Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  He tried not to stiffen.

  Another week, another vincristine injection. Even though the doctors gave Olivia the medication to stop vomiting earlier in the day, she spent most of that afternoon heaving. The next day the doctors said there was too much nitrogen in her blood, meaning her kidneys were being damaged. They had to give her less vincristine.

  In the hospital, most every hour seemed the same. In the hospital, there was no sense of the dry season progressing. No sense of season at all.

  One morning, Olivia found small black nests on her pillows. She cried silently, then cried harder when Lani cut the rest of her hair off. Two more weeks passed, each with the horrors of treatment. Then they took another sample of Olivia’s bone marrow.

  The next day a new doctor knocked before opening the door. He stuttered when he said that the bone marrow showed almost no improvement. Even so, they couldn’t increase the vincristine dose without destroying her kidneys.

  “So what are our choices?” Lani asked.

  “Continue treatment and hope there’s a change.” He paused before quickly adding, “That would be unlikely.”

  “Or?” Lani asked.

  “Stop and make sure she’s comfortable.”

  Lani shook her head. “But there’s no hope with that option.”

  The young physician looked at his lap and said they would want to talk it over. Trying not to hurry, he hurried out of the room.

  Lopez looked at his daughter, her shaved head. She was staring at her palms. “Lani,” he said, “we can’t keep putting her through this.”

  Olivia began to cry.

  Lopez clenched his jaw. He had done it at last. Of course he had. They had forced him to say it. To say anything else would have been monstrous.

  Lani hurried to her daughter. She argued with Lopez until she realized that Olivia was trying to interrupt her. “I want to stop. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She was mumbling through her tears. “I want to stop. I’ll go to heaven.”

  Lani grew quiet.

  Five hours later, they gathered their things and walked down and out of the hospital into the dry-season sunlight.

  In the first weeks, Olivia regained her vigor. Her gaunt face filled out again. After three weeks, she was running about with her cousins.

  Lopez worked in the fields with his in-laws. He liked most all of them, but he felt out of place at the large gatherings. He would leave when the conversation shifted into Samoan.

  This far down the peninsula, the fog never made it over the mountains. So, working under blue skies, Lopez felt darkness locked around his mind. At times he again suffered the sensation that the world had been painted onto emptiness made tangible.

  As the dry season grew old, Olivia ran with her cousins less and less. She looked pale to Lopez and was often short of breath. This didn’t stop her from climbing trees or swimming in the nearby reservoir. Once or twice she had nose bleeds that would take an hour or two to stop, but she rarely felt ill.

  Sometimes Lopez would see her walking about with her cousins, and he would boil with rage at his daughter and wife, at anyone reincarnated, at their privilege.

  More often, he was frightened by how intensely alone he would be in his last few moments before death. No one could be with him when he died, even if they were standing beside him. He would draw his last breath and look at their faces, at the painted-on reality. Impossibly, the eternal moment of his life would end.

  One morning just after breakfast, Olivia stumbled and fell on some steps. At first it seemed that she had only bruised her knee. But within an hour, the joint swelled to the size of a grapefruit.

  Lopez felt himself going numb again. It was almost a relief. Here was a crisis. He didn’t have to feel, just do.

  Lopez took his wife and daughter down to the hospital. They put Olivia in a small room on the second floor. She began to shiver, said that bad memories were giving her chills.

  A new doctor examined Olivia, explained that the cancer kept her from making the cells needed to stop bleeding. Maybe she had just bumped her knee and was bleeding into it. But she was also running a fever. He drew some blood, gave her some pills, asked them to stay the night.

  An hour passed. Then two.

  Olivia continued to shiver. Lani covered her with a few blankets. No one spoke. When the doctor returned, he looked grave. “Her fever is worse. I’m worried the cancer has limited her ability to fight infections, but we have given her the best medicine we have for that.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Lani said. “It’s nothing.”

  An hour later, Olivia began breathing quickly, her skin cold and clammy. The nurses hovered around her. The doctor returned.

  Time seemed to be passing faster and faster. Olivia felt hotter. As the sky outside their window darkened, her words became confused.

