Fugue, page 12
One of my new alarm spells sounded when they turned off the main road and headed toward the gate. A quick query confirmed it wasn’t Bronze. She was parked outside Jerry’s Lanes, watching the cars go by on the street—Oh, and next time, could we get a Mercury? She was parked across from one. The front grille looked very nice. I agreed we could. She also wanted to know if I needed her to come back? Phoebe wouldn’t be done for at least an hour. I decided not. Better to be sure Phoebe had transportation.
After the initial turn off the main road, there’s a gradual curve through the trees. The rest of the driveway is a straight shot to the gate. The Chuckleheads didn’t roar down it and ram. No. They moved up to the gate and looked around before backing up to take a run at it. Chuck hit the gate at about twenty miles an hour. They crashed through like they did before, smashing the gate to pieces.
The hidden grating folded down, dropping the front of the car into the pit. It didn’t flip, exactly, but it did go nose-down and vertical. Fortunately for them, I didn’t line the walls with concrete, so the dirt soaked up some of the momentum. This didn’t help the passengers a whole lot. The guys in the back seat were catapulted onto the lawn—lucky them. The front-seaters also came out, not quite so quickly, and tumbled on the paved portion of the driveway where it forks left and right into the circle. Good thing they were wearing those leather jackets, since they weren’t wearing seat belts. They could have used helmets, too.
Steam geysered up from the pit as the radiator broke open on impact. The concrete wedge at the bottom worked a treat.
Banged up, bruised, battered, and bleeding from various impacts and abrasions, they pulled themselves together and took stock. By some miracle—not mine—nothing was broken. Hurt, yes, but nobody needed anything more than compression bandages, ice, gauze, and maybe a sling. No more than a dozen stitches, total.
So far.
Gus was practically dancing, watching through the window with me, so I told him to go ahead. The big bundle of fluff tore out through the flap of his doggie door in back, circled the house, and paused as he came in sight of his targets.
Okay, I’m going to take a slight detour and go into a bit more detail on a small bear—I mean, a large dog—named Gus.
Phoebe, age five, came home covered in dirt, trailing bits of leaves and other outdoorsy materials. She looked as though she crawled under a fence, which, in fact, she had. In her arms she held a puppy. It hadn’t even opened its eyes, yet. It was a fuzzy little thing and seemed only too happy to cling to Phoebe. It’s sometimes hard to tell the ancestry of a puppy, but my guess was “mongrel.” It was a big puppy, though, for being newborn, and the size of the paws said he would be huge.
“His name is Gustavus Bartholomew Goldeneyes McFluffins Kent,” she told me, positively. No doubt she was thinking about a name for him on the walk home. I felt certain it was a long walk, so she had a lot of time to think of a good, long name.
I did some mental juggling. Affording a dog was not the issue. Did we need a dog? Phoebe was old enough—and far and away mentally developed enough—to have a pet. If she had a dog to romp around with, she could play outside more, and play more safely. I had spells to keep track of her, but a dog might make the difference in an emergency…
And she’d gone to great lengths for it already.
Phoebe, under mild questioning, gave me a good picture of how she came by a puppy. Across the fence from our property at the time, Mr. Ito had a farm. Henry, Mr. Ito’s hired hand, was responsible for getting rid of the mongrel pups. Presumably, Mr. Ito was interested in breeding his purebred golden retriever to a proper sire. Some roaming mutt was not on his acceptable list.
Phoebe, upon discovering the proposed fate of the puppies, immediately tried to defend them. She was wearing her favorite romper—a blue skirt with white stars, a red-and-yellow-striped top—and the cardboard bracers she made. Sadly, this pint-sized Wonder Woman wasn’t up to challenging a full-grown farm hand. Thus, she was unsuccessful in the larger sense, but did manage to rescue one and flee.
I’m guessing she could have asked for one, maybe even all of them, but how was she to know? They were helpless little things and she tried to save them. She’s a good kid. Maybe her comic books were a good thing. I don’t know.
