by Toby Barlow
Three steps into the house and he’s already seen
the two dead dogs in the living room.
The house is empty.
Sirens are getting louder.
There’s blood everywhere.
“Like a Jackson Pollock valentine,” he thinks,
quickly bolting the front door.
Moving through the rooms
with the fluidity of water,
he turns out every light.
Bedroom. Kitchen. Living room.
Then he rolls the dead dogs in a rug and
slides them behind the couch.
Pauses. The sirens.
He heads downstairs to the small workroom tucked
into the back of the basement.
There are three security cameras on the property
and a monitor here. He turns it on and fires up the laptop.
The screen reveals the patrol car
pulling into the drive.
He clicks at the laptop, logging onto his accounts.
On the monitor, the patrolmen are getting out.
One stays by the car.
Nobody has touched the accounts.
“Whoever they are,” Lark thinks to himself,
“they aren’t that smart.”
A patrolman is at the door now.
He hears the bell, ignores it.
Lark transfers the balance to an old, unused account.
The doorbell rings again.
Was there any blood on his car?
The patrolman moves around the house.
Lark switches to camera two, watches the cop
flash his light across the shrubs.
The phone rings,
Lark picks up quickly.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Lark Tennant?”
“Yes.”
“This is Atlas Security. We have reports of a disturbance
at your house. Is everything okay?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“We’ve sent patrolmen up to the house.”
“Oh, well actually, I’m not there. I have my phone forwarded,
I’m in the desert.”
“Do you have guests staying there? The patrolmen reported—”
“—oh, actually, I can probably tell you what happened.”
“Yes?”
“My sister came by to get the dogs, she’s dog sitting, sometimes
they get upset.”
“Well, that makes some sense, one of the reports mentioned dogs barking.”
“One of the reports?”
“Oh, everyone in the neighborhood called.”
“Boy, well, thanks for looking into it.”
“That’s our job.”
Lark hangs up, leans back, and exhales into the dark room
watching the cameras as the cameras watch
the patrolmen murmuring into their radios as
their car pulls slowly away.
Lark waits and waits. Thinking. Figuring.
When he went to meet Baron there were eight in the house.
Cutter and Blue were up in the Valley
playing in a two-day bridge tournament.
And he doesn’t know
where she was.
II
She’s lying next to Anthony,
naked, exhausted, worried.
What do you tell a man to whom
you can’t say everything?
As much as your bones muscles tendons
ache to open up, the truth still lies
curled and buried beneath your tongue.
So, instead of revealing all, she makes jokes.
“I guess you’ll give my brother the job now, right?”
“Is that what this was all about?”
He kisses her,
and a rush of warmth fills her blood.
“Kiss me again.” She reaches in the dark.
She feels the hunger awakening inside her
she wants to hold him closer,
just as she did
when they first danced.
She knows people can only
stand so close
for so long
but her body tries to hold as much of him as she can find
as her mouth measures the length of his neck,
the width of his shoulders.
There in that embrace, she feels something
shuffling around, moving warily
fumbling through the dusty rooms of her heart,
and, one by one, turning on the lights.
III
Peabody the cop wakes up
because his three-year-old
is vomiting.
It’s nothing serious.
There was a birthday party earlier
cake, ice cream, soda.
But still
it’s vomit
at four
in the morning.
Damn.
An hour later
the house is asleep again.
IV
Calley hasn’t had a drink
in twenty-two hours
he hasn’t slept either
not since the last visit.
He tries to remember the other guys
Turner and Mason.
Was he better than them?
Did he deserve to live?
Twenty-two hours is enough
there’s some vodka in the freezer.
He looks out the window again.
There’s a dog sitting there,
on the lawn across the street.
Watching him.
Calley’s not so social
but he’s been around long enough to know
that’s not the neighbor’s dog.
V
At the end of a card day
Cutter calls the pack
no one picks up,
Blue says fuck it.
Two days of silence has got their fur up.
“It’s like we’ve fallen off the map,”
says Cutter,
feeling a little like the Pasadena Hilton
is a spaceship and they’ve lost contact
with planet Earth.
What the hell?
They’re three rounds up in the western regional
kicking ass.
Blue took the Mormons down
on a hand that played like pure rockabilly.
The fat ass Fresno cracker fell
to a perfect finesse that made his eyes tear up.
So long sucker.
