A minty-fresh kiss descended out of the nothing to land on his cheek.

“The boys have already been out.”

Taylor rolled over. His shoulder bitched slightly, somewhere beneath the calm, viscous surface of Lake Percocet.

“I’ll be home early. If you do get up, will you see if there’s anything in the garage to cover up that hole under the sink? I heard The Pest again last night.”

He considered a reply, but by the time he settled on “unk grapple snoorf” her footsteps had been punctuated by the back door’s deadbolt. He went under again, wondering exactly how the nocturnal activities of the Pest sounded different to Renee’s ears than the various troublemakings of their two insomniac Yorkies, and dreamed of old machinery whining its way to a breakdown.

*****

Later, Taylor heard Dreyfuss scuttling along the side of the bed, trying to get his attention and a lift. When he couldn’t ignore it any longer, he lifted one heavy eyelid and spent a fuzzy decade deciphering the numerals on the alarm clock: 10:47 a.m. Meanwhile, Dreyfuss lost interest; Taylor followed the clicking toenails with his ears as they went out into the hall, then gently pivoted onto his back and extended his right arm straight up, testing it.

He’d been shooting a band called The Lights Out Motherfuckers at some abandoned gas station-slash-roadhouse out near White Sands, New Mexico. God knew who found it, or how. It looked great in the photos; the only thing that sucked was actually having to be there to take them. The tarantulas had pretty much been able to climb on the dust or asbestos or whatever it was hanging in the stale air, and Taylor and the band had to move dozens of boxes containing dessicated condiments and old-school diner-style napkin dispensers and t-shirts that said WELCOME TO NOWHERE, ASSHOLE.

Taylor had fallen off a bar stool while leaning out to get a few boldly defined shafts of late-afternoon light into the frame, and very nearly went through the floor when he hit. His right elbow had gone through, splitting a rotten plank that swallowed his arm up to the shoulder, dislocating it with authority.

It wasn’t the first time–he had a second to contemplate the kind of pain headed his way as the tendons started to stretch–and he’d been able to talk the horrified bass player into helping him jam things more or less back into place. (He’d also been able to talk the somewhat creepily amused rhythm guitarist into parting with a couple of codeine pills.) Taylor, and everyone else present, had been much more worried about the dirty, weeping scrapes that ran from his wrist to his armpit.

He’d been forced to negotiate a rickety set of steps into the tiny basement and retrieve his Nikon D80 from an ancient packing crate full of mummified rats and what looked like honest-to-God excelsior, only to find it trashed. Taylor brought the body, lens and flash back up the stairs in a hemp bag that had originally contained roasted peanuts, awkwardly pulling himself across missing steps with his dumb left arm, grabbed the rest of his stuff, apologized, and headed out for the rental car and the road to the airport.

Renee, naturally, had driven straight to the emergency room from Tampa International despite his slurry protestations; whatever the doctor had done to his shoulder there felt more like punishment for being dumb enough to fall than actual medical care. And he’d spent the next three days in bed and on the couch, half-submerged in Lake Percocet.

Taylor knew his hiatus from productive activity was officially over. When Renee said “if you do get up,” he’d heard “you’ve milked it long enough, champ,” even through the painkiller haze. And she was right. He wasn’t a total slacker, but he made his own hours, and had the kind of lazy streak that could turn a couple of days’ bed rest into a week-long movie marathon with a single perusal of the cable guide. The Lights Out Motherfuckers’ manager would be wanting to know if she needed to set up another photo session. The least he could do today was check out the shots on the busted Nikon’s memory card, go through his e-mail, look online for deals on a new camera, and run the dogs around a bit in the backyard.

And, of course, look into the curious case of The Pest.

*****

He slid out of bed, set The Riverboat Gamblers’ “Catastrophe” to blaring on the computer in the spare bedroom while his e-mails began to load, and went into the kitchen. He sucked another pill from the Scooby-Doo Pez dispenser he’d filled with his prescription, and washed it down with unsweetened tea from the fridge while he used a bare foot to pull open one of the cabinet doors under the sink.

He’d conned some semi-knowledgeable friends into helping with a recent kitchen upgrade rather than hiring a contractor. The results were superficially satisfactory, but they’d left some pretty ugly scars behind the new amenities, the worst of which was a six-inch gap in the sheetrock below where the sink’s drainpipe disappeared into the wall to join the vertical sewer line and vent.

