Because it was making the most terrible sound I'd ever heard. A pitiful, pleading sound that held in its undertones the vision of painful death and loneliness. The sound cut straight through my brain.
It was a girl in a pink dress, a frilly pink dress; a dress that had been ripped and torn, as if to make bandages. There were pieces missing from the dress. There were pieces missing from her face.
And it swayed there like some hideous underwater growth, anchored deep in the broken roadway, its stalk a softly hissing vapor, its stem a moist pink fall of torn cloth, its flower only part of a face, one cheek torn away as if by fangs, as if by a wild beast. And the eyes...
It swayed toward me, and away, toward me, and away...
I howled.
I was getting the vision from Vic's subconscious!
Then I ran. I dodged sidewise and around it as it swayed toward me, the eyes, those awful eyes filled with anguish and death, rolling in the sockets to track me as I dodged past.
Then I ran. Scampering sloppily as I turned my head to look behind me. It had revolved; it was facing toward me, still anchored in the macadam, still floating like a plume of seaweed. My claws made little ratcheting sounds on the pike as my feet went out from under me and I slid on my belly.
Then I ran. Up again and howling like my ancestors, chasing Vic and trying to get his mind out of that pit!
As bad as it had ever been for us, this could be the worst; because there wasn't any way to fight it. Something had happened to him with that girl, that Quilla June Holmes, that frilly pink dress. Something different from what he knew of women out here in the deadlands where it was make it or die, that simply, survival first and last and all the crannies in-between. No time for soft and sweet and Tom Sawyer walking Becky Thatcher's picket fence. He'd had a demonstration of what wetbrain could do: she'd coshed him over the head and lured him downunder. But something had been born in him, some human emotion like love. And I couldn't resist it or pillory him for it because I'd been trying to instill something like that in him since we'd come together.
But not like this. Not in a way that would collapse his grip on reality. That I couldn't permit. He was my boy and each of us was the only thing that stood between the other and getting wasted.
But now he hated me. Inside him, way down in his little kid's brain—because that's all he was, a fifteen-year-old kid—he had done something he thought was awful, and he'd got his guilt all twisted up in there and he blamed me. What the hell, why not? Wasn't it good old Blood who'd eaten his fill?
Another ghost came out of the roadway.
Right in front of me.
I could barely stop.
I put my ass down and skidded, trying to scrabble my claws into the blacktop, but that was a waste of time. I slid along tearing up good meat and tried to get my feet under me, and went around and around like a crab on ice...
...and I went right through it!
Another little girl in a pink dress. With more rips and more parts missing and a bloody stub hanging off the left shoulder where an arm should have been. And this time it reached for me. And this time I felt it. An icicle right through my hind-quarters. The chill steel of it reaching into my skin and trying to pull me out of myself. I screamed with pain and howled with fear and kept right on going.
And Vic was still walking. Still heading west and hating me deep inside himself for killing his love and then eating it. And I couldn't even catch up with him.
“Vic! Vic, for the love of God, Vic, stop!”
Nothing. Didn't even turn around to see what was making me deranged. He'd settled into some awful fugue state, self-hypnotized, just walking because it was automatic action, one foot in front of the other. How long he'd been like that, and me not doing anything about it because I wanted to let him work it out himself, not realizing he was paralyzing himself, I don't know. Maybe it had been a day, or two days. And I was half-insane myself from eating that lizard and there must have been something in its bloodstream, maybe some crazy psychedelic or psilocybin fraction that reacted with the chains of amino acids forming the peptide molecules in my brain that stimulated the telepathic ability in me—stimulated what the Third War neurophysiologists who mutated my ancestors called “psychoendorphins"—so I was picking up not just Vic's thoughts, but his buried fears and fantasies, his unconscious guilt and hatred. And that lizard meat had fucked up my psychoendorphins so I was seeing and feeling and maybe dying from fright of nothing but phantoms from Vic's mind swamp.
