  Three dozen huddled in a cramped mass in the large enclosure opposite Goldie’s.  They only bothered to hiss or claw at each other when Fergut remembered to drop a handful of food into their cage.  A bucket stood in the corner to catch rain water through a hole in the roof.  There was no place for them to go to the bathroom.

The poodle had gotten one thing right: there was no one coming for Goldie.  Fergut had been wanting to get his hands on him for years, decrying to the mayor, the city councilmen, and anyone who would listen that Goldie was a threat to the local human and animal population, that he had to be put down for the safety of the community.  If not for Officer Dan’s insistence that Goldie stay with him and Badge while he underwent testing for Helper Dogs, Goldie would have been put down long ago.

As if to confirm this thought, as though the dog catcher had tuned his mind to the canine frequency when it became obvious that he had more in common with wild dogs than his human counterparts, Edgar Fergut appeared in the doorway at the end of the corridor.  Even in the twilight of his years, the dog catcher cut an imposing figure.  Immensely tall, Fergut had to stoop to pass under the support beams that lined the low ceiling.  What’s more, his monstrous proportions were by no means exclusive to his height.  Edgar was massively obese.  Sausage fingers raked the chain link cages as he passed them.  Amorphous, mud-caked boots sent vibrations through the ground with each ponderous step.  A chain-smoker since the age of twelve, the human wheezed like a slowly deflating tire.  Goldie imagined a dead, leafless tree hanging suspended in Fergut’s chest where his lungs should have been.

He stopped in front of Goldie’s cage.

“What’re you lookin’ at?”  In stark contrast to his size, the dog catcher’s voice was high, almost dainty.

Fergut spat at the dog, then turned his attention to the feline enclosure.  He reached in and withdrew a grey half-molted bag of bones that could barely extend a claw in protest as it was hoisted into the air.

“Hell, Fergut, what’d you do, kill that one before you threw it in?”  Gill Grimes stood at the far end of the corridor.  Dwarfed by his own shadow, the superintendent of the Hope Falls dump stood five feet tall in the spotless army boots he wore at all times.  Misshapen lumps rose from Grimes’s shoulders where he’d stuffed them with socks to broaden their stature.  “What’s that one’s name, Appetizer?”

“Shut yer hole, Grimes.”  Fergut reared back to face Goldie’s cage.  “Oh hey, Goldie, I forgot to tell you, you’re owner called.  Caraway, right?  That blind queer?”

Goldie couldn’t help his tail from wagging at the sound of his master’s name.  Fergut took note of it, and grinned with a mouthful of thin, false teeth.

“Called up a little while ago askin’ if I’d seen you.  Said you ran away this mornin’.  I said I was sorry but I couldn’t help him.  Prolly ran off after some bitch in heat wagged her tail at you is what I told him.  And you know what?”  The dog catcher leaned close.  A green effluvium of sardines and beer flooded Goldie’s cage.  “He agreed with me.  Said I was probably, right.  Once a stray, always a stray— that’s what I always say, and that’s what I told him.  And he agreed with me.”

Grimes chuckled at the end of the row.  “Thought what you always said was ‘Hold still Lassie, my zipper’s caught.”

Fergut shot Grimes a withering glance.  White-whiskered pelican jowls shook like a gelatin mold.  He grunted his way to a standing position and lumbered back down the corridor before disappearing with the dump master behind the far door.

“You know I never really bought into religion.  All that nonsense about nine lives.”  Across the aisle, Medusa appeared at the chain link door of her enclosure.  A fat tabby murmured its argument as the Himalayan shouldered her way to the front of the pack.  “Kinda wish I had, now.”

“Be grateful,” Goldie said.  “At least someone’s coming for you.”

The cat’s reply was a half-hearted shrug, a gesture Goldie interpreted as demure agreement.  It was just a matter of course that the princess would be rescued from this squalor which she’d been born so high above.

“This place stinks,” she said.

A hot leash of jealousy tugged at Goldie’s heart.

“You really have no idea how lucky you are, do you?” he growled.  “That cat right there won’t live through the night and your only concern is that the fleet of solid gold cat carriers that are even now being whisked to your rescue might not make it before your caviar reaches room temp.”

Medusa looked on the dog as though her gaze was a scalding thing, the red-hot base of a boiling kettle.  Goldie swallowed her loathing and felt it sustain him.

“You think this is easy for me, dog?  Get fixed.  You know nothing of my suffering.”

“Oh spare me, Your Majesty!” Goldie barked.  “Don’t pretend you’re in this for any reason beyond your own entertainment.  I’ve seen the way your kind looks at me.  The Purity Association sees strays like humans watch TV.  Doesn’t matter if someone dies, it’s all just entertainment.  Every day dogs are beaten by their owners just so you’ll have something to discuss over milk and catnip.  Alley cats are thrown off bridges or set on fire by street punks so you won’t risk a yawn.  Go home, Your Highness.  Go back where you belong— where nothing will ever make a difference to you, and you’ll never make a difference to anyone.”

Out of patience and out of breath, exhaustion swept the dog like a hot wind.  Beyond the door at the end of the corridor, human cries joined animal howls as another fight began, and the world continued its relentless turning.

“No one’s coming to get me.”  Medusa’s voice was small.  Barely audible.  Like someone praying, but unaware that they are doing so aloud.

Goldie’s first impulse was to leap to his feet and shout her down, or perhaps to simply break wind in her direction without deigning to raise his head.  Only thing that kept him from doing so was the effort it would take.

“What?” was all he could manage, spoken without looking up, in the half-caring tone of one who isn’t sure the voice they’d heard call their name was real or imagined.

“No one knows I’m here,” the cat said.  “My home is barren.”

Goldie smirked.  He shifted his head to an angle that said he knew the magician was using wires to levitate his assistant, but that he couldn’t quite see them.  “The hell are you talking about?”

“The Countess’s heirs stripped the house.  The furniture, the servants, everything.  Then they abandoned it.  Left the place to rot with me inside it.  Didn’t even bother to sell the land.  It wasn’t worth their time.”

“Wait.  So you’ve been lying?  This whole time?”

“Of course I lied, dog.  My name was all I had left.  I couldn’t lose that, too.  So I lied about my inheritance, and about everything else.”

Goldie recognized the strange glint in Medusa’s eyes.  He’d seen it once before, while visiting the police station with Badge and Officer Dan.  They’d gone to meet Mr. Caraway for the first time.  A man, drunk behind the wheel, had killed a little girl on her bicycle earlier that morning.  Before he could be prosecuted, he’d hung himself in his holding cell minutes prior to Officer Dan and the dogs' arrival at the station.  Goldie had seen him.  The man’s eyes had been open.  Medusa owned them now.

