Paws

by Stefan Petrucha

  CHAPTER 19

  TheRealWade16:

  Cleanup’s here. Where’re u? How’s Mr. Snuffles and the collie?

  Preston2.0:

  Stuck w/paperwork, meaning the paper they use for their business. These dogs are like a water cooler w/broken tap.

  TheRealWade16:

  So…room for more?

  Preston2.0:

  ?! How many?

  TheRealWade16:

  Uh…29.

  Preston2.0:

  !!! They *have* to go to the lab.

  TheRealWade16:

  NVM. I’ll work something out. BFN.

  UNDAUNTED, I trot back down to the whimpering crowd in the private bowling alley. Soulful eyes trapped in pin shapes stare at me, sad as sad can be. You know the drill: I dunno which are actual pups, which may go super-sized, yadda yadda yadda. I’m no expert on dog breeds, but I see an Afghan, a malamute, foxhound and spaniel, shepherd and schnauzer, basset and boxer, retriever, Doberman, deerhound and pointer, setter and Dane, mastiff, Newfoundland, sheepdog, Pekingese, poodle, pug, rottweiler, husky, whippet, vizsla, Shiba Inu, Weimaraner, schipperke, and I think that little fellow is a Samoyed.

  Like I said, I’m no expert, but I already had the smartphone out to text Preston, so I looked them all up. And despite whatever weakness I may have previously displayed toward the magical Mr. Snuffles, I remain a pure professional, offering calming words as I do what I must.

  “Don’t be afraid, little ones! The mean Bowling Man is gone, and I’m here to save you!”

  A few tugs here and there, and they’re off scampering. Thankfully, being bound up has done nothing to stifle their youthful enthusiasm. It’s like overwinding spring toys and setting them down to run amok. They bounce off this, skid on that, crash into each other, tear into cardboard and old clothes.

  You’d think the overflow of delightfulness would tug at my wounded heart, but the sheer numbers make it easier to keep my emoticons to myself. One puppy is adorable. Twenty-nine is a statistic. Still, rather than subject them to a lab, I’m thinking I’ll take them along on the next job. Question is, how? Mr. Snuffles, I could hold in one hand. Sigh. Mr. Snuffles.

  Cruston left a collection of bowling-ball bags, but if I figure four pups to a bag, I’d wind up lugging seven bags with one dog left over. Boxes? Bulky. Backpack? Maybe. There’s a pile of burlap sacks that could work. Has to be better than the Velcro.

  I lay one sack down, hold an end open, slap my thigh, and point inside. “Here, guys! In here!”

  You probably think that’d never work. Shows what you know. Dogs and sacks are like toddlers and cardboard boxes. It’s their favorite thing. The closest pup, a pug, is a little hesitant at first, but his curiosity wins out, and he heads on in. After that, the others follow. Soon I’ve got ten rolling around in there happy as you please, with the others waiting for a turn.

  By the time I get the last of them into the third sack, the first group’s gotten a little quiet. Remembering the ugly Hulk incident, I peek in. No problems. They’re all cozy, lying on each other, keeping warm. A few have even fallen asleep, probably exhausted from trauma. And the fabric lets in plenty of air. Seal them off with a gently tied bow, hoist the bags over my shoulder, and I’m ready to roll.

  Where does our next lucky contestant reside? The wilds of Westchester County. Yeah, it’s famous for Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Geeks—A.K.A. the X-Men—but that’s in Salem Center, so far north it’s practically Putnam. This early dog-adopter is in Briarcliff Manor. Google Earth shows me a recently constructed home sporting a lush 0.6 acres of lawn.

  Without further ado (did we have ado earlier?), I ’port into a wooded patch behind the Double Quarter Pounder with cheese. That’s a McMansion joke, btw.

  Don’t know if you’re keeping track of time—I’m not—but when I arrive, it’s dark enough for the owners to have the lights on. I gently lay my puppy-love-sacks down on soft earth covered by pine needles. I’m on my way to a manicured backyard when I notice a little marker stuck in the ground among the junk trees. It’s all of two popsicle sticks glued together in a cross. A single word, nearly faded, is written on them, scrawled by a youthful hand in purple crayon:

  Goldie

  A grave some kid made for his pet fish. Hate to think I’m here to add to his losses, but that is part of the reason people give their children pets. The marker is pretty old, anyway. The kid must be over it by now; with any luck, it’s prepared him for the loss he’s about to experience.