Three chewed ghosts, ectoplasmic blood oozing from rips and tears in their flesh, slithered out of the Turnpike around me. They had me surrounded. I felt my eyeballs popping out of my head and my skin crawling and I went straight through the one directly in front of me.
My heart stopped.
The stuff in my veins and arteries just quit flowing to my heart, it froze solid, turned to rime, and everything went dead white and I crashed onto my face and died. I lay there. Ghosts came for me.
It was raining again. It was still dark. I was dead and it was raining on me. Pretty ratty, I thought. Least he could've done was get my carcass out of the wet. After all, it's been over three years, and it's not as if we were strangers. When I wanted to be left alone, to relieve myself against some salubrious standpipe or nifty bush, there he always was, just staring at me. “Do I gawk at you when you're squatting and grunting?” I used to say. So what happens when I need him to schlep me into the dry? He's gone and left me.
I called him an ingrate a few times, and then I opened my eyes.
Well, imagine my surprise to find I wasn't dead!
I had rolled over, apparently, and I was still alive. The ghosts of shredded little girls were gone.
It was, no doubt, something I ate ... I thought. Like a purple and pink yecchhh that I'll never again so help me never masticate. Plays unquestioned hell with my psychoendorphins.
I turned my head and there was Vic, sitting all crouched up at the side of the pike, hunkered down on his haunches with his arms wrapped around his knees, just staring off across nothing with unblinking eyes. I had a cataleptic boy on my paws. The warrior solo who would defend my sensitive self had gone all the way around the bend and down the road. Eyes wide open, he was stunned and silent, soaking wet and shivering even in the warm, sticky rain.
Every inch of my body hurt. Whatever energy pool had been tapped by radioactive or psychedelically altered psychoendorphins, it had unleashed enough power not only to conjure up those demons from Vic's unconscious, but had freighted them with actual killing ability. I was hurt. Every nerve in my body had been shorted and fused. And I hadn't recovered from the wounds I'd sustained in the YMCA fight or the deprivation I'd suffered waiting for lovesick Vic to come back from the downunder. Sometimes I marvel at my stamina in the face of adversity. A noble nature is the answer, of course.
Thinking just that ... and also wondering how the hell I was going to jolt my nearly catatonic buddy Vic out of his potentially suicidal fugue state ... I tried to get up. It was beyond my not inconsiderable abilities. I lay there whimpering.
The Noble Canine's Burden—A.K.A. Vic A.K.A. Albert—paid no attention. Hey, dipstick! I yelled, mind-to-mind.
Which brought his unconscious back to an awareness that I was still in the world. And the programmer of hate in there got right back on the job. Another ghost started to ooze out of the crumbled Turnpike about six feet in front of me. It had one eye and its lower jaw was ripped away; blood was pumping out of the neck, all over the sweet little pink dress.
I knew it was curtains this time. I couldn't move.
And then, when everything was as black as it could get, when troubles were greater than any one poor dog ought to have to contend with, when the darkness before the dawn was so utterly ebony that one could vomit at the thought of how shitty it all was ... things got much worse.
That ratbastard killer Fellini and his slave-wagon came thundering down the Ohio Turnpike straight for us.
I started
picking up random bits of thought formations long before I saw that batch of cuties in the flesh. Flesh is the operative term when speaking about Fellini. Loves his widdle boys, him does! Catamite is the exact word. Finds the poor little beggars starving in the ruins, coddles and squeezes them, pinches their cheeks and feeds them canned peaches to fill out their little butts and then turns them hind-end-to.
It is with difficulty that I think about Fellini and his gigantic roverpak of disgustos. My lunch repeats on me when I can't sweep the image out of my head.
And as for love of Vic and me, Fellini has about as much as I have for screamers. We'd managed to steal enough food from him that he had us on his list as A#1 removables.
Vic out of it. Miserable rain. Mean things in the woods. Darkness. Out in the open. No protection. A ghost coming for me. And Fellini's bunch hurtling down on us.
Death, where is thy sting?
I'm coming, Blood, just be patient.
