CW: death, blood/bodily fluids, animal peril.
The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky as Morris County Animal Control Officer Bailey Butler passes Stantonsville’s last operating gas station and turns off onto Franklin Road. For a merciful half-mile, a run of white ash and pignut hickory screens the Idiot from her sight until the canopy recedes, but then there it is again. Its enormous shadow haunts the feet of the western hills, but as the sun drags itself across the sky, Bailey knows the blot will crawl across the fields and then the town, heading east. She can trace its course like a slug’s trail left through the once vibrant rows of tobacco and soy, now translucent and enfeebled where they’ve been robbed of light. No one on earth knows what to do about it, least of all her.
The county-issued Ford leaves the asphalt for a dirt drive. Rocks and ruts set the cage doors in back jangling. Bailey squawks the two-way on her shoulder.
“Heck?” she calls.
A beep. “Yep.” Hector Gomez is a former Marine and has set up a permanent base camp at the big toe of Mount Pissed Off, but he’s never not answered. He’s the only one left at Animal Control besides Bailey and he won’t quit until he’s dead or the world really does end. For Heck, even those might not stop him.
She checks in: Jerry Grady’s place; unspecified animal; wounded or dead.
“Okay,” Heck says. “You need help on that?”
“No, just letting you know.”
“Okay.”
She pauses. “Hey Heck, you see an older Cavalier King Charles out there, black and white, maybe a blue leather collar, you let me know? It’s my neighbor Mrs. Rutledge’s.”
There’s a pause. “You checked Dog Town yet?”
She grimaces up at the Idiot staining the sky. “This afternoon,” she says.
Heck’s silence lasts an extra beat, then: “You need help on that?”
“No,” she says.
The other end of the line is quiet and she can picture the way he presses his thumb between his eyebrows as if to tamp the annoyance down. She imagines him lowering his hand.
“You want help on that?” he asks.
“Sure,” Bailey says. “If you’re not busy.”
“Okay.”
• • • •
The scent of the dead insists upon itself through her respirator even before they’ve left the manicured halo of bermudagrass around Grady’s house for the overgrown field where the old blue and gray stable sags. He’s “miss” and “young lady”-ing her as he hobbles along, telling a story about when his late wife boarded horses here, but the ripe decomposition ribboning out from the structure ties up Bailey’s full attention. She thanks any god but the Idiot—if that’s what it is—that she put on the 3M coveralls and mask before heading out. It’s only when they get inside, where the air’s thick as oil and stirred into eddies by buzzing insects, that Grady finally pipes down. In back, a single stall door is open.
Bailey inches forward. Bottle flies tumble in a deranged blue and green sheen through floating motes and across needle-thin fingers of light piercing the slats. Well before the Idiot appeared, she’d handled enough removals to be able to stitch up a carcass’s rough size and condition solely on smell. This is bigger than a possum, smaller than a fawn, she guesses; the texture of pudding. Grady had said it was wounded when he called this morning, but nothing on earth with this odor could have drawn breath in over a week.
Bailey slowly peers over the chest-high wall to confirm.
No animal.
One of the Idiot’s attendants. Larvae, parasites, worshippers; whatever they are, they ceaselessly skim around the Idiot like water boatmen through the air. Until they fall.
This one’s full shape is hidden beneath a shag carpet of carrion bugs, but it looks more like something that should wash up on a beach to die rather than crawl into a barn. She can see where it pried apart the boards to squeeze and drag itself inside, but it wasn’t made for land. The forelimbs are thick yet boneless, and where legs should be the carcass just bulbs out then tapers off like a radish with too many roots. Its eyeless head is crushed and toothless mouth stretched wide in a silent scream as if it hit the ground from a great height. Hard.
Beneath the insects, what flesh she can see is like a jellyfish: the color of smoky glass and visibly organless. It has no internal structures but a gullet where rotting gruel congeals, so how it moves or sees or thinks—if it thinks—are mysteries. In the points of light, though, she sees clusters of embedded fly eggs like tiny piles of rice and maggots growing just beneath the rubbery flesh. Things that should be hidden by the decorum of skin and hide are instead on proud display, the blind grubs suspended in its nearly transparent corpse like little replicas of the Idiot in the sky.
“What is it, miss?” Grady asks, voice muffled by a stained handkerchief.
“Dead,” Bailey says. Good thing she brought the rubber gloves.
• • • •
The impromptu burn pit behind the stable wasn’t protocol, but nothing was since the Idiot showed up. Even if she’d been able to drag the thing all the way to the truck and load it up, it would just end up in a different incinerator. Besides, Morris County Fire doesn’t even respond to emergencies these days and the handful of deputies left at the station aren’t checking for permits.
