Dogs

"There are all sorts of dogs in this world. There are old dogs, mad dogs, lame dogs, tame dogs." Ride pushed his hand through his earth-red hair, smiling ever so faintly, his unlit cigarette drooping dejectedly from the corner of his mouth. "I wonder, Rush, what kind of dog are you?"

Rush threw a hateful look at Ride. "I'm no dog," he said coldly.

Ride smiled that ever so distant slightly demented smile, saying in a low voice, "no, of course not." Clutching the unlit cigarette in his teeth and chewing it to a pulp, he replied, "You're a stray, aren't you? Stray dog."

Rush clenched his fang-like teeth in a soundless growl and raised his sunset-red palms to the rainy sky.

"Dogs don't pray, do they?" he said.

"Of course they don't," Ride answered. "Only humans are dumb enough to live on their knees."

"And what kinda dog are you?" Rush asked Ride sarcastically.

"Me?" Ride answered. The cigarette bobbed up and down in his lips. "I'm an old dog, just waiting to be put out of my misery."

Rush knew there were all sorts of dogs in this world. There were all kinds of mutts and curs and purebreds and hell-hounds, just as bad as humans and just as weak in their junkyard of a town. Gangs had left it riddled with bullets, police had left it stained with red rust, and the children just scuttled around in the dirt chasing some far-off dream. All of them were like that, Ride, Nemesio, and Solanna, and Rush himself. Just dogs howling at the sun and pawing at the red earth that had been left that way in their dirt-poor town.

He only really learned about dogs after his father had died. He had been a journalist who had trespassed too far into the realm of drug cartels and drug fights, punished with a bullet in his arm, his thigh, and straight through his head.

"Died just like a dog, didn't he?"

Rush turned around to look through the empty yard at a boy with straw-colored hair and a crooked smile. Solanna was still sobbing quietly against his arms, their black-clad relatives arguing about who would be saddled with the orphans inside the house as the children sat on the patio.

"He your Dad?" The boy asked, pointing to a picture under a broken frame. Solanna nodded, tears still running down her face and her fingers still crammed into her ears to block out the sounds of the relations screaming and complaining in the house.

Rush rose to his feet and pulled his sister toward him. "Don't talk to him, Solanna!" he shouted, and glaring at the boy, hissed, "Who do you think you are? Get out of here. Get lost!"

The boy simply flashed a half-moon smile. "My name is Nemesio. And I'm just like you." He smiled wider, and Rush could see the fang-like canines at the corners of his mouth– terrifying, thrilling, tempting. "I'm a stray dog." He raised his hand.

Rush looked at the outstretched hand suspiciously for a moment, and egged on by that lopsided smile, answered, "I guess I'm one of those, too," and grabbed those white fingers in his own.

They were all orphans, the three of them. Nemesio's whore of a mother had plummeted from a bridge into those rusty waters to sweet salvation, leaving him in the streets to fend for himself however he could, clawing, biting, and howling. They thought they could be better than all of them– Rush and Nemesio were strong enough to pry apart their world at its seams, and Solanna persevered without love, without sun– better than all the other adult bastards who sobbed to half-broken bottles and cold toy guns. He could be better than the people who killed his father.

It was fun, desperate fun, blind to blood in the dead of the pitch-dark night, oblivious to the scent of gunpowder and urine in the dust-filled, trash-heaped alleys. Terrible, sweet, apple-red fun. It felt like he could forget everything, like he could grab for anything with his own scrawny hands like he grabbed other men's throats until they wilted under his fingers.

"Y'know, Rush, Ride was here again today." Solanna pushed her sunflower-gold hair out of her face, her eyes steadily fixed on her brother's face. "He still wants us to go back with him. We could live with him in the city–"

"If he wanted to save us, why didn't he do it before?" Rush shouted, pounding the handle of his gun into his hands, feeling the cool metal. "Why didn't he come when it mattered after Dad died? He's just like the rest of them. They didn't care what happened to us."

"He's our uncle. He said he'll take us. He promised we could live with him."

"I can't leave," Rush insisted.

"Why? You always hated this place. Why won't you just let us let it go?"

"I can't leave now, Nemesio and I–"

"It's not that you can't!" Solanna screamed, her flaxen hair falling into her face. "It's that you won't. I can't stand this anymore, I– Rush, I hate this place, I don't want to be here anymore like a stray–!"

