by Owen Seth
He Runs
By Owen Seth
PART 1
Man wanders.
Man explores.
Man runs.
And we find him at this point in his journey, with a dog. It’s a large dog, a black retriever cross, male, with long strands of hair intersecting fleshy areas of mange and a loosely-fitted muzzle engulfing the snout to protect both of them. Man drags the dog using a makeshift lead, fashioned from an electric cord that once hung loose from the back of a TV set. Man holds the cord in his hand, the brown wiring taught with canine strength, and can’t remember the last time he watched TV. He guesses that it was the same day that the lights went off. The same day that initiated the test for Mankind’s love and compassion.
And then broke it.
Spring
A fire crackles in the darkness; wooden logs desiccating with the sound of a hundred twigs being crushed by giants’ feet. Flame shadows dance like wild pagans, catching the eye of the muzzled and mange addled Hound.
Hound growls and bounds in body-sized circles, his television cord lead restricting his movements.
‘Stop it!’ says Man. Hound does not listen. ‘HEY!’
The dog stops but isn’t best pleased. He growls, his yellowed teeth jutting out of the loose muzzle, hanging in the dark like a witch doctor’s necklace.
Man throws a rabbit bone at Hound. Should keep him quiet long enough for Man to sleep a little. Rest those eyes, those limbs, that mind. Sleep is a rarity these days. Too much noise in Man’s mind. It’s been there since he can remember, of course, but not like it is now. Not since the lights went out. It’s a mind filled with enough screams to crowd eternity, enough violence to provide a new nightmare every time his eyes close.
Man watches Hound gnaw on the rabbit bone, his tongue and teeth glancing off the thin white stick. Hound takes his time, as if he is conditioned to know that meals are few and far between.
If it comes to it, Man will eat Hound. He’ll cave his skull in with a rock, a quick death; no need for any more suffering in the world. Then he will gut him with a rusted hunting knife, remove the fur and roughly butcher the carcass. He’s thought about it before. Many times. But he likes the beast, even if the beast doesn’t like him.
Man reaches into a blue, worn out haversack and pulls out a flesh-clumped pelt, tears tiny chunks of rabbit meat off with his teeth. Every bit counts, every mouthful.
Man looks up at the night sky, lies down on his side. The stars glimmer like diamonds in a sea of tar. The clearest sky he’s ever seen. Sometimes, when these rare moments of beauty poke through from the chaos, he thanks his species for destroying its own work, for relegating mankind back to the Stone Age.
He fidgets in his clothes; threadbare camouflage pants and a bright orange hoody, caked in mud. His shoes are battered Converse, Chuck Taylors, with pages ripped from an aging Bible folded over and placed over the holes in the soles. Man started out with more kit but as he’s moved, day by day, he’s lost or abandoned it. He discards it carefully, hiding it under rocks or burying it or hanging it off branches, all to throw them off his scent. He was worried about taking Hound from them but it’s not the dog they’ll be sniffing out. It’s him, his clothes taken from his tent in the settlement, given to their pack of wild dogs to relish and savour. A meal they’ll have to work for.
Man turns and looks at Hound, the animal’s head like a wolf’s shadow as it attacks the rabbit bone. The haversack provides cushioning for Man’s head, a bumpy pillow that’s better than nothing at all. Using his skull, he tries to identify the items in the bag. First, the butt of his hunting knife. An easy one. Second, a crumpled plastic bottle filled with water. A box of lighters. Some brass knuckle dusters. The blunt curve of the back of a karambit that he bought when he was a teenager. A bag of small, plastic shampoo bottles for when he finally gets to wash. A first aid kid filled with plasters and a sowing kit. A bottle of scotch whiskey, Laphroaig, sparingly rationed. Two tins of Heinz beans, more than likely past their sell by date. You see, Man has known the world since the lights went off for longer than he knew it before. He knows not what day it is, what month it is or what year it is. Only that it is Spring. And the days are going to get hotter.
‘Let’s hope your fur sheds,’ says Man. Hound ignores him, licks bone. ‘You’re a dumb beast, aren’t you? I can win you over with the smallest offering of flesh and bone.’
