Erica zoomed in on the town courthouse like a controlled skydive and hover. She could already smell the sulfur, hear the podunk accents and sprung banjos, feel the eyes of the inbred and moonshine-addled fumbling at her breasts and hair. She glared at the screen, absorbing the photons and cooling them dead. A single word adorned the bottom of the map: Shard.
She looked up at the quivering lips of the attendant.
“Bourbon,” she said, setting down a plastic glass full of ice and a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels. “That’ll be five-fifty.”
Erica produced a crisp twenty. “Keep it.”
The attendant’s smile crystalized, the bill crinkled and she moved on.
Erica looked at the cup full of gray ice. She leaned forward and dumped it in the seat pocket in front of her. Jack Daniels was Tennessee whiskey not Kentucky bourbon. Coal was potential revenue not dead bodies. She slugged down the Jack, denied the shiver and straightened her seat as the turbines began to whine. Erica took a last look at the glowing satellite map and shut her computer.
She closed her eyes and leaned back, the cheap leather enveloping her shoulders, the electric dark enfolding her mind. She saw deep forest and hills and imagined the elbow of an old oak tree filled with spider web; there was nothing caught in it.
She opened her eyes and stared out the window at the hard, rolling tarmac. “Shard,” she whispered. “Fuck.”
Chapter 3
Darwin’s bowl overflowed with two days worth of kibble. That the beagle would be missing for long stretches at a time—running the woods in an ecstasy of forest smells—was nothing unusual. But even if twelve-year-old Childe Howard (known to most of Shard as “Kiddo”) hadn’t actually seen the dog, his food was always eaten.
Kiddo stared down at the small mound of brown pellets. “Mom?” he called over his sunburned shoulder. “Darwin hasn’t eaten in a while.” Kiddo waited the obligatory three Mississippi. He imagined his mother in her office down the hall, tilting her curly blonde explosion of a head just so, her wireless lenses a double mirror of the computer screen in front of her. It always took a couple of tries when she was writing. The first attempt was just a primer, a flare on the horizon of her unconscious. Kiddo nudged Darwin’s bowl and caused an avalanche of kibble. He thought about ants and Pompeii.
Kiddo grinned. “Yo, Loraine!” She hated it when he addressed her by her first name. “Your only son’s dog is missing.”
Down the hall Loraine Howard blinked and actually saw the words floating on the monitor in front of her. When she was in the zone, she didn’t see anything except the scene under construction. If she was typing and aware of the words on the computer, she wasn’t writing, not really. Drove the kid crazy when she went deep like that and ignored him. How long had he been calling her this time? At least once. Childe never resorted to her first name unless he was just this side of ticked. And her lovely son was almost never ticked. It’s probably why it bugged her so much when he called her Loraine. It meant something was wrong.
She hit “Ctrl” and “s” and shouted, “Sup’, buttercup?”
Childe rolled around the doorjamb, careful not to knock into the six-foot stack of books leaning there. Loraine’s office was filled with these literary towers. They were like seaweed spires growing from the ocean floor, and the casual observer might connote an un-packing still in progress. Thing was: Loraine’s office had looked just like this in Hollywood, too. The only difference was what came through the windows. In So. Cal. it was heliographs and honks from passing cars and shouts from the drivers within them. In Shard it was shifting green shadows and the ratchet-song of summer cicadas.
“You really gotta stop calling me, Loraine, Childe, my child.”
Kiddo channeled Dirty Harry, “Yeah? What’re ya gonna do about it, punk? You feel lucky? Well, do ya… Loraine?”
She grabbed the closest paperback and lobbed it at his head. Childe yipped and ducked, but his gawky elbow caught a book tower and brought it down all over him. “Yahhhh!” he cried, and crumbled beneath it. He immediately “died” with a long and mournful death rattle.
Loraine jumped to her feet and ran around the desk. She barked her ample right hip but didn’t lose momentum. Timing was everything in a situation like this. She knelt by her son and cradled his blonde head, hopelessly kinked like hers. She channeled Miss Scarlett, “Mah son, mah onlah boyah! Speak ta me!”