There’s a world of difference, though, between doing the job in a way that isn’t ideal and not doing it at all. If Bailey still puts on the uniform and still answers the calls when so many others have given up, it’s damn sure not so she can half-ass it.
As Bailey fills the Ford at the Zip Mart pump, the smell of unleaded takes her back to Grady emptying the rusty gas can over the creature. The crackle of flame as it caught. The whistling hiss as maggots under the jellied skin boiled and popped. The greasy smoke grasping past her and Grady, thinning out as it rejoined the other creatures circling the Idiot in the sky.
Bailey hazards a quick glance up from the pumps to where the inexplicable mountain of skin and mucus floats in the air. Fighting back the nausea that accompanies even a glimpse of the Idiot, she looks for the kin of the dead thing from Grady’s farm. That one must have been a baby because, even from down here, she can make out the other, much larger translucent creatures swimming around the Idiot like floaters in the eye of the wounded sky. That, or the ghosts of gargantuan flies swarming an impossible turd.
She stops at twenty and goes inside.
Malik is working the counter. He should be in school, but attendance is optional even for those who still have parents. His father and grandfather came over from Yemen and whatever led them to Morris County, it was long enough ago that when Bailey filled up here on her own for the first time on her sixteenth birthday a decade ago, they were already an institution. Having grown up local, Malik says “y’all” and calls every woman “ma’am,” but when he greets Bailey that way as she enters, it makes her feel even older than the end of the world.
Before paying, she scours the denuded snack shelves where bare boxes of Mars and Reese’s products are empty promises of a more normal tomorrow. The wall fridges are busted jaws with only a smattering of off-brand teeth. Of the slim pickings, Bailey takes a banana cream sponge cake and diet cream soda to the counter.
“Running low?” she asks as Malik rings her up.
“Supply chain, ma’am,” he says with a smile. “Maybe next week.”
It’s been “next week” for at least a month now, and things weren’t clockwork even before that. Still, the sporadic deliveries down at the Winn-Dixie or at Norma’s Diner means there’s still some semblance of order, even if there are fewer and fewer people to run it. People aren’t eating wallpaper, leather shoes, and/or each other. Yet.
Bailey taps her credit card and holds her breath. Each time, she wonders if this will be when the card finally fails to go through. When the invisible webs tying Morris County to the world beyond finally fall apart. But no. The far off banks answer with a beep and the transaction goes through.
She knows it’s a long shot, but she asks Malik anyway. “You haven’t seen a dog around here by any chance? Spaniel, black and white, big floppy ears and maybe a blue collar?”
“No, ma’am,” Malik says. The smile never falters.
• • • •
The rest of the morning until lunch is predictably insane, but in the rote way that everything in Morris County and life in general has become since the Idiot appeared.
She goes to Margaret Wells’s house and, under the Idiot’s eyeless glare, Bailey wrestles a trapped baby raccoon out of a vent with her thick leather gloves. The kit screams like a child in a wood chipper as soon as it hits daylight and can see the thing in the sky. Its rotund mama wobble-runs out from the holly hedge to snatch up her baby and haul ass away. They all run, Bailey thinks, as she watches the ingrates weave confused lines across the bright yards and then into a house half a block down whose front door has been wide open this whole time.
She drives over to Drexel’s Auto where a dying cat has wedged its way into a Subaru’s engine block trying to get warm. The vehicle’s owner—Dan Rodgers, whose son Bailey dated briefly before he went to jail for getting drunk and falling asleep while sticking up the Zip Mart—wants to just turn it on, cat be damned. The oil-stained suitcases jammed in back suggest a family in pieces and the way he keeps licking his teeth betrays his eagerness to flee, but Philip Drexel’s a good man. No killer, he makes Rodgers wait for Bailey. With some prodding, she cajoles the tortoiseshell bag of bones out and puts him in her pickup’s cage, only to let him out two blocks away because there’s nowhere else left for him to go.
She parks the truck along the curb downtown and eats her lunch of a stale half-sandwich and the banana cream sponge cake she’s been eyeing in the cupholder all morning. Bailey takes tiny bites, savoring the sugar until just before it turns cloying, again and again, dragging out the experience.
She turns down a call from Tom Jackson, whose house she knows is in the Idiot’s shadow. He says there’s a little bitty bunny down in a deep, cold well, that it’s wet and moaning, but his voice quivers and his tongue sounds thicker than just whiskey would do. Bailey also knows his property is on city water and doesn’t have a well. She tells him to call again in the morning, but after she hangs up, he calls back twice, each time filling up the voicemail. She blocks the number and deletes the messages without listening.
