Craig Davidson - Cataract City

“Gold water.”

“Yeah, gold.”

“What would they hunt?”

I turned to face Dunk, resting my cheek on my knees. “I guess the same things they would hunt here. Rabbits and rats. Squirrels.”

“You think they’d have rabbits on that planet?”

“Maybe. Or maybe there the rabbits are big as cars. Maybe bears are small. Maybe you could hold a shark in your palm there.”

“So they would run away from giant rabbits.”

“And hunt tiny bears. Or maybe there are animals we’ve never seen.”

“Things with tentacle faces. Things with lots of teeth.”

“Harmless things, too. Things that look like baby chicks, only ten feet tall.”

“A ten-foot-tall baby chick?”

“No, just a yellow fuzzy thing who happens to be ten feet tall.”

“Can it talk?”

“I guess, but not in a language dogs would understand.”

I tried to think about fuzzy ten-foot baby chicks, but I kept thinking about things with tentacle faces and lots of teeth.

“Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“You think things might hunt them ?”

“… I guess so. But they travelled far and they were still alive. That has to count for something, right? So yeah, things hunt them. So what? Things hunted them here, too. The dog catcher, right? They just kept on going.”

“Kept going, mmm, yeah.”

“And maybe they found someplace safe. Or I don’t know, maybe the whole planet is run by dogs. They get to be, like, kings of Dog Planet.”

“Why would they be kings? They just showed up.”

“Well, whatever. Maybe one of them gives a very inspiring speech and they make him the president.”

“Of the whole planet?”

I shrugged: why not?

“Hey, Owe?”

“Yeah?”

“Meatball trees would be awesome.”

“Totally. Eat them like apples.”

“Oh, man! Big greasy apples … We shouldn’t talk about food.”

I rolled onto my side. If I curled up and held my stomach, maybe it wouldn’t growl so much. Sounds came out of the darkness. Some like nails clawing into rotten wood. Others like the click-click of naked bones.

A slow, steady breathing wrapped around my shoulders then went out again, hugging the trees and sliding along the ground like the never-ending exhale of some huge creature with lungs the size of football stadiums. The heart of the woods beat through me: a soothing thack , a giant underground muscle pumping green blood through every root and into every tree, everything connected to everything else under the dirt.

I dozed and woke with Dunk settled next to me. He’d draped the blanket over us. His breath feathery on the back of my neck.

I fell into a deeper sleep and awoke with Dunk’s fingers clutching my chest.

“Something’s out there.”

The worry in his voice sent a spike of ice down my spine. The fire was dead. My feet were swollen and numb inside my sneakers, the blood pooled.

“Listen,” Dunk said urgently. “Can you hear it?”

The pressure of my held breath pressed against my eardrums, making it hard to hear anything. I forced myself to let it out in a shuddery hiss.

There were the usual clickings and rustlings that I’d almost gotten used to. But another sound, too. A soft noise atop those familiar ones, and beneath them at the same time.

“What is it?” I whispered.

Dunk blew on the coals, stirring the embers. An orange shine lit his face and gave me some confidence. He reached into the backpack. The light of a solitary star winked off the pistol’s silver barrel.

The sound approached then drifted away, switching places to come at us from a new angle.

It’s Bruiser Mahoney .

The thought snagged in my mind, a sticky black ball covered in fish hooks. Bruiser Mahoney was out there, alive but not really. He’d stalked all day and night and finally caught up. Sniffing us like a bloodhound, lumbering on all fours with his spine cracked out and shining like a half-buried centipede through the dead grey skin of his back. His dentures shoved past his sun-blistered lips and his face swollen with blood, his eyeballs two rotted grapes staring out of the piggy folds of flesh to make him look like a giant prehistoric slug. His fingernails matted with shreds of the tent he’d clawed free of. He’d followed us without stopping, blundering at first but becoming more aware, strides lengthening as he pursued us through the undergrowth. And now he was here.

You ever see an old clown, boys? Clowns don’t die. But sometimes they come back … oh, yessss …

“It’s him,” I said. “It’s Bruiser.”

“It’s not. It’s something, but not that.”

Except it was Mahoney. His hair hung in tangled, mud-clotted ropes. His stomach ballooned up with gas and his joints twisted with rigor mortis. Bones sticking out of his skin where he’d broken them on rocks, not noticing that he’d done so or not caring. The sounds suddenly made sense. The first was the rubber-band sound of Mahoney’s naked muscles: with the skin stripped off his arms and legs, his tendons had cured in the sun and now they creaked when he flexed them. The sucking sound was Mahoney’s rotted lungs.

God rot me, boys …

His lungs were filling and emptying — not because he needed to breathe, but because his body was still mindlessly doing what it had always done.

God’ll rot you, too, soon enough …

Would he eat us? Or just tear us apart? His rage seemed so unfair. We couldn’t have taken him with us — he weighed a million pounds.

The sticks caught. Firelight pushed back the darkness. Dunk stood, baby bird in one hand, gun in the other. Did he even know how to shoot? You could only learn so much from watching The Equalizer and Magnum, P.I .

Firelight bled to the edge of the clearing, flickering against the thickets. My heart was pounding so hard, my body so keyed up, that I saw everything in hyper-intense detail. Every dew-tipped blade of grass. The knife-edge serration of every leaf. My eyes hunted for the gleam of Bruiser Mahoney’s black eyes, my nose probing the breeze for his decaying stench. A gun would do nothing against him. It might chip off a little hide but you couldn’t kill something that was already dead.

“Over there,” Dunk said.

It skulked out of the bushes, sleek body pressed to the ground. Its fur shone like pewter. Its skull was a sloped wedge like a doorstop, eyes midnight-black, the yellow tips of its canine teeth showing.

“Just a coyote,” said Dunk. “A stupid coydog.”

I’d never seen one up close. It was about the size of a springer spaniel. But there was nothing doglike about it, at least not like the floppy-eared, slobbering, ball-chasing dogs in our neighbourhood. This creature was built for wild living, a coiled tension in its every movement. It didn’t run circles around the kitchen yelping for kibble: what it caught, it ate, and if it didn’t catch anything it starved. A ball of muscle was packed behind its jaw, built by cracking bones to lap up the marrow. It made no sound at all: its next meal could be anywhere, so it had learned to creep silently.

“Go on,” Dunk said sharply.

It melted into the darkness.

I woke with razor blades slashing my guts.

Air hissed between my teeth in a tea-kettle shriek. The slashing gave way to a steady pulse and grind: a clock’s worth of rusted gears meshing in my stomach.

I crawled to the bushes. Dots burst before my eyes in crazy gnat-swarms. My gut kicked and I puked so hard that everything went black. My nostrils filled with bile, thick strings of drool swaying from my lips. I’d hardly thrown up anything, just a sad yellow mess in the clover. It was awful, feeling sick and starving at the same time.