Breeds (20 page)

When the wind dropped, the pop and sizzle of wet junks of split wood thrown into the stove distracted her. She glanced at the candles: snowmen with their heads and shoulders long melted off. They’d been untouched leftovers from Christmas. At first, she was hesitant about lighting the top hat wicks since their portly shapes simply radiated a festive jolliness. When she did apply fire to their noggins, the snowmen’s smiles stayed firmly in place, as if swearing it didn’t bother them in the least. That odd little act of defiance struck her as cocky. There was no hesitation at all the second time she lit them up, setting their heads on fire. Watching their button grins sag into a grimace under the terrible heat filled her with wicked delight.

For some reason, Flossie enjoyed this immensely, knew it was probably wrong, and still made a note to look for more candles molded into characters.
Any
character. She wasn’t picky.

The window pane thumped when the blizzard leaned into it, hooking her attention. As far as storms went, this one was bad, but not the worst. She and her family had survived the beasts of the last century, grown accustomed to the forecasters’ dire sensationalism of weather systems. There had been a time when they dreaded the winter months, but that was when her Rufus had been alive, before the kids had all left for St. John’s or the mainland. Now, at her age of eighty-two, it was more like
show me what you got
.

Bitch
.

Flossie sighed and rocked in the chair that Rufus had made for her sixty years ago, still doing its job. Love held the thing together, or so she told her friends, not mentioning the fact that a few times love had to be reinforced with dollops of super glue. But the chair still served her, as did the old house. She defied the norm, staying under the roof that had sheltered her and her own for decades when so many had moved into retirement or nursing homes. She cut her own wood, shoveled snow at her own pace, walked laps up and down the hillside in the warmer seasons. Rufus was always proud of her for that, and she knew he waited for her on the other side, with that little chiding smirk that leaked the deepest affection.

She liked to think of him when he was tall and strong, in his thirties. And not the last phase of his life, where he’d shriveled up like a raisin in the sun. Done in by cancer of the stomach.

The blizzard rapped her window once again, causing Flossie to clear her tightening throat. Her face hardened when she gazed out the window.

Bring it. Slut.

As if hearing her, the storm did just that, tackling the house with enough force that it made the timbers squeal. And for a moment, she expected to see God’s hands rip the roof from overhead.

All this suddenly seemed secondary when she heard scratching at her front door.

Flossie stopped rocking in her chair and looked towards her porch area. A wooden bin lay to the right of the door while pegs for her winter clothes and boots were to the left, all smothered in shadow. But the scratching didn’t stop.

In fact, it grew stronger. Urgent.

Flossie knew her way around firearms. Still had Rufus’s old peashooter mounted above the fireplace, retired but still capable of putting a second asshole in someone if needed. She waited for a minute, the scratching coming in bursts, then subsiding, before starting up in earnest once again… but becoming weaker now.

She stood up, took a moment to steady herself, then forced blood into her limbs as she walked onto the porch. The front door could have been taken from a vault. There was no window in the heavy wood, so she had no way of looking out without actually opening it.

But she had a feeling—one of hope.

Releasing the inner hooks of the door, she gripped the old-fashioned latch and pulled.

A near frozen snout poked its nose inside, that of a German Shepherd.

Flossie Jones stood there, frozen for all of two seconds, before her heart near exploded with joy. She widened the door, bent over, and embraced her Max, finally come home.

At another household, the knocking at the door broke the tension between Sammy and Mary’s game of a hundred and twenties, played by candlelight and the warm glow of a fireplace. Sammy got up to see who it was, glad to be distracted from the current ass-kicking his wife delighted in giving him.

“Who could that be?” she asked, half in annoyance, the other in wonder.

“I’ll find out,” Sammy muttered, leaving the candles and groping for a flashlight, spitefully intending to open the door wide enough so a good blast would blow the damn cards all over the place.

He peeked out the window before opening it, waved the light and saw the dark figures standing outside. Sammy pulled the door open. “What in the name of Christ our Savior are you two doing out in this?”

“Can we come in?” Ross asked as a gale shoved snow into Sammy’s face. “It’s important.”

“Close the door, Sammy!” Mary squealed from within. “Oh my Jesus! The
cards!
The Jesus
cards!”

