by A. R. Wise
The zombie screeched in surprise as the dog landed on its chest. The two of them fell backward and tore at each other, giving me a chance to fend off the rest of the pack. I turned in time to swipe the knife through the air and stall the second dog before it could leap at me. This one was a stout creature, broad shouldered and squat, with a long snout and beady eyes that studied me as I threatened it. When it growled, it bared its long white teeth and snapped in my direction, but kept its distance. The commotion behind me must have spooked it, forcing me to make a hasty decision. I could lunge and try to kill the dog, or I could dare to climb the rope and pray that the feral creature didn't take the opportunity to attack.
I stepped back onto the broken staircase and swiped down at the dog in an attempt to frighten it away. The bastard stood stone still, snarling and only occasionally glancing past me while the other dog fought with the zombie. Survival requires a distinct sixth sense, and mine was warning me that this dog would attack the second I was vulnerable. I kept my eyes on him as I reached for the rope. He took one step closer, seeming to know that his chance was coming. I swiped down at him and he retreated a step, but kept his eyes locked on mine.
Two other members of the pack sauntered in from behind the one that stared at me. They were thinner than the first two and kept their heads low as they moved to opposite sides of the hall, waiting for the stronger members of their pack to make the kill. I couldn't risk looking back to see what was happening between the first dog and the zombie, but their fight seemed to be over as the sound of scuffling had ended.
If the zombie had won, perhaps it would spend a few minutes chewing on the dog before trying to catch me. If the dog had won, then he would turn on me since the canines knew better than to eat the rotten meat of the walking dead. If I was going to escape, I had to do it now.
I put the knife in my mouth, the serrated edge facing backward, and gripped the rope with both hands. Then I pushed off the steps, swinging back and preparing to kick at the second dog as I swung forward again. To my shock, the one thing I hadn't expected was exactly what happened: I bumped into the zombie.
It wrapped its arms around my legs and bit into my thigh. I involuntarily cried out in pain, causing my knife to fall to the floor, and kicked back at him. My foot pressed against his chest and I used it to push off, sending the zombie stumbling backward and me swinging in a spinning motion toward the dogs. I flailed my legs out, hoping to collide with the stout dog if it dared to leap, and struggled to pull myself up the slick rope. I collided with the splintered railing that still hung down from the ceiling and was finally able to get a foothold on one of the rope's lower knots.
I gripped the floorboards above with one hand and used the other to securely hold onto the rope as I pulled myself up. The pug yipped at me as I struggled to safety, finally getting my torso over the hole and swinging my legs up after. The puppy crawled over to me on its belly, as if doing its best to be as submissive as possible, and licked at my nose when it got close enough.
"Stop that, you stubby little bastard."
I had to push the dog away as it continued to lick at me. The little thing seemed fully aware of the sacrifice I nearly made to save its life.
I sat up and pulled my camouflage pants down to inspect the zombie bite. It was small, thankfully, but I knew well enough to get alcohol on it before any infection set in. Zombies had a bad habit of carrying a shocking number of pathogens in their mouths. They were fetid, walking Petri dishes of disease. I was immune to the virus that turned humans into zombies, a side effect of an experiment when I was thirteen, but zombie bites could still be lethal if not cared for properly.
I went back to the bedroom where I kept my things and the pug limped along behind me, each step followed by a pathetic whine. I turned to it and then pointed at my thigh, "I know how you feel." He looked at me with his saucer-wide eyes and tilted his head to the side as if he was confused by what I said. I pointed at my wound again. "I said I know how you feel. I got hurt too."
He yipped as if offering the best answer he could, and I knelt down to scoop him up. He was the fattest dog I'd seen since the apocalypse and weighed at least six pounds despite his small size. His skin molded around my grip as if he had far more of it than he needed and he let his legs droop relaxed under him. He looked up at me and started panting. I swear that dog looked like he was smiling.
"I've got no use for a pet, especially not one with stubby ass little legs like yours." I spun him to examine the wound on his left hind leg. There were three gashes in it that had torn away a large chunk of flesh. He looked back at it and then glanced at me. I put my finger on his thigh to pull the skin back to get a better look at the damage. I expected him to growl, or bite me for daring to touch his wound, but he just watched calmly and whined when I pulled too hard.
"Come on, Stubs, let's get you patched up." And that's how he got his name. His stubby nose, stubby legs, and wounded back leg earned him a nickname that would last the rest of his life.
I set Stubs on the end of my bedroll as I pulled my gear out of the corner. My backpack was precisely organized, each available square-inch packed with the exact gear I needed to survive. I traveled too much to waste energy on unnecessary gear, which I reminded myself of as I looked down at the wounded puppy on my bed. The last thing I needed to add to my list of things to haul around was another mouth to feed.
There was a brown glass bottle in my bag that had been used to hold hydrogen peroxide in a previous life. Now it served as an all-purpose grain alcohol holder for me. It had a strong cap with a tight seal, which was the main requirement for any liquid container to a survivor. I had traded a few pelts for a gallon of moonshine with a band of Greens I'd met on the road a month prior and every drop of it had been used to either clean wounds or disinfect utensils.
