Wild Hearts

by Sharon Sala

  * * *

  Trina went to bed early with a headache and a stuffy nose, hoping she could sleep off the beginnings of a cold.

  Betsy paced from kitchen to living room and back again until almost midnight, so weary she could barely put one foot in front of the other, but afraid to go to bed and close her eyes. The dreams she’d been having since finding Dick’s body were frightening. She kept dreaming of being chased, of being so sick she couldn’t stand up. Paul was in the dream, but then he wasn’t, and she could see Dick’s face. He was screaming, but she could never hear what he was saying.

  Finally she gave in to exhaustion, took a hot shower and crawled into bed. It felt so good to slide between those cool, crisp sheets. She grabbed the extra pillow and hugged it close as she shut her eyes. It was almost like having Beau beside her again. The wind outside was rising. She could hear the leaves as they began to rattle. It wouldn’t be long before fall came to the mountain. She loved fall. It was her favorite time of year.

  * * *

  “Bets, Bets, please don’t cry. I’m sorry that hurt. The next time it won’t. I promise.”

  “Did you see that? He fell. No. Someone pushed him!”

  More crying. Head swimming. “I’m going to throw up.”

  “He saw us! Get in the car! Get in the car!”

  “Faster, drive faster!”

  “We’re gonna die! We’re all gonna die!”

  A scream, loud and long.

  Silence.

  * * *

  The killer lit his pot-laced cigarette and leaned back in his recliner as he took his first puff. He’d been wound so tight all day that it felt like his body was humming, high on his own proximity to Dick Phillips’s friends and family. He inhaled and held his breath as long as he could, then exhaled slowly, feeling the love as his body began to relax.

  “This is some good shit,” he mumbled, and then reached for the remote and turned on the TV. He could hear footsteps in the hall outside the door, but no one would bother him in here.

  He took another puff, repeated the process and exhaled with a smile, then proceeded to get higher than a kite all alone.

  * * *

  Dallas rechecked the shotgun, making sure it was loaded before she went to bed, and then crawled between the covers and turned out the lights. She felt a sense of satisfaction, knowing she’d honored her father’s memory today, one of the things she’d come home to do. There was still the business of laying his body to rest, but that she would do alone.

  But the moment she closed her eyes, Trey’s face slid through her mind. She saw him standing up in front of everyone at the church, professing a lifelong love for a girl who didn’t want him, saw the pain on his face before he left. She hated the trick fate had played on them, giving soul mates two different paths in life and watching them squirm. Cosmic injustice to the max.

  She cried herself to sleep, but despite an expectation of being disturbed in the night, she woke up only minutes before daybreak.

  “Oh, Lord,” she mumbled as she threw back the covers and got out of bed.

  The floor was cold beneath her feet as she went across the hall to the bathroom. After a quick shower, she dressed and headed to the kitchen for coffee. She drank a cup standing on the back porch, watching daylight come to the land, and wondered how many of her ancestors had stood in this very same place, watching another day dawn.

  Had they been ready to welcome the day, happy about a good crop, or had they been worried about the weather and praying for rain? Was a family member ill or dying? Were they as torn as she was, wondering if this life was where they belonged?

  She emptied her cup and set it aside, felt her pants pocket to make sure she had her phone, then started down the steps. As she did, the chickens began to cluck and squawk, as if sensing her approach. About five feet from the porch, she remembered the shotgun and ran back to get it.

  By the time she got to the coop, the chickens sounded like they were in dire straits.

  Dallas smiled as she got the feed and scratch, and then headed into the pen, scattered everything for them, then opened the door to the coop. The hens came out in high indignation, which made her laugh.

  “Fuss all you want, ladies. I do the best I can,” she said, and began filling up the water troughs. She was getting ready to gather eggs when she saw one hen huddling down beneath the roost. She frowned. It was either hurt or sick. Damn, she didn’t want it to die.

