by Mark Wheaton
“And if they’ve gone rogue and are thinking about coming back here to shoot up the place or some silly shit, we’ll know that, too, right?” Lester replied making it sound like he hadn’t completely dismissed that as a possibility.
“Right.”
Lester sighed. “If that’s the case and you see them, feel free to shoot them. But after what befell you guys, I’m pretty sure I know what happened to them.”
Bones was with Carrie in back of the hotel when Denny came out.
Bones had had a big meal and was currently drinking a second large tub of water. Having been around dogs most of her life, Carrie knew that despite his healthy appetite, something was the matter with the shepherd. His teeth seemed fine as were his ears, but when she went to stroke his back, he moved away, obviously tender in a couple of places. She could see traces of blood dried in the fur near his haunches and had a good idea where that had come from and even his tear ducts were leaking pus. Even worse, she saw him limping around a little, all of which added up to a dog that wasn’t in great shape.
“I don’t think you should take him,” Carrie said, nodding up to Denny. “He’s sick.”
“Sick, ate something bad-sick? Or, sick-sick?”
“I think he’s an old dog. I think something happened to him after he left here yesterday maybe.”
“Really? Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Carrie replied. She stroked the hair between Bones’s ears and looked him in the eyes. “I’m sorry, Bones,” she said.
Bones, as if understanding her words, gave her a quick lick on the hand. But then he glanced up at Denny, saw the look of uncertainty on his face, and left Carrie’s hand to rise to his feet. He squared his shoulders and faced Denny as if literally rising to an unspoken challenge.
“He looks okay to me,” Denny scoffed. “Or, at least it looks like he’s not ready to throw in the towel.”
Carrie eyed the dog and had to agree.
• • •
Moments later, Denny and Bones were back in one of the two SUVs they’d taken to the medical supply warehouse. The sun was setting and there’d be no telling what was out in the night, but Denny cracked the window a little anyway to allow Bones and his impeccable nose access to the various scents passing by outside the vehicle in the hopes he’d get an early warning if there was trouble ahead.
All the way to the sporting goods store, Denny kept an eye on the road to make sure he didn’t drive right past one of the trucks Ches and his guys used, but seeing nothing only confirmed what Denny felt he already knew: They were all dead.
He knew why he wanted to prove this, though, and it only partially had to do with an attempted rescue. A real rescue, a rescue where there was any belief whatsoever that folks would be found alive, would’ve likely required at least two people. But Denny had taken up the mission to prove to himself and everybody else that, in the end, he was better equipped to survive out in this world than Ches. Yes, this was petty and small, and if it wasn’t for Bones, he probably would’ve been with Ches’s group.
Also, if it wasn’t for Bones, there’d be two groups out here dead, so he felt he’d been more than proved right.
But a small, primal part of him couldn’t let go of the fact that Ches had insulted him, and now Denny would be standing over his dead, arrogant body, able to literally piss on the man’s grave if he so wished. He did not wish and he didn’t even like to admit the impulse, but there it was, and here he was driving to the scene.
When he reached the sporting goods store, it was just dark enough that Denny had to turn on the headlights to see the two trucks. As he got closer, he saw that the front door of the store was wide open, suggesting that no one had managed to get back in and attempt a barricade if they were attacked, but a second later he saw the remains of one of the dead men on the ground.
It looked exactly like what the dogs had been trying to accomplish at the medical supply warehouse. The men had gone inside, collected their weapons and were on their way out when the animals attacked. The surprise had somehow been complete and the men were all dead, probably without getting off a shot as Denny didn’t see any sign of blood out in the parking lot, only up by the human carcasses. He looked for Ches but couldn’t differentiate one fallen man from another in the dark.
“Should we get the guns while we’re here?” Denny asked Bones.
The shepherd hadn’t so much as woofed on the drive, so Denny figured the dog pack might well have been long gone. He eyed the guns spilled out in front of the store and was starting to think that maybe he’d take his reputation up another notch by bringing back the weapons.
