by Jeff Carlson
The cashier never bothers to check whose name is on the envelope. He just rings it up.
So... Would other people's photos be more interesting than mine? Were they having better vacations, bigger homes, crazy sex on camera, or training ninja dogs able to walk a high wire above gasoline-soaked flaming metal spikes?
All writers are voyeurs. We like to get into other lives and times, or we wouldn't be writing, and most artists I know are the same. Whether they paint, sculpt, act, or sing, we share that urge capture some aspect of the human experience.
Eventually I got to know the girl in the photo department enough to ask what she saw. "This must be an interesting job," I said.
"Sometimes," she said. But mostly she just sat by the same machine, wearing the same white gloves, looking at almost-the-same groups of people standing in almost-the-same groups and smiling.
I thought that was interesting, too. There were patterns in our lives that most of us didn't see — only the girl at the photo counter. Mundane or not, the pattern was there.
One of my childhood friends is a sculptor. He's gone on to design artwork, statues, and other structures in city parks, inside libraries, in front of Target stores, and at the tram station outside the Denver Broncos' stadium, but first he suffered through a long stretch of poverty as he developed his portfolio and his reputation.
As a wedding present to Diana and I, he presented us with a four foot salmon left over from a fountain he developed for a sidewalk near California's state capital buildings.
"This is cool," I said. "Can we put it in our yard? I mean, is it weather-proof?"
"It's cement mixed with epoxy," he explained. "If it was bigger, you could use it for a shield against a nuclear blast."
So that's how Sauber's statue was born.
CANINUS
There was definitely something wrong with the dog. Cancer, maybe. An eleven-month-old shepherd should be its own riot of energy and noise. This poor girl sprawled on the examining table like a pile of yarn, utterly lethargic, offering no resistance to Diana's manipulations, wincing at the light and breathing shallowly. Her mild fever couldn't account for this stupor. Diana would test for parasites, but office files showed that the shepherd had been wormed on schedule.
Cancer at this age would be unusual, like leukemia or cystic fibrosis in a child. The world was a cesspool. Diana knew anger wouldn't help, yet she felt a familiar dull heat surge through her chest. Sickness was such an insult.
"You say she's better at night?" she asked.
A pit bull of a man, short and pudge-faced, the owner spoke in a grunt. "Not much," he said.
Diana glanced at the window, where late afternoon sunlight lanced through the drawn mini-blinds. If the summer heat was adding to the shepherd's problems, the briskness of the air conditioned office should have perked her up. As Diana's last walk-in of the day, the shepherd had been kept waiting most of an hour. Plenty of time to cool down. Diana guessed there were other periods of improvement during the day while the owner was at work, and that he must be imagining a pattern where there wasn't one.
"And she's not eating," Diana prompted him.
He shook his head.
"Are you sure she hasn't been fighting?"
"What?" He shook his head again.
"This isn't a self-inflicted wound."
He blinked, then stepped forward with a frown. Diana gently sifted her fingers through the shepherd's neck ruff to expose the newly-healed bite marks that she'd discovered. Some dogs were limber enough to gnaw open the base of their own necks in a vain attempt to destroy fleas or mange, but the angle of these punctures was all wrong. The attacker had come from behind and above. Strangely, it was a tightly localized pattern rather than the body-wide bruises and cuts typical of a fight. Diana might have thought that a rutting male had latched onto the shepherd, but the poor girl wasn't in heat.
Even more bizarre, it almost looked like the scars were layered, as if the bites had been inflicted over a period of time.
Diana was surprised that the owner hadn't noticed the wounds when they were fresh. The shepherd's jugular vein had nearly been opened. There must have been plenty of blood.
"My fence," the owner said. "She can't get out."
Diana didn't argue. He could believe what he wanted.
As a vet, Diana preferred dealing with chatty folks because they were easier to judge as care-givers, but off duty she favored the company of more quiet types. She enjoyed making her own sense of things, rather than being battered with the obvious. This made her something of a stranger in Gen M culture, but her pet huskies, Sam and Sandy, were enough for her. The three of them led a small, satisfying life together.
