by Andrew Pyper
I expect Mom to head for the front door but instead she veers to the left, starting for the side.
“Aren’t they in there?”
“Inside,” she says. “But not in the house.”
I don’t like how she’s in charge again, even with a gun pointed at her, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to swing control back my way. She knows things, can do things. She is my mother and father rolled into one.
We pass around to the back where there’s another structure, this one not trying to look like anything other than what it is: a cement block, flat topped and windowless. It frightens me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s sort of the control center of the whole place,” she says. “You said you wanted the fence turned off, right?”
At the narrow end of the building, there’s a steel door with an entry code pad next to it much like the one next to the underground porthole door. Mom places her hand onto the screen and the door latch clunks opens.
“You want me to—”
“What’s the code?” I ask.
“What difference—”
“Tell me.”
She barks out a laugh. “Your father’s birthday,” she says without turning around. “Do you remember?”
“July 4, 1951.”
“Very good!”
“Open the door.”
There’s something to smell before there’s something to see. Acrid urine, wet fur, animal waste.
“What’s in there?”
“Your sister,” Mom says, and steps into the dark before I tell her to.
61
I LIFT THE GUN HIGHER as if it’s a flashlight that will show the way. As soon as the shadow of the structure’s interior falls over me, the weapon feels all the more useless. A dead weight in my hand as meaningless as a bundle of keys.
It takes a moment to realize I’m not following Mom, but the whimpering.
“Is that a dog?”
“Poor thing,” Mom says, dimly visible ten feet ahead of me, the light from the partly open door showing her working at the buttons and dials of a power board against the right wall. “Not my idea. The security contractor thought it would be sensible in case external conflicts reached all the way up here. A guard dog. And wouldn’t you know it, I’ve completely forgotten to feed the creature. I’m frankly surprised it’s still alive. I mean, look at it.”
To her left, a fenced pen. Inside, pacing through mounds of its own filth, is a German shepherd mix of some kind, its hackles raised and head dipped so low it could be crossbred with a hyena. It never stops whimpering. Somehow the tenor of it makes it clear that it’s not voicing its loneliness but its simulation, a bluff meant to get one of us to open its cage door. It looks at me when it comes my way, and when it turns, it swivels its head to keep staring at me.
“The howling,” I say. “It was the dog.”
“That was part of why I had to slip away. I was concerned that one of you might follow the noise it was making and find the house and this place and—well, you did find the lab, so my coming here to feed the beast was a waste of time, as it turns out.”
I keep watching the dog as it watches me. It pulls me away from why I’m here, what Mom is doing.
“There were two originally, you know,” she says.
“Two what?”
“Dogs. This one and one at the lab. When I left my mother and Steven down there after their unsuccessful therapies, the two of them decided to let the animal out. God knows why. Well, there wasn’t food for all of them so—oh dear. Steven had to take care of it. That was all the mess on the floor you no doubt discovered. That dog. There was a fight. The dog lost.”
Mom squeezes her chin as she works the keys on the board, recalls some sequence in her mind, starts clicking again.
“I suppose the smell of it got to him eventually,” she goes on, “because Steven knocked that second door down, hammered it down with such—”
“You left them down there to die?”
She looks at me. “There was food.”
“But you closed the doors on them. Your mother and son. You locked them down there.”
“They weren’t my mother and son anymore. Nevertheless, I didn’t have the heart to—”
“Where’s Bridge?”
I shake my head as if pulling myself out of an attempted hypnosis.
“She’s close.”
“You said she—”
“You wanted me to turn off the fence,” she says, and punches a button on the board. “There. It’s off.”
She’s counting on me to speak next. The back-and-forth rules of conversation are a powerful convention, as some study of hers has probably told her, because what she does is so straightforward it takes me completely by surprise. Instead of honoring the gun, instead of waiting for my words, she shifts away from the control board and slides back the bolt on the dog’s cage.
It stops whimpering at the same time it comes at me.
I was right.
This occurs to me in the fragment of time of the dog’s advance, its claws scratching on the hard floor, the show of its teeth like the raising of a pink curtain.
It was faking.
It’s not the only thought I have either. The animal has been trained to not hurt Mom, only others.
Which means she was lying about having nothing to do with it.
Which means the dog was her idea.
“On!” she shouts, which makes no sense until the dog’s teeth wrap around my ankle.
The gun cracks. A deafening noise inside the concrete crypt, so loud it comes to me with the same as the pain of the bite: a flash of brightness, sickening and yellow.
I manage not to fall. Yanking the dog forward and back at the end of my leg. All of which means the bullet didn’t hit the animal.
A few feet away, I’m aware of Mom moving away. Her arms wheeling back, a hand slamming down on the control board.
“Oh . . . oh . . . oh.”
An escalation of polite astonishment, as if she’s pulled a soufflé out of the oven to discover that it’s not only fallen, it’s burnt.