Childe opened his eyes. “Your accent sucks, dude.”
“Oh, yeah?” Loraine let his head thunk down on the books.
“Ow, man, hey!”
“Don’t call her your mother ‘man’,” Loraine said, pulling them both up. “Just because we moved to the sticks doesn’t mean you can lose your West Coast manners.”
Childe thought for a moment. “Ow, dude?”
“Better.” She grabbed him in a hug and smelled his head. He wasn’t quite to the wet puppy stage, but by the end of the day her lovely boy was going to be one mighty stinky boy. “Now, what’s so important you gotta bother your mother in the middle of her next Oscar-winning screenplay?”
Childe pulled away, but not without a return squeeze. “Don’t you have to have won an Oscar before getting a ‘next’ one?”
“You want to clean up the tower of Babel you just knocked over?”
“Okay, okay.” The play fled his face, drawing the open, easy features into the points Loraine never cared for. Childe had looked like that for a year after his father left them. “Darwin’s been gone for a while.”
“The Amazing Ninja Dog? How can you tell?”
“Seriously, mom. It doesn’t look like he’s eaten anything for like two or three days.” The rind of a whine edged his voice.
Loraine kept the rebuke out of hers. The only reason he was a little whiny was because he was scared and Childe wasn’t normally a fraidy cat. Matter of fact, he was a little too cavalier for her tastes from time to time, running around the woods and the empty town with just the beagle for company. Maybe it was a testosterone thing. Would’ve been great to have a man around the house to help her with that kind of thing. Would’ve been even better if said man was the kid’s father. Jerk. She took a breath. The screenplay could wait.
“You wanna go look for him?”
Childe’s shoulders dropped a little. “Thanks, Loraine.”
She leaned forward and kissed a freckle on the end of his nose. “Booger.”
* * *
Deep in the woods, Darwin was in trouble. The sturdy Beagle fought for his life at the bottom of a natural bowl caused by the subsistence of mineshaft collapse. Trees ringed the hollow like spectators, hushing and sighing as the scene played out. High in the shifting green, a cluster of black orbs reflected the drama below.
Darwin’s left back leg was caught. He could smell his own blood, which was BAD. He could feel the emptiness of his tummy, which was also BAD. But the real BAD, the NO-BAD was the howler pack that encircled him. They looked like dogs of a sort, but were not like him. They didn’t smell like houses or boys and boy-mothers. They smelled like dirt and woods. They smelled like hunger and flies and shit. One or two of them smelled like sickness. And they sounded like the broken sirens on the giant flash animals that used to roar by the old house in the dry place. These forest dogs were longer in the leg and snout than Darwin was, but not as heavy in the middle.
Darwin could also smell their fear of him and that was GOOD. The forest dogs reeked of fear; it was an undercurrent to almost all of their other smells. Right now, fear of his jaws crushing their weak spines and tearing their thin bellies was enough to keep them back in a growling circle. But over time their fear of starvation had swollen. It pulsed like a red swarm of angry gnats. Soon it would be greater than their fear of his teeth and the forest dogs would charge him.
Every so often, their crazy, hungry, terror-rage would explode and one of the forest dogs would snap at his brother. They would roll in a ball of spiky limbs and triangle teeth, then fall away from each other like wet leaves in
a November wind. Eventually, they would all frenzy at the same time and boil in at him. Darwin would be able to kill one or two but in the end there would be too many. And his little doggie belly was so empty.
Darwin had about twenty boy and boy-mother words and word combinations in his mental vocabulary, most of which dealt with his behavior and food. He didn’t know the name for the metal mouth-thing that had bitten his back leg around the ankle. He didn’t know that some well meaning human had placed it long ago in an effort to trap the forest dogs that had been killing neighborhood cats and stealing the odd chicken from time to time. That had been when Shard was full of humans. Now, the forest dogs had taken back the woods and ran the town with near impunity. But without the trash from the humans, their smaller pets and livestock, the forest dogs had little on which to feed. Darwin would be like a huge TREAT for them, like what he got when he was a VERY GOOD BOY.
