He nearly damned himself for being so obtuse. Roadkill. Of course. He had seen rabbits that had been hit right across the torso by cars, their spines splintered, their innards smashed into one another so that their heads and hind legs looked perfectly natural, but what lay in between could have been slipped under a door. It was just like the dried up terrier’s guts, the terrier who, like all of them, had been born again into this world.
And if a terrier, why not a rabbit? Why not cats, for Christ’s sake? And turtles? And deer and squirrels and mice? Rusty had always liked to chase animals smaller than himself, though he hardly ever caught them. But he did not think he would like to chase the rabbit he had seen, and he wondered what its own prey might be.
The thoughts were blotted out by the sound of an engine idling, and Rusty saw a wooden bar ahead, the gate that kept vehicles out of the game trail. A car was next to that gate, perhaps fifty yards back from the main road, in the small parking area bounded by trees. Through the open windows of the car he could hear strains of that abysmal music that still drove spikes into his sensitive ears.
The pack crept closer to the car on splintered limbs, some of them trailing strands of gut like bridal trains behind them. Rusty heard voices now, one pleading, one protesting, and then the engine went dead, the music stopped. The pack froze in an instant, and the only sound was the soft clack of the dachshund’s misaligned jaw as he excitedly tried to moisten his tongue.
Rusty and Sparks opened their own jaws then, letting Rowdy’s ragged edges flop quietly to the earth, and looked at each other. Sparks’s dueling eyes were wild with anticipation of the kill, and his legs trembled. The other dogs were ready too, their tongues hanging from their mouths like dry leaves.
“Wait,” thought Rusty. The pack looked at him curiously and, he felt, angrily, as if frustrated at being heeled. But he was the leader, and the leader had a plan. “Let’s get them out. Out in the open.”
The pack pictured it in their minds and found it good. After a moment of plotting, Fluffy dragged herself to where the bitch inside could see her, while the others went to the front and back of the car. Lying on her mass of gut, she began to whimper, softly and pitifully.
“Ben . . .” came the bitch’s voice. “Ben, there’s something out there.
“Come on, it’s just an animal or something. Forget it.”
“No, it’s . . . a dog.”
Fluffy increased the volume now. It sounded, Rusty thought, like when she’d been mated a few times and was begging for more, and he gave a dog smile in the darkness.
“Oh, it is, it’s a little yellow dog, and it looks hurt, the poor thing.” The door opened, the bitch got out and knelt next to Fluffy, who was trying her damnedest not to let a loop of intestine pop out from between her forelegs. “Oh, Ben, come quick . . .”
Come quick, Ben, Rusty thought to himself.
Ben came quick, heaving a sigh of annoyance and frustration, opening the door, stepping out, and Rusty the first, around the side of the car, battering into the male snout first, burying his fangs in the midsection, through the shirt, the soft, yielding skin, into the guts, like the guts the humans so gaily and thoughtlessly scattered on their moonlit roads, the guts of the pack. And now others were on the male, and from the passenger side Rusty heard the squeal of the bitch as Fluffy and the junkyard dog, the terrier and the dachshund brought her down.
Rusty buried his snout in the male’s viscera, bit and bit again, tasted the chunks his sharp teeth detached, spit, shook them out, bit again, ripped more soft gut, heedless of the fists of the man raining down on his back, on his skull already broken, fists driving shards of white bone deeper into his brain, his brain that thought more clearly than it ever had before. He felt the others beside him, ripping, snarling, taking the man to pieces more surely than tires and metal underbodies had rended those of the pack, pressing them down into the asphalt, making them one with the road, and Rusty thought of Rowdy, then thought, “Stop!”
They did. It was as though they shared a mind, shared a will, and their bloodied snouts, bent jaws, dripping teeth came up from both the male and the bitch.
“The bitch?” Rusty thought, and Fluffy’s thought came back to him, “Dead.”
He looked down at the male. The chest was still rising and falling, though the stomach was torn wide open, the bowels flopping over the edge of the bloody pool. Rusty looked at Sparks, who was chewing vigorously on a dripping piece of meat. “Rowdy.”