Diana had recently spent her thirtieth birthday alone in a hot bath with a book and some wine, and didn't regret it a bit. Invisible beneath the layer of bubbles, her slim hands had recreated the perfect lazy urgency that her ex's fingers had once built inside her — without his roughness or his greedy kiss.
Pretending, alone, was new for Diana. But she knew what was good for herself. She hadn't moved from the suburbs to the San Francisco peninsula to find new friends but to escape her old ones, who'd ridiculed her for becoming such a solitary cliché after the divorce. Spinsters aren't supposed to be veterinarians, they're librarians, Beth had said, laughing.
People could be such shitty idiots.
#
Diana was glad to lock the front door behind the owner. She had more than an hour's work ahead of her, yet there was a slim chance that she could get in a quick walk afterward. The days were still getting longer.
As she glanced through the window over the empty parking lot, calculating the sun's fall toward the blocky horizon of highrises, Diana felt a strange sense of foreboding. She had always admired animals for their heightened instincts, which seemed quicker and more honest than complicated human emotion. She’d tried to adopt that centeredness herself and to act on hunches as if they were fact. Leaving her ex had been a test of intuition, and a successful one.
Diana wasn't sure yet whether she trusted the owner. He seemed to love his shepherd. He obviously combed the poor girl regularly, and he’d protested about being separated for the night... but Diana had never seen an animal so close to catatonia except when abused.
Back in the examining room, Diana noted that the shepherd's listless demeanor did not change now that they were alone. The poor girl's glazed stare made her feel guilty for being so concerned about getting out in time to get some exercise.
Finding a vein was surprisingly hard — and when Diana succeeded in drawing blood, its pale color made her frown. She was also glad she was wearing latex gloves. Human beings were not susceptible to most canine diseases, or visa-versa, but she always had to be extra careful to avoid carrying something home to Sam and Sandy.
In her closet-sized lab, Diana pulled an old microscope from the shelf and squeezed a tiny drop of a sample between two slide plates. It proved to be mostly plasma, the red cell count too low, the white corpuscles swarming furiously.
The shepherd was dying of what appeared to be a viral infection, which made it all the stranger that the bite wounds had healed so cleanly. Diana had never seen anything like this.
She gave the poor girl a dose of Claivax, a wide spectrum anti-viral, then two shots of vitamins. Unfortunately it would be at least seventy-two hours before the samples she'd mail to BioDyne were processed, animals being a last priority, but if—
The shepherd spasmed upward from the table like a gout of fire. The dog was fluid muscle and gnashing teeth.
Diana fell away, cracking the base of her spine against the counter. She instinctively raised both arms to protect herself as the shepherd coughed and spat.
Training made Diana move forward to help, her hands reaching out now, but fear caught her in mid-stride. She stared.
The shepherd convulsed, paws and muzzle drumming on the table, and then the poor creature also froze. Just as quickly, the shepherd relaxed, her head and legs
dropping to the table with gentle thumps. It was over.
Diana stepped forward, then hesitated again. She saw blood mixed with the shepherd's spittle.
The poor creature was dead.
#
The recording on the owner's answering machine seemed uncharacteristically jolly. "No one's home right now, so leave us a message," the man said.
She didn't. The last time a patient died in the office had been right after New Year's, and the family was right there to take the Siamese home.
Diana knew there were heavy plastic body-bags somewhere, but she was too upset to remember whether they'd been put in storage or were in one of the examining room's half-dozen cabinets.
She focused on the shepherd. Internal bleeding, heart failure, possible stroke... Such a powerful allergic reaction to Claivax was unheard of, and Diana tentatively decided that the shepherd's death could not be related to the injection.
She cleaned the floor and table slowly. Tending to the corpse became a meticulous ritual, a kind of penance. Then she called the owner again. Still no one home.