Renee began complaining about The Pest two days ago, assuming a rat or some other varmint was getting in though the hole to scarf dog food. Taylor had been under the house not a week before, running wire and water lines, and hadn’t seen any evidence that any kind of rodent was nesting down there. He knew that, if anything, it was a fruit rat using the fence, the trees and the attic to get into the house.

But the damn gap needed to be filled in anyway. He limped into the garage, returned with a putty knife and a slowly calcifying tub of joint compound–enough stuff to give Renee the impression he’d been working on it today, even if he didn’t quite get to the actual repair–and set them on the kitchen floor where his wife would trip over them if she came home too preoccupied. Rubbing his bum shoulder, Taylor smiled, considering the job at least three-quarters done, then headed back toward the spare bedroom and some less arm-intensive work.

He stopped where the kitchen gave way to the living room and the hall, suddenly aware that he could see both the good sofa and at least half of the ratty comforter covering the full-sized bed in the “office,” but neither of the pooches.

Taylor didn’t expect to hear them. Dreyfuss and Scheider both kept the same kind of nocturnal hours he did when he was at home; it would take more than a few days of him being on the road or laid up to undo habits reinforced by several years of Taylor idly playing with or harassing them into the wee hours while working at the computer or watching TV. They might rouse themselves to join him when he went outside to sneak a butt or if the FedEx girl who always brought treats knocked on the door, but otherwise, the Yorkies displayed the sort of daytime laziness usually reserved for cats, or at least bigger (and older) canines.

But they weren’t befouling the couch they seemed to love simply because they weren’t supposed to be on it, and they weren’t in their usual positions atop the end of the guest bed visible from the hall (from which they could casually raise their heads to see who was moving around the house, then decide they didn’t care).

Taylor frowned. He went down the hall into the spare bedroom. The comforter was twisted and heaped into the familiar circular nests, but unoccupied. He arched his spine to take a look in the master bedroom–it popped with disuse, and his right leg gave a minor grumbling throb–even though the dogs couldn’t manage the leap onto the big bed. He even sort of remembered blowing Dreyfuss off earlier in the morning.

It was likewise empty.

Which left the bathtub, where the pooches sometimes drank from the drippy faucet–another oddly feline quirk.

In the spare bedroom/office, the Gamblers had been shuffled off in favor of The Clash, who had been shuffled off in favor of Waylon Jennings. “Rainy Day Women” gave way to a power-pop tune Taylor didn’t immediately recognize as he stepped into the bathroom.

The far end of the shower curtain was bunched four or five inches short of where the tub met the wall, a sure sign that either Renee had been running late this morning, or at least one of the dogs had been at the faucet. Taylor couldn’t hear any lapping; he couldn’t hear much beyond the song. The passive part of his brain scrolled as it tried to come up with the name of the artist. The active part of his brain tried to break through the surface of Lake Percocet and let him know that weird feeling building where his backbone met his skull wasn’t just the result of his being a little bit high.

He pulled the shower curtain back.

Two-thirds of Dreyfuss lay strewn at the deep end of the tub, covering the drain that had, Taylor struggled to assume, already swallowed the other third.

Brown and wet and red.

Matted and torn.

Missing things.

His poleaxed mind reached crazily, disconnected, for anything else. Out of nowhere, the name of the song came clear; it was “Bright Future in Sales,” by Fountains of Wayne.

For a crazy, stoned second, Taylor couldn’t decide whether to throw up in the handy toilet, or go turn off the music first, and then come back and be sick in perhaps more respectful silence. He made the wrong decision, got halfway to the spare bedroom before he had to double back and yark up his iced tea and bewildered revulsion.

The decision to turn off the tunes before he took a second look in the tub was much easier to make. He made it into the spare bedroom, knocked the computer keyboard’s space bar with the heel of his hand to pause the music, and was standing in the center of the room freaking out when he realized he could hear Scheider scrabbling on the hardwood underneath the guest bed. Bedding? Scratching? Pulling a long forgotten toy out from behind the old turntable and the box of CDs and the framed concert posters and whatever the hell else was under there that he’d forgotten about?

Taylor fervently hoped it was any of those things, and not Scheider gamely trying to bury the bits he’d ripped from his litter-mate for later snacking.

What the hell happened?

“Scheider? Shy-baby?”

The scrabbling stopped.

No way he did that to Dreyfuss.

They didn’t fight; they just didn’t. No squabbles at the food bowls, no snarls if one was getting a little more scratchins from Renee than the other or if they got too close together while Taylor teased them with a dangling treat. Taylor tried to think of a scenario that could possibly lead to Dreyfuss and Scheider scrapping to the death and, barring rabies, came up empty.