The bullet found her. Her body folding under itself. I don’t know if I aimed at her or the dog or if it was a stray shot that found the base of her throat. I don’t know how it happened, but even through the searing pain, there’s satisfaction that it did.
The dog releases me. Leaping straight up, jaw snapping, looking for the soft flesh of my inner thigh. Part of its training too.
I don’t aim this time either. I just shoot down as the dog comes up.
It comes close enough that I can feel the rancid heat of its breath as it yips once before tumbling backward. The animal rolling onto its side, opening and closing its mouth as if testing to see if it still works.
I limp for the door at the same time I think I should shoot it again. But the gun isn’t in my hand anymore. I must have dropped it after taking the shot. If I did, it must be next to the dog.
My ankle feels like there’s an iron shackle that’s been left in a fire for hours fused tight around it. That doesn’t stop me from dragging it along at my side, learning how much weight it will take. It buckles when I’m not more than ten feet out.
I turn to find the dog having the same trouble I am.
The shot must have got some part of its hind leg. It comes out of the bunker and blinks against the light. Not a powerful animal, underfed and greasy, the head so low it appears shrunken with shame.
I’ve seen people like this before. Experiences from my previous life, breaking through now in a solid cluster. Despite their appearance, the weak, the desperate—they’re the ones you ought to be afraid of. The ones who won’t listen, won’t reason. The ones with nothing to lose who’ll come and keep coming.
62
A HOBBLED RACE BETWEEN MAN and dog.
If it was observed from the trees, it might appear comical, a Chaplinesque dance of limps and hops. So long as you didn’t see the terror on the man’s face you migh
t assume it was an act.
I make it to the house’s back door, and when it opens, I scream for the first time. If it had been locked, I was so ready for the bite against the back of my good leg that another second’s reprieve only doubles the panic.
It’s not a good idea to go upstairs. I think this once I’m halfway up the stairs.
I can hear the dog throwing itself at the first step but scrabbling to lift itself to the next. I’m lucky there’s no carpet on the varnished wood, leaving it slippery. Lucky too that the dog’s leg is making it hard to bound up at me as it otherwise would.
I’m at the top of the stairs when my luck runs out.
The dog figures out how it’s done. Lifting with its front legs and jumping with its uninjured back one. Once it’s got this down, it rushes up, leaving a looping signature of blood over the steps behind it.
I look down a hallway with three open doors off it and throw myself through the closest one. Kicking the door closed at the same instant the dog slams into it.
A moment’s pause before it starts scratching at the wood. The whole time it’s whimpering just as it had in its cage.
I slide over and put my back to the door. It gives me the time to look around and see that it’s Lauren’s room.
Judging from the Purple Rain movie poster on the wall and the volleyball trophies lined up along the top of her dresser, it was designed to look the way it did when she was in high school. Aside from the rain forest crowding close to the window’s glass it’s the absence of any human scent that gives it away. It also makes the room feel unbearably lonesome.
The dog stops.
I can hear it panting, the wet smack of its chops. I wonder how the thing on the other side might be killed. Animal and man waiting for each other in the loneliest house in the world.
Eventually I hear it go away. The thump of its hindquarters down the stairs, the startled yips of suffering as it goes.
Bridge is out there. I need to find Bridge.
But that won’t happen if the dog is at the bottom of the stairs or hidden in the living room, ready for when I come down. There’s no way of knowing when the right time might be.
I open the door. Slide over to the stairs. Nothing there but trails of blood. The dog’s coming and going, and one of my own.
At the back door, I look out over the tall grass, the trampled courses we’d made through it, the concrete outbuilding. I can’t see the dog, though it could be anywhere. Would my chances be better if I reversed, walked the length of the house’s interior and tried the front door? Maybe. Maybe not, if the animal is also inside and can corner me as soon as I make the move.
I’m at the bottom of the back porch steps when I hear the growling.
Echoed and hollow, coming from inside the concrete bunker. I watch the dark rectangle of the open door but the animal doesn’t come out. It’s busy. I can tell from the ripping and tearing. The clack of its teeth as it eats.
I start away to the right and enter the woods. Straight for a time, then left, straight again, right. Trying to make myself difficult to follow. It would have left me totally lost, except I know where I have to go, even if it will be hard to find from where I am. But I’m starting to understand Belfountain now. If I just keep going, I will come to one of its trails. Once you’ve followed it to the end, take another step and you’ll be there.
63
I HEAR THE HOWLING WITHIN minutes of coming upon what I’m pretty sure is the Green trail.
It’s on the move. Following my scent with greater certainty than me following the trail to the spot where I hope to head off and find the camp, the hole at the end of the cave beyond it that will take me down.
Jerry could have taken Bridge and Lauren back to the lodge or to one of the cabins or found a place in the woods it would take hours to discover. But I don’t think he’s in any of those places. For one thing, he assumes I’m dead. For another, he’s not hiding. He’s learning all he wants to learn, satisfying his wants, before leaving this place a grave behind him.