  “What’s wrong here, little lady,” she said softly, as she squatted down and reached for her.

  The fact that the hen didn’t fuss or try to get away made her anxious. It was going to die. She knew it. It clucked when she picked it up, and then she saw the slight tear in the comb and the egg beneath it, and sighed with relief. This was that same broody hen she’d dealt with yesterday.

  “Poor little girl,” Dallas said. “You want to nest, and no one is paying attention. I can fix that.” She got up and opened the door of a small cabinet by the door, took out one of the ceramic nesting eggs her Dad kept, and slipped it into a nesting box and the hen along with it. The hen settled down on the familiar shape with a cluck and pecked Dallas’s arm again, stating her disapproval of being moved.

  “Ouch, damn it. I’m trying to help.” She bent back down to get the egg on the floor of the coop, then gathered up the rest to go with it.

  She was halfway to the barn with the shotgun in one hand and the egg basket in the other when she realized the cows weren’t waiting in the pen for their ground feed.

  She paused to glance out across the pasture but didn’t see the herd anywhere. She frowned. This wasn’t normal. She hurried on down to the cooler to put up the eggs, and then went out the back side of the breezeway for a closer look, but she still saw nothing. It was early, though, and they would surely come in sometime this morning, so she went ahead and put out the ground feed and hay, then headed back to the house. She was planning what she would do today when she noticed the hens were no longer in the yard.

  Out of habit, she looked up at the sky. Sometimes when a hawk was flying over, the hens would run for cover back in the coop, but she didn’t see a bird of any kind anywhere. And the moment she thought that, she realized she didn’t hear anything, not even the squirrel that wintered in the big oak. The hair stood up on the back of her neck as she swung the shotgun up and started walking. The closer she got to the house, the more nervous she became. It was too damn quiet. She was about to take another step when she caught movement from the corner of her eye, and then the dog was coming toward her, less than two yards to her left.

  His size alone stopped her heart. His head was down, and the snarl coming up his throat was all the warning she would get. The barn was too far away, and he was standing between her and the house. She had nowhere to run. It was fight or die.

  She fired the first barrel as he leaped, but was a second too slow. He hit her chest high and knocked her flat on her back, the gun still in her hands. Now he was standing over her, straddling her body as she struggled to catch her breath.

  The pain of the first bite on her shoulder caught her off guard, but then she remembered the gun in her hands and shoved the side of the barrel against his head as he lunged for her throat, making him miss. He kept lunging and snapping as the pain in her shoulder grew so intense she was afraid she would pass out. She was screaming and jabbing at him, trying to angle the gun for one more try. When he lunged yet again she shoved the gun barrel up as hard as she could push with one hand, ramming it hard against his jaw, then pulled the trigger with the other.

  The shot was so loud it hurt her ears. Blood flew. The weight of the dog knocked the air out of her lungs as it collapsed on her chest. The last thing she remembered was the complete absence of sound.

  * * *

  If Hazel Woodley hadn’t stumbled over her house cat and dropped the bowl of eggs she was carrying, then Otis wouldn’t have been sent back to the Phillips farm for more eggs quite so soon.

  Otis was irked
with Hazel and cussing George Strait, their house cat, as he drove up to the Phillips place. Almost instantly he saw a huge dog down by the chicken house and quickly drove that way to run it off.

  He realized two things upon arrival. First, the dog was dead, and second, Dallas Phillips was lying beneath it, unmoving and covered in blood.

  “Lord, Lord, Lord!” he cried as he grabbed a pistol from his glove box and jumped out, scared to death of what he would find.

  The dog was missing part of its head and obviously dead. He couldn’t tell what shape Dallas was in, only that she was covered in blood.

  “Oh Lord, help me, Lord,” he kept praying, as he dropped to his knees beside her and felt for a pulse.

  When he felt it beating steadily, he went weak with relief, and even though she was unconscious, he patted her head.

  “Hang on, honey! I’ll get you some help.”

