Hours after he broke the record for time spent in a dog suit, McGruff sat alone in the Starlight Lounge on the fortieth floor of the immense police station. He was dreaming of Valhalla. He sat at the bar in an empty area roped-off for his world-record party, losing count of his celebratory drinks by the time an armored posse appeared asking for volunteers. A piece of highway had inexplicably collapsed on the eighth floor and the hunt was on for someone to arrest. The posse was indistinguishable in its insect geometries, its antennaed ordnance and ricochet angles. They needed men of good character—still a rare breed on a steady Tuesday night. Who would be left for McGruff’s celebration if the Starlight’s halfwits and shitheels threw-in with them? How could he compete with the romance of vigilante justice? The only answer was delicious treats, but even those hung in the balance. He’d specifically requested Buffalo wings for his party but they were proving difficult for the Officer Bartender to prepare and had been nearly impossible for her to source. She told him of a harrowing drive from the station miles and miles into the wastelands, the truck radar burrowing into the sand dunes for some unmolested 7-Eleven, some unirradiated Circle K her hired crew could exhume to resurrect its frozen food aisle.
When McGruff had stumbled in looking half-crazed, she tried to get him to talk about seeing the old man with the pension committee but he just held the bulbous contours of his mask as if they threatened to dribble through his fingers. She reached for the wet gash in the mask’s neck with the sudden urge to slip her entire hand through the fleece to unlock its weeping mystery. It had a smell. “Your neck,” she said. “Are you bleeding?” He asked for a beer. He needed to focus. He fished around one of his pockets bulging with pre-apocalypse funny-paper comic strips he’d found in memorabilia shops over the years and slung a clipping across the bar. Based on the pocket it came from, it was probably a dud anyway. Family Circus or something worse. She chirped something about accepted forms of payment but swiped it up before clanging the bowl of beer onto the counter and disappearing into the steel kitchen, a room the color of winter rain. Soon he heard her tinkering with the temperamental deep fryer, which still leaked a strange grease despite its frequent dormancy.
A dissociated hour passed, maybe three. There was still no sign of food and suddenly there was this posse in the doorway. “You’re only this hungry because you’re stressed,” the Officer Bartender said sometime during hour two.
“Does that matter?” he should’ve asked. The wings were the only thing that could talk him down and now he didn’t know how to look busy other than to feel sick. Joining the posse was out of the question. He’d just experienced a major ordeal and felt too miserable to do anything but celebrate himself. He heard a phone ring in the kitchen. Was she calling the missing RSVPs while eating the wings herself, the Buffalo sauce of the bogarted wings gunking the buttons of her corded phone? Or was it the pension committee officers searching for him, demanding she give him up while she suckled on the little bones, spicy-sweet as an alimony jubilee?
That evening the Starlight was hot and much worse in the suit. Everything itched and dripped and festered. On nights like these, the Officer Bartender used to open McGruff’s backflap and run the AC into him from a tube, filling him up like a balloon on the Macy’s Day rerun channel. But the second window unit broke down three months after it replaced the first, and their twin carcasses now obscured both views out of the bar. The frenzied escape from the old man’s hospital room engorged his hip tumor under his trousers like the beginnings of a misshapen limb. He once drunkenly asked the Officer Bartender to flick it to see if she could burst the relieved mess on the mirror over the bar, clumps waxing down his greasy reflection like flung grits. When she actually leaned over to oblige he’d recoiled as if she lunged at him with a big knife. McGruff’s body had become a mycotic incest of slops and horrors. This withered creature inhabiting the dark periphery of the immense bloodhound suit like a haunted house, where bags of groaning flesh bulged into hard protuberances seemingly overnight—one merely a prophecy of many. McGruff would squeeze himself in an establishment’s remotest toilet, begging the pair of feet nearest the door to flush in time to save him from the dissonant shame of it all. Long after McGruff let the gruesome rip out of him the smell was still there, a sweet kind of decay tiding up his many layers from between his legs.
