My foot had scarcely touched the ground when I heard a low snarling sound. I spun. Rocketing down the driveway toward me, mouth agape and teeth bared, was the biggest, meanest-looking pit bull I’d ever seen. He moved remarkably fast for such a big animal, and I found myself moving with surprising swiftness, too, back up the bars of the gate, over the top, and down the other side. I’d just removed my hands from the top bar when a pair of jaws snapped shut like a bear trap, an inch away from my fingers. The dog was too big to get more than his muzzle through the bars, but that didn’t stop him from lunging and snapping. I remembered a documentary I’d seen once on Animal Planet, in which a shark attacked the bars of a protective cage so ferociously that it gradually began bending the bars aside, nearly consuming the human quivering inside. Fortunately, this gate was made of sterner stuff; it rattled and strained against the chain, but it held.
Eventually the dog’s fury subsided a bit, but not the sense of menace it conveyed, and I decided we’d reached an impasse. I suspected that someone had let him out in response to my honking and calling, since he’d probably have arrived considerably sooner if he’d already been outdoors on guard duty. “Well, I guess that’s that,” I said. “Sorry we made the trip for nothing.” I fished out my handkerchief and mopped my face and neck. Some of the sweat probably came from the adrenaline rush the dog had provoked, but the morning was already remarkably hot. “Let’s stop at the nearest gas station and get a cold drink.”
Just as I said it, I felt the air stir a bit, whispering from the south—from the woods inside the fence. When it did, I caught a whiff of something familiar, and for a moment I thought I’d had some lapse in consciousness—a blackout that had lasted until I was back in Knoxville, back behind the UT Medical Center. When I realized my mistake, the hairs on my arms and my neck stood up, and I felt a jolt like electricity shoot through me. I was inhaling the stench of death—wholesale human death, Body Farm scale of death—not in Tennessee but here in Georgia, as it drifted lazily across the gate of the Trinity Crematorium.
CHAPTER 15
“I THINK HIS BARK IS WORSE THAN HIS BITE,” ART said. He took a step toward the gate, and the dog lunged at him, roaring and snapping.
“I think we can’t afford to test your theory,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said. He bent down and fiddled with the left leg of his pants, and when he straightened up, I saw a gun in his right hand. He squatted down and aimed through the bars of the gate. “Jesus, Art, you can’t just shoot—” I began, but then I saw his finger twitch. Instead of a bang, I heard a loud click; for an instant I thought the gun had misfired, but then the dog crumpled to a twitching heap in the gravel. A pair of thin wires ran from the dog’s body back to the barrel of the weapon.
“What the hell…?!”
“Taser,” said Art. “Think of me as Captain Kirk from Star Trek, with my phaser set to stun.”
I stared at the dog sprawled out in the road. “You sure you had that on stun?”
He glanced down at the Taser, which had a fat, round barrel, black with yellow markings—like some high-voltage yellow jacket. “Oops,” he said, then, “No, just kidding. It’s always on stun. Fifty thousand volts’ worth of stun.”
“How long will he be out?”
“Don’t know,” said Art. “Never used one on a dog before. Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe.” He scaled the gate and dropped to the other side. “You coming?”
“Isn’t he gonna come after us again when he wakes up?”
“Only if he’s a really dumb dog,” Art chuckled. “And if he does, I’ve got fifty more shots.” He frowned. “Of course, having fired my one set of barbs, I have to actually hold this gizmo against him for the next fifty shots. If he hasn’t learned by then, he’s got big problems.”
“If he comes after us fifty-one more times, we’ve got bigger problems than he does,” I reasoned.
“If he comes after us fifty-one times, we switch to Plan B,” Art said, patting his right ankle. He sniffed the air, like a hound seeking a rabbit. “Any guess where that aroma’s coming from?”
“Seems like the breeze is blowing from over that way,” I said, pointing slightly to the left of the gravel road, on a tangent that would take us into the woods.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I hope you put on tick repellent before you left home.”
“I did,” I said. “Did you?”
“Oops,” he said again, scratching his left thigh.
The going was slow at first, as we had to tread and trample our way through a tangle of blackberry bushes lining the road. The leaves hung heavy and orange, laden with dust from the road. Here and there I spotted shriveled berries. “Too bad we weren’t here six weeks ago,” I said. “This is a pretty good patch. We could’ve picked enough for a cobbler.”
“Maybe if we make friends with the people who own that nice doggy,” Art said, “they’ll let us come back next year, during blackberry season.”
Once we were beneath the shade of the forest canopy, the blackberries ended and the underbrush thinned, leaving us in a pine thicket with widely spaced trunks and a carpet of needles on the floor.
About a hundred yards in, I glimpsed what looked to be a narrow dirt track bulldozed through the woods. I touched Art’s arm and nodded in its direction. He changed course, heading for it at a brisk stride, and I followed. When we reached it, I saw multiple sets of tracks, some made by rubber tires, others by a tracked vehicle—a bulldozer or Bobcat. I looked in both directions and spied a rusting bulldozer tucked into a gap in the trees. Just beyond it, half hidden by the yellow dozer, I saw the boxy back end of a black vehicle. I pointed.
“Is that what I think it is?” Art asked.