Incredibly, listening to the poor thing’s screams as she hurried toward the motor home, Chyna winced with remorse. It would have torn her apart without hesitation if it could have gotten at her, but it was a mindless killer only by training, not by nature. In a way, the dogs were just other victims of Edgler Vess, their lives bent to his purpose. She would have spared them suffering if she had been able to rely solely on the protective clothing.
How many more dogs?
Vess had implied there was a pack. Hadn’t he said
four?
Of course, he might be lying. There might be only two.
Move, move, move.
At the passenger-side cockpit door of the motor home, she tried the handle. Locked.
No more dogs, just five seconds without dogs, please.
She dropped the spray bottle from her right hand, so she could pinch the bow of the key between her thumb and finger. She was barely able to feel it through the thick gloves.
Her hand was shaking. The key missed the keyhole and chattered against the chrome face of the lock cylinder. She would have dropped it if it hadn’t been sewn to the glove.
From behind this time, just as she was about to slip the key into the door on her second try, a Doberman hit her, leaping onto her back, biting at the nape of her neck.
She was slammed forward against the vehicle. The face shield on her helmet smacked hard against the door.
The dog’s teeth were sunk into the thick rolled collar of the trainer’s jacket, no doubt also into the padding on the segmented plastic collar that she wore under the jacket to protect her neck. It was holding on to her by its teeth, tearing at her ineffectively with its claws, like a demon lover in a nightmare.
As the dog’s impact had pitched her forward against the motor home, now the weight of it and its furious squirming dragged her away from the vehicle. She almost toppled backward, but she knew that the advantage would go to the dog if it managed to drag her to the ground.
Stay up. Stay tall.
Lurching around a hundred eighty degrees as she struggled to keep her balance, she saw that the first Doberman was no longer on the porch. Astonishingly, the creature hanging from her neck must be the small one that she had squirted on the muzzle. Now it was able to get its breath again, back in service, undaunted by her chemical arsenal, giving its all for Edgler Vess.
On the plus side, maybe there
were
only two dogs.
She still had the spray bottle in her left hand. She squeezed the trigger, aiming several squirts over her shoulder. But the heavy padding in the jacket sleeves didn’t allow her to bend her arms much, and she wasn’t able to fire at an angle that could splash the ammonia in the dog’s eyes.
She threw herself backward against the side of the motor home, much as she had hurtled into the fireplace earlier. The Doberman was trapped between her and the vehicle as the chair had been between her and the river-rock wall, and it took the brunt of the impact.
Letting go of her, falling away, the dog squealed, a pitiful sound that sickened her, but also a good sound—
oh, yes
—a good sound as sweet as any music.
Buckles jangling, padded chaps slapping together, Chyna scuttled sideways, trying to get out of the animal’s reach, worried about her ankles, her vulnerable ankles.
But suddenly the Doberman no longer seemed to be in a fighting mood. It slunk away from her, tail tucked between its legs, rolling its eyes to keep a watch on her peripherally, shaking and wheezing as though it had damaged a lung, and favoring its hind leg on the right side.
She squeezed the trigger on the spray bottle. The creature was out of range, and the stream of ammonia arced into the grass.
Two dogs down.
Move, move.
Chyna turned to the motor home again—and cried out as a third dog, weighing more than she did, leaped at her throat, bit through the jacket, and staggered her backward.
Going down.
Shit.
And as she went, the dog was on top of her, chewing frenziedly at the collar of the jacket.
When Chyna hit the ground, her breath was knocked from her in spite of all the padding, and the spray bottle popped out of her left hand, spun into the air. She grabbed at it as it tumbled away, but she missed.
The dog ripped loose a strip of padding from around the jacket collar and shook its head, casting the scrap aside, spraying her face shield with gobs of foamy saliva. It bore in at her again, tearing more fiercely at the same spot, burrowing deeper, seeking meat, blood, triumph.
She pounded its sleek head with both fists, trying to smash its ears, hoping that they would be sensitive, vulnerable. “Get off, damn it, off! Off!”