“It took two weeks for anyone to notice the Countess was dead,” she said.  “The mailman found her.  He noticed a bad smell when he lifted the mail slot, and called the police.”

“Two weeks?” Goldie balked.  “How did you survive?  Mansions don’t exactly come with doggy doors.”

“How do you think?”  Medusa’s face distorted with the memory, became the busted grill of a car crash.  Tears ran down her whiskers.  “I tried to save her face.  I didn’t want them to find her without a face.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The house is empty now,” the cat said.  “Just me and the mice.  I tried to keep them out at first, but there were too many.  At least I never went hungry.”

Goldie bowed his head.  He wanted to offer something.  Some magic word that would give the cat hope that they would survive this place.  But there was nothing, and they both knew it.

And then, sure enough, once more sensing that the most opportune moment for his entrance had come, when all hope had drained from the room like rain water into the cracks of desert hardpan, Edgar Fergut appeared at the end of the corridor.

“Hey, here comes Fergut.”

The cat made no indication that she’d heard the dog.

“Medusa. . .”

Lumbering footfalls worked their way toward them, echoing the thunder which continued to build outside.  Murmured curses of another lost wager.

“Hey!”  Goldie pawed at the chain link, ears high, his tail a flurry of panicked motion.  “Get down, cat!”

Fergut slapped a palm against Goldie’s enclosure.  “Shut up!”

“MEDUSA!  GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR!”

About half of the cats bunched themselves against the rear wall of the cage when Fergut opened its rusted aperture.  The older cats, along with a smattering of young ones too sick or starved to move or care, huddled where they stood, either ignoring the dog catcher or too delirious to be aware of his presence.  An orange tabby kitten, curious and starving, tried to climb out.  The dog catcher caught it by the scruff and lobbed into a pile of scat built up against a far corner.  Crouched among the decrepit and dying, Medusa made no move to run or defend herself when Fergut reached in and drew her out by the scruff of her neck.

Goldie erupted in his cage.  Threats bellowed from his throat like rotten food his body was trying to purge.  Medusa stared down at him with her hanged man’s eyes.

“You were right about me, dog,” she said.  Fergut retreated with her down the corridor.  “You were right about everything.”

Goldie howled until there was nothing left.  Until his blood had no color.  Until his chest collapsed as though struck by a car and a final, half-hearted yip followed the dog catcher and his charge through the closing door.

12

 

 

The door remained shut for five minutes.  Barks, yowls, hoots and hollers boxed the air around Goldie’s head, joined by thunder from above.  Lightning seared the windows every few seconds, raising the hair on his back.  Wind whipped across the roof, dove down through the many holes it found there.

When the door finally did open, when Fergut at last tromped his way back down the corridor, cursing between his teeth, Goldie said a silent prayer to his fathers in the Sky Pack that this inhumane human would not fetch another cat, but rather, would take the Labrador instead, and put him out of his misery.

The dog catcher stopped in front of the Goldie’s enclosure.  With a long wheeze, he bent down and opened the gate.

“All right, Goldie.  I guess you’ve waited long enough.”  Fergut reached in and prodded the Lab with the choke leader he’d brought with him, assuming he’d have to drag the dog tooth and nail to his death.  He was half-right.  “Let’s get this over with.”

Goldie let himself be hauled to his feet, then pulled down the corridor.

It only made sense that Fergut would rid himself of the controversial canine as quickly as possible.  No sense in keeping such an incriminating piece of evidence around.  Gill Grimes appeared at the door, barely a head taller than Goldie could rise on his hind legs.  A skeptical eye ran over the Lab like a branding iron looking for a place to imprint its mark.

“You serious?”  Grimes licked his straight, bright white teeth in a contemplative fashion.  “Doesn’t look like there’s much fight left in him.”

“Don’t bet on him, then.”  Fergut squeezed past through the door.

“Prick,” Grimes muttered.  He took Goldie by the collar and escorted him into the next room.

A large, square chain link enclosure with walls six tails high took up most of the room.  There was just enough space for a human to walk a circuit around the massive structure.  Like the rest of the facility, the room made a floor of densely packed earth.  A broad terracotta shadow stained the ground in its center.  Bits of fur pocked the floor.

The biggest dog Goldie had ever seen stood at the far end of the enclosure.  The Bull Mastiff was decorated with scars.  Tooth and claw marks striped its body like a tiger’s birthright.  Blood stained its mouth and collar.  A Kevlar leash ran from its collar to a support beam outside the cage.  Eyes like dug graves followed Goldie’s progress around the room to the small door opposite itself.  Made Samson look like a half-grown pup.

Grimes opened the door and shoved Goldie inside, careful to maintain his grip on the dog’s lead through a gap in the chain link.

There was no sign of Medusa.

“This won’t be any kind of fight, Fergut.  It’s gonna be a massacre.”

“Then gimme long odds.”

“Ten-to-one against.”

“Stakes?”

“Hundred bucks.”

“Done.”  Fergut clapped his hands and stepped back into the corridor.

At least Goldie would have the pleasure of knowing he’d cost Fergut a wad of cash.  There was no way he could fight the Mastiff.  The Labrador consoled himself with the fact that he would join the Sky Pack knowing he’d left behind a handsome corpse, and a righteously pissed-off dog catcher.

Then he saw it.  A lone tuft of orange and white fur clung to the corner of the Mastiff’s mouth.

“Get up, Goldie.  Don’t go out on your belly.”

Goldie shot to his feet and spun an about face.  Badge stood on the opposite side of the fence, his scarred and deformed muzzle pressed close to the rusted metal.

“I taught you better than that.”

For perhaps half a second, Goldie’s heart leapt at the sight of his old friend and mentor.  But that was the extent of their joyous reunion.

“I’m sorry,” the Lab groaned.  “I messed up.  I didn’t find the baby.  I just—”

“Stop right there, son.”  Ordinarily kind, Badge’s remaining eye flashed with fire, became a fierce thing from which Goldie could not turn away.  “I know all about what happened.  And I know you did the best you could.”

“But I—”

“And I’m here to tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and keep your head together.  Edgar’ll be back in a second, and we don’t have much time.”

“Time for what?”

“For you to remember who you are, damn it!” Badge barked.  “You’re a good dog, Goldie.  You’re the smartest dog I ever trained and YOU WILL NOT ROLL OVER AND PLAY DEAD WHILE I AM STILL ALIVE!”

Goldie reared back and straightened his spine, shoulders squared, head and tail raised high.  A pilot light ignited itself in his gut, a quavering thing in danger of blowing out at any moment.  Across the bloodied earth, the Mastiff strained at the end of his tether, drooling into the dirt.

