Unleashed (A Sydney Rye Novel, # 1) Read Online Free PDF

turned downtown, and I followed, hurrying to keep up. Toby pulled against the leash, tightening his collar and choking himself in the process. He coughed and made awful gagging noises until we reached a smell interesting enough to pause for. Toby sniffed intently for several seconds and then shot out to the end of the leash, hit it, and started the whole process all over again. My cell phone rang. I followed Toby to a fire hydrant, then answered it. It was James. “Hey,” I said, then lost my balance as Toby lunged down the street. I landed on my right hip with a thud. The leash flew out of my hand and my cell phone bounced against a parked car and smashed onto the sidewalk. Toby tore down an alley ten yards away.
    I jumped up ignoring my throbbing hip, grabbed my phone and its disconnected battery, then gave chase. Toby’s golden butt stuck out from behind a pair of dirty green Dumpsters. “Toby!” He ignored me, intent on whatever was hiding in the deep shade of the narrow alley. I picked my way through the littered dead end. After the relentless heat and bright sunshine of the street, the alley felt almost cold.
    Toby poked his head out from behind the Dumpster. There was something hairy and black in his mouth. Oh Jesus, I thought, please don’t let it be a rat. I stood in my tracks and called to him again. “Toby!” I yelled in a high-pitched, happy tone. He stood his ground and began shaking the hairy thing. A breeze blew through the alley and I smelled the putrid sweetness of garbage in June mixed with the rotten stench of decay. Toby looked at me, his eyes reflecting a shiny green in the darkness. I shivered in my thin T-shirt and wondered, for just a moment, if I could leave him here, go back to Brooklyn, take a nap, and pretend like none of this had ever happened.
    Instead, I pulled my collar over my mouth and nose and took a tentative step toward him. He backed away. “Toby come.” I took another step. He took another step away from me, holding the hairy, black mess tightly in his jaws. His leash—long, red, and nylon—curled off his choke collar onto the ground. With a swift move, I stomped it. Toby couldn’t get away.
    He whined through his stuffed mouth as I reached down to pick up the lead. It was in a puddle that I quickly realized I was standing in. The liquid was all over the leash, and when I looked at Toby, I saw that it covered his paws and dripped off the prize in his mouth.
    “What the—” “Fuck” caught in my throat as I looked at the dark, thick, red fluid. I turned my head ever so slowly and looked at where Toby had found that black mass of wet hair. A hand—gray, limp, and lifeless—lay inches from my left foot.
    Blood rushed in my ears. The hand was attached to a wrist that disappeared into a blue tracksuit jacket. Turning my head just the slightest bit more, I saw what had once been a face but was now a gaping red hole.
    The top of the man’s head had survived with its few pathetic strands of black hair. But his eyes, nose, mouth, chin—they were all gone. In their place was a mass of bloody pulp. The head lay in a pool of dark, clotted blood; I stood in that puddle and screamed.

 
     
    The Dispatched Units
     
    The only other blood and gore I’d seen in real life was on the road. Animals, disemboweled, splayed on the road, their blood ground into the pavement by a thousand tons of cars driving through it. Flies hovering above the carrion, buzzing away when a car came too close, but always resettling and continuing their work, turning the corpse into a nursery for their young.
    When I first got my license, I would drive around because it was the only thing to do. I would smoke cigarettes and blast loud, angry music. Those carcasses on the side of the road in all states of decomposition, some fresh and red, others brown and sunken, would make my insides quiver.
    As I sat there, with Toby at my feet, waiting for the police, all I could think about was this one decapitated cat