She keeps an eye out for Mrs. Rutledge’s Cavalier, Charlee, but doesn’t see any strays, much less that one.
She looks up at the Idiot and feels the banana cream beginning to rise. A pile of diseased flesh hovering in the sky—no strings attached. But what is there to be done? The Idiot is bigger than any city, any county. Any rocket or missile would bounce right off it. Any nuclear bomb would just fall out back down like poison rain.
She sits in the pickup’s cab and watches a cluster of sparrows that haunt the big oak by town hall. The birds just sit, afraid to fly with the Idiot there, just shitting and occasionally falling dead from the branches like little plush hailstones. A dozen people—a baker’s dozen, at best—walk by as they go to and from their jobs and about their errands, hunched over like they were living in the Blitz.
Finally, there’s nothing left to do but go to Dog Town. So she radios Heck.
“I’ll pick you up at the station?” she asks.
“Okay,” he says.
She drives over and honks the horn. Heck gets out of his own pickup and swaggers over like one of the Turner Classics cowboys Bailey’s Gram-Gram used to watch, bald as Yul Brynner and mustache like a walrus. Animal Control Officers are issued Kevlar vests since no one has ever responded kindly to someone trying to take their animals, but whereas Bailey stopped wearing hers the day after their supervisor tried to fly from the bridge to grab the Idiot, Heck wears his like a lizard wears his skin—shedding it once a season, at most. He’s added a personal sidearm, too: a two-tone Sig Sauer P320 with a 17-round magazine which she only knows because he wouldn’t shut up about it after she said it looked like a toy.
He points at her through the windshield, makes a driving motion as a question. She shakes her head and he shrugs, then gets in the passenger seat.
“Where’s your vest?” he asks as he buckles in.
“It’s just Dog Town,” she says.
He presses his thumb in between his eyebrows and closes his eyes, then shakes his head. “Okay.”
• • • •
Even with the windows up, they smell Dog Town from five blocks away. The air is humid with the reek of bad meat.
Heck named it Dog Town, but the area surrounding the old First Baptist Church on the edge of Stantonsville proper is rotten with all kinds of animals. Back in the early days, a sizable group of parishioners took the Idiot’s arrival as a sign of the End Times and locked themselves in the chapel to wait for the apocalypse. That was ages ago, though, and the world hasn’t yet gotten around to ending. Still, people swear you can see movement behind the stained glass windows, although any supplies would be long gone and Lord only knows what they could be eating.
The front lawn is given over to packs of feral dogs—more strays than could have been in all of Stantonsville, maybe even Morris County—who spend the daylight hours basking in the sun. At dusk they wake and whine at the church’s heavy door, clawing grooves into the oak as they beg and plead for whatever smells so irresistible to them, until finally they get bored and go hunting. Once they leave, the other creatures—possums, racoons, rats, and other slinky, furry things—emerge to take their turn pawing at the door and the hidden treasures within. Almost nobody comes to Dog Town, but those who do leave before nightfall.
At first, Animal Control had tried to keep the strays in check, but life under the Idiot is a series of compromises and forfeits. At best, one’s surrenders are tactical. Bailey and Heck now only roll through when they’re looking for a specific animal, like Mrs. Rutledge’s ancient Charlee. It’s a team job, too, since there are others who come down here for the dogs sometimes. Supply chain, ma’am, Bailey thinks and shudders.
“I’m going to burn it to the ground,” Heck says, right on cue as they pull up alongside the church. He says it every time, but however lapsed a Catholic he might be, Bailey doesn’t think Heck has it in him. Even with the Idiot, that still has to be a sin, right? She looks towards the windows, the colored panes like congealed blood flowing around stained-glass saints who squeeze a cross-eyed lamb in their marionette-armed ecstasy. There’s nothing moving behind them today.
Slowly, Bailey begins to drive, she and Heck craning towards their respective windows to search the dog piles, hunting packs, and occasional rawboned loner drawn to the sound of the truck. Lots of pitties; mangy terriers of every stripe; the odd working breed, including one shepherd still in his K9 vest; and an overwhelming motley of strays and piecemeal hounds. They lounge in the shaggy grass of abandoned lawns, the houses long since emptied by the same sweltering meat stench that draws the dogs like a magnet. Sometimes one or two stir and trot up to the truck as they reenact the buried memories of their lives before Dog Town, but their interest quickly wanes.
Cruising the blocks around Dog Town, facing away from each other and just enough attention spread in opposite directions, are the easiest times for Bailey and Heck to talk.
“How’ve you been?” she asks.
“Okay,” he says.