Sparks nodded, spat the chunk away, and padded toward the matted pile of dog. Together he and Rusty dragged what was left of Rowdy over to the male, and set the old dog down so that the edge of Rowdy touched the male’s forehead. Rowdy pulled himself over the male’s face by short jerks, unseen pieces of claw dragging the mat up and over until the male’s panting face was hidden. Then the mass quivered, shook, and Rusty saw the dome of Rowdy’s skull move up and down, up and down, until the dog’s hair turned red with the blood it soaked up. When Rowdy finally slid off, the male’s face was stripped of all its skin, and most of its muscle. The chest no longer rose and fell.
“Rowdy has fed. Now devour what you will,” thought Rusty, and sank his fangs into the male’s windpipe, feeling the blood, still warm, burst into his mouth, run down his chin.
The dachshund ripped with crooked jaws at the front of the male’s pants, tearing away the fabric with difficulty, and finally gnawing at the shriveled pouch of flesh until it came off, and he chewed with satisfaction. “Family took mine long ago,” he thought gleefully, and Rusty laughed, then stopped, feeling pity for the dachshund.
He sat up, felt the warm blood running down his jaw, watched the dogs greedily burrowing into the body of the male, then went to the other side of the car. Fluffy was chewing happily on the bitch’s thigh, and the junkyard dog was gobbling pieces of gut. He stopped, stretched, and rolled over in the puddle of blood so that Rusty could see the pieces of bitch flesh pressing against the lining of the dog’s exposed stomach. Then Rusty looked at the nearly decapitated sheep dog. The jaws of the dog’s head, hanging from a strand of muscle and skin, laboriously worked at tearing away a hunk of the human bitch’s bowels, but when the dog swallowed it, the meat merely crawled through its severed esophagus and dropped onto the dirt. The sheep dog turned, angled itself so that the jaws could grasp the morsel again, the throat could swallow again. But the esophagus excreted again, and the dog picked it up, swallowed, over and over.
Rusty, saddened nearly beyond the capacity of a dog to feel sorrow, turned away, walked to the front of the car, listened to the feast, of dead meat filling dead meat.
Days passed, and the dogs continued to hunt. Fewer cars drove through the woods now, but the pack had learned new ways to take their prey. The cars had to pass through several hollows, and Rusty and Sparks, the two most vigorous of the pack, would stand on the rocks at a level just above the car windows. Then, when a vehicle passed, they would leap through the windows into the car, and savage the humans within. The cars crashed, the humans (if they had not already been killed by the dogs) injured or made insensible, and the pack fed. If the windows were rolled up, it made no difference, for the skulls of the dogs, already broken, shattered the glass, allowing entrance.
Then, one night, a car filled with policemen parked by the side of the road near the rocks. The pack killed them all. Their bullets went through the dogs, spitting away only small pieces of meat the dogs could do without. The blast from a shotgun, however, did shear off Sparks’s left front foreleg, which, after the slaughter, they retrieved and reattached. It was a bit tricky. Rusty held the leg in his jaws while Sparks pushed his stump against it. Somehow the crevices wedged together firmly enough so that the limb remained in place, though Sparks used it as little as possible, and it became more of a liability to locomotion than an aid.
Three days after the devouring of the policemen, more humans came to the edge of the woods. They were armed with shotguns, and had dogs on leashes. But the living dogs refused
to go among the trees, and sat and howled and cowered, until the humans, cursing and scowling, put the dogs back into their trucks and cars and drove away, glancing out their windows in discomfort. Though the pack’s nostrils were caked with decay, they could still scent the humans’ fear on the wind, and they laughed.
And continued to laugh and hunt and prey until the day Sparks disappeared. Or rather, until most of him disappeared. The left foreleg remained, the limb that had become not so much a part of him as a prized possession, like a shit-caked rag or a rotting rabbit carcass would have been when the pack lived.
