by David Bruns
She walked west, all the way to the ocean, where the houses were made of glass and light. People sat in the sand or beneath restaurant umbrellas. They didn’t have to be at school or work, but when Raina asked one woman why, the woman gave her a funny look.
When afternoon came, she walked to the school, waited for the final bell to go off, and got on the bus home. She’d been on her own all day and nothing had happened. Her mom would be mad at her for leaving school again if she found out, but Raina didn’t care. Her mom had to learn that she was wrong.
Back home, both her parents were in bed. Their breathing was heavy and sounded like something wet dragging itself up the shore. Raina looked in on them, but they were asleep. She was hungry after the day of walking, and she went to the fridge to warm up last night’s rice and beans. Sirens whined outside, but there were always sirens.
Her parents stayed in bed the next day, too. Raina brought them water and broth. They were pale and the room smelled wrong. The Kleenex in the trash beside the bed were spotted with blood.
That evening, her parents argued. Blankets rustled. Drawers scraped. Her dad walked out. He was dressed, but his brown face was waxy. Sweat dewed his temples.
“Get your shoes.” His voice was thick. “We’re going to the hospital. Can’t leave you alone.”
On the drive, the only sound was their wet coughing.
Cars jammed the hospital parking lot. Sirens spun. Lights painted the crowds red and blue. There were tents in the lot like they were selling the cars parked there. Her dad had to park three blocks away. Hundreds of people stood back from the front doors, where uniformed men in bug-like masks held long guns. People shouted and pressed forward. The men lifted their guns and yelled, and the crowds fell back.
“Martin.” Her mom grabbed her dad’s arm. “They’ll never let us in there.”
“They have to. We’re sick.”
“Look around. Everyone’s sick. And if we stay, Raina will be, too.”
He blinked, skin pulled tight over his face. “Come on.”
As they walked away, a gun went off. Men and women screamed. The three of them ran to the car and drove home.
Her mom trudged back to bed, shoulders jerking as she coughed into her fist. Raina’s dad bent down in front of her. The heat from his face was like afternoon sand.
“What’s going on?” Raina asked.
“We don’t feel good. But we’ll get better soon. Can you make yourself dinner?”
“Do you want some?”
“Not now.” He reached out to touch her arm, then stopped. A bead of sweat slipped down his nose. “Keep the front door locked, okay?”
“Okay.”
He turned, then stopped and looked back, a vein pulsing in his brow. “If something … happens. Wait for help. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He went to his room and shut the door. Raina turned off the lights and sat beside the window blinds, where one of the slats was broken. She peered through it to the intersection down the street. Normally, headlights streamed through the break in the blinds long after dark. That night, seconds passed between each car. Sirens whooped past every few minutes.
Raina only left her post to get food, use the bathroom, or bring her parents water. A day and a half into her vigil, her head snapped up from a doze. It took her a minute to understand what had woken her.
They’d stopped coughing.
Raina shot to her feet, heart heavy with dread. She took two steps toward their door and stopped. What if it would only be true if she opened the door and looked in? What if they’d needed her but she’d been asleep and they’d been too weak to get up and wake her? She sank to the stained, threadbare carpet. She knew what waited on the other side of the door. The worst thing in the world.
And that was why she had to stand up and make herself see.
The door creaked. The room smelled like blood and waste. Raina watched them for several minutes, then closed the door again. She went to her bed and lay down and wept. When she was done, she went back to the broken slat to watch the street.
Like one of the windup toys she’d had when she was little, the city seemed to stall, shudder forward, and stop. No more sirens. No more little planes burbling through the sky all afternoon. No more men walking their pit bulls. No more older kids hanging outside the Wendy’s and laughing too loud.
But her dad had told her what she needed to do. So Raina stayed at the window and waited.
* * *
Three days after she’d opened the door to the bedroom—three days alone in the silence waiting for help—the phone rang. Raina snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Hi there,” a man said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “And who’s this?”
“Raina.” Too late, she knew this was the wrong thing to say. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend. Of your parents. Are you alone?”
Raina went still. “No.”
“Who’s there?” the man said. “Your parents?”
“That’s right. They’re in the other room.”
“Are they sick?”
“They’re fine.”
“Is that so. Then can I speak to them, Raina?”
She stared across the kitchen. “Hang on.”
Raina set the phone on the counter. As the man waited, she got the backpack she’d used for school. She got toilet paper and her toothbrush and the Tupperware of rice and beans she’d boiled. She emptied out the tail of a Pepsi two-liter and filled it with water. She got socks and underwear and a bag of the Bugles her dad liked.
Had liked.
Raina went to the front door, the man’s voice squawking from the phone back in the kitchen. He sounded angry, now. Like a man who wanted her parents to be dead. She went back to the kitchen and got the long, thin knife from the block. The same one she’d used to cut peppers and onions for dinner just a few days earlier.
Outside, crows scolded from the tile roofs. There was no sound of traffic. She didn’t know where she was going but she knew she needed to get away from the house and the lying, angry man on the phone. It was spring and the streets were wet from rain. Cars were parked at odd angles in the middle of the street. Others were crashed together and left behind. Sometimes she heard an engine far away, but that only made the silences in-between all the louder.
