A Feral Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

for him the year before he died. Her mother hadn't been able to bear taking it along to Sunset Village, the retirement community where she had been invited to stay with her younger sister Ada...it was a room Breanna loved, but not one in which anyone else spent much time. The little television was here, the one that got only two channels no matter how you twiddled the antennae. She flipped it on, found a news magazine show, and turned most of her attention to the sub.
           Too much mustard, all right.
           She ate it anyway, with as much—or as little—decorum as Sunny had used to devour her kibble. Then she went and washed the grime of the day from her face. She'd given up on the bath while gathering her wits in the kitchen, not about to sit naked in a tub after feeling so exposed and frightened right out there in the dog room, and dusted the insides of her elbows with corn starch powder to get rid of the dog hair that often worked into the skin there. She checked on Sunny—who seemed to have forgotten the entire strange incident and was hard at work on a bone—and plopped back down in front of the news show. Normally she just opened the back door and gave Sunny the boot until bedtime, but not tonight. Tonight she'd have to rig up something to keep Sunny under control when she went outside. An old longe line from Brenna's childhood horse, maybe, if she could find it.
           But for now she settled in for a few moments of important enlightenment. This particular news show segment seemed to have something to do with cruise ships and their chefs. "...and you'll be as surprised as we were to learn who really handles the food behind the scenes ," as they cut to commercial.
           "Bet I'm not," Brenna muttered at the television, pulling an old knit afghan off the back of the couch and wrapping it around herself as the commercials droned on. She closed her eyes; at some point the news show returned, diving into its intense scrutiny of shipboard cuisine with a grand display of moral outrage. Brenna drifted away, envisioning those same cameras behind the scenes at Pets!, focusing in tightly on Roger while in the background—
     
           "—regret to report that there were no survivors found on the farm, another entire family lost to this new rabies. Shedding Rabies is the common term being used for the mutated virus—"
           Brenna jolted awake, squinting at the screen, frantically trying to refocus her thoughts and her eyes on the information they were presenting. Rabies? What? She hadn't heard—
           "Not only were most of the workers we found less qualified than claimed, but our hidden cameras revealed unsanitary work habits—"
           Back to the cruise ship. No, that wasn't right , they'd been talking about rabies, she was sure of it. A new kind of rabies...
           Yeah, right. Or maybe it was just her imagination, fueled by a pack of loose dogs and one spooky moment in the dog room. Brenna drew the afghan closer, curling into a tighter ball on the couch, letting her hair become a shroud in which she could hide while she thought.
           Abruptly, she decided that she didn't want to think. She had things to do, and then she wanted to go to bed. Let Emily tease her about hitting the sack earlier than Emily's two kids; the kids didn't get up as early as she. Holding the afghan around her shoulders, she got a garbage bag and went from room to room, gathering the week's garbage in semi-darkness out of sheer laziness when it came to turning on the lights—only to realize, as she reached the kitchen on her way out, that there was no way she was going to put out garbage with the feral dogs running crazed. She left the sack in the corner behind the kitchen door and went through her mail, pulling out the bills and dumping the rest, and then relinquished the afghan long enough to clean up the kitchen sink and table.
           She ought to pay some of