Nobody chased her, but she didn’t know it. She thought she was being pursued between Mr. Ito’s greenhouses and through the cornfield all the way back to our fence. She ran like her life—or the puppy’s life—depended on it. She never even considered abandoning the puppy and she never stopped running. She reached Mr. Ito’s barbed wire fence, handed the puppy through first, and squirmed through herself. Then she negotiated the chain-link fence we had at the time by pushing hard and squirming under, since she couldn’t climb it with a puppy.
I sent Phoebe upstairs to clean up. I took charge of Gustavus Bartholomew Goldeneyes McFluffins Kent.
There are issues with snatching a newborn puppy. The downside of this is the sheer volume of care involved. It’s time-consuming. It’s demanding. It’s like caring for a newborn baby, which it is.
Phoebe was good about it, though. Keeping the puppy—excuse me. Keeping Gus warm was a priority. Feeding him every couple of hours came next. Then there’s cleaning up the puppy mess.
I had her do as much as possible, but there were limits. She has always been highly advanced for her age—possibly due to a lot of psychic conversation from almost the day she was born—but she was still only five. It was, therefore, more demanding on me than on her. I couldn’t pop off at night to get things done. Someone had to keep an eye on the puppy.
Oh, well. At least it slept a lot.
Gus is, however, Phoebe’s dog. This is right and proper. She rescued him, so she’s responsible for him. All I do is maintenance. For example, I installed the dog flap in the back door, so she doesn’t have to let him out. Meaning I don’t have to let him out. I also expanded the dog flap every other month while he was growing. He’s a big dog. His parent breeds aren’t small to begin with and I might have done minor modifications to him during his growth years.
I can’t leave well enough alone. I know, I know. But Phoebe is huggably attached to her dog and I’m not looking forward to the day when she has to say goodbye to him. If I’m honest, I also wanted him qualified as an attack dog.
Guard. Guard dog. I meant “guard dog.”
I did some checking with Mr. Ito. Gus was, indeed, a mix of golden retriever and what was probably German shepherd. My additions made him look as though there was mastiff in his ancestry, maybe Newfoundland.
He’s not fat. He really is big-boned. And big muscled.
I also did work on his brain while he was growing up, continuing with my previous experiments. It’s really just a variant on a healing spell. It gently encourages growth. However, when applied to something young enough to still be developing a brain, it seems—let me stress that: seems—to help it develop as far as possible. So Gus is smarter than the average dog. Since I have no idea how to give an IQ test to a dog, I have no way to measure how much smarter.
As an aside, I’ve done a lot of experimental work with brains, from octopus to dog to monkey brains. It hasn’t made me confident enough to do anything with Phoebe, but I do feel I’m more prepared for my bliss-addiction experiments, whenever I finally get around to them.
Since Gus is an atta—I mean, a guard dog, his collar has several utilitarian enchantments if it ever comes down to cases. It’s hard to see the collar, though. Gus has a lot of fur. A lot of fur. There’s a cleaning spell covering the whole house specifically for dog hair, plus a spell on the doggie door to do a brush-and-clean every time he comes in.
I’ve caught him going in and out just to get his fur brushed.
Gus knows I’m the alpha predator and leader of this five-person pack—counting Firebrand and Bronze, of course—but he loves Phoebe, as is right and proper.
He’s also well aware of his duties. First and foremost: guard Phoebe. Whenever she played in the yard or went off into the woods or sneaked into Mr. Ito’s cornfield, Gus was right there with her.
His other duties are entirely secondary. When at home, he guards the house and grounds if Phoebe doesn’t need his immediate attention. It’s a simple priority list.
If you threaten Phoebe, your partner can rob the place unmolested by the dog. I don’t recommend it. The dog won’t take long to deal with your partner. This will end in tears. Tears and bloodshed. And an abundance of dog food because I have a deep freeze and no compunctions.
If that isn’t bad enough, I’ll get an alert from an alarm spell, Bronze, or Phoebe herself. Phoebe will defend herself, and do it well. Escaping means you’re outside the house and in Bronze’s territory. And if by some miracle you escape Bronze, there’s me, an irate father with a flaming sword, both of which have gobs of attitude.