Then it dawned on me: what the hell was Fellini doing way out here? He practically owned the city. He'd whipped every other roverpak into subjugation; he wouldn't have left the city unless something catastrophic had happened back there.
It was logical they'd be on this route: it was the only main trail west we'd been able to discover, the lane of least resistance. So I understood that. But what was behind Fellini, what was back in the city that drove him away ... that had to be something neither Vic nor I could cope with.
I had to get Vic out of the way. Off the road. Into the woods. If Fellini saw him or me it would be a long and less-than-classy death he'd program for us.
I willed myself to move. Not much, and not very well, but I moved. A little bit to the side ... and the ghost swayed in my direction. A little bit to the other side ... and the ghost followed my lead.
Come on, lady, I thought, I'm sorry about dining alfresco but, like right now, I was dying. So give me a break here.
Bur break came there none.
So okay, so no more Mr. Compromise, no more Mr. Rational, no more Mr. Sweet Personality. Now we do what we do best—which is purely, simply staying alive!
And I found it in me somewhere, don't ask where, and I was up like the sprinter of old, and I ran! Hyaah! Eat confusion, noncorporeal wraith! Left, right, left again, and I was past her, empty eyesocket, shredded jaw, pumping carotid and all ... past her like a shot, skidding forward and hitting Vic so damned hard he went over on his back.
Then I jumped on his goddam chest and I bit him in the ear!
And let me tell you, that woke him up.
“Fellini!” I said, mind-to-mind.
He did a terrific huh-what? And I said again, very slowly (noticing the ghost had vanished when the psychotic glaze left his eyes), “We are about to be run down by Fellini's slave-wagon, massuh. We are about to be found by the warm and wonderful Fellini who will cut your balls off and stuff them in your teen-aged mouth. What say we get in the wind. Albert?”
“You bit my ear off.”
“Not off. Just nibbled it a little.”
“Why'd you do that, you little asshole?”
“Fit of pique. Imminent death does that to me.”
“Jesus Christ, dog, I'm bleeding all over the place.”
“Couldn't happen to a nicer place.”
He kept putting his filthy hand up to his chewed ear and then taking it away to see the blood. Wasn't that much blood. Couldn't see it without moonlight, anyhow. Just making a big thing of nothing. I didn't even clamp my jaws. Just gummed him a trifle.
“I'll probably get tetanus and die.”
“Not before Fellini throws some meat to your ass, I'll betcha.”
That caught his attention. That, and the sound of the drivers cracking their whips over the slaves harnessed into Fellini's cart. You could hear it now. I could hear it now.
Vic could hear it now. “Jesus,” he whispered.
“The same,” I said. “Shall we go?”
And he was up off his butt, and we were running.
Naturally, that was a stretch of Turnpike where the fence flanking the road hadn't gone down. So we had to run straight ahead down the blacktop. And then there he was, coming down the straightaway behind us...
Fellini, that king sleazo, and about a hundred rovers, all slavering and screaming and spotting us in the dark.
How?
Well, I'm not the only pooch who can read minds, if the truth be known. Call it bad luck. Call it caprice. Stick it in your hat and call it macaroni, for all I care; the point was that we were seen. And one of those little punk-stickers yelled, “It's that solo and the dog!” and I heard the whiskey voice of Fellini bellow, “Git'm! Git me thet boy!”
And a wave of skirmishers detached itself from the pak and came after us full-buck and slavering.
“You just seem to make friends wherever you go,” I said to Vic, running, running, running.
Somebody got off a shot that may have outraged a tree back in the woods, but didn't even come close to the blurs we had become vamoosing outta there. Trouble was, it gave the other rovers an idea and, unaccustomed as they were to actually thinking, they began plinking at us. Now if one crosseyed sonofabitch is shooting at you, only random chance can cause you angst, but when it's about fifty loonies all firing at once, the air gets filled with bad luck.
“Over here!” Vic yelled out loud.
