Backup Plan
By Musuko

I knew as soon as I opened the van’s doors that something had occurred that didn’t fit with my expectations. In such circumstances, I would normally expect my passenger to cower in the back corner, putting as much space between me and him as possible. Alternatively, some of the more lively cubs would try to fight me as soon as I opened the light of the garage to them. Invariably, each possibility led to the same end.
	This time, however, I faced a young squirrel boy, probably aged eight or nine, laid limp and still. I hesitated before taking action. I closed the door again and fetched a screwdriver from the cab. Caution paid when it came to facing the unknown. The boy had not moved when I returned, and I climbed up into the back of the van. A jab of the screwdriver to his exposed thigh should rouse a reaction.
	Nothing. No movement. No sound. I crouched and felt his neck.
	I tended not to swear. I don’t like the loss of composure that such dips in civility represent. But right then, at that moment, I felt sorely tempted to indulge. Because the boy, most frustratingly, had died.
	I kicked the van wall and spoke a few private words to myself. I rolled him onto his back and checked his body for any marks. Nothing. He had not taken his own life. So what, then?
	I checked his pockets. An asthma inhaler. Empty. Well...fuck.
	The day had begun so promisingly. I had a clean capture, and an adorable little cub in my possession, with an unknown number of days mapped out before me, filled with delicious delights. My body had tingled, and my palms had itched. But now...nothing. I flexed my fingers, feeling ants crawl.
	I hauled the limp body out by its ankle and dragged it down into the cellar, slamming the van door and cellar door on my way. I let its head crack against each and every stone step. The smashed face smeared blood into the dirt floor as I dragged it across the cellar.
	My dear little pet stirred from his home in the corner. My puppy. My toy. My captured wolf. The thing once known as ‘Wolfy’, body truncated at the elbows and knees, mind catapulted into turmoil and semi-feral instincts, fur matted with the muck and dirt from the floor and the corner where his food went in and came back out again. He lay in a heap, just under the hook that held the chain connected to his collar, the apparatus that constricted his entire existence to a small semi-circle in a killer’s cellar. His water dish contained plenty to last him another day or so, and beside him lay the remains of his most recent meal; the mangled and gnawed bones of the removed portion of his own left leg.
	He looked up as I dumped the limp body in front of him.
	“Dinner.”
	He snarled and pulled himself onto his stumps, retreating into the filthy corner, a place he avoided unless necessary. It didn’t matter. Sooner or later, hunger would bring him to the meat.
	I ignored him for a while. The table in the centre of the room held my attention. I had so hoped to have the boy tied to it, wailing and screaming as they usually did. My entertainment should have had the added enjoyment of knowing my pet watched, impotent and unable to escape the sounds, knowing that his abortive campaign to stop me had led to his life now spent as front row witness to my activities.
	I paused in thought, fingers drumming.
	Backup plan.
	I turned to face the wolf, a smile on my face. This more than anything made him press harder into the corner.
	“Bath time, puppy.”
I had a hose prepared months ago ready for this eventuality. To date, I had not needed to use it. The wolf had suffered entertainingly in his muck in the corner, and his attempts to groom himself with his tongue had invariably ended with vomiting, which only made his situation worse. Now, however, I desired him clean.
	The blast of frigid water hit him in the neck first. He shrieked and struggled away, running along the wall until the chain caught him short. I kept the stream trained on him. He turned away from me, huddled in against the wall, trying to escape it. I simply had to walk this way and that to angle the stream in from other directions. The dirt floor beneath him turned to mud, and the puddle spread towards his dirty corner and his meals, new and old. I kept the water on him, long past the point where his fur shone clean. I stopped only when he trembled and sobbed, drenched and frozen to the core.
	My screwdriver came into play. I held the point against his neck while I unlocked the chain from his collar and fitted a strong leash in its place. I didn’t need to remind him of the consequences for any attempt to bite me. The first few times he attempted to do so, and the prolonged beatings that followed, put enough hesitation in him to keep my paws safe. Even so, I moved to the extent of the leash as soon as I could, and kept a wary eye on him. He returned my gaze with a glare, and I knew full well his will remained unbroken. Battered, yes, and cowed into temporary obedience, but I knew it waited its moment to lunge forth and fight.
