'Nother Sip of Gin - Rhys Ford Page 0,10

sending a shockwave of pain up his arm. Unbalanced, his bad knee gave and he went down, slapping the concrete floor in an inelegant sprawl. The ache in his elbow was nothing compared to the twisting anguish coming up his leg to grab at the base of his neck, a devastating ripple through his nerves.

To add insult to injury, the squirrel’s remains still clung to his bare foot, its gummy flesh poking out between his toes.

More importantly, the bringer of the dead rodent sat there laughing at him, his pink tongue curled up like a one-finger salute poking out of his panting mouth.

A panting mouth reeking of dead squirrel stench.

“Dude, really?” Miki shook his foot, adding another layer of pain to his already aching knee. The squirrel remained lodged between his toes, and he spread them as wide as he could, shaking harder.

The damned dead thing was as stubborn as the dog who now seemed to live with him.

“You see this thing on my foot? What the fuck is this? Shit, now I’ve got to touch it.” Miki debated how long he could lie there with a dead squirrel stuck to his foot before someone found him. “Yeah, the answer to that is fucking forever ’cause no one gives a shit about you, Sinjun.”

He regretted using that old nickname instantly and the pain began again, rushing into his blood with a poisonous sting. No one called him that anymore. Hell, even Edie said Miki or even St. John when she was annoyed with him. Sinjun was dead. As dead as the men who’d once called him that.

God fucking damn it, he missed Damie so much. There wasn’t anyone to tell him it was okay that he woke up in the middle of the night shivering from fear. He missed being held. He missed being able to go down a hallway or across a room to find someone to anchor him to the now. Without the others, he was lost and… drowning.

He was drowning so much, and nothing Miki did seemed to get him closer to shore.

There were some days… most days… when he felt like going under, just so it would all stop.

“You do that, and that bitch family of his is going to get Damie’s shit. Next thing you know, they’ll be selling tampons and mineral water with our crap.” Miki sniffed, his nose clogging up too tightly for him to breathe. “Fuck it, Damie. Why’d you have to leave me here? Why couldn’t you have been the one to stay? You could have done this fucking shit without me, because I sure as shit can’t do it without you.”

Something tugged at his foot and he blinked, wiping away the tears in his eyes to look. Oddly, the terrier had the squirrel’s rather flat tail in his mouth and was tugging its dead prize off of Miki’s foot. Dropping his stench-laden gift onto the floor, the dog trotted over to Miki’s side and swiped at Miki’s tears with his slobbering tongue.

Miki laughed despite himself, then gagged, pushing the dog away gently. “Oh no, Dude. You just had a mouth of squirrel ass. No fucking way that’s coming near me. Never ass to face. Never.”

Three

MY HUMAN was useless.

There was no other way to say it but—useless. He couldn’t hunt. Well, hardly any human did these days. Most of them gathered from food places or had other humans come over with food, but even these simple things, my human failed at.

The noise he used for me was nice. Dude. I’d heard other humans use it to call one another. Much like saying Pack. It was an acknowledgment of equality, and I bore it with honor. I added it to my other names, gleefully in fact. It was much better than the bulldog’s and so much greater a name than the poor Chihuahua-mix I’d met whose owner called it Boobie-Hamster. But Snuffler of Warm, Soft Flesh liked the name and wore it as a badge.

Of course he also called himself Terror of Cats, and we both pretended it was true.

Sometimes, it’s best to let a dog’s pride remain intact, even if he shivered when passing by one of the Pack’s traditional rivals for affection—the canny feline.

No, my human was useless in so many things. He did not gather food that smelled of anything but salt, grains, and chemicals, even though he made sure the sustenance he gave me was primarily protein—even the dried kibble he left in an open bag for me