  Lopez sat on her bed, breathing too fast, his heart kicking his rib cage. Black spots appeared before his eyes. He tried to stand but found himself on the floor. Then Lani’s face was before him. She was begging him to get up. He tried harder to slow his breathing but couldn’t.

  Suddenly two nurses were lifting him up. One put a chair under him. Slowly the spots cleared from his vision and he could think more clearly.

  “Daddy.” Olivia said from her bed. “Daddy, I’m sorry.” Her voice was unsteady, her words slow. With effort, Lopez scooted his chair closer so he could take her hand. It was cold. Lani was crying.

  “Daddy, I’m sorry you picked me up.”

  “No, no,” he said automatically. In truth, he both wished he had not gathered her in and was so very grateful that he had.

  The doctor returned. Now he paid as much attention to Lopez as to Olivia. “Mr. Lopez,” he said, “your daughter’s getting worse.”

  The words made his heart kick harder. The world was spinning. Outside it was night. Someone behind him was talking in a low voice. Lani sometimes replied. Sometimes she would sob.

  A doctor was by his side again. “Mr. Lopez, should we give you something for the anxiety?”

  He couldn’t answer.

  Then there were hands on him, something sharp in his arm.

  Lani stood beside him, holding his hand. When he looked at her, he could hear. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.”

  Suddenly he realized what it must be like for her to have to stay behind while he and Olivia died. Suddenly he knew how hollow the world would be for her, his wife, the woman who had traveled through the ruined city and across the crumbling bridge to find him and their daughter in the redwoods.

  He felt sorry for her.

  He tried to say something but his lips were clumsy, his tongue unresponsive. But he was breathing slowly now. He thought of his faraway son, of Collin and Robert, of Olivia’s face when as a little girl she had begged for a sweet. Something like warmth but not warmth was pouring through his body. He seemed to sleep…

  Lani shifted in her seat, and Lopez saw his daughter lying in her bed. Her chest rose and fell only a little. In the candlelight, her face was pale. Her chest rose and fell a little less, a little less. And then. Not at all.

  Her skin began to shine.

  Lani shrieked.

  Lopez clumsily grabbed his wife’s hand. No llores, Nena. No llores. Don’t cry.

  Olivia grew brighter. At first white, then faintly violet. She melted into a cloud of indigo.

  Lopez fell back into his chair. The world at the periphery of his vision began to dim. His daughter drifted toward him and then over him, toward the window, toward her heaven.

  The glory of her light, a shining universe in miniature, filled his vision. The baby girl he’d found drifting about the water pump. He hadn’t truly known why he had picked her up. Now he knew, truly knew.

  The darkness at the edge of his vision gathered faster and faster, and so in his last moments, Joaquin Lopez marveled at his daughter’s luminosity.

  I don’t actually write a lot of horror stories, and the ones that I do, I’m usually not aware th
at they’re horror stories when I’m writing them. I mean, sure, it may be a little dark. But most of the time, I’m just following some idea wherever it goes and seeing what comes of it.

  Not with “Dogs.”

  When Shawn approached me with the idea of Unfettered—total freedom to write whatever I wanted!—my initial thought was “Sure, I’d love to.” My second thought was “Well, I’m boned.” No constraints at all is a terrible way to start a project.

  Eventually, I did find something, though. It was sparked by a couple conversations I was following online and a particularly grim study about sexual violence on college campuses. They came together in a single visual image, like a scene from a particularly unpleasant movie. And also as an idea.

  In the old days, writers would sometimes write a story in public as a kind of stunt. I wanted to do something like that with this story, and Shawn—gentleman that he is—let me. So here in your hands is the final draft of “Dogs.” The whole process of building it is outlined at: www.danielabraham.com/2012/02/01/the-dogs-project-introduction.

  On the up side, at least I knew going in that it was horror.

  — Daniel Abraham

  DOGS

  Daniel Abraham

  “Well, you’ve used a lot less morphine today,” the nurse said, tapping the feed with her thumbnail. “Keep this up and we’ll have you out of here by the weekend.”

  “Go dancing,” Alexander joked.