The dog will instantly become the least of your problems.
Ever since he was big enough to not be squished, Phoebe has allowed him to sleep in her room. This causes him to smell of honeysuckle, Phoebe’s favorite fragrance. He usually takes up half the bed and Phoebe doesn’t mind. Her stuffed animals couldn’t compete—not even Mr. Stuffins, her guardian teddy bear. Gus sleeps on the bed. Mr. Stuffins sits on a shelf with a bunch of other stuffed toys. To be fair, Gus is more animate and responsive, but I’m pretty sure Mr. Stuffins is more dangerous.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. And, for the love of your physical integrity, you do not mess with Mr. Stuffins. I put a lot of work into her teddy bear.
Gus loves intruders. He thinks of them as mobile chew toys. He likes to play Fetch, but he loves to play Chase! He also enjoys Catch, Drag, and Maul. Sadly, nobody wants to play with him. Not more than once.
Then the Chuckleheads volunteered.
With the Chuckwagon nose-down in the pit trap, Gus sat back on his haunches and howled, raising up a noise like a pack of timber wolves with a full moon, but deeper. It’s not normal hunting behavior, but it is a learned behavior. I taught him to do it. Even if an alarm spell failed, the collar amplifies his howl enough to wake the semi-dead. It also scares the hell out of anyone who hears it. Something in the primitive section of the human brain registers the howling as a danger. It raises hackles. It releases adrenalin. It makes people channel the spirits of their monkey ancestors. They want to climb the tallest tree in sight or sprint for the nearest one.
He lowered his head and tore paw-sized divots in the lawn as he charged, barking with a deep, chesty voice like something three times his size.
Three of the chuckleheads channeled their monkey ancestors and scrambled back to the car and up it, ignoring the steam still rising from the pit. Most of it had blown away, but streamers of it still wafted away on the breeze. One of the Chuckleheads—Zippo, I think—ran through the shattered gate and down the dirt driveway. Gus sprinted past the car, past Zippo, and skidded around in a sudden cloud of dust into a low-down, snarling posture, showing all his teeth and snarling. Zippo changed his mind about outrunning the hellhound and, screaming, headed back to the car, Gus barking and snapping at his heels, herding him the whole way.
Four almost-grown men can sit on the back of a hotrod version of a Model A Ford sedan, but it would help if the thing had a hardtop. Gus prowled around the pit, snarling and stalking and slavering. They clambered over the car and each other, trying to find a static equilibrium. At least the rear fenders were intact, although they deformed alarmingly. They’re not meant to be load-bearing.
Chuck pulled out a small revolver and braced himself. The car had rocked backward, tilting about ten degrees. He stood on the back of the front seats and leaned into the rear seats. He fired all six rounds at Gus, which told me two things. First, he’s an idiot to have a fully-loaded revolver stuffed down his pants. Second, he came armed. The first one was already obvious. The second one was likely to get him killed if the first one didn’t.
Gus knows what guns are. He acclimated to them slowly, but Phoebe and I practiced a lot, so he understands gunfire. The noise doesn’t bother him anymore. On the other hand, I recognized being shot would bother him both deeply and permanently, so I decided to do something about it well in advance.
His collar is two layers of leather riveted together along the edges. Inside, there are spell crystals. Some of these are experimental spells to help keep him healthy and offset the effects of aging. They’re based in medical science, not the usual share-the-age effects of the Rethvan magicians. Gus is about twelve years old, but you wouldn’t know it.
Other crystals are for times like these. A simple, low-cost spell detected something fast about to hit him and activated other spells. The first was a momentum-sharing spell, much like the ones my knights used against cannonballs. It might knock Gus down, back, or away, but whatever it was wouldn’t hurt him.
Well, I take that back. Being caught between a car and a wall will still squish him, but otherwise he’s probably going to be okay.
