Chapter 8

 

 

Finally, I had to stop.

Breathing hard, I turned and looked back over the path I’d taken. Billy and his friends were nowhere to be seen, and that was good, but I was further out than I’d ever been before, and that was not good.

Plus, I’d lost Max.

That was the really scary part.

Dad didn’t mind that I took Max with me on my treks into the Swamp. His philosophy of dog handling was to fully integrate the dog into the home. He said he got a more energetic and better performing dog as a result. He said other K9 handlers believed in keeping the dog completely segregated from their families. But there was no one and only way to handle a police dog. Whatever worked was the right answer, he said. He said that if you got three handlers together and asked them about the right way to raise and train a police K9 the only thing you could be sure of two of them agreeing on was that the third guy was wrong.

There was one thing I could be sure of if I lost Max for good. My dad may not have kicked my ass for taking his gun out, but if I lost his dog, he surely would. Then he’d have to report it to the police department. Max was worth thousands of dollars, and represented three years of intensive training. My dad could lose his post as shift director for the HPD’s K9 Unit. And he’d lose the respect of the cops under his command. It’d be proof positive that his way of caring for and training a dog was wrong.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst of it was that I’d lose my best bud, my dog. I was already feeling like I was going to cry when I heard what sounded like a bark coming from somewhere ahead of me.

I listened, but didn’t call out. I couldn’t take that chance, not with Billy and his friends possibly close by.

I walked out of the copse of trees in which I stopped to rest and saw an old rundown house. It was completely abandoned, and had been for years. There was no glass in the windows, and the front door was missing. The roof had holes in it and sagged down at one corner like the brim of an old floppy hat. Yellow shoots of Johnson grass grew up all around it, making the house look like it had sunk down to its waist in the weeds. There was no yard to speak of, just patches of grass struggling to spread through bare earth.

The house was a surprise.

So too was the smell.

The stench of dead things hung in the air, heavy and cloying.

But the real shocker was the vast profusion of animal bones spread around the yard. I saw remnants of rabbits and birds and dogs and wild hogs and even the mangled carcass of a deer. Some of the skeletons appeared to have been stripped completely of the flesh and had bleached white in the sun. Others still had blackened bits of rotten meat clumped on them. The deer, mangled as it was, almost looked fresh, maybe a day or two old.

I wandered around the yard, studying the house. Flies buzzed around my face and I swatted them away. Small bones crunched beneath my feet. I wondered what this place was. I figured it was the home of whoever owned the cotton farm of which all this land was a part, which meant that it had to have been abandoned at least thirty years earlier. But it was the bones that really made me wonder. Was this some kind of animal dying place, like those famed elephant graveyards I was always reading about in my H. Rider Haggard novels, or was it the feeding ground for a predator, like a cougar or a pack of coyotes? The coyotes seemed like the best bet, and if it was a bunch of coyotes that would also explain the barking.

That was what I was thinking anyway, when I heard bones crunching behind me.

With a skipped heartbeat I wheeled around and saw a naked man crouching at the far corner of the yard, staring at me, not blinking, and not sane.

He was the hairiest man I’d ever seen. He had a ragged beard with all sorts of unidentifiable things tangled in it, and long scraggly hair and thick black hair on his arms and chest and legs.

But it was his eyes that held me.

He stared at me, and when his gaze narrowed, I felt like I’d just been put in the crosshairs of a hate so singular and violent it was like I owed him money.

I paled from that. I fell back.

He growled. It was a doglike sound, guttural, from the back of his throat, and it caused me to take another few steps back.

Then he charged.

He ran in a crouch, arms swinging in an almost apelike fashion, his knuckles grazing the grass, but all the while snarling, his eyes locked on me.

I was so startled it took me a moment to react, but when I did I screamed and turned and ran as fast as I could.

He was right behind me, his snarls turning into something that was very close to words but inarticulate for the fury behind them.

I veered left, toward the house. I jumped onto the porch where the front steps were missing, narrowly dodged a rotted hole in the wooden floor, and entered the house. There was trash all over the floor, mildewing furniture pressed up against the wall, picture frames crashed in piles near the angle where the floors met the walls. I saw it all in a blur as I sprinted through one room after another, that snarling, raging, lunatic man at my heels.

Then I turned a corner and found myself rushing headlong toward the back porch. There was a rotten hole in the wooden floor and I jumped it. I landed on soft wood that snapped beneath my feet, but barely held. I jumped again from the porch to the bare dirt of the yard and kept on running.

