Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  Then we zip-tied their hands behind their backs. We did their feet too but didn’t hogtie them. That would have been mean. I made sure that things were secure, not awful.

  “What should we do with him?” said Gwen, pointing to the man in the chair. “I’m thinking that if they have him, we don’t want them to.”

  “Want to come with us?” I said.

  He nodded his head emphatically.

  “Okay,” I said and pulled the tape off his mouth.

  “Do anything weird, and my girlfriend’s going to shoot you.”

  “I’m your girlfriend now?” said Gwen. “Awesome.”

  “I thought I was your girlfriend,” said Babd.

  “Uh maybe we need to have a talk,” I said.

  Babd smiled and made a weird barky-laughy sound.

  “Oh,” I said. “You made a funny.”

  Gwen cut the man loose.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  We all went into the hallway, and something strange happened.

  The room we’d been in had been fairly nicely appointed for a combination office/interrogation center. Clean. Newly painted. The kind of furniture you can get at Staples. But the hallway outside was that of an abandoned building right out of Central Casting. Garbage all around. Smelled like pee. Holes in the old cement board walls where someone had ripped out the copper.

  When we looked through the blown open doorway, the interior of the apartment looked like the hallway: an abandoned wreck. There must have been some kind of magical effect at play. Where were we? I was thinking that I still didn’t understand the rules.

  “You know what?” I said. “I have another idea.”

  I reversed direction and went back into the apartment. The one man who was still conscious (bound and gagged of course!) became visibly frightened when I showed up again. But I wasn’t there to cause more problems. Instead, I rummaged through their pockets and collected four mobile phones: two iPhones and two Androids.

  Three of them, I powered down and put in my pockets. With the last one, I pulled up the Maps app. Maybe the doorway wasn’t some kind of illusionary shield. Maybe it was something else.

  The pin on the map put us way south of the city. Almost an hour.

  Leaving the app up, I went back into the hallway. After a couple of seconds, the pin moved off the screen. I hit the locator to recenter. I was now on the North Side and in a pretty bad neighborhood.

  “Oh, this is cool,” I said. “That’s no illusion. The room on the other side of that door actually is creepy and abandoned. It’s just that walking through the door takes you somewhere else.”

  “Of course,” said Babd. “Is it not obvious?”

  “Not to us creatures that have to keep their souls in one body it isn’t.”

  “Apologies,” said Babd. “Would you like to be informed of such things in the future?”

  “Yes,” said Gwen. “If you could let me know when I’m going to walk through a magical portal, that would be great.”

  “I shall try,” said Babd. “Although it may be difficult. To me, this is not anomalous.”

  “Do your best,” said Gwen. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  “That is a kindness,” said Babd. “Thank you.”

  Babd stretched her front legs out and lowered her head to the ground in a kind of bow.

  “Okay,” said Gwen. “You’re welcome.”

  “Do we want to head north or south?” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, if we want to go south, we can just head back into the apartment and climb out the window, then we’re already south.”

  “How hard did you get hit on the head?” said Gwen.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’re not normally this dumb,” she said. Her face was selling it hard. “Maybe you’re just geeking out about going through a teleporting doorway, but my car is parked outside. That’s how we’re getting out of here. If we teleport to the south hills, we’re walking because wherever this comes out, my car isn’t there.”

  “Oh,” I said. Of course.

  We went through the hallway, trying not to step on something that looked suspiciously like a bag of human waste, and down the stairs at the end. If the hallway was scuzzy, the stairwell was even worse. I’ll bet Beings of the Outer Forth have materialized in this stairwell, said “Nope” and just decided things were better out in the hellish nether lands.

  In the entryway, there was a lot of broken glass, and it looked fairly fresh. As in “just minutes ago.” A guard wearing a blue blazer lay face down on the disgusting tile floor, groaning and trying to get up.

  I raised an eyebrow at Gwen and she did a kind of “Oops? Was that me?” move with her hands.

  Outside.

  This was not a nice neighborhood. Mostly boarded-up brick buildings and a couple of cars. No one around that I could see, but that didn’t mean that there was no one actually around. Gwen’s little Mazda2 sat across the street. It’s not a bad car. It’s just small. And underpowered. But it handles really well. If you don’t have two adults and a giant dog inside of it.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I opened the back door, and Babd jumped in. I eased my way into the front passenger side. Gwen climbed behind the wheel.

  She fired up the little engine. Vroom vroom!

  There was a knock on my window.

  I rolled it down a crack. It was the man we’d untied.

  “So uh, I don’t actually know where we are,” he said. He had a low voice, and something in his pronunciation indicated that he probably wasn’t that smart.

  “Do you need to get somewhere?” I said.

  “I dunno. Just out of here.”

  “You’re a Praecant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know about Praecant stuff and could answer a few questions?”

  “I guess so.”