'Greens' was the term used to refer to people born after the apocalypse, and 'Reds' were the ones born before. As time moved on, the world was running low on Reds.
The Greens I traded with for the alcohol had been nice enough, and were eager to trade for the skins. They wanted me to stay with them and tried to convince me to partake in the 'Shine' I'd bought from them. I wasn't buying it for pleasure, unfortunately. My nomadic lifestyle prevented me from settling in any place long enough to make alcohol with any sort of regularity, making it far more precious to me than it was to others; certainly too precious to waste by drinking.
I dabbed the potent alcohol onto a rag and cleaned my wound first. I didn't want to give the zombie's saliva enough time to seep into my blood. He didn't do much more than break the skin, but I wasn't going to take chances.
Next, I pulled Stubs into my lap and flipped him on his right side so his wound faced up. He squiggled as I held him down and then yipped as I pressed the rag against his cuts. I had to pour a little more alcohol on it to clean the wound to the point where I could see how serious the infection had become. Luckily, it was fresh and only a slight infection had set in, but it was large enough that it needed stitches.
Stubs finally got pissed off at me the first time I pushed the needle through his skin. He never bit me though, which was a surprise. He just quivered in my lap like some dying child succumbing to fever, and occasionally glanced up at me with angry eyes and bared teeth. When I was done, I set him down and he immediately began licking at his leg.
"Don't," I said and tried to stop him. "You're going to pull the stitches out." He ignored me and went right back to licking them the second I let him loose.
I shouldn't have wasted the stitches on him to begin with. I'd found them in a medical kit in the back of a decrepit ambulance a few months back and had been lucky enough not to need them until now. Most emergency vehicles had been scavenged through over a decade ago, and to find one with even a few strips of gauze and stitches left inside was nothing short of a miracle.
Raiders and traders had long ago scavenged all the useful items out of most places. In the interest of keeping their economy strong, they burne
d down stores after they looted them to ensure that no one else ever found something useful there. Traders always insisted that they had no part in the burning of stores, and blamed the destruction on raiders, but I'd seen enough of them leaving smoldering ruins in my day to know differently. They were invested in ensuring they were the only ones that had an abundance of supplies.
I was already keeping a tally in my head of the trade value that Stubs had cost me so far. The alcohol I'd used to clean his wound was worth at least a pelt, and the stitches could've been traded for a cup of berries or a shot glass of grain with most of the caravans I'd encountered recently.
Stubs sneezed and looked at me as if shocked by the sound he'd made. He shook his head and then pawed at his ear before crawling on his belly across the bedroll to me.
"I guess I could use someone to talk to." I picked him up and held him over my head. He snorted as he looked around, and then sneezed, sending a glop of snot down on my face. "But you're going to have to stop doing that, and you're going to have to learn how to be quiet too. I don't need some barking twerp giving me away everywhere I go. Got it?" I wiped my face off on my sleeve as I continued to hold the dog over me.
He licked his nose and stared down at me with one of his eyes, the other looking somewhere off to the side. I set him on the floor and dug into my backpack again to retrieve a strip of salted beef that I'd wrapped in cheesecloth. I used the head of my wood cutting axe to slice off a piece of the meat and then bit it into a smaller piece that I threw to Stubs. It bounced off his face, proving that either he wasn't naturally adept at catching or his wonky eye kept him from seeing well enough to be able to catch. He looked at it curiously and then back up at me with a tilted head.
"What? It's meat, eat it."
He sniffed it again and snorted before laying his head down in front of it, uninterested.
"Are you kidding me?" I pointed at the chunk of salted meat. "That's good food. If you don't like eating that then you're never going to make it out here. That's as good as it gets."
He snorted and licked his nose as he stared up at me with those huge eyes.
"What the hell were you eating before that this isn't good enough for you?" I asked the question as a joke, but then began to consider what the answer could possibly be. "You're a pet, aren't you? There's no way you’re a feral dog. Your breed couldn't survive this long."
Stubs rolled over onto his back, inviting me to scratch his plump, pink tummy. I complied and his mouth drooped open into his goofy, flopping-lip smile again.
"Where did you come from?"
I heard the tin cans rattle downstairs, signaling that something was moving either in or out of the house. "Sounds like our friends are done fighting. Let's go finish off the survivors."
My gun would've been too loud, and it wasn't worth alerting every living, and dead creature within a mile that I was there. I could've fashioned a spear out of my knife and a strip of baseboard, but my knife was lying on the first floor under the staircase. I had my axe, but it was dull enough that I didn't trust it in a fight. I had to come up with a way to kill whatever was still alive downstairs without making too much noise.
I took my Glock 19 with me, though I hoped to avoid using it. Time was on my side, which was a rare luxury, and I was smart enough not to waste an opportunity to be prepared. I disassembled the pistol and examined the pieces to make sure they were clean. I kept it as clean as possible at all times, but nothing was in a hurry to kill me at the moment, so there was no point in jumping into a situation before all of my bases were covered. I swiftly re-assembled the gun and slid the magazine inside. The previous owner of the weapon had fastened three strips of black tape around the handle that improved the grip, something I'd been unfamiliar with until I found it. The gun was expertly cared for and it was a shame that the man I killed to get it never saw me coming - a shame for him at least.