McGruff’s mitts were ten and two on either side of the dog bowl. His urochrome reflection sheened up from the Coors Light. His stomach moaned. If he had to walk out unfed and unfeted he might simply collapse in a puddle three hallways over, half-drowned by the time the pension committee found him and the king’s ransom of comic strips, ticket stubs, stamps, American coins, baseball cards, bottlecaps, and old-world pornography he lined his coat and trousers with. How badly would they cut him up? How much would they get for his mask? The Officer Bartender wanted him to choose between that or starving to death in the Starlight Lounge. Was she still bitter over that bad memorabilia trade four years earlier—something to do with diner mugs—or something even less significant, a missed tip, a reassuring pat on her satin rear as forgettable as some half-tumescent wet dream? If a world record truly meant anything, he confided into the confessional darkness of his mask, it would unlock the mysteries of the fairer sex. He would crawl back to the kitchen on a floor of scalding fry grease and throw himself at her feet if it made her happy. He would get all his limbs around her legs long enough to show her who’s boss while the hidden triad of pension officers, eight feet tall and multiplying, discussed further ways to humiliate them.
At the Starlight he would obsess over his own history, trying to identify the time, the exact instant his life went off the rails. Something always materialized after five or six bowls of beer and this time it was the posse. McGruff mistook them for his partygoers when they walked in, but they weren’t holding giftbags or cases of moonshine. They were locked and loaded with Havana Syndrome sound cannons, laser-precision battering rams, M4s with lots of ass. McGruff assumed they were sent by the pension committee—that they were here for him. His service revolver throbbed on his belt longing for his touch. “Party’s over,” he waited for them to say. He could probably pop one or two of them before they filled him full of holes. Perhaps dying in the arms of the Officer Bartender, his last moments feeling inside her tight corners to extract a stray bullet she would try to conceal from him. His final breath naming his newborn world record his sole heir. “Tell me I did it,” he would say. “Tell me it mattered.” He’d never discharged the .38 in the field because the fuzzy fingers of the bloodhound mascot suit had trouble fitting through the trigger guard. He wanted to draw it fast and light, make a show of checking the cylinder, but last time he did an honest-to-god moth fluttered out of the chamber. Were there moths in Valhalla with wings like razorblades? Could they cocoon their silks in his terrible wounds?
After the posse announced it was hunting the highway saboteur, the Officer Bartender reappeared and asked if she could interest anyone in refreshments. Sweat glistened down her slopes. McGruff stood up to look respectfully. Her white bridal dress betrayed no signs of sauce or stains. It held no history and its veil was a wisp of clouds along the posse’s mountainous phalanx of dark armor. Despite her advanced age, the gown entranced the minds of her customers with a domestic mystique that guaranteed the biggest tips while she pursued her own world record for most drinks served in a wedding dress. She was still several years off. A buoyant longing worked its way up McGruff’s throat and he didn’t know if he was going to puke or burst into tears. Maybe she didn’t hate him after all. The feeling raised him up, inflated with the new knowledge that as long as the posse was there, he was safe—if they just stuck around until his guests arrived. All the people he knew were notoriously late. He ran down the list of invitees who expressed interest: the last head of the K-9 unit before the dogs were liquidated, what’s-his-name who designed tactical casualwear, the pair of officers who ran the uniform laundry service—all strong ‘maybes!’ And already enough to hold off the three committee officers while McGruff made his escape or died bravely. He was imagining a combination of both when the Officer Bartender pulled him by the wrist to the far end of the bar. A desirous heat prickled along his ears and sharpened his vision. It was the first time she touched him in years. Maybe on this night of nights she would take pity on him and let him follow her home at a reasonable distance. His nostrils grasping at her faint scent through his fake nose. If he was a real dog, he could begin digesting her just by smelling her. Wasn’t that something like love?
“You disobeyed a direct order?” Her voice was hushed. “From the pension committee?”
“That’s what they told you?” McGruff said.
“Insubordinate was the word.”