A flash of boy memory floated through his mind, a smell that said Childe. Darwin whined and gave a cracked whimper of a bark. His throat was dry and the full-bodied beagle barks he so loved to voice sounded like a trombone run over by a truck. For a moment, he thought about just stopping. In as much as he could consider, Darwin thought about lying down, putting his head on his paws and closing his tired brown eyes. The forest dogs would come in and have him. He was never going to see his boy again or the boy-mother. There wasn’t much point in struggling any longer.
One of the forest dogs sensed Darwin’s thinning resolve and lunged. It moved with a sly, jerking grace, pretending to be in one spot for an instant then injecting itself into the kill zone just below Darwin’s snout. Darwin spread his front legs and angled his head down. He was already lower to the ground by design than the rangy forest dog and was able to dodge under its snapping teeth. Darwin growled a strange canine roar (had Childe seen his beloved pet he might think twice before inviting him onto the couch again) and shoved his own jaws at the forest dog’s throat. The metal mouth-thing threw pain up his hind leg and hauled him back. Had it not been attached to a short length of chain, Darwin would have torn out his attacker’s throat.
The forest dog recovered her place in the shifting ring of her fellows. Darwin showed her his teeth. These are what just missed you. The forest dog bared her own. These will tear you open. These will feed my pups. A soft summer breeze soughed through the canopy. A few fat green leaves floated to the ground.
The forest dogs grew quiet; those in front of Darwin lifted their noses over his head. Again, the scent of his boy, but stronger now. Darwin turned around and now all the animals looked up at the rim of the bowl. Climbing headfirst down the boney trunk of a venerable sycamore was a human boy. He clung to the bark with insectile prowess and righted himself on the ground with a deep bend to his lower back. Darwin’s head tilted to one side, one long ear flopping over. Was that his boy? It looked like his boy and the smell was the same, but the way he moved and something else… He barked a question.
The boy lifted a gawky wave and smiled, the sun glowing through his corona of curls. The forest dogs sent up a chorus of growls and yips; one of them sat back on his shit-stiff haunches and howled. They would not be denied their windfall feast. The smallest of their number had not tasted meat in a week. The boy made no sound and took a step down the slope.
Darwin lurched back. This was wrong. Why wasn’t Childe making the word sounds? Why wasn’t he calling DARWIN? Why wasn’t he shooing the forest dogs, calling them BAD and NO-BAD? The beagle could feel that the attention of the forest dogs was off him, but he still couldn’t flee or reach them to bite. What if they attacked the boy? Darwin whined and yapped but the boy took another step toward the circle.
Two of the forest dogs peeled off from the group and pounded up the side of the bowl, scrabbling for purchase in the leaves and roots. Their growls melted into slavering snarls as their snouts skinned back. Unmindful of the tearing fire in his back leg, Darwin lurched forward against the metal mouth-thing and was held fast. The forest dogs were going to kill his boy! He charged forward again and again but his wound only gouged deeper. Fresh blood pumped over his fur and slicked his footing. He barked and barked. One of the forest dogs nipped his tail from behind and in his fury Darwin whirled back on himself and caught the beast in his strong jaws. His teeth crashed down on the forest dog’s snout and splintered its nasal bones and the lower orbits of its eye-sockets. The blood in his mouth was bright triumph.
Darwin turned back in time to see something he couldn’t understand. Childe was holding one of the forest dogs by the neck, dangling it at his side as if he were examining a ragged coat. The other lay dead at his feet in three large pieces connected to each other by sinew and intestine. The forest dog in his grip snapped and flailed, saliva flying and legs gouging air. Childe painted it with cold fascination.
The three remaining forest dogs streaked up the ridge. Childe moved almost faster than Darwin could register. He pulled his victim close and bit down hard on the back of its neck. An instant later, he dropped the limp animal and faced the other attackers. Without looking, Childe leapt up and back and clung to the trunk of the sycamore. His arms and legs contorted so he was gripping the tree while facing out. The forest dogs stood up against the bark and commenced their rowdy complaints a few feet below.
