She reaches in with ginger hands, grabs the dog in a tricky stealth hug, uses the fake affection to try to drag his white ass off the seat. But he’s heavy, a statue moored to a concrete slab. There’s that age-old question, could God create an object that He Himself could not move? The answer: yes. This dog.

The dog licks her ear. The tongue is wet and dry at the same time, like drooly sandpaper.

“C’mon,” Guy says, snapping his fingers. “They could be on us soon. We gotta roll, Atlanta.”

“Dangit,” she says, getting back in the car.

They manage to get Shane out of the car, carrying him over to one of the white plastic patio chairs in front of her house and dumping his butt into it.

The dog hops out of the car and plods after.

Guy doesn’t say much. She’s not sure if he’s mad or scared or something else, but he’s stewing and simmering, and she knows to leave well enough alone. He doesn’t even say good-bye—she thinks he’s just going over to turn off the car engine, but instead he gets in and peels out. The Scion rockets down her driveway toward the road.

The dog sits in front of her, panting and licking his chops. In effect licking the blood that stains his muzzle. Bodie’s blood. From Bodie’s ruined hand.

“I have got to clean you off,” she tells the dog.

She heads inside, hoping that while she’s in there he’ll decide to wander off into the corn or the weeds. Instead, he follows her inside, her own white shadow. At the sink she runs the faucet over a wad of paper towels. When she’s got them good and wet, she squats next to him, hesitant.

“You’re not gonna bite my hand off, are you?”

He thumps his nose into her forehead.

“I hope that isn’t secret dog language for ‘yes.’” She sighs. “Let’s get you cleaned off.”

She wipes his muzzle, the paper towels turning pink her hands. A shudder grapples up her arms, to her spine, and then to the rest of her body. Don’t think about that. Soon she has the creature’s face clean.

Back outside, the dog at her every step.

Shane is awake, wide-eyed and staring down the driveway, hands clutching the sides of the patio chair in a mortified grip. He hears her coming, starts talking: “I remember a dog. Like, this monster from Hell. Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards—”

Then he tilts his head and finally sees that the dog is hot on her heels, and he squeal-yelps and pulls his arms and legs up tight like he’s floating on a buoy in shark-infested waters.

“Yeah, the dog’s real,” she says. “Sorry about that.”

“Whuh . . . what happened?”