  I looked over at Gwen, and she gave me the “why not?” face.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Steven.” He scratched at his face where adhesive residue clung to his skin.

  “Okay Steven, we’ll give you a ride out of the city, but here’s the deal. If things get weird, my demon dog back there is going barf fire all over your face then eat you for supper. Got it?”

  He looked into the open back door. Babd stared back at him.

  “You are large and would make a fine feast,” she said.

  “You okay with those rules?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Steven, looking around nervously. He crammed himself into the back seat with Babd. He was really big.

  “You two going to make it back there?” said Gwen. I turned my head as much as I could. Babd and Steven were smashed together in the tiny back seat. There was barely room for either one of them, let alone both.

  “This is not pleasant,” said Babd. “Will someone with thumbs open my door?”

  Steven reached across and did it.

  “Bide a moment,” said Babd. She scrambled out of the car and wandered off down the street.

  “I hate it when she does this,” I said.

  After about two minutes, Babd came back, but she was different. Smaller. A lot smaller. Who knows where the other dog went, and where she found this one.

  “What are you, like fifteen pounds?” I said.

  “You’re adorable!” said Gwen.

  Babd sat up in the back seat. She looked at Steven.

  “I may be small,” Babd said, “but I shall dine upon your flesh if it is required of me.”

  And away we go.

  Chapter 11

  We went north.

  “I’m not taking us back into the city,” said Gwen. “We tried that. It didn’t work, and by ‘didn’t work’ I mean almost killed us all, you dumbass.”

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Plus it was Dan saying that, so I’m going to do the exact opposite. We’re out of here.”

  “I’m ready to try something differ
ent,” I said. “Hey Steven?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “If someone is after us, are we safer in the city or getting far away?”

  Silence from the back of the car.

  “Do you have an opinion?” I said.

  “I dunno,” said Steven. “Never really thought about it.”

  “We’ll head up to Erie,” said Gwen. “My dad has a cabin up there off the lake.”

  “I thought you didn’t talk to your dad.”

  “I don’t. But he’s not going to be there, so I won’t have to.”

  I quieted down while she navigated the city traffic. No one seemed to be following us. But if they were magically cloaked, would I know?

  “Did you bring my glasses?” I said.

  “Yep,” said Gwen. “Glove box.”

  I put them on and tried to do a 360 recon. Nothing magical appeared to be around us, although I learned that I had what was probably the world’s stiffest neck. I tried to think back to everything that had happened in the park. It was all kind of running together. Mostly impressions like pain and confusion and more pain. And Dan. And Guster.

  I realized that I was touching my face, feeling for the gore that seemed like it was there only moments ago.

  “You bring anything else?” I said.

  “Yeah. All of your stuff that I’m not already wearing is in the hatch.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said. “You went through my closet.”

  “Yes, and you’re a slob.”

  Gwen cleared the last light and merged, putting us on the highway headed north.

  “I got you Arby’s,” she said. “It’s on the floor in the back.”

  I didn’t feel great, but as soon as she said it, my nose keyed on the smell, and I became ridiculously hungry. I reached my arm down and back and felt for a bag. I found it.

  “Steve,” I said. “Can you move your foot? You’re on my food.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Did you get me food?”

  “How the hell would I know to get you food?” said Gwen. “You just came along at the last second because we felt bad for you.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He moved his foot. I pulled the bag up front. He’d crushed half the fries, but the roast beef sandwich was in good shape.

  I took a huge bite. I think I swallowed it whole.

  “So what happened after you hit the woods?” I said and continued eating.

  “Well,” she said, “you saw me. I wasn’t doing too well. FYI, this is the absolute last time I do anything like this. I can’t take it. I’m not wired that way.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “And coming to get you was…” She paused, and it looked like she was trying to figure out exactly how to say something, or whether or not to say it at all.

  “I’ll get to that later. Anyway, I made it to the woods and tried to keep from passing out, but I was trying to keep quiet too. That was hard. After a while, I noticed that things were more or less quiet in the clearing. I wanted to just get away, but I knew you were probably out there.

  “So I went back. It was like a five mile walk into the clearing to where I’d last seen you, but you weren’t there. There was a big, dead wolf. Most of the people that came in with Guster were either gone or going. No one bothered me.

  “I kept looking around, hoping I’d find you, and kind of also hoping I wouldn’t find you, you know, dead. Because that would suck.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “That’s when I saw the two goons dragging you off. They were heading toward where we’d parked the cars. I saw Fox on the ground, and I knelt down to grab him. I wanted to pick him up and go after you, but… I froze. I’m sorry. I tried to reach for it, but when I thought about it I’d get this horrible sense of panic.

  “I couldn’t. I could have stopped them from taking you, but I couldn’t make my body move.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said.

  “Well, yes and no. But I wanted to.”

  “It’s okay. Really.”