  But then I notice another marker: Gerry the Gerbil.

  And another, with better penmanship: Mehitabel the Cat.

  And another: Gef the Mongoose.

  It’s like a pet necropolis. They’re all over. That’s a lot of bad luck for one kid. His pet care may not have improved over the years, but his funerary design has sure picked up. The newer graves sport ornate designs. There’s even a Play-Doh stele for Oscar the Ferret, with an inscription:

  Remember me as you pass by,

  As you are now, so once was I,

  As I am now, so you will be,

  Prepare for death and follow me.

  Brrr! There’s something about all these silent little graves, the hollow chirps of insect minds, the gray trees with long-fingered branches. It’s not easy for someone whose skin oozes multicolored pus to get the willies, but at this point, one lone wind whistling through the trees behind me is all it takes. I snap my head around, expecting the Blair Witch to jump up with a shaky camcorder.

  Leaves crunch. Or is it more wind? A branch snaps. A squirrel? A shovel chucks in the dirt, and I almost leap out of my cancer-scarred skin.

  It came from behind me, away from the house and deeper in the small wood. Taking a few steps closer, I see a flashlight poke dying yellow light along the ground, hitting even more grave markers. How big is this junior cemetery?

  The shovel chucks again. The yellow light wobbles and threatens to fade. You just can’t get a decent flashlight these days. I can see the digger, but barely. He’s a silhouette in the dark, a shadow against shadow, a blacker black hunched over a bunch of grayness. There’s a hiss. Around where his mouth should be, a horrid, swelling pink mass rises into the dying flashlight beam. The glowing orb grows, then disappears with a pop.

  Bubble gum. It’s a kid chewing bubblegum. Of course it’s a kid. Heh. What else would it be? And the graves? Maybe this is where all the neighborhood kids bury their pets. Nothing strange about that.

  Much.

  If he’s digging that hole for the dog on my list, it’s not going to be turning into a monster. Have to be sure who the deceased is, though. Maybe he waited to bury his previous pet until he got a new one. I move closer, loudly, so he can hear me coming. No need for both of us to be scared, right?

  As he comes more clearly into view, I feel pretty stupid for getting spooked. He’s a pudgy, Harry Potter type, maybe seven years old, in jeans and old sneakers. He couldn’t look more harmless if he tried. Unless he’s a vampire, I guess. Even then, I’ve got him on weight. Speed too, judging from the way he’s moving that shovel. It’s heavy for him, but he doesn’t stop digging.

  Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.

  Think he’d have noticed me by now, but aside from being totally focused, he’s got flecks of soil on his glasses. While I’m waiting, I catch a whiff of fresh-cut pine and earthy clay. The pine’s coming from a coffin-shaped box on the ground behind him. The hinges are mismatched, and a nail pokes out, but it’s not bad woodwork for a kid. The clay smell is coming from the headstone he’s got propped up against a tree. It’s a wafer-thin, slate-colored copy of an old Puritan marker, complete with a crudely etched angel of death on the tympanum—and underneath, the words:

  Here Lies

  Rusty

  Kid has talent. Hate to interrupt. It’s sort of a sacred moment, after all, and, well, he’s almost done with the digging. Giving him another half a minute won’t hurt. Besides, I’m so close, I have to figure out how to let him know I’m h
ere without making him crap his pants. I’m already a masked man skulking around the back of his house. If I say something like “Don’t scream,” it’ll only make it worse.

  The kid’s done now. Still not seeing me, he drags the box into the hole, settles it in straight, and starts pushing the loose earth back in. No way to avoid it anymore. I clear my throat.

  “Hey, kid.”

  He doesn’t even look up. “You sure dress funny, mister. Are you a burger?”

  “I think you mean burglar. Me? Nah.”

  He gathers a shovel-full of dirt and tosses it in the hole. “If you are, you should try next door. They’ve got much more stuff than we do.”

  “Really? What kind of stuff? Do they have a fourth-gen gaming console?” I clear my throat again. “Uh…never mind. So…not a lot of luck in the pet department, huh?”

  “Mom says it’s a question of perspection. It ’pends how you look

  at it.”

