It was as cold as the ice after a losing game. The sky was heavy and dark and hung on him like his dad’s old-style hockey gear. His ribs ached. Somebody had checked him hard, real hard, and he crabbed himself to the ground to stop the sense of falling up. A single red light, like a tiny, tired sun, winked halfway up in the sky. Instintively Brian felt for his gearbag. “Don’t worry, dad. I’ll be ready before the lights come on.”
But dad didn’t answer. There was no reassuring sound of dad patting the rinkkeeper’s back, no smell of a fine Cubañero, no electric whine as the lights exchanged heat for light. A breeze came and it moved the cold air with a scent like meat gone bad, a smell he remembered from helping mom clean out the freezer when the power had been off for a day. The only sound was the voice of the cold as penetrated his clothes and cralwed over his skin.
He stood slowly, awkwardly, the air heavy against his aching ribs. The falling-up vertigo remained and he kept his arms spread wide to break the fall he knew was coming.
Two dots, blurry and red as the light in the sky, came and went in the distance.
A sound like frieghtcars coupling knocked him down as something came at him from above, something that pushed the air ahead of it like a whale moving through deep ocean waters. Brian strained to see it but only saw clouds swirl in its wake as it passed.
The two dots on the horizon moved.
The thing passed overhead again. Its wake pushed him flat against the earth as somebody whispered his name. “Brian.”
The ground thrummed underneath him. He looked up and saw two dots blaze white in the distance. They grew larger and moved like headlights in a fog as he watched.
He waved and ran. “Here! I’m over here!”
The thing in the air turned towards him, sought him out.
The lights came right at him and lobbed as if racing over speedbumps.
“Here! I’m here!”
More thrumming. The fog gathered behind him as the thing in the sky approached.
A huge, dark shape formed behind the headlights. He ran towards it and stopped. The smell of rotting meat came to him on gusts of hot breath.
The lights stopped moving and blinked. They weren’t lights. They were eyes. The eyes of some large beagle-like dog, its panting breath moving the thick air and filling it with the smells of its last, turgid meal. A man, his skin-tight silver uniform showing him tall and thin like Brian’s dad, rode in a white metal sedan growing out of the animal’s back. What Brian first thought were red highlights on the sedan he recognized as veins coursing with blood, as if the animals veins and arteries lashed the sedan to its back. The man patted the animal the way Brian’s dad would pat a fine automobile then walked around and met Brian in front of the animal’s headlight eyes.
“Dad! Dad, take me home. Get me out of here, dad!”
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