Tails of the Apocalypse (9 page)

She cleaned up the mess. Poured fresh water. Let out the little dogs who’d been cooped up all night. After, most went back to bed. Raina sat on the bench in the front room, Knife on her lap.

“She was right,” Raina whispered. “I can’t take care of you all. If something had happened to me, they would have been trapped. Nothing to eat. Nothing to drink.”

Knife looked up at her from the corners of his eyes.

“I had to learn to take care of myself. That’s the only way now. For all of us. Do you understand?”

He yawned, squeaking, and closed his eyes.

She let them sleep a while longer. She tried to think of another way, but Officer Morgan had shown her the truth. No one was coming to save you. No matter what your dad said, there was no salvation except what you honed for yourself from whatever you had.

The next night, she brought a full bag of kibbles down to the parking lot and poured it into multiple tubs in case any of the dogs came back later. Then she got her pack, brought the dogs outside, and headed east.

The dogs ranged ahead. Raina slowed. Dragon bounded onward and the others raced after. One block away, then two. Raina stopped. The dogs kept running. All except for Knife, who turned his head, one black paw lifted from the street. He glanced at the others as they disappeared around a hedge, then strutted back to Raina and took his place by her side.

She wanted to tell him to go, to be with the others, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She kneeled and scratched his ears.

“I can’t take care of all of them,” she said. “But maybe we can take care of each other.”

He lifted his nose to the wind. Raina did the same. When he moved down the street, she followed.

Growing up, my family had a golden retriever named Lady. She’s been dead for close to twenty years now, but my family still tells the occasional story about her. Like when we got a kitten who was so small she would curl up on Lady’s back to sleep. Or the time my dad went pheasant hunting in his friend’s asparagus field; my dad got one bird, his friend got one, and so did Lady—she’d found a hen out in the maze of asparagus gone to seed and done as her instincts suggested.

But Lady was the only dog I had as a kid. After her, it was nothing but cats. As recently as my late twenties, I didn’t think too much of dogs. I had nothing against them, but I had no desire to own one. And I definitely didn’t like little yappers.

Then I started dating someone whose mom had two dogs: a little orange terrier and a mutt—maybe a Chihuahua/miniature greyhound—named Vinnie. I thought the terrier was okay, but Vinnie was an ambassador to dog skeptics. Funny. Playful. Loyal. One time, when we came by the house for the first time in a few weeks, Vinnie threw back his head and howled when he saw me.

Six years later, I own two dogs. Little ones. One’s a mutt from an LA shelter. The other’s a Chihuahua we got as a puppy from a family at the dog park. She bears a suspicious resemblance to Knife. Both my dogs are yappers, but they make up for it in other ways.

In LA, sometimes it seems like there are more dogs than people. Most of my
Breakers
books are set in this area. When I thought about what the end would bring, I had no problem squashing seven billion people. But I never liked to think about what would happen to all those dogs.

In this corner of the universe, it turns out they helped a little girl through the loss of everything she knew.

The fire had separated him
from his pack. The wolves had made their way east, across the great plains and toward the lower mountains. They traveled around the city. Even though there was food there, they dared not go too close. Meat was rare, and wolf meat was considered a delicacy. They wouldn’t have survived.

When the thunder came and fire began to rain from the sky, the earth shook under them in great tremors. He was still too small to run as fast as they did. So he and his sister, cubs and not yet fully certain on their feet, fell behind. His mother’s eyes commanded them to follow whenever she turned her head back to find them. He understood but couldn’t go any faster, as hard as he tried. His sister, slightly bigger and stronger already, had a good twenty feet on him. But even she couldn’t reach the others.

His mother slowed down and his sister caught up to her. Through the raging fire and the thunderous sounds around him, he saw his mother pick up his sibling by the neck. She looked at him once more, then turned and disappeared into the storm. His howling didn’t reach farther than the wind.

His nose couldn’t find them anymore. The acrid smoke overwhelmed his senses. As he drifted farther and farther away from his mother’s path, trying to escape the maze of fire that enclosed him, his feet suddenly stepped into emptiness. He fell down an embankment, tumbling over and over to land in a small reservoir of water. The fire above him leapt across the narrow creek bed to the other side, the heat scorching the parts of his fur not covered by water.

And there he waited. In the days that followed, he never forgot his mother’s eyes as she’d turned, his sister safe in her jaws, to find safety for the pack. He saw her face when he looked up at the sky at night, and she was there when he closed his eyes to sleep. He’d never been alone. No previous experience had prepared him for it. He felt the pain of it, raw and unremitting. It ached worse than the growing hunger in his belly.

When the rain came, the creek swelled up, and he found a low section of the embankment to climb up. He ran across the plains, his nose picking up his mother’s fading scent. He didn’t have to go far. He saw her, recognized her shape and that of his sister—blackened remnants, coated in ash on the charred ground. The whole pack lay there with them in death.

He held watch for two days. It was his hunger that drove him away in the end. It took the night and half the next day before the ground beneath his paws was no longer burned, before the desert grasses began to peek through the blackened soil.

He was dizzy and half-starved when he came upon the settlement. It lay in a valley before him, with the sun shining on the small lake surrounded by makeshift tents and hastily erected huts.

Somewhere in his mind he remembered his mother’s warning, her fear of places like this one, where wolf flesh was prized. But his exhaustion had taken over, and finding food was his only instinct. He trotted along the creek bed, watching the slow-flowing water for any signs of fish. He’d been with his mother when she’d caught them in the past, but he’d never done it himself.

