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Dog Run

- Taking the Scenic Route

Deep in a particularly remote and inhospitable corner of a bog that could swallow half of Birmingham with a happy belch, much to the benefit of the rest of the country, hid a cheerfully painted mansion, with a shaded white three-car garage in back. Inside the garage squatted a massive obsolete lump of pressed steel and paint that currently looked as much like an unmade bed as an automobile, and slowly dripped oil onto what had been a spotless waxed concrete floor.

A waif named Gia, whose face looked like someone had been chewing on it, and whose adopted mother had taken to dressing up in black bows, embroidered white lace, and anything else that might appeal to you "Loli" pervs, you know who you are, stood beside the car, arguing. The voice that talked back to her from the car's speakers was usually not somebody you wanna annoy if you like not being roadkill, but at the moment it sounded more like a weak and hoarse and much put-upon hospital patient.

"I'm not firing on all cylinders, Gia. Could you go over all that again? Start by explaining what the heck you're wearing."

Gia chuffed, suddenly feeling self-conscious in the too-cute, old-timey outfit: wide skirt with apron and puffy short sleeves. She looked like she was playing dress-up as Alice in Wonderland, only in black instead of blue.

"Mama's psychology hobby. She uhm... convinced me that some re-parenting would be good for me."

"I should have figured that one out myself. Role-playing and so forth, right? Is it working?"

"It's... playing tricks with my memory. It's like my old childhood memories are gettin' written over with new ones, or sometimes she's standing there instead of my uhm..." Gia cocked her head, eyes searching about in their sockets. "Y'know, I'm even having trouble remembering what my old parents looked like?"

"Hypnosis too. Gia, don't fight it; she's terrific at what she does. And she won't appreciate me interrupting her work."

Gia took an impatient breath and jabbed each word out one at a time. "I'm having this awful recurring dream about Kino. You remember her?"

"Of course," the car intoned ominously.

"So I asked Cecy to track her down. She found her, well west of us, and Kino's fine except... she's headed straight for a real bad place." Gia had taken to pacing the empty stalls.

"That would be the badlands," Christine growled. "And Cecy didn't warn her because...?"

"The Rules. She can't reveal herself like that to—"

"Yeah yeah, got it. She'd endanger the whole family. So... because you and Kino jumped in the sack once upon a time, you're now obligated to go charging off to her rescue? Helloooo, sexy supervillain to scrappy minion: not our job!"

"What is our job, anyway?"

"Revenge. And if you're right, I could just sit here recuperating and get my revenge all at once."

"What've you got against her?"

"Well, nothin' anymore, 'cept she's Hermes' sidekick." The car spoke the name like an epithet. "Let him take care of her."

"You'd just sit here while a good and decent person dies?"

"Good and decent people die all the... aw hell, you're not gonna let me get back to sleep, are you?" the voice moaned. The ignition fired, then fired again, until finally the engine turned over and rattled and sputtered back to life, filling the garage with a haze of gray smoke. "I do not believe I'm doing this! C'mon, let's git before your mama takes you over her knee."

"Whoa, hang on. I better write a note." Gia found a clipboard with attached pen in the tightly organized garage.

"Oooh, look who's suddenly such a good girl," the car minced.

"You don't really think she'd do it, do you?"

"If we ever need a goddess of puttin' people in their place, I'll write her recommendation myself. This family's got a lot of extreme personalities. Only way to keep peace is for everyone, including me, to back papa an' mama as rulers of the roost."

"Ah! That's why Cousin Dark backed off when mama announced my adoption." Gia scribbled furiously on the clipboard.

"Oh, just tell her I woke up hungry."

"I'd better tell mama the truth, or she'll get mad." Gia answered.

"It is the truth! I need to sniff out a really bad person by lunchtime, preferably driving a Pinto."

Gia left the clipboard in the middle of a workbench, and rushed back. She stripped off the dress and tossed it into the rumpled back seat, leaving her in a black unitard.

"Watch the glass."