Hound looks up, releases a low snarl.
‘Not as dumb as I thought! But dumber than me. I hope we can be friends. If we do, I’ll take that muzzle away. We can become partners, of sorts. Like in that film with Tom Hanks. You know the one! Shit! I forget, you’re probably not old enough. How old are you?’
Hound snarls again.
‘Three? Jesus you’ve had a hard paper round, mate. You look at least seven!’
Man sits up, cross-legged and contemplates filling his mouth with the warmth of peaty malt. Decides against it. It only makes the dreams worse. But ale, that’s different. That would do the trick. Something to take the edge off. He used to make homebrew back at the settlement. Found a book on it during a raid and started his own batch. Nettle beer was a popular choice, traded in old glass bottles for food and tobacco.
Hound lies on his belly, then rolls over and rubs his back on the grass. Man looks at him, finds it hard to contemplate the moment when pup became beast. Then he rolls over next to the dog, rubs his back in a mimicking manner. Hound jumps up in a flash, watches Man roll around and cocks his head in puzzlement, as if he can’t understand the human’s actions.
Man jumps to his feet with the agility of a night cat, throws his arms back like a blood eagle, malnourished chest stretched wide. His mouth opens.
And he howls!
Hound howls with him.
They could be close behind him, close enough to hear. With their horses and guns and axes and machetes.
But Man does not care. He is lost, gone in a moment, a marriage of man and nature, a primal journey into the dark wilderness of life.
And he howls.
***********************
Man traverses the land. For days he does this, Hound in tow, dragging his paws, tugging at the tyrannical TV cable. But every now and then, Hound relents, trots alongside Man, growling intermittently so that Man knows that the situation has not changed.
Man catches food when and where he can, digging small, booby-trapped holes outside of rabbit warrens, sticks sharpened by his rusted hunting knife, standing up like porcupine spines. He got the idea from a documentary on the Vietnam War; the Punji stick traps that wounded so many American soldiers. Surprisingly, Man finds this method to be very effective, watching from afar as the bravest rabbits step onto suspended leaves, gravity dragging them to impalement. Man has found that rabbits have a tendency to die quickly. Little to no suffering. Good.
***********************
After three days without a rabbit, Man and Hound, who are camping in a dense forest, spot a plume of smoke above the treeline, idly ascending into the cloudless sky.
Man knows what this means. Buildings. People. Problems. All of which he is keen to avoid.
‘We can’t go,’ says Man. Hound whimpers as two strings of saliva pass through the muzzle. ‘We can’t! We know what people do!”
Hound lies down, belly fixed to the forest floor. A protest. Man smiles at the beast, wonders if they are beginning to understand each other. He looks at the smoke and wonders what it could be. A settlement could have been raided and burned to the ground. Or it could be a trap. He’s seen it before, the friendly signalling, the pleas for help. Then the naïve idiots who come looking are caught, ambushed by their own species and boiled alive until flesh falls from bone.
‘Best to avoid trouble,
’ says Man.
Hound whimpers, then growls, then barks lowly, threatening their exposure.
‘Shush! Quiet! We can’t!’
A louder bark.
‘Stop it, you fucking idiot!’
Hound growls.
‘Okay, okay,’ Man relents. ‘We’ll take a look.’
The dog ceases and jumps up, trots against the tug of the cord, Man following briskly behind.
In front, trees stand against them like an army of wooden savages, branches like spears, weeds like nets. Hound is gifted with manoeuvrability; Man, not so much. So when they emerge at the edge of the forest, Hound is keen to keep going while Man pulls twigs from his hair and thorns from his face.
Together they look ahead, across a wide, green paddock contained by ancient stone walls, to a farm house, the chimney spewing smoke like an old man’s pipe.
Hound drags Man across the grass until they reach a wall. They crouch down, backs against moss-riddled stones, heads beneath caramel-coloured barbed wire. Hound moves in eccentric circles, his teeth chattering a rhythmic beat.
