Free Muzzled by June Whyte

I’m coming!”
    Another scream, even more terrified than the first, directed me to the back of the house where I found Tanya in a rundown kitchen that looked like it was set in a 1950s time warp, green laminated table top, old style kitchen hatch, worn linoleum floor covering.
    “What is it, Tan? What’s happened?”
    Tanya stared at me, her eyes wide and bulging. Then, one hand covering her mouth, she slowly lifted her other arm, and pointed at the open refrigerator. I followed her shaking finger and felt the room spin.
    Tanya hadn’t found meat for the dogs. Or booze. Bathed by the inside door light of the refrigerator I could see all the wire shelves had been removed and Jack Lantana had been jammed in, knees scrunched under his chin, arms wrapped around his scrawny bare chicken legs. Not only had his purple pants been removed—he had died the way he’d been born. Completely naked. After gaping for what felt like a hundred years at his poor shriveled penis, my eyes shifted up over the soft paunch and the sunken chest to his head. A wrecked head. A head that had been beaten out of shape by something hard, blunt, and deadly.
    And I knew, without going any closer, that Jack Lantana would never steal another dog.

8
    Whoever stashed Jack in the refrigerator must have turned the gauge to minus 50 degrees. Ice clung to his broken nose, his bloodied lifeless eyes were frozen popsicles and if I leant forward and gave his ear a tug I had a feeling it would break off in my hand. Even the blood from his smashed skull was no longer liquid. Blood that had spurted, congealed or spilled down onto his nakedness, now resembled paint from a child’s finger painting.
    I wanted to be sick. I wanted to scream. I wanted to slam the refrigerator door shut and block the sight of dead Jack from view, but my feet refused to take me closer to the nightmare. Instead, they turned into two lead weights and became rooted to the spot. I still hadn’t recovered from waking beside my first dead body six weeks ago and here I was in the presence of another one.
    A nervous lump clogged my throat and with an effort I tore my eyes away from the thing in the refrigerator, the thing that used to be Jack Lantana, and turned towards Tanya. In the dim light from the fly-spotted bulb in the kitchen, I could see my white faced friend clutching at a wooden rail-backed chair for support.
    “Jesus!” She finally gasped, her breath wheezing like she’d just crossed the finish line in a Bay to City marathon. “Is that—”
    Almost choking, I swallowed the lump in my throat before answering. “Tanya, meet my dog-napper. Jack Lantana.”
    “He looks so…so…”
    “Dead?”
    “And…so meaty. You know, like a…a butcher shop.”
    Tanya was right. From this day forth, the nauseating stench of blood and the image of Jack Lantana’s raw gaping head would precede me every time I set foot in a butcher’s shop. I was just contemplating the pros and cons of turning vegetarian, when Tanya spun around and took off out of the kitchen like she’d been bitten by a swarm of bees.
    I followed her. No way did I want to be left alone with that . What if, now the refrigerator door was open, Jack started to melt? Would the blood melt too? Would the blood trickle out in a pool over the gray linoleum? I started to run. No way did I want to hang around in front of the refrigerator and risk drowning in melting blood.
    “I’ve gotta find something to drink,” Tanya called over her shoulder as she made a dash down the passageway and into the first room on the left which was Jack’s lounge room. “And I don’t mean water.”
    “Shouldn’t we ring the police first?” I asked, then froze–half-in, half-out of the doorway. An upturned coffee table, now minus one leg, shards of opaque glass with the remains of what looked like a cheap vase, and dirty white lace curtains torn from a smashed window littered the stained carpet. Clearly Jack had put up one heck of a fight.