The Doberman snapped at her right hand, missed, teeth clashing audibly, snapped again, and connected. Its incisors didn’t instantly penetrate the tough leather glove, but it shook her hand viciously, as though it had hold of a rat and meant to snap its spine. Though her skin hadn’t been broken, the grinding pressure of the bite was so painful that Chyna screamed.
In an instant, the dog released her hand and was at her throat again. Past the torn jacket. Teeth slashing at the Kevlar vest.
Howling in pain, Chyna stretched her throbbing right hand toward the spray bottle lying in the grass. The weapon was a foot beyond her reach.
When turning her head to look at the bottle, she inadvertently caused the bottom of her face shield to lift, giving the Doberman better access to her throat, and it thrust its muzzle under the curve of Plexiglas, above the Kevlar vest, biting into the thick padding on the exterior of the segmented hard-plastic collar, which was her last defense. Intent on tearing this band of body armor away, the dog jerked back so hard that Chyna’s head was lifted off the ground, and pain flared across the nape of her neck.
She tried to heave the Doberman off her. It was heavy, bearing down stubbornly, paws digging frantically at her.
As the dog wrenched at Chyna’s protective collar, she could feel its hot breath against the underside of her chin. If it could get its snout under the shield at a slightly better angle, it might be able to bite her chin,
would
be able to bite her chin, and at any moment it was going to realize this.
She heaved with all her strength, and the dog clung, but she was able to hitch a few inches closer to the spray bottle. She heaved again, and now the bottle was just six inches beyond her grasping fingertips.
She saw the other Doberman limping toward her, ready to rejoin the fray. She hadn’t damaged its lungs, after all, when she slammed it between her and the motor home.
Two of them. She couldn’t handle two of them at once, both on top of her.
She heaved, desperately hitching sideways on her back, dragging the clinging Doberman with her.
Its hot tongue licked the underside of her chin, licked, tasting her sweat. It was making that horrible, needful sound deep in its throat.
Heave.
Spotting her point of greatest vulnerability, the limping dog scuttled toward her right foot. She kicked at it, and the dog dodged back, but then it darted in again. She kicked, and the Doberman bit the heel of her Rockport.
Her frantic breathing fogged the inside of the visor. In fact, the breath of the clinging Doberman fogged it too, because its muzzle was under the Plexiglas. She was effectively blind.
Kicking with both feet to ward off the limping dog. Kicking, heaving sideways.
The other’s hot tongue slathered her chin. Its sour breath. Teeth gnashing an inch short of her flesh. The tongue again.
Chyna touched the spray bottle. Closed her fingers around it.
Though the bite hadn’t penetrated the glove, her hand was still throbbing with such crippling pain that she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold on to the bottle or find the right grip, wouldn’t be able to work the lever-action trigger, but then she blindly squeezed off a stream of ammonia. Unthinking, she had used her swollen trigger finger, and the flash of pain made her dizzy. She shifted her middle finger onto the lever and squeezed off another blast.
In spite of her kicking, the injured dog bit through her shoe. Teeth pierced her right foot.
Chyna triggered another thick stream of ammonia toward her feet, yet another, and abruptly that Doberman let go of her. Both she and the dog were shrieking, blind and shaking and living now in the same commonwealth of pain.
Snapping teeth. The remaining dog. Pressing toward her chin, under the visor.
Snap-snap-snap.
And the eager hungry whine.
She jammed the bottle in its face, pulled the trigger, pulled, and the dog scrambled off her, screaming.
A few drops of ammonia penetrated the visor through the series of small holes across the center of the pane. She wasn’t able to see through the fogged Plexiglas, and the acrid fumes made breathing difficult.
Gasping, eyes watering, she dropped the spray bottle and crawled on her hands and knees toward where she thought the motor home stood. She bumped into the side of it and pulled herself to her feet. Her bitten foot felt hot, perhaps because it was soaking in the bath of blood contained in her shoe, but she could put her weight on it.
Three dogs so far.
If three, then surely four.
The fourth would be coming.
