The Night Listener and Others (22 page)

The pack began to move in the direction of the road, but quickly learned that they would make dreadful time if they waited for Rowdy. So Rusty and Sparks got on either side of the irregular disc of leather and fur, dug their fangs into the mass, and hauled their companion along. The dog had been dead so long that Rusty tasted only the ghost of vileness. Once or twice Rowdy’s matted hair got caught on roots and in branches, but the old dog writhed while the young ones tugged, until they reached a state game trail.

On the way, Rusty’s eyes (still sharp, despite yellowing of the white and minor leaking of the vitreous fluid) discerned a rabbit standing in darkness next to a stump. Although his first reaction was to immediately drop Rowdy’s fur pie and race after the creature, something made him hesitate. He thought at first that it might be increased intelligence, that the mental maturity he and his cohorts had achieved had shown him the futility of chasing rodents. But as the stump and the creature that stood next to it retreated in his peripheral vision, he realized that there had been something dreadfully
wrong
with the rabbit, if rabbit it was. It had seemed terribly thin, reduced in girth beyond the effects of emaciation. He had seen rabbits like that before, but where?…

He nearly damned himself for being so obtuse. Roadkill. Of course. He had seen rabbits that had been hit right across the torso by cars, their spines splintered, their innards smashed into one another so that their heads and hind legs looked perfectly natural, but what lay in between could have been slipped under a door. It was just like the dried-up terrier’s guts, the terrier who, like all of them, had been born again into this world.

And if a terrier, why not a rabbit? Why not cats, for Christ’s sake? And turtles? And deer and squirrels and mice? Rusty always liked to chase animals smaller than himself, though he hardly ever caught them. But he did not think he would like to chase the rabbit he had seen, and he wondered what its own prey might be.

The thoughts were blotted out by the sound of an engine idling, and Rusty saw a wooden bar ahead, the gate that kept vehicles out of the game trail. A car was next to the gate, perhaps fifty yards back from the main road, in the small parking area bounded by trees. Through the open windows of the car he could hear strains of that abysmal music that still drove spikes into his sensitive ears.

The pack crept closer to the car on splintered limbs, some of them trailing strands of guts like bridal trains behind them. Rusty heard voices now, one pleading, one protesting, and then the engine went dead, the music stopped. The pack froze in an instant, and the only sound was the soft clack of the dachshund’s misaligned jaw as he excitedly tried to moisten his tongue.

Rusty and Sparks opened their own jaws then, letting Rowdy’s ragged edges flop quietly to the earth, and looked at each other. Spark’s dueling eyes were wild with anticipation of the kill, and his legs trembled. The other dogs were ready too, their tongues hanging from their mouths like dry leaves.

“Wait,” thought Rusty. Th pack looked at him curiously and, he felt, angrily, as if frustrated at being heeled. But he was the leader, and the leader had a plan. “Let’s get them out. Out in the open.”

The pack pictured it in their minds and found it good. After a moment of plotting, Fluffy dragged herself to where the bitch inside could see her, while the others went to the front and back of the car. Lying on her mass of gut, she began to whimper, softly and pitifully.

“Ben…” came the bitch’s voice. “Ben, there’s something out there…”

“Come on, it’s just an animal or something. Forget it.”

“No, it’s…a
dog
.”

Fluffy increased the volume now. It sounded. Rusty thought, like when she’d been mated a few times and was begging for more, and he gave a dog smile in the darkness.

“Oh, it
is
, it’s a little yellow dog, and it looks hurt, the poor thing.” The door opened, the bitch got out and knelt next to Fluffy, who was trying her damnedest not to let a loop of intestine pop out from between her forelegs. “Oh, Ben, come quick…”

Come quick
, Ben, Rusty thought to himself.

Ben came quick, heaving a sigh of annoyance and frustration, opening the door, stepping out, and Rusty the first, around the side of the car, battering into the male snout first, burying his fangs in the midsection, through the shirt, the soft, yielding skin, into the guts, like the guts the humans so gaily and thoughtlessly scattered on their moonlit roads, the guts of the pack. And now others were on the male, and from the passenger side Rusty heard the squeal of the bitch as Fluffy and the junkyard dog, the terrier and the dachshund brought her down.

