There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (25 page)

In fact, they had walked halfway through the woods before Bud brought them to a halt.

“Hey! What gives?” Rusty whined. He peered from around Bud’s broad back, as if it were a solid wall from which to hide behind. “D-d-do you s-s-see it?”

              “No, but…”

             
“But
what
?” Rusty demanded, his voice rising hysterically.
“Ahh, fuck a damn duck, man! C’mon, let’s get the hell out of these woods!”

             
“Shut up,” Bud growled back at him. His shotgun moved slowly from side to side. Tubby noticed that the gun didn’t quiver the slightest bit in Bud’s rock-steady hands.

             
“What’s wrong, Bud?” whispered Josie beside him. The sun passed into a heavy curtain of clouds, and all at once, the late afternoon shadows fell hard on the Pines. The trail in front and behind them ominously dark now.

             
The woods had gone quiet again, too. The noisy crickets stopping-as-one in mid-chirp. The birds, silent and still. The silence was so complete now they could hear the ocean breakers all the way from Crater Cove.

             
Bud held up his free hand, motioning for them to be quiet as well. They needed no further prodding. Each felt the eyes of another upon them.
“Can you feel it?”
he said.
“She’s watching us.”

             
Without comment, they formed a circle, their backs to one another, their eyes on the encroaching foliage. Bud could feel his friends tremble to the danger at hand. He forced his own fear down as a matter of necessity. If they knew he was just as frightened, they might bolt out of sheer panic. Especially Rusty, who was barely keeping it together as it was. Gnat was clutching the blanket Bud had given him like a child taking courage from his wooly woobie.

             
A humid wind cascaded through the forest, causing every brush to move, the branches to sway, each leaf to rustle sinisterly. Bud and his companions surveyed each direction of the compass. No matter what angle the rabid dog might attempt her attack at least one pair of eyes would witness her approach. Deep down, Bud understood their efforts were a waste of time, for he knew exactly where the dog was.
Felt
where the dog was. The path, just ahead, had a sharp bend where the Oyster Trail was lost from view.

             
He knew from walking these woods his entire life that a deep tangle of ground palmettos directly abutted the path as soon as you turned that narrow corner.

             
On the other side, a nearly impenetrable line of scrub pines hedged in the path. Like bars on a cage. A perfect place to pen them in. Even if Bud had forgotten this fact, the silence of the Pines would have been warning enough. The very air seemed sullen and mean. 

The furtive rustling of the bushes from around the bend confirmed Bud’s hunch. A heavy animal was moving about in there, anticipating their arrival.

Bud looked around and found a two-foot long tree branch on the side of the trail. It was thick and hefty, with a sizeable knot at one end, just what he needed. Josie gave him a curious look, obviously wondering what he needed a stick for when he had the shotgun.

He held a finger to his lips.

              To walk around that narrow bend was suicide. The rabid dog would be on top of him before he could even draw a bead on it. Or worse, on top of one of his friends, when he
dare
not shoot. He needed to draw her out of hiding, without blindly blasting away.

             
The last thing I want now is to scare her off.

             
He drew the stick to his shoulder, ready to throw it at the approximate area where the dog was hiding in wait, when he felt Josie’s hand on top of his own.

             
He turned around and arched an eyebrow.    

             
“You can’t throw and shoot at the same time!”

             
Seeing the wisdom in this, Bud handed her the branch. He was completely unprepared, however, for Josie’s approach to the problem. Moving well off the path, until she had a better angle at the Gray’s hiding place, Josie let out a Miss Piggy battle cry, flinging the stick as hard as she could. And like Miss Piggy, Josie was no sissy girl. She threw like a Pony League centerfielder. It might’ve been hilarious, if not for the dire consequences awaiting her...

       “!!!HHHYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

              The results were swift and certain. The pine-knot club hit the palmetto brush, ripping through the fan-like fronds, and scored a hairy bulls-eye. A meaty
Thud!
was the outcome, followed by a startled
Yip!

             
The Gray came snarling and biting out of the brush like a pissed off wolverine. Gone was the zombie-like shamble from before, the slow but steady gait that pursued. It tore out of the bushes, mad as hell, and straight at the person who had dared to strike her.

             
“RUN, JOSIE! RUN!!”
Rusty screeched.

Josie, like Rusty before her, stood frozen in place, calmly watching her demise rushing towards her like a bolt of greasy gray lightning.
So fast,
was all she could think, watching the gray bitch fly through the air.

Her red-rimmed eyes were open impossibly wide, as were her lupine jaws. Ropy strings of foam and saliva flew from either side of the dog’s head, like the wake from a motorboat. The hair along the creature’s back and neck stood on end, and the earth rumbled beneath her paws.

Josie faintly heard her name called out, seconds before a blast from the shotgun broke her paralysis. Flames leapt out at the dog, catching it broadside, sending the animal tumbling into the deep brush further into the woods, her gray pelt ablaze and smoking.

Josie barely heard herself scream.

In the terror of the moment she’d forgotten all about her friends, much less Bud’s shotgun. The blast from the Mossberg threw the dog at least six feet, her body pursuing a scarlet wave of blood and gore.

Tangy smoke filled the air. It commingled with the rusty stink of shredded intestines and crisping hair.

Josie stumbled towards her friends, relieved that the ordeal was at last over. She looked up to see Tubby and Rusty frantically waving their arms. She couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Her ears had been left ringing.

Their lips moved quick and ominous, their faces fraught with fresh terror.
What’s wrong with them?
She thought, irritably.
Can’t they see she’s dead already?

