One fine April evening shooting broke out down the hill from me.

I'm pretty firearms-averse, but that sort of thing gets your attention. Ralph Lazard, my only near neighbor, doesn't have much use for me, and I've got mixed feelings about him at best, but neighbors look after each other out here in the Texas Hill Country.

So I waited about ten minutes after the shooting stopped, then push-started my '75 Volvo sedan to rattle slowly down the half-mile or so of steep gravel track and see what was wrong. I came sputtering around the stand of mesquite just outside Ralph's front gate to find the man himself waving a thirty-ought-six at me.

"God damn, Bet!" he yelled, lowering the rifle barrel to point at the dirt.

Better Method, that's me, raised in a school bus by a couple of dropouts with a lot of LSD and not much sense. It hasn't been easy being a boy named 'Bet,' but my sister Crystal definitely got the worst of it.

I killed the headlights but left the engine running, and got out of the car.

"Ralph, you okay?"

We nearly had a full moon, and the stars are always bright out here in Kerr County, so I could see Ralph clearly. He was a big old man with a battered face and a life to match. For all that it was about fifty degrees, he was sweating like he'd been out postholing. The gun trembled in his hands, rattling against the bottle of Shiner Bock he'd got in the crook of two fingers. Ralph wore one of those old man polyester jump suits, and reeked of perspiration and beer.

"You seen anyone on the road?"

"No." It was a silly question -- I lived at the upper end of our little road. No one drove between his place and mine but me.

"You didn't see no taillights or nothing heading down for the highway?" He sounded desperate.

"Sorry, Ralph. Um...why don't you put that gun down and tell me what's going on?"

"My dogs." Ralph swung the gun toward the dark woods. "Some crazy son-of-a-bitch cut up my God-damned dogs." He choked back a sob, then loosed another round off into the night.

"The gun, Ralph." I held out my hand. I don't usually handle firearms, but it seemed time to make an exception.

We stood out by the dog run, me holding the rifle and Ralph holding his Shiner Bock. Three coon hounds were dead at our feet. It was gory, even by moonlight.

"Tore their throats out. God damned kill zone." He rolled the neck of the bottle in his big fingers. "I've seen stuff like this done with a k-bar, in country, but never here Stateside." The beer bottle shattered in his hand. I jumped, startled. Ralph didn't even seem to notice.

Ralph didn't have a lot left to notice. His wife had left him a year or so after I moved into the area -- right about this time of year in fact, on their wedding anniversary. People said she was tired of rusty pickups and droughts, broiling summers and scrawny cattle.

I knew she was tired of Ralph, especially, because she told me so personally, with great care and attention, shortly before she ran off with a stock boy from the H.E.B. grocery in town. They stole a fast car and headed west. And Marion especially hated his dogs. Perversely, they always loved her.

As if that wasn't bad enough, a couple of years after that, Ralph's boy Leroy got run down and killed by a Chevy Suburban filled with drunken starters from the high school football squad. Kerrville had a shot at going to state that year, so there wasn't much community interest in serious efforts at prosecution. Ralph's marriage hadn't been worth the effort to his wife, and Leroy's life hadn't been worth the effort to the county attorney.

All Ralph had now was his dogs, and fools like me on whom to lavish his resentment. And someone had just taken his dogs.

I was glad as hell he never found out about me and Marion.

We provided ourselves with Shiner Bock from an ice chest. As he started to talk, Ralph cleaned his bloody fingers with splashes from the newly opened beer and an oil rag from the back seat of my Volvo, studying the cut dogs in the orange glare of the car's parking lights.

"I was inside when I heard Dimwit whining." Ralph sniffed and paused for a slug of Bock. "Dimwit, he barks, but he don't -- didn't -- whine much. He was carrying on pretty loud, so I stuck my head out the screen door. Someone was down here in the pen."

"Weren't they barking?"

"No, it was a person."

Lord love a duck. As far as I could ever tell, the damned animals barked at anything that moved and most things that didn't. Same as Marion, they liked me even though I didn't like them very much. My feelings aside, they sure as hell didn't deserve this.

"The dogs, Ralph. Weren't they barking at all?"

He shook his head. "Just Dimwit whining. It was like he knew the -- the guy. So I cussed real loud, and..."