	I tugged the leash. He followed. He had learned how to walk on his stumps, and kept pace well. He whimpered as we neared the table, as he well knew what occurred there. He didn’t form words, however. He had stopped doing that a long time ago, aside from extreme circumstances. A coping mechanism, perhaps. Act like a feral to cope with being forced to live as one. I didn’t dwell too much on the intricacies of it. We passed the table, however, and I led him up the steps to the garage. His stumps slipped and struggled in the squirrel boy’s blood.
	He had not seen the garage for months. He perked up as we approached the garage door, and I could see him thinking. I wrapped the leash tight around my paw. Perhaps he could pull free of my grasp. Perhaps he had practiced his quadrupedal running. Perhaps he could outrun me. Life contained many risks, however, and I took this one without fear.
	Because the door opened to the emptiness of the moors, with nothing in sight from one horizon to the other, save for the meandering dirt and gravel drive that led to the house and the broken remains of drystone walls that once marked the fields that the house had stood sentry over in centuries long lost. I watched his expression deflate, his hope withering. He might outrun me, but in which direction? He couldn’t hide, and I had the van. I doubted he could outrun a diesel engine.
	I tugged him outside. He recoiled from the sunlight. I didn’t think much of the watery glow from the overcast sky, but I supposed it must overpower the eye if you have lived by the light of a forty watt bulb for months. He yelped as his stumps pressed into the gravel on the driveway, and I smiled to myself and enjoyed private memories of a certain pathetic cat running in gravel-filled shoes on a treadmill. It had been a while since I had summoned him. I would have to make an appointment.
	But for now, I had an itch to scratch. I led my puppy around the corner of the house, then the next corner, to the scrubby courtyard at the back. A tree stood there. It didn’t look well. Perhaps close to dying of whatever kills trees. I couldn’t begin to guess its breed. Oak? Ash? Elm? I hardly cared. To me, I judged it merely a thick pillar of wind-battered wood, topped by a tangled spray of tattered branches, bare of leaves. I suspected it would topple into the house one day.
	I led the wolf over to it. I kicked his flank and he yelped, retreating from me towards the knobbly roots.
	“Stay.”
	He snarled at me. I yanked the leash and he stopped. I looked up, inspecting the branches, judging distances. I picked my target, a nice stout branch and flung the end of the leash over it, catching it as it fell down the other side. I pulled until the strap slid down into the join between the branch and the trunk. I hauled on it, lifting my heels off the floor. The leash came down, and the wolf’s neck went up. He cried out in panic, his voice lost to the empty moors, and soon dangled with only his hind stumps on the ground, his front stumps waggling uselessly in the air.
	“Neck...neck,” he gasped. Rare words.
	I grabbed a pawful of his damp headfur and held his head still. I positioned the loop at the end of the leash in front of his nose.
	“Open!”
	With a whine, he opened his mouth. I stuffed the leash into his maw, keeping my fingers as clear of those teeth as I could. He snapped his mouth shut, and I yanked my paw clear just in time, nearly losing a fingertip. I hissed in warning, and he snarled back. But I had accomplished my task; he held the end of the leash that held his collar up in the air. Let go, and he could drop down and relieve the strangling pressure on his neck.
	I leaned close to his ear and whispered against the wind. “Don’t let go of that.”
	He growled again, and parted his teeth slightly. The leash strap slipped an inch closer to his nose.
	“If your front legs...stumps...touch the ground, I will kill you.”
	He glared at me. The leash slipped another inch. Perhaps that threat held no menace now.
	“I will do it slowly...”
	His growl intensified. His teeth clenched, and the strap stopped slipping.
	“Good boy.” His growl became a rumble, and he looked away from me. A nervous response. Shy, perhaps. I couldn’t tell if he blushed; the cold air reddened his ears regardless, as it did mine. I walked towards the back wall of the house. “Keep that in mind. Don’t let go, whatever happens.”
	I turned back to face him. I held in my paws a rusty spade, retrieved from the detritus piled against the wall.
	“Whatever happens...”
