[Music: “Swamp Fever,” by Walt Adams]
Sodapop picks his way through a forest gone wrong. His shoulders ache a little, but he ignores it. His bad knee catches, but he shakes it off.
Nearby, the thing with giant paws leads him up the hill again. Its footsteps send little electrical pulses through the dirt. They tingle when they reach his paw-pads. Sodapop tries to step over and around them, but their trajectory is hard to predict.
Here and there, Big-Paws stops, tilts its head, and listens. Occasionally, it calls in a high, clear voice. Sodapop never hears a reply, but it seems this creature has a companion, or maybe even a pack.
The forest has grown uncannily dark, darker even than the room with black-out curtains where Lara sometimes sleeps. Distorted calls from changed animals echo through the night. The scent profile is dizzying. Big-Paws is the scent equivalent of a neon siren, a tangled mass of pheromones under a pungent sulfur smell. The bizarre, half-dead animals are almost masked by it, though he can find them if he concentrates. If Sodapop’s nose is to be trusted, night and day animals are out at the same time, and at least a third of them have been dead for weeks. If it doesn’t smell of death, it smells of fear. Sodapop has never encountered so many different kinds of fear.
While the big-pawed creature’s ultimate goal is unclear, it seems to want to protect the little dog. When it sees him cringe away from an underground pulse, it stops sending them his way. Instead, it turns its head toward him now and then.
Once, a group of evil opossums draw near. It stomps its foot then, and Sodapop hears them shriek and run away. He follows a little closer after that.
Far above them, the sky begins to scream.
Before tonight, the worst sound Sodapop had ever heard was the low battery alarm on a smoke detector. The smoke detector is a horrible little creature that lives on the ceiling in Lara’s house. It lies silent for most of its life, but sometimes – usually when Lara makes dinner – it wakes up and screams. The low battery sound is shorter than the scream, but it is infinitely more painful. Its frequency pierces right through Sodapop’s brain. When he first heard that chirp, Sodapop shook all over, and he didn’t stop shaking until late into the night. Even after Lara took the smoke detector down, took out all its pieces, he still remembered the pain. It hasn’t chirped since she put it back together, but he’s careful of it all the same. That chirp is Sodapop’s greatest fear.
That is, until he hears the stars.
There is something wrong with the stars.
They appear in the sky as sickly bolts of light. As each appears, it begins to whine. The high-pitched sound blooms, rises, and falls, hits every discordant note across a thousand scales. The reverberations hit a pitch that Sodapop can’t even hear – but he still feels them, tearing through his eardrums, clawing at his eyeballs, rattling his bones. Sodapop screams, though he can’t hear himself screaming. He feels like he’s being compressed, every atom crashing into each other, then shaking loose only to settle closer, tighter, heavier. In desperation, he barks at his own body, at the attacker within and without. He cries for someone else to help him, and he cries in case it helps someone else.
Then there’s a ripple under his feet, and the sky goes quiet. Sodapop looks up to see the big-pawed creature by his side. It leans over and looks down at him. Its eyes glitter with broken moonlight. Everything smells like sulfur. Sodapop doesn’t mind.
It walks forward, and this time Sodapop stays very close, touching when he can. Its fur is rough, like uncut brush. He trembles at the sky. He trembles at the monster by his side. He is caught, he realizes. And he is so very far from home.
Suddenly, the monster stops. Its excitement fills the air around it, like static electricity. It lets out a piercing, rumbling roar.
This time, another sound echoes back. Many sounds, actually. Rumbles, roars, cries. Big-paws has found its pack.
They loom up out of shadows, differentiate themselves from thickets and grass piles. They could be bears, or they could be trees. Tall, mossy, human-like and plant-like and wild. They vary in size. The one who came here with Sodapop, which looks taller than any animal Sodapop has yet seen, might be the smallest one. It is the most like a human. The others take strange forms. One has antler-like growths sprouting from its head. Another has long, leathery flaps that sweep the earth behind it. All have four limbs, though. All have huge paws. All of them move both above and beneath the ground.
By their sides, perched on their arms, following in their wake, are animals. Regular animals, alive ones, untouched by whatever decay has struck the other creatures of this place. Birds, field mice, furry things and feathery things and even a few scaly ones. They ought to be afraid of each other, but they’re too dazed, too exhausted. Like Sodapop, they can only huddle close and worry.