  “That’s the spirit, my man.”

  The nurse adjusted something in the suite of machines beside the bed, and the low, chiming alert stopped for the first time in an hour. The sounds of the hospital came in to fill the void: the television in the next room, the murmur and laughter of nursing station shop talk, monitor alarms from all along the ward, someone crying.

  “I’ll get you some more ice,” the nurse said, taking the Styrofoam cup from the little rolling bed table. “Be right back.”

  He tried to say thank you, but it was hard to focus. His mind didn’t feel right, and his body was a catalog of pains that he didn’t want to associate with. They’d saved his toes, but in five days, he’d only glimpsed the complication of red flesh and black stitching that was his leg. The muscles of his abdomen were compromised. That was the word the surgeon had used: compromised. As if there had been some sort of agreement, some give-and-take. The fluid draining from his gut had seeped down, feeding deep, bloody bruises on both his thighs, and filling his scrotum until it swelled up to the size of a grapefruit, the skin tight, hot, painful, and discolored. Strangely, the punctures on his neck where the dog’s teeth had held him were the least of his injuries and the quickest to heal.

  The nurse stepped back in, put the cup where it had been. Firm white foam holding crushed white ice.

  “Up and around in no time,” she said.

  “You bet,” Alexander said and lifted the cup to his lips. The cold comforted him. It was like a water-flavored sno-cone: a kid’s treat with all the sweetness gone. He remembered something about the ancient Greeks thinking the afterlife was like that, just the same as life, but with all the sensation and color turned to gray. That’s how he knew he wasn’t dead. The pleasures might all be gone, but the pain was exquisite.

  After the nurse left again, Alexander thumbed the morphine drip. A few seconds later, the pain lost its edge, and the tightness in his throat went a little softer around the edges. He closed his eyes and let the nightmares come play for a while—dreams of formless dread and shame, more like an emotional cold sore than a real dream—and when he woke, Erin was there. Sandy hair. Sun-scarred face. She was wearing a lumpy flight jacket that made her look massive.

  “Hey,” Alexander said.

  “Hey, you. You’re looking better.”

  “This is better?”

  “There was some room for improvement,” she said. This was what they did. Joked, like if they laughed about it, nothing would have happened. It felt dishonest, but Alexander didn’t have words for the things that wanted to be said. Even if he did, he didn’t want to put it on her. She was dong so much for him already. They had been friendly acquaintances before. She was the newest draftsman in the office. He was the guy who checked the prices and specifications on materials for the architects. She’d watched Dickens for him when he went to his father’s funeral the year before, and it seemed like that was enough to make a little bond between them. No one else from the office had even visited. “I got your mail in. Pretty much just bills, ads, and credit card applications. Figure it’s all stuff that can wait.”

  “Thanks for that,” he said, pulling himself slowly up to sitting. His crotch shrieked in pain, and for a moment he thought the skin around his scrotum had popped open like an overcooked hot dog. It only felt that way. “How’re the salt mines?”

  “The usual. Too many projects in not enough time. Joey’s covering for you, but he takes twice as long with everything. Everyone’s looking forward to getting you back in,” Erin said. “There’s a collection to get you a welcome-back present, but don’t tell ’em I spilled the beans.”

  “Just glad they remember who I am.”

  On the intercom, a professionally calm voice announced, “Code seven in the pediatrics lobby.” Code seven meant someone was dying. Someone was doing worse than he was. He felt a pang of guilt for taking the bed space, the doctors’ attention. He wasn’t dying.

  “Brought a surprise for you,” Erin said with a grin, and unzipped the flight jacket. “Had to smuggle him in, right?”

  Dickens’s head popped out, nose black and wet and sniffing wildly. His expressive eyebrows shifted anxiously back and forth, but he didn’t bark or growl. When he saw Alexander, he tried to scramble out of the half-zipped jacket, his legs and paws flailing wildly. Erin grunted as she lifted the dog up and set him gently on the bed.

