* * *
Mike O’Brien woke at the break of dawn, feeling tired and spent, as though he had barely slept at all. He lifted his arm off the slumbering bulldog and tripped his way through the dark room to the drawn window shade. He tugged the string and the screen zipped up its spool, making a loud whapping noise that startled Huey to life.
On the stained mattress, the dog sprang to his feet and hurriedly searched the room for his master. Spotting Mike’s silhouette in the window, Huey snorted through his flat face, jumped from the bed to the carpet, and maneuvered through a sea of junk to Mike’s feet. There, he lolled out his broad tongue and began licking the human’s toes.
O’Brien giggled as he went through the automatic motions of trying to escape something he didn’t want to get away from. "Stop, Huey. That tickles!"
Huey sucked his tongue back into his mouth, cocked his head, and stared up at his master.
In a single swift movement, O’Brien fell to his knees and grabbed Huey’s head. Getting in the bulldog’s face, he babbled, "I wuv you sooo much, don’t I, boy? Don’t I, boy? Don’t Mikey-boy wuv you so much?"
Huey continued to stare at his master, a pink nub of tongue poking through his front teeth. Then he snorted, wriggled out of Mike’s grasp, and wove a serpentine’s path around heaps of clothes, G.I. Joe figurines, their vehicles, Thundercat paraphernalia, and a broken Teddy Ruxpin doll. When he reached the door, he wedged his stout body between the door and the frame and entered the hall.
The sight of Huey’s stub tail leaving the room made Mike want to cry and throw up. Mostly cry.
Sniffling, O’Brien crouched low and went into stealth mode. He surreptitiously chased the dog through the catacombs of the small, cluttered house, making a game of it by ducking behind furniture whenever Huey turned to see who was following him. It was only a matter of minutes before Mike’s sadness flipped back to joy. Clearly, O’Brien was enjoying the game more than Huey, because after only thirty minutes into it, the dog plopped down in the middle of the kitchen floor, either in indifference or defeat.
As usual, the house was empty save the boy and his dog. Since George O’Brien drove a rig for a living, he was away on hauls most days of the month, and Mrs. O’Brien was gone permanently, having found a new man in Mobile to shack up with. The house hadn’t been in the best of shape when the O’Brien’s moved in, but after Mary left, it had literally began falling apart. One day, out of nowhere, the foundation, ancient and flimsy to begin with, began to sink, and once that started, a whole host of problems set in: leaky pipes, electrical shortages, a decomposing roof, and other nightmares most homeowners would have gone great lengths to avoid by either moving or by fixing the damn foundation. But, as the whole town knew, Mike and George weren’t like everybody else; they were weird. And reckless. They allowed the house to fall apart around them, then pretended like it wasn’t happening, even as chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling and clonked their heads. The structure should have been condemned, and in a reasonable city it would have been, but since the neighbors didn’t complain and George O’Brien paid his taxes, the higher-ups in City Hall turned a blind eye to their chaotic hovel.
Mike fished an orange plastic bowl from a sink overflowing with plastic dishes and turned the faucet handle until it wouldn’t turn any more. He waited over a minute for a thread of water to pitifully dribble out. After giving the bowl a cursory rinse, he stepped over Huey, went to the pantry, and reached for the box of Honeycombs on the top shelf. Pouring his breakfast, a cockroach fell from the box, landed in the bowl, and proceeded to push and crawl its way to freedom. O’Brien nabbed the insect from the bowl’s lip and chucked it into the den, then wiped his hand on his naked thigh, walked back to the sink, and slowly filled the bowl with water. With that task complete, he opened the drawer next to the sputtering refrigerator and felt around for the old tarnished serving spoon. Finding it, he covered the short distance to the newspaper-covered kitchen table, sat down, and began downing the meal in huge, serving-sized gulps.
As he ate, water trickled down his bare chest. Huey’s ears lifted to the sound of it splattering on the floor.
The bulldog stood and paced the kitchen, whimpering.
"Hold on, boy. I ain’t finished yet."
Huey barked.
"I said hold on. Can’tcha wait till I’m done with my breakfast? We’ll play chase after."
Huey continued to plod about the tiny kitchen, then abruptly stopped and squatted. Staring up with huge, pleading eyes, a tube of excrement coiled under the dog’s haunches.
"HUEY!!"
When he finished, the bulldog slunk away to the living room to lie down next to the couch, where he rested his chin on his forepaws and alternately flicked his eyebrows up and down.
Mike got up from the table and dropped a yellow sheet of newspaper over the mess. It was just like the cockroach: out of sight, out of mind. After throwing the bowl and spoon in the sink, he walked over to the dog—stepping carefully to avoid the hidden pile of crap—and stroked his head.
"I’m sorry for hollerin’ at you, boy," he said tenderly, "but what have I told you about doing that in here?" He then slapped his skinny thighs. "Wanna go outside? C’mon, boy. Let’s go outside!"
The dog looked at him the same way he had in the bedroom: head cocked and a bewildered expression on his mashed face. Mike walked backwards toward the kitchen door, all the time coaxing, "C’mon, boy, let’s go play!" But Huey didn’t move. Finally, Mike gave up, went to the living room, grabbed a handful of loose skin behind the dog’s neck, and dragged him across the floor. Mike pushed the screen door open with his butt, let go of Huey’s neck, and pointed behind him. "Go!"
Huey just sat there, panting.
O’Brien then turned around and instantly understood the reason for his dog’s obstinance. The starkness of the horror in his backyard blindsided him. It was as if he had breached the seal of an airtight vessel by opening the door and the pressure drop had physically sucked the air out of his lungs. Shrinking back into the house, he tried catching his breath but couldn’t. Yet somehow he managed to shriek like a little girl when the screen door slammed shut. Mike retreated further into the kitchen, where he stepped on the newspaper, slid, and fell flat on his ass. A loud crack issued beneath him; the house dropped half an inch. He closed his eyes, but the image was seared onto his retina like a photographic negative. His senses were so overloaded that his mind began shutting down. Had it not been for Huey barking, he might have fainted. What he had seen in his backyard couldn’t have been real. There was just no way. And having convinced himself of that, he found the resolve to stand and walk calmly back to the door. He hesitated, just the same, when he opened it. He couldn’t help it. This time, instead of freaking out, he stood and took it all in. He felt so hot and exposed lingering in the open doorway in his underwear that, for a second, he played with the possibility that maybe he had woken up on some alien planet, perhaps one closer to the sun, or one in a different solar system with a hotter sun. Despite the heat, a chill zipped through his body, raising goosebumps on his exposed flesh.
Like Hector, Mike’s backyard was oversized and enclosed on two sides by wooden property fences. At the far end, the lot ended in a six foot high chain-link fence that butted up against a forest of oak and pine. But O’Brien’s yard differed from Hector’s in one distinct way: In O’Brien’s yard, there were bloody rabbits everywhere—at least two hundred of them, shredded and torn to pieces in the overgrown grass. Ten or more lay in a pile on the concrete stoop. Fire ants and flies, he saw, were having a feast with those. Most of the corpses were missing their throats. There was even a splayed bunny on top of Huey’s igloo-shaped dog house. An indifferent buzzard lazily pecked at that one’s face, stopping briefly to look at the skinny kid in his underwear before returning to his meal.
And their ears…. Their floppy ears were everywhere