* * *
Michelle squatted in one of the few dry patches behind Russell and Pete, listening in on their short conversation. When she spoke, they jumped and nearly slipped in a puddle of blood.
"Huey didn’t do this."
They rotated slowly in unison. Under different circumstances it would have been funny, but it was the furthest thing from funny now.
"We need to get outta here," Russell said, removing the hoe blade from the rabbit pile, "like now." Pete swallowed and nodded in agreement. Russell went on, the gravity in his voice unlike anything Michelle had ever heard from him, "This is some serious shit here, Michelle. Way over our heads." He paused, then reiterated, "We gotta get the hell outta here."
Michelle searched deep into Russell’s hazel eyes and saw the terror roiling there. She looked into Pete’s mahogany orbs and saw the same. She stood and backed slowly away from them. An animal’s guts squished under her Chucks, causing her to slip but not fall. She looked down at the slick, pink mess and thought God, why did I come along with these fools?
Russell ignored her retreat, along with her tremor of revulsion as she stutter-stepped through entrails. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he called out to the far end of the yard: "Hey, Mike! I need to go inside and use your phone, okay?" He wanted it to sound casual, like it was no big deal, but he couldn’t quite hide the edge in his voice. He thought his words had come out high-pitched and shaky.
If they did, O’Brien didn’t notice, for he was bent over in a thicket and hadn’t heard. When Mike failed to respond, Russell called out again to use the phone. This time Mike turned around.
"What?"
Russell brought his fist to his ear in the universal sign that even Mike understood, then pointed emphatically at the house.
"No!" O’Brien shouted, beginning to run. "Don’t go inside!! DON’T GO INSIDE!!" He waved his arms as if he were trying to stop an oncoming car.
"What—" Pete asked Russell. Russell cut him off with a wave of his hand.
Something was wrong with the air. Mike was screaming, but Russell, Pete, and Michelle could barely hear him. Russell repeated, "I gotta use the phone, Mike. Can you let me in?"
"NO!! NO!!" O’Brien yelled back. He ran faster, the grass behind him parting. Deep in the grass forest, Huey let out a bark.
Then he was gone.
Tripped, Russell thought. He tried to imagine what had tripped Mike. Was it a rabbit? Probably. But it also could have been a raccoon, a skunk, a possum…
They’re hares, not rabbits. Rabbits don’t get this big.
As quickly as O’Brien went down, he bounced back up. Michelle recalled the way he had jumped from the truck bed (Stood on top of the tailgate and dropped. Then popped up like it was nothing) not fifteen minutes ago.
When Mike stood, he brought a swarm of mosquitos with him. They flitted from his neck to his face, but he didn’t swat at them. He did, however, turn to see what had tripped him. The moment Mike bent over, Huey yelped and barreled out of the thicket at full throttle, speeding for the house. Dumbstruck, O’Brien cried out, "Huey! Come back!" but the dog did not heed his call.
Naturally, Mike assumed something had bitten Huey. The thought of it being rabid never crossed his mind, only his anger for what it had done to his dog.
The grass opened between Mike’s scrawny arms as he peered into the thicket. Far away (it could have been another universe as far as he was concerned) he heard warbling voices—raised voices. Shortly after, his nose picked up an odor different from the other rotting smells. This new one smelled like freshly stepped-in dog shit. He checked his shoes, and that was when he heard a deep growling, like a revving lawnmower, emanating from the Saint Augustine jungle.
Russell heard it too, but not the others. They were still shouting at O’Brien, begging him to run for Christ’s sake and not go in any deeper. Not two seconds after the growling started, the thing that was surely a dog vaulted out—more cat-like than dog-like, almost like a puma.
Mike turned and sprinted for the house, cackling indecipherably as he tromped over rabbit carcasses and other assorted buried treasures, screaming short, high-pitched girl shrieks as he kicked his way toward the three horrified faces waving frantically by his back stoop. With each stride, the thing chasing him snarled and grunted and gained ground. It was clearly going after his calves, for it lunged at his scissoring legs every chance it got. But each time the beast turned its head to bite, Mike would pull the leg it was going after forward and the thing would chomp down on air.
The sensation of hot, animal breath huffing at his ankles spurred Mike to hightail it even faster. Pumping his arms and legs like pistons, he kept just out of reach of the beast’s maw. All he learned about what chased him he garnered from his peripheral vision. The thing behind him was big and brown, and given his current set of circumstances, that was all he needed to know. That, and the fact that it was one mean bastard.
"Run, Mike!" Michelle shouted, pushing her hands down on Pete’s and Russell’s shoulders, raising onto her toes.
Russell broke away from the group and ran to meet Mike, lifting the hoe over his head as he went. Mike entered the trampled-down area of the yard, allowing him to run faster. He closed the gap and rushed past Russell, into the waiting arms of Michelle, who reluctantly hugged his sweaty, trembling body while he sobbed into her neck.