"And?"

Ralph shifted, looked uncomfortable. I could swear he was shivering. "I never seen nothing like it," he finally said.

The man had spent eighteen months of his youth in the jungles of Southeast Asia killing people, and he was losing control now?

"He -- it -- that thing...it didn't top five foot six. Its eyes were glowing. And Bet, I swear it had wings. Like an angel or something. It tore the throats out of the three meanest coon dogs in the county without them giving any kind of a fight."

"Chupacabras?" I whispered. My one regular magazine was Fortean Times. I wasn't even sure who the governor was these days, but I was up on a lot of odd phenomena. Including the distinct possibility Ralph was lying -- he was acting damned twitchy. On the other hand, who wouldn't be, finding something like this in their front yard?

"What?" Ralph prompted me.

"Goat sucker," I said, as if that explained anything to Ralph.

"Bet," he said in that tone of voice the good old boys reserve for the contemptibly stupid. "These here are dogs, not goats."

Out here among the dry creeks and crumbling stock tanks, the world is brown with flashes of dark green, and it always smelled like dust and cow shit. We're surrounded by rolling limestone hills, cedar and mesquite, whitetail deer, javelina, turkey vultures, red-tailed hawks, cows and country people. There isn't much for a would-be hippie with a tiny trust fund to do except drink a little beer, smoke a little grass, and read up on the wide, weird world.

So I rooted through my pile of Fortean Times until I hit pay dirt. Chupacabras -- the story started in Puerto Rico, a culture virus that spread all over Latin America within a couple of years. Sort of a junior version of a cattle mutilator -- tearing throats, sucking blood and spreading panic among the campesinos.

I believe in a lot of things against all evidence or pressure of public opinion -- the brotherhood of man, the power of faith to move mountains, the incompetent evil of Ronald Reagan -- but I couldn't bring myself to believe in chupacabras. Not in broad daylight in the Texas Hill Country.

Ralph had refused to go get the sheriff -- a combination of stubborn pride and redneck resentment of authority. He wanted to handle this himself. Himself and me and a fearsome bloody dog killer, one happy family on our little hill.

I went out on my porch to watch the view and think about dog killing for a while. After a bit, I noticed a new stain on the decaying white paint of my Volvo, one that seems to be attracting flies. On closer inspection, I realized there were several bloody handprints around the trunk lid. Ralph must have gotten the stuff on the car the night before.

Sighing, I tore a strip of paisley cloth from my porch couch and went to clean the blood off.

Around two in the morning I woke up to barking. It sure sounded like Ralph's dogs are loose again. That struck me as wrong, then I remembered why.

They were dead.

No one else lived closer than two miles to me. It had to be another damned pack -- they sometimes roamed the hills, killing my chickens and tearing up God knew what else. I hoped like hell these weren't feral.

Between this new pack and the dog killer, I really didn't want to go outside, but they sounded like they were on the property, close to the house. I had to check. I went into the kitchen and considered my cooking knives for a minute before realizing I could barely cut tomatoes, let alone knife-fight a dog pack. I settled on my police flashlight, one of those six battery jobs that could crack a skull. So armed, I stepped outside.

The moon was bright, on its way to the back of the world behind the western sky. The dogs still barked somewhere just down the hill from me, much closer than they should have been unless they were a loose pack -- definitely in my yard, although I still couldn't see where they are.

You can tell a lot from a dog's bark. These dogs didn't sound angry, really, and I couldn't hear a fight in progress, so I stepped off the porch and gave a sharp whistle, the kind you use to herd sheep or goats. The barking stopped immediately. I walked around the yard, checking things. Nothing inside the rusted Studebaker, nothing under my Volvo. Nothing in the old metal stock tank lying on its side. As I worked my way toward the gate, I heard whining.

"Come here, boy." I felt foolish, talking to the dark. I didn't know what was out there. Certainly nothing I really wanted to meet. "Come on, where are you?" I whistled a couple more times and slapped my thighs.

I heard panting, and some excited yips, like a dog doing that little dance when they get worked up. I walked over to the gate. "Here, doggie, doggie."