“His name’s Torque and he’s a monster.”  Badge’s voice was low and calm.  “Edgar’s been training him.  If not for that stun gun of his, Torque would have torn his master’s throat out long ago.”

“Why do I get the feeling he’s not interested in eating another cat?”

“Because the last cat that the came through here tore the hell out of his brother’s face.”

“Medusa?”

Badge nodded at the wooden crossbeams that lined the ceiling.  “Your friend took to the air.  She’s hiding up there somewhere.”

Relief crashed over Goldie in a freshwater wave.

“Medusa!” he called.  “Hey!  You up there?!  Where are you?”

A scraggly voice called down from above:  “I’m in Pissed-Off City, that’s where I am!”

The Labrador smiled.  Torque was smiling, too.

“I’m gonna bite high,” the Bull Mastiff said.  His voice was jagged, mangled and slurred, the result of a throat bitten by dozens of opponents, all of whom he’d put to death.  “But that’s only gonna cripple you.  You won’t feel nothing, but you’ll still be alive when I mount you.  And when I’m done, after I’ve put my scent on you and in you, that’s when I’m gonna eat you.  You won’t die till I’ve bit your balls off and licked your face with their taste on my tongue.”

Goldie did not hear the finished speech.  A low rumble filled his throat, his ears, as the fire in his belly grew to a sharp blue flame.  The cold, unseen hand stroked the fur on his back against the grain.  Goldie welcomed it invited it to touch his heart and fill it with the killing joy he’d felt when he took down Bottlerocket’s kin.

Good boy. . .

“Uh, listen Fergut, I think I may have changed my mind on those odds,” Grimes said.  The dog catcher had returned, dragging an animal that smelled as if it had already begun to rot in anticipation of its own death.

“Too bad, Grimes.  Bet’s placed.”  Fergut heaved the lump of mangy fur over the fence, not bothering to open the enclosure’s door.  Scurvy Scounger landed with a sharp yip in the center of the chain link arena.

“Scounger!” Goldie called.

Still on his side, the old stray lifted his head in the direction of Goldie’s voice.

“Goldie?”  Swollen, battered eyes tried to pry themselves open.  “That you?”

“Yeah, Scrounger, it’s me.”

“What’s happening, Goldie?  Am I dead?”

“No.”  The Labrador tried to say more, tried to explain what was happening, that Scrounger had to get as far away as he could from the slathering Mastiff.  But he was cut off, strangled back against the fence by Grimes as Fergut stalked around the enclosure and took hold of Torque’s choke leader.  Torque struggled against his leash, eyes bloodshot.

Scrounger was instantly forgotten.

Medusa was back in her sequestered Victorian.

Badge no longer stood behind him, snarling a slow and steady encouragement.

There was only Goldie, and the Mastiff three times his size.

At Fergut’s signal, they released the hounds.

For exactly one second –the same amount of time it takes a dog to catch a Frisbee in its mouth— Torque tore from his corner, lunging forward, jaws wide, long pink teeth aimed squarely at the Lab’s neck.

By the time that second was over, Goldie had closed the distance between himself and the Mastiff, ducked his own muzzle under the attack dog’s gaping maw, and torn out his throat.

Good boy. . .

The Mastiff froze.  It looked confused.  Like it had been about to say something important, but had lost its train of thought.

“OH MY GOD!” Grimes howled.  The dump master roared with laughter, clutching his sides, belly shaking.  Across the room, Edgar Fergut was a portrait of shock, eyes pinned open and unable to shut.  “That is. . .the greatest thing. . .I HAVE EVER SEEN!”

Goldie’s first instinct was to chew, to grind the pulpy mass of flesh and sinew and swallow it whole.  Saliva flowed over his tongue, mingled with blood that squelched from the shredded tissue.  Something twitched in his mouth.  He imagined Torque’s vocal chords squirming in a vain effort to affect a final, impotent threat.

He let the glob of gore fall to the dirt.  Blue veins sprouted from either end like an uprooted plant.

“Tear his heart out, boy!” Grimes hollered, fist pumping.  “I’m gonna buy you a solid gold chew toy!”

By now Fergut had shaken the surprise from his rotund figure and strode to a far corner of the room that was bathed in dust and shadows.  He returned with a double-barrel shotgun.  He spoke no words and made no threats.  His rebuttal to this nightmare would be made by the rifle’s report.

Torque remained on his feet near his end of the enclosure, legs locked and unbending while his heart dutifully continued to pump the rest of his blood from his throat.  The Labrador shot toward him, a dark blur of movement.

Three steps and he was in the air.  He barely touched the dying dog, appeared not to settle any weight on him at all as he sprang off his back and hurdled the chain link divider.

“Oh shit!” Grimes cried.  He clutched at the fence, doubled-over, strangled by comedy.

A choked gasp escaped Edgar Fergut.  Whatever curse he’d prepared for the Labrador’s execution retreated from the airborne nightmare.

Goldie fell on the dog catcher.  Together, they crashed to the floor.  The Lab rolled on impact, hit the ground roughly.  Air shot from his lungs in a great burst so that he floundered in the dirt, unable to rise.  Fergut never lost his grip on his gun.  Accustomed to dealing wild animals, the dog catcher had already recovered.  He rose to one knee and drew a bead on the fugitive Lab.

Badge attacked.  Rushing forward, the German Shepherd clamped down between his master’s legs like the steel jaws of one of Fergut’s own bear traps.  Even as he gasped for air, Goldie heard one of the human’s testicles explode.  Fergut dropped the gun, collapsed, and wailed like a child.  Grimes joined him on the ground, double-over with laughter, fists pounding the earth for mercy.

“Get up dog, time to go!”

Goldie righted himself with a hard-won lungful of air and found Medusa beside the now open gate.  Scurvy Scounger limped out.  Behind him, Torque lay on his side in a pool of blood.  A chandelier of veins and sinew hung loosely from his throat like an appliance torn from the wall.

Badge grunted beside them, a scrap of filthy denim clutched between his teeth.  He spat it out, disgusted and triumphant.  Edgar Fergut rocked back and forth behind them while Grimes got a hold of himself, tuned in now to his friend’s agony.  The garbage king’s reddened, tear-blurred eyes ticked to Fergut’s shotgun, then back to the animals.

Who were already out the door.  Into the breaking storm.

13

 

 

They were halfway around the compound, six o’clock to the front gate’s noon, passing an old two-horse stable Fergut used to store the tools of his dubious trade, when Goldie first smelled it.

A vague hint of something on the wind, the echo of a scent.  The Black Lab slowed to a trot in the driving rain as the others passed quickly out of sight.  The dog catcher’s shrill cries filled the night like steam from a human tea kettle.