Solanna hated this place. Like a lame dog, she hobbled through the streets, constantly looking down at her feet, her hands in her golden hair. The only things she loved about their town were the sunflower fields with countless rows of green stalks and yellow-gold sunflower heads watching the sun. It was the only place she treasured, the only solace she could find curled beneath the sunflowers, her black, lightless eyes roaming the blue sky.

"I don't want it–" She screamed, clutching her face, tears dancing as fiercely as starlight on her cheeks. She howled like a broken, lame dog.

Nemesio was known as the Mad Dog by police and gangsters alike. A savage smile constantly painted on his face, he spent the day roaming through the streets and the nights prowling alleys and warehouses for some new hunt, some new chase.

"We're gonna meet up with them at the old hospital lot tonight."

Nemesio was leaning out the window and looking into the town. He laughed and his fangs showed in the light. "The sons of bitches won't know what's coming, and I got Eris and Drake and some other guys to come, too. All that cash and the prizes–" and Nemesio licked his dark lips. He was always involved in the gangs and guns and weapons, brandishing his gun and submerging the gang meets and gang fights with gunpowder and smoke. He laughed with vicious joy whenever his shot caught any of the gang bitches he hated so much, his howls and the thunder of gunshots rife in the air already fragrant with blood, sweat, and metal. He was a mad dog no man could capture or put down. Rush never tried to stop him, and watched his friend get riddled with bullet holes, blood soaking his clothes like an auburn mane.

Rush, he– he was a stray dog. He had no place, not in the rust-red streets and metal-gray alleys that Nemesio called his territory, not in the sunflower fields that burned like golden fire in his eyes, singeing his dirty skin– he just wandered and roamed in the open space with not even so much as a collar with his faded name. He was both thrilled and repulsed by the killing, at the same time satiated and devastated when he painted his own paws in crimson like a stray lost and out-of-place in hell.

"Where's Nemesio? He isn't back yet?" Solanna asked. There was thudding on the door. "He's always late like this," Solanna complained and went to unlatch the door. "Nemes—"

There was the thunder of footsteps, the crackle of glass breaking, the pound as the door sailed to the ground. It was so quick that Rush didn't even hear Solanna scream– just the pulse of a solitary bullet flitting through the air.

"You damned strays! Goddamned stray dogs!" A man screamed as he pushed Rush down to the ground and slashed at him with his knife. Rush felt the blood stream down his face as the men flooded their apartment, closing in like a pack of hell hounds. "Just die, motherfuckers!" The hell hound brought down its teeth.

"You're finally awake."

Rush opened his eyes into the blinding whiteness of a hospital. On one side of his bed lay his arms wrapped in white and pinned with an IV and on the other sat a doctor in a white coat, his arms crossed and an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

"It's a good thing Solanna told me to see you yesterday," the doctor, Ride, said, his fingers twitching over his lips. "I heard from her that you were involved with some stuff you shouldn't be, but I didn't know it was this deep. What the hell do you think you were doing? Didn't you learn anything after what happened to your father, you fool? If I'd come any later–"

"I'm not thanking you," Rush answered coldly.

"Yeah?"

"You didn't come after Dad died. You didn't pick us up. Don't get conceited and think that you're our savior or anything like that now that you're here." Rush glared at him, his eyes flashing with a dark, violent, stony light. "Don't think you can save us now. I don't need you to save us."

"Because you're obviously doing fine by yourself."

"I can take care of myself," Rush replied defensively. "Even if I couldn't, don't you think you're a little too late now?" He laughed bitterly and his chest ached. Glancing at the moss-gray hospital roof, he closed his weary eyes. "It's too late."

Ride watched him in silence as the door flapped open and a white-clad nurse ran inside. "Mr. Redderth, your niece isn't in her room," she gasped.

"Solanna?" Ride rose to his feet, chewing on his cigarette. "Where did she–"

Rush jumped out of his bed and pushed his way through Ride out of the room. The only thing that was good about being a dog was that he could run, run on his own two feet with reckless, desperate abandon, oblivious to the pain in his lungs, racing like a stray from the feeling of sheer nothingness through the streets. The only thing he was good at was running away.

"Solanna?" He turned his head through the dilapidated neighborhood, running through puddles of grime, blinded by the white light. "Solanna?" He saw the sunflower fields in the distance glowing with yellow light, set aflame.

"Solanna!" Running as fast as he could, he reached the sunflower field and watched it transform into a fire fed by the golden flowers. He jumped into the fire, looking through the flames until he found what he was looking for: Solanna standing in a ring of fire.