But where was the beast? One minute it had been chasing Mike and the next it was gone. Then out of the corner of his eye, Russell glimpsed a flash of brown among the green. He made his way toward it, careful not to let his feet stir up anything else that may be lurking in the yard. As he drew closer, he saw that the thing—the animal—lay cowering against the side property fence, its abdomen heaving in and out like a blacksmith’s bellows.
The creature mashed its bloodied muzzle into the splintering fence boards. White foam frothed from its mouth, then slid into its flews and settled there like meringue. Chunks of flesh hung loosely from its tick-infested neck and trunk. The spider-silk sheen of bone peeked through the wounds on the top of its head, where the lacerations were particularly severe. Russell nudged it with the hoe blade. It didn’t recoil. But it did shiver.
As Russell stared at the fetid, broken dog—he now realized that was what it was: a dog—he couldn’t help but feel terrified. The thing was dying, squirming in its death throes like an eel plucked from the depths, but the dread persisted. It—she—mewled a sad guttural song while writhing in an unimaginable, solitary pain. Eventually her vocalizations dissolved into wet, unrecognizable gargles of a kind Russell had never heard a canine make before.
Yet he lingered there, unsure of what to do or where to go. He knew that putting the thing out of its misery was the ethical thing to do, but he also knew that he could never bring himself to hack a living animal to death. I’m a musician, he thought, not a killer.
He never got the chance to break that news to the poor creature. The dog lunged at him, catching him off guard where he stood lost in thought. In the end, Russell reacted as he always reacted: with flair and nonchalance. Almost comically, he swung the hoe in a wide sideways arc, striking the dog’s neck with the blunt end of the instrument, slamming its head against the fence. When the body flopped down to the ground a half second later, Russell rotated the hoe to make use of the blade.
He commenced hacking away at the dog’s neck, feeling preternaturally calm while doing so. The carotid artery severed, and blood squirted up in pulsating maroon jets, throwing Jackson Pollock patterns over the gray fence. The dog, which at first had only groaned, now began to bark maddeningly, enraged by the sight of its own blood. The barking didn’t stop Russell. If anything, it compelled him to chop down harder, more aggressively. The next blow destroyed the dog’s voice box, rendering it mute save a high-pitched whine that rasped from its split trachea. The gristly sound of the blade tearing through cervical vertebrae was the trigger that released the dose of adrenaline through Russell’s body. His arms became le
aden and quaked. Shortly after, the hoe slipped out of his sweat-slick hands.
Leaning against the fence, a forearm over his eyes, Russell grew aware of a presence behind him. When he turned, Michelle was staring at him with wide, glassy eyes. Disbelieving eyes. She reached out to touch his shoulders, but he shimmied away from her hand. He looked down at what he had done and nearly fainted from vertigo. It was like looking down from the top of a tall building, but different. Maybe it was because he was the building, and the vertigo was something that he had caused to exist.
"What did I just do?" he asked, motioning to the dog with a sweep of his still-trembling hand. He breathed haltingly and avoided eye contact with Michelle. "What the hell…" His hands went to his face, and he hid behind them. Michelle put her hand on his shoulder. He didn’t move away this time. He didn’t even see it coming.
A few minutes went by before Mike and Pete made their way over. When they got there, Pete looked at the dead dog and let out a long, low whistle. "Yep—rabid, all right." He picked the hoe up off the ground and pried it between the dog’s clenched jaws. Bloody foam oozed onto the grass. When Mike bent to get a closer look, Pete blocked him with his arm. "Better stay away, Mike. It may be dead, but it’s still dangerous."
Pete then began lecturing Mike on the different transmission vectors for rabies, how it was a virus, and how it could become airborne and infect that way. Russell barely heard him. His hatred for Pete—his best friend, and in many rights, his only friend—had begun to boil over again. In recent weeks, he had found himself growing more and more annoyed with Pete’s increasingly confrontational and pedantic behavior. Now he thought he understood why Hector Graham gave him such a hard time. The answer came to him as he watched Pete explain to Mike (a kid who didn’t give a shit what Pete said) the life cycle of the rabies virus. He spouted off scientific terms like rhabdovirus and RNA like they meant something, like they were important, like anybody cared. Mike clearly wasn’t listening, but still Pete droned on. Now that the danger was over, Pete the Expert was here to explain what had happened—in the most clinical of terms, of course. Yeah, Russell thought, I can see how someone could come to despise this kid.
Raising his hand, O’Brien shushed Pete mid-sentence, then dropped to his knees to get a closer view of the dead dog’s face. He looked back up at Michelle and Russell, alternately flicking his gaze from the one to the other. "This is Lola." He said it simply and guilelessly. "I swear to God, it’s her."
Russell yanked the hoe from Pete’s hands and hooked the blade under the collar. He lifted the nearly-decapitated head. It was Lola all right. He didn’t need to check the tags, but he checked them anyway. A little reassurance never hurt.
"Jeez…" Pete muttered behind his teeth. "What do you think Hector’s gonna say?"
Right then, Russell was pretty sure he could have buried the hoe blade in the back of Pete’s cowardly, know-it-all neck and not have felt the slightest twinge of remorse. None at all.