Lark knew they could do it
But they’ve surprised even themselves.
Celebrated with three pizzas,
four cheeseburgers, some buffalo wings,
and a couple of steaks.
Yeah.
They call the house one more time
hoping to find a pack to howl along with them
to celebrate like brothers would
but nobody answers.
No cells answer either.
It all puts a certain pall
on the festivities.
Whatever. Time to call room ser vice.
Time to eat.
VI
Bone wakes up in a new pack.
With a new code.
Slowly coming back from defeat.
Still feeling the teeth on his neck from back in the house.
He had been outplayed and out-fought that night
and wound up lying wild-eyed on the living room floor
an invading dog’s teeth stretched across his neck.
Then he heard Baron’s voice. “Don’t kill them.”
Realizing then that Baron had somehow
betrayed them all.
Who knows why.
Life’s filled with tough choices.
For instance at that moment
when Bone lay there on the floor
his neck still caught between his attacker’s teeth
that was a moment of choice.
A br
eath, a decision,
“I’m with you Baron.”
Baron kneeled down
and looked directly into Bone’s eyes.
“Smart move, bro.”
“Lark is dead to me,” thinks Bone.
“Pretty soon, probably dead to the world.”
Rising from his mat,
he looks through the warehouse’s open door,
feels the sunshine waking the neighborhood,
smells the morning’s sweetness.
“This day is nice,” he thinks.
“Tomorrow will be nice too,
and I’ll do whatever I have to do
just to keep ’em coming.”
VII
Lark IDs the dead dog he knows,
Zack, a rough wild one.
Lark remembers that the kid wasn’t
much of a fighter.
The other’s unknown.
He has to mop, bury, plan,
But first, a pause, a reconstruction.
As the light comes over the mountains,
Lark’s reading the blood on the wall,
his senses unfolding the tale
of what must have gone down.
He traces streaks of red with his finger,
thinking, intuiting, guessing
how it must have been.
It was early in the night,
perhaps twenty minutes after he left.
They came up, his pack had just eight here.
She wasn’t in the house. Where was she?
Bone was here, she should have been too.
The other side arrived, bringing fifteen.
Yes, he smells Baron.
The surprise must have been complete.
And perhaps his pack wasn’t as ready as it should have been.
He didn’t build them to fight like this.
The way he had it organized, the Ukan path, focused on lying low,
on avoiding wars. It was easier to infiltrate the enemy
isolate them
and then take them out one by one.
He hadn’t foreseen the assault.
Lark wonders how much else he missed.
Three games. Did he blow them all?
His head spins. He stomach feels hollow.
It’s the feeling that hits a world-class chess player
when he finds he’s not in the game at all.
He touches a small pool of blood.
There was probably a courier, a delivery
anything to get the door open.
Zack answers, the moment of defeat lying right there.
The first rush brings eight or so in, taking out Zack first.
He barks the warning as he goes down,
and the others pour into the room to help
teeth ready for skin, fur up and set to fight.
One of the invaders lunges forward, spitting for blood,
but two of the pack take him down,
one cutting his throat so fast
the assault is thrown off for a stroke of time, the surprise
pushing them back on their haunches, as
blood from the torn artery arcs across the room.
But then the attackers surge forward again,
through the raining blood
which glistens on their coats
and flicks in their eyes,
only raising their adrenaline.
Their numbers are too good
and Lark’s dogs are too unsettled.
In the breath of moments, it’s over.
Three lie with their throats
caught between three jaws,
all ready to cut.
There is a bark. A man enters. Words are spoken.
A long pause. A jaw tightens.
A submissive nod from one of Lark’s wolves
and then the conquered head off, tails between legs,
delivered into a new world.
VIII
Her cell rings again, for the sixth time.
“Maybe you should answer this time,” says Anthony.
She pulls the sheet around her body and
takes the phone to the living room.
“Hi, Lark.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She takes a breath.
“Lark, I’m not coming back.”
There’s a long silence before he answers,
“I’m not sure there’s anything to come back to.”
She waits for him to say more.
Nothing but the sound of traffic through the phone line until
finally he speaks again. “The house is gone, the pack is gone.”
His voice sounds hard
but not angry,
“Christ, Lark. What? What happened?”
Another long pause.
She can’t tell if he’s feeling anything.
There’s only gravity and heaviness on the phone.
Then his tone changes, sounding almost casual.