“Hey,” Goldie said to the empty air.

The smell of old blood permeated the torrential gloom around the dilapidated structure.  Mixed into it were heady amounts of mold and rust, the excrement of age.

And something else, too.

“You smell that?”  Words spoken only for the storm’s ears to hear as Goldie made his way down the muddy slope in a walking slide toward the old stable.

Children had an unmistakable scent.  An amalgam of scents, really, a mélange of odors both fragrant and foul, temporal and ephemeral: milk and blankets, dollies and baby powder, soap bubbles and vomit and rubber duckies, mashed vegetables, piss and shit, laughter and love.

The smell of children surrounded the stable, pressed itself through the gaps between rotten boards.

Medusa had asked Goldie what fear smelled like.  Goldie had not replied, though not for lack of an answer.  Fear smelled different to each animal that had a nose for such things.  To hummingbirds, Goldie knew, fear smelled of bitter, unripe fruit.  To a grizzly bear, it reeked of brine.  A lion picked up the scent of scalded honey.  While a salamander detected peanuts and tar.

To Goldie, fear had always smelled of sweet, fresh-cut grass.  It made him want to play, activated a Pavlovian response to leap and make chase.  The smell of terror made him happy.  Like he’d been trained to like it.

The smell of fear filled the stable’s only room, mixed with the juvenile odor which had lead him there.  Rain hammered the roof, fell in streams through cracked slats.

He found them in the northeast corner, huddled at the far end of a large kennel covered in a green-black patina of mold.

“Justine?”

Samson’s mother lifted her head.  The Great Pyrenees was on her side.  Adam Kelly lay curled into her belly, nursing from the bitch’s swollen, unused teats.  A wool blanket served as bedding.

“Badge?”  Justine’s voice was rich, husky from sleep.  “You’re back early.  Everything okay?”

“No,” Goldie choked.  “It isn’t.”

The purebred’s crystal blue eyes snapped open to reflect a fuller sense of awareness.

“Goldie?”  Justine kicked at the air to right herself, scrambling to her feet.  Panic sharpened her voice to a fine edge.  “What are you doing here?  You have to go!”

Goldie offered no response.  The human child lay still at the bitch’s feet.  It had not stirred an inch since the Lab had come in.  Its hair smelled like strawberries.  A hint of lilac on its skin.  Buttermilk.  He wondered how long it had been dead.

“You can’t blame him, Goldie.”  Justine’s voice fell apart as she spoke, each word the tinkle of glass falling from the frame of a busted window.  “If you have to blame someone, let it be me.”

The child’s eyes were closed.  A pinhead of protein had built up at each tear duct.  Baby Adam had died in his sleep –no doubt from blood-loss or a complication from the puncture wound in his shoulder where his kidnapper had torn him from Nanny Monica.

The story unfolded in Goldie’s mind with the ease and well-cut dimensions of pictures rising from a pop-up storybook:

After so many years of tortured hardship from her breeders, Justine had finally lost her mind, just as her son had.  Only rather than adopt the sheltering, lunatic innocence of her son, Justine had taken the child-rearing imperative engrained in her by her owners to a homicidal extent.  She had taken the child, wounded it in the process –however unintentionally— then brought it here where it died.

“You can’t blame him, Goldie.  You can’t!”

The Lab returned from his reverie.  “What?”

“Goldie.”  A voice spoke over his shoulder.  Terribly familiar, just inside the stable door.  “Listen to me, son.  This isn’t what it looks like.”

Something kicked Goldie’s heart.  Hard.  He’d been as blind as Mr. Caraway.  It took more effort than he could have imagined to turn from the dead child and its deranged, canine nursemaid to meet Adam’s kidnapper.

“Stand down, Goldie,” Badge ordered.  “It was the best thing for everyone.  You have to believe me.”

Goldie had heard professional negotiators use this same tone to prevent terrorists from executing their hostages.

“It was only going to be for a little while, but things got out of hand.  I didn’t expect the nanny to be back so soon.  I never meant to hurt her, and I certainly didn’t mean to hurt the child.  You have to believe that.  Are you listening to me?  Stand down, Goldie.  It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The German Shepherd’s words warped, became distant and slurred as though a tick had settled itself onto Goldie’s eardrum and was sucking out every sound in the world save one: the high tenor voice of a man covered in blood, reaching out his cold, cold hand.

Good boy. . .

Badge might as well have been speaking a different language.

“You lied to me,” Goldie hissed.  Tears mixed with rainwater on his muzzle.  “You told me to be a good dog.  You taught me how.”

The Lab stepped away from the kennel door, toward the center of the room.  Badge sidestepped, head low to protect his throat.

“You gave me that when I had nothing, and now you’ve taken it away!”

Badge put his back to Justine’s kennel.  “No, Goldie.  You don’t understand.  It’s not how it looks.  Justine came to me.  She was upset.  She said—”

“SAID WHAT?!  That she didn’t have enough dead pups already?”

A high, agonized whine from inside the kennel.

“I CAN NEVER GO HOME, BADGE!  Don’t you understand?  I ran away from home to find this kid because I thought it’s what you would do!  Because I thought you were a good dog.”  Goldie looked away, shivering uncontrollably.  “But you’re not.  You’re bad.  You’re a bad dog.”

Badge cringed as though struck.  He held his stance.  Head low, tail out, legs coiled, ready to spring should it come to that.

“Stand down, Goldie,” the German Shepherd snarled.  “You don’t want this.”

“Yes, I do,” the Black Lab pleaded.  “Don’t you get it?  It’s the only thing I want.  It’s the only thing I was trained to want.  Because I’m a bad dog, too, Badge.  And your biggest mistake in this whole thing was thinking you were worse than me.”

When the Labrador raised his head again, Goldie was gone.  The other dog had taken his place.  The sleeping dog Officer Dan had decided to let lie.

He would have no memory of what happened— only the story Medusa would tell, having bared witness from a high rafter as the storm loosed its remaining fury on them.

Two dogs ran to meet each other.

Crashing in the center of the barn, Badge and Goldie rose up on hind legs, fore claws scratching at the other’s exposed brisket, teeth clashing high, scraping, grating, gnashing like broken porcelain.  They fell to the dirt, entangled.  Rolled to right themselves, heads low in search of a deeper well from which to draw blood.

Badge made the first deep cut.  He bit down with all his considerable strength on Goldie’s left foreleg.  High above the melee, Medusa heard what sounded like cloth tearing between the German Shepherd’s jaws.

There was no yelp of pain from Goldie.  No high whine of the wounded.  Badge reared back to wait for his adversary to falter and expose his throat to a killing blow.