“Tried to cut my head off.”
“They didn’t mention that.”
“No?”
“Could have missed it. There were three or four of them around the phone, all talking at once. Was this attempted beheading before or after you were insubordinate?”
“Happened so fast.”
“I don’t see it helping you then.”
“Why?”
“Cuz they remember and you don’t. Several officers against one, so they could convince the department you sprouted fluffy ears and started laying colored eggs in the bedpan as long as they corroborated what kind of chocolate was inside. This is a real mess, McGruff.”
“Supposed to be my night.” His face was burning.
“This isn’t about you anymore. Don’t you understand the position you’ve put me in?” The posse stopped their recruiting pitch to watch them bicker and didn’t resume even after she turned and disappeared into the kitchen.
“All my friends are dead,” McGruff said, raising his bowl in something like a toast to diffuse the tension. No one reacted so he said it louder. He slurped air and liquid up through his mouth hole until he felt dizzy. He shook his head within his head and when the world stopped spinning he found the ghosts of dead friends assembled around him.
“What are you drinking, McGruff?” Lieutenant Peters asked. He looked okay for a dead man. His face was all teeth, though it was never much to write home about in the first place. It was harder now to tell if he was mad or happy.
McGruff didn’t want to look at the others because, based on the mortified smell, they had been dead much longer than Peters. He probably owed them money.
“What about the old man? Did you do him in? Did he cry like a little bitch?” Peters asked, his toothy reflection already wavering in McGruff’s beer. McGruff exercised his Miranda rights. “No shit. He couldn’t go through with it, boys. What did I tell you?” The ghosts’ laughter sounded like a chorus of fax machines. Peters whispered under the noise, “You really thought it’d be different for you, McGruff? We’ll hang side by side on the mantelpiece. Together again like old times.”
After setting a world record for something to do with a foot-operated pistol, Peters was murdered by persons unknown who anonymously sold his severed leg as memorabilia, still in its customized sharpshooter bootie and pinstriped trouser thoroughly shellacked to stand upright. His funeral’s food was bland and burned. McGruff once saw three different listings for Peters’ leg on the same website. They all looked different. It was rumored the culprits were on the pension committee, pressured by the department to cut costs as registrations for World Record Pensions somehow continued to steadily increase. McGruff had never believed it, even after the committee heads were reassigned.
He pushed away the bowl of beer and the ghosts evaporated in its slosh. Their smell lingered even after he changed seats. To get his mind right, he flipped through a stack of hotel matchbooks from his trench coat pocket. Their names like verses. The Red Fox Motel. He resented his predecessor McGruffs spending the halcyon days before the world died battling drug dealers with suburban children during Saturday morning cartoons. In his youth he patrolled the vast tarpaulin shanties of the coastal wasteland as a mascot officer focused on community outreach. The Lamplighter Hotel. But when the need came for a 5% increase to the chemical warfare division—well, that was that. They let him down easy, which somehow made it worse. The Beefeater Inn and Pub. After being put out to pasture, McGruff actually thanked them for their time as they shut the department chief’s door in his face. The Biltmore.
He was still called out to officer versus officer standoffs and hostage situations a few times a year as a symbolic reminder to everyone how much the police culture, once the pride of the western world, had already lost. Sometimes he was invited to hot dog stand openings and memorabilia raffle events to exemplify what they were trying to get back to. Once, a lone surviving hostage lifted the bloody rag away from his mutilated scalp in the blue-red slow motion of the ambulance lights and saluted McGruff as the figurehead of the whole department. He gave McGruff his badge and said “You made a difference today.” It was something to that effect, anyway. McGruff lay in bed at night questioning why these interactions weren’t enough. Deep inside him there was always a freefalling bottomlessness to his desire. There were nights he wished they had offered him the ceremonial coonskin cap and Bowie knife, compelling him to commit seppuku by sliding them under the chief’s door after he thanked them for firing him.