The place Mom called the lab would allow him to do all of these things. And Bridge could take him there.
• • •
I come to the camp sooner than I expected. Limp through the grounds, keeping my eyes straight on the trees on the far side. Then I’m into them. Keep going until the ridge.
The climb up is harder and higher than the last time. With my gnawed ankle it hurts a lot more too. When I reach the cave mouth, I roll over the ground and into the darkness. Eventually the tunnel’s narrowing width forces me up.
At the hole I pause before descending, listening for voices below or howls from the woods, but everything is quiet. Even the moist breeze that I’ve been grateful to for cooling the sweat at the back of my neck has stopped, thickening the air into broth.
When I reach the bottom and step through the battered metal door I see how the Tall Man broke out. He used the heavy fire extinguisher that’s missing from its box inset on the wall and now lies battered on the floor. Swung it into the steel door until it started to bend, pulling away from the bolts. Once he could get his hands through, he must have put on the oversized gloves and pulled until it came off altogether. And then the two of them had come up into the forest and wandered like spirits, drinking from rain puddles and eating leaves and roots without any way of knowing how they had come to be abandoned in this way.
I slide my back along the wall, careful with each step not to disturb any of the wires or files on the floor. When I’m at the T-junction where the other hallway runs left to the porthole door, I notice how there’s the same kind of keypad on the wall next to it on the inside just as there is on the outside. Locked both ways.
There’s something moving in the shadows straight ahead. But it’s not something I can see. It’s something I can hear.
A chair being dragged over the floor. A male voice. Coming from one of the rooms along the hallway to the left.
I come around the corner and freeze.
Lauren. Lying on her side in the hallway outside the pod room. Her body behind a console on the floor so that I didn’t see her at first, one arm out in front of her like a swimmer stretching to touch the end of the pool.
The blood, her stillness, the frozen eyes. Then the eyes blink. Look up at me.
She whispers something and I bend close to hear.
I died.
I understand her to mean her life before this. That everything that happened at Belfountain doesn’t count because she’d already lived, already passed.
She glances down. She wants me to check under her. I roll her halfway over as gently as I can and she stifles her pain. It’s a steak knife. One she must have pocketed before Jerry took them all.
I tried.
Her lips say this, soundlessly. The same word she had whispered a moment ago. Telling me that she’d resisted as best she could, she’d been brave.
I pick up the knife. When I stand, her eyes remain open, but they are still now in a way they weren’t before.
“ . . . all the time in the world . . .”
In the pod room, Jerry is speaking and Bridge is sobbing, but even without seeing her, I can tell she’s trying not to.
“ . . . can be friends, or we can be something else. It all amounts to the same thing, so you might . . .”
His voice is drowned out by the blood in my ears. An escalating expression of force, what remains of me. The body telling the brain it will take it from here.
I come around the doorframe. Jerry is standing with his back to me ten feet away. He’s holding the chef’s blade in his right hand. A comma-shaped puddle of blood on the floor, the tip of it dripping, adding to its size. He’s talking to Bridge, who sits in a metal desk chair—has been told to sit there, told not to move.
She sees me. The quickest dart of her eyes that she instantly corrects but Jerry detects it anyway. He starts to turn around. It lets me notice how his belt is unbuckled, the top button of his pants undone. Readying himself.
The body is doing something else.
The body brings the steak knife into the top of Jerry’s shoulder, pulling it out and doing the same to the middle of his back. When he spins around to defend himself, it goes into his side.
He drops to his knees, but his arm is moving, the one with the chef’s blade at the end of it, a wide arc intended for the back of my knee. It’s slow though—slower than me—and I’m able to kick the blade out of his grip before it gets close.
Jerry’s mouth is moving.
Cursing me, showing me he’s not afraid. I can see that without hearing the words. But he’s in the past now too. His threats, the intimidating confidence and handsomeness. He’s behind me. The body wants only to go to Bridge, help Bridge up, get her out.
She’s out of the chair before I reach her. Taking me by the hand and pulling me past Jerry, who’s weaving from side to side while remaining on his knees as if screwing his body into the ground.
“Leave him,” Bridge says.
We’re starting back toward the tunnel when both of us hear the click of claws on the concrete. Bridge and I back away from the corner, but we don’t take our eyes from it, as if so long as we can’t see the animal it isn’t actually there.
“What is it?”
“A dog,” I say.
“Will it—”
“Yes.”
We’ve backed up far enough that the dog stands at an equal distance from the pod room door as we do. There’s just the iron door to the cave behind us, the one with the porthole window.
“We run on three,” I say. “You ready?”
“Ready.”
“One. Two—”
Jerry comes out into the hallway.
For a second we watch him just as the dog does. Jerry’s pants are undone and his belt buckle is clanking against his hip, a look of groggy irritation on his face. If it weren’t for his wounds, he would appear hungover, rising from a fitful rest to tell somebody to turn the music down or get him a coffee.