As the ammonia evaporated from the face shield and less rapidly from the front of her torn jacket, the quantity of fumes decreased but not quickly enough. She was eager to remove the helmet and draw an unobstructed breath. She didn’t dare take it off, however, not until she was inside the motor home.
Choking on ammonia fumes, trying to remember to exhale downward under the Plexiglas visor but half blinded because her eyes wouldn’t stop watering, Chyna felt along the side of the motor home until she found the cockpit door again. She was surprised that she could walk on her bitten foot with only tolerable twinges of pain.
The key was still sewn securely to her right glove. She pinched it between her thumb and forefinger.
A dog was wailing in the distance, probably the first one that she had squirted in the eyes. Nearby, another was crying pitifully and howling. A third whimpered, sneezed, gagged on fumes.
But where was the fourth?
Fumbling at the lock cylinder, she found the keyhole by trial and error. She opened the door. She hauled herself up into the copilot’s seat.
As she pulled the door shut, something slammed into the outside of it. The fourth dog.
She took off the helmet, the gloves. She stripped out of the padded jacket.
Teeth bared, the fourth Doberman leaped at the side window. Its claws rattled briefly against the glass, and then it dropped back to the lawn, glaring at her.
Revealed by the light from the narrow hallway, Laura Templeton’s body still lay on the bed in a tangle of manacles and chains, wrapped in a sheet.
Chyna’s chest tightened with emotion, and her throat swelled so that she had trouble swallowing. She told herself that the corpse on the bed was not really Laura. The essence of Laura was gone, and this was only the husk, merely flesh and bone on a long journey to dust. Laura’s spirit had traveled in the night to a brighter and warmer home, and there was no point shedding tears for her, because she had transcended.
The closet door was closed. Chyna was sure that the dead man still hung in there.
In the fourteen hours or longer since she had been in the motor-home bedroom, the stuffy air had acquired a faint but repulsive scent of corruption. She had expected worse. Nevertheless, she breathed through her mouth, trying to avoid the smell.
She switched on the reading lamp and opened the top drawer of the nightstand. The items that she had discovered the previous night were still there, rattling softly against one another as the engine vibrations translated through the floor.
She was nervous about leaving the engine running, because the sound of it would mask the approach of another vehicle in case Vess came home earlier. But she needed lights, and she didn’t want to risk depleting the battery.
From the drawer, she withdrew the package of gauze pads, the roll of cloth tape, and the scissors.
In the lounge area behind the cockpit, she sat in one of the armchairs. Earlier, she had stripped out of all the protective gear. Now she removed her right shoe. Her sock was sodden with blood, and she peeled it off.
From two punctures in the top of her foot, blood welled dark and thick. It was seeping, however, not spurting, and she wasn’t going to die from the wound itself anytime soon.
She quickly pressed a double thickness of gauze pads over the seeping holes and fixed them in place with a length of cloth tape. By tightening the tape to apply a little pressure, she might be able to make the bleeding slow or stop.
She would have preferred to saturate the punctures with Bactine or iodine, but she didn’t have anything like that. Anyway, infection wouldn’t set in for a few hours, and by then she would have gotten away from here and obtained medical attention. Or she’d be dead of other causes.
The chance of rabies seemed small to nil. Edgler Vess would be solicitous of the health of his dogs. They would have received all their vaccinations.
Her sock was cold and slimy with blood, and she didn’t even try to pull it on again. She slipped her bandaged foot into her shoe and tied the lace slightly looser than usual.
A folding metal stepstool was stored in a narrow slot between the kitchen cabinetry and the refrigerator. She carried it into the short hallway at the end of the vehicle and opened it under the skylight, which was a flat panel of frosted plastic about three feet long and perhaps twenty inches wide.
She climbed onto the stool to inspect the skylight, hoping that it either tilted open to admit fresh air or was attached to the roof from the interior. Unfortunately, the panel was fixed, with no louver function, and the mounting flange was on the exterior, so she could not get at any screws or rivets from the inside.
Under her padded clothing, she had worn a tool belt that she’d found in one of the drawers of Vess’s workbench. She had taken it off with the rest of the gear. Now it was on the table in the dining nook.