Another recession, more fighting in Ireland, Doctor Doom butchers his eleventh victim, another terrorist attack. I grab the remote. Hell with the news, let’s have the weather and make it nice, so I can call in sick and spend a long weekend at the beach. We’re short-staffed at the gin mill where I work. I’ve bartended every afternoon for a month, going crazy with drunks crying in their boilermakers, telling me stories they told me yesterday, and leaving lousy tips. I deserve a mental health day. Tomorrow I’ll stroll the boardwalk, check out the babes, drink beer, eat crabs, read Elmore Leonard’s latest. Work out if I feel like it.

The weatherman looks like an ad for dental hygiene. Cracking lame jokes, trying to ease those low fronts on us with promises of bright days ahead. The clown knows how much of our sanity we invest in the weather.

Oh, no. We’re in for a storm. High winds, two types of precipitation, ninety-six inches of— My God, he’s got to be kidding!

I’m halfway to the picture window when I hear a banging on my roof. Wump. Wump. Wump. Like a mortar attack. The lights go out. A howling rips through my house. I try the phone. Dead. My elkhound Thor yelps in the cellar. I grab my flashlight and go out to my carport.

WUMP! WUMP! WUMP! I shine my light into this ghastly rain. Torn limbs hang from power lines. Corpses fall off of roofs. Blood spills from my downspouts, drips down the walls, seeps over the concrete floor. A red mist covers my new Mustang Convertible, its top down. And the howling, that dreadful howling, keeps getting louder. Where are they all coming from?

The ratio does look fifty-fifty, like the clown said, and there’s all kinds of breeds. Persian, Manx, ear-torn toms, common tabbies, calicos, and Siamese whining in the blood. Somersaulting Great Danes, nosediving pit bulls, shorthaired pointers, Chihuahuas yipping like crazy before they hit, and lots of mutts.

He was right about the cats landing on their feet. But it’s no good. Even the lions are crushed in this pounding rain.

A basset hound slams onto Mrs. Ott’s Volvo, caving in the roof. My satellite dish looks like a giant wok of raw meat. A disemboweled doberman drapes Sweeney’s fence. I raise my light. Chows claw at the air like kamikazes with a change of heart, then crash, frothing and biting their tongues.

The wind gusts, the bodies spill into my carport. The clown sure downplayed this part. Impaled bellies, oozing guts, bones poking out. The shit, vomit, and blood. That’s the weatherman for you. “A domestic downpour,” he said. “Organic pollution, nothing nature can’t fix.” They ought to can his ass. Lock him up, make him eat soap.

I’m backed against my Mustang, jumping side to side with my arms out, to ward off the barrage. A poodle rams into my chest, knocking me onto the trunk. I get back up, gasping and squinting in the blood spray. I grab my baseball bat and swat at the bodies.

A pug flies by and smashes into my windshield. First new car I ever bought. Thirty grand and look at it now. Battered and bloody, with a rottweiler on the dash. Will insurance stiff me, claiming an act of God? Thor is howling.

“Shut up, Thor! Shut up!”

Then, as quick as it came, the storm lets up.

I step over the bodies and raise my light and see the gaps in the sky. Yeah, it’s clearing all right. We got four feet at most, half the expected amount. Thank God the clown was wrong about that.

Survivors mew and bark at where the moon should be. Gutters hiss. Here comes the first plow, clearing the street. A young collie bounds about, kicking up blood. Two kittens tussle on the ribs of a dead mastiff. A tiger is chasing its tail where my mailbox was.

I climb over the carnage and watch the tiger up close. He turns faster and faster, blind to all but his play.