Nothing came. She glanced back, and now the dog was once again just a shadow among other shadows.
She looked ahead, moving through the bushes and reeds, trying to step around the wettest patches and stay on dry, or at least soggy, ground. She glanced back again and saw nothing. The dog had disappeared into the shadows as mysteriously and completely as it had appeared. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that although one threat had been avoided, there were so many more out there waiting for her.
Two more minutes of walking and she began to think less about the dog, which she felt confident was well behind her, and more about finding a hiding place for the night. She knew it was a fair distance to the nearest houses on the other side of the park, where she could maybe break in and find shelter, assuming they were unoccupied, and she didn’t relish stumbling around in the darkness any longer than necessary.
The wetland was crisscrossed with boardwalks, however. They had been built for families coming from the park, or kids coming from the school behind her, allowing them to walk into the wetlands and see the natural ecology without trampling all over that same ecology. The boardwalks were anywhere from a few inches to a few feet off the ground, and she thought crawling under one of them would get her as far out of the way as she was likely to get tonight.
Approaching a likely section of boardwalk, not too high and not too low, and over one of the dryer patches of ground, she turned to scan her surroundings before crawling under. Suddenly, she caught a hint of movement in the shadows behind her. She crouched, drawing out her knife and baring her teeth in an unconscious imitation of the dog she had run across earlier. She was ready to defend herself from whatever new terror the night had delivered.
Her sharp motions must have let her stalker know she was aware of it. She heard a low growling coming from the shadows behind her. That same low growling. The dog was behind her—had followed her. She couldn’t tell if it was stalking her or following her. Maybe there isn’t much difference when it comes right down to it.
After a moment’s thought she stood straighter, lowering her knife but not putting it away yet. The growling quieted, but did not cease completely.
Suddenly, she was tired. There was so much to worry about, so much to fight against or to hide from, she just couldn’t bring herself to think about the intentions of this deranged dog any more.
Maybe it would attack, maybe not. Whatever it did, it did, but she needed some rest. Turning her back, she got on her knees, then her belly, and crawled under the boardwalk. She did keep her knife in her hand though.
Under the boardwalk she lay on her side, facing the direction that the growling was coming from. Her black hair fell across her eyes, and she shook her head to clear her sight. Her view did not change, for the cloudy, moonless night was just as black as her hair. After a while, she saw the shape of the dog approaching slowly. The growling subsided, fading gradually until she could no longer hear it. It approached the boardwalk, slowly coming right up to the edge, so that all she could see were the dog’s feet. Then the muzzle dropped down, sniffing, questing back and forth under the boardwalk.
It took a few steps beside the boardwalk, down toward her feet. Then suddenly the dog was on its belly, shoving its head, and then its body, under the boardwalk. It came in down by her feet, coming close to them, but never touching them, making her nervous. If the dog decided to fight in these cramped quarters, it was going to be a nasty tussle. She gripped her knife, ready to stab out at the first sharp move those teeth made.
Next the dog turned, crawling up past her hips and chest, until its head was even with hers. And there it stayed. It never looked at her, just looking straight ahead, almost as if it was hoping if it didn’t look at her, she wouldn’t see it.
This close, she could see that the dog’s whole body was quivering, shaking, and she could hear that the growl hadn’t completely stopped, but had become a sort of sub-audible rumble coming from deep in the dog’s chest.
After a few moments, she relaxed. It seemed that there wasn’t going to be a fight. Setting down her knife between them, she gently scooted a few inches away from the dog, not wanting to come in contact. The dog never moved its head, but it somehow sensed her movement and the growling increased, moving back into the plainly audible range, accompanied by a silvery flash of teeth in the dog’s dark muzzle. She stopped moving, and the dog’s rumblings slowly subsided as well, dropping back to the deep rumbling that she could barely hear or sense. The dog never stopped shaking though, tense as a bowstring.
She didn’t really want company here under the boardwalk. But on the other hand, there were plenty of dangers stalking the world these days, and it didn’t make sense for two members of what was left of civilization to be fighting each other. Perhaps the dog felt the same way.
At least that was her hope as she drifted off to sleep. She was wet and cold, huddled under a boardwalk next to an animal she still thought might turn on her. She slept well.
---
When she awoke, she was lying on her back. She could see the gray light of dawn drifting through the slats on the boardwalk above her. She was cold. Her canvas jacket, taken off a dead man she’d run across several days ago, was no proof against the early morning chill.
Not all of her was cold, though. Her right side was warm enough. Curious, still fuzzy from sleep, she looked over. There was a dog next to her, sleeping up against her side, way too close. Touching her.
Startled, she rolled left, out of the shelter of the boardwalk and sprang to her feet. The dog, jolted from sleep by her movements, awoke snarling and scrambling out from beneath the other side of the boardwalk. They both stood, crouched, ready, watching each other across the boardwalk whose shelter they had peacefully shared just moments ago.