The tree-bear-beings move into a loose circle. They stand on their hind paws, whatever shape those take, and extend their front paws toward each other. Sodapop feels waves of energy pass between them. It’s electric, like before, but not uncomfortable. It pulses like a heartbeat.
Gradually, they begin to hum. It’s a deep, rumbling note that drowns out the horrible screams of the stars and shakes loose muscles bound by fear. Sodapop looks around, and sees the other animals come back to themselves. He watches them relax. He looks up at the little big thing that brought him here. It glances down at him, its eyes soft. Then it looks to its companions and joins the hum.
Across the Beast-Ring, Sodapop spots a familiar spot of white-on-black fur. The Barn Cat is here, standing between the feet of a beast that looks like a giant pile of moss. She holds a kitten in her jaws. As he makes his way toward her, she sets the kitten down and cleans its ears. She pauses as he draws close, but a flicker of recognition runs through her, and she resumes cleaning.
Sodapop sniffs them both. The kitten smells a little like the Barn Cat, but not much. It came from the same place, perhaps. But it isn’t hers. Still, she calms it. Then she turns back, toward the space behind the moss-beast. She twitches her tail, then plunges back into the darkness.
It’s still horrible out there. Sodapop can feel it. Everything is wrong, and the stars still scream. He moves to catch the Barn Cat, to call her back, but she’s gone before he can react. He looks at the kitten, tiny and forlorn at the feet of a mossy monster. He whines.
The Barn Cat darts back in with another kitten. Her hair is all on end. He can feel her frayed nerves, smell her pain and panic. Still, she licks the kitten once, sets it with its sibling, and races back into the forest again.
The kittens stare up at him with wide, frightened eyes. He sniffs at them carefully. The first kitten reaches up, tiny claws extended, and grabs onto his muzzle. He yelps and pulls backward. The Moss-Beast lets out a deep, subsonic grumble. Dog and cats freeze in place until it stops with a satisfied grunt.
Two more times the Barn Cat comes back with a kitten, sets it with the others, and runs away again. Each journey seems to hit her harder. By the time she gets back with the fifth kitten, smaller and stickier than its siblings, she moves slowly, like every joint hurts. Her hair sheds in tufts. She sets the tiny one with the others and leans against the moss-beast, exhausted. She looks at Sodapop, as if seeing him for the first time. Her ears twitch. He moves in and licks the kittens for her. The little one tastes like blood. Feline blood. Not its own.
It’s hard to say when Sodapop becomes aware that Lara is in trouble. The feeling creeps up on him, a tiny sensation running up his spine. He licks the kittens harder and harder until the Barn Cat steps between them with a hiss. That’s when he realizes how tense he is.
He pads back to the Big-Pawed creature, the young one who led him here. Young Big-Paws looks down at him. Sodapop whines. It seems to understand. It glances at the others. It moves one giant foot, just a little. Just enough to open a path to the outside.
Sodapop sniffs the air. He has to concentrate hard, as there’s a lot of interference now. The Big-Pawed creatures are overwhelming, so many of them all together emitting a series of pulses and pheromones. He pushes himself, though. Sulfur, electricity, mice, robins, crows, kitten, moss, sulfur, bat, kitten, squirrel, old dirt, new dirt, decay, water, life…a million scents accost him, and he presses past them all, sorts through them, looking for…
Nothing.
At the edge of this jumble of smells, there’s nothing.
And deep inside the nothing, there’s a call.
It’s not a smell, or a sound, or anything else. It’s a force. A pull. The thing that pulls the tides, beckons waves to the shore and drags them back again. If it’s a light, then it’s a dull one. But it calls all the same.
He glances back at the barn cat. The kittens aren’t hers. But she still saved the kittens.
He looks up at the young Big-paw. It meets his gaze. He wags his tail. It nods.
The cacophony rushes back the second he leaves the circle. It takes all his senses with it. Sodapop can’t understand anything he passes. A group of elk fight over the carcass of a coyote. Bats slam into tree trunks, unable to hear themselves over the screaming sky. Everything smells of confusion, of fear, of blood.
Sodapop points himself at the nothing-smell and crashes wildly into the underbrush. He careens sideways, unmoored, like the time that a child tried to take him on a swing set and just kept pulling him back and forth. The nothingness is his beacon, a comforting bit of silence in this ocean of input, and he orients himself toward it. At its center is the urgent thing, the compulsion that pushes him on.