Giving up on opening the crumpled door, Gia lithely hitched herself through the window, carefully avoiding the jagged shards remaining at the bottom. Finally seated, she pushed some dangling roof-vinyl out of her eyes, and stared out of the big honkin' hole where a windshield should have been. Her entire demeaner had changed. Little-girl-Gia lay crumpled in the backseat; Tisiphone's caustic chauffeur sat behind the wheel. "Know where we can get some coffee this early in the morning?" she asked.

That's how, in the middle of the night, the car and its worried driver trundled off into the murky fog that surrounded Casa de Elliott on an almost nightly basis, listing well off to starboard the whole way.

The driver squinted at the road not five meters ahead, and pushed forward at a maddeningly slow pace. A backfire banged out of the tailpipe.

"'Scuze me," the car apologized. "Gia, if we're gonna get there in time to do any good, we're gonna hafta cut right through the heart of the badlands.

The driver didn't answer.

"You could get killed. Hell, probably get killed. Shape I'm in, I might just get killed."

"You can die?"

"Most living things can if you abuse 'em hard enough."

They continued forward.

"Gia Elliott, you are not in love with that shitter, are you?"

"Kino? Well not..." Gia hesitated. "We only met once! But... I really liked her."

"Gia Elliott," Gia ruminated. Strange how quickly I got used to it. Is identity that malleable?

The voice from the AV system kvetched, "What am I doing? I can barely move. I'm turning us around. I'm turning us around right now and going home. This is stupid."

They continued forward.

"Aaarrgghh!" the car aaarrgghhed. Not for the first time, the entity haunting the rickety old Plymouth wished she still had a head, so she could beat it against something.

They continued forward.

So, the badlands. Christine explained it to her driver best she could, but I can tell you better. Who'm I? I've been in the writing biz since the fifties and you've not read my stuff? Bet you watched some on the glass teat before I swore off writing for it. Go on, go find an anthology, "Harlequin" or "I Must Scream" or something. I'm everywhere, except maybe Barnes and Noble 'cause they don't carry anything anymore except goddamn Harry Potter and Twilight. Y'know, I'd pay serious money to see Van Helsing or Buffy or somebody drive a wooden tent pole right up that punk's scrawny emo high school butt. Maybe I'll write it. Anyway, go find some of my work. I'll wait.

Dum dum de dum...

...okay, you back? Learn some respect, kiddo? Good. Now, where were we? The Badlands!

Right, put a few thermonuclear weapons into the hands of some self-important power-hungry goofballs and watch the inevitable. Now wait a few hundred years so the place gets marginally habitable again. The sterile underground societies start kicking their malcontents topside, a few vagabonds drift in from the edges, no law and order and not enough food. And there's our dog-eared Fury, idling rough in the afternoon light, right on the edge of miles upon miles of that.

"There are artificial intelligences here that will trap you in their torture-sims forever," Christine warned. "Subterranean dystopias, roving gangs, and cannibals, and—"

"After the pest holes you've been dropping me off in, it's about time I drove you through a place you don't like." Gia sassed back.

"Gia, I was so happy when the family adopted you. I really liked having you as my driver. I'm gonna miss you."

Gia tapped her finger on the bent steering wheel irritably. "Yeah, Just watch me live through this too!" She hit the gas. The car shuddered and kicked up dust on the road as it roared forward.

"Well, too late to turn around now," the voice lamented. "Don't try. All that dust behind us is radioactive."

Gia's eyes bulged a bit when she took this little safety tip in.

"Y'know, there are easier ways to commit suicide."

"Maybe we should die," Gia murmured.

"...What did you just say?"

"Christine, you kill people."

"Sure do! Eat 'em up like the Big Bad Wolf."

"What am I doing, staying with you?"

"You're part of the family now. They told me you wanted to stay, that you fought cousin Dark to stay with me. I thought we were done with this! Why, of all times, are you agonizing about this — now?"

The AV crackled to life. "See-cue-bee two-four-one, this is collision control," an unfamiliar, flat and mechanical voice spoke. "Clearance for duel requested."

"Oh hell...!" Christine groaned. "Here we go."

"What's that?" Gia asked, at about the moment she heard the rumble of a turbocharged engine behind them.

