THE PEOPLE THAT LAWRENCE HATED were out again, for the third day in a row. I cursed under my breath, reigning him in close to my hip, trying not to pull on the leash. I’d never seen them before this week, and now here they were, walking every day at the same time I took Lawrence out, a time I’d chosen specifically because the sidewalks were quiet and we wouldn’t run into anyone.
They were still some ways off down the road, tromping with maddening slowness along the street towards us, their heavy long coats overhanging their heavy winter boots, collars pulled up and swaddled in thick black scarves. They wore hats, too, hunting hats with ear flaps and bills, but black with some kind of fur, fur I hoped was fake but somehow felt—given the way the fibers moved in the icy wind—they were real. Black fox, or maybe rabbit fur. Were there black rabbits?
I thought about just going back inside, letting them pass, waiting them out. But Lawrence had been stuck inside all day while I was on back-to-back work calls, and he needed the walk. If we hurried, we could get ahead of them, keep out of the line of sight for a while.
“Hey, Larry. Touch!” I held out my fist with a treat in it, and Lawrence touched it with his black nose with surprising gentleness for such a big dog. The shelter had said he was a golden retriever mix of some kind, and though he looked it, he was about forty-pounds too heavy, almost as large as a Burmese and muscled like one, too.
He spotted the walkers as we turned the corner to head uphill, and went rictus rigid. Mountains of fur spiked along his spine. His tail went up almost pointing to the sky and held very, very still. A volcanic growl rumbled in his chest.
“Come on, bud,” I said, remembering to keep my voice light like our trainer had said to do. “Larry! Larry! Look!”
I held out another fisted treat, but it was like Lawrence was on the moon. The scent of freeze-dried liver, his favorite, couldn’t cross the void of space.
The walkers were getting closer. You couldn’t see their eyes under all those wrappings. They kept their hands in their pockets as they shuffled along, as though the ground were black ice and they didn’t want slip. I felt the hair along my own nape rise, heart racing. Dogs can hear your heartbeat. That’s one of the things I learned when Larry started showing his reactivity. He could tell I was upset, but he couldn’t differentiate what the cause was, his own behavior or the presence of a stranger.
But these people… they did give me the creeps.
Stooping in Larry’s peripheral vision, I called softly again, put the treat to his nose. He shivered and turned to me, and I got him moving, quickly along the sidewalk, trudging uphill. The skies were swathed in dark, fluffy clouds, and I could smell snow on the air just before a few glittering spots began to drift down, slow at first but quickly gaining momentum. Snow stuck to Lawrence’s fur, coating his back.
Just what I needed, a snow squall. I glanced behind us, hoping the people had turned off or headed home when the snow started, but there they were, shuffling along. Despite their slow steps, I swore they were closer now, closing the gap. I tugged on Lawrence’s lead and urged him faster.
“Come on, bud! It’s snowy, huh? Let’s hurry up!”
He trotted beside me, occasionally stopping to glance back and stare at the walkers, letting out an irritated huff. I wanted to huff at them, too. He’d barked at them enough before when they came suddenly around a corner from behind a bush, or appeared on the far side of the road as if out of nowhere, much too fast for me to be able to reroute Lawrence off onto the grass, to put distance between us, to keep him under his reactivity threshold. It almost felt as if they wanted to bother him.
I tightened my grip on the leash and bit back a curse. I wanted to yell at them, but if I did, Lawrence would definitely lose it, and the last thing I wanted was to have to drag him home, lunging and barking and maxxed out on cortisol for the rest of the day.
The snow thickened, each flake now as big as my thumbnail. My hat was soaked. My hair was wet like seaweed against my cheeks. My fingers were going numb through my gloves, gripping the lead so tightly.
Lawrence stopped again, and I saw it coming: he flinched, eyes wide, instantly ridging like a hyena, every muscle in his body tensing with fury. I turned just as he lunged, scream-howling and erupting into barks. The walkers were there, not ten feet behind us.