Shards of glass glittered on the sidewalk where shop windows had been punched out. At the corner, the Walgreens was torn apart, deodorant and shampoo bottles littering the entrance. Raina wandered down a side street. The front doors hung open like dark mouths at some houses. The people who owned them had abandoned them. If she wanted, she could walk in and make them her own.
But she doubted they were truly empty. She thought they had rooms like her parents’, where people slept forever in their bloody beds.
Los Angeles was gone. But what if the sickness hadn’t gotten to other places? She could go north. Santa Barbara. Her parents had taken her there when she was younger. It was pretty there. Maybe it wasn’t so silent and still. Maybe she could find help.
An hour later, with the clouds drizzling rain onto the apartments and strip malls, something growled at her from beneath a shrub. Raina stopped. A stout, black Chihuahua trotted out, hackles raised.
“Hi,” she said. “Are you scared?”
She crouched and held out her hand. The dog leaned warily forward, sniffing. It backed up a step, then leaned in and sniffed her again, its nose catching a whiff from her pack.
“I’ve got food.” She glanced down the street and shrugged out of her backpack. “Are you hungry?”
She opened the container of rice and beans and scooped a few bites out with her fingers. The Chihuahua edged closer, nostrils whuffing. He licked her hand, spilling grains of spicy rice to the sidewalk. He gobbled these up, so Raina dropped more to the ground. When the dog finished that too, she dug another scoop from the Tupperware, and he ate it from her hand.
“Hey!” A man’s voice echoed down the street. “Hey,
you!”
He was two blocks away. A grown-up. The man leaned forward, breaking into a jog. Something about the way he moved felt wrong. He looked like a dog going after a squirrel. She shoved the food into her backpack and ran the other way.
“Hey!”
His shoes pounded the wet sidewalk. Raina darted down an alley that cut between two rows of houses. At the first open door, she ran inside. It smelled like her parents’ room. She found an empty bedroom and scampered under the bed.
Outside, the man’s shouts grew wrathful. That was the way of things now: with everything else taken, the only thing people had left was their anger.
Raina’s heart beat hard against her chest. Footsteps smacked outside the house, then faded, leaving nothing behind but the patter of the rain. After a few minutes, she got out her two-liter and drank some water. She waited half an hour before sliding from beneath the bed to check the windows. The alley was clear.
She couldn’t go north for help after all. Because she’d forgotten all about the dogs in the cages at her mom’s hospital. And if she’d forgotten them, then maybe everyone else had, too. She walked west toward the ocean she couldn’t see. It had stopped raining, but the streets smelled good for the first time since the sickness.
Something scraped behind her. She turned, tensing to run. The black dog stood on the cracked concrete, head tilted to the side.
“You can come with me,” she said. “But you better keep up.”
A mile later, he was still with her. Sometimes he trotted ahead, head swiveling every time a crow flapped from a tree. His nails didn’t click as he walked. He was so quiet Raina decided his name should be Knife.
She saw two people on her way to the hospital, but she hid behind bushes until they went away. At the intersection on PCH, cars clogged the lanes. Most were empty, but in a few, bodies sat behind the wheel, their flesh puffy and dark. Raina moved past them as quietly as she could.
The animal hospital’s front doors were locked. So were the dented metal doors downstairs. She trudged back up the slope to the front and pressed her nose to the glass. Knife joined her, nose twitching. If someone had locked the doors, maybe they’d taken the dogs out of the cages, too. But she wasn’t sure people were doing what they were supposed to anymore. Not after what she’d seen at the hospital.
She walked down the sloped parking lot to get one of the rocks from the landscaping and bash out the glass in the front door. She picked up a round stone and turned back. One of the second floor windows was open.
She walked beneath it, Knife trotting beside her. “Hello?”
No one came. There were some trash cans in the parking lot, but even if she stacked them, they wouldn’t be high enough to reach. Inside the window ledge, a hand crank jutted up. Raina frowned and went to the box at the front doors where they kept the slip leads. She took out a tangle of them, tying them together until she had a rope twelve feet long with a loop at the end. She went back to the window, twirled the rope, and slung it at the crank.
It took her dozens of tries before she snagged it. She tested the line, then set down her pack and climbed. Near the top, her arms began to shake. She hauled herself inside and dropped to the floor of a veterinarian’s office.
She went downstairs and unlocked the outer door. Knife ambled in, hopping up the steps behind her. The room with the cages smelled like pee and poop and something even worse. When she walked inside, the dogs lifted their heads and began to whine.
* * *
Not all of them stirred to greet her. A pug and a German shepherd lay flat in their cages. Their skin was the same temperature as the room.
One by one, she let the others out. There were twelve in all, from a big golden lab to a tiny tan Chihuahua. They crowded around her, whining and yowling, licking her hands and legs. Knife moved back, watching in concern. Raina opened the door to the large room, where her mom’s friends used to bathe and inspect the animals, and filled shallow plastic trays with water. The dogs lapped greedily.