"CQB 241, this is collision control. Respond please," the automated voice polite and distant, the antithesis of Christine's steamy tones.

"Collision control, this is CQB 241. We are heavily armed," Christine lied, "but we're gonna decline at this time."

Gia stared as strange letters appeared on the AV's screen.

U boze in OMGWTF car LOLcopters elevendyone u in bigdogz turf say bye bye.

"The heck is—?"

"Shush!" the car commanded.

B-hold 1337 skilzors! Haxxorz CC! Pwned!

"Christine...?" Gia tried to interject.

"This is collision control. Opponent confirms. Freeway underwriters have cross-filed you as mutual beneficiaries."

"Collision control," Christine shouted. "Override! We wish to decline!"

"Please observe standard traffic regulations, and good luck."

"Christine!"

"What?"

"Save your breath. This guy 'Big Dog,' he's hacked collision control."

"...you can read that gibberish...?"

ROTFLMAO1111

"Now he's laughing at us."

At that moment, Gia heard a clatter behind her, then immediately after heard the thunder of supersonic gunfire. She abruptly noticed the bullet holes in Christine's freshly regrown windshield.

"No, no no!" Christine bellowed.

"He's shooting at us!" Gia shouted back.

"I know! Gia, floor it!"

Gia stomped the throttle, and reached for the red button attached to the car's aftermarket shifter. She heard the hiss, then the car bucked forward, slamming her into the seat. The heavily modified V-8 under their hood roared.

The voice howled something unintelligible.

"I'm so glad I don't speak any of those languages!" Gia shouted over the noise.

"I'm being held together with duck tape and old chicken wire and you just gotta drive us into the badlands?!"

Wooot! appeared on the AV's screen. U old carz sleeper. GG!

In the current absence of a rear-view mirror, Gia looked backwards and saw only the empty desert. "I think we lost 'em," she shouted over the noise.

"Enough with the nitrous!" Christine pleaded.

Gia pulled the button... and nothing happened. "It's jammed."

"WHAT?"

"The injector. Control's jammed."

"Radiator's gonna blow!" the voice yowled in panic. "Tank's under the passenger seat. Twist the nozzle! Twist the nozzle! Shut it down! No no, the other way! Other! Way!"

Gia rotated the nozzle until the engine's roaring died down, only to look up and see a turn just ahead. She hit the brakes, and managed to skid sideways into the curve and accelerate out. Gia heard a high-pitched scream over the noise.

They decelerated to a sane pace, and Gia took a moment to congratulate herself for stumbling through such an impossible maneuver.

"Do I look like a drift racer to you, girl?" Christine sounded like she was almost in tears.

"You screamed," Gia gloated. "That was a little girl scream."

"Have you lost your mind?" the voice cracked.

"How does it feel," Gia grinned tightly, "to be the target of somebody else's revenge for once."

"This! Is not! The Time! Gia—"

"Why not? You've been tormenting me, dumping me off in those horrid places."

"I don't want to lose you!"

Gia blinked.

"You could get shot here, don't you understand?"

They drove in silence for a while.

"There's a rest stop coming up," the car said with a uncharacteristically flat tone. "They don't fire around pumps. It'd spoil the game. Pull in. We'll hold up here."

A few clicks later, Gia pulled the car alongside a petrol stand and turned the key. The engine rattled and shook itself to a halt. A puff of steam abruptly burst from the seams where the hood met the fenders.

Gia let her face fall into her hands.

"Gia," the voice said softly, and she looked up to see a stranger sitting in the passenger seat right beside her. "How 'bout a heart-to-heart?"

The tall woman wore a vivid, glittering red one-piece with a chrome belt and black running shoes, had brown hair that fell in curls, dark olive skin, piercing amber eyes and sharp features that immediately made Gia think of the word, "Hellenic." Gia took a long look at her adopted sister.

"Christine?" Gia said, touched. A face to go with that contralto, at last!