Ches? Oh, yeah, he had ten armed men and couldn’t manage to get the guns back to the hotel in broad daylight. Denny Edwin Tallchief? Went out alone and got them at night.
Denny parked alongside one of the SUVs. He glanced over at Bones, who was sniffing the fresh corpses from the window.
“Is it safe out there, Bones?”
Bones glanced over to Denny at the sound of his name but didn’t bark, so Denny took this as a positive sign and slowly opened the truck door with one hand as he awkwardly held up his rifle with the other. He took a cautious step out of the cab and glanced around, aiming the gun in every direction. So far, so good.
“C’mon, Bones,” Denny said and the shepherd hopped out of the vehicle as well, sticking close to the human as they both carefully walked over to the front of the store.
Denny peered into the building but almost lost his footing when his shoe began to slip around on the slick surface below. He looked down and realized from the color of the shirt that he had inadvertently stepped on a chunk of Ches’s body that had fallen directly onto the store’s welcome mat.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Denny said, without thinking that he was apologizing to a corpse.
He took a step back, reached down and grabbed two of the shotguns that had fallen alongside the man, and piled them in the back of the SUV. Still hearing nothing out in the night, Denny got a little braver and started picking up more weapons and then baskets full of ammunition, which he loaded into the truck as well. The men had spilled some of the bullets and shells onto the concrete when they’d fallen, but Denny scooped those up as well and soon had an SUV full of enough guns and ammunition to supply a full company of soldiers.
“All right, Bones,” Denny said finally. “Let’s go home.”
Denny opened the driver’s-side door. Bones tried to jump up onto the seat but slipped and fell backwards onto the parking lot.
“Oh, shit, are you okay?” Denny asked the dog before helping him back up.
Bones snapped at Denny’s hand when he accidentally touched Bones’s throbbing right rear haunch, but it was only a warning. Denny angled his hands around and tried a second time to help the dog up. This time he made it.
Denny grinned and patted Bones on the snout. “We make a good team, you and I.”
At that moment, Denny heard a new sound from behind him, something clicking out a fast rhythm on the parking lot, and knew it was a dog. Cats retracted their claws, dogs didn’t, a lesson taught to him by his grandmother at one point when pointing out tracks in the mud. This was clearly a dog.
Having been distracted while attempting to climb into the SUV, Bones had not immediately picked up on the new scent in the air. The shepherd turned, saw the Rhodesian ridgeback racing full-tilt for Denny, and started barking as he wheeled around. He awkwardly tried to launch himself forward from the seat to defend Denny but slipped again, this time smashing his snout on the dashboard as his legs went out from under him.
Denny had set down his rifle to help Bones but now turned his head and was frantically looking for it as the large dog grew closer. He had just spotted it leaning up against the back door of the vehicle when he sensed movement in the air behind him, and before he could react, two hundred pounds of muscle and claws slammed into him, smashing his body down onto the driver’s seat of the car. He felt the hot breath of the snarling ridgeback at the back o
f his neck just before the animal began tearing into his flesh with its claws.
“Fuuuuuck!” Denny screamed.
He fought against his canine attacker, trying in vain to lift himself up enough to shrug the heavy animal back out of the SUV, but it was just too heavy. The ridgeback’s powerful front paws were pressed down against his shoulders with his left arm curled under him and his right straight out in front making it impossible to get any lift as the animal’s claws shredded his skin. He felt so helpless in the face of his own death that he became furious, his face reddening in frustration as he pushed with all his might but was still unable to move his body up a single inch.
