Muffled but loud barks explode from the house to the truck’s right. Men shout: “Hey, we got one!” “It’s pissed!” “He’s a big one.” “He wants to dig right through that door.”
Standing on tiptoes, Ramola is able to see over a row of hedges to the modest Cape-style home, painted yellow with white trim, single-car garage attached. Two dormers rise out of the charcoal-black shingle roof and a single redbrick chimney splits the home in the middle. An American flag and a yellow Gadsden flag with its coiled snake flank the front door. Also on either side of the front door are two of Dan’s men, their faces pressed against the sidelight windows. A third stands on the brick front landing.
Dan is half-in, half-out of the truck. He asks, “Are people home?”
“No one’s answering! Car might be in the garage.” The man in the tan shirt bangs on the door with an open palm and shouts, “Hello, this is Animal Control. We’d like to have a word. Hey, anyone home?” With his other hand he holds the pole with the loop at the end.
The dog’s barks are heavy and deep, varying in rhythm; quick staccato yaps mixing with longer, haunting bays.
Dan steps back from the truck then stops, unsure of where to be. He says, “Okay, if they answer, be up-front. Don’t lie to them. It’ll go better. If no one answers, um, just wait. Wait until I get back. I’ll make this quick.” He ducks into the cab and shuts the door.
Luis says to Josh, “Are those assholes doing what I think they’re doing?”
The Tree laughs, beams an I-thought-you’d-never-ask smile, and says, “You want to stop this virus? You need to give it less places to jump to, right, Doc?” He says “Doc” as though it’s a slur. “Quarantine the humans, cull the animal vectors. Sorry to say, pets are animal vectors. It’s not nice work, but—” He lets the “but” hang, lets it linger. It’s typical, reactionary, barbaric reasoning, all too familiar, and historically proven to fail time and again.
Dan starts the engine and backs up slowly. The truck bed vibrates under Ramola’s feet.
Ramola says to the Tree, “Killing healthy animals has never been effective in halting rabies outbreaks. Vaccinating them has.”
The truck’s horn blasts twice and simultaneously the truck stops short, pitching Ramola, Josh, and Luis toward the bikes and rear gate. Ramola keeps her feet but the two teens stumble and fall next to the bikes. There are two more horn blasts, loud and piercing. Ramola scrambles back to the cab and peers through the rear window. Dan and Natalie are arguing. Ramola knocks on the window then realizes there’s a sliding panel of glass about the width of her head surrounded by a black, metal frame. She works it open.
Natalie presses the horn one more time with her left hand, and points out the windshield with her right and says, “Big bad coyotes.”
Two mangy, battle-scarred coyotes trot down the road toward the truck. One is considerably larger than the other. The big one trots with a noticeable limp. Ramola stands for a better look over the cab. The longer she stares at the bigger animal the more she is convinced, despite the improbability, it is the same one that dove into their ambulance. The sight of this sick, wounded, undeterred animal fills her with near-incapacitating dread and awe; an emotional-level recognition, or reconciliation, that the gears of the universe will always grind its adherents—apostles and apostates alike—in its teeth.
The Tree whoops, shouts, “Game time!” and fist-bumps his partner. They leave the trailer and walk into the middle of the road, in front of the truck, readying their crossbows.
The coyotes’ front shoulders are in a permanent up-shrug, heads lolling low to the ground, their mouths dripping saliva. They snarl, bark, and cry. When their weaving paths overlap they snap at and bite each other, which doesn’t slow their progress. They continue inexorably forward as a recombinant organism, driven by their relentless new instinct.
Ramola says into the cab, “Dan, we can still go, correct? Surely your friends can handle this,” hoping it’s the right thing to say to get the truck rolling again. Her hand taps a hurry-up SOS on the cab’s roof.
Natalie says, “Where coyotes? There coyotes,” and laughs.
Dan begins backing up again, aiming for the mouth of the yellow house’s driveway.
One of the camo men shouts, “Dan, you’re gonna miss the fun part!”
Two men, including the one carrying the hunting rifle, trot down the opposite shoulder, toward the approaching coyotes. Josh and Luis have pulled out their own weapons and are conspicuously quiet.
As the truck’s rear end crawls up the inclined drive, the men at the yellow house back away from the front door, shouting and pointing at one another. The front door opens and the dog’s barks increase in volume exponentially. A tan-and-black blur launches from the darkened interior of the house, knocking the man in the animal control shirt onto his ass. It’s a muscular, broad-shouldered German shepherd, jaws snapping, white-and-pink spittle spooling from its mouth. The dog pivots right and attacks one of the shovel-carrying members of Dan’s group, clamping onto his left calf, biting its way higher up the leg. Undaunted by two solid shovel blows to its side, the dog forces the flailing, screaming man to ground. With his quarry down, the dog tears into his neck and face.
A white man, presumably the one who opened the front door, follows the dog out of house, lurching between the flags and onto the stoop. He is as tall as the Tree, but likely at least a decade younger, and he is awash in blood; arms, legs, torso, cheeks splashed and stained red. There’s so much blood on him it can’t all be his, though some of it must be, as one leg of his joggers is torn and so too one of his shirtsleeves.