Rusty buried his snout in the male’s viscera, bit and bit again, tasted the chunks his sharp teeth detached, spit, shook them out, bit again, ripped more soft gut, heedless of the fists of the man raining down on his back, on his skull already broken, fists driving shards of white bone deeper into his brain, his brain that thought more clearly than it ever had before. He felt the others beside him, ripping, snarling, taking the man to pieces more surely than tires and metal underbodies had rended those of the pack, pressing them down into the asphalt, making them one with the road, and Rusty thought of Rowdy, then thought,
“Stop!”

They did. It was as though they shared a mind, shared a will, and their bloodied snouts, bent jaws, dripping teeth came up from both the male and the bitch.

“The bitch?” Rusty thought, and Fluffy’s thought came back, “Dead.”

He looked down at the male. The chest was still rising and falling though the stomach was torn wide open, the bowels flopping over the edge of the bloody pool. Rusty looked at Sparks, who was chewing vigorously on a dripping piece of meat. “Rowdy.”

Sparks nodded, spat the chunk away, and padded toward the matted pile of dog. Together he and Rusty dragged what was left of Rowdy over to the male, and set the old dog down so that the edge of Rowdy touched the male’s forehead. Rowdy pulled himself over the male’s face by short jerks, unseen pieces of claw dragging the mat up and over until the male’s panting face was hidden. Then the mass quivered, shook, and Rusty saw the dome of Rowdy’s skull move up and down, up and down, until the dog’s hair turned red with the blood it soaked up. When Rowdy finally slid off the male’s face was stripped of all its skin and most of its muscle. The chest no longer rose and fell.

“Rowdy has fed. Now devour what you will,” thought Rusty, and sank his fangs into the male’s windpipe, feeling the blood, still warm, burst into his mouth, run down his chin.

The dachshund ripped with crooked jaws at the front of the male’s pants, tearing away the fabric with difficulty, and finally gnawing at the shriveled pouch of flesh until it came off, and he chewed with satisfaction. “Family took mine a long time ago,” he thought gleefully, and Rusty laughed, then stopped, feeling pity for the dachshund.

He sat up, felt the warm blood running down his jaw, watched the dogs greedily burrowing into the body of the male, then went to the other side of the car. Fluffy was chewing happily on the bitch’s thigh, and the junkyard dog was gobbling pieces of gut. He stopped, stretched, and rolled over in the puddle of blood so that Rusty could see the pieces of bitch flesh pressing against the lining of the dog’s exposed stomach. Then Rusty looked at the nearly decapitated sheep dog. The jaws of the dog’s head, hanging from a strand of muscle and skin, laboriously worked at tearing away a hunk of the human bitch’s bowels, but when the dog swallowed it, the meat merely crawled through its severed esophagus and dropped onto the dirt. The sheep dog turned, angled itself so that the jaws could grasp the morsel again, the throat could swallow again. But the esophagus excreted again, and the dog picked it up, swallowed, over and over.

Rusty, saddened nearly beyond the capacity of a dog to feel sorrow, turned away, walked to the front of the car, listened to the feast, of dead meat filling dead meat.

Days passed, and the dogs continued to hunt. Fewer cars drove through the woods now, but the pack had learned new ways to take their prey. The cars had to pass through several hollows, and Rusty and Sparks, the two most vigorous of the pack, would stand on the rocks at a level just above the car windows. Then, when a vehicle passed, they would leap through the windows into the car, and savage the humans within. The cars crashed, the humans (if they had not already been killed by the dogs) injured or made insensible, and the pack fed. If the windows were rolled up, it made no difference, for the skulls of the dogs, already broken, shattered the glass, allowing entrance.

Then, one night, a car filled with policemen parked by the side of the road near the rocks. The pack killed them all. Their bullets went through the dogs, spitting away only small pieces of meat the dogs could do without. The blast from a shotgun, however, did shear off Spark’s left front foreleg, which, after the slaughter, they retrieved and reattached. It was a bit tricky. Rusty held the leg in his jaws while Spark’s pushed his stump against it. Somehow the crevices wedged together firmly enough so that the limb remained in place, though Sparks used it as little as possible, and it became more of a liability to locomotion than an aid.