By the time he reaches the clearing, he is utterly confusing. The lifeless dirt feels like soft sand beneath his paws. The screaming stars blend with the voices of distressed animals and humans. To his overspent ears, they become a distant roar, the roiling of a lifeless surf. He staggers sideways, shakes his head, and searches again.
This time he feels it, a strange thump in his chest. He looks toward the center of this dead place. Past a sea of death and decay and panic lies the whole, entire world.
There is his human. And there is Lara. They are there together, very far away.
Sodapop summons the last of his strength and sprints. It takes everything he has to move in this place, but because he is a dog, he has everything to give. He runs. And as he runs, he howls at the moon.
Lara hears him first. Both of his humans are far away, somehow here and somewhere else. But when he cries, Lara turns. The movement is slow, dazed, but unmistakable. He leaps toward her outstretched arms, and in a moment, she’s only here.
It’s Lara who brings his human back. She reflects the human who is the sun, and she draws her from the darkness. His human wraps him in light, and for a moment everything is okay, even in this nightmare world. Sodapop helps Lara who helps Rose who helps Sodapop, just as it ought to be.
When his human rises, she is the brightest thing in the night. She throws a lantern into the center of the nothingness, and the monsters burst into flame. Lara is cool against the ensuing fire, her arms secure around his chest as she lifts him up and carries him away.
What follows after that is a blur. Sodapop falls asleep in the backseat of another car. When he wakes up, Mom has him. She is kinder than she was before. She gives him treats and takes him to a groomer, where he gets even more treats. The groomer picks at his paw pads and pulls at his matted hair. He hates this. But when the groomer finishes, Sodapop feels better than he has in days. This is most likely a coincidence.
Time passes slowly, until one day Mom takes him somewhere new. It’s a strange place, with slick floors and a bitey, antiseptic smell. She hurries him down the hall, though he wants to stop and sniff at everything he sees, and ushers him into a room. There, on a bed, is Rose. He knows that she is called Rose, because the humans keep saying it over and over. For the first time since he can remember, she seems happy. She is at peace. She smells of medicine and still carries hints of the forest, but she is well. He licks her face, and she laughs.
At the edge of her bed is Lara. Lara shrinks away from Mom, who touches Rose’s hair. Mom takes care of Rose, he thinks.
Mom leaves the room so his humans can talk. He doesn’t know the words they say, but for once the tone seems soft, kind.
As they talk, Sodapop watches Lara. She compels him, somehow. He’s never noticed that before. He feels her movements. There’s such comfort to her presence. She is quiet, and cool, and not always easy to read. But mostly, she is alone.
Sodapop thinks of the barn cat, watching the kittens that didn’t smell like her. He thinks of the big-pawed monster that saved him even though every instinct said that they should fight. He thinks of the ocean – the real ocean. He thinks of the moon and the tides.
The humans go quiet, and he knows they’re going to move apart again. This is the way of them, it turns out. Perfect pieces that never seem to fit.
When Lara moves, Sodapop wants to follow. She needs him, he realizes. And he is a good boy. A good boy goes where he’s needed.
For the final time, his human envelops him in warm, healing light. She says something in a sad, determined voice. She sets him on the ground. Then Lara walks out the door, and Sodapop follows. Like the tide. Like a beacon in the night.
They step out into the parking lot, and Lara lets out a shuddering breath. She stares into space for a long, quiet moment. Sodapop nudges her leg with his nose. Lara looks down at him and laughs.
Everything, he knows, will be okay.
The end. ‘Bye now.
[Outro song: “Dear Moon,” by Velvet Moon]
SEVEN OF HEARTS PROMO TRANSCRIPT
VOICE
Are you alone? Are you sure? Anyone could be watching, waiting…you wouldn’t know, would you? No, of course you wouldn’t.
Pause
ZACH
Still smoking, I see
ALEX
Still acting like I give a damn about your opinion.
Pause
CARM
There’s…nobody here. Nobody here, just…my imagination.
Pause
SAL
Look, you either need to leave me alone, or show yourself, because I’m not doing this.
Pause
VOICE
You don’t even know what’s coming. Don’t worry, I promise, in the end, it will be quick.
Pause
CARMIN
You really don’t see anything wrong with making a coke and mentos volcano in the dorm bathroom. Really?
SAL
No.
CONNOR
Nope.