Her eyes flicked over to Bud. He was looking her right in the eye. The stock of the shotgun sat in the crook of his arm, the smoking barrel aimed right at her chest.

She stopped in her tracks and said, “
Bud?
” She couldn’t hear her own voice for the ringing in her ears.

Bud stared back at her, his lips clearly articulating: “GET DOWN!
GET DOWN!”

Josie hit the ground facedown, her hands over her head. The second blast from the Mossberg seemed to open up her ears again. She heard the terrible timbre of steel pellets ripping their way through the flesh of a living, breathing creature behind her. The thud, splat and splatter.

              Josie spun on her back to see the gray bitch somersaulting backwards from the volcanic thrust of the shotgun blast.
She was right behind me!
Stalking me! Despite being gutted!
Her shiny and swollen entrails marked her slug-like journey along the carpet of pine straw and leaf litter. Josie watched the dog smack into the trunk of an old pine tree with enough force to cause the two-hundred-foot spire to sway back and forth.

             
Her furry body bent around the barrel of the tree, her ribs snapping and cracking like dry kindling, before sliding down to the ground in a slack heap.

             
Pine needles fell silently from the boughs above and into the sticky puddles of gore on the forest floor. The second blast had hit the dog higher in her chest, taking out her determined heart. Her hind legs twitched for several seconds, a dream perhaps of a world without men and their long needles, and then stiffened out, slowly coming to rest.

Finally, test subject K-13—#139 at peace now.

A long shadow fell over Josie as she watched the last bit of life leak out of the dog’s fearsome eyes. She looked up to see Bud standing over her, his big hand outstretched. Gratefully Josie grabbed it, choking back a sob as he helped her to her feet. “All right?” he asked her.

“All right,” she said, trying to steady the tremor in her voice. For a second back there, she was sure her Bud had meant to kill her. She grabbed him by the arm and tried to pull him away. “She’s dead, Bud. Leave her be.”

“Dead my ass,” said Rusty, running over to her, his fear for Josie’s welfare outweighing his own cowardice at the moment. “If that first shot didn’t kill—”

A third shotgun blast drowned out the rest of Rusty’s summation. Bud had removed the dog’s head with the final shot, turning its fevered brain into so much jelly.

“What’d you do that for?” Josie snapped. The unexpected blast had been a jolt to her frazzled nerves.

Bud’s eyebrows knitted together. “She opened her eyes and looked right at me. As if she knew me.”

“Dying reflex,” Tubby said, looking on in awe. He gaped up at Bud Brown, the deadly shotgun he held at the ready, and the skill in which he had employed it.
Jeepers! That was something!
he thought, trying to stem the flow of adrenalin surging through his wildly thumping heart.

“Yeah?” Bud replied. “Well, she sure as hell got up the first time, didn’t she?”

                            ******* 

They left the headless corpse behind them and walked through the woods in silence. The sun had come out again, reminding them that they were all still alive and well. Except for Bud, none of them had ever been through anything quite like that before. Tubby couldn’t get the smell of the blood out of his nostrils. He never knew blood had such a distinctive odor. It wasn’t at all like the stuff you see in the movies, either. Rusty kept picturing the Gray’s innards flying through the air, and the awful,
awful
sound of its spine snapping around the tree. For Josie, it was how close the dog came to ripping out her throat. So close she could have reached out and touched its crusty, hot nose. For Bud it had been the beast’s red-rimmed eyes, for he had seen their luminescent like before.

             
“Wait a minute,” Rusty Huggins exclaimed.

             
He stopped so suddenly that Tubby, still taking up the rear, walked right into him. Josie and Bud looked back at their friend curiously. The last thing they expected was for Gnat to call a halt to their backwoods exit. His forehead had furrowed into familiar worry lines. “What are we going to do about the Baskerville Bitch back there?”

             
Josie snorted. “That’s what we’re doing now, genius! We’re going to get Sheriff Henderson, so
he
can deal with it. The lazy old coot.”

             
Bud recognized the thoughtful look on his friend’s face. A look that Rusty got whenever he saw something he and Josie had missed. “What’s the problem, Short Round?”

             
“When he asks how we killed the dog, what are we going to tell him?”

             
Bud’s eyes turned skyward, then down at the shotgun in his hand, surprised to see it there.

             
What was I thinking?

Josie still missed the point. “We’ll tell him the truth, of course! That Bud killed her with the shot…

“Oh…I see what you mean, Gnat.”

             
“Doesn’t matter,” Bud said, continuing up the path. They were less than two miles from where they’d dumped their backpacks at the entrance to the Pines. “I’ll cross that bridge when the time comes.”

             
“Maybe we could tell Rupert we found the dog that way,” Josie said, catching up to him. “You know.
Dead
. Why do we have to tell him you were the one who shot it?”

             
“Because he needs to know how the dog acted
before
it was killed! That’s important. If we tell him we found it dead like that, he—”

             
“—won’t treat it like a rabid dog,” Rusty said, completing the sentence.

             
“Then I’ll tell him
I
was the one who shot it!” The look on Bud’s face told Josie she was wasting her breath; he’d never let her take the fall for him. “Okay…then let’s just ditch the damn gun,” she said, grabbing Bud by the arm. Tubby thought it odd how Josie looked more scared now, than when she was facing down the rabid mutt.

             
“That’ll only make Henderson more suspicious.” Rusty was in his element now. He scratched his head, deep in thought. “And while Rupert may be a lazy old coot, he’ll still insist on seeing the weapon that killed the dog.”