Vincent Nasco felt wonderful. So strong, so powerful, so alive.
3
Sometimes the dog led, and sometimes Travis took the lead. They went a long way before Travis realized that he had been completely jolted out of the despair and desperate loneliness that had brought him to the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains in the first place.
The big tattered dog stayed with him all the way to his pickup, which was parked along the dirt lane under the overhanging boughs of an enormous spruce. Stopping at the truck, the retriever looked back the way they had come.
Behind them, black birds swooped through the cloudless sky, as if engaged in reconnaissance for some mountain sorcerer. A dark wall of trees loomed like the ramparts of a sinister castle.
Though the woods were gloomy, the dirt road onto which Travis had stepped was fully exposed to the sun, baked to a pale brown, mantled in fine, soft dust that plumed around his boots with each step he took. He was surprised that such a bright day could have been abruptly filled with an overpowering, palpable sense of evil.
Studying the forest out of which they had fled, the dog barked for the first time in half an hour.
“Still coming, isn’t it?” Travis said.
The dog glanced at him and mewled unhappily.
“Yeah,” he said, “I feel it too. Crazy… yet I feel it, too. But what the hell’s out there, boy? Huh? What the hell is it?”
The dog shuddered violently.
Travis’s own fear was amplified every time he saw the dog’s terror manifested.
He put down the tailgate of the truck and said, “Come on. I’ll give you a lift out of this place.”
The dog sprang into the cargo hold.
Travis slammed the gate shut and went around the side of the truck. As he pulled open the driver’s door, he thought he glimpsed movement in nearby brush. Not back toward the forest but at the far side of the dirt road. Over there, a narrow field was choked with waist-high brown grass as crisp as hay, a few bristly clumps of mesquite, and some sprawling oleander bushes with roots deep enough to keep them green. When he stared directly at the field, he saw none of the movement he thought he had caught from the corner of his eye, but he suspected that he had not imagined it.
With a renewed sense of urgency, he climbed into the truck and put the revolver on the seat beside him. He drove away from there as fast as the washboard lane permitted, and with constant consideration for the four-legged passenger in the cargo bed.
Twenty minutes later, when he stopped along Santiago Canyon Road, back in the world of blacktop and civilization, he still felt weak and shaky. But the fear that lingered was different from that he’d felt in the forest. His heart was no longer drumming. The cold sweat had dried on his hands and brow. The odd prickling of nape and scalp was gone-and the memory of it seemed unreal. Now he was afraid not of some unknown creature but of his own strange behavior. Safely out of the woods, he could not quite recall the degree of terror that had gripped him; therefore, his actions seemed irrational.
He pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. It was eleven o’clock, and the flurry of morning traffic had gone; only an occasional car passed on the rural two-lane blacktop. He sat for a minute, trying to convince himself that he had acted on instincts that were good, right, and reliable.
He had always taken pride in his unshakable equanimity and hardheaded pragmatism-in that if in nothing else. He could stay cool in the middle of a bonfire. He could make hard decisions under pressure and accept the consequences.
Except-he found it increasingly difficult to believe something strange had actually been stalking him out there. He wondered if he had misinterpreted the dog’s behavior and had imagined the movement in the brush merely to give himself an excuse to turn his mind away from self-pity.
He got out of the truck and stepped back to the side of it, where he came face-to-face with the retriever, which stood in the cargo bed. It shoved its burly head toward him and licked his neck, his chin. Though it had snapped and barked earlier, it was an affectionate dog, and for the first time its bedraggled condition struck him as having a comical aspect. He tried to hold the dog back. But it strained forward, nearly clambering over the side of the cargo hold in its eagerness to lick his face. He laughed and ruffled its tangled coat.
The retriever’s friskiness and the frenzied wagging of its tail had an unexpected effect on Travis. For a long time his mind had been a dark place, filled with thoughts of death, culminating in today’s journey. But this animal’s unadulterated joy in being alive was like a spotlight that pierced Travis’s inner gloom and reminded him that life had a brighter side from which he had long ago turned away.
“What was that all about back there?” he wondered aloud.
The dog stopped licking him, stopped wagging its matted tail. It regarded him solemnly, and he was suddenly transfixed by the animal’s gentle, warm brown eyes. Something in them was unusual, compelling. Travis was half-mesmerized, and the dog seemed equally captivated. As a mild spring breeze rose from the south, Travis searched the dog’s eyes for a clue to their special Power and appeal, but he saw nothing extraordinary about them. Except… well, they seemed somehow more expressive than a dog’s eyes usually were, more intelligent and aware. Given the short attention span of any dog, the retriever’s unwavering stare was damned unusual. As the seconds ticked past and as neither Travis nor the dog broke the encounter, he felt increasingly peculiar. A shiver rippled through him, occasioned not by fear but by a sense that something uncanny was happening, that he was teetering on the threshold of an awesome revelation.
Then the dog shook its head and licked Travis’s hand, and the spell was broken.
“Where’d you come from, boy?”
The dog cocked its head to the left.
“Who’s your owner?”
The dog cocked its head to the right.
“What should I do with you?”
As if in answer, the dog jumped over the truck’s tailgate, ran past Travis to the driver’s door, and climbed into the pickup’s cab.
When Travis peered inside, the retriever was in the passenger’s seat, looking straight ahead through the windshield. It turned to him and issued a soft woof, as if impatient with his dawdling.
He got in behind the wheel, tucked the revolver under his seat. “Don’t believe I can take care of you. Too much responsibility, fella. Doesn’t fit in with my plans. Sorry about that.”
The dog regarded him beseechingly.
“You look hungry, boy.”
It woofed once, softly.
“Okay, maybe I can help you that much. I think there’s a Hershey’s bar in the glove compartment… and there’s a McDonald’s not far from here, where they’ve probably got a couple hamburgers with your name on them. But after that… well, I’ll either have to let you loose again or take you to the pound.”
Even as Travis was speaking, the dog raised one foreleg and hit the glove-compartment release button with a paw. The lid fell open.
“What the hell-”
The dog leaned forward, put its snout into the open box, and withdrew the candy in its teeth, holding the bar so lightly that the wrapping was not punctured.
Travis blinked in surprise.
The retriever held forth the Hershey’s bar, as if requesting that Travis unwrap the treat.