Chapter Two: Mr Gladly is My Dad

I wouldn't call myself old.

Other people, if straw-polled on the street, wouldn't either. To the objective observer, I'm practically in my twenties. I chalk it up to good genes and good grooming.

My morning routine is simple. Brush teeth, floss, shave, splash on some aftershave and a medley of herb-scented facial toners, moisturise, dab on just a touch of styling wax to keep the coiffure roguishly tousled, apply half a can of Axe body spray, pop the collar and I'm out the door.

Joking, of course. There's all the exfoliating business, and I have to pick out an ensemble. Here's a secret: I like vintage clothing. A good bowtie can really set off your eyes. But there's only so much vintage clothing you can wear before you become vintage yourself, so only wear it as accents.

But I know what you're really wondering: exactly how hot is Mr G?

The answer is, hotter than my dad. My dad is old and infirm. So infirm, in fact, that he has to eat food through a tube. Meanwhile, I eat food out of paper bags and occasionally even cartons. I've got speed in spades and strength dribbling out of my sleeves—I was the hydration specialist on my high school baseball team. Even now I voluntarily visit the gym every weekend, just to recce the machines. I'm in the prime of my life.

Not to flex, but my raw physical prowess has gotten me out of a few scrapes in the past. For instance, when something happened a while back. It's gonna be some time before I've cleaned this up for publishing, so it won't actually be 'a while' back. I'll edit a date in later when I remember.

So, a while back, I was hanging out with three of my mates—Percival Quinlan, Jay Harley, and Steve Duncan. We were sitting around Harley's house, shooting the shit and getting progressively more wasted. I think we were celebrating something. I want to say someone got promoted, but I don't think teachers get promoted. Otherwise I'd be like, the CEO of Winslow High by now. Maybe Quinlan got tenure. That sounds right.

"Cheers," Quinlan said. "Cheers to me getting tenure."

"Whatever that is," Harley said. He raised his glass, and wrinkled his nose at the wine he'd been quaffing since 7pm.

Harley is revolving door staff. He subs for basically every class, in between writing his post-grad thesis. Major hipster, wears a lot of denim, appropriates a lot of cultures. He was a pack-a-day smoker when I met him, but recently he's switched to puffing tobacco-flavoured e-cigs and I can't comprehend why.

Harley is the kind of dude who spends the whole day at the park pushing a stroller around in the hopes that some eager single mother will flirt with him under the guise of complimenting his baby. Then, after they've successfully hit it off, he sweeps the blanket off to reveal that there is no baby and never has been. He proceeds to circle the woman with the stroller like a vulture: "You thought my baby was cute. You kept cooing at it, over and over. But all this time it was a bundle of cassava roots in a onesie. How does that make you feel?"

He'd propped himself up indifferently against his bookshelf, which was stocked with a meticulously curated collection of hardcover classics like Infinite Jest, Pale Fire, On the Road ("Kerouac, not McCarthy, pleb"), and Ginsberg poetry anthologies.

I'd seen the spines, but I've never read a book I didn't have to.

"I don't know why I'm still here," Steve fretted, fussing at his sweat-dampened white button-down. "I should have been in bed two hours ago."

Steve was the new history teacher, but he quit pretty early on and went back to Immaculata. No idea why he took off when Snotty Kids Central is an hour's drive away, although rumour has it that his wife just wasn't happy with him working somewhere with a gang problem. That's social stratification for you. He's a stand-up guy if you can get past the fluffy idealism and white picket fence dreams and self-imposed curfews.

I'll tell you what, though. He is boring as all get out. Allow me to pose a hypothetical scenario: Say you lose your arm in a freak accident. Or complications during surgery or whatever, and you have to get it amputated below the elbow. What do you replace your arm with?

Think about this carefully. There is a wrong answer.

Steve would choose a prosthetic arm. Seriously. Out of all the potential replacements—a sawn-off, a drill, a grappling hook, all kinds of Swiss army knife tinkertech bullshit (yes, I read the forums), he'd pick a metallic version of literally the exact same thing he had before, except less functional. I think cyborgs are as awesome as the next person, but we live in a dangerous city. There are limits to what you can do with a claw. Personally, I'd go for a harpoon gun and move dockside. How easy would fishing be if you could shoot spears with a thought?

You'd think Harley was the sexiest of us, because he's the youngest and wears waistcoats instead of condoms. You'd be wrong. Quinlan is the sexiest. We took a vote and he won three out of four. I voted for myself, but even I have to concede defeat. The man's a silver fox.