“I’m going up to Pasadena for a while.
I don’t know when I’ll be back.
but do me a favor, okay?”
“What’s that Lark?”
“Just answer when I call.”
“All right, Lark, I’ll answer.”
She hangs up realizing he never asked
where she was.
IX
A new pack, a new path.
The Ukan way was something Lark believed in.
Discipline from the inside, a tension holding the pack together.
The new pack follows a different form,
nobody has a name for it,
but it’s a rough way of life.
They drive in three vehicles, six to a black Econoline,
Bone rides in the lead group. Sasha sits up front next to Ray.
She’s stripping down, pulling off her black jeans and
the T-shirt that reads love honky.
She’s got hair that is jet-black,
marble white skin and an attitude of pure assurance.
Bone marvels at that, watching as she changes
into a black dog whose motions
still carry hints of her human rhythm.
Nobody notices how transfixed he is, the rest of them
are too busy changing themselves.
Bone doesn’t have to change. Ray has other plans.
They pull into a suburban sprawl and hit the lights.
The other vans follow suit and they cut the engines, gliding in dark.
Getting out, Ray and Bone are men, the rest dogs.
The dogs vanish around the house except for Jackson and Sasha,
they trot alongside the men, large animals with a quick gait.
All according to plan.
Stepping up to the tract home, Ray rings the bell. No answer.
Ray rings it again. They hear footsteps,
the door is opened a little more than a crack.
A woman pokes her head out, looking like she hasn’t slept in a thousand years.
Small scabs cover her cheeks and chin.
Ray is polite, using a cowboy voice, “´Scuse me, ma’am,
are you missing—Whoa!” Sasha darts forward, bursting in,
“Get your fucking dog outta here!” the woman shouts.
distracted just enough so she doesn’t see Ray’s gun
until he hits her with it.
“Shut up.” Two moments later and Bone has her arms pinned
back as Ray puts duct tape over her mouth,
her eyes bulging. They hear a man’s voice shout,
“Whose damn dog? Margie?”
Ray holds the front door open as Jackson runs in.
Then the snarl of the attack and a man’s scream.
Ray goes back and hits the light, a hallway door to the garage is open.
The man’s cries grow louder.
They enter and find a homemade lab.
Blood is everywhere, the man’s stomach ripped open.
> Sasha and Jackson settle in next to the body, attentive.
Ray scratches Sasha behind the ear, Ray surveys the room.
“Two here, one’s missing.”
He duct tapes the man’s bloody mouth.
“Bring the woman in here, we’ll wait.”
Bone drags her back in from the kitchen, she doesn’t fight.
He hits the lights, the six of them sit in the dark.
The man wheezes through his tape.
They wait.
Bone looks around. Clearly, the lab is making something,
speed, crank, crystal meth, who knows.
All Bone has been able to piece together is that Ray
is paid by someone unknown to hit these home cookers.
No one talks about who is paying for this and
he really doesn’t care.
They’ve been swooping down on mom-and-pop shops
all over the Valley, spilling blood,
intimidating them with fierce displays of the damage
a dog can do. The woman lying at Bone’s feet is scared now,
her eyes swimming wide and panicked.
She doesn’t have to wait long before she hears
footsteps and keys fumbling.
She makes grunting noises through the tape
but it’s not enough.
The missing man comes through the door and
his shopping bag full of milk and egg
takes Ray’s shotgun blast.
As the pack moves out, stepping
over the spilled groceries and blood,
the dogs pause to lap the yolk and white from the floor
then scamper to catch up to the pack.
It’s bloody muscle work, Bone thinks,
it’s not the way Lark would have done things.
Lark believed the tension of the threat
was more powerful than the blood of the action.
But this is Ray’s pack now.
Enough said.
X
Morning and she’s sitting in the bright kitchen
wearing his robe, stirring her tea.
How is it? How is this so? How is she here?
Her body worn delicious in exhaustion,
wrapped in wisps of his scent.
But wondering how long it can last.
We are all china barely mended,
clumsily glued together
just waiting
for the hot water and lemon
to seep through our seams.
She takes a sip, running through the questions.
What next?
What if he knew?
She’s wondering how to unknot all that’s bound within her
when his fine, fit body carries the rest of him into the room
and pours himself some tea.
“Morning.”
Soft kiss, like dream trains coupling at the station.