  He ran back to the truck, frantically fumbling in the seat for his cell phone to call the police.

  * * *

  Trey was at his desk when he heard a call come in to the dispatcher. The panic he heard in Avery’s voice brought him to his feet. He was moving out of his office into the hall when he heard Avery paging the ambulance, and then everything became a nightmare.

  All he heard was an ambulance being dispatched to Dick Phillips’s farm, something about a bloody woman and a dead dog. Trey couldn’t get out of the building fast enough.

  He drove hot out of Mystic with the siren screaming in a way he couldn’t, and he didn’t slow down until he had to make the turn leading down the driveway.

  He didn’t realize he’d beaten the ambulance there until he saw Otis Woodley’s pickup and Otis on his knees. It took Trey a few moments to realize what he was seeing, and then he slid the cruiser to a stop and got out on the run.

  Otis looked up at him. He was crying.

  “I couldn’t move the dog. I couldn’t get it off her ’cause I’m too damn old. She keeps coming to and then passing out. I know she’s having trouble breathing.”

  Trey was speechless. There was so much blood on Dallas’s face that he couldn’t even tell where she was hurt, and he was afraid to drag the dog off for fear of making other wounds worse. And then training kicked in, and he heard a voice in his head.

  Don’t look at her. Focus on what has to be done.

  She needed oxygen? Move the dog.

  Trey leaned over, grabbed the dog around the belly and lifted it straight up, then threw it aside.

  Otis shook his head in disbelief.

  “Lord, Trey. That was amazing.”

  Almost instantly, Dallas’s chest began to heave as she drew much-needed oxygen into her lungs. At the same time, her eyelids began to flutter.

  Trey heard an approaching siren. “That’s the ambulance,” he said.

  Otis jumped to his feet and ran to wave them over.

  Trey leaned over Dallas’s body, one hand on the crown of her head, the other with a finger on her pulse.

  Her whole body jerked as she opened her eyes, and then she frantically grabbed at his wrist.

  “Trey?”

  “Thank you, Jesus,” he whispered. “Yes, baby, it’s me. The ambulance is here. You’re going to be fine. Can you tell me where he bit you?”

  “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  Trey blinked. “You’re covered in blood.”

  She saw his lips moving, but still couldn’t hear. She touched her ear.

  “Are they bleeding? I can’t hear.”

  Trey looked. “I can’t tell whose blood is whose,” he said.

  She shook her head. “He was on top of me. The... gun was between us. I jammed the barrel against his jaw and fired.”

  Trey nodded without speaking. The percussion of the shot was what had deafened her. All he could do was hope to God it was temporary.

  And then the paramedics were coming toward them, so Trey stood up and stepped back. One of them saw all the blood all over Trey and stopped.

  “Are you injured, Chief?”

  “No, it’s theirs,” he said, pointing to Dallas and the dog. “She can’t hear you. The gun went off too close to her head.”

  Otis came up behind him as the paramedics began assessing her condition.

  “It’s a miracle she’s alive,” Otis said. “I never saw a dog that big.”

  Trey eyed the carcass, stunned that Dallas had fought the thing and lived. “It could be a mixed breed, but it looks like a mastiff. It’s certainly as big as one. From the look of all the old scars, it’s for sure one of the dogs they were fighting. It’s no wonder it went feral after they turned it into a killer. Dallas is lucky to be alive.”

  Reassured she was in good hands, he ran to the house to look for her purse, knowing it would have medical information they might need. When he found it, he went through the house, turning out lights, shutting off the coffeepot, then locking the doors behind him as he left.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for word of what had happened to sweep through Mystic, and with a few more phone calls, the horror of it spread up and down the mountain, sending panic through the families living there. Women scattered, calling their children in from play, running along the creeks behind their houses in a frantic race to find their teenagers, ringing the bells on their back porches to call in family, all in a panic to be safe should another wild dog appear.