I holstered the pistol and then got ready to go. Stubs watched me and tilted his head to the side when I looked at him. "I'm just trying to be prepared," I explained to him. "That's all. You wouldn't want to get stuck up here with no one to watch out for you, would you?"
I grabbed the axe and held it just under its head as I walked out of the room to see what was still alive downstairs. There was movement, and a human moan that let me know the zombie had won the fight. That was lucky since it meant he would be focused on eating the dogs and might not hear me climbing down.
My nylon rope was tied to the banister and hung down through the hole in the floor. It was a thirty-foot rope, and the slack was spooled on the floor below. I grabbed it, walked as quietly as I could to the opening, and looked down. To my shock, the zombie was waiting for me.
"Whoa!" I backed up as the creature swung its arms up at me. He screamed out in bloodthirsty anger and I got a better chance to examine him.
He was fresh.
"How in the fuck?"
It had been a middle-aged man with short hair and a beard. He looked gaunt everywhere except his stomach, which bulged as if belonging to a much larger man. His face was swollen, his eyes white, and puss leaked out of his nose while sores oozed on his lips. The zombie's eyelids were inflamed and the corners of his mouth had turned black. When he screamed and stretched out at me, I saw black sores on his neck.
This wasn't a mutant. I hadn't seen a zombie like this in nearly two decades.
Had the virus mutated again, or was the original virus still infecting people in this area?
Stubs peered into the hallway from around the corner. I looked back at him and shrugged. "How do you feel about hanging here to see if our friend down there pops?"
Stubs stared at me blankly as if to prove the point that he was just a dog and had no idea what I was trying to ask him.
"Okay." I nodded and looked back down at the living corpse beneath me. "That's the plan then. Let's hang out and give this guy a chance to rot. I want to see if he pops or if he's a Grey."
I knelt down and put my head low enough to be able to see to the back door where I'd thrown the first dog that attacked. I'd been confident that the zombie would eat the creature, happily willing to feed on animal flesh the way every zombie I'd encountered for the past two decades had been willing to do. Instead, I saw that the dog was wounded but alive, panting and bleeding on the floor near the back door. The zombie had no interest in him.
"I've got a bad feeling about this, Stubs." I walked back to the dog and it did its best to wag its short tail. His whole rear end jerked back and forth with his effort. "I guess it's not so bad up here though. We've got enough food and water to last the week if we have to. Just don't piss on me."
It took three days for the zombie to pop. It tried to leave a few times, but I was able to entice it back in by calling out to it from the staircase. The mindless creature scampered back like a moth to a flame, desperate to chew on me as I waved down from the hole in our floor.
On the third day, it collapsed in the kitchen, knocking over a cast iron skillet and causing an echoing crash that woke me and scared Stubs nearly to death. The poor pup had been asleep at my feet and leapt almost a foot in the air when the pan hit the floor.
I was careful not to assume that it was our friend that made the noise. I crept across the hall to spy through the hole in the floor. I could smell the creature's sweet, fetid odor, but that was nothing new. We'd been suffering through that obnoxious scent ever since he arrived and I'd been wearing a mask to avoid it.
The mask I wore was a simple surgeon's mask that I wet with a vial of lavender oil I'd been carrying for a few years. Pungent perfumes weren't something I used frequently, but circumstances like this made me happy I'd brought one along. The world was filled with dead things, and it was always nice to avoid smelling them when you had the chance. I also owned a proper gas mask with an attached respirator, but the filters for those were hard to come by and I would've never broken the seal on a new filter just to avoid smelling a zombie, no matter how pungent the odor was.
; Chemical leaks were one of the leading killers of the early post apocalypse world. After the electricity went out, it only took a few weeks before chemical trucks and tanks began to explode. In the early years it was almost impossible to avoid the poisonous air, especially near any major city. Hardly a single day would go by that an explosion didn't light up the sky from somewhere nearby.
The chaos of the first year was hard to fathom now, after the world had settled into its morose decay. I'd been taught how to handle the apocalypse, and even I was nearly swept up in the madness. The mission that my father left behind for me is what helped keep me sane. I had a plan, and it was the only thing that mattered. He'd left me gear, maps, and enough food to carry me through for several weeks. He even charted the path to my first destination in the panhandle of Oklahoma where I tracked down the second person on my list.
My father's maps, and the path he drew for my first journey, seemed almost nonsensical. I was sent along a winding trek that avoided all major highways and seemed to curve around areas for no apparent reason. It wasn't until after I'd made it west that I realized what he'd done. The eastern United States was dotted with nuclear power plants, and he'd designed my escape route to avoid them by a 200 mile radius whenever possible. I was lucky he had. I never witnessed the aftermath of a nuclear meltdown, but I'd met hundreds who had. From what I knew, the majority of the eastern half of the United States was a desolate wasteland. I remember one old man, his face bulbous with tumors and his throat swollen to the point that his voice came out as a squeak, begging me to heed his warning. He said, "Watch for the red pines. When you see the red pines, run the other way."