The pack remained together most of the time, but, as dogs will, they would go off by themselves from time to time, or in a pair or a trio. One night Sparks went off alone, just for a trot, to make the motions of pissing against a tree to mark territory (though none of them were any longer capable of producing urine. If they drank, it merely flowed through and out of them, so the pissing motion was now more symbolic than ever). The longest any of the dogs had ever been gone before was an hour at a time, so when nearly the entire night passed without his reappearance, the pack began to worry, and went to look for him.
They found only the pitiful left foreleg, in which no life remained. That, and some fragments of bone that appeared to have been shattered by remarkably strong teeth. There was no blood on the ground (Sparks and the other dogs had emptied their blood on the roads long before), but the brush was torn up as though there had been a tremendous struggle, and broken branches showed where a large body, no doubt the same creature that had devoured Sparks, had crashed through it.
The pack was silent, keeping its individual thoughts to its separate selves. The dogs poked about with dead noses, trying to catch a scent, something that would tell them what it was that had cut out a member of their pack. For a moment, Rusty thought he caught a trace of something familiar, something large and gross and dimly remembered, but then it was gone, and would not come again, and he was unable to recall it strongly enough to claim the memory he was sure was there.
By the time they gave up, it was morning, and they crept, crawled, and slid silently back to the lair they had found in the shelter of two fallen trees. They lay there on the thick carpet of dead pine needles and leaves, lay and rested, though none of them was capable of sleep.
“Was it a monster?” the dachshund thought, and Rusty knew the query was directed to him alone.
“I don’t know,” Rusty replied. “I thought we were the monsters, and now . . .”
“Another pack?”
“No. You saw how high the branches were broken. Not a dog. Or dogs.”
The dachshund grinned lopsidedly. “God then.”
“And not God.”
“What would you call something that can devour one of us? Give us long enough and we’ll be gods to men—or demons. They’ll come to fear us and avoid us. They’ll make these woods forbidden—sacred, if you will.” The dachshund gave a thoughtful whine. “Funny how things come around. Men were gods to us. They crushed us, devoured us, and now we devour them. What were we Gods to, Rusty? What did we devour?” He thought silently for a moment. Rusty concentrated on a solution, remembering that he was the leader. “Could it have been man?” the dachshund asked.
“There were no gunshots. And men would not have devoured Sparks. Not in that way.”
Rusty, unable to come up with an answer, brooded, and was still brooding when night fell again. It had begun to rain, but none of the dogs were bothered by it. The drops merely matted their fur a little more, beaded on their exposed viscera, pooled in the hollow pouches of their rotted flesh, so that every now and then they would have to twist one way or the other to let the malodorous water run out onto the forest floor.
Rusty mentally inquired if the others were ready to hunt, but he felt only mild interest in return. Their last few nights of hunting had been unsuccessful. Humans hardly dared to travel the road anymore, and when they did they drove so fast that Rusty and Sparks found it difficult to leap at the windows. Indeed, on the last attempt, while Sparks was still alive, Rusty had landed on the car’s trunk and slid right off, while Sparks had missed the vehicle completely.
Something else interested the pack tonight. Fluffy, the only female among them, had somehow gone into something that passed for estrous, despite the mutilation of her sexual organs. She dragged her posterior along the ground, whining and moaning, her vegetation-coated insides roiling behind her like thick, drunken serpents. The males crowded around her, sniffing futilely, but recalling the scent, and what remained of their penises left their sheaths reluctantly, as if sheer will rather than blood engorged them, making them a sickly yellow rather than the thrilling pink of former matings.
Rusty ignored them. His equipment would have functioned better than any, but he wasn’t in the mood, and wondered how the others could be. He felt no sexual stirring whatsoever, and suspected that the pack was planning to rut (or attempt to rut—what could they really do with that conglomeration of bowels and fissures that used to be Fluffy’s slit?) more for the sake of nostalgia than out of any real lust.
For a while he sat there, watching the others follow the bitch through the woods. Soon they were out of sight, and he sighed for the lost times that would not come again, and thought about taking the pack elsewhere, away from the woods where prey no longer came, perhaps into the cities, from which humans could not flee. The dogs could hide there almost as easily as in the woods, and the supply of prey would never run low.
