Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  “It pays the bills,” I said.

  “I see,” said Babd.

  “So that’s my job.”

  “You are hurt,” said the dog.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sometimes I feel… like I’m not supposed to be here. Like it’s a mistake that I didn’t die with everyone else, and that I’m always just a few seconds from the universe figuring it out.”

  “You are hurt,” said Babd.

  “I’ll live,” I said.

  “I don’t think you will always do this thing,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No. I think that you have had hard times and that things will change. You will do what you train yourself to do, Lincoln, regardless of whether you know it or not. Best to know it and take command of what comes next.”

  “Like an interrupt,” I said.

  Babd smiled a doggy smile.

  “Like an interrupt,” she said.

  “So it’s that easy?” I said.

  “Opportunities shall present themselves.”

  “If you say so.”

  I scuffed my foot on the ground, kicking dry dirt over the spot where the acid had soaked into the ground. You could barely see it now.

  A stout stick lay near my other foot. I reached down and grabbed it.

  “Here’s an opportunity,” I said, as I stood up and threw it. “Fetch.”

  Babd looked at me for a moment.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Biology,” I said. “Training. Give it a shot.”

  I unhooked the leash from her collar.

  Babd shot across the grass like a missile. The sun seemed to turn her coat to molten bronze. She scooped the stick on the run, made a long arc at full speed and came racing back to me. The stick fell at my feet. I looked at her, and she gave a shrug, something I’d never seen a dog do before.

  I threw it again, really hard.

  She tore after it. I followed.

  We ran around and played for the next half hour. I didn’t think about May, or my family, or the laptop and money, or Dan or Stoneface or any of that stuff. We just played.

  “Biology is fun,” said Babd.

  “Haha. Yeah.”

  My pocket buzzed. It was Gwen.

  Come on over.

  Can I bring my dog? I asked.

  ????!?!?!

  * * *

  Gwen lived with two roommates in an apartment on the South Side. The place was pretty small, but her roommates worked opposite shifts, and she was always in and out, so they didn’t really get in each other’s way. She was working on getting her therapist’s license, but she didn’t need it. She was already pretty amazing.

  Gwen wasn’t a Praecant but was magically sensitive. Unusually so. She could see magic with her naked eye like I could see it with my glasses. She was also strongly empathic, which made me wonder why she ever hung with me.

  She buzzed me into the building, and Babd and I took the elevator to the fifth floor.

  “You got a dog?” she said when we came in. “She’s so sweet!” Gwen knelt down and gave Babd some love.

  “Well,” said Babd, “I got a human.”

  “Jesus!” Gwen jumped backwards, awkwardly but effectively.

  Babd looked around at me with a smirk. I’d told her that Gwen was cool to be clued in during the drive over.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not quite sure what we’re dealing with, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

  “Okay,” said Gwen. “You have a talking dog.”

  “This is Babd. I think she’s some kind of spirit that’s following me and that she can only possess the bodies of dogs. Is that fair?” I looked at Babd.

  “Fair,” said the dog.

  “Do you want… a treat?” said Gwen.

  “I’m fine,” Babd said.

  Gwen took a few steps into the kitchenette. She opened the mini fridge and cracked a can of Yuengling Light.

  “You want?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. She grabbed a second beer and put it on the counter.

  “There you go.”

  We locked eyes for just a second, and then she laughed. It was kind of a running joke with her. When we’d met a couple of years ago, we were hanging out with friends, and she’d asked me if I wanted a beer. I’d said yes, expecting that she was being a good host and was about to grab me one. She’d said, “Well, they’re in the fridge.” And everyone had laughed. She had a fantastic dismissive delivery.

  We’d since graduated to her actually getting me one when she offered but not opening it or handing it to me. I figured that if I still knew her ten years from now, we’d work our way to that point.

  I liked Gwen. I thought she was funny, and she was pretty but not a model or anything, which was perfect. She had her own style. I called it “happy goth” because it was the same stuff and trappings as your run-of-the-mill goth but all in bright colors. Unlike your traditional goth, she liked to smile, and somehow it all held together. I’d kind of pushed things a year ago, and it turned out that she wasn’t available and that she wasn’t “ready for a relationship”, and I guess that was that.

  Oh well.

  She chugged the first half of her beer in one shot.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked. “Food? I could eat. Wanna play Smash? Wait, can the dog play Smash!?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was kind of hoping for a session.”

  “Oh.”

  “There’s been a lot going on lately,” I said. “I’m feeling like things are kind of all over the place, but like it’s moving forward too. You said that I’d start to feel out of control when I was getting close to making sense of things, and they’re starting to feel pretty … different.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said. “I was just thinking…" She paused, then her face changed. “No, it’s fine. We’ll do a session.”

  I could tell she was reluctant. Things I like about Gwen: almost everything. Things I don’t like: very hard to figure out what’s going on in her head.

  “If you don’t want to, it’s cool. We can do it another day.”

  “No, really. Let’s get set up.”

