Savage (15 page)

Doc Martin dragged Bear's body across the threshold from the kennel, a wide smear of crimson on the linoleum floor marking their passing.

The animals in their cages were still throwing their bodies mercilessly against the doors, trying to escape and get at her. With a grunt she pulled the mastiff into the office and allowed the kennel door to close, muffling the sounds of the crazed animals beyond.

She leaned against the wall to catch her breath.

“You're a big boy, aren't you,” she said to the dead dog. She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and removed a pack of cigarettes, at that moment not really giving two craps about office rules.
I'll be sure to fine myself in the morning,
she thought, popping a smoke into her mouth and lighting up.

They'd always told her that the cancer sticks would be the cause of her death, and typically she'd believed them. Now she stared at the massive dog at her feet. Never had she thought one of her own patients would do her in.

She took a long drag on the cigarette, feeling her nerves start to settle.

Then, cigarette sticking from the corner of her mouth, she bent down, took the big dog by his front paws, and pulled him to the nearby examination room. Lifting with her knees, she managed to haul the dead beast up and flop him onto the metal table.

“Holy crap,” she said breathlessly. “What the hell were they feeding you?”

She took a few more puffs on her smoke before throwing the butt into the metal sink, then she plucked two rubber gloves from the box on the counter and turned back to the mastiff.

“All right then,” she said, pulling on the gloves. “Let's see if we can figure out what's happened.”

She started by feeling the animal's body, looking for any odd lumps or lesions, but other than the gaping surgical wound, she felt nothing. Next, she placed a hand against the dog's massive head and pulled open his eyes. She shined the penlight from her lab coat pocket into the left eye and then the right.

“Well, what do we have here?” she asked aloud as the beam of light reflected off a metallic, almost spiderweb-like covering on the right eye.

The vet took a scalpel from another drawer in the supply cabinet and began to poke at the covering. At first she believed it to be some kind of cataract, but the more she examined it . . .

Holding the flesh around the eye wide, she peered even closer. From the looks of it, the cataract—or whatever the hell it was—appeared to completely encase the eye.

Doc Martin wanted an even closer look. Flipping the scalpel around and using the rounded end to wedge beneath the eyeball, she forced it upward, eventually popping it from the skull.

She held the still-attached eyeball in her rubber-gloved hand, slowly turning it. The foreign material did indeed cover the entire orb and then entwined around the optic nerve, going farther up into the skull cavity.

“Huh,” she said, letting the eye dangle against the mastiff's face. She stepped back and removed her rubber gloves, tossing them in a nearby trash can.

Doc Martin knew what she wanted to do next, but in order to do that she was going to need to take a look inside the dog's skull. A slight smile formed on her face as she left the examination room, remembering how they told her she was crazy when she'd invested in the bone saw.

Dale Moore sat in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the storm raging outside.

He picked up the cell phone that rested on his thigh, looked at the time, and dialed Sidney's number again. The call, as the twenty or more calls before it, didn't go through.

Maybe a tower's come down with this wind,
Dale thought as he hung up and placed the phone back on his thigh.

But that didn't explain where Sidney was.

He racked his brain trying to remember if she'd said anything to him about her plans for the day and evening. They hadn't talked much after the business of that morning, each annoyed with the other. The only thing he knew for sure was that she was going to work. He picked up his phone again and looked at the time.

Something thumped outside, and he looked in the general direction of the sound. The wind howled like a hungry wolf, and he could hear the hissing patter of rain against the windows.

It sounded pretty bad out there, which just made him worry all the more. He figured she was probably hanging out at the animal hospital, helping Doc Martin until the storm calmed down. That's just how she was, but still, he'd like to know for sure.

When Sid's mother had left them, his daughter had suddenly become his focus; everything he did was somehow connected to her, her well-being, and her happiness. It had become his job to make sure that she had everything she needed to live her life in the best way possible. Dale recalled, with a twinge of guilt, the amount of time he'd spent away from his little girl, the special jobs that he'd sometimes taken on the mainland, leaving Sidney to fend for herself. But truth be told, it had all been for her. A lot of the money he'd made had gone to her college fund, to help her with her dream—with her future.

His right arm began to ache, a dull throbbing pain to remind him that it was still there. How could he forget? Too many cigarettes and stress.

He'd thought he was going to die, to leave his little girl all alone, but then he'd gotten better—
if you want to call it that
—and he began to worry that it would have been better if he had died.

Sure, it would have been tough for her at first, but then she would have gone on with her life and on to to great things. Amazing things.

But with him alive—
if you want to call it that
—Sidney was left with the burden of his care. He remembered the days following his release from rehab and the things that his daughter had had to do for him.

Things that a daughter should never have to do for her father.

Dale felt that familiar anger again. He and it had become old friends, the anger usually rearing its ugly head when he was feeling sorry for himself. It was the kind of anger that resulted in him doing something he knew he shouldn't. Something that both he and his daughter knew was completely stupid, like smoking cigarettes or changing the batteries in the smoke alarm or flipping the mattress on his bed.

He wondered what sort of stupid thing he would do now.

His mind raced with a number of really dumb things, but instead, he just sat on the couch and stewed, waiting for his daughter to come home.

His thoughts drifted to the near future when Sidney wouldn't be there anymore, when she'd be living in Boston and going to college. He decided that he'd probably miss moments like this, worrying about where she was in the storm.

The house shuddered in a blast of wind, and his concern began to amplify. He grabbed his cane and maneuvered himself off the couch, slowly crossing the living room to the window that looked out at the road. Pulling the shade aside, he squinted through the glass at windswept darkness outside. It was as bad as it sounded, the rain blown sideways by the intensity of the wind. It was no surprise that they'd lost power and cell signal.

