As Alexander cut across the parking lot, one barked, a high, happy sound. The Dane ran in front of Alexander, blocking his way. When he tried to walk around it, the big dog shifted into his path again and growled, and Alexander thought it was being playful. Running claws tapped against the pavement behind him.
Even when the first bite tore into his leg, the pain blaring and sudden, Alexander didn’t understand. He reached for his calf, thinking that something had gone wrong, that there’d been some sort of accident. The bull terrier leaped away from him. Blood reddened its muzzle, and its tail wagged. Alexander tried to walk, but his foot wouldn’t support him, the tendon cut. Bitten through. The fear came on him like he was waking up from a dream. The parking lot seemed too real and suddenly unfamiliar.
“Hey,” he said, and the smiling hound lunged at him, yellow teeth snapping at the air as Alexander danced back, lost his balance, fell. A white minivan drove by, not pausing. The bull terrier jumped forward, and Alexander tried to pull his foot away from it. The Dane stepped over to him, bent down, and fastened its teeth around his throat. The thick saliva dripped down the sides of Alexander’s neck, and for a moment, all four of them were still. When Alexander lifted his hand toward the Dane’s muzzle, it growled once, faintly—almost conversationally—and the jaw tightened. You live if I let you live. Alexander put his hand back down.
The attack began in earnest, but he didn’t get to see it happen. The only thing in his field of vision was the side of the Dane’s head, its sharp-cropped ear, the curve of its eye, and beyond that, the clear blue of the sky. Teeth dug into Alexander’s leg, into his arm. One of the dogs stood on his chest, its weight pressing down on him, bit deep into the softness of his belly, and then shook its head back and forth. The pain was intense, but also distant, implausible. Intimate, and happening to somebody else. It seemed to go on forever.
The Dane growled again, shifting its grip on Alexander’s neck. Its breath warmed Alexander’s ear. The smell of its mouth filled his nostrils. The voices of hound and terrier mixed, growls and yips and barks. Violence and threat and pleasure. Something bit into this foot, and he felt the teeth scraping against the small bones of his toe. A pigeon flew overhead, landed on a power line. Another bite to his belly, and then something deep and internal slipped and tugged. The dogs had chewed through the muscle and were pulling out his intestine.
I’m going to die, Alexander thought.
And then it was over. If there had been something that stopped it—a shout or the sound of a car horn—he hadn’t heard it. The grip on his throat just eased, the assaulting teeth went away. Alexander looked down at the slaughterhouse floor that his body had become, the ruins of his blood-soaked clothes, the pink loop of gut spilling out onto the asphalt. The hound with its friendly face and permanent goofy smile trotted to his head and hitched up its hind leg. Its testicles seemed huge, its red, exposed pizzle obscene. Urine spattered Alexander’s face, thick and rank.
Then they were gone, pelting down the street away from him. They barked to each other, their voices growing softer with distance until they were just part of the background of the city. Alexander listened to his own breath, half expecting it to stop. It didn’t. Another car drove by, slowed, and then sped away. He felt a vague obligation to scream or weep. Something. The pigeon launched itself from the wire above him and flew away, black against the bright sky.
Some time later, he thought to pull the cell phone from his pocket and call 911. The blood made dialing hard.
The effort of going home exhausted him. The effort of being home. Alexander had spent weeks in his nightmare, and all his things waited for him, unchanged. It was like walking into his room in his parents’ house and finding all his books and clothes from high school still where he’d left them. The artifacts of a previous life.
Erin had stacked the mail neatly on the dining table. Alexander sat there, his new aluminum cane against his leg, and went through it, envelope by envelope. Dickens capered and danced and brought his old fetch toy, a ragged penguin. Alexander only had the energy to toss it halfheartedly across the apartment a few times, and Dickens seemed to recognize his lack of enthusiasm. The little dog hopped up on the couch with a sigh and rested his head on his forepaws for the rest of the evening.
In the morning, Alexander took Dickens on a quick walk around the block, focusing on getting out to the street and back again as quickly as he could, trying not to feel anything more than impatience. Then he fed the dog, fixed himself a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, and called a taxi to carry him to work. The indulgence wouldn’t work as an everyday occurrence, but for his first day back to the office, he didn’t want to push.