  What had happened to Dallas Phillips was the straw that had needed to break. People had been shooting at wild dogs off and on for months, running them off their cattle, losing geese, turkeys and chickens to them, even their hogs right out of the lots.

  But once they learned the size of the animal that attacked Dallas, a large group of men headed to the Phillips farm to see for themselves. The monster shocked them. It was all the impetus they needed to act.

  One man offered his pickup truck to bring the dead dog to the vet to check for rabies. The rest of the men formed hunting parties on the spot and took off in four different directions from the Phillips farm, determined to eradicate the danger from the mountain.

  Nine

  Dallas woke as they were moving her from the paramedics’ gurney onto an exam table in the ER. The silence in her head was frightening. She could see people scrambling. The horror on their faces was obvious, but she could only imagine how bad she looked. When they began to pull at her clothing, her anxiety grew. She wanted Trey and called his name.

  When she didn’t see him, her voice rose an octave. “Trey.”

  A nurse leaned over her, talking.

  Dear God, was she going to be deaf forever?

  Panic hit her, and the next time she spoke his name she was screaming. “Trey!”

  Within seconds he was standing at the foot of the exam table in her line of vision. His clothes were bloody and his expression grim as he grabbed her ankle. Then she read his lips.

  I love you.

  She hadn’t heard his voice, and she couldn’t hear her own, but this was not the time to evade the truth.

  “I love you, too,” she said, watching as quiet joy spread over his face.

  Two nurses were cleaning the blood off her face, while another was cutting off her clothes. A doctor she didn’t recognize was standing near her elbow. She could see him talking and guessed he was asking her questions. She pointed to her ears and shook her head.

  Trey intervened.

  “She can’t hear,” he said. “The gun was between her and the dog. When she pulled the trigger, it went off just above her head.”

  “Okay, good to know,” the doctor said. “As soon as they get her cleaned up, I’ll check that out and get some X-rays, as well.”

  At that point they had all her clothing except her underwear cut away from her body. The bite marks on her shoulder were horrible, but they seemed to be the worst of it.

  Trey breathed a little easier.

  The doctor leaned down for a closer examination of the wound.

  “Good thing she had that jacket on. I thin
k it saved the flesh from much tearing, although there are close to thirty different puncture wounds. We’ll clean this up and get her started on some high-powered antibiotics to prevent infection. The dog is dead, correct?”

  “Yes,” Trey said.

  “Get it to a vet to check for rabies.”

  “I got a phone call a few minutes ago that someone picked it up from the farm and took it straight to the vet for testing.”

  “Good,” the doctor said, and then began examining the rest of her body to make sure there were no other wounds. Then he looked up at the two nurses. “Help me roll her over onto her right side. I want to check for wounds on her back.”

  Dallas moaned when they rolled her over. “That hurts!” she cried.

  “Damn it. Her ribs. I didn’t even think. The dog was lying on her,” Trey said.

  The doctor frowned. “How big a dog are we talking about here?”

  “About the size of a mastiff,” Trey said.

  The medical staff stopped what they were doing and looked up, shocked that a dog of that size had been running wild in their area, and then looked at Dallas, surprised that this woman had brought it down.

  The doctor wasn’t happy. “Get the portable X-ray in here, stat! We need to make sure moving her didn’t puncture a lung.”

  And just like that, Trey’s fear was back, and he didn’t breathe easy until he got confirmation that her ribs were only bruised, not broken.

  * * *

  Dallas woke up in pain. It hurt to breathe, and her left shoulder was throbbing. Betsy was sitting in a chair by her bed. She looked around for Trey and saw him blocking the door to her room, and guessed he was arguing with what looked like a news crew. She recognized the cameraman and groaned. That was a crew from WOML Charleston. Damn it to hell, she had become a segment on her own evening news. Watching them argue without being able to hear what they said was an ugly reminder that she was still deaf. She touched her ears, then closed her eyes as tears rolled out from beneath the lids.