  “Okay. I couldn’t make myself stop them, but I followed them. I watched them put you into their car, and as soon as I thought I could, I got in Dan’s car. It was still there, and he’d left the keys in it. I took it.”

  “Smart.”

  “I guess so. Anyway, I followed them to the building on the North Side. They took you inside. I didn’t know what to do. I sat in the car down the street from them for three hours. I may have cried a little. People tried to sell me drugs. Twice.

  “I finally just went home. I was exhausted and didn’t trust myself. I wanted to fall asleep, but I was too wired. My roommates weren’t home, and I was having a pretty bad time. Then I heard a scratch on the door and a dog whining.”

  Babd let out a little sigh from the back seat.

  “Babd showed up and said that she needed me to help get you out. I needed sleep and to recover, and she said she’d keep an eye on you until we could get everything ready.

  “And here I am.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. Thank you seemed to not cover it.

  “Both of you,” I said. “You’re just… real to me.”

  That was stupid but true. No one and nothing else felt real. But Gwen with her hands on the wheel of the little Mazda, in her bright green skirt and rust leggings, and Babd, now a twitchy little schnauzer thing trying to stay upright in the seat as we weaved through highway traffic. They were real to me and when I was with them, I felt almost real too.

  “Lincoln?” said Gwen.

  I looked at her and pitched an eyebrow.

  “This is the last time. No more Action Gwen. I’m out.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “I thought this kind of thing would be fun or cool, but what happened at the park... at that house… I wasn’t expecting it. I hadn’t thought it through–what it was going to be like.”

  She stopped talking and shook her head slightly. Her eyes were focused way down the road.

  “I get it,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  “There’s actually more to it than that,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Babd wanted to get you out, and she wanted me to help. But I couldn’t. Every time I thought about doing anything like this, I freaked out. But I wanted to help you. I really did.”

  “Okay. And you managed to do it. Thank you.”

  It seemed like there must have been more to it than that, but I wasn’t going to push it.

  We rode along for a while. I listened to Babd breathe. Steven must have fallen asleep because he was snoring. I looked back, and indeed he had. His hand rested on Babd’s little frame.

  “So, you okay with that stuff?” Gwen said.

  “What?”

  “The park. Everything else. How’s that going for you?”

  Good question.

  “I’m not okay with it if you mean ‘do I condone it.’”

  “That’s not what I mean. How does it make you feel?”

  Good question.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I could give her one answer, and it would make her like me better, or I could tell her the truth.

  “It’s gross.”

  “Not what I’m talking about.”

  Fine. The truth. If she didn’t like it, then, I don’t even know what.

  “It doesn’t make me feel anything,” I said. “It’s just stuff to me. I don’t think about it. ”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “It’s like everything else. It’s things that I find myself doing. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s probably not what you wanted to hear.”

  She shrugged.

  “I wanted to hear the truth,” she said. “That sounds like the truth to me.”

  It was. It was it was.

  I tried to remember what it felt like to be not that way. I couldn’t. I had the sense that when I was happy or sad or even angry for as far back as I could think, the
y weren’t real feelings. They were just simulations. A surface coating. Something was wrong with me.

  Or maybe not. If I wasn’t like this, what would have happened in the park? At the house? Would I have been able to do what I needed to do?

  What if it had always been like this, and I’d just never noticed? It’s impossible to know what the writing says on the outside of the box when you’re inside of it. I thought about the man who’d burned Babd to a cinder and the bat in my hands. I had wanted to kill him. Some part of me did for sure.

  But I hadn’t, and I knew that it wasn’t because I would have felt bad. I played the instant over again in my head, and I could see my thinking. All the paths ahead of me from that moment, laid out like cards on a table. Some bigger. Some smaller. I hadn’t done it because I could see how the cards on the table shifted from there. I didn’t like what I saw.

  “Hey, you still with us?”

  Yeah.

  “It’s okay. Really.”

  Okay.

  “You mind some music?” said Gwen.

  “Sure. Please,” I said. “Just not too loud.”

  She put something on. I haven’t listened to music in years, so I don’t even know what it was. It was fine.

  We cruised along. Traffic thins out the further north you get of the city, but it never really goes away completely. For being basically in the middle of nowhere, the corridor between Pittsburgh and Erie is a pretty heavily traveled route.

  I idly wondered if some kind of magical Tomahawk missile was bearing down on us right now, ready to slam into the car and turn us into smoking cinders. If so, we had no way of stopping it. I guess there was no sense in worrying about it then, which always works.

  “Can you turn this up?” said a voice from the back. “I like this song.”

  “Hey Steven,” I said. “You feel up to answering some questions?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Okay. Tell me why the same people who had me had you.”

  “Uh. The thing with the Russian guy and that skinny bitch, what’s-her-name. They thought I had something to do with that.”

  “You mean Stoneface and Carol Dee?” I said.