Goldie never fell.  Never hesitated.  He leapt forward and snipped the remaining ear from his mentor’s skull with surgical precision.

Badge howled and twisted away, right forepaw nagging desperately at the wound as though the pain was a physical thing to be rubbed away.  Goldie rushed him.  Bit through the web of fur and flesh under Badge’s raised foreleg, clipping the tendon and killing the leg.

Badge fell with a cry.  Goldie lunged for his throat.  Would have killed him then and there if Gill Grimes hadn’t put a bullet through the sliver of air that separated the two dogs’ muzzles, no doubt intent on putting down the seemingly rabid Labrador.  He missed by an inch.

“The hell is goin’ on?!” the dump master bellowed.  He cocked the firearm again.  “You bloody dogs are. . .oh.  Oh sweet Jesus.  Oh fuck me.”

Grimes staggered backwards out of the stable, head turned away from the infant in the kennel.  He drew a cell phone from his pocket, and vomited on it.

The black dog stood over his felled teacher.

“Goldie?” Medusa called.  She kept her distance, in case the Other Dog hadn’t completely gone.  At the far end of the barn, Justine lay sprawled in her kennel with a crisp red bullet hole in the center of her skull. “Goldie, we have to go.  We have to go right now.”

By now Gill Grimes had wiped his phone off on his pants and was trying to dial a number.

“We have to run away, Goldie.”

He was gone before she could finish.

14

 

 

Every animal knows that leaves never fall from trees in the hours between midnight and dawn.  This is because there is no one there to see them.  For while trees are generous in nature, they are also quite vain, and, proud of their painted Autumn faces, they crave the audience of a young child who will watch their tumbling foliage and dream of the coming winter’s first snow, or the wistful gaze of an old man who might compare himself to a drifting leaf’s decay and wonder if, like the leaf itself, this is the last season he shall live to see.

She found him under Mr. Caraway’s porch, sometime before dawn.  Weeping.  Not for himself, but for the dog he had wanted to be but would never become.

“I’m a bad dog,” he said.  His throat was hoarse, abraded by grief.  “I’m a bad, bad dog.”

“That’s not true, Goldie,” the cat offered.  “You’re the best dog I know.”

“But you hate dogs.”

“Which should really tell you something.”

“Go home, cat.  Save face while you can.  Go home to your empty house.  Go home to your lies and leave me with mine.  They’re all we ever had, anyway.”

The cat stared at her paws while the dog cried into the dirt.

The moon emerged from the vanishing clouds.

Medusa sidled up next to dog.  A low rumble rose from Goldie’s aching gut.  “What’re you doing?”

“Shut up and put your head down,” Medusa ordered, gently.  She put a paw on his snout.  “Good boy.”  She began licking the blood from the dog’s face.

And when the blood was gone, she licked at the dog’s tears.

And when the tears were gone, Goldie was asleep.

The cat regarded him for a while.  Finally, she pressed her own body against his warm flank, curled herself into a tight spiral, and let the gentle rise and fall of the dog’s breathing rock her to sleep.

15

 

 

“Can you not hear him pacing the floor?”

Medusa scowled at the Lab.

Footsteps creaked above them as Mr. Caraway strode back and forth across what Goldie gauged to be the living room floor.  Each time the steps passed over him, Goldie felt his stupid tail wag.  Wished Bottlerocket had bitten the rest of it off.  Wished the cat would shut up.

Beyond the cocoon of shade beneath the house, dawn had painted a strip of night’s dark canvas a bright, vibrant green.  Dew pantomimed its twinkling satire of the fading stars.  The paperboy came and went.

“Humans aren’t show ponies, dog.  They don’t trot back and forth like that unless they’re looking for something or waiting for something.  And seeing as this one’s blind, that really only leaves one option.”

Still no reply.

“Come on!  Can’t you see he’s waiting for you?  You know what I’ve got waiting for me at home?  Rats and silverfish.  Empty roomfuls of dust.  Now stop feeling sorry for yourself, get off your ass, and get up there.”

Very slowly, as though scratching his way up from beneath the earth rather than rising from atop it, Goldie struggled to his feet.  Scrapes, scratches, sore muscles, torn muscles, busted ligaments, a pair of deep cuts and a broken tooth played a down-tempo dirge as he struggled his way toward daylight.

“Good boy.”

“Goodbye.”

The sun felt like the spotlight of a squad car when Goldie emerged from beneath the house.

“You mean see you later.”  Medusa ambled at his side.

“I mean I’m leaving.  You’re a good cat, Medusa.  Probably the only one.”

Goldie started down the cement walk, toward the street.  The cat scrambled to get around him and planted herself directly in his path, butting her head against his chest.

“Goddamn it, you dumb dog!  You’re not bad!  I mean, sure you stink and your breath smells like a toilet and you lick your crotch a few dozen times more than necessary, but good dogs aren’t born, they’re trained.  You know that!  And you can train yourself to be whatever you want.  You want to be a bad dog?  Fine.  Keep feeling sorry for yourself and walk out on that human who needs you and depends on you.”

She took a step back.

“Being the good dog doesn’t mean fetching the paper and staying by your master’s side, Goldie.  A good dog knows where he’s needed, and goes there.  And you’re needed here.  In this house and in this town.  Even the Purity Association needs you, whether they know it or not.  With all the crazy stuff that happens around here, those prissy bitches need someone to watch their backs.  Isis knows, they can’t do it themselves with their heads stuck so far up their asses.”

The dog took a long breath, and let it out.  Sunlight touched his forepaws, urged its way up his legs and across his chest so that a kind of lifting sensation tugged at his center.

“This the part where you say how you need me, too?” he said.

Medusa sniffed.  She licked a paw and ran it over one ear.

“That was implied,” she said.  “You know, with the whole this town reference.”

“I see.”  Goldie cast a glance over his shoulder at the house.  The pacing had stopped.  “Well, I’m not sure I agree with your assessment of the crotch-licking, but the rest doesn’t seem too wildly inaccurate.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t.  Now why don’t you just. . .ah hell.”

Goldie’s nose twitched.  A rank, familiar tang filled the air.  Hate had always smelled spicy to the Lab, like it would scorch his insides if he took a bite of it.

“You goddamn beast.”  Edgar Fergut lumbered across the street from his snatch van, legs spread wider than wide, as if he’d been riding a horse for days.  Or one of his balls had been bitten off.  In his right hand he held a choke leader.  In his left, a stun gun.  Lizard tongues of electricity flashed between its prongs.  “I’m gonna burn you into dust, boy.  I’m gonna melt your brains and spread ‘em on my toast!”

“Get behind me,” Goldie snarled to the cat, who roundly ignored him, arching her back and poofing her tail with a long, guttural yowl.