They’re passing a yard with a single leafless magnolia that looks like it was struck by lightning in an otherwise overgrown but unblemished yard. A flock of starlings lies like fallen leaves around its base and a coterie of former lap dogs are snarling as they gorge themselves. She doesn’t see Charlee in the scrum.
“How’re the girls?” she asks. “You hear from them recently?”
“Good,” Heck says.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Selena’s having trouble in her new school, but we’re getting some extra help after class. She’s real smart, you know, just has difficulty with authority.”
“Takes after her father, huh?”
Heck snorts. “Could be worse.”
There’s a pile of brown and brindle dogs of every size that almost look dead, until one of them lifts its head to stare at the truck and all the rest follow in eerie symmetry. None of them are a black and white Cavalier, though. As one, they lay their heads back down as Bailey and Heck drive on.
“What about Mariana?” Bailey asks. “She’s gotta be, what, ten?”
“Almost eleven,” Heck says. “Her birthday’s coming up next month.”
“Oh yeah?” Bailey asks. “You going out to see them for that?”
When Heck doesn’t answer, Bailey steals a quick glance. He’s staring into the side mirror as if searching for an answer.
Bailey knows that he hasn’t heard from Selena, Mariana, or his wife, Julia, in at least a year. She’d taken the girls to another state even before the Idiot showed up, and however they’re surviving—if they’re surviving—it’s without Heck. Bailey would bet even money they might be dead and Heck, perpetual pessimist, probably would too, but these stories he makes up keep him going. Just like pretending that a marriage isn’t over or coming in to work even with the Idiot in the sky, maybe if Heck keeps plowing forward as if the world hasn’t changed, he can bend it back into the shape it was. Or maybe the lies just keep him from acknowledging the loss and giving up. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t nothing.
“Yeah,” he says, “I think I’ll try to get out there for that. Maybe take a week.”
“I’m sure they’d love to see you,” Bailey says, knowing that just like bringing the girls home after the Idiot arrived, Heck will never stray from his course.
“Okay.”
They ride in silence, the shadows getting longer as their search grid spirals out from the locked chapel at the heart of Dog Town and the looming darkness beneath the Idiot that is crawling towards it as the sun goes down. No sign of the Cavalier, but as the air gets cooler, more things are starting to stir in the bushes. A pitbull emerges from behind a clutch of wilted azaleas, a tiny chihuahua perched like a jockey on its back, then jogs off in the church’s direction.
“Heck,” Bailey says, “about this dog we’re looking for.”
“Your neighbor’s, right?” he asks, mustache pressed to the window as he keeps watch.
“Right,” she says. “Mrs. Rutledge. Older lady, kind of a firecracker.”
“I remember her. We did a couple of calls out to her house in the early days, dog getting loose from the house or something, right?”
“Right,” Bailey said. “But—well, so—”
Heck laughs, cutting Bailey off. “What was the name she used to have for that thing?”
“Which thing?”
He turns in his seat, surprised. He jerks a thumb up toward the roof, through it, to the floating alien mass of cancerous decay that has occupied every waking moment and every ruined dream of every human life since it appeared and destroyed any semblance of order with just its presence.
“That thing,” he says.
“The Idiot,” Bailey mutters.
Heck slaps his knee, mustache shaking like a push broom. “The Idiot!” he repeats. “What a fucking name.” He leans back, still smiling as he shakes a fist at the sky, saying it again in an exaggerated falsetto. “El idiota!”
She can’t help but smile, which is a treat rarer than banana cream sponge and diet cream soda these days. Bailey lets it linger on her lips as if she could taste it.
Then Heck frowns. “What’s that doing here?” he says and points out the passenger window. Up Havemeyer Street, a red Dodge pickup and a blue Volvo station wagon are parked. Unlike the abandoned cars that have become shade spots for the dogs and are plastered gold by pollen from the seasons passed beneath the Idiot, these vehicles are clean.
“Let’s check it out,” Heck says.
There are only two kinds of people with reasons to come to Dog Town. There’s Heck and Bailey, then there’s the other. Supply chain, ma’am.
“We don’t need to get involved,” Bailey says. Even in the stuffy cab, she’s aware of a chill settling across her chest where her Kevlar jacket would be.
Heck snorts. “We’re the only ones here. Turn.”
She rolls her eyes and the steering wheel too. They pull up next to the truck and it’s empty. Volvo, same.
Havemeyer Street collects misfortunes. Not just the Idiot; not just the Dog Town miasma; but a fire that crawled down the block back in the early days, chewing up the houses along the west side of the street. When it rains, the smell of wet cinder and smoke still rises up from the ribs and slabs left. If there are only two reasons to come to Dog Town, there are none to come to Havemeyer Street.
