Free Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross

small, off-the-map place—there are dozens of cays like that down there—and it’s maybe a half mile around. Big white stucco house you could see from the water. Red tile roof, a pen for livestock. Even a stable off the main house, but there’s no horse, no nothing. The place looks completely deserted from offshore. And Ralston says to me, ‘What we’ve got here,’ he says, ‘is an old lady dead of a heart attack or a robbery, and a couple of servants who bugged out.’ Which seemed like a solid theory because there’s not another boat in sight and it doesn’t look like there’s a soul around.
    “So we anchor, launch the outboard, drag the Zodiac onto the beach, and head up to the main house. The front door’s wide open, so we call out. No one answers. We walk into this huge great room, marble floors, beautiful furniture, a bazillion-dollar place. All the windows are open, curtains blowing, a small secretary’s desk by the door with all the letters and correspondence and shit warped fromthe rain and scattered by the breeze. A couple lights are on, but there’s no people.”
    “Nothing?”
    “Zippo. The kitchen’s immaculate, the fridge is cleaned out. The garbage can got knocked over, but there’s no garbage in it to speak of—even the opened aluminum cans are clean. There are empty dog bowls, but no dogs. And no sign of a robbery. There’s art on the wall, china on the mantel, a stereo, a television, even some cash in the secretary. It’s like the fucking Bermuda Triangle. So we go upstairs to finish our sweep.
    “And it’s a total horror show up there. There are three bedrooms, and in each one there’s been a fucking massacre. Like something you hear about in Africa, Hutu and Tutsi shit. The floors are covered with blood, the walls all sprayed with it. There are bloody handprints everywhere, bloody footprints on the floor. Psycho stuff. Like the victims had been liquefied. The beds are bloody, the sheets coagulated into crazy shapes. The furniture’s all smashed up. But no bodies.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “We didn’t either. We didn’t know
what
to think. And it’s the same thing when we check out the livestock. The chicken coop looks like a bomb went off, and there’s not a carcass in sight. We find three goat’s collars and bells in the pen—but no goats. The stable’s covered in blood, like the horse blew up, but there’s not so much as a hoof.”
    “So then what?”
    “Game over. We’re both so spooked Ralston’s like, ‘Marines, we are
leaving
.’ We come out of the stable, checking our backs forwhatever demon came flying through the place, when Ralston grabs my shoulder and points down the beach. And maybe a thousand yards away, we see these two black things just hauling ass at us. We can’t make them out at first. There’s glare and heat haze, and these things are rippling and elongated, tall as horses. They looked like they’re made of smoke—coming so fast that we stand there and wait, like a couple of fucking morons, until they’re within maybe three hundred yards.
    “They’re two enormous Dobermans. But it doesn’t compute at first, you know? We’re just fiddling with our dicks watching them run like we’re at the dog track. Like, ‘Look at ’em go!’ And Ralston says to me, ‘Sons of bitches must be hungry.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, they must be
starving
.’ And I look at Ralston and he looks at me …
    “And then it’s a foot race. The lightbulbs go on in our heads and Ralston and I start
sprinting
to the Zodiac. We’ve got maybe seventy-five yards to the boat, the dogs two hundred to us, and we’re all headed for a collision …
    “We get to the raft first, shouldering it into the water like a blocking sled. The dogs
dive
in after us. I mean they
leap
into the sea full stretch—
pow!
—like those Labs you see on ESPN. They swim after us, ears back, chugging along. And they don’t
stop
swimming until after we get the outboard going