What Remains by Bailey Bradford (to read list txt) 📕

He felt instant relief when it dawned on him that he must be looking at someone’s German Shepherd. A big German Shepherd, sure, but it wasn’t a coyote and the markings were similar to a German Shepherd he’d seen ages ago.

“Someone must have dumped you, huh, buddy?” Joe chuckled and leaned back in the seat. “Damn, boy. Or girl. You about scared a decade off me.”

For one fleeting second, he wondered if it was a wolf, but Joe discounted the idea. Once there’d been red wolves in the area, but they’d been extinct for a long time. At least they had been from Texas. He vaguely remembered hearing something on a TV show about them having been raised in captivity and freed elsewhere.

As far as he knew, there weren’t any other wolves native to the area, so that had to be a dog, he reasoned.

It walked out to stand in front of the truck. Joe shivered as he looked into the dog’s yellow eyes.

“Ah, hell, I must be more messed up than I thought.” Joe rubbed at his eyes before giving the dog another look. His stomach did a weird flip. “German Shepherds have some red on them, don’t they?” He racked his brain trying to recall, but all he came up with was a black and tan dog.

“That’s it. I’m totally wasted and seeing things.” What else could it be when that dog was grinning at him? It was, too, he was sure of it.

Normally, a few tokes and a few beers didn’t do much more than make him relax. “Guess I got some good stuff, or bad stuff, or something. Bad beer. Shoulda checked the expiration…date…” he trailed off, because that dog put first one big ol’ front paw then the second on the hood so that the critter was staring straight at him. “Oh, shit.”

Joe slapped at the horn, remembering too late that it had quit working weeks ago. “Those are some fuckin’ freaky eyes, dog.” They were really yellow. “Aw, now what’re you doing?” he asked, whining just a little when the dog leaped and there it was, the big burly maybe-not-a-dog after all, pushing its nose against the outside of the windshield.

“No, no, no, don’t do that, you’re getting the glass all slimy.” He gawped as he got a look at the long, sharp canines. “Uh, okay. You just lick until you’re all licked out, bud.”

Something kept him from putting the truck in gear and driving off. One, it went against Joe’s nature to hurt anything, except for flies and mosquitoes. Those were such nuisances that he could get over his embarrassingly squeamish and okay, soft-heartedness, and off the little bastards.

But anything else? Trent had to handle it when any of the cattle needed to be put down, or when there was butchering done for their own freezers. Joe just didn’t want to mess with that part of it all.

And there was a reason he didn’t have a dog. Once Roscoe had died, his heeler he’d had throughout most of his childhood and into early adulthood, Joe hadn’t been willing to have his heart broken like that again.

So he didn’t want to hurt whatever the hell was on his truck, dog or hallucination or some coyote or extinct wolf. “Besides, it ain’t real. Probably.”

But Joe did flick on the windshield wipers, knocking them into the spray position.

It might have been funny had the dog not yelped like it’d been hurt. Joe felt like an asshole as the animal scrabbled on the hood before sliding or jumping off, he couldn’t tell with the wipers and the water going.

He couldn’t see where the critter had gone, either, and after a couple of minutes, he began to worry. “What if it broke a bone, or…or hit its head on the bumper and died?” The thoughts raced around in his head until finally Joe risked opening his door. Slowly. Very, very slowly, in case he’d pissed the dog off and it was just waiting to rip out his throat.

There was nothing out there on his side of the truck except dirt and scrub. Joe almost took the rifle off the gun rack, but he didn’t want to shoot anything. He’d just have to hope, if the animal tried to attack him, that he could run back to the truck and get away.

So he was really going to do it, get out and see where the dog had ended up. Joe was a little quivery inside, and his head was still spinny from the beer and pot. He was beginning to question whether maybe Trent had laced either of those things with something stronger, because the night was turning out to be so freaking bizarre.

The ground crunched under his boots when he slid out of the truck and made contact with the dirt. Maybe he wasn’t loud, but it sure seemed like it in the quiet of the night. Even the purr of the engine had an almost animalistic sound to it, as if the old thing belonged out there, one of Mother Nature’s beasts.

But Joe’s boots on the dirt didn’t fit in at all. So much for being stealthy. Shit. He held onto the door handle with one hand and the left side of the frame with the other. His arms burned from the tension and strength of his grip.

The door was in the way, so he had to scoot out and around it. That meant letting go of his two supports, which turned out to be harder than he’d have thought.

Joe’s concentration was split between letting go and watching for a vicious killer dog. Every canine horror movie he’d ever seen ran through is head—which meant Cujo was on a loop upstairs.

Joe got his fingers to cooperate and he flattened himself against the truck as he slid to the left. The rear passenger door handle jabbed him in the back and he hissed.

And froze as a low, rumbling growl came from down