Bailey puts their truck in park but leaves the engine running, careful not to box either themselves or the others in. Survival these days is a series of compromises and tactical retreats. Heck dismounts and surveys the charred carcasses of single-family homes, thumb tucked in his gun belt. Bailey hops out and winces at the odor from the church, still smothering despite its distance.
Voices from behind a dilapidated Craftsman. Heck raises a hand to stop her. They can’t make out the words, but there are two men, at least. One is laughing. Then a new sound—the wordless yelping whine of a dog in terror, if not yet pain.
Before he can do another one of his little hand signals, Bailey is off. Even with Heck running, she’s first around the crumbling corner of the burned out house.
• • • •
What Bailey runs headfirst into is trouble. Two men and a woman stand around the empty footprint of a cellar where the body of the house has fallen away. The man closest to Bailey holds a tarnished revolver in one hand and a tan puppy—some kind of terrier—by the scruff of its neck in the other. Ninety degrees away but across the pit, the woman and the other man, who is holding a hand-me-down .22 hunting rifle, are laughing at the squealing dog suspended over the drop. Down in the exposed basement, among the fallen timbers and stagnant water, something ponderous is moving.
Bailey was in the process of running up to the man, just out of arm’s reach, but she locks up when she sees the weapons. She hears Heck behind her and the hiss of leather as he draws his sidearm. All around her, the empty eyes of gun barrels turn to stare at her intrusion. The space above her heart where the bulletproof fabric should be is freezing.
“Give me the dog,” she says. The words and their firmness probably surprise her more than the others.
“What?” the man with the revolver says.
“Give me the dog.”
In the open cellar beneath their feet, a sound stirs like wind groaning through a cavern. Bailey’s eyes drop from the revolver to the debris-choked hole below.
Another of the Idiot’s attendant creatures, but orders of magnitude larger than the one from Grady’s farm. The size of a sedan—and with its size come more stubby limbs and long whip-like appendages, flailing in agitation—it shares the same hazy and translucent flesh, body empty of organs save the digestive. Obviously maimed by its fall and pinned by the cracked beams collapsed down around it, Bailey sees the scraps of fur and wet bones on the ground that have kept it alive. The slurry creeping along that single track from mouth to anus.
Someone has been feeding it.
Supply chain, ma’am.
“Drop your weapon!” Heck shouts.
“You drop it,” the woman yells back. Like Bailey, she is unarmed, but her side has superior numbers and so the guns turn from Bailey to Heck. The puppy stares at the surrounding chaos and whimpers, comprehending immensely the overwhelming pain and fear, but not their sources. It is a creature of great sensation, but precious little discernment as of yet.
Bailey holds out her hands. “Give me the dog,” she repeats.
“You can’t shoot us all,” the man with the .22 calls across the pit to Heck.
“Okay,” Heck says. “But I don’t need to shoot her and that leaves you 50/50. You like those odds?”
The man’s face sags and the woman steps back slightly.
“Hey,” Bailey says. “Hey!”
The group’s attention returns to her. The thing in the pit below thumps the ground once as it tries and fails to lift itself high enough to understand who is interrupting its mealtime.
“Give me the dog.”
The man with the revolver and the puppy squints. “Who the fuck are you?”
Her heart is buzzing like a cell phone on vibrate and limbs are numb, but Bailey taps the badge pinned to her shirt. Once. Definitively. “Officer Butler, Morris County Animal Control.”
Everyone stares and she can picture Heck behind her taking a hand off his pistol to press the thumb between his eyebrows.
It takes a split second, but then the man with the pistol sneers. “You think that means something?” He laughs and his companions echo it, although in nervous diminution. But then his face goes red and his knuckles go white. The puppy whines in a higher register as the grip tightens.
He shoves the revolver’s barrel against Bailey’s badge, pushing the pin behind it down into her chest. “What is that?”
“Put it down!” Heck yells, but with Bailey as an inadvertent shield, the man ignores him.
Now he points the revolver down at the unnatural creature in the empty footprint of the ruined house. “What is that?”
He points his gun up at the insanity floating in the darkening sky and screams: “What the fuck is that?”
“Idiot,” Bailey mutters.
Like a snake bite, the revolver is back in her face and Bailey’s life flashes before her eyes.
She emerges into the world from darkness. She takes her first steps, says her first words. She goes to school, makes friends, loses friends. Her world ends the summer after third grade when her best friend Stephanie moves two towns over, but then it keeps going when fourth grade starts.
Her world ends when Gram-Gram dies, when John T. dumps her, when she fails Algebra II, when she doesn’t get in to her out-of-state dream school. But then it keeps going.