"Rush," she said in a low, dreamy voice. She watched the flames dance and surge around her, and a half-asleep smile crept across her burnt face. "Aren't you happy now, Rush? They can't hurt us anymore. There's nothing more they can take away from us now, now that our home is gone, and Dad, too." She smiled into the fire and tears rolled like gray rain down her face. "They can't hurt us anymore."

"Let's go, Solanna. Now." Rush tugged her urgently as he watched the flames rise and tried to avoid their heat.

"Right," she said simply, and followed her brother brokenly, her dog-dark eyes watching the embers smoldering under her feet.

As the white-hot sun faded to pitch, sooty blackness, Rush the stray meandered through the broken neighborhood until he reached the old hospital covered in moss and water stains. Gun smoke was still clinging to the air, and he followed it with his feeble canine nose, treading the tire marks in the lot, and finally finding the dark residue of blood on the cement.

"Nemesio?" Rush shouted into the dusty, grimy darkness. Rusty cars were punctured with bullet wounds, blood streaked the fractured cement. "Nemesio!" Rush screamed. Then, on the pavement, he saw bright red letters drawn with bloody fingerprints.

BEWARE OF MAD DOG.

"Nemesio!" The stray howled, his throat raw, his paws clawing uselessly at the red earth as they always did until he painted it in red.

"You found Nemesio?" Solanna asked from her bed as Rush sat at her bedside. Her wide eyes searched her brother's face, but there was no question in them. Finally, she said, "I knew it... you found him, but you couldn't bring him back because he's already gotten away, hasn't he? He always said he was a stray." She pressed her poppy palms to her face. "Why couldn't he have taken me away, too?"

Rush stroked Solanna's singed hair as she looked at him with empty eyes.

"And here I thought you said you'd protect her," Ride said in a low voice, fingering his cigarette. "It doesn't take a genius to know that a stray dog can't protect anyone but himself."

"And what would you know?" Rush replied viciously.

"I know because I'm worse than any stray." Ride gnawed on the cigarette in his mouth and scratched his head.

"'Cause you're an old dog?" Rush said with a leering smile. Ride said nothing and stamped his cigarette into the ground.

"Why didn't you take us in after Dad died?" Rush said into the quiet air. "Is it that you feel bad only now? Because you pity us?"

"And if I said yes?"

"Then I'd kill you."

Unable to control himself, Ride laughed with a near hysterical energy. "Kill me? You'd kill me?" Ride clutched his sides and his hair fell in lavish, heart-red pieces into his face. Rush watched him in surprise and horror. "Do you know how long I've been waiting to die? Well, if you want to, just try, I'd be more than willing to let you. I've just been waiting for someone to put me out of my misery." He looked at Rush coldly, saying with a twisted smile, "but you can't even do that, can you? You're just a stray. You can't even decide when it's time to die."

Grabbing Ride's collar, Rush pushed him against the wall, his bone white fingers posed with the strength to strangle on Ride's neck. Ride merely looked at him with a miserable, lopsided grin on his face.

"You poor stray," he said simply, expressions of relief and agony alternately passing over his face. "But then, I have no right to say anything."

Rush grabbed his hands away as abruptly as from fire. "I'll find him," he said quietly as he dug his hands into his pockets. "We don't need you or anybody."

"Whatever you say, stray dog." Ride answered with a soft smile and he spat his cigarette into his nephew's face. Rush leapt abruptly away and shook the cigarette from his clothes, checking his skin for burns, while his uncle laughed against the wall and drew another cigarette from his pocket.

"Relax, it's not like it's actually lit. You're not allowed to smoke in a hospital," Ride said and gestured to the DO NOT SMOKE sign on the door. "That's why I never smoke lit cigarettes."

Before Rush could reply, Ride's cellphone rang through the stale hospital air and he pressed it to his ear.

"Bastard," Rush responded and raced through the hospital corridors. When he was in the streets again, he breathed in deeply the dirty air, watching the rust-red dust rise under the wheels of passing cars and float under his own footsteps. In the road there was a crowd gathered and staring into an alley, their footprints as deeply ingrained as blood on the ground and gravel.

"What the...?" Rush pushed his way through the crowd, weaving through the massive throng of bodies and feeling his body pushed and pulled in the current.

"Look," a boy said beside him and tugged his hand. "That man's laughing."

When Rush finally pushed his way through the crowd, he emerged, his pants covered in red dust and eyes wide and white, staring at the familiar crooked smile of a straw-haired boy. His body hunched against a wall, blood splattered behind him like broken wings and pooling at his sprawled legs, Nemesio smiled blindly with that forever mad grin on his face, a crimson gash across his throat like a collar.