Meanwhile, Bones worked hard to regain his footing on the cab floor. He was dazed from the dashboard-inflicted shot to the snout, but he could tell Denny was in real trouble. With a tremendous effort, he finally found the strength to pull himself back up onto the seat and lunged for the ridgeback. The ridgeback, having believed Bones incapacitated, staggered backwards in surprise just as the shepherd lowered his head, ducked under the ridgeback’s snout, and clamped his jaws directly onto her throat. Terrified, the ridgeback lifted herself off Denny and thumped back down on all fours, effectively dragging Bones out of the truck. The dog’s teeth were still embedded in the ridgeback’s throat. As the shepherd slid over Denny and onto the parking lot, he relaxed his jaws. The ridgeback yanked herself free from Bones’s grip.
But no sooner was Bones outside the truck than the female lunged straight for Bones’s weakened hind leg and sank her teeth into it. Bones yelped but then quickly swung around and bit into the ridgeback’s ear, tearing into the soft flesh. The ridgeback yanked away, losing much of the ear in the process but then clawed into Bones’s underbelly.
Bones rolled away from the ridgeback but was already winded. He had given everything he had to his first attack and was now almost drained after less than half a minute. He bared his teeth as the ridgeback prepared to spring one last time, knowing he wouldn’t have the energy to fight back.
The roar of a rifle echoed through the empty parking lot, causing Bones to flinch. The ridgeback had been in mid-spring, and the bullet had cut across her back, cooking the fur, burrowing through the flesh, and exiting out the other side after chipping bone.
The ridgeback hit the ground with an agonized yelp. Bones sprang to his feet to go in for the kill, only to have his legs buckle out from under him. Denny turned the rifle on the ridgeback’s head as it slunk away behind Ches’s truck, but then he saw them.
While they had been distracted by the ridgeback’s attack, the entire pack had moved into the parking lot, forming a horseshoe-shaped ring around the three vehicles, hanging back ten to twenty feet.
“Oh, shit,” Denny whispered. “Oh, shit.”
He fumbled with the rifle as Bones joined him on the side of the truck. The ridgeback was whining now, attempting to lick its wound but having little success. Bones moved next to her and, to Denny’s surprise, began licking at the wound himself.
But then his attention turned back to the rest of the dogs. None were growling or making any sign of attack. They were skittish and confused by what was going, which made the one human in attendance believe they were seconds away from simply tearing him and Bones apart.
That’s when Denny got an idea. Below his feet was a Heckler & Koch 9mm that one of Ches’s men had dropped and beside that, a pump-action shotgun. He slowly bent down and picked up the automatic, dropped the safety, and stepped in front of Bones and the ridgeback.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” Denny roared, pulling the trigger.
The pistol kicked so hard that Denny almost dropped it, but when he regained his stance, he fired another flurry of rounds into the air. When the gun was empty, he raised his rifle and emptied that into the air and when that was drained, he picked up the shotgun and did the same.
From the first shot, the dogs started moving away though their eyes were still on their fallen alpha. When Denny had switched to the rifle, the dogs were already beginning to scatter, but after the final empty shell had been ejected from the shotgun, the only dogs left in the parking lot were Bones and the ridgeback.
Denny looked down at the two wounded canines, then pushed every bit of advice he’d ever heard about dealing with injured animals out of his mind as he opened the back of the SUV and grabbed a towel. The ridgeback had lost some blood, but he thought he could still manage to lift her into the truck if she would let him.
“Bones,” Denny said as he walked back around to the dogs. “Get in the truck.”
At first, Bones wouldn’t leave the ridgeback’s side. Denny was incredulous at how instantly devoted the shepherd was to an animal he was fighting to the death moments before. Feeling a stabbing reminder of his own battle with the dog as his shredded shirt brushed against his shoulder wounds, he pointed out to himself that he was doing the same thing.
However, his reasons for requisitioning the bitch were far different from Bones’s.
X
“That’s it!” Norman was shouting. “That’s the fucking dog that attacked us!”
Denny was lying face down on a kitchen table as Carrie and the doula, Lucille, cleaned up his wounds while a young woman named Beth did what she could to disinfect the ridgeback’s wound through the bars of an animal cage that Denny had picked up from a giant pet food retailer on the way back, though she continued to circle and snap at her as she did so.