The phone rang, sparing me from having to make some pithy comment that would succinctly capture my personality. I picked it up so I could moan sensually into it if it turned out to be Harley's grandma or something.

"Hey… uh, hi," said the guy on the other line. Not Harley's grandma, sadly.

"Yeah?" I said. "Who is this?"

"Uh, I have your pizzas."

"Oh, sweet. Guys, pizza's here."

"But—"

"One sec," I said, heading towards the window to peek outside. There was nobody at the door that I could see. "Where are you?"

"Uh, wait, don't open the door."

"The catflap isn't wide enough to fit a pizza box," I said. "Trust me, I've checked."

"No, uh, I mean, don't open the door because there's, uh, there's dogs."

"Dogs?" I turned to my friends. "Delivery guy says there're dogs."

"Some of my neighbours have them, I suppose," Harley said, inspecting his nailjob. "But they should be tied up."

I brought the phone back to my ear. "Aren't the dogs tied up?"

"I meant my neighbours," Harley said.

"No," the guy on the other line said. He paused, and for a moment all that came through was his laboured breathing. "No, uh, these dogs aren't tied up."

Then we heard it: a howl that drew frost from the air.

Then another.

And another.

They went on and on, overlapping, getting louder. This wasn't normal howling. The sound was the aural equivalent of chewing a ball of tinfoil with toothpicks sticking out of it and then swallowing it. It rattled through your teeth and reverberated through your bones, found the part of you that still slept with a nightlight and ground it into kibble.

Worst of all, the howling wasn't just coming from the receiver. It was also coming from outside.

"So, uh, I can get the pizza to you but, uh, you're gonna have to, uh, collect it. I'm, uh, holed up in my truck. A block away."

I relayed the message. We all looked at each other, our skin prickling, our eyes wide. One of us was going to have to walk out there into the dark night, traverse the vast chasm of unspeakable canine-plagued horror that lay between this house and that truck, collect three pizzas, and make the journey back. Alone.

There were two main reasons we picked Steve.

Firstly, he was the least shithoused of all of us. He'd been talking all night about needing to drive home early, needing to see his wife before she went to bed, needing to send his two point five kids to school. I had a couple of classes in the morning, but it wouldn't be the first time I taught hungover. Anyway, he'd only had like three beers, while the rest of us were three steps away from puking our souls out. We reasoned that he'd be most likely to escape, should the worst come to pass and he garnered the attention of the hounds.

Secondly, Steve was and is pathologically afraid of dogs. Genuinely phobic. We used to think he was just allergic, because one time we were having dinner at Quinlan's and Steve excused himself when Quinlan's mom brought out the whippets, but then we caught him trying to pry open the garage door with a crowbar. Man, that was a great night. Quinlan's mom makes exquisite quiches.

I can't emphasise this enough: Steve Duncan is terrified of all members of the genus Canis. He walks the other way when he sees a pomeranian.

So not only would this be exposure therapy for him, it would also be a kind of group therapy for our shared complex that manifests as an itchy, swollen, burning desire to instigate and spectate each other's suffering. We dragged him out from the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink and shoved him out onto the front steps.

No sooner had we thrown his wallet and an umbrella out after him and slammed the door shut did he start hammering away with his fists. He screamed and screamed, but no way were we letting him in yet. Knock knock. Who's there? Guy without pizza? Nice try.

He stuck his head through the catflap in desperation, so we briefed him while he could still hear us. Or Quinlan did, plumbing the veritable trove of knowledge he'd accrued from his past as a bum outrunning Boardwalk enforcers. The thing to remember, he said, is you can't outrun them. Enforcers, dogs and coke dealers are all faster than you—it's how they're built and how they grew up. So you just have to not move in straight lines, use obstacles to your advantage, trip them up where possible. You don't have to outrun the cops, you just have to outrun your friend. That sort of thing.

Steve wouldn't have the benefit of a friend out there in the wild, but hopefully just having that little slice of homegrown wisdom would bring him comfort.

"Don't worry," Quinlan said. "The parkour just kicks in."

When he realised we weren't kidding around, Steve finally stopped hyperventilating and crying long enough to go get the pizza. Harley held vigil at the window while Quinlan waited by the door for the signal to open it. I kept them both entertained with my sick freestyles.