They started barking again like crazy, sounding like they were right next to me, and I still couldn't see them. They sure did sound like Ralph's dogs, though. One hand on the gatepost, I swept the flashlight across some Johnson grass and post oak. When something cold nudged my ear, I screamed.

"What the hell you diddy-bopping around here in the hot zone for, Bet?" Ralph had the barrel of his rifle stuck in my right ear. I couldn't see him at all. "Noisy bastard like you wouldn't last ten minutes in country."

"Me? What the hell are you doing?!" I was mad enough to grab the rifle barrel, pull it away from my head. "Jesus Christ, don't point that God-damned thing at me again or I'll stick it so far up your ass they'll need a tongue depressor to find it!"

"I heard Dimwit up here," said Ralph real quietly. "Howling and barking with Dummy and Fleabag."

"Ralph." I sighed. "We buried all three of them last night, remember?"

"I heard 'em, Bet." The tears stood out in his voice. I still couldn't see Ralph -- he was crouched in the big wisteria by my gate, but his voice shook. "I know their barking. I heard my dogs."

"Ralph," I said in my gentlest voice. "I don't know what we heard, I don't know why. But your dogs are dead and buried. Come up to the house. I'll make some ham scramble and crack a couple of beers."

He stepped out of the shadows of the wisteria into the moonlight. I backed away -- Ralph had returned to the jungles of Southeast Asia. He wore torn fatigues, his face blackened with some mucky, dark crap. He was carrying a lot gear.

"Whoa, Ralph, this is Kerr County, not Da Nang." I really, really hoped he didn't know about me and Marion.

Ralph didn't answer at first, just stalked me as I trudged back up the yard.

"Bet..." he finally mumbled from behind me. "If my dogs were going to come back, why'd they come to you instead of me?"

I bit off the first answer that leapt to mind -- because they always liked Marion better than you, Ralph, and she liked me better than you. I thought of a lot of answers, thought of wives gone and sons dead and lives wasted pounding dirt in the hot, brown Texas hills. A lack of honesty seemed kindest right then.

"Because no one would have believed you, Ralph. Not even me." Especially not me.

We were both somewhere on the far side of drunk, sitting on my front porch surrounded by rows of empties with plates of scramble half-eaten at our feet. I had hidden the rifle inside the house as soon as Ralph was too potted to notice. I figured with the rifle gone, we could work on getting so whacked Ralph wouldn't be tempted to go hunting dog killers in the caliche. My plan seemed a lot safer than finding that gun barrel in my ear again in a few hours.

"Why would a dog come back from the dead?" Ralph addressed his question to the darkened western horizon.

"Hell, Ralph, why would anyone come back from the dead?"

"Lots of reasons..." He hurled a Bock bottle into the yard. It shattered on a fender of the Studebaker. He still hadn't wiped off the face paint.

"Man, I walk around out there. With my feet, I mean."

"Everyone walks around out there, Bet."

"In my yard?"

"In the world, boonierat. You sit still long enough, everyone walks by."

The world according to Ralph. It was profound, coming from a drunken, washed-up dirt rancher. "You're deep, man."

"Not deep enough." Unexpectedly, he started to cry. "The dogs, Bet...my dogs..."

"I know."

"No. You have no God damned idea." He jumped up out of my second-best chair, knocked it over and broke the scramble-encrusted plate. My grandmother's china, such as it was.

"Damn it, Ralph, I've only got three of those left."

"Come on," he said. "I want to show you something." He staggered over to my Volvo, pawed at the driver's door a couple of times before jerking it open. "You'd better give me a push," he called.

I was too drunk to say no.

We crashed through my gate. One of the headlights smashed in the process, dimming our already questionable view of the road.

"Ralph!"

He grinned. "We're hitting the LZ hot and hard, man."

We slammed down the moonlit road considerably faster than I drove it in broad daylight. The beer bottles, loose tools and fencing wire in the back seat clattered and bounced with the lurching of my car. Stark terror sobered me up quickly, but Ralph was at the wheel and there wasn't much I could do. Yelling only seemed to endanger his concentration. At least the rifle was hidden in the busted chest freezer in my bedroom.

"You ever think ill of the dead?" Ralph screamed over the spewing gravel and bone-rattling lurches of our progress through the dark. Twigs and brush slapped against the sides of the car as we slewed back and forth.