Bones sat nearby on a pile of towels. Denny looked over at one point and was sure Bones had fallen asleep, but when he looked back, the dog was wide awake and paying attention.
As Norman ranted, Lester looked from Bones to the ridgeback to Denny, appearing like a man harassed to the edge of sanity. He finally raised a hand to silence the Jicarilla survivor and turned to Denny.
“You brought this dog back, why?” Lester asked.
“She’s the pack’s alpha,” Denny explained. “She’s the key to stopping these dogs from attacking us and, hopefully, other packs in the future.”
Lester let this soak in, realized it didn’t make sense to him and eyed Denny. “What are you talking about?”
Denny tried to raise himself a little, but Carrie just pushed him back down. “Hold still.”
Denny nodded but then looked over at Lester. “These dogs were pets two months ago. How many dogs you think there are in America?”
“I don’t know. A million?”
“Almost a hundred million,” replied Denny, happy to surprise the group. “Some student every year would do a science fair project involving their family pooch with that factoid glued to their trifold display board, though I think the real answer was closer to 77 million. How many humans do you think are left in America? Optimistically what, a few thousand? Let’s go as high as 100,000. Do the math. Two hundred dogs killed seventy people in fifteen minutes two days ago. One hundred dogs killed ten people earlier today. One hundred dogs almost killed another ten at the same time. The only thing that saved them was another dog.”
The room did the math and didn’t like what they came back with. Lester looked over at Bones a little dubiously but then nodded. “It sounds like you’re getting ready to make a point.”
“Say a third of those 77 million dogs died in the plague because they were locked up, couldn’t find food, whatever,” Denny continued. “That’s still 500 dogs to every one human. We are no longer the dominant species here. These feral dogs have proven that they’re extremely capable of making us go extinct very quickly. If not in this generation, then in future ones. But you see how Bones reacts to us. He recognizes that there’s this tie of domestication between humans and dogs. He respects that. The other dogs, well, they respect and follow their alpha, this other dog here. Somewhere in her mind, this dog and the other dogs remember that they were domesticated at one point. But a generation of dogs from now isn’t going to have those memories. We have to take this opportunity and try to re-establish ties of domestication between our two species the way our fo
refathers did. If we don’t, the human race may well be on its way towards extinction.”
• • •
The room had gone quiet after Denny explained what he hoped to accomplish, but this was broken by Norman shaking his head at Denny with a scolding glance.
“We have bullets. We have guns. We can wipe them out. This is absurd, specious reasoning.”
“You think we can wipe them out for good?” Lester asked. “Fifty million dogs breeding other dogs? Chasing down deer like wolves out there away from where we are? We’re going to have bigger fish to fry than exterminating dogs.”
Lester waited for a response but continued when he got none. “They always said we didn’t have many predators in North America. Snakes, bears, a few wolves,” he said, shaking his head. “We never thought we were cultivating a damn army in our own houses. We can’t kill all of them. It’s that simple. We’re barely able to survive right now. It’s not like that’s going to get better. We’re having to teach ourselves how to gather food and water, basic necessities. How soon until we run out of grocery stores and medical warehouses and pawn shops and we have to start fabricating what we use again? We’re at the beginning again. Luckily, we still have our books and our memories of how a light bulb works or how a battery works, so we can get there again, but we have to get moving. It’s not going to work if we’re looking over our shoulders the whole time waiting to get attacked.”
Lester turned to Denny, a serious look on his face. “If you have some way to fix that, you’ve got my support.”
With that, Lester exited the room. It was obvious that Norman and some of the others who had gathered still thought Denny’s plan was insane, but they eventually walked out as well to leave Denny to be patched up.
When Lucille finished stitching up Denny’s back, she glanced from Carrie to Denny and smiled. “You’re planning to get pregnant, aren’t you?” she asked matter-of-factly.
“We’ve talked about it,” Carrie said.