Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

She ventured into town. The lone traffic light, as dead as everything else, was dark like the dark windows around her, and swayed in the wind. Lightning flashed again. Her plan was to keep going, travel west along 64, but at the last second she swung left onto the town’s secondary road, Vine Street. She wanted to hide from whoever was behind them. Her blood drummed past her ears. She looked around for someplace to hide, and in the next lightning flash saw a church; and, no, she wasn’t religious, but the church seemed like a beacon, and all the knee–jerk responses she’d been taught in Sunday school came back: how a church, any church, was a sanctuary, and how the good Lord would protect. She swerved into the small lot in front.

Only thing was, the church was still fairly close to Main Street, and she didn’t feel safe sitting in the car like this. It might be better if she and the kids…

“Kids, get out. We’ll go up to the church porch until this guy passes.”

“Mom, why are you so worried?” asked Hanna.

“Because we’ve got food. Do you want a repeat of Cedarvale?”

They all got out of the car, climbed the broken concrete steps to the church lawn, hurried up the walk to the church porch, and huddled under its roof. Glenda got on her knees behind the railing. She wondered how her world could have changed so much, so that she would feel the need to hide from anybody who happened along the highway. She felt vulnerable, and miserable, and as if she still had far to go before she reached Marblehill.

She listened for the car and thought she heard it coming through the rain, the tires ripping against the wet pavement, but it was just the sound of the rain itself, a steady hiss, fluctuating in pitch. For the longest time the car didn’t come, and she thought it might have turned onto a side road, that perhaps it was a local farmer going back to his farmhouse; but then she heard the vehicle, and over this uneven section of 64 it made a bump and rattle she recognized only too well. She felt both hot and cold, and her body automatically tried to adjust with a sharp intake of air; but once the air was inside, she couldn’t let it go, as if, with this new emergency, this terrible threat, her lungs had suddenly seized up.

Her mind froze as well, and it wasn’t until a few seconds later that she began to put it all together: why Buzz was here, how he was here, the reason behind this I-shot-the-sheriff-but-did-not-shoot-the-deputy scenario. The truck passed the intersection at Main, not more than a quarter block away. There could be no mistaking the geriatric jalopy. She was sure the truck might turn onto Vine, but it kept going. Her shoulders remained tight, and she gripped the edge of the porch railing as if she never wanted to let it go.

At last she found herself exhaling. Lightning flashed yet again. She caught a glimpse of the truck climbing the road into the mountains, a quarter mile distant.

She turned to her daughter. “I told you not to leave a note.” Her tone was icy, and she didn’t mean to speak so harshly to her daughter but couldn’t help it.

“I didn’t leave a note.”

“Then why is Buzz following us? I told you this would happen.”

“Mom, I didn’t leave a note. How could I leave a note? You were hovering over me like a vulture.”

“I left a note,” said Jake, defiance in his voice.

She turned. She barely discerned the outlines of Jake’s face in the dark. “Didn’t you hear what I was telling Hanna?”

“Mom, I wasn’t going to have Dad come home and not know where we were.”

“Yes, but I said I was going to keep foning him.”

“Don’t worry. I didn’t say Marblehill. I used a clue. Like I said we should.”

Her lips pursed, her eyes momentarily moistened, and she felt an odd mixture of sympathy and pity for her son; he was, after all, only twelve, and was bound to do childlike things. He couldn’t reason the situation through the way an adult could, and really, when it came right down to it, how could you control your kids in a circumstance like this? A clue. Like it was a game.

“And what did you put in your clue?” she said, hoping for the best.

“I said we were going to Chattahoochee. I didn’t mention anything about Marblehill.”

Her exasperation jumped a notch. “Yes, but Buzz knows Marblehill is in Chattahoochee. A clue like that…it’s not really a clue at all.”

And of course kids might think they were outsmarting adults, but they rarely did.

“Hanna said I should make sure it was a clue Dad would get.”

Now he was blaming Hanna, another kid thing to do. She wanted to trust him, but how could she ultimately trust a twelve-year-old?

Jake tried to stick up for himself some more. “It’s a good thing I had to take a pee, otherwise he’d have caught us for sure. Now he’s never going to find us.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t have to find us. There’s only one road into Marblehill, and if he doesn’t find us now, he’ll be waiting for us once we get there.”

Hanna interrupted her. “Mom, there’s a big dog out by the car.”

She turned. The lightning flashed. She saw the dog. Just a glimpse of it; a large white mastiff, what she would have called a British bulldog, only she didn’t know breeds that well. The dog was huge, and so skinny she could see its ribs sticking out from under its fur. The ribs scared her, because she had never seen a dog so emaciated before, and when dogs got that thin, that starved, with no owners or masters around, it meant trouble. She didn’t forget Buzz, not entirely, because Buzz was definitely a big problem, something they would have to face, like a hurricane brewing out in the Atlantic that was going to get here sooner or later. But for the moment she shoved Buzz to the back of her mind and concentrated on the dog. Not only the white dog, but also another dog that was now coming up the street. This was a big dog too, but it was a dark one, and in the next lightning flash, she saw that it had some Rottweiler in it.

Jake suddenly got up and extended his hand. “Here, boy.”

She pulled him back. “Jake, what are you doing?”

“I want to see if he’s friendly.”

“He might have gone wild. Look at him. And now there’s two.”

“Mom, why can’t we have a dog?” he asked.

“You know why. Because of Hanna’s asthma.”

“Maybe when Hanna goes to college.”

As if the future were still the same, and not vastly altered. In the next lightning flash she saw both dogs looking up at the church, sniffing the air. Then they started nosing around the car. It was so dark she could hardly see. She hoped that by the next flash they would be gone. This wasn’t right, dogs in the pouring rain like this, alone, at night, without masters, their ribs like the bars on a jail cell.

They slavered around her car, as if, even through all that metal, they could smell the vacu-paks of Chinese noodles and cans of Irish stew.

Another dog came along. She was relieved to see that it was a lot smaller, one of those Jack something terriers, and she thought this dog would just sniff the car with the others. And it did for a while, but then came trotting up the steps, and it didn’t even look like a dog anymore but more like some creature from the depths of Hell, because all its fur was plastered to its skinny body and its ribs were like the fingers on a corpse, and when it barked, it wasn’t so much a bark as a shriek, the oddest and most unnerving thing she had ever heard, as though the animal were possessed.

The bark acted like a siren call to the other two animals. They stopped sniffing the car and came up the steps. The bulldog’s chin was up and his jaw was forward, and he looked like a prizewinning fighter ready to jump into the ring and tear someone to pieces. She didn’t feel safe up here on the church steps anymore. Hadn’t she read about this somewhere, dogs going wild, turning feral, packing, cooperating in order to get their gullets filled with whatever fresh meat they could find? And it was like she could sense they were feral because she herself had gone feral. The darkness had changed her into something that was dangerous: a cop killer. So what had it done to these dogs? Their owners had obviously abandoned them. She knew it was happening all over the country: pets getting abandoned. But what actually happened to animals when they were forced to live in darkness all the time, and when they had no choice but to subsist on food that didn’t come out of a can but had to be found or killed?