  I don’t like it when people do things for me that they would rather not do.

  “I’ll pay you for it,” I said, and instantly regretted it.

  “Oh. That’s so nice.” Her real smile melted away as a sarcastic, evil baby-doll one replaced it.

  Oh no.

  Things I don’t like about myself: I’m stupid.

  Gwen had a ton of debt. Student loans out the wazoo, and credit debt because she didn’t make a ton of money and wasn’t the best at managing what she did make. When the offer to pay was still in my brain, it made perfect sense. I had money. She needed money. She could help me. I should offer to pay her. Somewhere between my head and my mouth, I should have realized that you don’t do that to try to get friends to do something nice for you, but my mental reflexes were too slow to stop it from coming out.

  “Damn it, Lincoln. Why can’t you just-”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I glanced down, and Babd was taking all this in. That was disconcerting.

  “Forget it,” I said. “We’ll hang out. Grab a bite. You can pay.”

  She downed the rest of her beer.

  “You can get your session now, or you can get out,” she said. “And I don’t want your money.”

  I put my hand on her arm. It felt super awkward, but I thought it was the right thing to do. I pictured someone who was involved and emotionally available doing that and it turning out well. She kind of jerked her arm a bit, but she didn’t make me move my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m an idiot. Really. We can do whatever you want.”

  “No, it’s me,” she said. “Things are weird right now for me too. I overreacted. It’s cool.”

  “It’s cool?”

  “Yeah. Let’s do your session.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you can pay m
e a penny, so it’s legit.” She stuck out her tongue at me.

  Okay, we’re cool.

  Gwen closed the blinds, which didn’t do too much to make the room darker. The afternoon sun was still kicking it old school. I took up a position in her old recliner and carefully leaned it back. If you put her chair back too fast, you’d go over backwards.

  Gwen does hypnotherapy. In my case, she’d been having me recreate key moments in my recent past and comment on them like they were a movie. Her empathic and magical sensitivity let her drop me (and others, I presumed) into an almost instant hypnogogic state and be very tuned into what we were experiencing while there.

  She couldn’t sling power or hang spells, but in a way, she could do magic. And I trusted her inside my head.

  I closed my eyes. She laid three fingers firmly on my forehead.

  “Lincoln,” she said, her voice taking on a soothing, whispered tone. “You’re asleep.”

  I didn’t feel asleep, but I knew from past experience with her that that was all it took. If she said it, and I wanted it, then that’s how it was.

  So I guess I was asleep, regardless of my opinion of things.

  “Let’s go the park,” she said. “I want to hear about that.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re by yourself in the park.”

  I was.

  I was standing on the hillside in the Park. It was cold.

  “There’s another part of the park. There are buildings there and your family.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you get to there?”

  Not from here. It was too far, and there were roads to cross. I could see the other hillside from here, across a small valley. There were people there, having fun. Neat little pavilions. I saw balloons and a big banner. But the road in the valley was a constant stream of tractor trailers, silent as death but moving a hundred miles an hour. They were nose to ass, and trying to get through them would be insane. Suicide.

  “No,” I said. “It’s way too dangerous.”

  “Okay,” said Gwen. “Let’s stay here. Here is fine. We’ll go to the other part next time.”

  Okay.

  I looked around. The hilltop. Someone came walking up. They looked flushed. It was me.

  “There I am,” I said. “I look really tired. Or worn out.”

  I remembered it and knew what the “me” walking up the hill was thinking. He’s just cleaned up a whole home network. Nasty stuff. He’s seen some of it accidentally. And it... unthinkable. Plain unthinkable. His car is back down at the road, parked on the berm. There’s fifteen-thousand dollars in a satchel in the trunk. He needs it, but he doesn’t want to touch it. He’s abandoned it, basically. Couldn’t stand another moment inside the car. He needs more air than you can get there.

  There’s not enough air in Pittsburgh. Not enough sky. The horizon is too close no matter where you go.

  Find a hilltop. See some sky. Breathe a little.

  He thinks about his family. He thinks about his dog.

  He thinks that it’s impossible that he’s alive. It’s not just improbable. It’s impossible. He’s convinced that somehow the time he is living in cannot be real because it’s impossible that there is time at all now. It’s impossible that no one else that he cared about can be here and he can.

  Now he’s looking at his phone, and the texts say things like where are u and are you okay, but he sets it to silent and puts it back in his pocket because he doesn’t know what his fingers will say if he tries to respond.

  A thought comes to him: that he just lays down in the grass to see what happens. Maybe time will end. Maybe the universe will figure out that it was impossible for him to be here, and he will just cease to be. Maybe something will eat him. Or maybe it won’t. He has a funny vision in his head of adorable forest creatures nibbling him to death, and part of him starts to laugh, but it catches in his throat.

  He thinks that he doesn’t really want to die right now, but he’s struck by the realization that he’s trying it on for a moment. Feeling it out. Training.