He didn’t see the trap. It was set inside a patch of ferns in a narrow area between the creek and a large outcropping of rock. If he’d been protected by the wisdom of the pack, or older and more experienced himself, he would have seen it or smelled the human imprint on it. But he was young and hungry and alone.

The sudden, piercing pain obliterated his hunger, inundated his senses completely. Panicking, he tried to pull away from the iron claws that ripped through the muscles and tendons of his front leg. His cries of terror were swallowed by the sound of the rushing stream. Nobody heard him. Except for one.

“It’s not gonna hold.”

“It’ll hold.”

“It needs to be reinforced over there. Otherwise, it’ll break apart.”

“It’ll hold.”

“And how can you be so sure?”

“I’m telling you, it’ll hold, Manny.”

Jack, ever so slowly, let go of the branch. It was embedded in a pile of other branches anchored into both sides of a small creek bed. The two boys stood in the center of the stream, watching the dam.

“We need to reinforce it here.” Manny pointed at a spot where the water rushed through, cascading along the driftwood and into the now much lower stream on the other side of it.

Both boys dug their hands into the muddy soil along the water’s edge.

“We’ll mix that with leaves and smaller sticks, and we should be good to go,” Jack said as he worked.

They moved several handfuls of dirt up top and added whatever they found from the ground, working it into a thick paste. They then carried it carefully to the dam. Jack heard the faint whining sound but didn’t think much of it. He was too focused on ladling the leafy paste into the narrow openings between the dam’s branches.

The second grunt was louder, more urgent. Jack stopped for a moment, listening closely.

“What is it?” Manny asked. His hands were still submerged. At this point, their clothes were completely soaked.

“I don’t know. I thought I heard something.”

The third cry was followed by a low growl.

“There’s something out there,” Jack said.

He saw fear in Manny’s eyes. Fear and the hope that if it was an animal, it would simply pass through without bothering them any further. Jack knew better. The cries had been stationary. They’d come from the same spot maybe fifty feet behind the area of the ferns and close to the large boulder downstream. He moved away from the dam toward the other side of the creek bed.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jack.”

“We won’t find out until we take a look.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Manny said.

“I did.”

“We should go back. It’s getting late.”

“I’m going,” Jack said, climbing out of the creek bed. Manny followed as he’d always done. They’d entered the world from their mother’s womb three minutes apart, with Jack leading the way. Manny had followed his older twin ever since.

The whimper was urgent now and fueled by pain. It was Manny who found the source first. They’d climbed on top of the boulder.

“It’s a wolf cub,” Manny said. Jack moved forward until he saw it too. The cub’s right front paw was caught in a large, iron trap. It was evident from the whining and the odd way it was trying to stand that the cub was in pain.

The two boys gave each other a glance. Both knew that meat—any meat—was sparse, and for them to come home with something that could feed at least part of their group would be a big deal. Their status would instantly rise from mere children, dependent on their elders, to young men, able to take on some of the group’s responsibilities.

When they climbed down the side of the boulder and approached the cub, it didn’t move. Jack didn’t realize just how young it was until they stood in front of it. Half its fur was blackened and singed, the other half burned off entirely. The trap had caught its right front leg half-way up, and the shin and foot were soaked in blood.

Jack could almost feel the animal’s pain himself. He held his knife inside his pocket, readying himself to cut the cub’s throat. The boys had watched other members of their group of survivors slaughter animals before, and Jack was fairly sure of what to do.

He’d planned to move around the cub and get behind it. From there it would be relatively easy to hold it and slit its throat. But when he saw the cub up close, all he could think of was to open the trap and set it free.

“Help me open the trap,” Jack said after a moment’s hesitation.

“What?”

“The trap. We need to open it and I can’t do it by myself.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“We have to go back and tell them that there’s a wolf cub in one of the traps.”

“But they’ll kill it,” Jack replied, louder than he’d intended. He was sure now. He wouldn’t kill the cub or go back to the village and tell them of a new food source. He could only hope it wouldn’t die out here, injured and without the ability to hunt for itself.

“It’ll die anyway,” Manny replied. “It’ll die without food.”

“You don’t know that—”

“And if it doesn’t die, if it survives and gets stronger and becomes a full-grown wolf, it will come back and try to kill
us
.”

Jack didn’t want to admit that Manny was right.

“Besides,” Manny continued, “we can’t set the trap back. It’ll be closed with nothing in it, and they’ll know someone must have freed whatever was in there.”

Damn you, Manny!
Jack thought. He couldn’t argue with his brother’s logic. He was right.

“I’m going back to tell them,” Manny said as he turned and began to climb up the boulder.

“Manny!”

“I’m going back to tell them,” his brother repeated without turning. “You can come or not. It’s up to you.”

Manny was gone. It would take him thirty minutes to get to the village and another thirty to bring someone back. Jack didn’t think. He didn’t consider the possible consequences for himself or the village. He only saw the pain the cub was in, the terror in its eyes. Its silent plea for help.

He knelt before the trap. A grown man could probably open the trap alone, but Jack knew he wasn’t strong enough. Nevertheless, he had to try. He put his hands on either side of the iron jaws and pulled. The cub was still, as if it knew that moving might result in further injury. It watched him carefully.

Jack was able to pull the claws apart a quarter inch, but it wasn’t enough. The cub whimpered when Jack eased them back together around its leg. He needed to prevent the claws from closing once he pulled them apart. He needed to pull harder and farther than he did before.