Or maybe Joule was right, and they had seen it, but the dogs had been so well-camouflaged, the pair had walked right by and not known it. At least there had been no incidents along their walk.
He was halfway through the sandwich, Joule not as far along with hers, when he heard the noise.
Placing a hand on her shoulder, Cage let the sandwich dangle at his side, before thinking better of it. He was grateful again that the dogs had a poor sense of smell.
He didn't even whisper, just moved her shoulder, directing her to where he the sound came from. As they watched, in the distance through the trees, one of the dogs trotted by.
11
Kaya perked up as her children suddenly burst through the front door.
“How was it?” she asked brightly. The two had acted as though they had been going out to play in the woods today but, at seventeen, that story didn't hold water. She suspected they were looking for something specific, but she had no real idea what it was. Given recent events, she was highly suspicious that it was related to the dogs.
“Well,” Joule began, setting her bow down. Kaya now noticed that she’d been clenching it tightly in her hand. Though she set it aside, she seemed reluctant to leave it. “It was eventful.”
That made Kaya spring up from her seat. Though, as she looked at her screen, she realized she didn't want to leave her own research up or be so obvious. She tried to surreptitiously tap a button and change tabs to a different picture. She only wound up on another tab with a similar image and she clicked again and again until her screensaver was up.
Then, she jumped up and threw her arms around her daughter and said, “Oh, tell me.”
Joule sank into the embrace—not the most normal reaction for her very independent, sometimes to the point of prickliness, daughter. The past few days had changed her, made her a little more aware of her family and the need to hold them tight. While Kaya appreciated Joule’s new affection, she hated the reason. Now Joule was hugging her and saying she'd seen something. As she stroked her daughter’s hair, Kaya pushed, “Tell me.”
But it was Cage who spoke up. “We saw a dog. It went past us.”
Kaya stilled. Surely she’d heard him wrong. The dogs weren't out during the daytime. Confusion and disbelief warred in her expression.
“It was alive, walking around… with a human foot in its mouth.” Her son added the last as though it were a funny afterthought.
Kaya almost barfed, but she got herself together enough to ask, “What the ever loving fuck?”
She and Nate had never been the kind to censor themselves in front of their children. The children had been taught there were words they could say at home, words they could say with their friends, and words their friends’ parents would kick them out for having taught to their own children.
Now Kaya shakily ushered the kids over to the table, where she plopped down into her chair and saw that the two kids weren't as stable as they had originally seemed.
It was Cage who kept talking. Joule had not yet removed the quiver from her back, and Kaya was not going to point it out.
“It walked right by. We found the human foot,” Cage said, as though there were a perfectly reasonable explanation, “on the walk out, and we tossed it aside.”
Kaya put her hands over her mouth to cover where it had completely fallen open in shock and fear. She whispered the words, “Do you know whose foot it is? Was?”
Both kids shrugged and this time Joule spoke. Though Kaya didn't like the words, she was glad her daughter was communicating. “It was some high-end, red and black sneaker. Had some ballplayer’s name on it. I think. And it was at least a size twelve.”
Kaya was nodding, not recognizing the shoe or the size as someone she knew who’d gone missing, and honestly, she felt grateful for that. “So you picked up the foot and tossed it aside?”
“Not really.” Cage shook his head as though she were being silly. Of course she was. She was having a conversation with her kids about finding a severed human foot in the woods. Instead of discussing calling the police and opening a murder investigation, instead of asking them to lead a detective to it, she was instead worried that they’d seen a dog. Shaking her head, she focused on her son’s words.
“I double-bagged my hand. I just picked it up because we were trying to figure out whose foot it was. When we couldn’t, I tossed off to the side of the trail. It was… what?” He looked to his sister. “Probably a few hours later the dog walked by in front of us carrying that foot.”
Kaya didn't ask if maybe it was the other foot.
“He didn't see us, or hear us,” Joule added to the conversation. “Since I don't think they can smell us, we just stayed still and quiet. He trotted by.” She motioned with her hand as though the dog were at a tea party, but she still hadn’t taken off the quiver.
“That's good,” Kaya agreed. But it wasn't. It was shit. It was pure shit.
It was good that the dog hadn't seen them. It was good that Joule was an excellent shot with her bow and arrow. It was good that the arrows were made of sturdy metal that might pierce a dog well enough to slow it down. Might.
Kaya was immensely bothered that those were the good points.
She looked to both of the children, stark terror in her eyes and her heart. She should have hidden it, but she couldn’t. She’d thought the world had tilted on its axis when they discovered the first people missing and discovered that it was the dogs.
Now, she felt it tilt again, and though everything her children said added up, she had to ask. “So the dogs are out during the day now?”
12
Joule sat up in the tree and surveyed the neighborhood, first with bare eyes, and then through the binoculars she’d brought up with her.
The weekend had gone by with lots of work and several hundred dollars spent. The Mazur family had hit up a home store, and her parents had readily paid for the things she and Cage loaded into the cart. They’d looked like they belonged on a TV show called Apocalypse 101. She would have laughed if it wasn’t so close to true.