  I nod sympathetically. “Perspective. Right. When you lose someone you care about, you’re better off relishing the happy times than dwelling on the loss.”

  “Plus, she says you don’t have to feed it or clean up after it anymore.”

  Okay, then, moving on. Better try to ease him into it before I ask any unpleasant questions about the pooch. “It’s nice here—peaceful. Very natural. These graves all yours?”

  “Uh-huh.” He sticks the shovel in the dirt, then rests his chin on the handle. “I’ve been making them since I was little. Popsicle sticks got boring, so I started copying hiscorical pictures.”

  “Historical.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I look at the clay marker lying against the tree. “Cool headstone. I’m sure Rusty would like it. He a doggie?”

  He sighs. “Just a puppy. Mommy and Daddy got him for me yesterday.”

  “Yesterday.” That’s my target, then, so no hurry. “Wow. Uh… how’d he die so quick? He get sick? Hit by a car?”

  He shakes his head. “Oh, he’s not dead, mister.”

  Thinking there may still be some Goom in my ears and I didn’t hear him correctly, I whack my head. “What’d you say? Not…?”

  “But he will be. All living things need…oxy-tin.”

  “Oxygen.”

  “Uh-huh. Even fish. It’s in water, so they need gills to breathe it. People don’t have gills, so they drown in water, but a fish drowns without water.”

  “Back up a bit, Mr. Wizard. You bury your pets alive?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “I like making the little grave markers, and my mommy said I can’t make ’em anymore unless I have to. The mean school counselor said it was too…moo-bid?”

  “Morbid.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I dive toward him. “Are you related to a guy named Cruston, you miserable little…?”

  I grab him and yank him toward me, but stop myself before I do anything he’ll regret. The shovel falls, hitting the flashlight and sending it rolling into the dark. He’s not like Cruston. He’s just a kid. A psychopath, sure, but just a little one. Brain’s not developed enough yet to have a moral compass. This could be a phase. He could grow up to be a CEO. Or Hitler.

  I put him down and pat his clothes all nicey-nice. “Listen. As someone who gets a kick out of taking lives in interesting and, yeah, I like to think poetic, ways, part of me’s impressed by all your hard work. The thing is…” I look around, hoping to see the right words carved on a tree trunk somewhere. No luck. “The thing is, I draw very specific lines about who does and doesn’t deserve it. Your poor pets, they…wait.”

  The flashlight settles, its beam slicing across the new markers on two more freshly dug graves. One says, “Mom”; the other, “Dad.”

  I go into a standard pose of extreme shock and frustration. You know the one—hunched over, hands out, fingers curled, head thrown back.

  “Holy crap! Did you…could you…? A little guy like…? How’d you even…?”

  He shrugs. “I used chora…flora…”

  “Chloroform!”

  I grab the shovel. He looks like he’s afraid I’ll smack him with it, and I admit it crosses my mind, but I step past him, toward the mom-and-pop plots. Some quick chuck-chuck-chucking of my own—and yep, there’s truth in labeling. They didn’t get boxes. He just bound and gagged them. I got to them in time. They’re alive and squirming, staring up at me, unsure whether to be grateful or even more afraid.

  “Pretty strange day for you two, huh? Knocked out and buried alive by your Bad Seed, and now you wake up staring at my masked kisser? Funny old world, ain’t it?”

  The kid tries to tug the shovel from my hands. “Please, mister! When my mommy saw Rusty’s coffin, I heard her tell Daddy she couldn’t take it anymore! She was going to call the social cervixes—”

  “Services.”

  “—and they were going to take me away, and I got scared!”

  We all get scared. Thing is, after seeing all this, there’s something on my mind. It’s a little dark thing, hard like a crumb, but a perfect dot. It’s right over…got it.

  What the hell is that? Some kind of bug? A poppy seed?

  Honestly, I’m relieved when the loose soil above Rusty’s resting place gets the shakes. Clumps of soil roll down the sides of the small mound, more and more, until whatever’s giving off all that energy down there can’t contain itself any longer.

