It stared at her with frightened eyes. Its dry tongue licked at cracked lips.
Gutsy used her free hand to wipe the tears away and clear her eyes. Behind her, Gordo struck the ground with his iron hooves and gave a shake of his big head. Gutsy heard the high, plaintive call of a carrion bird, and she glanced up to see a dozen vultures circling the spot where she and the dog stood. Whether they were drawn by the silent form wrapped in sheets in the back of the cart or by the dog, who looked more than three-quarters dead himself, Gutsy couldn’t tell. The moment stretched as she and the animal studied each other.
“Not going to hurt you if you don’t try and hurt me,” said Gutsy.
The coydog looked at her warily. It moved nervously and she saw that it was a male.
“You look like crap, boy,” said Gutsy. “You got any bites on you?”
The dog cocked his head sideways as if considering those words. Gutsy saw that there was blood dried black around a deep cut on his neck below the thick leather collar. She tightened her grip on the machete. Dogs couldn’t become los muertos, as far as she knew, but the world kept changing and it never changed for the better. There were living-dead wild hogs and stories about other kinds of animals that had crossed over and crossed right back again. Father Esteban said he saw a donkey who was dead but walking around. Spider and his foster-sister, Alethea, swore they’d seen a dead puma chase down a deer and kill it. Old Mr. Urrea said that he’d seen a bunch of los muertos gibbons in the San Antonio Zoo. The world was broken, so nothing could be taken for granted.
The coydog took a tentative step forward, wobbling and uncertain. He whimpered a little and stood there, trembling. Gutsy kept her weapon ready, even though the pitiful sight of the animal twisted a knife in her heart. The long scars on the dog’s back and sides looked like whip marks; and the marks on his face were from dog bites. No doubt about it. Spider used to have an old pit bull who had the same kind of scars, remnants from dogfights. It made Gutsy angry and confused to think that anyone would want to make dogs fight each other, sometimes to the death. Wasn’t there already enough pain and death in the world? People, she thought—and not for the first time—were often cruel and stupid.
The coydog took another step, and Gutsy held her ground. The animal was maybe fifty pounds and she was ninety, and a lot of it was lean muscle. She knew how fast she was and how skilled she was with the machete.
“Don’t make me do something bad here, dog,” she said.
The coydog whined again.
He took one more step . . . and then his eyes rolled high and white and he fell over and lay still.
Gutsy squatted down, the machete across her knees, and waited. Patience and observation were important to her. She hated doing anything without thinking it through. Even mercy shouldn’t be allowed to run faster than common sense.
She watched the dog’s ribs, saw the steady rise and fall, the slight shudder with each breath. The birds circled lower, their shadows drifting across the graves and across the dog’s body. Gutsy didn’t care about them, either. Birds wouldn’t attack her; and even if they did, she had her weapon.
The dog continued to breathe—badly, with effort—but it was all he did.
Gutsy straightened and walked in a big circle around the animal. Twice. The first time she looked outward, making sure that the dog was not part of some elaborate and nasty trick. The second time she looked at the dog, watching for signs of movement. Dogs didn’t play tricks as clever as this, not even smart dogs.
Finally she went to the cart, fetched a bottle of water and her first aid kit, gave Gordo a reassuring pat on the neck, then went back and knelt by the dog. She put on a pair of canvas work gloves before she touched him, though. Then she checked him over. As soon as she touched him, the dusty gray color of his coat changed and she realized that he was actually a dark-haired dog covered in ash. She brushed a lot of it away, revealing a coat that was almost as black as shadows. The coat made him look heavier than he was.
“You don’t have a lot of meat on you, do you?” she asked. “Los muertos wouldn’t get more than a snack off you.”
A vulture shadow swept past again and Gutsy glanced up. They were close and hopeful and hungry.
“Not today, Señor Buitre,” she said. There was no anger in her voice. Vultures were being vultures. This was what they did when they could. “Go find something else. Vete, vete.”
The bird didn’t go away. He kept circling.
It struck Gutsy that the shadow of the vulture was actually less dark than the coydog, as if he was more of a real shadow. Some of the lines came drifting to her from an old song her mother used to sing. “Sombra.” The shadow.
“No,” she told herself firmly. “You are not going to name him. No way. That’s stupid. Don’t even think of getting attached.”
Gutsy poured a little water on her gloved fingers and touched them to the dog’s mouth, moistening the lips and the lolling tongue. The animal twitched and, after a few moments, took a weak lick. If the coydog minded the roughness of the gloves, he didn’t seem to want to complain. Gutsy dribbled more water and the dog licked and licked. His eyes opened and looked at her with a mixture of fear, need, and a pathetic desperation.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all okay, Sombra.”
Then she heard her own words as if they were an echo. Sombra. She winced. But despite her firm decision to the contrary, Sombra he became.
After a little more water she capped the bottle and set it aside, then continued her examination of the coydog’s injuries. There were a lot of them, and she wasn’t positive the animal had much life left in him. Maybe all he needed was a little kindness before death came whispering. Gutsy could understand that.
What mattered most, though, was the fact that none of the many injuries seemed to be from human bites or boar bites. There was no evident fever, either. Sombra was hurt, but none of his wounds were infected. Which meant he wasn’t infected.
“Well,” she said, “that’s something, anyway.”
The leather collar was buckled on, but the fittings were rusty and it took Gutsy a few minutes to unfasten it. Removing it revealed a vicious red band of hairless skin, and it sickened her to realize that the dog had probably worn that collar all its life. She studied it, noting the workmanship to determine whether it was from before the End or something made in the after times.
“After,” she murmured, talking to herself as she often did. “Good leatherwork, though.” It was two inches wide, a quarter-inch thick, and ringed by sharp studs that had been painted flat black. There was a name burned into the band between two studs. KILLER.
She gave a dismissive snort. Stupid name. The kind of unimaginative name an actual killer would hang on a dog forced to fight for its life against other dogs, and she was pretty sure that’s what had happened. She thought of a few names she’d like to burn into a leather collar and cinch around the neck of whoever used to own this dog. None of them were nice names. Some of them might have gotten her slapped by . . .
Mama.
And just that fast it was all back.
The reason Gutsy was here. The grief, the bottomless pain. She closed her eyes and clenched the collar in two strong brown fists. She heard a sound and whirled to see a vulture come fluttering down to land on the wooden side of her work cart.