Joule was also suffering a serious case of senior-itis. She knew many high school seniors claimed to have the malady, and she thought it made sense. Unless she flat out failed more than one class, graduation was guaranteed, including honors. As long as she showed up half the time, she wouldn’t fail. Normally, she was an enthusiastic student, but she’d ground her way through a project due on Monday. She didn’t need a presentation on Oedipus Rex.
What she did need was a college education, and dropping her GPA at the last minute of her senior year would not look good. So she'd readied her presentation, and she'd done it well enough, but she and her brother and her father had spent the bulk of the weekend on the ladders. They talked about nylon rope, but eventually engineered it with webbing. The flat, tape-like shape made the webbing less likely to get tangled.
They’d discussed wood size—thinner boards weren’t solid enough to hold them, while thicker boards added to what was already becoming a weight problem. With two-by-fours, the problem was the arm strength a person needed to pull twenty planks up behind them, considering any friction and possibly tired arms from a frantic climb or a more frantic escape. Even worse, the ladder might give a dog just enough purchase to get up.
In the end, they used more-expensive but slightly lighter polymer planking. Making the ladders out of flat pieces allowed the design to zip up like blinds, taking up very little space, once pulled up tight. They considered using ship anchors to tie the cords down but, on the first test run, the cleats had epically failed the speed test.
Instead, they used finger hooks and cross handles. If you needed the ladder, one need only yank it out and let it go. The ladder would zip down. Another cord dangled about two thirds of the way, so that once a climber got there, they could pull the ladder up behind as they climbed. This would limit susceptibility to a well-placed jump, at least as long as the dog wasn't right underneath.
They’d made a prototype and
tested it until her arms hurt, but Joule’s heart felt light. As she sat up here on the first warmish afternoon of the season, she felt a weight come off her shoulders.
This afternoon, there were three functioning ladders in her yard. One front, one back, and one out in the woods. The family had knocked on doors—deciding this was too important to let a few angry answers dissuade them—and asked a few neighbors if they wanted any. They’d then added two more down the street. A feeling of safety settled into her chest, loosening the ties that had held tight this week.
She'd been repeatedly jolted awake at night, with no memory of what her dream had been, only knowing that she'd been petrified, and that she was grateful to be awake—to touch her sheets, to know she was inside the house and she was safe. She would sit for a moment and hope she hadn't made enough noise to attract the dogs. But so far, none had banged on the windows. And she felt better, stronger. Tonight, she intended to sleep through.
While she and Cage and their father had made the ladders, her mother had installed attic access in the upstairs hallway. Their own home had not had the pull-down stairs. They had only a square frame in the top of one of the closets.
Joule had analyzed it and found it beyond lacking. Trying to get anyone—let alone the whole family contorted up through that frame was not a survivable scenario, Joule thought. Now they had attic access, and that was another thing that would help them all sleep better.
This morning, there had been handsaws, plywood, and plaster dust everywhere. Her mother understood all things physical: She knew exactly how the hinges worked, the weight they could bear, the best angle to place them at, and so on. But Kaya Mazur was no carpenter.
“How are you doing up there?” Joule’s father called up. Setting aside her binoculars, she looked down at him from where she was tucked into the crook of two branches.
“I'm good.” It had been her answer all week, but he hadn’t pushed and she’d been grateful.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing of value.” She'd hoped to spot a pack of dogs, but it hadn’t happened. They'd not seen another one since “the foot sighting,” nor any other evidence of daytime activity.
Joule wasn't sure if that made her feel better or worse. If they were out, she wanted to see them and know where they were. If the one had been a fluke, it would take days, or months, of data to convince her that was the case. Also, she was standing behind her theory that the dogs were well enough camouflaged to be moving through the woods unseen.
Her dad knocked on the tree’s trunk. He might have climbed up behind her, but she’d pulled the ladder up after her, realizing that—as the person in the tree—she had solid decision-making power about who could join her and who couldn't. Interesting.
“Come on down, Sugar Plum,” he said after a moment, using an old nickname that she hadn't heard in a while. “Your mom has decided to gather the family. She wants to have a talk.”
That wasn’t ominous at all… But what Joule said was, “Look out below!” and waited until her dad was out of the way before she let the ripcord go. Turning around and climbing down was the hardest part. She jumped the last few feet to the ground, and then zipped the ladder back up into the tree. Keeping tension on it, she hooked the handgrip into the metal fingers, satisfied the next person could grab it and release the stairs when necessary.
Nate put a gentle arm around her shoulders as they crossed the wide yard. Joule looked over her shoulder at the woods one more time. Just to be sure.
Right before he opened the door, her father stopped and looked at her. “You haven’t talked about what you saw. But your mom has decided that it’s time you do.”
Joule nodded. She didn’t like talking about the night she’d run and huddled in the attic while the dogs clawed and growled in the hallway below her. They’d known she was there. She couldn’t even turn her phone on to write messages to her family. And she hadn’t said anything about that since.