I prayed for dawn, for sobriety, for patience. Ralph was an entire twelve-step program on the hoof. "I'm gonna think ill of you if you don't slow down," I screamed back.

"No, no, you don't get it." Letting go of the twisting steering wheel, his right hand chopped up and down. "You ever curse the dead, Bet? You ever hate someone so much it just got worse when they passed on?"

I tried to give the question a serious answer. "I never hated anyone that much. Richard Nixon, maybe. I don't know."

Ralph shook his head, stared at me in the glow of the dash lights instead of watching the road. His pale eyes gleamed out of his dark face paint. We clipped a cedar with a crumpling screech of metal. The other headlight went out. It was pretty damned dark out there on the hill. The inside of the car reeked of juniper.

"The road, Ralph!"

"Yeah, yeah, roger that." He settled down over the wheel again, squinting forward into the dark as if narrowed eyes could compensate for a lack of headlights. He was driving by the amber glow of the one surviving parking light. "Bet, you poor bastard, you ain't had much of a life. You never cursed the dead, that means you never really loved the living."

Oh Christ, I thought, he'd popped his twist cap for real now. As Ralph power-slid my Volvo through his own front gate, I leapt up in my seat. I could swear a dog had just licked my ear.

We shot by Ralph's doublewide like we were cruising down the highway, busted through another gate and across his pasturage. Damned near hit a Brangus heifer too, which would have been the end of the road for my long-suffering Volvo.

I'd given up talking to Ralph, mostly because I was afraid of whatever crap he might say next. There was no way I was looking into the back seat. Not with that warm dog breath panting in my ear. I held on as we tore through a barbed wire fence line. I heard one of the tires go. The car immediately started to pull hard to the right.

Ralph fought the wheel. "Almost there!" he sang out.

We drove up a steep hill, along a track that clearly hadn't been used in years. Saplings taller than me snapped beneath the front bumper to scrape along the bottom of the car. I could hear topsoil spray from the rear wheels. I'd need new transportation considerably sooner than I had budgeted for. Ralph gunned the Volvo up a little switchback and ran it straight at a bank of brush laying against a limestone cliff face.

"Oh God!" I screamed as I let go of the dash to cover my head.

We crashed through the brush and slammed to halt, a much gentler impact than the solid limestone catastrophe I had expected. The engine died with a muttering cough, followed by the pinging of heat dissipation and the hiss of escaping fluids. I looked up to realize we had pushed through the brush into a cave. The stench of overheated engine and scorched brakes twisted through my nostrils. The remaining parking light showed that my Volvo had rear-ended a Corvette convertible.

"Oh, Ralph."

"Khong xau." His grin seemed tight enough to force his teeth out of his gums and his eyes glittered like an amphetamine overdose.

"Huh?"

"Viet-- Never mind. End of the line, Bet. Everything you need to see is right here."

"After all I've done for her, she killed my dogs, Bet. It wasn't no chalupa cabana."

"Chupacabras," I corrected automatically. Marion? What everything had he done for her? Ralph was so far gone it had to be him that killed the dogs.

"Yeah," he muttered. "I knew it was her."

The Corvette had been there a long time. The tires were dead flat, there was a thick layer of grime on the car, and the body in the passenger seat was a leathery sack of bones. It grinned at me above a knitted H.E.B. Grocery golf shirt, the kind stock boys wore. There wasn't a matching body in the driver's seat.

Where the hell was Marion? Had she escaped?

I realized I wasn't likely getting out of here. Stall, I thought, stall Ralph, and think hard. "Was she, uh, here?"

"Oh, yes." Ralph's chuckle echoed in the little cave. "Until she escaped, and killed my dogs. Gets restless every year around our anniversary."

Their anniversary -- the day they married and the day she left him. My knees buckled. He couldn't be serious -- no way he'd had Marion living up here these past five years, not in a cave. Marion. My heart ached, for a moment, for both of them. She always hated his dogs -- was that all he had left of her in his heart?

"She knew I loved them," he added.

"Ah." I figured if I ran like hell back down the track we came up, and he didn't catch me and break my neck on the way, I could make the highway and flag down a ride into town. Ralph didn't have a phone and neither did I, so that was the only way to get help.

