Jack walks towards the woods, looking to the sky through the leaves for answers.
“So let me get this straight,” he says, turning back to Derek. “You’re tellin’ me that the reason you’re this crazy-ass rapist is because you got turned on staring at fuzzy plants as a boy, and you started thinking of them as green little Martian pussies or some such bullshit?”
“I just want my family tree to go on!” Derek yells. “Is that so hard to understand? Just one more generation will be enough, I think. At first, I thought I could just store some seeds for later. And I did that. I stored it everywhere I could. Underground, under any loose brick in the road, in prescription bottles, at work in the break-room freezer. Yeah, that’s right. I’d even drop some in someone’s drink, so they could carry me around for the day, just in case.”
“In case of emergencies, huh?”
“By the way, if you ever see him again, tell Rick you should never, never steal someone’s lunch. That goes double for me. ‘Cause technically, that’s fucking kidnapping! Anyway, I thought maybe a part of me could wait for Toni, too, and if I couldn’t live inside her for more than forty-eight hours, hell, maybe it didn’t matter. The Guinness Book of World Records says the youngest pregnancy case on record is nine years-old. Nine. So there’s a chance, you know? Maybe it’s always been possible and not such a strange thing, just no one ever takes that chance until there’s no other choice.”
“But there is a dog right? Those dog attacks? That’s all you, right?”
Derek hangs his head, suddenly ashamed.
“I’d never kill anyone. At least not before I found the second tumor.”
Jack starts running.
“I know I’ve made mistakes,” Derek is still explaining. “My dog... my Smokey, he helps me keep things straight in my head. Still, I probably killed nobody. Somebody else is doing that shit. It’s been a weird summer...”
Evil had spent three long seconds with the wheels of his dirt bike still on the ramp when he saw Bully’s shadow start dancing in the corner of his eye. That sad, lonely asshole “Billy” was still singing, all proud of the horrible song he’d written for her. The dog biting his handlebars whined, almost seeming to sing along between its teeth.
“…with a flamethrower, Russell ain’t no slouch… Garry ain’t spendin’ the winter... tied to this fuckin’ couch… fat bastard’s belly ate our defibrillator… wait, how the hell did we climb outta that crater…”
Amazingly, Evil had seen most of the movies drawn all over her body, too. At least the faces looked familiar. But maybe it was just the beam, the excitement of seeing her on the big screen. The biggest screen.
Even more incredibly, Evil wasn’t afraid. If it was one thing growing up in the era of 80’s blockbusters had taught him, it was that deadpan under-reaction to insane or life-threatening situations was required. Billy was entirely too passionate and probably should have been born decades later. But not Evil.
Then the tape coughed and clicked, and another voice was talking. Somewhere out in the world, at the end of long a table in a glass room, a cop was revisiting his worst day in the glower of Internal Affairs:
“The collar that held the bomb to the victim’s neck was as weak as a child’s toy. It could have been pried away with little or no effort. The device appeared to be sophisticated, but Federal agents discovered it was constructed with, among other things, a partial Girl Scout’s bracelet that could have been easily snapped, given a significant amount of pressure. One investigator at the first of several press conferences famously compared it to a Native American ‘dreamcatcher.’ ‘What’s that?’ the reporter asked, that single question recorded before cameras were abruptly turned off that day. ‘Bunch of shit hanging off a hoop,’ the Erie, Pennsylvania Chief of Police answered impatiently. ‘Catches dreams.’ At 3:28 p.m., the Chief was proven wrong as two bombs exploded…”
Then the beat of the song was back on, and Evil now was flying, and Bully was dancing, and Larry, he was down there fighting again. Fighting hard.
Larry fought harder than he ever thought he was capable. He was convinced it was the nakedness that allowed this. Naked people always fought harder, of course, even if his new tattoos had blurred the rules of the game. He turned the .38 back on Bigby, firing three wild shots at the cop as he ducked down inside the covered slide where the kids were crying and vanishing forever.