"He looks so happy," the boy said as his mother pulled him back with anxious arms. "The mad dog looks so happy."

Soundlessly, motionlessly, Rush stared at his fellow stray and watched in disbelief the red smile painted across his still face, insanely, derisively, agonizingly. "Why're you still smiling?" The stray dog watched the mad dog's savage smile, his pearly fangs now coated in scarlet, dark eyes hateful and unseeing. "Godammit, Nemesio." The stray dog buried his head in his hands, howling in tribute to his fellow stray who had been driven mad for some power he couldn't reach on his hind legs. As the police waded their way through the crowd and forced them back, finally pulling at Rush's shoulders, he let out a wordless scream as mad and piercing as a howl into the air.

"Damn, damn, damn–" Rush pulled himself away from the policemen, striding toward Nemesio's body, baring his fangs uselessly as a mad dog who could no longer see. "Goddammit, Nemesio! You coward! How could you run away from us, from this place–" Rough arms pulled him back, fighting, clawing and shaking. "Nemesio!"

The sirens blared against Rush's ears, the sounds of screaming and shuffling feet and the harried voices of policemen playing through the air with the dulled quality of a broke record-player. As if in a dream, with that same feeling of hazy, unreal detachment, Rush tore himself away from the crowd of spectators and cops and raced him way back to the hospital.

"Solanna?" he gasped, clambering up the stairs as quickly as he could, his body shaking. He raced through the whitewashed hospital, glancing around the sterilized rooms, panting, lost. "Solanna, Nemesio–"

"Goddammit, I've already given you what you wanted, how much more do you need?"

Rush stumbled to a halt in the doorway when he found Ride on his feet, his cellphone pressed like a lifeline to his ear, an expression unlike anything he had ever seen before on his uncle's face: a look of sheer fear, rage, and desperation. For no more than a heartbeat Ride stared at Rush with a look of stunned lack of recognition on his face, and when he was finally back to his senses, he flipped his phone shut.

"Why– you– there's blood... on your clothes," Ride said after a moment.

"It's not mine," Rush replied, and Ride merely nodded his head as if the answer were perfectly normal. Shoving his trembling hands into his pockets, Ride emerged shakily from his seat and walked past his nephew.

"What was that?" Rush pointed to Ride's cellphone.

"Oh, just some unfinished business," Ride answered, a tremulous smile on his regularly careless face. Throwing his white lab coat over his shoulder, Ride made his way through the halls and disappeared around the corner.

"Rush?" a quiet voice wafted through the still air, and Rush found Solanna lying in her bed, her hair tumbling, the same flaxen color of Fools' gold. "I...thought you were hurt."

"I'm fine," Rush murmured and stroked her thin hair.

"You don't look fine," Solanna said in a small voice and touched her brother's face. "I thought...maybe... you wouldn't come back. There's no place for a stray here, anyway. Since Nemesio's already gotten away." Her hand fell to her side. "I hoped you'd get away from here. I thought you were hurt. Ride was asking if you were hurt over the phone."

"Ride?" Rush drew himself up in his seat. His sister looked at him with dark dull eyes as if she were half-asleep, half-awake, halfway on the verge of remembering an old dream.

"Yeah. Over the phone...he was worried that you were hurt. That you shouldn't have been hurt. That both of us should have been okay...he was supposed to make sure that we were safe..." She closed her weary eyes. "Because Nemesio was gone, we were supposed to be safe... he's dead, isn't he, Rush? Ride already told me..."

"How did Ride know–" Rush felt a cold thrill possess him as a shiver ran up his spine. His heart was beating in his throat, and his mind was blank. "How did Ride–" Rush ran out from the room and when he turned the corner, he found Ride leaning against the wall, an unlit cigarette in his lips, a faint suggestion of a smile on his tired mouth.

"Well, if it isn't the stray," Ride said slowly. "What's with that look?"

"You...how did you know that Nemesio was dead?" Rush said after a moment.

The smile vanishing from his lips, Ride looked at his nephew with that same look of shock and horror as he did before. As Rush saw it, he felt the thrill course through him like ice water.

"I need a smoke," Ride replied quietly.

"What do you–?"

Before Rush could finish Ride turned his back on him and was climbing the staircase. Rush followed him, his heart hammering in his chest, winded, his head as airless and faint as if he were drowning. When he caught up to Ride, he found his uncle on the rooftop and leaning against the rails, a cigarette in his mouth, flicking on his lighter.