He cut right toward the fence, but I didn't know how he was going to go over it, with or without me. As it turned out he didn't. We went under. Storms had washed away a gully under a stretch of the chain-link and we slid under in the mud and came up on the other side and broke for the woods as fast as we could, our feet sucking up slop at every step. Ten seconds more and we'd made it. Right into the trees and thick underbrush, my coat full of nasty little foxtails that worked their way in and would have to be removed one by one later by Vic. If we lived that long.
The rain was getting heavier, and that was good. It would slow our pursuers. Nothing could slow us ... not even the thick spiderwebs that hung like festoons from every tree. They clung and tore as we smashed through them. A sudden break in the swollen storm clouds overhead revealed the waning moon skidding along high above the overcast; and in that fleeting moment of aluminum light the forest was lit like a carnival midway.
Spiderwebs, as big as the topsails of frigates hung necklaced with raindrops, silver and exquisite, everywhere. Incredibly complex territorial imperatives of master spinners, bough to bough, bole to bole, vanishing into the topmost branches; orb-webs and safety lines hung everywhere, thick as snowflakes and intricate beyond belief. We ran deeper into the forest, smashing through the veils of silk, destroying the ornate fretwork like barbarians in a cathedral.
Behind us we could hear the fifty rovers of Fellini's pak slamming through; the sound of their boots slapping against the carpet of slippery leaves and mud, spread out behind us, made it seem we were being chased by a legion of angry ducks.
We ran up a mudbank and Vic slipped, sliding back down on his stomach. As he floundered to his feet he caught his right foot in the protruding root of a rotted-out stump. I saw him catch it, started to teep a caution, but he moved before I could get the thought off. I heard the pop of ligaments and he screamed.
The ducks stopped slapping and listened.
“This way!” one of them yelled, and then they altered course and were right on our trail again.
Vic had sat down again. His face was a withered potato of pain. “Oh, Jesus Jesus Jesus, oh, Christ that hurts!”
There are no atheists in foxholes.
“How bad is it?” I said.
“Can't tell. Heard something rip. Oh shit it hurts!”
He was nursing the foot, holding the muddy boot with both hands. I started thinking very fast. Doing what I do best.
“Can you pull yourself up a little bit?”
He nodded, knowing I had something in mind.
“The stump. It's hollow. Crawl up in there, in the side. There's a big hole.”
>
“They'll see it, too. They'll find us.”
“Do it.”
He did it. He sculled backward on hands and buttocks and managed to slip inside the short pillar of the tree stump. I turned my ass to him and began scrabbling, throwing mud in a thick spatter. I dug in and worked fast, not even stopping when the pain in my hind legs made me feel as if everything inside, so recently frozen, was on fire. I covered him with mud and leaves and bits of mulch until the hole was packed and he was safe inside. Then I limped off to a low depression between two thick bushes, burrowed under the foliage and into a cover of leaves packed solid with rain.
It was dark, it was wet, it was tough going through this stretch of the forest with the spiderwebs and the branches sweeping the ground. With a little luck they'd get up that mudbank and keep going. With a dash of decency on the part of the uncaring universe, we'd make it.
Three hours later they'd gone, and we were safe.
For a long time I didn't think they'd give up. Fellini was obviously completely crazy with hatred for me and Vic by this time. But finally, long before sunrise, they gave up, the last straggling skirmisher beat his way back to the pak, and though I couldn't hear the slave-wagon rolling west on the Turnpike, I knew they were gone. The air was clear of thoughts.
But I stayed put for another hour, just to be sure.
Lying in the cold like that, with the rain that had turned very cold at last when it would do the most harm, after having been speared by ghosts, after having opened wounds only minimally healed, weary and frightened, with foxtails that had worked their way through my matted fur into my skin ... I was barely able to drag myself out of the covering protection of the moldy leaves.
I slipped in the downspill runoff of mud from the high bank, and in the emerging light of day I could just barely make out the stump where Vic had been immured with mud.
There was movement around the stump.
The light wasn't good enough to see what it was...
Not ants...
No, it was something bigger. Black. Big and black and moving. I moved forward slowly...