This spell crystal expends its power as an initial, emergency defense and goes into recharge mode. Another crystal activates a deflection spell and maintains the effect for a while. I prefer deflection spells. They cost much less. They also don’t run the risk of knocking me off my feet when I’m hit by something. I can’t feel the impact, so I don’t react properly to sudden changes in momentum. I really need to work out more refinements for the thing.
The other thing about my momentum-transfer spell is how obvious it is. Shoot me—or Gus—and the bullet simply stops and drops. There are times when this is a wonderful idea. Most of the time, it simply means the ignorant peasants try to burn you at the stake. Inconvenient, especially if there are a lot of them. It doesn’t help if you’re flammable. If not, they can be dismayingly imaginative.
The first bullet encountered the momentum-transfer spell and thumped lightly against Gus. It dropped to the grass. The other five mysteriously missed. Chuck looked more than a little panicky. The Chuckleheads assumed he missed all six times, but Chuck knew he didn’t. He had nothing in his experience to prepare him for bulletproof attack dogs. He started yelling obscenities about evil monster dogs while the other three shouted at him about the gun. They didn’t know he carried one and were concerned about his intent in bringing it. The monkeys were rather shrill in their chattering and screaming.
I wasn’t concerned about his intent, but I was curious. Not very, but a little. Did he intend to brandish it in an attempt to intimidate me? Or did he intend all along to use it? I tried very hard to concentrate on his possible motives in bringing a gun, because if I didn’t, I’d think about the fact the son of a bitch just shot my dog. Gus wasn’t hurt, no, but the bastard shot my dog.
Okay, fine. Phoebe’s dog. She wasn’t present to be outraged, so I did it for her.
Calm. Centered. Focused. Don’t think about that part.
One of the other spells in the collar was an alert to me, but I was already watching. Chuck was out of ammunition, at least on his person. There might be extra bullets in the car, somewhere, but he wasn’t climbing down to search for them.
I strolled across the lawn, inside the circle drive, shotgun cradled sideways in my arms, and came to a halt about ten feet away. Gus quit circling his treed varmints and came to sit by my side, panting happily. He was proud of catching them and I scratched behind his ears, telling him what a good dog he was. It helped me relax from thinking about how Chuck shot him.
Chuck tried to climb down. Gus snarled and barked and ran for him. Chuck practically flew back to his perch on the seat. This rocked the car a little and raised considerable chatter from the treed primates. Gus stayed almost under him for a moment, snarling until he was sure the dipshit got the message, then trotted happily back to me.
“Hey! Uh… Mr. Kent? Sir? Can we come down?” I think it was Mark, since I was only certain about which one was Chuck. I didn’t care to memorize any of them.
“Sure,” I called back, “if you want to be eaten or shot.” I pumped a shell into the chamber. “You boys are in a world of trouble, you know that, right? Especially you, Chucklehead, for trying to shoot my dog.”
“Fuck you, old man!” Chuck shouted back. “You busted up my car!” He threw the pistol at me, hard. I swatted it out of the air with the shotgun stock and the pistol bounced into the grass. I didn’t want it, but it would be evidence, later. Chuck wasn’t getting it back. Gus tensed, but I signaled him not to fetch—nor attack.
“I’m not the one who drove it into a hole, moron,” I shot back. “And, last I checked, you just drove my car into a hole.”
His response was equally vulgar and somewhat repetitive.
“Has it occurred to you the position you’re in, boy?” I asked, calmly. “You didn’t tell anyone you were headed out here, now did you?” I walked closer, Gus at my heel, to stand at the edge of the pit. “All I have to do is shoot the four of you and bury you.” I raised my weapon and took aim at Chuck’s face from a range of maybe four feet.
“You and I already had a discussion about mistakes,” I told him, my tone growing colder and more vicious with every word. “Did you tell your friends how I would make your deaths look like an accident? Or did you keep them in the dark, tricking them into coming with you without understanding the risk? Did they know they were putting their lives in your hands, butterfingers? Or did you conveniently forget to tell them you were going to get them killed?”
I moved my aim from ashen face to ashen face, slowly, as I spoke, returning my aim to Chuck.