Her hand went to her belt, seeking the comfort of her knife, but it was not there. She’d left it under the boardwalk, where it had lain next to her as she slept. Slowly, with the dog watching her warily, but no longer growling, she crouched down, reaching her hand under the boardwalk. She could not feel the knife. She lowered her head to look for it. As her head lowered, so did the dog’s, and soon they were looking at each other beneath the boardwalk instead of above it.
She lowered her eyes to the ground and spotted her knife, just to the side of where her hand had been feeling for it. She grasped the handle and stood, still cautious, making no sudden moves. The dog matched her movements, again standing to gaze at her across the boardwalk.
Feeling more secure now that she was fully awake and armed, she took the time to look at the dog. In the growing daylight she could see details that had escaped her in the night. The dog was big, but not enormous. She guessed it weighed maybe seventy pounds. It was a strange color, a patchy mixture of black flecked with a dusty brown and the occasional bit of gray. Its face and ears were mostly black, with more brown and grey showing on the rest of its body. Its ears were laid back on its skull as it regarded her now, but she could tell they would point up and forward if it were in a friendlier mood. It looked a bit like a German Shepard, but without the sloping hind quarters of that breed, or a bit like a Doberman Pincher with thicker hair and bigger ears. It also had a wide face and thick ruff at its cheeks, making it look like a wolf or husky when it pricked its ears forward.
It was some kind of mix, or some exotic breed she had never seen. If anything, it looked like a darker, taller, and thicker-chested version of a coyote she had seen on a trip to Eastern Oregon a few years ago.
Even stranger than the mysterious breeding was the fact that this dog was wearing some sort of vest. The vest was black, and fit snugly around the dog’s chest and back, with holes for each of the front legs. It extended about two-thirds of the way to the dog’s hind legs. The vest was covered with straps, pockets, and loops, whose purpose she could not discern. The vest combined with the dog’s natural looks to give it a truly ferocious aspect.
But at least the vest gave a hint of the dog’s origins. It must have been a
part of the military contingent she had seen strewn across the soccer fields last night, at the edge of the wetlands. She had read articles on the internet stating that the military used dogs for everything from sniffing out bombs to serving alongside Navy Seals. This dog looked more like the fighting alongside Seals type. She could tell it was on edge, ready to attack or run at any moment. It wasn’t wide-eyed and growling like last night, but it wasn’t anywhere near relaxed either. Living through whatever had happened back at the battlefield could certainly account for the dog’s nervous nature.
But it didn’t look likely to attack her at the moment, so she slowly backed away and began to look about, considering her surroundings. She was close to her goal and the carnage she had witnessed last night would not deter her. The fact that whatever had torn through the guardsmen hadn’t sought her out and killed her last night was comforting, after a fashion. She could hope it, or they, had moved on.
She would have to go around the battlefield though. She turned back into the wetlands, heading back to the park behind her, intending to take one of the trails leading from the park to reach her goal. She knew these trails well. She had been here many times.
Walking slowly away from the dog, and from their shared resting place under the boardwalk, she kept glancing back, not trusting its intentions. It stayed still, watching her, its ears now lifted up off its skull and pointing at her. Good. As she got further away, she felt slightly more relaxed, until she could no longer see the dog for the trees and tall grasses that had come between them.
She relaxed, at least as much as she was ever able to relax in this new world, extending her awareness to what was ahead rather than behind, searching for new threats.
As she came to the edge of the wetlands and looked out across the park, she saw nothing. Nobody moving. No signs of life. She had gotten used to the emptiness of the places she’d seen since the Fall, since she started her journey here. Most people were dead or simply gone, and the world was a largely silent place. Even the birds that usually punctuated summer mornings like this one seemed to have moved on.
But she knew this park, and the silence of this familiar place struck her. Sometimes things like that still caught up with her, all of a sudden—creeping up when she was least prepared and slapping her across the face with the painful facts of this new world.
It was too early in the morning for the baseball teams to be practicing, or for the playground to be full of preschoolers, but there should be joggers on the paths, suburban moms walking their dogs and their strollers, retired couples out walking for their health, and perhaps a family member or two setting up for an all-day picnic.
She saw none of that. The world was different now, and that difference was especially wrong in this familiar place. She felt betrayed by her own mind. She knew she shouldn’t have expected anything different here, but somehow her mind had subconsciously built up those expectations anyway. The hope that yes, everything else was gone, everything else had changed irrevocably, but surely here, in these familiar fields, life as she had once known it would carry on.
It had been a foolish hope, even if she hadn’t really known she had been thinking it, and she chastised herself for it. If she saw anything now, it would probably be a cautious survivor like herself or, more likely, one of the many things that hunted the survivors.
She saw none of the familiar signs of life that she might have hoped for, but she didn’t see anything threatening either. Cautiously exiting the cover of the trees along the border of the park, she made her way across the park and onto the walking paths that lined the local neighborhood.