The moment would no doubt linger in my memory for a long time. As my arms raised up, and the spade reached the peak of its arc, I knew that I had crossed a line. I could not claim to remain the wholly composed and precise master of my art with this blot on my portfolio. My perfection dropped to an imperfect 99% that day. Because, for the first time I could recall, the pain I inflicted did not stem from controlled satisfaction of an urge, or from the quelling of some unwanted internal lust, as had happened too often with that disgusting cat.
	No. This time, the fuel that drove my arms swinging down I could only truthfully describe as rage.
	He barely had time to react as the rusted metal rushed towards him. In those short milliseconds his eyes widened and then closed, and his head turned to the side. His brow knitted, tense, bracing.
	The flat of the spade’s blade impacted his muzzle and cheekbone and sent his head swinging off to the side. Rust flakes sprayed in a brown puff caught and carried away by the wind. He howled like a beast and swung back and forth on the leash, oscillating with the force of the impact. His arm stumps flailed and tried to rub at his face. The leash slipped an inch in his muzzle.
	I rested with the spade on the floor. The exertion did not suit my body. I felt the pounding of blood behind my eyes, and I sucked in cool air. I watched a trickle of blood leave his nostril.
	He growled more threateningly than I had ever known. I locked my eyes on his, and for a while it felt like a classic battle of wills. Perhaps he weighed his chances. He still had his teeth, after all, and I always knew he could take a sizeable chunk out of my body with them. Below the hip, of course.
	I raked the spade through the dirt and propped it under my arm, leaning into it for support.
	“Do you remember what I said when I took your limbs, pup? I had no way of knowing for certain that you would survive that day. We explored virgin territory together that day.”
	I raised the spade above my shoulder again.
	“We explore another today!”
	His hip took the blow this time. His legs shot out from beneath him, and he dangled from his neck while recovering his footing. Stumping. His howl of pain strangled in his constricted neck, turning it into a horrible gurgle of mortal distress. I left him no time to properly recover. I swung again, loose and uncontrolled. Chance alone brought the impact down upon his shoulder, which seemed to buckle under the blow. A broken bone, perhaps. Collarbone. Shoulder blade. Socket. Who could tell.
	“Fuck you.” The shock hit me. The words came from my own mouth. Not his. Mine. The vile expletive left my own lips. I had become something...else. Not of my normal frame of mind. Did losing the means to scratch my itch lead to this?
	I tossed the spade to the ground. I balled my paw into a fist, and for the first time since age nine I threw a punch. I could not aim. I could not put any decent force behind the attack. My fist hit his neck, and could well have hurt my paw as much as it hurt him. He coughed and seized rigid, then struggled, arms waving. His head tilted back, and the leash slipped. It caught, lodged behind his upper front teeth.
	Then...
	...and then...
	...a wet crunching sound. And the leash slipped free. And the wolf fell face-first into the dirt. And two blood-covered teeth bounced off my shin.
I almost vomited. This violent release felt nothing like the normal satisfaction I sought. I took hold of the leash and pulled. The wolf would stand and follow, or strangle. Stand and follow he did. Back towards the house we went, faster now, his stumps scrabbling in the dirt and gathering small nicks and cuts from the gravel, each stumbling step announced to the world with a feeble cry of pain, each movement threatening to lead into a topple to the floor as his crippled shoulder fought against all natural sense to keep him moving.
	“Pleath...don’t kill me,” he said, spitting blood.
	“Shut up.”
	I took him inside. Into the house. Not the garage. Not the cellar. I didn’t want to mar my memories any further by associating this day’s events with my normal activities here. I wouldn’t let this mutt come to my thoughts the next time I had some trembling boy strapped to my table.
	I kicked the door into the dining room. It screeched on its hinges. Unlike the dry, stale state of the rooms in much of the rest of the derelict house, this room and the kitchen that neighboured it had suffered facing the prevailing winds, and two broken panes in the dining room window let in the rain that turned these rooms into a fetid mess. The air stank of damp, and wallpaper and plaster hung from the walls in rotting chunks. Much of the furniture had collapsed from rot. But a dining table large enough to seat eight sat still strong and sturdy after so many years of neglect. I had considered it a candidate for the cellar, once upon a time. Today, it would serve as a backup. I dumped the leash on the floor.