Officer Bigby would never be seen alive again.
So Larry turned his gun on the shadow of the girl, who held her arms a mile wide, just like the Journey song, showing off the remote control to everyone who was still paying attention to the movie.
And Evil, he was still flying. A good hundred feet up, he felt gravity bringing him back down to Earth, so he took his hands off his dog, turned down his music, and opened his shirt to reveal the smeared names and logos of his sponsors, rivers of Magic Marker dripping down the sweat of his chest.
But did she see him? She had to see him. He was flying, for fuck’s sake.
Larry didn’t see him, but he could still hear the song. He’d seen the movie, but the lyrics still made no sense to him at all.
“…can you drag a man by his face? I got some misgivings… a pimp ties up the dead along with the living… man with diabetes wants to come back inside… builds a saucer in an hour? No way that shit flies…”
Back in the beam, Bully had her thumb back on the button. The same thumb that had wrestled Evil into submission the first time they met. She saw the second-to-last dog left in the world, still tied to the slide, surrounded by the screaming families scooping up their children. The second-to-last dog had bright lesions on its nose from trying to get out of her trunk earlier in the day, and she felt a moment of pity, and her thumb wavered.
Then she saw a little girl yelling and running toward the animal, shouting a word indistinguishable to everyone but Bully, whose veteran drive-in eyes could read her lips easily.
What are the chances of that? she thought when she deciphered the dog’s name. Well, no time for reunions...
Then she pushed the button.
Six years ago through the reflection in a dog’s eyes. The smoke and fire of a burning car reveals a shadow dragging a girl’s body toward a stump. The dog knows the shadow and cowers from it, trying to make itself small.
“Aren’t you hungry?” the shadow asks. “You have to be thirsty.”
Every word is like a hard tap on the dog’s head, and it flinches with each one.
“Come here!”
This command impossible to resist, the dog takes a few wary steps toward the voice. When it reaches the stump, it begins to lap up cold black rain from inside the ring of wavering plants. Then a vicious kick sends the dog rolling into the brush with a yelp. The shadow looms over it as it offers its belly.
“Don’t ever do that.”
The dog slinks away, miserable in its confusion, averting its eyes but trying to be ready for what its master may expect. It hears the sound of a zipper and finally relaxes its shoulders. It associates this sound with moments of reprise. Calm before the storm. The dog looks up, whimpers.
A long time ago, the shadow tried to teach the dog to sing, starting with a particularly easy one, 5-year-old wunderkind Nellie McKay’s “Dog Song.”
“I said, ‘Woof, be mine,’ And you gave a wail, and then I was no longer alone…”
The lesson ended with the dog as miserable as he was after a kick.
“Here it comes... open wide...” the shadow says to the plants. The dog howls almost reflexively, but he knows this command is not for him. Then the dog sneaks another look, brown wet eyes following the rain of white, ropey tendrils that begin painting the open mouths of the young plants. The bulbs ache towards the ejaculate, until they are covered and falling around the ring like dominoes, snapping shut like baby birds.
Jack Grinstead stares up into the sky, his body swaying with the treetops while he shakes his head, thinks about everything he’s just been told.
“You can’t tre
at a dog like that, you know? You can’t force a dog to do things like that and still expect to keep it around. They’re smarter than you think. Okay, they can’t make you an omelet or anything, but emotionally? They are fuckin’ complicated.”
Derek raises a gray eyebrow.
“Clearly more complicated than you,” Jack adds.
“What I am doing is the most natural thing in the world,” Derek’s voice is quiet, serene.
“No, that dog will turn on you eventually. Trust me. Think I’m lying? Trying jerking off into your dog’s mouth and see what happens, you crazy fuck. Wait, I’ll bet you already did that.”
There’s some crunching underbrush behind him, and Jack spins to see Derek is gone. He quickly runs back to find the Flytrap with the black spot in the center, and he tears it open, suddenly desperate to save the fly for no good reason at all.