She gets older, dreams of a new life, but the one she wants—the one she deserves—still eludes her. She falls in love, out of love, she is alone, she is surrounded. Her world ends a thousand times, sometimes every morning for a stretch of months, a year, but somehow it keeps going.
Her life plays out like a film being projected from the barrel of that revolver and it doesn’t stop when the Idiot shows up. It doesn’t stop when people begin losing their shit. When everyone else but Heck stops showing up. When the aisles at the Zip Mart go bare.
When everything else stops, Bailey’s life keeps going. It runs up to this very moment, here beneath the Idiot.
And it keeps going too, because it’s not over. This isn’t the life she wanted and it’s damn sure not the one she deserved, but if she stops now, that’ll make it the only one she’ll ever have. No. That’s not good enough.
Her life goes on. Every day she gets up and she forces her world to keep turning, because one day—she doesn’t know when—things will change. And when they do, Bailey Butler is going to be here.
She reaches up and puts her hand on the revolver’s barrel. She pushes it away and her life continues to stream out like a movie into the air. All around her.
“Give me–”
The other man behind her shrieks like a fox in a trap and they all turn. His rifle lies on the ground and his neck is craned upwards, face to the Idiot above.
On the Idiot’s downward-facing surface, a tremendous fissure has cracked open and is spreading. Like a new canyon forming on a diseased planet’s surface, the tectonic shift is visible from the haunted Earth below. The mottled plane of the Idiot closest to them splits and peels apart, inner lips of the wound running along its surface pink and glistening. It opens to reveal a hole, the deepest black—no.
Not a hole. The filmy sheen beneath is something else.
It is an impossible eyeball, rheumy and bleary with sleep or some kind of living death. The pupil in the dark lavender iris is not the familiar circle or even a goat’s boxy rectangle, but a three-lobed blob. Obscene.
The woman falls to her knees and then rolls in the grass as the great wet lens above them stares down. The man with the revolver just cackles hysterically. Even Heck lets go of his pistol with one hand to cross himself, an almost hilariously quaint movement beneath the literal eye of the end of all sense and meaning.
Above them, the Idiot ponderously blinks once and time stands still. Then it slowly closes its eye. The surface is once again undisturbed.
Bailey steps forward to take the puppy, and the man does not resist.
“He’s coming with me,” she says.
The man with the revolver looks at her and the sad creature cowering in her arms. Then down at the Idiot’s writhing emissary, now flapping about in great agitation in the muck of the cellar. Then back up to the sky where the Idiot above has revealed itself to be … what? Alive? Aware? Simply something different than what they all thought it was, which was already something that never could be?
“Sure,” the man says. “What the fuck ever. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything.”
“Okay,” Bailey says, as she cradles the dog and turns her back on all the men with all the guns.
But he’s wrong. This means something. This little heart trembling; the soft warmth from the organs inside these scrawny bones. The breath on her neck as she holds it to her chest and carries it back to the truck, leaving the standoff behind. The small things mean something, even when—especially when—the big things don’t.
• • • •
The four-legged residents of Dog Town hover at the end of Havemeyer, furiously sniffing the air but refusing to draw closer. Bailey nestles the puppy into one of the crates in the back, bundling him with extra blankets, and she waits. She watches as the two men help the woman back around the corner of the ruined house, legs stiff like a colt just fallen from a mare.
They approach their vehicles parked near Bailey’s county-issued with eyes averted. The man with the revolver gets in the truck and the other one helps the woman into the Volvo’s passenger seat. They drive off without a word, the wall of dogs parting to let them pass. But no Heck.
Bailey leaves the pup in the truck and holds her breath as she goes back around the corner of the burned out house. Braced for the worst, she lets out a confused sigh of relief when she finds Heck standing by the lip of the collapsed cellar. His gun is still in one hand, but with the other he is digging his thumb into that spot between his brows, screwing it back and forth as if prying something loose. Above them, the Idiot remains impassive, no sign that it has ever done anything but sit there. Around it, the other strange creatures flit and float—kin to this degraded beast in the cellar, but unencumbered by its fate.
“Hey,” she says. “Let’s go.”
Heck stops twisting his thumb against his skull but doesn’t look up. “How do you think it got here?” he asks.
Bailey doesn’t know what he’s referring to, but says: “Bad luck, I guess?”
Now her partner turns and his eyes are red, but not from tears. More as if from straining against some enormous weight, the way a power lifter’s capillaries might burst.
Heck’s voice quivers, “I hate it.”
“I know. But it’s not going anywhere. Just leave it.”