Behind me, the hairy man’s snarls suddenly turned to a whimper of pain.

It was unmistakable. A yap, followed by a whining groan.

I turned and saw him half buried in the wooden porch that had snapped, but held, beneath my weight.

It hadn’t held for him. His right leg was buried to the thigh in broken wooden timbers and he was trying to jerk himself loose at the cost of tremendous pain.

I didn’t waste the opportunity.

I ran for the trail.

 

Screw Billy and his gang. Let them catch me now. Let the hairy man come on too. Maybe they’d attack each other and end all my problems, even though I knew, even as I ran, that probably wouldn’t happen.

I looked back to see the hairy man pulling himself out of the hole in the floor. His leg was all bloody from midthigh down past his knee, but it didn’t look like it was going to slow him down any. He sighted in on me again and ran after me. With a scream I redoubled my pace, and by the time I’d reached the tall grass, with only twenty yards to go to reach the cover of the trees–or what I hoped would be cover, as it had been when I was running from Billy–my lungs were burning.

My heart was hammering against my chest so hard I felt like it was going to burst. But I could hear the hairy man gaining on me. I could hear the awful slathering sound his breathing made, punctuated by grunts and a sharp, piercing growl. He was right behind me, and I didn’t dare look back. All I had to do was reach the cover of–

He hit me hard on the back of my shoulders, knocking me to the ground.

I fell over forward and rolled into the tall grass next to the trail.

With a whimper I tried to scurry back to my feet, but it did no good. He was all over me. He pounded on my head and tore into the skin on my arms with nails that felt sharp as a frayed piece of metal.

I didn’t realize at first he was trying to flip me over onto my back. It felt like he was trying to dig a hole through my back down to my heart. But then he managed to get a grip on my elbow and pulled me roughly up and twisted me around so that I landed on my back. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

I was staring at him then. I smelled the fetid odor of rot on his breath. I looked into his bloodshot eyes. I saw the mud and twigs matted into the hair of his beard and saw bugs crawling in his hair. Then he growled at me, showing his teeth, and they were blackened with clotted blood.

“Please, don’t,” I managed to choke out.

His lips remained curled away from his teeth. Hate, a venomous, savage hate, lit his gaze.

He knelt closer and sniffed me.

I couldn’t breathe. I just waited, pinned there beneath his weight, trembling from head to foot. The one thought flooding out all else in my mind was that I didn’t want to die. Please don’t let me die.

Something flashed out of the corner of my eye.

The hairy man’s lips uncurled and he looked up just as Max crashed into him from the side. Dog and hairy man went tumbling into the tall grass. It took me a moment to realize what was going on, but when I did I quickly jumped to my feet and ran a few steps toward the trees.

I stopped when I heard Max. Looking back I saw a dog I didn’t recognize. It was Max all right, but he was in berserker mode. His fur was standing all on end. Ferociously loud stuttering growls seemed to come from deep inside him. He was relentless in his attack. I’d been threatened by some of the dogs in my neighborhood before. They’d seemed mean enough, yet they were slow to charge, as though trying to break my confidence with their threats and make me run. Not Max. He was all teeth and volume, tearing into the hairy man with a violence that shocked me. It was hard to believe this was the same dog whose enormous chest I had used for a pillow while watching horror movies. It was hard to believe he was the same dog that, when Lisa Rodriguez and I were on the couch together, sitting close, had climbed up and sandwiched his butt down between us, leaning against me and giving her a jealous sneer. If that was the dog that fought side by side with my dad up in Houston’s 2nd Ward, then I felt sorry for the bad guys.

But then the hairy man grabbed Max in a bear hug and threw him into the grass. I saw the hairy man raise his face to the sky, open his bloodstained mouth, and bite down on my dog.

Max’s growls turned to a pained whimper, and when he rolled out from under the hairy man and got to his feet, his right ear was covered in blood.

Somehow, Max broke loose from him and ran back to the trail. Hurt as he was, he still managed to put himself between the hairy man and me. The hairy man charged us in that weird, loping, apelike run of his, but he had barely covered a few steps before Max charged him again.

The hairy man got a face full of fangs and fell back.

Max disengaged too.

He backed up, his eyes still lasered in on the hairy man.

I turned and ran toward the trees, and when I looked back I saw Max coming up behind me and, off in the distance, the hairy man, watching us.

Max and I ducked into the trees and ran for home.

From behind us, I could hear the hairy man howling in rage.

But he didn’t follow.