The apparition nodded. Her brows were knit together with worry. "Long ago," the woman said as she took Gia's hand, "so long ago... there was a mortal woman named Tisiphone. She was the daughter of a Greek warlord who doesn't deserve the dignity of the title 'king.' Her heart was broken when he had her betrothed, a noble named Cithǽron, murdered."

Christine faltered. Gia took a secret, perverse comfort in seeing the implacable Fury overwrought.

"This one boy, Arnold, younger than you even when you met me... reminded me so much of him. But he wasn't strong enough, and Roland before him wasn't good enough. That's why I insisted on the racing harnesses — sorry, I'm drifting. Where was I...? When Tisiphone defied her father, the king conveniently sacrificed her to the gods..."

The woman's coiled hair opened many hissing mouths. Tisiphone's horizontally slitted eyes glowed golden and sharp fangs peeked past her lips. "...not realizing death by fire is a terrific way to kick-start a transfiguration. He paid dearly for that mistake."

Gia stubbornly refused to look away from the gorgon unveiled. "Big sister, you're babbling. What are you trying to tell me?"

A clawed, squamous hand gently brushed Gia's cheek. "I'm trying to say... I'd rather you not die for a little while longer."

Gia grunted. A hot wind blew the scraggly brush of the desert around them. She let her head lean back upon the headrest.

"I can't protect you from machine guns. 'Cept maybe with my engine block. There are a hundred ways I could lose you out here. And you don't know what it's like to be us. We don't measure time the same way. Eternal loneliness isn't an option, but next week your hair will turn gray and you'll wanna retire, and the day after that I'll never get to see you again."

"Christine, how can I stay with you, with the family, without betraying the human family?"

"Well... about time you asked the big question. I guess I really intimidated you, huh?" Now the woman in the passenger seat looked human again, and her voice matched Gia's quiet, reflective tone.

"Murdering someone's parents'll do that."

"We Furies, think of us as personifications of those impersonal forces that select against people like "Big Dog" back there. Let's say you were breeding animals for domestication. You start out with wild animals. The ones that show tractability and smarts, you breed. The others you release back into the woods. There comes a point where most of the puppies are housebroken, but some are throwbacks - useless stock, very dangerous to the other puppies, and no longer fit to survive on their own. The only responsible answer is to cull them."

"That's a dressed-up way of saying, 'you kill people you don't like,'" Gia retorted.

"Humans have rules they must live by. So do Furies. Besides, I'm not completely unreasonable. One of my first drivers got careless and hit a kid. He tried to cover it up."

"Hoo! He had no idea what he was driving," Gia chuckled.

"Nope! But he was 'a good and decent man.' I convinced him to turn himself in and... never saw him again." Christine's voice sounded nostalgic. "And there I go, getting lost in all these memories." She smiled to Gia. "It's an ocean."

"So we're pets to you?"

"It's a metaphor, hun. We saw your potential, and... you matter to us."

Gia struggled to force away the simpering smile written into her nervous system. "How is what you're doing to humanity any different from what my parents did to me? I didn't measure up to their idea of perfection..." She angrily pointed to her own face, once pretty, now deformed, like a stroke victim. "...so they did this to me."

"Ouch! That's a good argument."

"By what right did they change me?" Gia pressed the point. "Even if you suppose my... 'flaw' is terrible and sinful—"

"You preferring girls?" Christine cut in. "Takes you out of the breeding pool, but it isn't—"

"By what right did they put a scissor up my nose!"

"By no right at all! L'il sister, please calm down."

"You asked for it!"

"I did, and that was brilliant. So good, I need a moment." Christine spoke with uncharacteristic meekness, both to rally her thoughts and to placate her driver. "Whew, cousin Dark never stood a chance!"

Gia chuffed and climbed out of the dilapidated Fury.

The sun was already setting. Gia approached the little hut at the edge of the station. She peeked in, confused. The proprietor's dog sat calmly at her feet, but no one human was anywhere to be found.

"Fill 'er up?" the dog asked helpfully.

Gia started, then she stared down at the bushy sheepdog. "You can talk."

"Your senses do not deceive you, young miss, and I regret startling you. Have you never met a talking dog before?"