I wanted to scream at them, tell them this all could have been avoided if they’d just leave us alone, give us our space, but all I could do was hold onto Lawrence and drag him back into the snow-slicked grass off the sidewalk. There were only about twelve empty feet before the forest closed in, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough to get him below threshold. I grit my teeth and hauled him, slipping and sliding, into the underbrush, putting a couple trees between us and the walkers.
Usually, I called out an apology when Lawrence went over threshold. Usually my face burned with embarrassment at his horrifying barking. But I was so pissed at these jerks for sneaking up on us like that, when they knew, they knew, what he’d do, that I just clamped my teeth and prayed they’d hurry on past.
Instead, they stopped. Right there on the sidewalk, right where Lawrence’s paws had scraped the snow off the cement in his panic, they stopped and turned to stare at us.
Lawrence scream-howled again, beside himself.
“Please keep going!” I shouted, wanting to add some colorful barks of my own to the mix. “Go ahead! Go on!” I tried to flag them to move in case they couldn’t hear me.
But they just stood there, the snow piling up on their coat shoulders, their hands casually in their pockets, their faces hidden beneath their hats and scarves.
I was losing my grip. I’d never seen Lawrence like this before, spinning, snarling, jerking on his lead so hard, I could feel the leash slipping through my gloves. I couldn’t hold him like this.
“Go!” I shouted at them. “Go, damnnit, or I’m going to let him loose, you fucking assholes!”
No response. No shift. The snow was falling so thickly I almost couldn’t see them through the flakes: just shadows of loathing standing motionless.
They were too close. It was too much. Too much for Lawrence, but too much for me. Rage surged up in me, stiffening my spine, raising the hair on my scalp. I bared my teeth, snarling, “Leave us alone!”
Beside me, Lawrence drew back, sitting into his heavy haunches, watching me, panting but suddenly quiet. I was the one tugging on the leash, lunging forward, teeth bared, ready to bite. And I did want to bite them, these walkers. I wanted to tear them to shreds, I wanted to chase them off into the snow, I wanted to be away, away from them and their weird coats and their hidden faces and the fear, the overwhelming fear that redlined into terror.
“Go! Go! Go!” I barked. Lawrence shuffled back, drawing me away with a keening, a whimpering. Was I scaring him, now?
I turned to wrap my arms around him. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m sorry, buddy, it’s okay. I’m okay.”
But the moment the leash went slack, he snarled and charged. My numb fingers lost their grip, the leash snapped out of my hand. I screamed his name, screamed for him to stop, but when I turned, I saw the people right behind us, right at the edge of the woods not five feet away. Their faces were still hidden in darkness, though something simmered there, something bright and hot and evil. Their hands lay outside their pockets now, their fingers long and spindly, twitching, pale as birch bark. Their arms went up when Lawrence charged, and they scattered, emitting a shrill, piercing screech that made my skull vibrate, made Lawrence go mad with fury. One darted away into the billowing snow, but he caught the other one and tore into their coat and yanking them to the ground. They thrashed, flailing, clawing at him, hissing. I snatched up a fallen branch as their claws slashed his side, eliciting a sharp yip of pain.
“I told you to leave us alone!”
I brought the branch down hard. It was half rotten, too soft to do much damage, but it did something. Stunned or just distracted, they reeled back. Lawrence gave the coat an almighty death-roll head-shake like he did whenever we were playing tug-o-war at home, and I heard fabric rip, shred. A scream and a wisp of fog evaporated into the falling snow. The tattered coat billowed in the wind. There was nothing else inside it. The coat was empty, it wasn’t even a coat, but a shred of fabric or tarp, folded and draped to look like a coat. But there was nothing, nothing inside.
When Lawrence released it, it tumbled off into like a dry leaf, vanishing into the snow. Lawrence came to me as I knelt down, gasping for breath. I wrapped my arms around his shaggy neck as he pressed up against me, his breath hot and stinking of salmon treats.
“Good boy,” I whispered into his cheek as he blinked slowly, comfortingly beside me. He bumped his head against my chin as if to say, “You too, human. You too.”
The snowfall was easing; the sky brightening. We sat in nearly four inches of snow, but there wasn’t a single footprint from the walkers. It was as though they’d never been there at all.
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