“It’s ruined everything,” Heck says. The exhaustion on his face curdles and then ignites in anger. He points his pistol at the thing in the cellar.
“Heck,” Bailey says, approaching slowly with palms forward. “This isn’t—”
“Idiot!” he shouts and the pistol barks in agreement. Bailey flinches. Dogs howl from all around and the thing below the surface flails as the bullet strikes. She’s stopped, but Heck is stepping down onto a mound of debris that might once have been the stairs.
His pistol barks again, again, again, again. The surface of the thing in the basement blooms little holes and she watches bullets burrow into its translucent flesh like the ballistic gel that simulates bodies in the County’s firearm safety videos. The thing thrashes, but it’s too big and bulky, the bullets too small in comparison. While there is a shape to the creature, there is nothing inside it. Its undifferentiated mass takes Heck’s assault and continues to squirm.
Bailey shouts above the ringing in her ears and the unearthly chorus of keening whines that rise from all sides. Dog Town does not like this intrusion, but Heck and his pistol don’t care.
Again, again, again, again. Big tatters of the creature’s hazy skin are flapping as it bucks and the places inside of it where Heck keeps hitting are pulverized. Sections of it appear to be collapsing, parts of the surface caving in, but there’s still too much of it.
“Hector! Leave it!”
Again, again, again, again. Now he’s standing so close that he could lean over and kick the damned thing. The trash pile beneath him bends, the fire-ruined and water-logged ruins quivering under his weight.
Again, again—
An arm of some kind whips up from below, the jelly of the appendage suddenly a hardened razor’s edge, and it swipes across Heck’s stomach. The Kevlar above his abdomen rips like tissue paper and for a moment there’s a look on his face like someone who walked into the wrong restroom. Then his guts peek out and the blood begins to pour.
“Idiota,” he gasps, hands over his belly, trying to hold himself together as he stumbles backwards, up towards Bailey. She rushes forward out to catch him as the thing in the ground lets out a whistling howl and the Idiot floats above.
• • • •
Heck sprawls in the passenger seat, hands over his midsection the way a pregnant woman might hold her belly. Blood spills like a red apron across his waist, his thighs, down into the seat and onto the floor. Each bump on the road, each corner the Ford takes as they fly out of Dog Town sloshes a little more out.
His face is pale. Beneath his mustache, the grimace that twists his mouth is more like an upset father than a man in agony. Not angry, just disappointed.
“Bailey,” he mutters. “Can you hear me?”
She looks away from the road briefly and takes a hand from the wheel to pat Heck’s knee. She pulls it back, sticky and red-palmed.
“I hear you,” she says. “It’ll be okay.”
“Oh, good,” he says. “I was afraid I was asleep.”
“Not yet. We’ll get you to Morris General real soon.” They’re coming up on the straightaway and so she leans on the gas, the trees outside blurring into one. “Don’t sleep yet.”
“Bailey?” Heck sighs long and hard, eyes drifting closed as the air leaves him. “I wish—I wish I’d run.”
She grabs his knee again and this time squeezes hard. His eyes fly open.
“You don’t mean that,” she says, shaking his leg. “You and I—we’re the ones who stay. The ones who keep going.”
He laughs, but the movement of his stomach makes a gurgle and he winces.
“We are,” he says, “but I wish we weren’t.”
“Don’t say that.”
He coughs once and something inside is tearing. “Bailey,” he gasps. “I lied.”
“Shhhh, it’s okay.” She leans harder on the pedal but it’s already on the floor.
“Julia—the girls—they …”
Bailey keeps her eyes on the road. “It’s okay. I know.”
From the corner of her eye, his face seems to run a passage through shock, then pain, then something like shame. She doesn’t look to confirm.
“Why … why did you let …”
“Because it kept you going.”
Heck laughs and it is an ugly, desperate thing. “For what? I should have—should have just let it go. None of it … Nothing means anything.”
“What about me?” Bailey whispers.
Now she glances over, and for a split second Heck is giving a massive, shoulder to ear shrug, but it’s a spasm. One final seizure as if he were either trying to hold his life inside or, maybe, slipping a yoke from his neck. Then his body goes limp and a foul smell fills the cab.
• • • •
She drives on to the hospital because there’s nowhere else left for her to take him. The emergency drop-off loop is empty, but a patient in a gown and work boots with no pants or socks puts out a cigarette and helps Bailey lower Heck’s body down from the cab. The man is about thirty-five, one side of his head is bandaged, but his visible eye is blue and kind.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Bailey says, staring down at all the blood and the empty flesh on the concrete. The man shrugs.
“You can leave him here with me,” he says. He points to the badge on Heck’s vest. “I got his name and I got these,” he lifts up a nearly full soft pack of ultralights. “I won’t leave him.”