#
It was twilight before Diana walked out to her car, still shaken and thinking queerly. She glanced over her shoulder twice, provoked by an unidentified feeling. It felt like fear. She told herself that guilt was only natural.
Bad things happened to good people. That was the stumbling, random way of the world. Her mother liked to say the important thing was how each person dealt with their burdens.
The city looked different, hard, sterile, even threatening. The surreal pinkish hue cast by the streetlamps only heightened her strange mood. Waiting at a stoplight beside a hulking bus, fenced off from the dark sky by power and phone lines, Diana realized she'd passed through three entire blocks without seeing a single tree or any vegetation whatsoever except a few weeds struggling up from the sidewalk.
This was no place for animals, or for humans, really, living in boxes stacked ten high and in the straight narrow canyons between, reabsorbing their own filth and pollution through lungs, stomach, and skin.
She'd wanted to be anonymous outside of work and to be her own boss in a private clinic — but she spent her days treating claws fractured on concrete, irritated eyes, asthma, digestive disorders, and bones and bodies smashed by cars.
It was a losing battle. The sheer density of the population was the very reason that the city was so inhospitable... And yet she was content here, both at home in her own little space with Sandy and Sam, and at the office where she met so many other animal lovers and their companions.
Pets softened people, awakened compassion and a sense of responsibility in them, traits that all too often otherwise seemed nonexistent.
Lost in her musings, Diana drove right past a parking space just half a block from her building. By the time she realized her luck, another car had pulled into it.
She found another space down by the corner.
That spider-light feeling whispered up the back of her neck again as she stepped out of her car. She glanced around. Full darkness had come. Illuminated windows cast a hazy gleam upon the rows of parked cars. She saw nothing.
Then a low, sneaking shadow detached itself from the blackness beneath a station wagon. Inhuman eyes gleamed back at her. Diana's heart jumped and she took a step back. Then she grew angry with herself.
Men were something to be scared of — muggers, rapists — not a neighbor's dog or some stray. Yet she was very aware of the distance to her front door.
The compact shape paced closer, strong, deliberate, its glinting eyes never wavering from her.
Diana spun and ran.
#
She felt strangely sad to see Sandy and Sam, who trampled each other — and her — in their eagerness for contact. Thoughts of the dead shepherd were like a tapeworm in her mind.
Sam and Sandy sensed her anxiety, the way they understood all her moods. They calmed quickly and she knelt to meet them, and all three became a roving pack hug of fur and comfortingly familiar smells. Sam and Sandy were husky-lab mixes, smart, loyal — and stinky. Diana could never bring herself to rob them of their identities by washing them, because scent was a canine's most crucial sense.
Visitors might have considered her ground-floor apartment somewhat ripe, but she didn't have visitors.
After giving both huskies an individual scratching and nonsense murmurs of praise, Diana led them to the side door. The so-called yard was only four feet wide but it ran the length of the entire building. It was just enough room to toss a ball. The landlord refused to let her install a pet-door, but, like most dogs, Sandy and Sam had an amazing capacity to hold their bladders all day.
Back inside, both huskies got a chew treat for being so wonderful and Diana allowed herself a glass of wine.
She put a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove, diced some garlic and green onions, then went to her room with a second glass. She distracted herself from memories of the ugly day with glances at the mirror, smoothing her nylons from her calves, opening her blouse from her small, perfect chest, knowing that true escape would come later in a hot soak, knowing—
Sam and Sandy howled, not their usual throaty bark but a panicked yelping.
It felt as if the doses of adrenaline from earlier in the day were still in Diana's bloodstream. Her limbs surged with fear and clumsy strength. She threw down her blouse and rummaged through her nightstand, then ran.
Sam fell silent before Diana reached the end of the hall, as Sandy's baying took on an even higher pitch.
There was another dog in the living room.