They made him complete take after take of demeaning voiceover work for his own robotic replacements: the McGruff Autonomous Ground Units—the MAGUs. These machines wandered the apocalyptic remains of the empire proselytizing to the American leftovers the gateway dangers of marijuana and the downsides of stockpiling expired horse tranquilizers. They sought sanctuary in buildings when their battery was low, bumping into everything as they searched for a charging station or an exit—whichever came first. Earlier that evening, one had wheeled into the Starlight and slowly t-boned the wall near the bathrooms. Its miniature McGruff had a weird open-mouthed smile and sat in a red, white, and blue Bel-Air convertible, its own clownish grin smeared across the grille. McGruff heard his own voice buzzing from its degraded speaker so frequently that it became a separate entity he was free to hate. An idiot cousin he’d never stop apologizing for. Pardon me citizen, my battery is cooooode red. Please escort this McGruff Autonomous Ground Unit to the nearest charging station so I can get back to taking a bzzzzzsht out of crime. Bow Wow! Woof Wozzzzzzst! Just say no!—This was what replaced him. Had the choice at least been difficult? It was still in the dark under a far table near the door, puzzling its exit from between four legs of a chair. McGruff pocketed the matchbooks. He needed to snap out of it and focus on the positive. He was finally entitled to the coveted World Record Pension. This last relic of a more humane past afforded a monthly stipend to the station’s most meritorious officers paid out by the pension committee from percentages skimmed from the world-record betting markets. The paperwork was submitted. His world record of thirty years, six months, twenty-seven days in a dog suit was officially officialized. He repeated those facts in his head and felt nothing. He touched the slit fleece along his neck.
McGruff was ordered to accompany the pension committee to inform the old man, the now-ex-world record holder that had been McGruff on television reruns when McGruff was a boy, that he would no longer receive the allowance. McGruff initially thought little of this formality but over the past few months he began to look forward to it, to take anticipatory shelter in its far-reaching shadow after yet another humiliating day. From ten in the morning until he started drinking he would write and rework drafts of a monologue informing the old man that the record was now his. Over time the monologue became a dialogue with McGruff playing both McGruffs as the later passages fractalized into theoretical geometries of horror, shame, anger, sadness. The pursuit of the record had been his own personal Alamo, a last stand of his honor against the defiling hordes of irrelevance, but in those final months it became his San Jacinto, a vengeful ambush demanding that all he had endured be remembered, even if just by one person.
How had everything gone so sideways when he joined the pension officer trio outside the hospital room where on the bed lay a shriveled heaving of feeding tubes? The three officers were dressed like pioneers in a community theater western. Two of them had eyes that looked like they were stomped into their faces each morning. When McGruff told them about “his theorems,” referring to the monologue, their red ears twitched identically and they snatched the papers from his hands.
“You’re not reading anything,” one or both of them said after scanning the pages and pressing them back into McGruff’s chest. “And honestly, you should throw that shit away.” They said the old man was dying and the pension committee had decided to honor his final wish as a former world record holder. This was news to McGruff.
One of them produced a folded piece of dot matrix paper. “Your new orders just came in.”
The old man dreamed of living his final days with a yokel family somewhere isolated deep in the wastelands and eventually fending off an attack from a rabid wolf, despite enduring a grievous wound himself. As the rabies cooked the brain in his skull, he would lose himself and attack one of the small children, leading the older boy to realize the old man no longer recognized them. Taking the shotgun from his mother the older boy would tearfully send their loyal companion and protector to Valhalla. The wasteland and civilian aspects were obviously out of the question now, but the pension committee was to carry out whatever details they could manage for under a hundred bucks. They handed McGruff his new orders. He was playing the older boy. The third officer in the plaid dress and bonnet handed McGruff the old shotgun and little burlap chaps. The trigger guard was cut away. An unseen hand gripped each shoulder as the twin officers were suddenly behind him and someone said, “Let’s make a wish come true today, McGruff.”