"Oh! No, but I've heard about them." For once Gia smiled a real smile, disarmed by the animal's politeness.

"There are many here," he volunteered helpfully. "This is where talking dogs come from. I suppose we were an experiment of some sort. But now we've been abandoned, and that is a terrible thing for a dog."

Gia pumped the gas, paid the sheepdog, and returned to Christine, but the seats were empty. The constant music had fallen silent, waiting.

She hitched herself through the window again. "Think our friend back there's gone?" Gia asked the empty air as she shrugged back into her harness.

"Doubt it," the voice answered from the AV. The engine started anyhow. With a wave to the sheepdog, they were on their way. Gia selected a new song. The car cooed her approval and sang along, "There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke."

"Christine, the truth," Gia demanded firmly. "What do you want from me?"

"I want your hands on the wheel and your foot on the brakes," the Fury answered. "I want a pact: you give me balance, and I'll give you power."

"So I'm your Jiminy Cricket? Okay, now we gotta talk about the contraband."

"Uh uh! You're the one who assumed we were smuggling drugs. One'a my former drivers did that and got caught. Never again. I said we were secure couriers, remember? Mostly we carry donor organs in the trunk. Drugs too, but not the illegal kind."

"Organs from your...?"

"Heck no! Girl, you can't just stuff random kidneys into someone!"

"Well with the magic you already do..."

"Wish I could; be a neat trick."

"Tisiphone? Why 'Christine?'"

"Oh! Heh... Rollie had just come back from Europe. Soon before we met, he'd seen this French film about a man's mistress called Christine. Called me that 'cause I was the only one in his life that could tempt him away from his wife. I was so flattered, I kept it. Wouldn't you?"

Gia calmly peered at the oncoming headlights in the desert night. "Let us not speak falsely now, the hour's getting late," they sang together.

"Alright, why me? Why'd you choose me?"

"Because you needed me, because I like you, 'cause it royally pisses Hermes off, and if you didn't have arms to scrub away bird droppings you'd want a driver too."

Gia laughed, despite herself. "Be serious."

"You get serious! Back at Zachry you saw as I see. You were safe, you were free to go, but you couldn't turn your back. That is what it means to be driven by the Furies. We both know how you're gonna choose, so get on with it."

"Christine, I don't buy it."

"Buy what?"

"I've let myself be defined by what my parents did to me. You let yourself be defined by... what was it? Sith-uh-ron?"

"Near enough."

"So the real question is: when do we start defining who we are?" Gia jabbed a button on the AV. "That you, Big Dog?"

"Hey hey, izzat see-cue-bee come to play again?" A tenor voice answered from the speakers. "What are you wearing?"

How many people has this schmuck killed? "Shut it, poser!" Gia cut him off. "You trying to sound street? You're no more street than I am, Shylock. You get beat up too much in school, short stuff? Dog get run over? Is that why you're out here with that big ol' chip on your shoulder?"

"Gia...!" Christine whispered, amazed.

"...you dead," Big Dog answered coldly. "Oh, you so dead!"

Easily manipulated. C'mon, let's play chicken, straight for the engine block. "Grow up, Napoleon!" Gia kicked on Christine's floodlights.

You were safe, you were free to go, but you couldn't turn your back.

That is what it means to be driven by the Furies.

And what the heck, they won.

Big Dog's blood flowed through the bent metal, painting the bare patches red. With ear-grating groans and pops and hisses, the old Plymouth bulged like a vein into its proper shape.

"This is CQB 241," a sultry contralto purred from all nearby radios. "We just put Big Dog down. Woof woof. Anyone else wanna play? I'm hungry."

— Ignatz01 has signed off.

— 1FFZ354 has signed off.

— Jomomma1337 has signed off.

— Biggusdickus has signed off.

You get the idea.

"...a wildcat did growl," the girls belted over the airwaves. "Two riders were approaching. The wind began to howl!"

That's how our blood-red Plymouth Fury cruised through the rest of the badlands unopposed. Now wasn't that a nice story? I'm off to write the death of Eddie Cullen. I promise it'll be messy.

And fuck you too.

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