From the other side of the room, a cat meowed like there was no hope. Raina jogged to the other room of cages, where eight cats stared at her from behind the thin metal bars that enclosed them. She had to let them out, but if she did that, she was afraid the dogs would eat them.
Raina stepped away, pressing her back to the wall. The dogs needed to be fed and cleaned. Some of them had chewed wounds in their paws and needed the medicine her mom used to give them. She should clean out the cages and take the dogs outside, in case they needed to use the bathroom. There was so much to do, and she didn’t know if she could do it. Abruptly, she felt very young. Why had the adults left the animals to die?
She clenched her teeth. Maybe the adults had been too scared or too stupid. But she was there now. And she was the only one the animals had.
“Don’t worry, kitties,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
If they were full of food, the dogs wouldn’t want to eat the cats. Raina got a bag of kibbles from the shelves out front and filled two of the plastic trays. As soon as she set the first one down, the dogs lunged for it, growling and menacing each other with their fangs. She set down the second tub. Soon, they’d each found a place, crunching away. While they ate, she carried the pug and then the German shepherd outside. There was nowhere to bury them, so she took them down the ramp to the underground parking of the motel next door.
Upstairs, a schnauzer had barfed on the floor, but it was already cleaning it up. While the dogs sniffed around, she brought water and kibbles to the cats. Some of them hissed at her and most of them didn’t want to eat.
Raina had known lots of cats in her neighborhood. Some had liked to be petted, but most slunk away when she came near. They liked to be by themselves. Three cat carriers were stacked against the wall. She went out back to set out food and water, then brought the cats outside one by one. They all ran away.
She’d thought to keep the dogs inside, but seeing the cats scatter to their freedom, Raina knew she had to bring the dogs out, too. Or she would be no better than the people who’d kept her in school against her will. Who’d abandoned the animals in the first place?
Upstairs, she whistled to the dogs and led them outside. Knife stood beside her, watching the others click around the parking lot to sniff and pee. The schnauzer and a terrier climbed the incline to the road and strutted away, but the others stayed close, stealing the cat food she’d brought out or flopping in the sun. When she opened the door, they filed back inside and clattered up the stairs.
“Okay,” she said to Knife. “Looks like we’re staying.”
* * *
The first thing she did was clean the cages. The second thing she did was wash the dogs. The third thing she did was go to the motel and get sheets to shape beds for them.
And the fourth thing she did was name them.
There was Brick the golden lab and Eggplant the pug. There was Dragon, the little one with long black tufts on her ears and tail who never backed down. The Chihuahuas, Cloud and Mean and Mouse, who scattered whenever there was a loud noise. Smile the retriever. And the mutts, Tooth and Tough.
And there was Knife.
For food, there were dozens of bags and hundreds of cans in the hospital, but Raina knew no one would ever bring them more. And she needed people food, too. There was a Target store up the street her mom had sometimes gone to on the way home. Raina fed the dogs and brought them out to the bathroom, then got Knife, who went everywhere with her, and walked up the hill to the Target.
She got a red shopping cart and pushed it up and down the aisles. The tile floor was cluttered with kid’s clothes and containers of hand soap people had knocked down and left there. Every single scrap of people food was gone. Raina’s head flushed with hot blood. How could they have been so greedy? To take everything? She hoped whoever had taken it all had been found by the man who’d tried to find out if she was alone, or the other one who’d chased her in the street.
Abruptly, a cold tingle soothed
her blood. She wasn’t the only one out there. The others would be hungry, too. And there was no one left to stop them from taking whatever they wanted.
The people food was gone, but there were shelves and shelves of dog food. Too much for one trip. Or even two. She loaded bags into the cart and headed out of the store. On the smooth tile of the aisles, the cart hadn’t been too loud, but out on the pavement, it rattled so badly Raina wanted to scream at it to stop. At the hospital, she wrestled the bags of dog food inside and stashed the cart in the motel’s underground parking, far away from where she’d covered the pug and shepherd.
With Knife beside her, she returned to the Target. In the aisles of skateboards and Legos, she found a big red wagon. Its tall rubber tires crossed the linoleum with the faintest of gripping sounds. She loaded it with the biggest bags of kibbles and dragged it back to the hospital.
By the time her knees were too tired to keep going, she’d filled up all the empty shelves downstairs. It was only when Raina went to feed the dogs dinner that she realized she had nothing for herself. She got a kibble from the bag and crunched it between her teeth. It was very dry and tasted exactly the way it smelled. But it was food. She ate.
After dinner, she felt rested enough for another trip to the store. She came back with enough dog beds for all of them. Including herself. She turned off the lights and flopped down.
Now, in the quiet aloneness, the impact jarred tears from her eyes. She wiped them on her shirt. What had happened to her parents? Her teachers? The stupid girls at school? Why wasn’t anyone there to tell her what had happened and bring her somewhere safe? Why hadn’t someone stopped the bloody cough? Why was she still alive?
Two paws pressed down on the side of the bed. A small round head stood in silhouette. Knife leaned forward. She tried to push him away, but he ducked her hand and licked her face. Hearing the sound of licking, another dog trotted over and licked her, too—Eggplant, there was no mistaking her breathing. A third dog rolled into the bed and flopped down on her feet.