‘Calm down,’ says Man, in little more than a whisper that is whisked away by a gust of wind. Hound ignores him, pounds hard, a low and excited growl humming from his jaws. ‘Calm the fuck down, you stupid mutt! You’ll have us caught!’
Man contemplates letting Hound go but he knows he’d only run straight for the farm house. Man slowly rises, peers over the wall, his head poking up until his eyes are level with a blanket of vernal stone. Past this he sees something he didn’t see before. Too rushed to take everything in; too concerned with possibility of death to have a good look.
Cows. Dozens of them. Big brown lumps of flesh and blood and bone. They totter around another paddock, grunting and pissing and shitting, their mouths churning grass into mulch. Man used to think they were stupid creatures, but in the days since the lights went out he’s come to think differently of animals. Human intervention, the worst kind of all, domesticated and stupefied these creatures, turning them into a steady line of flesh and milk.
Voices! Man hears them, faint, but close by. He ducks quickly and grabs Hound, his hand holding those jaws shut, looking in every direction, checking for the hunters. He doesn’t like to handle the beast in this manner. No attention. Never. Man thinks about those cows and knows that if the voices belong to their owners then they will not be looking for man-flesh. They have food, possibly other animals, tucked away, miles from the anarchy and the cannibalism. He’s sure that they won’t eat him. But they might kill him. He knows he won’t be the first one to come up here, won’t be the last either. They’ll have killed before and they will kill again to keep this scrap of a life long-gone.
‘Celeste, darling,’ croons a male voice, ‘which number are we on? Forty two or forty three?’ The voice is gruff and deep in the way that large men speak.
‘Forty three, Daniel,’ replies a female voice, much softer. ‘Forty two was two months ago.’ Her voice is soothing to Man’s ears, the mellifluous tone of an angel on Earth. Man closes his eyes and imagines her; blonde and tall and lithe, floating through the paddock on an ethereal mist. He hasn’t heard a woman’s voice sound like that in a long time. Calm and serene. He’s used to hearing screams and shouts and cries. And then silence.
‘Okay, okay, I think I’ve found her!’ says the man called Daniel.
‘Not her, my dear,’ says the woman called Celeste, ‘just use the number. Or say it.’
‘Sorry, I forgot! I’ve got forty three.’
‘Well put the lead round it’s neck and take it to the barn. The quicker we do this, the quicker I can make that blood pudding that you like so much!’
Man hears the nervous grunt of a bovine beast, the clapping of hooves on dry earth. He waits a few seconds and then risks a look; sees the man and woman, number forty three in tow, the animal blissfully unaware that the minutes that follow will be its last. Man recognises the beast’s ignorance as a gift rarely shared with the human race.
Man shifts his attention back Celeste and Daniel, studies their forms, weighs them up in case violence is required. They are both lean, muscles taught and farm-fit and not to be underestimated. He learned a long time ago that underestimation means defeat and possibly death.
Daniel has long dark hair, shoulder length and walks with a confident gait. He is wearing green shorts, cargo-style and a loose fitting blue t-shirt. Wellington boots climb up past his calves. Celeste is how Man imagined her, lithe and tall with sun-bleached hair, flowing in wild ringlets over her tanned shoulders. She wears blue dungarees, cut off above the knee and a peach coloured t-shirt that clings with sweat to her sinewy back. Something inside Man, a lost and foreign feeling, wants her to be beautiful. Something wants her to be his.
A low growl through trapped jaws breaks Man free from his trance, leaving his daydreams to float freely into the everlasting abyss of the past.
It is the present, after all.
And Man needs to eat.
************************
Hound is tied to a tree in the forest, his muzzle tightened to prevent him from barking. Man will come back for the dog. Man will come back with the spoils of a successful raid.
He creeps across the first paddock, his back arched and just lower than the top of the wall. He reaches the wooden gate, slips a square, rusted lock off the end beam and pushes forward. The next paddock is filled with cows and he decides to run, lightly on his tip toes, side-stepping the beasts. Contemplates stopping, slitting one of the beast’s throat with the karambit. Could be noisy, could draw attention before enough flesh could be cut away.