Sam pressed against the intruder, his nose ducked submissively low but his tail at stiff attention, his hips cocked and hind-legs quivering, enthralled. Diana glimpsed his red penis as it grew erect. Sandy, still baying, fell quiet and also ducked her head as the intruder turned on her, as if its sparking eyes were some sort of weapon.
The utter wrongness of the huskies' reactions sent a heavy pain tumbling through Diana's entire body.
"Sam!" The word came out as a howl.
Empty of thought, only instinct, Diana thrust her .32 forward and fired twice. Directly behind the intruder, small blossoms of splinters burst from the side door.
Less than ten feet separated them. Diana sighted carefully and fired again. And a third crater appeared in the door.
The locked door.
Sandy squeezed under the loveseat, moaning, but Sam seemed oblivious to the gunshots and began to awkwardly hump the air. The intruder was also unaffected.
Conscious thought returned to Diana in a cold shocking swarm as the intruder faced her, its lips drawn back from a mouthful of unnaturally large fangs. Part of Diana noted clinically that its nose was dry and scaling, its paws misshapen.
It was the shepherd, the dead shepherd, whom Diana had left zipped in a heavy bag inside an industrial refrigerator.
Would silver bullets work? No, that was for werewolves and this was no oversized hulk of muscle — it was a shadow, a mesmerizer.
Vampire.
The clues had been there all along: the multiple bites where another caninus had fed repeatedly on its seduced victim. Diana had also noted the shepherd's weakness, lack of appetite, and bad reaction to daylight. Had an infected human somehow managed to pass the curse to a favorite pet, immortalizing it, or had the werewolf and vampire legends always been confused?
Diana thought of the Claivax. The drug had caused a violent reaction from whatever had been incubating in the shepherd before it had died, but vampirism was clearly more than a viral disease — more powerful and more evil.
The shepherd had died.
She was certain of that.
It had died, and then it had resurrected. Perhaps the Claivax had even forced the transformation as the paranormal disease grew beyond some critical level in response to the drug's attack. These creatures must be extremely rare or even the conveniently dense feeding ground of the city would have long since been overwhelmed.
Wood and garlic wer
e supposed to be weapons—
Even as Diana began to turn toward the kitchen, the shepherd pounced. The logic blasting through her head vanished. She fired once more, point-blank. The shepherd didn't notice. It slashed at her forearm and unprotected chest as they fell together. Diana felt blinded more by horror and the suddenness of motion than by pain.
The floor slammed awareness back into her, an awareness shot through with agony. The shepherd dug through her soft belly and scraped its fangs against her flexing spine as she thrashed, her scream reduced to a wet sigh.
But the shepherd wasn't interested in her. It did not feed. It turned and left her as everything went black.
Diana dreamed that Sandy was burning. The high note of Sandy's yowling bespoke complete helplessness... and silence fell again as Diana woke, dull and hazy.
She saw Sandy creep out from under the loveseat stiffly, compelled, as the shepherd stood waiting. Satisfied by this total obedience, the shepherd moved past Sandy to Sam, sniffing briefly at his maleness before latching onto his neck. He collapsed with a loving groan.
Diana wept, clawing weakly at the carpet, only vaguely aware of the sticky red bog spreading through the soft fibers beneath her or the flecks of meat that her hands encountered.
Why had the shepherd come here? Because she was its last memory? For revenge or sheer evil? How intelligent could it be?
Then she remembered how it had simply walked away after neutralizing her as any sort of threat. Vampires thirsted for their own. Perhaps it had scented Sam and Sandy among her things and fixated on them as its first meal. Why no longer mattered.
Steadying her arm demanded more physical strength than her body seemed to contain, but Diana's mind had shrunk to one rigid point and there was energy in desperation.
Her first shot was bad. It took Sandy in the flank as Sandy stood watching the shepherd bleed Sam. Sandy yelped, waking from her trance, and Diana shot her in the face. Sandy crumpled.
The feasting shepherd didn't lift its sopping muzzle from Sam's neck until Diana put a bullet through Sam's chest — not until the blood flow stopped as Sam died.