Rabies.

He back-stepped awkwardly out of the room, eyeing the bed, thinking that a little more scrabbling would cut way down on the creepy factor right about now. Thinking about the hole behind the sink cabinet, how big it was, how big something might be and still get through it. Thinking about how long it took for an animal to start showing signs of the disease.

Hours? Days? A week?

He wouldn’t have known even if he hadn’t spent the last three days doped to the gills.

Taylor continued backwards down the hall, past the open bathroom door, eyed the shower curtain’s festive pastel circles and whorls. He couldn’t remember pulling it closed. He went in, knocked the toilet seat cover down with a wave of his hand, sat. He took several deep breaths, and turned on the sink’s cold handle, sure in some undefined way the continuous sound of the water would help.

Then he leaned over, pulled the shower curtain back, and took a good look at what was left of his dog.

You should be getting a broom or a rake or a fucking power drill from the garage–you know that, right? You should be standing outside in the yard with your phone to your ear, talking to an exterminator or Animal Control or, better yet, one of those county-certified rednecks who drives around in a custom-painted pickup taking alligators out of people’s yards. Right?

Yeah, he knew, but oh man oh shit it was Dreyfuss it was his dog and something had torn out his guts and his eyes and eaten them.

He asked his brain to just give him a minute, please, to understand that neither of them was exactly at his best at the moment and they couldn’t grieve and run and kick righteous pet-avenging ass all at the same time anyway, okay? He pleaded for a minute, just a minute to try and get it together, to climb out of Lake Percocet, towel off, and deal with what was obviously some sort of emergency.

The part of his brain that had never liked the dope as much as the rest of him opined that maybe dealing with an emergency was a task best left to the professionals. It wasn’t a very big part of his brain, though, so Taylor ignored it and sat on the toilet for several minutes, tears blurring his vision but never quite spilling over the lip of his lower eyelid, trying to process everything.

For a while, the idea of getting Dreyfuss’ remains out of the bathtub seemed to be the most important thing. The notion swam into his consciousness and grew huge, until the variables began to pile up–to bury him in the backyard before Renee got home, to put him in the freezer until Renee got home and then hold some sort of, what, some sort of memorial service, to take him to a lab where they could tell Taylor what killed him and whether or not the dog had been poisoned with some infectious disease, and fuck, to clean up the mess in the tub–and crowd the simple imperative that spawned them out. To distract himself from the unpleasantness, Taylor turned to happier memories of Dreyfuss chasing a deftly tossed rubber skull from the living room into the bathroom; of Dreyfuss jumping up on that vain moron Danielle’s skirt, tearing it and causing her to decline to attend Renee’s birthday party at Ceviche; of Dreyfuss watching Scheider watching a monkey make barking noises on TV, all keyed up and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Taylor was simultaneously remembering the time Dreyfuss shat in the center of a red circle on a Twister mat they’d left out and examining the moral implications of his jones for more iced tea when he heard Scheider resume scratching at the hardwood under the guest room bed.

The scritchings became less frantic, less staccato. They began to run together, forming an amorphous and somehow stealthy series of dragging rasps and dampened thumps. They began to sound closer.

Taylor was suddenly very sorry they’d started up again at all.

He lifted himself off the toilet too quickly, shot out a hand to steady himself, looked around frantically for anything that vaguely resembled a defensive weapon, and settled on the toilet brush. He hadn’t been aware that they owned a toilet brush. His eyes shot wildly between the moist and matted thing in the bathtub and the hall beyond the open bathroom doorway.

That’s not Scheider, his numb and overtaxed mind pointed out. And if you see it in the doorway, it’s over. If you see it in the doorway, we’ve got no place to go.

It was true. But it didn’t exactly spur Taylor into the hallway to do battle. He didn’t kid himself that he could handle a rabid raccoon, or even a dying broke-back possum pulling its useless hindquarters along behind it–which was pretty much what it sounded like–just now. He was injured and stoned and paralyzed with grief and fear.

Then he remembered that whatever was out there had maybe killed Dreyfuss, and he lurched unsteadily into the hall and toward the guest room with something approaching purpose.

It took several seconds to process what he saw.

It was Scheider in the room, halfway between the bed and the door. Taylor grinned, very nearly in shock, to see him. He instinctively continued toward the animal, even as his grin began to falter in painful, terraced stages almost immediately as the things that were wrong about what he was seeing clicked into place.

Click. Scheider was coming at him backwards, ass-first, in a slow, jerky, disjointed series of motions that reminded him of a marionette conducted by a spastic or seizing puppet master.