The window frame cracked as the Officer Bartender jimmied the dead AC from its recess. The appliance was apparently load-bearing and the room lurched askew as she beckoned him over with the machine slung low in her arms. Years earlier on a rare cool night, they had held each other on his dog bed watching themselves in a Victorian mirror while he thought about his mother. He had inherited the mirror from her. His first piece of memorabilia, his least valuable. The wood curved into elegant shelves and soft edges that were humiliating and feminine. But how he missed her. His mouth foamed with chipotle memories of her birthday Buffalo wings as the Officer Bartender raked the smell of deep fryer from her hair. When she then touched his head, an electricity pulsed along the wetlands of his scalp, up through the muppet fleece into the nails of the Officer Bartender’s crooked fingers and back again at low voltage. This is it, he thought, the most erotic night of my life. He wanted to build a castle in that moment that would last a thousand years. She told him her name was Anna and she believed she was from Orange County. She undressed and spread herself before him and instinct kicked in as she beckoned him. His spine arched and his pants fell around his ankles. His hips jerked forward and back and forward and back as he moved toward her with the shambolic violence of a failing machine. She put a hand on him and asked if he was okay but his jaw had locked shut and he panted through his teeth. They never spoke about it, but there were nights when he curled up wide awake on his favorite rug and grieved it like a death.
When he went to take the AC unit from her she pulled it away and told him to look through the window. Down the ribcage of floors banded along the atrium’s perimeter three men stood in the thirty-second floor lobby each outside a pool of streetlight, arms crossed, draped in the shadows of their pioneer costumes.
“The only thing they don’t know yet is how few people are actually up here,” she said.
“I’m safer here than anywhere. Have friends here. More on the way.” He tried to meet her eyes but watched her track the final two other officers in the bar joining the posse.
“Please go with them. Use them as cover to sneak out. Lay low for a while.”
“Can’t go. Not now. Guys from the laundry service said they’d stop by at nine.”
“It’s ten-fifteen.”
“They’re always late.”
“They’re not coming.”
“That blood spatter expert’s coming. The one I helped with school assemblies.”
“Henderson?”
“Henderson.”
“He’s not coming.”
“Called him?”
“I called everyone, McGruff.”
“Everyone?”
One of the pension officers stepped into the light, holding up his hat as he looked up at them.
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Can I hide at your place?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Ah. There it is.”
“Come on. They’ll look there.”
He went to the window and shouted down at the officers. “I see you! If you’re too chickenshit to come up here why don’t you just leave me alone?” The trio looked at each other, and each sunk a few steps farther into the shadows.
“You shouldn’t have done that. Now you’ve upset them,” the Officer Bartender said.
“Have it your way. I’ll get these guys to stick around.” He turned toward the posse.
“McGruff—”
“Even if it’s just a little longer. Enough to call the guests myself. Who knows what you’ve been telling them. That I’m insubordinate or some criminal. To avoid me at all costs.”
He limped over to the captain at the head of the posse, who looked like a dozen sheets of black steel tempered into the vague shape of a giant. McGruff often envisioned himself riding out from the sea with a dozen heavily armed officers penetrating deep into the wastelands of America, supply carts loaded with tasty snacks packaged in easy-tear plastic nestled safely between impressive electronics and markdown furniture. A kind of Sherman’s March on turbo-rewind as civilization was resurrected one recliner at a time. While facing a syndicate of property criminals McGruff dreamed of sacrificing himself in a hail of automatic gunfire. The overkill of an MG42 peppering a dog suit on horseback. The holes steaming in the August heat. The snacks churned to a paste indiscernible from his guts all flocked in feathers of eviscerated cushions. Perhaps this was his chance. Would Odin be there waiting for him if he volunteered now, the Valkyries with their Chevy-drawn sleigh ready to tow his corpse out of the radioactive desert?
The captain cut him off when he tried to speak. “Hey buddy, do me a favor, go ahead and take three steps back for me. You’re scaring the sergeant.” McGruff took four out of respect, nearly returning to his stool.