Winnin', grinnin', young like the night is

All this howlin' coming in like tinnitus

Quinlan, chillin', pumpin' gas like it's New Jersey,

Tenure in ten years, teaching math in a hearse, see

High noon at the Corral, all-he-can-eat is golden pussy

Not twenty minutes later, Steve came running up the driveway with the boxes of pizza. He was not alone. He'd been followed by two hulking mutant lizard-dog monsters and now they were having it out on Harley's immaculately manicured lawn.

We huddled around the window and watched Steve tussle with the pair (something Quinlan explicitly said not to do, but Steve never was good at following instructions) for a while. There he was, batting at them valiantly with the umbrella while they were batting him around like kittens with a ball of yarn. It may be strange to compare cats to dogs, but I'd aver that it's stranger to compare dogs to eldritch reptilian hellbeasts that crawled up from the volcanic bowels of the earth.

"Somebody ought to get him in here," Harley remarked. "I'm absolutely famished."

"You could do it," I said, dread already creeping up on me.

"I could, but varnish doesn't dry that fast."

"Don't look at me," Quinlan said, in this creaky old voice that didn't sound anything like his usual guttural rumble. He gestured at his legs. "I'm so frail, I comparison shop for Zimmer frames."

I didn't have an excuse prepared. They both looked at me and nodded.

So with pounding heart, trembling hands, and decorative rainstick, I stepped into the fray.

They were way, way bigger up close. The streetlights illuminated every crag and spine and shard of calcified flesh. Why would anyone put spikes on a dog, a creature that was placed on this mortal plane for the express purpose of being petted? That's like, cotton candy that comes in the form of dental floss so it gets stuck between your teeth. It's actively malignant.

One of them growled at my approach, prompting me to bivouac behind a bush for a bit until my heart calmed down.

No sense getting panicky at the wrong time. Running on instinct can lead to some irreversible mistakes.

Unfortunately, Steve had noticed my tactical retreat. "Gladly! Gladly, help! HELP!"

I steeled myself and went back out there, holding the rainstick out like a sword. A man's gotta do.

God, I wished I had the umbrella instead. Those jaws could sever a limb, but that umbrella could survive a monsoon. It was fibreglass. I glanced nervously at the rainstick. It was made of bamboo. Fucking bamboo! Pandas literally eat that shit for breakfast, and they can't eat anything. Stupid Harley. I bet he'd only been holding onto it as a potential regift.

Steve wasn't doing too well. They'd backed him into a topiary, content to snap and snarl at him. He flung the stack of pizza boxes onto the ground, right next to me.

That idiot. It was like he was trying to bait them away from him.

One of the monsters turned away from him to sniff at the box, more curious than anything. It raised its head, opened its mouth—

My body reacted before my thoughts caught up.

"EAT RAIN!" I screamed, and jammed the rainstick between its jaws.

They say adrenaline is supposed to make everything sharp, throw the world into searing focus, but my vision went fuzzy instead. I couldn't think straight enough to flee, let alone break out the parkour. I felt something impact my stomach, robbing me of breath, and I fell. Just one careless swipe of a paw and I was on the ground.

Quinlan's voice blared like a foghorn through the mist.

"Get the pizza," he yelled through the window. "Get it, Gladly, you useless motherfucker, I swear to god. Get the pizza!"

People are capable of incredible feats of strength and agility when their pizza is at stake, even if they are bleeding internally. Coughing with pain and probably punctured lung, I scrambled forward on my hands and knees. I grabbed the boxes while one monster was spitting out the stick it'd snapped in two and the other was distracted by Steve's flailing. Then I made a break for the house.

I flew over the front steps, flinging myself and the boxes through the door. Quinlan and Harley locked it behind me. I collapsed on the welcome mat, where I was loudly and violently sick.

We dined like kings that night, supping on salvaged pizza and well-aged wine. The pizza was pretty good. I mean, it was kinda cold and they forgot the pineapple, but I'm sure even royalty has to fight for their substandard meals every now and then. Wine sucked though.

My ribs were bruised but not fractured, leaving me free to contemplate other, less physical lessons in the wake of this incident. For instance, nature is pretty scary when you think about it. What was up with those dogs? How did they get so big, and who put those spikes on them? An umbrella might be able to survive a monsoon, but at what cost? If that guy had the pizzas, but I was the one who delivered them, then who was phone? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

I haven't seen Steve in a while either. I hope his new arm's working okay.