A hacking cough, and then a rattling gurgle emit from the hound. The head drops—the tongue lolls out. I realize I have not been breathing, and with a gasp, I laugh triumphantly. I grab the rolls of skin on the back of the dog’s neck, lift its head up, and slam it down.
“Help!” Nelson struggles to keep the other dogs from entering the kitchen.
I grab the square end table and jam it into the window frame, wedging it tight. The snouts and snapping jaws of the other dogs poke around the sides of the small table, but they cannot break through. The rest of the pack lacks the determination of their fallen leader. Realizing they cannot enter the kitchen via the window, they retreat, howling and barking.
I climb off the dog. Nelson kicks it, shrieking “Ha!”
I peer around the table wedged in the window. “They’ve encircled the building.”
“My God, your back,” Nelson exclaims.
I touch my backside and my hand comes back covered with blood. I feel faint. Nelson steadies me.
“You’re bleeding pretty badly. Drop your pants,” Nelson says.
I manage a woozy smile. “This is hardly the time or place.”
Nelson unbuckles my shorts and drop them down. The grimace on his face alarms me.
“What? How bad is it?” I demand.
“Let me get a wet cloth,” he says. “It’s hard to tell with so much blood.”
Nelson finds a clean washcloth and wets it with pump water. He dabs at my wounded buttock. To try to distract me from the pain he quips, “And here I was thinking I’d never have a young man’s ass in my face again.”
Nelson presses a dry cloth against my rear. “Here. Hold this in place. The good news is the punctures are not that deep. The bad news is you’ll probably have a scar. I’m afraid your career as a butt double in movies is over. My biggest concern is infection.”
He rummages through the lower cabinets.
“Aha,” he exclaims, and holds up a large bottle of light rum. “It seems a shame to waste this on your rear end, but this is 100 proof. We’ll use it to disinfect the wound. I’m not going to lie to you; this will probably hurt a little bit.”
He pours the rum on my injury. The pain is so sharp that I grip the counter and hiss through clenched teeth.
He reapplies the dry cloth to my wound. “That should do the trick. While I’m at it, let me put some on that hole on your leg. How’d you get that anyway?”
“Sea urchin.”
He dabs rum on the calf wound and offers me a swig from the bottle.
I pull up my pants and shake my head, declining the rum. “Not on an empty stomach. Let’s find some food.”
In the same cabinet where Nelson found the rum we discover cans of chili, boxes of dried cereal, and jars of jelly. We devour it all, mixing it into a horrendous new recipe and scooping it into our maws with our hands. I finish eating and take a deep gulp of the rum. All the while, the wild dogs outside serenade us with frenzied barking.
“How are we going to get out of here?” Nelson asks.
I stare at the dog carcass on the floor. “Help me carry that upstairs.”
I grab the thick folds of skin on the dead dog’s neck and Nelson lifts the back end.
“Now I know what they mean by the term ‘dead weight’,” Nelson grunts as we struggle to lift the dog.
Upstairs there are two small, sparsely furnished bedrooms. The room ceilings angle with the steep pitch of the roof. Before I entered the dwelling, I noticed a small upper balcony. Now, I open the window and climb onto it. Instantly, the encircling pack regroups beneath me. Oddly, even as they bark and pace back and forth, many of the dogs wag their tails, as though they cannot decide if they want to play or maul somebody.
I turn to Nelson. “It seems without their leader they don’t know what to do.”
I drag the dead dog over the windowsill and heave it onto the balcony railing. The moment the pack sees their leader they freeze, watching us with tense expectation. I clench my first and beat the dead dog’s ribs, shouting with each blow.
Pointing at the pack below, I holler, “Your leader is dead! I killed him, and I’ll do the same to you.”
I push the carcass off the balcony and it lands with a thud on the dusty, hard packed ground. Three of the dogs bolt fifty yards away, stopping to look back with their tails between their legs. Other dogs tentatively sniff the body of their fallen leader. The stunned silence from the pack is in stark contrast to their previous frenetic barks and growls. They look back up at me and I refuse to break eye contact, staring them down until each one of them looks away.
I climb back into the bedroom. “I believe I got my point across.”
We slide the table from the entrance and venture outside. Half the dogs have vanished, while the remainders keep a wary distance from us, heads bowed, tails between their legs.
“They seem almost tame without the lead dog,” Nelson notes.
I nod in agreement, and then pat the kitchen knife I tucked in the belt loop of my pants. “I’m glad we have this, all the same.”
There is a small, rusted shed not far from the main building. The sliding doors grate loudly as we push them open. The shed contains numerous useful items such as a gas canister filled with gasoline, a long spool of thick, nylon rope, pick axes, saws, hammers and other tools. We find a shovel and a pitchfork and begin digging a grave for Curtis. I am injured; Nelson is old; the noon sun blazes above. Those three facts slow, but do not halt, our progress. As we dig, we relay what happened to one another after Conner banished Nelson from the resort. Nelson explains how he wandered with Curtis; staying off the paved roads for fear that Action and his thugs would see them. As night fell, they spotted the home we are now in, but as they approached the building, the dogs attacked. I tell Nelson of Conner’s attempt to kill me, how I fled into the sea, landed on Goat Island and swam back.
Nelson shakes his head in disgust. “Conner is insane. Curtis would still be alive if it weren’t for him.”
“I have to go back there.”
“He’ll kill you.”
“Not if he doesn’t know I’m there. I can’t leave Gwen. I’ll sneak her out. We can stay here, in this home. It’s got access to fresh water and we can figure out how to grow our own food. This island has tropical fruit farms. If we work with the islanders, we can maintain them. Between fish from the sea and crops that we grow we will have enough food to survive.”
Nelson pauses from digging to catch his breath and consider my proposal.
“It could work, but what about the thugs?” Nelson asks. “They don’t want to work with us. They want to kill us.”
I lean on my shovel and with the back of my hand wipe a trickle of sweat from my eye. I wish I had an answer to Nelson’s question, but I have none. He is right. There is no chance of forming a community with the islanders as long as Action and his thugs run amok. The dwelling could protect us from the dogs should they decide to attack again, but it would not keep the thugs out. The safest place from Action and his men is the resort, and Conner ensures the resort is not safe at all.
I take an old sheet from the dwelling to throw over Curtis’s remains to spare Nelson from the gruesome sight. After a day in the heat, covered in flies, the putrid smell nearly makes me wretch. Dragging Curtis’s body to the grave is awful, grisly work—the kind of thing that causes someone to involuntarily shudder later on when they think about it. Gently placing him in the grave is impossible—he is too heavy—so we unceremoniously drop him in. Nelson looks traumatized by the crude treatment of his beloved.
“Sorry,” I say, and then grab the shovel to cover the body with dirt.
Afterwards, in the rusted shed, I loop the nylon rope from the shed around my shoulder.