“Was just saying, you’ve probably heard I just set a world record—”
“Didn’t hear that.”
“Well that’s why I won’t be joining you all this evening.”
“We weren’t expecting you to. No offense but, look at you.”
“Yeah, just hungry. Stressed. I’m told the food will be here soon. Want to stick around? The other guests are on their way. You like Buffalo wings?”
“I’m vegetarian.” The captain asked if there was anything else and another shape in the assemblage gave a signal. McGruff again asked him to stay just another hour, another ten minutes. The captain didn’t hear or didn’t listen and told the men to move out.
“What we do in life,” the captain said.
“Echoes in eternity!” the posse called back.
They funneled out in synchronized step and all but disappeared down the vast gloom of the hallway by the time the steel door eased shut and siphoned the march to a distant groan. Somewhere a timer was ringing, the smell of wings was everywhere, working its way to the airless regions of McGruff’s suit full of the sudden and strange realization that he was totally alone. That no guests would arrive. He felt imprisoned here as if after some secret tribunal, or in a solitary cell on the fortieth floor of his mind where sand would crash through at any moment to bury him alive. There were desert rats the size of dogs that when caught in sandstorms were known to spend their last moments eating each other. Every part of them wanting to consume something to distract from being consumed.
The MAGU was still trying to break free from under the chair. Its camera eyes were swirling bright in hypnotized low-battery spirals like a cartoon’s. The Bel Air’s headlights flashed. A honking noise gargled in slow motion from its speakers. All the cruelties and embarrassments in McGruff’s life were because of this machine snared under a barroom chair, sounding its fading horn. The sudden urge to pick it up and tear it apart piece by piece brought McGruff to his feet and he crossed the room because he wanted it to feel humiliated. He kicked at it until it shuddered out from under the chair. Standing over the feeble MAGU, he was reminded how much he hated its stupid voice and ridiculous costume. In the hospital room he had stood over the old man, wires and tubes strung up over a body so withered beneath the sheet that it appeared little more than the wrinkles that ran alongside it. The three officers whispered words of encouragement that were more like commands, one lifting the barrel of the shotgun until it was pointed at the former world record holder, but McGruff let the barrel drop. He felt his rising panic take charge of his body while he stepped outside of it. They lifted the gun again, and then again. Someone was screaming the order to shoot. There were no windows in the room. He turned to break out between the trio but was pushed down into the bed. Someone fell onto McGruff’s right side and a knife plunged through his mask. Hands pulled at his coat and the old man croaked “Not the coat, the mask! The client wants the mask!” McGruff swung his body like a blinded elephant while the blade rooted deeper searching for flesh. Then the shotgun went off, both barrels, pieces of ceiling rained down and the weight fell from his back. The last thing McGruff heard before escaping was a question asking who had loaded the gun. Caution! This vehicle hazzst a constitutional right to defend itszzzzsft! Caution! McGruff managed to lift the MAGU in a bearhug on the second attempt, the first thwarted by a sudden coughing fit. His blood burned along the desiccated fields of his body. The machine’s wheels clicked and stridulated in their wells as the McGruffs approached the open window.
The captain of the posse just finished asking who the pension committee was looking for when a miniature ’57 Chevy Bel Air fell eight stories and obliterated his skull. Up through the bloody mist sparkling in fake moonlight, the answer he would never hear was leaning out the window of the Starlight Lounge. For a moment the scene was suspended in numb anticipation as if they were watching it fall from the same window. Then in groups of twos and threes they started screaming up at McGruff. STAY RIGHT THERE! MURDERER! WE’LL SEE YOU SOON! COP KILLER! Murmurs spread through their ranks that it was McGruff who sabotaged the eighth-floor highway. He was under their noses the whole time. They coalesced into larger groups and drained out to the stairwells and elevators thirsty for blood, passing from McGruff’s view between his outstretched arms that could no longer keep his life from shattering.