	“Get up!”
	He moved a step away from me, then collapsed as his arm buckled beneath him. His shoulder. Shattered, perhaps.
	“Get the fuck up onto the table,” I hissed.
	He looked up at me with an expression I struggled to read. His eye had almost pinched shut behind his swelling cheek. The blood from his mouth had reached his chest. He made a valiant attempt to haul up onto his hind legs, but he collapsed back onto his face, moaning in pain.
	“Hurts,” he gasped.
	I struggled to see past my anger. I didn’t really know what I hoped to do, but the idea took shape as I moved. I almost enjoyed the spontaneity of it. Almost. I gripped the opposite edge of the table and heaved, toppling the table onto its side with a crash, only barely missing crushing my toes and the wolf’s prone body.
	The table lay with its surface at a 45 degree angle from the floor, propped up by the central support and the feet that splayed out from it. I snatched the wolf’s leash from the floor and moved behind the table, trailing the leash over the top of it and then pulling. Hard.
	The wolf yowled like a stabbed cat and slid up the table’s surface much as the squirrel boy had in the cellar; limp and bleeding. I looped the end of the leash around one of the table’s feet, then moved back to the other side.
	The wolf hung strung up against the sloping wood, back to me, hind stumps scrabbling against the floorboards, his breathing coming in ragged gasps. The awkward pull of the leash kept his muzzle pulled up, and one eye regarded me with angry fear.
	Yes, I recognised it now. The expression from earlier. Anger. Fear. Mixed together.
	His back lay exposed to me. I regarded it for a moment. Then...left the room.
	A quick trip downstairs.
	Returning with...chain.
	I wrapped the first few feet around my paw. The remaining four feet hung from my fist. I let it rattle across the floor as I approached him. He knew the implication right away, and started struggling to pull himself free from the table. His stumps could find no purchase, and the leash and collar held him upright.
	I raised my impromptu whip with a great degree of effort, and swung it horizontally. I had enough sense even in my rage to not dare to risk smashing myself in the face with it. The metal links slashed across the small of his back and ripped skin and fur in its wake. The extent of damage surprised me. Blood splashed to the far wall of the room, flicked there from the end of the chain. Still more poured in rivulets down the wolf’s rear and speckled his flailing tail. His howl shook the room, and he banged his head against the table over and over until I feared he would knock himself out.
	I considered whipping again. But the anger had started to fade. In its place, the crashing realisation that I risked losing a second plaything in one day. I let the chain fall from my paw.
	But...I had room for one final cruelty. I remembered something in the kitchen, and my search soon found it. An ancient and half-collapsed cardboard container of salt in the back of one of the cabinets. The salt inside had long since soaked with condensation and become a rigid block.
	A block that I brought back to scrub vigorously over the raw red gash across his back.
	He did pass out then...after about ten minutes of screaming.

*     *     *

In the quiet hours that followed, I contemplated. He still hung on the table, his breathing laboured. I sat in the damp and collapsed remains of a sofa chair.
	He had let go of the leash. I had promised to kill him if he did. Would I do it? Would I break my word? Did keeping to honesty when the whole concept of telling the truth never factored into my life make sense now? I had lied to this mutt before. Repeatedly. Why not do the same now?
	He began to stir. Decision time. I stood up.
	“Hurr...” he coughed. “Hurts...”
	“Surprising, that.”
	I untied his leash and let him slide down the table to pile into a heap on the floor.
	“Follow.” I allowed him to move without my guiding paw on the leash. I had serious doubts about his capability to move at all, let alone escape. I walked to the door and stood watching.
	He spent an age rising to his stumps. Pain danced in his expression, and the plaintive whine that escaped his gritted teeth only intensified when he tried to take a step. He collapsed back onto his chest and lay in a panting, pathetic heap.
	“Don’t make me drag you, puppy. I don’t think I have the strength.”
	His panting became a weak growl. It felt nice to hear that his will hadn’t completely cracked.
	“Get up.”
	He tried again. His stumps found purchase amongst the blood and sodden mould. He took a step, wobbled, and appeared close to falling again. But he caught himself with a second step, and his moan of pain stifled behind his gritted teeth, and his eyes blazed fire at me.