Man looks ahead when he reaches the next wall. The farm house is close, less than thirty yards. This close up he can see how bad of a state it is in: tiles missing from the roof, moss and greenery covering the brickwork, the side wall tilting up as the root of a giant guardian-like tree worms its way into the foundations.
He hops over the wall, making sure to keep his skin away from the barbed wire, and runs to the side of the house, keeping his head below the ground-floor window ledge. Behind the farm house is the barn, a mud-coloured block of corrugated iron that looks more industrial than agricultural. Close by, Man can hear the clucking of chickens. He thinks of their eggs, pilfered on a daily basis by their captors.
‘Shit!’ whispers Man to himself, as another thought creeps into his head. There could be someone else inside the house. An elderly parent, perhaps, or a child. A stupid mistake, borne out of hunger and desperation. But the reward, in this case, certainly outweighs the risk. And if he is spotted then he can subdue the person, trade flesh for flesh.
Man creeps forward, feels a cooling breeze tunnelled between the house and barn. He moves toward the barn door, the side entrance, which stands open to the world. The karambit is hooked over his thumb, the curved, five inch blade ready to slice through anything that comes close.
‘Hold it still!’ says Daniel, his voice dampened by the steel walls.
‘I’m trying,’ replies Celeste, ‘but it’s strong! Hurry up and do it!’
‘I don’t want to hit your hand! Hold her still!’
‘It, Daniel, it’s an it!’
Man closes in on the barn door, thick clumps of grass on the ground cushioning his feet, quietening his approach. He positions his face so that he can see through the gap between the door and the hinges, peers in with his good eye.
He sees the cow, number forty three, her, it, a rope taught around the neck, the beast huffing and puffing; he sees the axe swing down, the blade whistling a death song through its silvery arc. Steel splits through fur and meat and the animal slumps in an explosion of blood, its bulky mass convulsing, the nerves firing off in sensory firestorms as they try to keep the beast alive. The axe falls again, hits the neck, passes through vertebrae. Again. And again. And again, until the cow’s head lies separate from its body, its neck a circle of gore, spewing blood like a burst pipe.
Daniel’s face is red-speckled, thin lines of
blood racing down into his beard like roads on a map. Man looks closer, sees that Daniel’s nose has been broken. Wonders why. The woman called Celeste moves fully into Man’s view, puts a hand on Daniel’s shoulder, and nuzzles into him. She lifts her head and Man sees her face; she’s beautiful, even with the thick, pink scar running over her left eye and down onto the cheek. Man smiles to himself, looks at her eyes and notices that they are green; two deep emerald pools. He sees her standing in those dungarees, cuddling her partner, kissing him on the shoulder as number forty three’s blood laps at their wellington boots like the last tide of a summer’s day.
************************
Man runs as fast as he can, jumping over walls with an agility he reserves for such occasions as this. He’s pretty sure that no one else was in the house.
He left just as Daniel and Celeste began to butcher the cow, its carcass hanging on a metal hook, winched in the barn by an old pulley rig.
Man’s lungs are not what they used to be and he sucks hard for air, hurdling ancient walls and dodging cows. He runs until he is back in the forest. He runs until he can see Hound.
The dog is lying on his belly but jumps up with excitement when Man approaches, huffing and wheezing. The beast jumps on his hind legs but is stopped by the tension of the wire lead. Man moves to Hound, offers his hand for the dog to sniff. He loosens the muzzle. No growls. No barks. Hound has missed him.
‘Good boy!’ says Man. ‘We’ve got a treat coming our way! A cow leg. Meat and fat and the bone, as long as my arm, all for you.’ Man sits down, just out of Hound’s reach, in case the dog’s temper suddenly changes. ‘I’ll see if I can find some salt. They’re bound to have some. It’ll help preserve the meat.’
Hound murmurs excitedly and Man contemplates removing the muzzle completely but is too wary of what the dog can do. Hound is an animal, a smart animal and Man knows he has to be careful.