"I lost her boy, and no one got called to account for it."

"What?" Leroy died two years after Marion left. Was he crazy, or was she still around?

"Marion was real angry when Leroy died. She knew it wasn't my fault. But when they wouldn't do nothing to those other boys that killed him, she wanted me to take care of it." He shook his head. "I couldn't do it. No more dead boys, not even for her."

God, I thought. Ralph must have walked up to this cave and talked to his wife all the time. No wonder he was crazy.

"She said I'd killed once, it was easy enough to kill again."

"Once?"

Ralph nodded at the dead stock boy. His nametag read, "Jason, Serving the Public for 1 Year." He didn't smell at all. Ralph laughed. "Her boyfriend. I killed him."

Thank God he didn't know about me and Marion.

Ralph studied the expression on my face, then sucked in a breath. "Oh God, Bet, you think I killed my wife, don't you?" He sounded more hurt than anything else.

Honesty, I told myself. It was honesty that killed the cat, not curiosity, but I had to keep him talking. Was she here or not? Where the hell was she? "Yes, the thought had crossed my mind."

"Bet, you know me. I'm not that kind of guy."

Yeah, right. That's obvious.

He reached down into the foot well of the driver's side of the Corvette and pulled out a long dog chain. "She was fine up here until she broke free last week."

He was for real. She'd been up here all this time. His wife, my one-time lover, chained next to her dead boyfriend. I retched, my throat filling with stinging bile as my thoughts spiraled into horrified panic.

I couldn't make it to the cave mouth before my stomach gave out. Ham scramble and Shiner Bock didn't taste any better coming back through the second time. Outside the cave, invisible dogs bark as I heaved, over and over, crying though my eyes were screwed tight.

"Ask not for whom the dogs howl," I gasped through my stinging, stinking puke breath.

"What?" Ralph was becoming more and more dissociated. I could almost see his head floating free of its tethering neck.

We sat on the hood of the Corvette, deeper inside the cave. In the growing golden light of morning that flooded through the broken barrier of brush, I could see stacks of unopened army surplus C ration cases, barrels of water, manacles bolted to the limestone wall of the cave, and the little nickel-plated pistol Ralph had slipped out of his boot before I finished throwing up.

Outside, Ralph's dead dogs howled. I didn't think about Marion, not for a moment. Not me.

"Your dogs, Ralph, they're talking to you."

Ralph waved the pistol in a vague gesture. "They're dead. You helped me bury them, remember?"

"They didn't stay dead."

"Not like my boy," he sniffed. "I miss Leroy."

"Yeah, well, somebody misses Jason there, too."

Ralph gave me a hard look before staring back at the cave wall. Me and my big mouth. How the hell was I getting out of this? I wasn't about to wrestle Ralph for the gun. The dead dog chorus was like a color commentator on sports-talk radio -- interesting but meaningless. I figured Jason wasn't going to do anything for me at this late date.

If Marion had escaped and killed the dogs, she was probably hiding somewhere nearby. Then I remembered the blood on the trunk of my car. The lock never had worked.

She was in my trunk.

Marion had to have climbed into the trunk while I was helping Ralph bury the dogs.

Something killed those poor coon hounds, and it sure as hell wasn't me or the stock boy. And Ralph loved those damned dogs too much, for one thing.

Get him to confront her, I thought. That ought to cause enough trouble for me to escape. I felt sick about Marion being chained up here all these years, but whatever was between them now was far beyond me. "Ralph." My voice was quiet, calm. "I need a drink."

"Plenty of water up here," he said dreamily.

I nodded at the Volvo. "Couple of six packs in the trunk." Like hell.

The thought of beer brought Ralph back into focus for a moment. He looked at me with narrowed eyes. "I don't reckon they would of made the trip up here, what with all that bouncing around."

Inspiration soared, or flapped in this case. "They're wrapped in some laundry. They might have survived."

Ralph wandered back through the cave, down the length of the Corvette, past the Volvo, to the brush-strewn entrance. He staggered a bit, looking confused. I wondered if he was having a stroke. Outside, the dogs kept howling.

He stopped behind the Volvo as I stood up to stare across the two cars at him. I ignored Jason's permanent grin to focus on Ralph's increasingly glassy stare.