	No. I wouldn’t kill him. Not yet.
	I retreated into the hallway as he approached, taking my time. His shaking legs carried him in slow, unsteady steps. But his eyes stayed on me, and that anger burned steady.
	Perhaps by beating him I had transfered my anger into him?
	An anger sink perhaps?
	Interesting idea.
	He picked up speed as we turned the corner in the hall, then turned again to step down into the garage. He stumbled and bumped against the garage wall, stopping to rest. I reached down to pull the trailing leash away from between his legs, but he growled and bared his teeth.
	I kicked his arm out from under him, and he crashed face first into the concrete.
	“Behave.”
	Through his grimace, the glare came back. He pulled himself back standing. Blood dripped from his muzzle. I moved to the cellar stairs and he followed, a little faster now. I hurried down the steps, because as his stumps hit the squirrel’s blood on the stairs he became a tumbling ball of fur and blood and screaming, smashing and crunching against each step until he slid into the dirt at the bottom. I heard his breath wheeze. He seemed unable to stand again, each attempt leading to a howl and a collapse. His glare had gone, knocked away by pain and exhaustion. Despite myself, I could not help but feel impressed. He had made it this far. Almost to his destination.
	“Well done,” I said, with hardly any sarcasm at all. He didn’t react. I imagined I hardly factored into his thoughts at that precise moment.
	I occupied myself for ten minutes with, of all things, a cheese sandwich and an apple. I had, after all, planned to spend the day with my squirrel, and had prepared accordingly. He lay still, but I could see his chest moving.
	Eventually, I grew tired of waiting. Clapping my paws free of crumbs, I crouched in front of him and prodded my finger against his muzzle.
	His head shot up and he snapped his teeth.
	I fell back into the dirt, my finger escaping amputation by wolf just barely. He snarled and lunged towards me. I kicked out, acting on instinct alone. My heel made contact with his cheek, the exact spot where my spade had so violently touched him, and he fell back with a pained yelp. I scrambled back to my feet.
	“Well...” I said, and could not think of a comment to make. Actually, yes. I could.
	“Good boy. Well done.”
	He looked up at me, angry, confused, conflicted. I loved that expression. Lurking under it, and rising fast, came that awkward crawling look of embarrassment, a small hint of the emotion that the damn cat swam in; some enjoyment had cut through his suffering, and he knew full well that feeling that response marked him unequivocally as a sick freak.
	I smiled. My palms itched.
	“You like being a good boy, hmm puppy?”
	A rumble of a growl, quieter than before. He shuffled his stumps and looked away.
	“Sit up.”
	He looked back, glaring, stubbornly refusing to move.
	“Sit up!”
	He swung his stumps in a slow arc and rolled his body until he reached a position where he could pull himself up onto all fours. He panted and whimpered all the way through it. Only he knew how badly each part of his body hurt. Once up, he sat back, resting on his hind legs in an awkward squat.
	“Beg.”
	He stared me down. I burst into laughter. Genuine, unintentional laughter. I often imagined certain moments in my life as viewed from outside by a stranger lacking any context of the situation. This moment would rank highly. An albino mouse in a blood-splashed suit giving classic pet dog instructions to a naked, adult wolf missing substantial parts of his anatomy, and bleeding profusely from his back and face, in a dimly lit dirt-floored cellar that stank of piss and shit and blood.
	And if the hypothetical viewer turned their head just a fraction, they would see the ragdoll corpse of a small child laid amongst gnawed bones in a muddy pool in the corner.
	So I laughed. And the wolf looked at me with puzzlement.
	“But seriously though...beg, or I’ll hurt you.”
	He grumbled, a sound I assumed came as a mix of growl and whimper. He pushed upwards with his front legs and managed a strange little hop, rising his legs up and managing to sit upright, his front legs wobbling about for balance.
	“Speak!”
	He teetered, nearly falling. He actually tilted his head, eyebrow raised. Confused. “H-hurts...”
“That means bark like a dog, puppy.”
The tangled expression of shame rolled back into his face. He looked away from me, then back again. I waited. He coughed, and made a feeble grunting sound.