The shredded plant falls from his hands, and he sees that it’s empty after all.
Derek’s apartment. Later that night. Derek is lying on the floor again, looking at his ceiling with binoculars, studying each photograph for several minutes at a time. He has a phone balanced on the side of his face.
“Hello? Toni? This is Jack, your mommy’s friend. Hey, I have a secret to tell you. You wanna hear a secret?” Pause. “Good. You can’t tell anyone, but I’m going to tell you who I really am. Now, this is a secret just for you. And it takes only four words to tell you this secret, so listen close. You swear you won’t tell?”
He balances the binoculars on his forehead as he waits for her to swear.
A whimper comes from the closet, and he blinks slow, disgusted. He’s not sure when he became so impatient with dogs, but he thinks it has something to do with growing up in those alleys, with all those cats. After all those felines orbiting his feet, looking for food from his hand and nothing else, he always found himself hating the intelligence he’d find in a dog’s eyes. And if a dog looked at him worried or miserable? Forget about it.
If Derek was the kind of person to attach meaning to incomprehensible events, he would have reflected on what happened to his ears 30 years ago, when something went wrong at the local radio station during a freak thunderstorm, when there was a huge, red, mercurial blob on all the local weather radars, and for nine long months, the only thing the two little woofers in Derek’s eardrums could pick up were songs about dogs. Desperate, he’d tracked down the station’s tall, blinking towers, but no matter how many plugs he pulled, flashing lights he smashed, antennas he bent, or boomboxes he destroyed, it was all dogs, all the time. These days, he remembered hearing dog songs back then that hadn’t even been written yet, and, of course, no one believed such incredible reception. He’d heard of a shoestring nephew picking up Springsteen in his fillings once, but none of those were dog songs, as far as he knew. And that incident was over mercifully quick. But for Derek, it was nine straight months of music echoing around his brainpan, and never one dog song repeated. That year, Derek realized there were a lot of dogs in the world, and even more songs written about the beasts.
Doctors were of little help. One of them even peered judgmentally down her otoscope and shamed him for jamming magnets into his ears as a boy, as if every kid didn’t try it at least once.
Then one day, the dog songs stopped, as if the canid-obsessed musicians had finally run out of ideas.
He was relieved there were never any long-term psychological effects.
“Okay, you got your crayons? Good, just hide this after you write it down. Yes, write it on your hand. That’ll be the easiest thing to hide. Are you ready? These four words are important, our secret. They mean I’m everything to you...”
Toni’s bedroom. Minutes later. Jacki walks in and turns off a late-night talk show. She sees Toni hiding something from her mother behind her back, and Jacki smiles and playfully wrestles her hands open. Scrawled in crayon is red gibberish that spells:
“Rehtorbapdnargelcnuyddad.”
“What is this?” Jacki asks, and Toni surprises her by bursting into tears. She thinks back to when they both sat through a Citizen Kane and The Shining double feature, and how afterwards, Toni started writing “Rosebud” on everything, but backwards. It was better than “Redrub,” she decided at the time.
Toni is crying harder, so Jacki lets her go, unplugging the television on the way out and vowing to get her some books.
Highway. Next day. Rick is driving with his new partner, Jess. About half a mile back on the highway is Jack, trailing them in another ambulance.
Before Rick can notice him in his rear-view mirror, he pulls a U-turn and heads in the other direction, lights flashing and siren blaring. Rick’s siren is now clear and normal. He leans over to share a bag of peanuts with Jess, but she refuses, so he throws the bag out the window.
“What the hell?” she says.
“What?”
“Don’t throw that shit into the street, man.” Jess is young, black, muscular. Speaks with authority, confidence, even on her first day at work.
“You didn’t care when I was throwing the shells,” Rick tells her.
“That’s ‘cause those are natural.”
“Well, so is plastic.”
“The hell it is.”
“What do you mean? You see plastic in bird’s nests constantly these days. Just like any leaf.”