During her journey, she had noticed how random the signs of destruction seemed. It was the same here, in this more familiar territory. One street would still look like the perfect suburban retreat it had been built to be, and the next would be nothing more than a collection of shattered boards and smoking ruins. All of them were equally abandoned, as every place she’d seen since the Fall had been. She’d given up wondering where all the people had gone. They were just… gone.
Walking the half mile to the street she was looking for, she saw nothing and no one. Perhaps it was better that way.
Soon she arrived at the street she’d been headed for. It turned out to be one of the unlucky ones—one that was nothing more than a shattered ruin. She should have known. Walking up the street, she arrived at her destination. This was the place she had been headed for ever since the Fall—ever since her old life had ended.[4] This charred ruin of sticks and boards, this scattered debris field with only chunks of foundation to show the outline of where a home had been, this was her parents’ house.
She didn’t think of it as her house. She had never really felt the warm, fuzzy things everyone told her she should feel about a home. The house had been a place of strained silence, and her parents, though kind, had been nervous strangers to her. There was no attachment here.
Ever since her parents had brought her home at the age of four, overlooking her difficult background in favor of the sparkling blue eyes peeking through her dark bangs, it had been their one dream to see the love they gave returned in kind. And if not that, then at least to foster some feeling of caring, of attachment to their home, to their family, to them. That dream had gone unfulfilled.
These emotions were not a part of her. She didn’t remember if they ever had been, but if they had, they had been burned out by the time she arrived at her new home in America.
At first it had been “love will conquer all,” “give her time” and various other platitudes disguising their irrational hope. Later it had been counselors, psychologists, even an attempt at medicating her that went nowhere because she wouldn’t swallow the pills. She had no interest in being somebody else. In later years, the attempts to bond her into the all-American family unit had grown half-hearted at best. Eventually, she spent most of her time at her school, just coming back here for the occasional holiday visit or sometimes a few weeks in the summer.
She wasn’t sure why she had worked so hard to get to this house, to see this wreckage. But what else was there to do when the world fell apart? Maybe she just had to be sure there was truly nothing tying her to her old life.
Now the home she had grown up in was just the same as the others on this street. It was mostly collapsed, with splintered boards and roof tiles scattered across the street. She stood contemplating the ruins of the house for a moment.
Suddenly she spied movement out of the corner of her eye. She snapped her head that way, back in the direction from which she had come. Down at the end of the block she saw dog again. It was walking up the sidewalk towards her. When she looked at it, it stopped, looking back at her.
She turned away, frowning, and regarded the house again. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the approach of the dog. It came all the way up the sidewalk to her. She kept her hand close to her knife, but made no other moves. For a moment she feared it was going to sniff her, or lean against her, but it didn’t. It sat down next to her, a few feet away, also looking at the ruins of the house.
They both kept that position for a few minutes, until she turned to the dog and spoke.
“This is not how things are done.”
She wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but it seemed sufficient. It broke the stasis. They looked at each other for another moment, then both moved into the wreckage of the house. The dog padded carefully over things, sniffing them, satisfying its curiosity, and she followed more slowly, digging through scattered clothes and lifting broken boards to look under them and see if she could find anything useful. The one advantage of having visited here so often was that she knew what her parents had owned, and where in the house things had been.
It was surprising how many things were either torn and mangled beyond use, or buried too far under the wreckage to be accessed. She did find a pair of sturdy leather hiking boots that had belonged to her adoptive mother. She put them on, replacing the ragged sneakers she’d been wearing the day she
left her school. She also found a pair of cargo pants in what remained of a dresser reserved for the clothes her parents kept buying her even though she didn’t want them. They would serve better than her jeans, which already had several rips in them, so she changed into them.
She found her adoptive father’s gun safe, crushed under a section of roof along with the rest of the closet the safe had been in. The door had sprung open, so accessing it was no problem. The insides were somewhat disappointing. Most of what was left was damaged, and therefore useless, but a few of the best long guns were gone, as were both of her father’s pistols. She supposed her father had taken them out, probably when the Fall began. There had been gunfire all over the city in those first chaotic days. She guessed this meant that her parents had gone somewhere else, and were not buried here in the wreckage of their home. She was not sure how she was supposed to feel about that. It made no effective difference to her—all that mattered was that the most useful guns were not here.
Amid what was left, she managed to pull out a shotgun, a .22 target rifle, and a 30.06 hunting rifle. All three looked to be in working order. Scratching around the bottom of the safe, she managed to find two bullets for the .22 and nine for the hunting rifle. There were no shells for the shotgun. She loaded the hunting rifle and put the extra bullets in her pocket. She left the .22 and the shotgun behind. It wasn’t worth the weight to carry a weapon she didn’t have ammunition for.
The last thing she did was to look into what used to be the kitchen of the house. The dog had already found this area, and was chewing through a packet of ramen noodles with great gusto. She bent over next to the dog to search for things that were easily totable. The dog paid her no mind.
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