“Speak! Don’t make me ask again!”
He glared, just for a moment. Then the shamed look. Then...an impressive “Hurroof!” noise.
	“Good boy.”
	He fell back onto his front legs. The expression returned, distinct now. The glow of shamed pleasure. This felt almost as good as hurting him. Perhaps a new avenue for exploration, a new way to scratch the itch.
	“Follow me.”
	I walked over to my cabinets. He followed. Slowly. Very, very slowly. His apprehension I could understand. The circular saw that took his limbs lay there, prominently in view. I crouched to open one of the cabinets and rooted through the medical supplies stuffed inside.
	“Okay, let us test my first-aid skills,” I said, dumping armfuls of gauze and disinfectants and miscellaneous paraphernalia on the top of the cabinet.
	I glanced back at the wolf, and I believe I almost caught a smile.

*     *     *

I must have missed my calling as a doctor or surgeon. When I put my mind to it, I seemed to have as much a knack for putting bodies back together as I did tearing them apart. The wolf rested in a pile of blankets, his muzzle and torso wrapped in bandages, his collar reattached to the chain that restricted him to the corner of the cellar. The floor around the table had ended up strewn with various discarded bits of packaging. I had left scissors and scalpels and oddly-shaped sewing implements whose names escaped me all over the place. I would probably throw most if them away, or more likely bury them in the garden, rather than bother learning how to properly sterilise and store them.
	I had dragged the sofa chair down from the dining room while he slept. I sat in its squelching padding, feeling oddly at ease. I had a thermos of tea with me, and I passed some hours in thought whilst I emptied it. I thought. And thought. And my thoughts returned over and over to one thing; this felt altogether too much like my dealings with the cat.
	I stood up and dumped the thermos on the floor. The wolf stirred at the noise, but didn’t wake. I approached him, stood over him, and looked down at him while I unzipped...while I aimed.
	The splash of piss hitting his muzzle woke him, and he flinched and rolled to the side. I kept the stream on him and he got an eye full of stinging liquid before he clenched it shut. He tried to wriggle away, rolling off the blankets and splashing into the mud. I shook the last drips away. His bandages soaked it all up, turning yellow. Right over his nose. He would breathe the stink of it for a while. I put myself away and zipped myself back to modesty, then crouched in front of him.
	“I recall reading that your kind mark ownership in that fashion. I know that I have no need to remind you how thoroughly I own and control you, wolf, but it strikes me that properly enforcing the concept would help our relationship immeasurably.”
	He coughed, droplets flying from his lips. He tried in vain to wipe at his face with his stumps, just ending up adding mud to the bandages.
	“I don’t intend to kill you, not just yet, despite my earlier promise to do so. Don’t let this leniency breed complacency, however. I have changed my mind once on this matter, and could well do so at any time. The only control you have over anything that happens to you now comes through pleasing me. And as things stand, you can do this through your obedience. Do you understand?”
	He lifted his head and parted his lips as much as the bandages allowed. I cut him off, my finger held up.
	“Pet dogs do not speak. They do not nod. They do not gesture. They bark. You will bark. Do you understand?”
	“Hruff!”
	“And you do not ever attempt to bite me again. Understand?”
	“Hruff.” Slightly less emphatically.
	“Good boy.”
	I leaned over and took hold of the dead cub’s ankle, dragging the body through the muddy slime and dropping it in front of the wolf’s nose.
	“Eat your dinner, and we will talk more later.”
	He wore a dim expression of doe-eyed shame for the short moments before revulsion hit him. But then, as he had so many times before, he shuffled closer and opened his mouth and leant in towards the boy’s bare shin. I quickly turned away. I tended not to remain as an audience to this.
	I left him, confused and alone in the dim, cold cellar, tearing with tiny, bandage-restricted bites at the corpse of a boy, while I ascended the stairs.
	I felt...
	...unsure.
	Perhaps just a little worried about the day, about how far I had strayed from my norm.
	But, I thought, looking down at my paws, the itch that would take a week of screaming torture to satisfy had gone...inside of one day.
	I turned out the light. I left him in darkness. I locked the door. I would see the wolf again in the morning.