For a brief moment he considered trying to pull out the old generator in the garage and starting it up, but then he heard his daughter's angry voice in his head and decided against it. Bitterness at being an invalid began to surge through him, but something outside caught his eye, mercifully distracting him from his rage.

At first he believed it to be debris caught up in the exceptional flow of rainwater that was running like a river past his house, but as he watched, it changed course, moving against the flow of water and heading directly for his home.

“What the hell is that?” Dale muttered. Whatever it was, it had moved out of the road and into the grass before the white picket fence. He left the window and went to another, hoping for a better angle. Through the rain he could see something moving around the fence and through the grass, coming up toward the front—

The front doorknob violently rattled, startling him.

Dale went to the hallway and stood, staring at the front door, listening.

Again the knob rattled.

It has to be Sidney,
he thought, moving toward the heavy wooden door.
But why would she use the front door when she always uses the back?

His brain was already formulating reasons as he moved his cane from his left hand to his weakened right and reached for the door chain. He slid the chain across and popped it from its track, then undid the lock above the doorknob before taking it firmly in hand, turning, and pulling it open.

“Where the heck have you been?” he found himself asking the man who stood on the doorstep. The man who was most definitely not his daughter.

“I'm sorry,” Dale started to apologize, about to ask if there was something he could do for the stranger, but the next words didn't come as he noticed the odd way the man was standing, the way he swayed, and the way his head tilted weirdly to the left.

Then lightning flashed, and Dale saw the paleness of his flesh, the blood that covered his face, and the unnatural contours of his skull.

The ghoulish stranger seemed to smile as he lurched forward, wedging himself in the doorway, even as Dale attempted to close the door. Dale struggled to push the door closed, but the man pushed harder, causing Dale to lose his balance and fall backward to the floor.

The door had swung wide in the struggle and wind, and the assailant just stood there, as if waiting for something. Dale floundered upon the floor, searching for his cane. He found it and pulled it toward him, rolling onto his side and using it to push himself up onto his knees.

He heard a strange, snuffling sound from the entryway behind him and turned his head to see that an ugly bulldoglike dog had joined the stranger in the entryway.

Now Dale knew who this was. He was one of the summer folk, those who usually came out to the island at the end of May and left on Labor Day. Dale remembered because before his stroke this man had called him for a construction quote on his summer house. While at the house, Dale had had a less than pleasant encounter with this nasty bulldog.

Berthold was the name. Alfred, he believed the dog was named.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded as he fought to his feet.

The dog moved into the hallway, the man following him. The way they moved made Dale think of the walking corpses in that zombie show that was so popular on television.

He actually managed to right himself and turned toward the intruders. “Get out!”

Instead of leaving, the dog sprang at him, knocking him backward with the weight of his thrust. Dale managed to stay on his feet by angling his body in such a way that he fell against the hallway wall. He raised his cane to club the dog that crouched before him, but the man, as if responding to some inaudible command, came at him next, his hands reaching out . . .

Cold fingers wrapping around Dale's throat . . .

And he began to squeeze.

Isaac ran through the thick underbrush that separated his family's property from his neighbor's, driven by the terror he had just experienced.

The ground was wet and slippery and fraught with hidden dangers. It was hard for him to see in the dark and pouring rain, and he found himself stumbling over trash covered by years of rotten leaves, sticks, and tree branches. There were rusted bike frames, rotting wooden doors, and even an old dollhouse that looked as though it had erupted up from beneath the slimy ground cover.

Something snagged his ankle, and Isaac went down on all fours, his fingers sinking into the rotting detritus. He began to panic, thinking that a snake had tripped him up, but as he pulled his foot away, he saw that it was in fact an old garden hose. Feeling relieved, and just a bit foolish, he freed his foot and pulled his hands from the sucking mud. But as lightning flashed, he saw that there were things moving on his hands; worms entwined around his fingers as earwigs traversed the muddy flesh of his hand and up his arms.

Isaac shook his hands crazily, wiping away the filth and crawling things as he again began to run. He wasn't sure exactly where he was going, just that he had to get away from his house.

He tried to remember what this area of the yard looked like when it was light and not in the midst of a hurricane. Finally, he stopped for a moment in the hissing rain, closing his eyes to picture the backyard.

In his mind he saw her, Sidney, his neighbor and his friend. Just the thought of the girl who didn't smile was enough to bring him some measure of solace. She had always been nice to him, even though she never seemed to be all that happy.

Isaac looked through the thick underbrush in the direction he believed Sidney's house to be. Maybe she would help him. He could tell her about the cats and the mice.

And his mother.

Images of his mother lying dead in the backyard, a cat burrowing deeply into her chest, made him want to fall to the ground in a tight little ball.

But things rustled in the wet leaves and squirmed upon the ground, and he knew that whatever they were, they were coming for him. If he didn't move, they would get him.

The hearing aid in his Steve ear began to make that sound again, as if picking up some frequency broadcasting nothing but fear, menace, and unspeakable violence. If he chose to listen, he knew that he would be lost to it, falling into the embrace of the sound that was nothing but bad.

Like a bad radio station playing in his ear, wanting him to do horrible things like the cats and mice and creepy crawlers in the dirt.

Isaac's hand shot up to his Steve ear, fiddling with the settings of the hearing device. For a brief moment he could have sworn that he heard his mother screaming his name over the sound of the howling winds, and he quickly pulled his hand away, listening carefully as he peered through the darkness.