He got to his feet and saw Gertie, then looked down at his own chest, clawing at his T-shirt, wet with dog blood.

What is happening to me?

The blood on the checkered rug made a nasty black stain. Yet there wasn’t much of it. And that was when he remembered that he had drunk it.

Ansel went first to Gertie, touching her coat, knowing that she was dead—that he had killed her—and then, setting aside his disgust, rolled her up inside the ruined rug. He lifted the bundle into his arms with a great grunt and carried it through the kitchen, outside and down the steps to the backyard dog shed. Inside, he dropped to his knees, unrolled the rug and the heavy Saint Bernard, and left Gertie to go back for Pap.

He laid them together against the wall of the shed, underneath his pegboard of tools. His revulsion was distant, foreign. His neck was tight but not sore, his throat cool suddenly, his head calm. He looked at his bloody hands and had to accept what he could not understand.

What he had done had made him better.

He went back inside the house, to the bathroom upstairs. He stripped off his bloody shirt and boxers and pulled on an old sweat suit, knowing Ann-Marie and the kids would return at any moment. As he searched the bedroom for sneakers, he felt the thrumming return. He didn’t hear it: he felt it. And what it meant terrified him.

Voices at the front door.

His family was home.

He made it back downstairs and just out the back door, unseen, his bare feet hitting the backyard grass, running from the pulsating sense filling his head.

He turned toward the driveway, but there were voices in the dark street. He had left the shed doors open, and so, in his desperation, ducked inside the doghouse to hide, shutting both doors behind him. He didn’t know what else to do.

Gertie and Pap lay dead against the side wall. A cry nearly escaped Ansel’s lips.

What have I done?

New York winters had warped the shed doors, so they no longer hung perfectly flush. He could still see through the seam, spying Benjy getting a glass of water from the kitchen sink, his head in the window, Hailey’s little hand reaching up.

What is happening to me?

He was like a dog who had turned. A rabid dog.

I have caught some form of rabies.

Voices now. The kids coming down the back-porch steps, lit by the security light over the deck, calling the dogs. Ansel looked around him fast and seized a rake from the corner, sliding it through the interior door handles as quickly and quietly as he could. Locking the children out. Locking himself inside.

“Ger-tie! Pa-ap!”

No true concern in their voices, not yet. The dogs had gotten away a few times in the past couple of months, which was why Ansel had dug the iron stake into the ground here in the shed, so they could be chained up securely at night.