Goldie braced himself at the edge of Mr. Caraway’s property, prepared to bite off the first toe that touched his master’s land.

Good b—

“Goldie!”  A sharp voice called out from behind, a kind of human bark that jerked Goldie from his attack stance better than a handful of his own scruff.

Mr. Caraway stood on his porch, framed by the open front door.

“Get in the house, boy,” he said.

Goldie looked from his owner to the cat, then to Fergut hunched at Mr. Caraway’s property line.

“Go on,” Medusa said.

“Goldie.  Come.”

The Labrador did as he was ordered.  Head straight, fangs sheathed, he trotted up the walk, then up the steps to stand beside his master.  The blind human tussled the fur behind the dog’s ears.

“Good boy,” the man hushed.  “Welcome home.”

“I got no truck with you, Caraway,” Fergut growled.  Hiking up his XXXXXL jeans, the dog snatcher lurched up the front walk.  “But that black-ass monster you’re hidin’ belongs on Death Row with his buddy, Badge.  You hear me dog?!  Your baby-killin’ friend’s getting the sharp kiss goodnight and he’s getting it soon!”

Fergut mimed a brutal injection to the neck.  The twang of a broken guitar string sounded in Goldie’s throat.  So Badge lived.  For now.

“Though not by you I gather, Mr. Fergut.”

Fergut’s tiny toad eyes ticked to the blind man.

“It’s my understanding, Mr. Fergut, that the police tried to arrest you for animal cruelty when they responded to Mr. Grimes’s call.  Which means that, like Goldie here, you too are a fugitive.  Is that not correct?”

“Like I give a rat’s ass,” Fergut growled.  He punctuated the words with a sizzle from his stun gun.  “I ain’t begun to define the word cruel.  Not till I get my hands on this mutt.”

Fergut planted his foot on the first porch step.  The wooden board wailed under his weight.  He did not reach the second.

The revolver’s barrel was perhaps three feet from his forehead.

“Do you know the only thing more dangerous than a man with a gun, Mr. Fergut?” Mr. Caraway asked.  The six shooter’s hammer clicked back into place, ready to fire.  The firearm had a good, clean smell to Goldie.  Fresh oil and polished iron.  “A blind man with a gun.”

Fergut settled his weight back on the cement path.  He took a second step, then half-turned.  “You’ll see me around, Caraway.”

“Not likely.”

Goldie and Mr. Caraway went inside.  The interior of the house was well-lit, as always.  Blind since birth, Mr. Caraway had no need for illumination of any kind, but still kept every bulb in the house burning for the comfort of his canine companion.

A palsy hand put the gun away in the pocket of a trench coat that hung by the door.  The hand was still shaking when it patted Goldie on the head.

“Don’t worry, boy.  I won’t let anybody take you way.  Call me crazy, but I’ve got a good idea what you were trying to do when you took off.  You’re a good boy, Kappa.  Don’t anyone tell you otherwise.”

The floor seemed to tilt then, by a single degree.  Enough for the Labrador to shoot out a single paw for purchase, to keep from sliding away.

Goldie watched the blind man feel his way from the foyer into the living room, counting his strides as he always did, fingertips brushing the walls as they always had.

“Goldie?” he called back.  “You didn’t take off again already, did you?  Be a sport and help me find my other slipper.  Can’t find that darn thing anywhere.  Going on day two now of Operation: Cold Left Foot.”

Goldie shook himself from head to toe, so that the world gradually righted itself like a crooked picture nudged a quarter-inch to the better.  He went to help his master.

16

 

 

The morning of Badge’s execution, Medusa came to visit.  They met in Goldie’s backyard, under the shade of the towering sycamore, as was their custom now.

Mr. Caraway was out building a bird house in the sycamore’s lowest branches, a project which caused Goldie no small number of heart palpitations each time his master climbed the ladder to hammer blindly at his carpentry, missing his own fingers by the narrowest of margins while dropping an unceasing barrage of nails at Goldie’s paws.

“Gotta hand it to you, dog.  This human makes chasing cars look safe.”

A glum snort was all Goldie could muster.  His morose mood perfectly matched his dark exterior.  A black cloud had not settled over the dog.  The dog had become the cloud.

Between the loose boards of the fence, Goldie watched the Kellys’ nanny feed a spoonful of applesauce to Baby Adam.  Adam Kelly had come home from the hospital three days ago, having spent three weeks there as his doctors, parents, and three local news anchors waited to see if he would live or die.  When Goldie had first found the child, he’d thought he was dead.  And he very nearly was.  Adam’s heart was only beating ten times every minute.  One of his lungs had stopped working and shrunk like a balloon with no air inside it.  He was in a coma for almost a week.  But he lived.  And now, at last, he was home.

“Talked to Scurvy Scrounger day before last,” said the cat.  “Against my will, I assure you.  I was visiting a friend near Animal Control when I picked up his scent.”

Less than a month out and the Greyhound had already been captured by the new folks in charge of Animal Control.  In the few years Goldie had known him, Scurvy Scrounger had been arrested and escaped custody at least a dozen times.  Just one of those creatures whose luck was like a half-full cola bottle laid on its side— give it a nudge in one direction, toward good fortune or ill, and the momentum would carry it the rest of the way.

“He says they’ve fixed up the place.  Put in dozens of new kennels, cleaned everything up so there’s no overcrowding or unsanitary conditions.”

“I’m sure the euthanasia needles will be sterilized, too,” Goldie snorted.  Badge’s execution was scheduled for noon.  Bad dogs had to be put down.  It was the only way to make sure they didn’t harm another human being.

A flea hopped aboard the Lab’s flank and began to burrow at his undercarriage.  He made no move to oppose it.  His brain felt fogged in, his senses made fuzzy and unreal, as though he were walking around in a dream.

Across the fence, Nanny Monica sang to Baby Adam as they sat at the edge of a brand new sand box.  The woman sang of lost sheep, curds and whey, and how life was but a dream.  The thought turned Goldie’s stomach.  Many was the night he’d waked in the dark to calls of Wake up, Goldie.  It’s okay.  You’re just having a bad dream.

Wished someone would say it now.

“You ever think about what the Oracle said?”

The Lab’s muscles tensed.  “Only when I’m in the mood for a migraine.”

“No, I mean, she told you to Seek the owl, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you ever think about the fact that finding Bottlerocket lead us to Fergut’s place, and then to Adam?”

Goldie snorted.  “I try not to.”  Hard not to wonder what else the Oracle had been right about.

“The Association is convening to discuss what to do,” Medusa said, after a time.  Her mouth soured around the words.

“You mean what to do with me.”

The cat nodded.