"Maybe she is and maybe she isn't," he said.

Marion? "Is or isn't what?"

"You learn weird shit in country."

"Weird how?" He was gone, way far gone. Keep him talking, that had to be good. Be cool about the trunk, I reminded myself, don't spook the man.

"There was a Cuban guy in my platoon, used to slice open chickens and spit rum all over the place. Didn't save him from being killed by a beer truck in Saigon, but it did keep the VC bullets away."

The dogs quieted down as Ralph spoke. Perhaps they were soothed by his voice.

"He showed me the line that separates the living from the dead, Bet. He showed how that line could be moved. Thing is, I did kill Marion." I noticed the Volvo rocking on its shocks. He tapped the trunk lid, tears tracing pale gray lines through his black face paint. "Thing is, then I brought her back. Bet, I loved my wife so much I brought her back from the dead. But she still didn't love me, even after all I done for her."

Dead? Brought back? Had he chained a corpse to the Corvette? I heard the squeak of the Volvo's distressed suspension. Whoever -- whatever -- killed the dogs was in there. My skin felt cold and numb and my gut threatened to heave again. Dead or alive, suddenly I wanted nothing to do with whatever Marion had become. I didn't want Ralph to open the trunk, not even to save my own life.

Tears, modern tears, tracking over the camouflage face paint of a war lost thirty years ago, focused me back on Ralph. Things had gone so very badly wrong in his life. He needed help, a lot of it.

"Ralph," I said, repenting of my plan. I had to get him, and me, away from the cave and Marion. "I don't need that beer. You don't need to open that trunk. You and me, we could just walk down to town together and check in to the hospital. Leave the cars here, no one would ever know."

The sheriff, I thought, let him come find Marion.

"I'd know." Ralph cocked his pistol. "She'd know." He reached for the trunk release. "The dogs would know." Gun ready, he opened the trunk. "Happy anniversary, baby."

The howling rose to merge with a human scream. Something man-sized and leathery sprang out of the trunk, knocking Ralph backward and sideways against the mouth of the cave.

"I love you," he yelled as Marion, naked and desiccated, grabbed him by the throat and face and cracked his head against the limestone. Ralph looked like he was being attacked by a giant, four-legged spider.

I scuttled down the left side of the cars, toward where Ralph was meeting his noisy, messy death at the hands of his late wife. My stomach heaved to the sounds of Ralph's bones breaking against the limestone wall -- like hearing sacks of meat dropped on pavement. Marion's chain was caught around my right foot. I kept my eyes on the floor, seeing only Ralph's jungle boots and Marion's curled, dried feet.

And his nickel-plated pistol.

I grabbed that pistol like I was grabbing a snake. I hated the damned things, but Marion had passed beyond killing rage and somewhere into the realm of an elemental force. I stood, my right foot tugged backward by the dog chain and raised the pistol braced in two hands just like in the movies.

Marion dropped Ralph's bubbling body and turned to face me. Everything about her was twisted, curved, pulled tight, her tendons drawn backward in death. Her lips were bacon rind, pulled far back from shattered eggshell teeth, her eyes withered black olives. She looked like a rabid bat weeks dead on the highway.

"Marion." There was nothing to say.

She nudged Ralph with one clawed foot, staring at me. Her body trembled like an overtightened come-along -- that killing force was held back, at least for a moment. I noticed that she really didn't breathe. "Finish it," she said. Her voice creaked like my porch in the wind. "Please."

I pulled the trigger, putting a bullet into the chest of my one-time lover, murdering her for the second time in her life as her husband's dead dogs howled.

It took a few weeks for the county attorney's office to decide not to charge me. Shooting a corpse wasn't precisely a criminal act, and the sheriff finally chalked Ralph's death up to self-defense on my part. Lucky for me there was no other remotely logical explanation.

I tell myself it all meant something, but I'll be damned if I know what. Nobody got what they wanted, except maybe the dogs. Sometimes those dead dogs come to my window at night, but I just whistle and call them by name, and they whine happily and go away until the next time the moon is bright. Haven't had any problems with roving packs lately, either.

I like to think those dogs are out hunting dead raccoons somewhere in the woods with Ralph and Leroy.

The End

Story copyright Jay Lake, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com