"You...you said you were the one that found us when those guys crashed our house...you said if it weren't for you..." The words tumbled clumsily from Rush's mouth. When he looked to his uncle for some answer, Ride's eyes were cold, uncompassionate, and miserable. "You said if it weren't for you...we would have been killed. But if they hadn't left, how did you stop them– there's no way you could have stopped them, not even Nemesio...!"

"It was that mad dog's fault you guys were in this mess in the first place," Ride answered in measured, icy tones, shaking his earth-red hair in aggravation, his hands fidgeting shaking, smoke pouring in sheets from his mouth. For a moment the man appeared hazy through the filmy trickles of cigarette smoke, washed-up, transparent.

"You were working with them!" Rush shouted angrily. "You were working with those gang bastards! It was your fault that Nemesio died, that we were attacked, that Solanna–!"

"It wasn't because of me that they did that." Ride's mouth barely moved as if his lips too were exhausted, fatigued to the point that it was pointless to do anything. "I made sure that they didn't kill you two or worse that day. I made them keep their word to me. I wouldn't let them hurt you, not after they–" He laughed with vicious pleasure, bending over himself as if the very force of his own voice were too much for his frail body. "I've already told you, haven't I, that I'm an old dog? I lied. What's worse than an old dog and a lame dog is a tame one. I obeyed them to save my own skin when your father had to go and dig up dirt where he shouldn't have. Somehow they found out the connection between us, and they said if they didn't get him, it would be I who paid the price."

Rush stared at his uncle in wide-eyed horror, face pale, hands clenched into tentative fists at his sides. "You..." he said in little more than a whisper, than wind-whipped smoke. "You're the one that gave away Dad? You're the reason he's dead? You sold him out!"

Ride smiled bitterly, wearily, self-loathing and self-pity in his black eyes. Rush watched him in revulsion and sheer rage, his voice transforming into a howl, his eyes shining and pale.

"You're the one who killed him! Your own brother, just to save your own goddamned skin! That's why you didn't take us in until now, because of the guilt– You coward! You're the reason why we're like this, why we're goddamned strays!"

"They were going to destroy me. The hospital, my life–"

"And that's why you let them destroy him! That's why–" Rush gasped, the words clawing up his throat, making it ache, choked with anger, with tears. "–you let them destroy us?"

Ride merely smiled through his cigarette as Rush glared at him, panting, and his chest heaving. The man spat the cigarette out of his mouth, stomping it into crumbled ash under his heel, before backing up against the rails and propping himself on top of them.

"I've already told you, Rush; there are all types of dogs in this world. There are mad dogs, lame dogs, tame dogs, and the rest of us–" Ride climbed on top of the railing, perching on it and holding himself onto it only with his bare hands. A small smile crept onto his face. "–well, we're just old dogs, waiting to be put out of our misery." Grabbing his hands into his pocket, Ride pulled out a gun. Rush watched as it soared through the air and landed into his hands. "Well?" Ride said smilingly. "What's it going to be, stray dog? Won't you at least give me this? Either you pull the trigger or I'll end it myself." He touched the rusty railings with his fingers. "I can't wait any longer."

For a moment Rush stared, wide-eyed, transfixed on his uncle, his hands numbly holding the gun. He could barely feel it in his fingers, and then, before he could think, before he could react, he heard the gunshot through the deafening white noise in his head and watched his uncle topple, still smiling, off the rooftop with a red blossom of blood spreading through his white coat with Solanna holding the gun in her hands.

Rush didn't even watch Ride tumble through the air, and he felt his sister leaning against him, his own hands empty with the gun she had taken from them and had used to shoot their uncle.

"You forgot, Ride," she said, her voice trembling with stifled laughter and tears. The gun tumbled from her hands and clattered against the rooftop. She smiled with canine-like fangs, her eyes blind, and the look on her face infinitely sad, infinitely mad. She howled like a broken dog that finally fell to pieces. "There are dead dogs, too."

There were all sorts of dogs in this world. Old dogs, mad dogs, lame dogs, tame dogs. Stray dogs. They were all just dogs, howling at the sun, chasing their tails in perpetual circles, owned by people they didn't even know. Solanna was a broken dog, Nemesio a mad one, and Rush a simple stray. Solanna fell to her knees, and her brother joined her and held her in his arms, two lost children and two dogs, mutts who scoured the earth and ripped the collars from their own necks, just dogs in a stray town.