Rusty trotted back to the shelter, crawled in, and lay down, his head on his forepaws. He could hear them now, and guessed that they were a half mile or more away. He heard the feigned yaps of anger as the males fought for dominance, then Fluffy’s rather unconvincing yowl as something Rusty didn’t care to think about was penetrated, then a long period of silence, during which, he surmised, a mere charade was performed for old time’s sake.
Screams shattered the silence—authentic, sincere cries, yelps, growls that Rusty took at first to be the vocal outbursts of passion, and, upon hearing them, forgotten lust launched itself in his haunches, engorged his rod with memory alone, pressing it from its sheath. Aroused, he stood, drinking in what he took to be the sounds of hot, wet sex, until he realized that such could not take place in cold, dry bodies.
The screams were screams of pain, of terror.
But what could terrorize the dead?
Rusty launched himself toward the sound. He was supposed to have been the leader, and he cursed himself for not going with them, as he thought of what it could have been that had taken Sparks. He pushed himself through the brush, taking the most direct route to the sounds of his shrieking pack. There was no moon, and the darkness was thick and blinding. Several times he battered his already crushed forehead against the trunks of trees, but it had no more effect on him than if he had been wearing a helmet. He simply righted himself, aimed himself in the direction of the sounds, and charged once more, bouncing, ricocheting off oaks, maples, pines, until he broke through a final thicket whose thorns and brambles tore at his scraggly coat like sharp wires, one of them piercing his eye and holding him captive until he wrenched himself away from it, ripping the eyeball, leaving half of it hanging on the thorn, and entered a small clearing.
With his one remaining eye, Rusty saw the carnage that had been his pack. He saw Fluffy’s head lying on the leaves, the jaw flapping up and down, trying to drag it toward the mud-yellow body from which great chunks of dead meat had been chewed away; saw the junkyard dog, his middle bitten through so that only a rod of spine connected the two halves, trying to push himself to his feet like a broken bridge in a windstorm; saw the dachshund’s short legs swinging at something that towered above it, a deeper darkness against the dark of night, and that darkness detaching itself, falling toward the dog and entrapping his pointed head in blackness. There was a thick crunch, and the dachshund’s head vanished in a cacophony of splitting bones and tearing gristle. The legs of the headless body continued to
jerk, but with no sense of balance, no eyes to guide it, no ears to hear, it could do no more than wait to join its cicerone in the maw that had stolen it. With the next bite it was divided once more, then, with the last, was reunited with its other pieces.
Whether it continued to live in the stomach of its devourer was a possibility that occurred only dimly to Rusty. Such metaphysical thoughts on the afterlife of the afterlife were far from his mind now. The destruction of his fellows had maddened him, returned him to that state of canine savagery to which rational thought was a stranger, and he thrust himself at the greater darkness over the bits and pieces of the pack. Something sharp-edged and brutal battered him, hurling him to the side and against a tree whose trunk cracked his spine. Then that something pressed against his chest like God’s hammer, pinning him to the ground, and Rusty heard a snort, but saw no breath steam from the creature’s nostrils. It was as dead as Rusty, but not as dead as the pack.
The horse’s head came down, buried itself in Rusty’s guts, and chewed. Its teeth and jaws were strong, even stronger than the musky, tinny taste of its fellows’ canned flesh that Rusty had wolfed down a thousand times. And as Rusty watched himself entering the horse’s dead mouth bite by bite, he wondered with his recently-found imagination what would devour the horse? Then his head was taken, the brain smashed, swallowed, and the thoughts ceased.
Grain? thought Rowdy, continuing Rusty’s thought. Dead oats? Dead apples come alive again? And what would they do? Bounce up the road on which they fell and were run over? Fruit roadkill? But how could they bounce if they were squashed? And how could oats devour, or hay destroy, or clover hate? But hell, there’d be something.
Rowdy shook the half dome of his skull. The thoughts were too much for him, and he lay still while the horse finished its meal, going from chunk to chunk, its grinding teeth preparing the flesh for its ruminant stomach, unused to meat and bone. The feast would kill it, Rowdy thought, if it weren’t already dead.
Masques IV Page 3