Bailey takes a long look at the body. His eyebrows are raised, his face soft.
“Okay,” she says. “It’s been a long day.”
The man silently offers Bailey a cigarette, but she shakes her head no.
She climbs back in the truck and pulls away, leaving the man beside Heck’s empty vessel, patting down his gown in confusion, searching for a light.
• • • •
Bailey parks the truck at Animal Control. Still in the cab, in the bloom of Hector’s final moments as the smell of his death is condensing into a taste, Bailey squawks the two-way on her shoulder.
“Heck?” she calls.
She squawks the two-way again. Again.
Heck doesn’t answer.
The empty line will suck her soul out. The silent channel is the long, hollow gullet of an invisible creature that kills and eats and shits and dies, leaving behind nothing but scraps.
It will destroy her if she lets it.
She turns off the radio without trying it again. She’s in shock and can guess what’s coming, but grief is a tomorrow problem.
She looks at the passenger seat. Blood and shit is a tomorrow problem too.
Bailey’s slammed the door and is shuffling past the truck bed when a small whine calls to her, almost apologetic. She leans in and stares at the puppy in the cages. Its eyes are deep and brown, the off-kilter frame of white sclera giving them an immeasurable depth of soul.
High above, the Idiot gleams in the sunset sky. A corona of purple haze halos it. Creatures like great translucent tadpoles swim through the vibrant pink and tangerine around the oddity. Its underside in shadow, Bailey can make out that its eye’s still closed before the nausea becomes too much.
As Bailey opens the latch to the cage, she thinks again about the cat she pulled from the engine block at Drexel’s. How she let him go just a few blocks away. She could do that again here, she thinks as her hands touch the soft, warm fur. There’s nowhere else to take him.
• • • •
Mrs. Rutledge’s house next door is still dark when Bailey pulls her Camry into her drive. The curtains are still drawn, the front door still open. Nothing has changed since this morning, or last night, or the morning before when she found the note taped to her front door.
Dear Bailey, it read, I’m terribly sorry not to have asked, but could you take care of Charlee for me? He gets along with you so well. I’ve left him downstairs with a bag of his things and the front door’s open a crack, so please come in. No need to knock.
—Beth R.
PS—Please don’t come upstairs.
Bailey steps over the row of wilted orange nasturtium that separates their lawns. The porch steps creak and she remembers Mrs. Rutledge out here, shaking her fist at the Idiot. She could stare and stare, enough that Bailey wondered if maybe the old woman’s eyesight had gone or if she was too stubborn for it to have any effect or if maybe she’d gone just batty enough beneath her frizzed gray hair that she was immune to the Idiot. Well, the last two days put the lie to that.
“Charlee?” she calls out as she enters the house. The smell inside is terrible, but not as bad as Grady’s farm, Dog Town, or her county-issue Ford. “Charlee?” she calls again, but the walls echo and no cheerful bark, no sound of scampering paws, not even a scratch against a door answers her call.
The doggy gate at the foot of the stairs up to the second floor is still in place. The bag of Charlee’s accouterments is still there—heavy with tin cans of Senior Diet that clank against separate aluminum bowls for food and water. A leash and three rolls of plastic bags coiled like a snake; a well-gnawed rawhide nib; a once-stuffed squirrel with cartoon eyes now worn down to a saliva-crusted sock. A spare collar with Mrs. Rutledge’s telephone number and a rabies vaccination date that will never need to be renewed.
Bailey loops Charlee’s extra collar around the newel post at the bottom of the staircases and leaves. She closes the door behind her.
• • • •
At 5 a.m., Bailey Butler’s alarm goes off. She gets up and, still in her pajamas, lets the puppy out of the crate with Morris County Animal Control stenciled on the side. She lets it run and relieve itself in the backyard. Next door, the lights are off, the curtains closed, the front door shut.
She doesn’t turn her head to the sky. Instead, she watches the little dog wag its tail, each sniff and scent a new entry in a book whose writing she can’t understand. The wind blows and a fence gate somewhere in the distance slams, sending the dog bounding back up the steps to her ankles. Its dew-damp paws leave muddy streaks on her leg, but she smiles as she fights back something larger and more insane that she can’t yet bear to look at. She scratches the puppy’s chin and rubs its ears. They feel like warm velveteen between her fingers.
“Let’s get you some breakfast,” she says. “And then we gotta go to work.”
She watches the dog walk past her and into the house, already taking stock as if it owns the place. Bailey doesn’t know what to call it yet, but names can be a tomorrow problem.
Above them, the Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky. Beneath it, the world continues to turn.