Three days after the devouring of the policemen, more humans came to the edge of the woods. They were armed with shotguns, and had dogs on leashes. But the living dogs refused to go among the trees, and sat and howled and cowered, until the humans, cursing and scowling, put the dogs back into their trucks and cars and drove away, glancing out their windows in discomfort. Though the pack’s nostrils were caked with decay, they could still scent the human’s fear on the wind, and they laughed.

And continued to laugh and hunt and prey until the day Sparks disappeared. Or rather, until most of him disappeared. The left foreleg remained, the limb that had become not so much a part of him as a prized possession, like a shit-caked rag or a rotting rabbit carcass would have been when the pack lived.

The pack remained together most of the time, but, as dogs will, they would go off by themselves from time to time, or in a pair or a trio. One night Sparks went off alone, just for a trot, to make the motions of pissing against a tree to mark territory (though none of them were any longer capable of producing urine. If they drank, it merely flowed through and out of them, so the pissing motion was now more symbolic than ever). The longest any of the dogs had ever gone before was an hour at a time, so when nearly the entire night passed without his reappearance, the pack began to worry, and went to look for him.

They found only the pitiful foreleg, in which no life remained. That, and some fragments of bone that appeared to have been shattered by remarkably strong teeth. There was no blood on the ground (Sparks and the other dogs had emptied their blood on the roads long before), but the brush was torn as though there had been a tremendous struggle, and broken branches showed where a large body, no doubt the same creature that had devoured Sparks, had crashed through it.

The pack was silent, keeping its individual thoughts to its separate selves. The dogs poked about with dead noses, trying to catch a scent, something that would tell them what it was that had cut out a member of their pack. For a moment, Rusty thought he caught a trace of something familiar, something large and gross and dimly remembered, but then it was gone, and would not come again, and he was unable to recall it strongly enough to claim the memory he was sure was there.

Bt the time they gave up, it was morning, and they crept, crawled, and slid silently back to the lair they had found in the shelter of two fallen trees. They lay there on the thick carpet of dead pine needles and leaves, lay and rested, though none of them was capable of sleep.

“Was it a monster?” the dachshund thought, and Rusty knew that query was directed to him alone.

“I don’t know,” Rusty replied. “I thought
we
were monsters, and now…”

“Another pack?”

“No. You saw how high the branches were broken. Not a dog. Or dogs.” The dachshund grinned lopsidedly. “God then.”

“And not God.”

“What would you call something that can devour one of us? Give us long enough and we’ll be gods to men—or demons. They’ll come to fear us and avoid us. Th y’ll make these woods forbidden—sacred, if you will.” Th dachshund gave a thoughtful whine. “Funny how things come around. Men were gods to us. They crushed us, devoured us, and now we devour them. What were
we
gods to, Rusty? What did we devour?” He thought silently for a moment. Rusty concentrated on a solution, remembering that he was the leader. “Could it have been man?” the dachshund asked.

“There were no gunshots. And men would not have devoured Sparks. Not in that way.”

Rusty, unable to come up with an answer, brooded, and was still brooding when night fell again. It had begun to rain, but none of the dogs were bothered by it. The drops merely matted their fur a little more, beaded on their exposed viscera, pooled in the hollow pouches of their rotted flesh, so that every now and then they would have to twist one way or the other to let the malodorous water run out onto the forest floor.

Rusty mentally inquired if the others were ready to hunt, but he felt only mild interest in return. Their last few nights of hunting had been unsuccessful. Humans hardly dared to travel the road anymore, and when they did they drove so fast that Rusty and Sparks found it difficult to leap at the windows. Indeed, on the last attempt, while Sparks was still alive, Rusty had landed on the car’s trunk and slid right off, while Sparks had missed the vehicle completely.

Something else interested the pack tonight. Fluffy, the only female among them, had somehow gone into something that passed for estrous, despite the mutilation of her sexual organs. She dragged her posterior along the ground, whining and moaning, her vegetation-coated insides roiling behind her like thick, drunken serpents. The males crowded around her, sniffing futilely, but recalling the scent, and what remained of their penises left their sheaths reluctantly, as if sheer will rather than blood engorged them, making them a sickly yellow rather than the thrilling pink of former matings.