Click. Scheider’s hindquarters were the only part of the Yorkie actually moving, up and enthusiastic while the rest lay boneless, a sickening parody of the famous Yoga stretch in reverse.

Click. Scheider was leaving an awful lot of himself in his erratic wake, a viscous, occasionally chunky liquid trail that led all the way back beneath the guest bed’s dust ruffle.

Taylor would’ve gone to the dog, would’ve knelt and cradled him, whispering baby talk while he tried to be gentle and searched for his cell phone, would’ve gladly assented to paying any price to see at least one of the Yorkies put back together again. He was almost there, his thoughts seeming to grow sharp the way a drunk driver’s do when the flashing lights come on behind, making a plan. He was starting to lean down, caught halfway between relief and revulsion, almost willing to ignore everything that was wrong with this picture, when Scheider’s motivated backside tore open with a sound like someone found a zipper in an overripe pumpkin, and Renee’s Pest surged free of the carcass.

Still moving toward it, Taylor unwillingly received the impression of a chitinous gore-streaked body, dark and greasy with the dogs’ innards. Buglike, lobsterlike. Segmented, multi-legged, multi-jointed. Spiky. Glistening, almost oily. Alien.

Two impossibly large eyes rose and canted forward over the carapace on stalks like twin scorpions’ tails. As he watched, a quick feathered flicker cleared Scheider’s blood from the left one.

Unable to quit his forward momentum, Taylor juked left toward the doorway to the master bedroom. The jamb interrupted his damaged right shoulder like a swung bat, spinning him yowling to his knees. Behind him, the dragging turned back into stealthy scurrying, somehow louder than his screams. It encouraged him up and onto the high, giant bed, where he spun, his shoulder bellowing, to make sure he hadn’t missed the thing catching his bare ankle, numb with shock, and brought it up with him, where it could feast at its leisure.

The backwards scorpion thing with the nictating eyelids wasn’t on the bed.

It wasn’t in the room.

How stoned am I, really? he wondered, even as he pushed himself back against the headboard, even as he heard the skeletal telegraph of The Pest’s approach as it entered the bedroom below his field of vision. Warm Florida sunlight flowed in through the window behind him. Out there, in that warm Florida sunlight, his street was quiet, kids at school, folks at work.

Can I really be in here, trapped by a mutant lobster from H.R. Giger’s sketchbook that ate my dogs, when it’s so normal out there?

The skittering stopped.

The comforter slid the slightest bit down and over the foot of the bed.

Taylor raised his left hand in front of his face, realized it still held the toilet brush.

A long, dark, ugly, multi-knuckled appendage unfurled over the edge of the bed like bony oil. Impaled upon it, up near the third or fourth joint, was a sodden scrap of tough fabric Taylor was suddenly sure came from a bag that once held the kind of peanuts they put out on the bar at shitty southwestern roadhouses, or used to, anyway.

The eyes came up and over next.

*****

It was nearly dark outside when Renee finally got home, and completely dark in the house. Taylor would’ve been amused to know that, navigating the shadows with a thick sheaf of files in one arm and her purse in the other, she actually did kick the vat of joint compound he’d left out. Not that she was fooled by its false implication.

“Nice try, Taylor,” she muttered, then more loudly, as she set her stuff on the butcher-block island:

“Baby?”

Renee reached over the range to fire up the microwave’s light, glancing down at the cabinet concealing the hole in the wall and shuddering slightly.

“Sheider? Peanut? Dreyfuss?”

It was a small house, and Renee, who bought it a couple of years before she and Taylor got together, knew every step. She headed down the darkened hallway and peeked in on the shape of her husband in the bed they shared without bothering to turn on another light. As she turned, a small half-smile forming on her face, her right shoe stuck in something tacky on the floor. Her hand moved automatically inside the bathroom to flick the switch as her foot came up; the sudden glare caught a sticky red goo on the scuffed-to-tan bottom of her patent leather mary jane, and more on the floor.

“Um, what the hell, Taylor?”

Barbecue sauce? General Tso’s chicken?

She leaned in, reached behind the shower curtain without looking and turned the water on. A disquieting thought came to her and she glanced again toward the lumpy form on the bed.

“Are you all right, baby? Did you throw up?”

Then she went into the bathroom to wet down a washcloth, confident she would know what was up shortly; in a shaft of light darting from the bathroom across the narrow hall’s hardwood and syrupy stains into their bedroom, she’d seen Taylor’s body start to move.

THE END