“Yeah, and you see it wrapped around a turtle’s face, too.”
“Exactly!”
She shakes her head in disgust. “Once, I saw a turtle with one of those plastic rings from a six pack squeezing its shell. It turned the shell into a big-ass question mark. Tell me that wasn’t a message from somewhere telling us to get our shit together.”
“You’d think those rings would squeeze a shell into a number eight.”
“What’s your point,” she asks.
“That’s like infinity. Can’t be all bad.”
The radio crackles.
“What did dispatch just say?” Rick asks.
“He said something about Greenbury Road?”
“Greenbury Road? There’s nothing out there. That voice didn’t sound right. Do me a favor. Try calling ‘em back.”
She eats a stray peanut from the crease of her pleats, wipes her hands on her pants, then clicks the CB.
“Dispatch. Come in, dispatch.”
She drops the receiver and shrugs.
“Now it’s dead.”
Rick ducks down to check the equipment, teeth grinding as he pulls up a handful of loose wires.
“What the fuck?”
While he’s leaning over, Rick doesn’t notice Jack driving past them in his ambulance. But Jess does, and she taps on her window as he zips by.
“Now where was he…”
Then Jack swerves and does a quick wobbly U-turn to follow them, and she turns back around, assuming he’s on the same call.
But Jack exits before they do, so that he can get there first. Jack still has routes in his head. Back in England, he used to have the routes on his walls. Sometimes he even drew them on his arms. If he’d have kept that job, he might have gotten them tattooed. But now his head would have to do.
Rick sees the car wreck on the horizon, the twisted body of a woman visible on the road.
It’s Jacki.
He hits the brakes, and they both jump out just as Jack runs past them, bumping his shoulder into Rick’s and rebounding him against the side of his truck.
Jack’s heart is jack-hammering as he recognizes where they are, of course, near the woods again, back to the scene of Jacki’s first crash, the stump, the Flytraps, everything. Suddenly, he ducks around their ambulance, out of Rick’s sight.
Rick freezes, back against the truck, and Jess stops and tugs on his shirt.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Just stay where I can see you. I’m calling the cops.”
Rick climbs back into his vehicle and comes face to face with Jack opening the passenger door and reaching for the ignition. Jack plucks the ke
y, and Rick grabs Jack around the throat.
“You crazy fuck. I’m going to-”
The threat is squeezed off like a valve as Jack’s hand turns white under Rick’s chin, too. Then a third hand reaches up to help choke Rick harder.
Then a fourth.
Rick’s hands slump.
Confused by the math with all those hands, Rick falls backwards out of the ambulance, catching a glimpse of someone pulling Jack out of the passenger door. Through the haze of his circulation pumping back into his brain, Rick see Jess helping him to his feet, but he pushes her away and runs back to the second ambulance, looking for Jack and the owner of those extra hands. He does a lap around it, stopping to stare at huge, jagged childlike letters spray-painted on the back doors.
“Time Machine.”
“Stop running in circles!” Jess screams. “What are you looking for?!”
“Where did they go?” Rick pushes past her, frantic. “Did you see him?”
“Who was that? Come on, she needs our help.”
Rick hesitates.
“I don’t know.”
He turns back toward the woods, motioning for her to follow.
“C’mon. He took the keys.”
“Wait, aren’t you forgetting something?”
Jess points back to Jacki’s body on the side of the road.
“No. This is more important. It’s probably a trick. She’ll be fine.”
They climb into Jack’s ambulance, and Rick floors it, his tires throwing up a fishtail of dirt and dead leaves on his way out. The siren is choked and strangled.
Back to normal, Rick laughs to himself.
When the dust from their tires clears and they’re long gone, sunlight and insects start to penetrate the smoke and light on Jack’s body, bloody and inert between the tire tracks. In the distance, a shadow crashes through the woods, breaking branches for no reason.
Later that night. Derek is standing back in front of Rick and Jess’s ambulance with his dog, a huge, hairless blue Doberman.
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