Childe grinned through huge teeth and spat a long ropey substance. It enveloped the head of one of the forest dogs, but before it could pull away, Childe reached forward and began to reel it up toward him hand over hand. The last bit of strength ran out of Darwin and he lost consciousness watching the forest dog writhe and wrench at the end of the giant string. The voice of a gentle boy-mother, a voice he had never heard before, whispered Good boy, brave Darwin, in his head. He followed it down into sleep.
* * *
Two miles away from where Darwin had caught his leg in an old bear trap, Loraine and Childe Howard walked a narrow deer path. This wasn’t exactly a Park Service trail and they were deeper into the woods than she would have liked, but it was the kid’s dog. They’d look until they couldn’t.
Were it not for the grave nature of their hike, Loraine would have loved the walk. The woods were gorgeous. Or, if you liked Frost, lovely, dark and deep. She hated Frost, though—sanctimonious prick. Maybe it was just that Childe’s father, Jordan, had loved Frost. Anyway, she was definitely going to make a point of spending more time in the forest. She took a greedy breath and tasted verdant, cool earth, and emerald air.
She watched her son move in front of her with a steady gait, dodging under the odd spider web, electrified silver-white in a lucky bar of sun. Like a lot of city dwellers, the idea of getting lost didn’t really occur to Loraine. It was like any other path, you just walked backward along it until you ended where you began. That and the fact that she was marking every fifth tree trunk or so with a blaze of fantastically orange lipstick; “Radioactive Rita” she thought it was called.
Loraine held her hand up in front of her, fingers tight and pointing to the side. She squinted and stacked her other hand on top and then again. She’d seen this trick on the Survival Network and used it whenever she could. You stacked your hands from the horizon to the bottom edge of the sun. Each finger was approximately fifteen minutes. So, four hands from the horizon equaled four hours. If they hadn’t found Darwin yet, they’d start back two hours before sunset.
Childe looked at his watch and stopped. He faced his mother. “Sun’s going to set in about four hours,” he said. “We should probably head back way before that.”
Loraine smirked. “Show off.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing. You’re right.”
“You were doing that thing with your hands, weren’t you?”
“Quit smiling at me, punko, or when we find your dumb dog we’re eating him for din—”
A long howl drooled through the trees.
Childe’s eyes widened. “What the hell was that?”
“Watch that mouth, mister.” Loraine scanned the fores
t, eyes darting into the dark spaces. “It was a coyote. Shit.”
“Watch that mouth.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She breathed long over her teeth. “You know what, kiddo?”
“Aw, don’t say we hafta go back! It’s just a coyote. They hate people! It’ll be okay.”
“I know they’re not big fans of human beings, but they’re on the comeback in this part of the country. I read it in National Geographic.”
“The one that’s been on the coffee table for, like, ever? I read that same article. That’s how come I know they’re afraid of people.”
“Do you also remember the bit about how that’s changing now that people are moving more and more into their territory? Do you remember about how they’re actually going after small pets and—” Childe’s shoulders rose up around his ears. She put her hands on them, the smell of insect repellant and sweaty boy rose into her nostrils. “Honey,” she lied, “I’m sure Darwin’s too big.”
Another series of howls and alien canine noises ricocheted through the trees. It was impossible to tell distances in these woods. The hills rose and fell like waves and bounced the sound all over the place. They could be five miles away. They could be just over the next rise. And there were abandoned mine tunnels all over. What the hell had she been thinking coming back here as cavalier as her son and his dog on a summer romp? A drop of sweat rolled out of her hairline. A fat fly droned. It was suddenly hot and very damp.
“We should go,” she said. Loraine looked over her son’s head into the green halls of the forest. Shadows shifted and twigs cracked. “We should go now.”
Childe yanked free of her grip and bolted down the faint trail. “Childe Jordan Howard!” she shouted. “Get your ass back here. Right! Now!” But the boy was already twenty yards away, bounding like the deer that had made the trail. She started after him, huffing and puffing, her forty-seven-year-old lungs dry and hot. She watched his red and white striped t-shirt recede and began to feel real fear for the first time that afternoon.