The outraged cries of his wife lit up Sammy’s face and improved his disposition considerably. “Come on in, b’ys. Just stomp yer boots, is all.”

“Everything okay?” Ross asked once inside. His face appeared near frozen in the meager light.

“Oh, pretty good,” Sammy replied, eyeing the shotgun in the man’s hands. “Yourself?”

“Been better. Look, I need you to lock up yer doors when we leave here. Wild dogs tore up old Walt Borland. They might still be on the prowl. Maybe even in town.”

“What? Wild dogs?”

“Yeah.” Ross nodded. “Just keep yer eyes and ears open. Keep a gun handy, too, just in case. And Sammy, do me a favor and go on over to yer drinkin’ buddy Harry, okay?”

Sammy turned to see his wife in her warm housecoat, face contorted with worry. “I can do that,” he said, facing the men again.

“The storm will probably kill them if anything,” Ross said. “But now y’know.”

“Walt Borland’s dead?”

“Yeah,” Ross acknowledged. His silent companion opened the door then, and left. Ross took the hint and backed out himself, adjusting his hood. “Keep everything locked down tight, Sammy.”

With that, they left the couple, closing the door tight.

Sammy had no intention of going back to the cards.

After getting back on what Kirk hoped was the road, he turned to Ross. “What direction’s the woods?”

Ross pointed.

“All right, we go that way now. Give them people a heads up.”

“Then what?”

Good question,
Kirk thought. “I’ll let you know.”

Ross’s near black shape stopped in the bluster of the storm, his frame unsteady in the gale. “You do that. Stay behind me, then. We’ll keep to the roads. Cutting over will only beat us out. Snow’s too deep.”

“Lead on,” Kirk muttered through wind-lashed lips. Snow clung to his beard. Every breath expanded his ribs, stretched his chest wound, and nearly drove him to his knees. The weather made his cuts ache, and he dearly wanted to be out of the cold. Someplace warm.

Instead, they trudged down the hill towards the beach, through a landscape of shifting snow, until the obscure shape of the next house materialized out of the night like a creaking monolith. A car wearing a fat beanie of white was parked in the driveway, submerged in cream to its windows.

Ross started to climb the drifts when a dog’s yelp pierced the storm’s voice. Ross stopped dead in his tracks, head lifted in the direction of the sound. Kirk gazed into the swirling, killing dark as well. Both waited, but the noise didn’t repeat.

His face swathed in night, Ross turned to Kirk.

“Lead on,” the Halifax warden repeated.

The owners, Kate and Karl Gibbs, were mousy people in their seventies, who appeared jacked up on coffee and caffeine pills. Their eyes widened impossibly when Ross conveyed the warning. Nodding they would indeed ready a gun, just in case, and yes, they would certainly be on guard, they closed the door in Ross and Kirk’s faces.

“Friendly people,” Kirk observed drily as they walked out the driveway.

Ross leaned in close. “Yeah, not really. They’re assholes. Keep your eyes open and stay behind me. There’re ditches on either side.”

“How far to the next house?”

“In this weather? Ten or fifteen minutes.”

Kirk looked to the stormy heavens. The moon called. He knew how to resist it.

But the others…

Something pulled Ben Trakers up from his sofa, where he lay nice and snug under a mound of warm blankets. He sat up, smelled the air as if he could detect danger, and got to his feet. The wailing storm and the creaks of the wood blotted out his efforts to hear anything. Snow peppered glass in a harsh sprinkle as Ben turned his flashlight and shone a beam on the huge pane in his living room. His picture window faced the bay, but the blackness lurking beyond could just as easily have been deep space. He walked over, feeling the grind of his arthritic hips, and peered outside all the same, switching off his light to improve his visibility. Or so he thought. In reality, he couldn’t see squat with the tempest raging. Mother Nature was having her period tonight.

But he couldn’t shake that feeling of having heard something. Hearing a
scream
, of all things, and not just the wind. He thumbed the switch on his flashlight and shone it around his living room, poorly kept since his wife Agatha’s passing, or so he thought. In reality, Ben did quite fine with the housekeeping, keeping the dust from settling, though no one could convince him of that. Agatha had done all the housework for them both, mesmerizing him with a tireless energy in maintaining their home, while he did his part with the outside. A retired fisherman by trade (and not a goddamn ‘fisher’ as labeled by government heads), he’d married Agatha, a marine biologist five years graduated from MUN. The next forty years had been, in retrospect, the sweetest of his life, and he knew it.