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Nothing.  I’ve resigned from my seat on the board.”

Goldie’s tail thumped once against the grass.

“They found out about what happened with the Countess,” she said.  “They know I’m broke.”

“I didn’t tell.”

“I know.  Iris –you know that Persian over on Sea Salt Way?— she saw me rummaging through her garbage and followed me back to my house.”

“You know you wouldn’t have to do that if you came to stay here.”  Goldie nodded at the blind carpenter still whacking away at his birdhouse, which more and more came to resemble a torture device designed to interrogate blue jays rather than shelter them.

Many times Mr. Caraway had set out a plate of albacore for the stray Himalayan, somehow aware of her plight, and each time the plate had remained untouched until a local raccoon caught its scent on the wind.

“Seriously, ditch those old tags and move in.  They’re just a bunch of baggage weighing you down.”

Medusa batted at the tag that hung around her neck, proclaiming her the property of obscure Russian nobility.  She shrugged, then smiled.

“It’s who I am,” she said.  “Even the Association can’t take that away.  Same for you, dog.  There’s nothing they can do to you unless you let them.”

Goldie stared ahead.  Nanny Monica scraped the last bits of apple sauce from the jar.

“Yeah, well—”

She dipped the spoon into the sandbox, and fed it to Baby Adam.

Goldie blinked.  “What?”

Adam began to cry.  His lips were encrusted with sand.  Nanny Monica picked him up, shushed him soothingly.  She brought a bottle of milk for the baby to suckle.

You don’t understand.  This was the only safe place. . .

“Son of a bitch,” Goldie whispered.

“What is it?”

Having finally washed the grit from his toothless mouth, Baby Adam managed to calm himself, eyes red, lips scrunched into a pout.  Softly, soothingly, Nanny Monica took the bottle away and began to sing to him once more as she lowered the spoon, brought up another serving of sand, and fed it to the infant.

“Son of a bitch!” Goldie barked.

This time Medusa saw.  Baby Adam was near hysterics.

“Everything okay?” Mr. Caraway called out across the fence.  He received no response.

Ought to have torn her throat out right there.  It would have been so easy to break through the loose board and slaughter the woman where she stood.  But then Goldie would have been taken away and put to sleep too, with everyone thinking him a mindless monster.

He stared at the ground.  Scratched at his collar.  Tried to think of what to do, tried to focus.  His attention drifted to his shadow.  It lay directly beneath him, hidden by the late morning sun.

“Fix me, it’s almost noon!”

Medusa did not look at the dog.  Her face remained impassive as she stared through the loose board into the Kellys’ yard.

“Go,” she said.  Her voice was light and distant, like she was trying to discern a familiar shape from a passing cloud.  “I’ll be here when you get back.”

17

 

 

Animal Control was four-and-a-half miles away.  To a dog on foot, this distance equated to approximately half the circumference of the known world.

He ran the whole way.  Left his wounds behind to catch up with him later.  A howling black bullet sped through town.  A blurred shadow turning heads and stopping cars as it roared down busy roads and sidewalks.

Nine-year-old Suzy Rendelle would later claim she’d seen the ghost of her old dog Mittens bounding down the street, that it must have gotten lost on its way to Heaven.

Postmaster Warren Weingarten would swear, if only to himself, that it was the soul of a dog who’d once terrified his old mail route until he took it out of commission with a bowl of raw hamburger laced with rat poison.

Mrs. Hathaway the librarian would point out the mysterious dog’s uncanny resemblance to Cerberus, the hound that guarded the gates of Hades in Greek mythology.

Perhaps this last claim would prove the most accurate.

He’d tried to save Baby Adam.  Justine had seen something, by sheer chance, some lunatic behavior such as Goldie had just witnessed, and gone to Badge for help.  So the German Shepherd had taken the child away, wrestled it from its so-called caregiver, but wounded Adam in the process.  Not knowing what else to do, Badge had taken the infant back to Justine, a good dog and mother, to see what could be done.  Badge had tried to explain all this, but Goldie had refused him, had lost himself to his temper and his past, choosing instead to once more heed the call of the bloody man from his dreams.

The old gate, along with three hundred yards of rusted barbed wire, had been removed from Animal Control.  Goldie bolted up the steps of the main building and threw himself against the front door.  He clawed at it, barking and yowling that Badge was innocent, that he’d been trying to protect the child, that he’d only wanted to help.

Inside, Badge lay in his kennel.  Head between his paws.  Eyes closed.  He’d been in the same position for three days.  Death would be a mercy, the two young men who were now in charge kept telling themselves.  Just look at him.  Look at his face.  What kind of person would want something like that, anyway?  No wonder he went nuts.  The world would be a better place with him gone.  One less bad dog.

Goldie was told these things later, by Scurvy Scrounger.

When the clock struck twelve and they came to fetch him, Badge knew that he would not be returning.  Yet, he put up no resistance when the shelter’s new custodians removed him from his enclosure.  He lead the way, walking ahead of them with his head down.  Almost like he wanted to go, to leave this place where he’d caused so much misery to everyone he’d ever set eyes on.  He’d led Officer Dan to his death.  Made Goldie ashamed of himself.  Failed to protect the child.  Brought Justine all the warmth and compassion of a hole in the head.  This was better.

“Is he crying?” one of the young men said, name of Browne.  He was short and squat, a buzzed brunette.

His partner, Lang, shook his head.  Tall and thin, long blonde hair tied back into a stringy ponytail.  “Nah man, dogs can’t cry.  It’s like, a scientific fact.”

“I don’t know.  He looks like he’s crying to me.  I mean, look at him.”

Badge stopped at Scurvy Scrounger’s enclosure.  It was the last kennel on the row.  The German Shepherd turned to the cage.

“If you get out,” he offered, his voice made rough from wounds he’d suffered during the fight, chipped teeth, scored gums, a punctured cheek.  “Tell Goldie. . .”

There was nothing more.

He turned and stepped into the next room.

As part of the renovations planned for the compound, Animal Control’s new superintendents had converted Fergut’s old dog fighting corral into an examination room.  The two men had laid down a linoleum floor and covered the walls with floral wall paper.  Florescent lighting fixtures had been installed in the ceiling.  Curtains hung from the windows.

The dog needed help getting up onto the examination table.  He rose on his hind legs, put his forepaws on the cold, steel surface, and looked back at the two men still lingering in the open doorway.

Without a word Browne and Lang stepped forward.  They each took a haunch and lifted.  The dog suppressed a whine of pain as they hoisted him up and he eased himself onto the table.  They strapped him down.  Tied his muzzle shut.

Somewhere, a dog was barking.