  “Hey, boy. Did you miss me?” Alexander said, trying to keep the tone of his voice gentle and happy, the way he would have with a child. Dickens looked up at him, eyebrows bunched in worry, then at Erin, then back again. The sniffing sounded like hyperventilating. “It’s all right, boy. It’s okay.”

  But the dog, hind legs shaking, only looked around the room, distress in his eyes. Distress, and a question he couldn’t ask and Alexander couldn’t answer.

  It had happened on the walk from his apartment to the bus stop. The morning air was clean and crisp. The leaves of the trees still held the rich green of summer, but the morning chill was autumn clearing its throat. Running late, Alexander trotted along the familiar streets the way he did every morning. Past the corner deli with its hand-drawn signs, past the dog park where he’d take Dickens to run on the weekends, past the little strip mall with the head shop that never seemed to be open and the Laundromat that always was. There was a meeting scheduled for ten o’clock with the interior designer. He had the pricing on three different brands of paint, and was waiting on the technical specifications of the fourth. Alexander’s mind ran, preparing for the day ahead.

  The dogs started following him at the park, and at first, he saw them but didn’t particularly take note. There were three: a buff-colored hound with long, loose ears and a joyful canine smile; a Dane cross, broad-jawed and tall; and a bull terrier whose white fur was so short that the pink of its skin showed through. They were facts of the landscape, like the grass pushing up from cracks in the sidewalk and the smell of garbage from the Dumpster.

  As Alexander cut across the parking lot, one barked, a high, happy sound. The Dane ran in front of Alexander, blocking his way. When he tried to walk around it, the big dog shifted into his path again and growled, and Alexander thought it was being playful. Running claws tapped against the pavement behind him.

  Even when the first bite tore into his leg, the pain blaring and sudden, Alexander didn’t understand. He reached for his calf, thinking that something had gone wrong, that there’d been some sort of accident. The bull terrier leaped away from him. Blood reddened its muzzle, and its tail wagged. Alexander tried to walk, but his
foot wouldn’t support him, the tendon cut. Bitten through. The fear came on him like he was waking up from a dream. The parking lot seemed too real and suddenly unfamiliar.

  “Hey,” he said, and the smiling hound lunged at him, yellow teeth snapping at the air as Alexander danced back, lost his balance, fell. A white minivan drove by, not pausing. The bull terrier jumped forward, and Alexander tried to pull his foot away from it. The Dane stepped over to him, bent down, and fastened its teeth around his throat. The thick saliva dripped down the sides of Alexander’s neck, and for a moment, all four of them were still. When Alexander lifted his hand toward the Dane’s muzzle, it growled once, faintly—almost conversationally—and the jaw tightened. You live if I let you live. Alexander put his hand back down.

  The attack began in earnest, but he didn’t get to see it happen. The only thing in his field of vision was the side of the Dane’s head, its sharp-cropped ear, the curve of its eye, and beyond that, the clear blue of the sky. Teeth dug into Alexander’s leg, into his arm. One of the dogs stood on his chest, its weight pressing down on him, bit deep into the softness of his belly, and then shook its head back and forth. The pain was intense, but also distant, implausible. Intimate, and happening to somebody else. It seemed to go on forever.

  The Dane growled again, shifting its grip on Alexander’s neck. Its breath warmed Alexander’s ear. The smell of its mouth filled his nostrils. The voices of hound and terrier mixed, growls and yips and barks. Violence and threat and pleasure. Something bit into this foot, and he felt the teeth scraping against the small bones of his toe. A pigeon flew overhead, landed on a power line. Another bite to his belly, and then something deep and internal slipped and tugged. The dogs had chewed through the muscle and were pulling out his intestine.

  I’m going to die, Alexander thought.

  And then it was over. If there had been something that stopped it—a shout or the sound of a car horn—he hadn’t heard it. The grip on his throat just eased, the assaulting teeth went away. Alexander looked down at the slaughterhouse floor that his body had become, the ruins of his blood-soaked clothes, the pink loop of gut spilling out onto the asphalt. The hound with its friendly face and permanent goofy smile trotted to his head and hitched up its hind leg. Its testicles seemed huge, its red, exposed pizzle obscene. Urine spattered Alexander’s face, thick and rank.