  He knows that he has a gun back at home and is glad that he isn’t there right now. He decides that before he goes into his house later, he’s going to call someone to meet him and take the gun away. But for now, he’s just going to lay here in the grass and see only the sky.

  “There’s a lot of detail there,” Gwen said quietly. I felt her mouth close to my ear. “You’re seeing it really well. How do you feel?”

  “I feel bad for him,” I said. “He’s pretty messed up.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Do you want to keep going?”

  “Yeah.”

  He hears something coming. There are coyotes in the park, confirmed cases over the years. He thinks it might be one of them. If that’s the case, he gets his wish.

  He opens his eyes and sees something vaguely dog-like but also very, very not. It’s bigger than a coyote and has two large eye-like structures on its shoulders.

  It is terrifying. He opens his mouth to scream, but when he tries, no sound comes out. Instead, the thing opens its wide mouth, and he hears his own scream played from deep within the creature.

  He grabs a rock and hits it hard in the head, then runs down the hill in a blind panic. It doesn’t catch him, and he’s not sure how. If he can make it to his car, he thinks he’ll be fine.

  Somehow, he tumbles out of the woods a few yards from his car. The thing is standing there waiting. He stops. Time slows. The thing looks at him. He can feel it and can hear something in his head that he knows isn’t coming through his ears. It’s a voice that sounds like his own, even though he knows it isn’t. It’s telling him to sit down. To put down the rock.

  Then something else comes out from behind the car, and this is different somehow. This something never came from behind the car before. It’s a dog. Fairly small.

  But this wasn’t right. This didn’t belong here. For an instant, he gets the strangest look on his face, and then he isn’t there any more. It’s only me. I look at the Zoro, the big coyote mutated by magic force. I look at the other thing, the dog. I recognize it. It winks at me. I get the sense that it’s been here all along.

  “What?” said Gwen.

  The hypnotic state broke.

  Babd sat at the foot of the recliner, looking pleased.

  “Lincoln,” said Gwen, “why did you put your dog in that session?”

  “I did not,” I said.

  Babd jumped onto the recliner and nuzzled herself in beside me.

  “You seemed like you needed help,” said the dog.

  “This is pretty weird,” said Gwen. “That’s not supposed to be able to happen.”

  My phone started buzzing.

  A phone call? Really?

  Who calls?

  Dan.

  I showed the phone’s face to Gwen.

  “To be continued,” she said, shrugging.

  I hit Answer.

  “Hey buddy!”

  Dan’s voice came slamming through the phone. He was shouting. I extracted myself from the recliner.

  “What’s up?” I said. I heard what sounded like construction noises in the background.

  “You know that skinny chick from the club? She’s back, and she’s pissed! Thinks you and I killed her good buddy Stoneface.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did I mention Stoneface is dead?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Well, he is. Look, she’s here at Brigit’s, and she’s kind of tearing the place up.”

  “Shouldn’t you call 911?”

  “Dude!” yelled Dan. “The cops are useless! You’re my 911! Get Fox and get your ass over here! We’re in trouble!”

  He cut the call, and two seconds later an address came over via text.

  Gwen looked amused.

  “Dan the Man Without a Plan,” she said.

  “He’s at Brigit’s, and there’s another Praecant there who’s trying to frag them because she thinks Dan and I killed her f
riend. He wants me to come settle it.”

  “Do you want a sidekick?” she said.

  Yes, please.

  “I don’t know what I’m walking into up there. It could get weird. It sounds like it already did get weird.”

  “I’m okay with weird,” said Gwen.

  “Let’s go then,” I said.

  “Just a sec!” Gwen opened a shallow coat closet inside the front door and pulled out an old aluminum ball bat.

  “In case,” she said.

  I looked over at Babd.

  “You coming too?” I said.

  Chapter 5

  It was quick math time again. I had Fox, and Gwen had… not much. A ball bat. It sounded like Dan needed help ASAP, but I had personal safety concerns. A stop at home would add five minutes onto the run to the suburbs to help him out, and I figured it was worth it. I didn’t even have my glasses, and if we were walking into a magically active hostile situation, I wanted every advantage a non-Praecant could get.

  “We’re swinging by my place,” I said. I tossed Gwen my phone. “Here’s the address. Fastest route there, please.”

  Three minutes later, I was running into my house. I grabbed all of the good, magically resistant stuff: jacket, the long gloves, and, why not, the apron. Glasses too.

  Let’s go.

  The address for Brigit’s was in the west suburbs. I’d never been to her place before. At this time of day, the Parkway was pretty clear, and I knew the police had better things to do, so I was able to hit triple digits a couple of times.

  As we put distance from the skyscrapers behind us, a thought hit me. The further you got from the city, the less iron there was in the surroundings. That meant we were possibly heading into some dangerous stuff.

  I’d never thought about it before, but the general wind patterns in Pittsburgh are from the west with Ohio dumping a nice chunk of air pollution onto the city. This probably also meant that most of the debris from the Iron Age of Pittsburgh hadn’t made it west.

  I’d not encountered magic without the damping effects of environmental iron before.