He struggled to shut the window and teetered back as he saw the Officer Bartender reflected holding a metal serving tray piled with chipotle Buffalo wings. The lower half of his body was numb and he didn’t know why. He apologized for himself as she helped him up, and then for the headless police captain eight floors down. He searched the chancels of his mind for Valhalla and found only its absence hanging there like the vivid residue of unrecorded dreams. “You just have to tell them it was an accident,” he said. She shushed him and eased him back onto his barstool where the stacks of wings were waiting for him. They were the color of storybook fire with the shine of melted plastic. She asked for his gun. He hesitated so she moved to the steel door and turned all three of the large locks, then pulled at it. It didn’t budge. She took a chair and jammed it under the handle and tried in vain to lift a table from where it had been bolted with the others years prior to prevent theft. She stopped when they heard the cavernous footsteps of the posse enveloping the hallway. She again demanded his gun. This time he complied and she tore up the side of her wedding dress and shoved the pistol in her garter.
She told him to eat. Her voice was so calm. How could he think of food at a time like this, and yet there was the familiar need, more acute and electrifying something deep within him, swarming up his throat to evacuate itself onto the wings to divide the spoils between its parts. She was rubbing his back with her palm in small, soft circles. “It’s ok,” she said. “I’m here with you and I’m not going anywhere.” She watched the measureless noise build beyond the door. Now they heard voices. She took a wing and fed him.
When he bit into the first wing the bottom of his spine gurgled. It was bland and burned. Something heavy bashed against the steel door, and when it drew back again it seemed to suck the breath from the room. “Eat faster,” she said softly. The second wing turned to dust between his teeth. She put her hand under his mask and ran it through the scatterings of his hair. Each piece tasted worse than the last. “That’s it, yes, keep going,” she said. He began to eat as if filling in a grave that had no bottom. He tore each piece apart, rending the flesh and piling the bones. One of the locks pinged broken as the walls around the door started to crack. He wanted to keep eating, keep searching wing by wing, wanted to smear the bar in Buffalo sauce so he could swallow the entire room to find something, anything that would taste like what he remembered. “Faster. They’re coming.” She was whispering in his ear with both her hands on him. The battering ram cracked through the door and black-gloved hands fluttered clumsily through it before withdrawing. Five or six wings logjammed their way into McGruff’s stomach and he felt power returning to him. He knew then he could still save her, that he would save her. He would ask for his gun back and tell her to take cover. The reappearance of his strength urged him to try stuffing two into his mouth at once and when he added a third, bones and all, the wings formed an ossified boot on his throat. He couldn’t call out. Something more monstrous threw itself against the door. He felt like he was drowning, his eyes bulging to the surface of his consciousness as his body capsized. The Officer Bartender backed away from him. He willed himself to reach for her but every muscle was locked in the panic to free the wings from his throat. Regret filled the depleting rooms of his life. He floated onto his back weightless as driftwood. His arms had slipped away. His ears popped and it felt like the Fourth of July. The second lock screeched out of itself, the floor strewn with rubble. He heard individual voices now, the monster disentangling into something more human. Then the pure white panic began to softly recede behind the hardboiled bloodhound expression. He licked the sauce from his lips and held it on his swollen tongue as the Officer Bartender knelt over him, her hands working over theoretical parts of his body he had already scuttled, stuffing whatever she found there into her dress. He found one of the last lit rooms flickering in his mind long enough to hope she would place his hands on her neck and squeeze so they could ride her final breath into eternity, but she stood far above him, a world away with tears in her eyes and his pistol perched gleaming in her hands. And for one perfect moment he saw it. Deep down the throat of the barrel cutting through fields of corn, the aurora columns of eternal warriors all waiting for him under a ceiling of golden shields shimmering forever, the warlike sounds of their celebration pouring into him like gunfire.
Garrett Saleen’s fiction has appeared in Santa Monica Review, Prism International, The Collagist, Funicular, and other places. He grew up in Southern California and studied playwrighting at New York University. He lives in Seattle. Instagram: @jan_homm.