“Is this really necessary?”  Browne gestured to the many straps that bound the dog to the table.  He slipped on a smock, gloves, and a pair of goggles.  “He isn’t going anywhere.”

Lang shrugged.  “Rules are rules.”

The bark came again.  It was close.

Badge’s ear twitched.

“You hear that?” Browne asked.  “That coming from inside or outside?”

“Sounds like it’s out front.”  Lang slipped on his own smock, gloves, and goggles, then busied himself filling a syringe with a colorless fluid.  He tapped the syringe’s plastic housing, let the bubbles rise to the top to flush them out.  “Tell you one thing— he’s knocking at the wrong door for scraps.”

Badge lifted his head.  Was that Goldie?

Browne put a hand on him.

“Easy, boy.  This’ll be over in a minute.”  Badge offered no protest.  But he recognized that bark.  It was Goldie.  “Hurry up, man.  Let’s get this over with.”

At the far end of the building, Goldie stepped away from the door.  A firm knot had tied itself in his shoulder where he’d thrown it against the door a dozen times.  His claws had been reduced to raw nubs.  His heart sagged.  The sun was directly overhead.  It was past noon.

“Over here!”

Who?  Goldie poked his head around the corner of the building.

“Hey, Goldie!  Over here!”

Was that Scurvy?

“He’s over here, Goldie!”

Head tilted, ears high, Goldie trotted down to the far end of the building.

“Scurvy?” he called.  “Is that you?”

“Goldie!” the Greyhound barked.  The windows were too high too see inside, but they were open all down the row.  “They got him in the next room, Goldie.  They’re gonna put him down!”

Goldie looked up at the last window.  He took a quick breath, stepped forward.

And did nothing.

What was he doing here?  What did he expect to accomplish?  What do you say to the dog you’ve condemned?  What is there to explain to the friend you have betrayed?

Lang approached the table, syringe in hand and pointed at the ceiling.  He put his free hand on the German Shepherd.

“You ready?”

Browne nodded.

“You gotta say it, man.  You gotta say you’re ready.  It’s the rules.  Liability and stuff.”

“Yeah, okay.  I’m ready.”  Browne held the dog as tightly as he could.

His partner lowered the syringe.

“YOU’RE A GOOD DOG!” Goldie barked, as loud as he could.

“Shit!”  Lang dropped the syringe.  He squatted to fetch it from under the table.

“You’re a good dog, Badge!”  Goldie howled at the window.  “I know what happened and I’ll tell them.  I’ll tell them why you did it and they’ll know.  They’ll know you’re a good dog!”

“Shut up!” Lang yelled.  He dusted off his trousers.  “Damn.”

“I wonder if it knows what we’re doing in here,” said Browne.

On the table, the dog’s tail had begun to wag.

“Whatever,” said Lang.  “Hold him still, would you?”

“You’re a good dog, Badge!  You’re—”

The needle emptied itself into the dog.  Badge shuddered, stiffened, muscles flexed taught.  He grunted twice, then relaxed with a long sigh.

Lang turned back to his work table where he removed his goggles, glove and smock.  Browne held the dog a moment longer, then released it.  He backed away from the table.

The phone rang.  He went to answer it.

“Hello?  Yeah.  What?  Is this a joke?  All right, all right.  Yeah.  Yeah, we’ll be right there.”  Browne hung up the phone, then shed the skin of his smock in a long, clean gesture.  “Dude, check this out, this guy just called, says his snake ran away.”

“What, like a garden snake?”

“No, man, like a snake snake.  Like a python or something.  Come on.”

“All right.”  Lang nodded to the dead dog on the table.  “Stay, boy.”

Epilogue

 

 

There would be tales told as long as there were ears to hear them about Badge, the ghost hound of Hope Falls.  Bedtime stories for mischievous pups.  Watch out, ye bad dogs, the Badge knows what foul bones are buried in the gardens of your souls, and he shall dig them up!

The two orderlies never spoke a word about what they found, or rather did not find, upon their empty-handed return from combing Hope Falls for the lost python.  The man who owned the snake had come home to find its enclosure empty, the only evidence of the party responsible being a collection of feline paw prints that littered the mud outside the window where the terrarium was kept.

After a long and ultimately fruitless search, the men from Animal Control had concluded that the snake had probably fled to Lost Hills.  Stray animals seemed to know to go there.  Still, it couldn’t hurt to call the cops.  The snake’s owner said he’d already tried them.  Said they were tied up with a missing person’s report.  Some blind guy over on Watershed had reported an abandoned child, describing to the 9-11 dispatcher what sounded like the baby’s nanny being attacked by an unidentified assailant who subdued her without a sound, then dragged her off in the direction of the animal sanctuary.

The men from Animal Control found the examination table empty when they came back.

There was no sign of the dog they’d put down.  The straps had been chewed clean through.  The front door was open, the way they’d left it when they went to answer the call.  Hard to blame them, new to the facility as they were.

Goldie had wanted to let the other animals out as well, but the Greyhound’s kennel was the last one that had yet to be replaced, its lock no more than a rusted bolt, easily nosed free.  Just Scurvy’s luck that it would be so.

The two dogs worked for half an hour gnawing through the straps which bound Badge to the table.  When at last he was free, they dragged him from the building, then out beyond the tree line that bordered the property, to the western edge of Lost Hills.

“Tell them what happened,” Goldie said.  “Tell them he was a good dog.”

“I will,” Scrounger nodded.  “You take care now, Goldie.  I’ll see you around.”  With a wink and a snort, Scurvy Scrounger ducked into the woods, no doubt composing the first of many midnight adventures for Badge the crime-fighting, death-defying spirit dog of Hope Falls.

Goldie waited until the homeless Greyhound was out of earshot, then began to dig.

It was near dark by the time he’d finished, when at last the Labrador could wipe the grit from his raw and aching paws, and lift a leg over the grave to discourage strays.

Finished and empty in more ways than he cared to count, Goldie looked up at the first lights that had begun to scatter themselves across the sky, those endless fields where Badge had gone to join the Sky Pack in the Great Hunt, and where he would wait for his friend the Labrador to some day join him.

Goldie nodded to the stars.  To the grave before him.  To himself as he turned toward home.

“Good boy.”

 

 

 

 

To Be Continued. . .

Dear Reader:

Much obliged for checking out what I hope shall prove to be but the first of several trials for our heroes, Goldie and Medusa. In the meantime, if you feel compelled to run out into the streets and tell everyone how much you enjoyed Red Rover. . .don't!  Running willy-nilly into the streets is dangerous and ill-advised.  A healthier alternative would be to review this novel on Amazon.com, where it's available for sale on the Kindle for a scandalously low 1.99, though you don't have to buy it to review it.

caio for now,

nik