“Here, girlie!” he called out, his raspy voice echoing across the lake’s still waters. He blew three bursts on a rusty whistle. “Come, girlie!”
The dog he sought was a young female black Labrador-Great Dane mix, a sweetheart of a hound that he had found rooting through trash one day on the side of the road, her body so emaciated that every one of her ribs was visible. He’d offered her a meaty treat, coaxed her into his old pickup, and brought her home.
To live with the fifty-seven other dogs he’d rescued.
“I know you’re out here, girl,” he muttered, picking his way through the weeds with a gnarled wooden cane he needed to support his bum right leg. “Come on home to Ed. Ed loves you. Ed needs you. Come on home, please.”
Ed lived to rescue dogs. Although he had dim memories of doing other things in life-he vaguely remembered fighting a war in a foreign land of rice paddies and fearsome enemies who wore hats that looked like lamp shades-his life had not truly begun until he’d launched his rescue mission, until he’d begun to fill his home with wonderful canine lives that, if it had not been for his intervention, would have been snuffed out by soulless bastards who thought “putting down” an innocent animal was a humane thing to do.
They were murderers, in his opinion, no better than Nazis running gas chambers in concentration camps. Cold-hearted killers. They were the ones who really deserved to die.
He often saw cats that needed to be rescued, too, but felines did not seem to like him, and would scramble away when he tried to cajole them near with treats. But he had a natural affinity for dogs.
In fact, he much preferred dogs to the company of people. All a dog wanted was food, a belly rub, and a warm place to sleep. People. . well, he’d never been much able to figure out what the hell they wanted, and had long ago washed his hands of them.
He’d once had a people family, though. A wife with jewel eyes and a little girl with a smile like July sunshine. They had left him one day, and in spite of his best efforts, he could not understand why.
But the dogs were his family now. Although one or two sometimes wandered away, tempted by alluring scents or noises, it was only because in their innocence they didn’t understand the dangers lurking out there in the world. The fast cars that would crush them and keep on moving. The malicious teenagers who would torture them for laughs. The Nazi patrols who would capture them and sentence them to agonizing deaths in their gas chambers.
If he could, he would save every stray dog in the world, bring them into his home and let them live in comfort as a member of his family. The thought of so many sweet-hearted dogs roaming the night, scavenging for food and suffering at the hands of a cruel world, filled him with a nearly crippling sadness.
He had to find his dog. He had to.
The night was dark and quiet. Ahead, a forest bordered the lake, and beyond the woods, They had erected their atrocious homes.
“Hope you didn’t wander over into Their territory.” He squeezed the cane’s handle more tightly. “That’s not a safe place for you, girl.”
They had erected their monstrous creations some time ago. He couldn’t recall when exactly because he didn’t have a calendar. They had come in, ripping apart the earth with their mighty machines, leveling trees, driving out deer, foxes, and other natural wildlife as they raped the land.
And then, They put up those abominations they dared to call homes.
A railroad ran along the southern perimeter of some of the so-called homes, carrying freight train traffic that occasionally woke him in the middle of the night. But some of the other houses were smack-dab on the other side of the woods, not far from the lake.
His lake. Dog Lake, he called it.
What troubled him about the homes They had built was that none of them were finished. Once, feeling brave after drinking several cans of beer, he had ventured into the territory. He’d discovered almost two dozen residential plots, some of them completely empty, the red clay bare, other parcels occupied by huge houses that were missing windows or doors, and others that had only the wooden framework of the home completed and stood like the preserved bones of some prehistoric creature in a dusty museum.
But there were no people, anywhere.
It was strange, and deeply disturbing.
Shivering, he entered the woods and sounded his whistle several times. “Here, girlie!”
He blamed himself for the dog escaping the house. It was hard to keep track of fifty-eight dogs, but he managed to do a good job, had never lost one. He’d opened the door earlier that evening to sit on the porch and drink a beer, and a few of the dogs sat out with him, the lost one included, and she must have slipped away from the pack and gone exploring.
“Here, girl! Look what Ed’s brought for you.”
He removed a hot dog from his shirt pocket and waved it, spreading the scent through the warm air.
“Ed’s got a hot dog for you! Come get it, girl!”
He heard a rustling in the undergrowth, on his right. He shambled in that direction, parting the weeds with his cane, tattered shoulders of his fatigue jacket bending back tree branches, long mane of gray hair billowing behind him.
In a small clearing, he found the Lab and two unfamiliar dogs tearing into the bloody carcass of a raccoon. At his approach, his dog’s tail wagged.
“There you are, girlie,” Ed said. “Who are your two new friends here, huh?”
He panned the flashlight across them. The new dogs, both female, looked to be barely older than whelps. They were some sort of Lab mix, like many strays he encountered. Based on their age, black coats, and similar white markings on their chests, he guessed they were litter mates.
Their poor bodies were gaunt and trembling. He felt a pang of anguish.
Drawn by the scent of the hot dog, the three canines approached. He broke it into pieces and shared the treat amongst them. They devoured the meat, licking their chops, drooling.
“There you go, now, girlies, there you go.”
Leaning on the cane, he knelt to the ground, and the dogs crowded him. They licked his fingers and his cheeks, poked their wet snouts into his grizzled beard as if searching for more food in its tangled knots. He stroked them behind the ears, his chest so full of joy he felt he might burst.
God Almighty, he lived for this.
“You two beauties are going to come live with Ed, too. Come now, girlies.”
He slowly got to his feet. He noticed a flicker of yellow light beyond the trees. He squinted, looking.
It came from one of Their houses.
“Oh, no,” he said.
He walked closer, to the edge of the woods, but he dared proceed no farther. The dogs followed, but remained behind him, as if sensing the danger.
A couple hundred yards ahead, a white van was parked at one of the residences. The light glimmered inside the garage. Two dark figures were lugging items out of the van’s back doors and into the house.
Ed chewed a fingernail. He didn’t like this, not at all.
Someone was finally moving in.
12
For Simone, Wednesday began like every other normal weekday morning. She awoke at seven to the buzzing of the bedside alarm clock, groaned in protest to no one in particular, and rolled over and fumbled it off.
“Morning, babe,” Corey said.
Blinking against the gray morning light, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Corey stood at the dresser mirror buttoning his shirt, nearly completely dressed. An early riser, he typically would be up and out the door while she was still dragging out of bed. She’d never been a morning person and would have slept in till ten o’clock every day if she could get away with it.
“Morning,” she said, throat scratchy from sleep.