  Bright, blinding light stabs upward in white spears that stretch from the grave to the stars. The earth shakes and parts. A hand reaches up—a giant hand wrapped in flax linen. Ripping through the dirt, it spreads its fingers as if touching the air for the first time in millennia. The huge arm follows, pulling the wrapped body to the surface with it, head and all. The linen is ancient—some dangles in shards—but the vile body remains completely covered, save for the dead yellow eyes.

  The kid gasps. “Rusty?”

  The parents cry out: “Mmf?”

  They’re answered by a voice like a dry desert wind: “I am Gomdulla, the Living Pharaoh! Tremble, mortals, before my awesome might!”

  Norman Bates Jr. ducks behind me like all of a sudden, I’m his best friend. I put my hands on my hips and stare up at the towering form.

  “Living Pharaoh? Oh, please. First of all, we’ve already had Goom, Gorgolla, and Gruto! I’m sick of the G-names, okay? Second of all, you don’t really expect me to believe you have an actual political title like Pharaoh, do you? Which dynasty? Old Kingdom or New? No answer? Thought so. Third, wait for it…you call that living?”

  Rimshot.

  Between the trees, the parents, the bagged dogs, and that lone whistling wind, it’s too risky to use the ADD. The sensor only lets me fire it at a monster, but if anything else gets in the way…

  I whisper to the kid, “Run.”

  “Can’t I please get some better names here? How about Gravitas, the Thing that Must Be Taken Seriously? No, wait, that’s another G. Hold on. Maybe Toe, The Thing that Went Whee, Whee, Whee! All the Way Home?”

  I hear crickets. At first I’m worried the audience doesn’t like the jokes. People are crossing their arms. Even Sophie isn’t laughing. Then I remember there is no audience. I’m outside in a patch of woods, and there really are crickets chirping.

  Another costumed character might use his witty patter to distract his foes. Not me. I never could stop talking. At least Gomdulla’s still staring at me, unsure how to react. The running kid, who really should be on some watch list somewhere, almost gets out of sight, but then stumbles over one of his own headstones. The mummy’s eyes squint. He raises a wrapped arm and points a bony finger the size of a foot-long hot dog—meaning it’s about a foot long.

  “You buried me!”

  Mini American Psycho looks over his shoulder, terrified. “I’m only six! I’m not restonsible for my actions!”

  I cup a hand around my mouth and scream, “Responsible!”

  Big mummy legs cover ground fast. Before I finish
thinking that last sentence, Gomdulla’s over me, swatting trees out of the way to reach his former owner.

  “Dude! Cut him some slack! Didn’t you ever bury stuff alive when you were a kid? Oh, right. You weren’t a kid. You were a dog. My bad.”

  I jump, sliding out my trusty and not-at-all-rusty katana, landing on that broad, linen-covered back like it’s a 3,000-year-old futon. The swords’ points dig in, going deep and deeper. No idea what he’s got in there, but the blades don’t seem to register.

  He tries to shake me off, but I ride the blades’ hilts down his back, opening up a wound wide enough to drive a truck through. Okay, maybe not a truck, but a Prius, easy. I hop off somewhere around the waistline, expecting that to hurt, at least. It doesn’t.

  He reaches down for Lil’ Hannibal Lecter. Based on what Gomdulla’s done to the trees, it won’t take more than two of those fingers to squish the kid. Well, if pain is meaningless, there’s always physics. Since he’s not as meaty as his G-name brothers, I go for the ankles, cutting away until both of his feet come free. He falls—toward the kid.

  Arm outstretched, palms down, it looks like he’ll crush him.

  Time to take a risk.

  The Pharaoh’s open back wound hasn’t sealed yet, so I toss in the ADD. Its green “active” light flips end over end as it passes into the gash, landing somewhere within his dry, dusty confines. I see it blink twice more before the tear heals up, covering it completely.

  Huh. I was hoping it’d hit something in there that would set it off and spray his innards. Oh, well.

  His hand plunges toward the kid. The kid raises his own hand to shield his eyes from what’s coming. For a moment, it’s tiny hand against great big hand.

  Then Gomdullah goes bloop. Like the others before him, the extra-large mummy rains his organic pinkness on the woods. A single drop hits the kid’s index finger. He shakes his hand, flicking it off into the enormous puddle. With no more monster innards to hold it, the ADD clatters to the earth. Ha! Something did press the trigger.

  Leaving us back at that whole who-is-the-real-monster-here conceit.