But now, it was time to tell what she’d seen.
13
Joule wanted to drag her feet as she headed into the house, but she didn’t do it. It was past time to get this over with.
Honestly, she was somewhat surprised the police hadn't shown up and asked her about her night out. Then again, the police force was only taking reports. They had sworn off handling the dogs, saying first that they couldn’t risk their officers and second that it was animal control’s job. Animal control said it was a police issue. Both agencies claimed that too many of their workers had gone missing to cover more than the basic city services until they could hire more qualified candidates. So the Mazurs hadn’t bothered to file a report about Joule’s attack.
Joule had noticed—when they were knocking on neighbors’ doors to offer to build ladders in their trees or suggest that they had usable attic access to escape the dogs—that her mother had carefully skirted the issue that Joule had seen the pack of dogs and lived to tell about it.
As much as it had freaked her out to see the dog walking by yesterday, she was grateful that now Cage had seen one up close, too. Maybe that was why her parents had decided it was time to talk.
Her mother started by asking the kids if they wanted a soda. That was a pretty telling hallmark that this wasn't going to be a pleasant conversation. Her mom did not hand out sodas freely.
Joule took her up on it. “Coke, please.” How often would she get this chance?
As she sat down, her father organized an odd collection of things on the table while her mother pulled drinks from the fridge. Joule frowned when she saw her dad was gathering art pencils and a sketchbook and she glanced sideways at it, wondering what was going on. But his return look told her nothing.
It was Nate who started the conversation. “I think it's time that your mom and I know as much about these dogs as we can. It's possible other people are doing the same things we are doing: fortifying their houses and making plans. It’s also possible that they saw the dogs but they're not telling anyone, either.”
Oh. Joule hadn’t considered that possibility. She’d thought she was special, but maybe she wasn't. Maybe everyone else had seen the dogs.
“Let's create some kind of composite drawing and figure out what they really look like,” her father continued.
That was when they all turned and looked at her. Despite Cage having seen one, Joule was still the one with the most knowledge. She looked to her brother, and he offered a small nod back, though she had no idea if that meant Go ahead, you can do this, or Yeah, I've got your back.
“They’re big,” she started.
“Weight?” her mother asked, but that wasn’t something Joule usually thought about. She didn’t have a comparison.
“Bigger than a German Shepherd.”
Kaya opened her laptop and began typing. “So, maybe sixty or so pounds? That's the average weight of a German Shepherd.”
“Probably seventy then,” Joule replied, realizing that this was how it would go. It would be more like a police interrogation and not a monologue about what she had seen and her general impression of the dogs.
“What did their ears look like?”
“Pointy. Like a German Shepherd. Or fox or wolf.” Joule noticed this time, Cage nodding along beside her.
As her mother turned to look at her brother, Joule listened to another surprising question. “Are you sure the dog that you saw yesterday wasn't just a regular house dog, or even a feral dog?”
Cage and Joule looked at each other. It was a thought that hadn't crossed her mind before, but she replied, “It looked exactly like the dogs I saw the other night.”
It hadn’t occurred to her that all the house dogs might not actually be gone, that some might actually still be around. But Cage replied, and turned her attention away. “It didn’t look like a regular feral dog. Like Joule said, it was too big and it carried its weight in all the wrong places to be a pet.”
“Okay.” Kaya nodded at them. “Then both of you agree: pointy ears?”
<
br /> Cage nodded.
“What does the face look like? What dog should we start with to model this dog’s face?”
“Boxer.” Cage’s answer was both instant and emphatic. Joule nodded along, glad to have the backup.
“So, squarish snout?
“Less square than a boxer.” Joule found it was easier to chime in when everyone wasn’t staring at her, wanting her to dig into the scariest night of her life. So she kept going. “These dogs’ snouts protrude a little more than a boxer’s does. Same general shape, but bigger. The jaws are scary.”
Kaya was making notes when Joule had another thought. “Their jaws are thick. And their faces are wide.”
Her mother offered a quick sketch and Joules and Cage offered a few changes. “More here, less here.” “The eyes should be bigger.” “The nose smaller.”
“Body?” Kaya asked next.
“Thick and lean. Fur looks short and wiry. I didn't touch it!” Joule added, grateful that was the case.
Her mother's eyebrows quirked, and Joule imagined again that she must be glad her daughter had not gotten close enough to touch.
“They’re barrel chested.” Cage motioned with his hands, up his chest toward his head. “Their necks are thick.” He was pointing to the drawing her mother was making.
Kaya’s drawing was almost elegant, Joule thought, but these dogs were not. They were thick, lean killing machines.
“Legs?”
“Meaty.”
“Big haunches.” Joule and Cage answered in overlapping voices.
“Huge feet,” Joule said. “Think of the biggest puppy dog paw you can, and then make it angry and give it claws.”
She watched as her mother's face pulled into a strange expression, but it clearly indicated her horror at the thought. Still, she sketched a little bit more, took a few pointers from the kids, and then looked up. “Tail?”
The Hunted Page 5