Goddamn right he knew it.

Ben shuffled into a short, dismal hallway, the flashlight beam sweeping this way and that, uncovering piles of books stacked against rich panel wood walls. The decapitated necks of winter boots appeared, reminding him of mouths, and he slipped a bare foot into each, appreciating the warm insulation. He only wore pajama bottoms, the insulated kind, but he had a heavy enough coat to protect him from the worst of the elements. It wasn’t as if he were going any farther than the back deck. He wasn’t. The lure of wanting to clarify and perhaps get a fix on what the hell he’d heard while dozing on his couch was too great. Agatha always said that his curiosity bordered on being outright nosy. Cherished dear.

With fingers made thick and achy from arthritis (he was polluted with the shit), Ben got into his coat, pulled a stocking cap down over his head, and cracked open the door. The intake of wind teetered him right on his threshold. Bracing himself, he stepped out, feeling icy lashes that made his pajama bottoms flutter and his balls swear. Snow attacked the flashlight’s beam so he switched it off, realizing he didn’t have any gloves on. Cursing himself, he fastened a hand onto the nearest length of deck railing, and pulled himself to the edge.

Peered in the direction of the Moseby home.

A broad expanse of snow separated the two houses, and Agatha had often sent him over to borrow sugar as fine as the frozen grain presently burying the land. Alice and Jacob were more Agatha’s friends than his, but he got along well enough with the couple. They’d been at her funeral. Aggie––as she despised him for calling her––would want him to––

There.

A growl?

Ben squinted, snow stinging his ruddy cheeks. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. Goddamn storm made seeing worth shit. He flicked on the flashlight and aimed it into the night, not seeing any better.

Marie and Clifford Spree’s place was only a baseball toss away, not as close as the Moseby’s, but this weather made all but the closest properties disappear and feel far away. The wind shrieked and chilled his hands and legs. The timbers of the deck squeaked frozen notes when he shifted. He aimed the light to the right, in the direction of the Spree house, and held his breath even as he felt the blood in his limbs painfully crystallize.

Sensed movement made him whip the light back towards the Moseby's. The beam wavered for a moment, on space shimmering with falling snow.

Then a dog slunk into the beam of light. Muzzle first. A large, white terrier breed. The animal crept towards the deck, low to the ground.

“What the hell y’doin out?” Ben hissed, his words smoking out of his mouth in instant vapor, twisted by the gale.

The dog halted, raised its snout and showed its teeth.

Ben felt his heart stop, blocked with ice. He backed away from the railing, keeping his light on the dog skulking closer, liking the animal less by the second. His hand slapped against the side of his house, felt the gap of the door. The flashlight’s beam revealed a monster of a pup, staring at him like he was a chunk of barbecued pork instead of a man. Ben’s breathing quickened as if he’d been dunked in the deepest waters of the arctic flow.

The dog, a guard breed whose name escaped him, lilted his head between meaty shoulders. More dogs padded up onto the cold, slippery surface of the deck, black as rats, crowding in and cutting off any escape. A trio of the tiny little foreign yappers appeared amongst the bigger brutes, bouncing as if at a party, tongues wagging like pink ribbons. A terrier growled and bared teeth, distracting Ben.

The lead dog––the Rottweiler, Ben remembered in a flash––leapt at his chest. He dropped the flashlight and caught the dog, but his frail legs buckled under the weight of the animal. The beast snapped for his throat but Ben jerked back with a speed defying his arthritic frame. Then another went under him and upended his world. The old fisherman went down amongst almost a dozen dogs that had gathered upon his deck. They swarmed him. The Shih Tzus yammered shrill notes, like a trio of playground sidekicks in full support of the bullies.

One dog clamped down on Ben’s hand, crushing the bone and making him spend whatever breath was left in his lungs on a groan of agony. Others fastened onto his pajamas and the legs beneath. Cloth ripped and the cold licked bare skin. Another feasted on Ben’s right elbow, the arm protecting his throat. The dog jerked the limb away, stretching him out, leaving the old fisherman defenseless. The Rottweiler plunged forward, jaws flashing, tilted to the side, and attempted to take off his face with one bite.