by McCloud, Wes
A few more days passed with me trying to pretend everything was “normal”. The thoughts of the town now consumed me and made every attempt to erode my brain away until I was a shell of a man obsessed with only one desire. I found myself craving music once again. I had been for quite awhile. I dug out my Walkman and sat on the front porch, watching the clouds lazily meander over the hills. The sounds of Metallica took me back, back to the time of carefree days that I didn’t realize were carefree days. Honestly, it did little to smash the hunger in my heart.
I flinched as a finger began poking me. Maddie sat down beside me with a burning curiosity dancing in her eyes. She said something, but of course, I couldn’t hear her through the music consuming my ears. I pulled off the headphones, she spoke,
“What’s that?” My god, she really didn’t know. She genuinely didn’t know. I know she undoubtedly was sheltered most of her life, but still, even kids that hadn’t been were still clueless to the cassette. I remember watching those videos where they’d hand kids Walkman’s and they had no idea what they were or how they worked. They were all birthed into the digital age. And it was videos like that that made me feel lucky to be born in the era I was. I had seen the genesis of household tech. I watched it go from, tape, to disc, to file, to cloud. I’d lived through it all and therefore found a way to appreciate it even more. To most kids, being able to instantly listen to any song through a lightning fast download was just normalcy. As I silently transferred the headphones over onto Maddie’s head, I couldn’t help but wonder what her generation would’ve said at my age had the world kept going. “Back in my day all we could do was instantly listen to any song we wanted. We couldn’t digitally alter our DNA and implant ourselves in virtual reality to actually become the rock star we were listening to.”…Hmmm, maybe this zombie apocalypse is what we needed. Just as I had watched her with a smile when she read the comics, I now watched Maddie as she listened to Metallica on cassette for the first time. She didn’t grimace and rip off the headphones like I’d expected. She just smiled and pointed at them like they were some kind of otherworldly force she’d never experienced. Hell, cassettes aside, maybe she’d never worn headphones. I honestly didn’t take her for the heavy metal type, I would’ve pegged her for an Ariana Grande fan or whoever else these dadgum kids were listening to these days. Still, as minutes ticked by amongst muffled guitar riffs, I couldn’t even beg to pry that music from her ears. She was soon out in the yard practicing with her sword, engrossed in the music she now seemed to be absolutely possessed by. I guess that Walkman wasn’t mine anymore, neither were my comic books, but that was okay, seeing her happy was all that was really important to me now.
I went into the house and fished out the remnants of another past hobby I’d buried years ago. I threw a box of colored pencils, pens, and a few pads of paper onto the picnic table and began trying to scrawl out some of the ideas that had been haunting my brain ever since we left the town. I dabbled in art once upon a time, mainly sketching. I was told I was good, but I could never quite convince myself of that. I almost felt myself shaking my head as I instantly became frustrated at the drawings I began dishing out. This is exactly why I stopped drawing years ago. There was a time it had been therapeutic to me, I just sat down and drew whatever crazy thing was in my head, abstract or otherwise, and I genuinely enjoyed it. It wasn’t about the quality of the work, or how it stood up against the works of some other artist, it was simply art. But somewhere along the line, I just began to loathe it, and it seemed things hadn’t changed much.
I soon felt the presence of Maddie standing beside me, I figured she was there, eavesdropping on what I was sketching, but I looked to see her holding the Walkman and headphones in her hand with this sort of heartbroken expression.
“It’s broken…I broke it.” At first I thought maybe she dropped it or glanced it with the sword or something. I took it from her hands. “It just stopped,” she further spoke as I began flipping it over with inspection. This poor kid had herself in a tizzy over nothing. I almost chuckled, but held it in as I realized she’d simply reached the end of side A.
“Sweetie, it aint broken,” I reassured her and then went on to explain the logistics of how a cassette player worked, flipping the tape over, pause, play, all that stuff. I soon had her ears full of metal once again, and I went back to toiling away on the ivory before me.
Soon, Maddie sat down across from me and began watching. I fully expected the whole “What are you doing? What are you drawing?” lines of questioning, but nothing came. She stayed silent and I soon watched from the corner of my eye as she too grabbed a pencil and pad and began sketching away. It felt like two hours passed, it was just us and the serenade of muffled Metallica, pencils scratching paper, and panting dogs surrounding us. The pad before me soon began to look like an over-caffeinated, movie artist’s concept notebook, full of crude sketches and notes chasing their edges. I had no idea what I was doing, but did I ever? I felt like I was just wasting time with all this. I soon flipped the book shut and sighed. Maddie was still fast at work, she’d barely taken a break since her pencil hit that paper. I have to admit, I was quite curious as to what she was bringing to life over there, and what I saw shocked me. I expected to see a page full of rainbows and butterflies, maybe the sun drawn up in the corner of the page, but no. It was two people, standing side by side, donning gas masks. And they weren’t stick figures. They were drawn in fair detail, all in red pencil, and when I say fair detail, I mean it was amazingly done. I was stunned. And what exacerbated that fact was she’d obviously drawn that from her mind, with no modeling reference standing in front of her. She was a true artist. She pulled off her headphones and flipped the pad up so I could see it better. I was seriously taken aback. The two people standing side by side wearing the masks were drawn much like American Gothic. If you don’t know what American Gothic is, it’s a painting also referred to as ‘the farmer and his wife’. I’m sure you know the one, a man and a woman, standing close, side by side, the husband holding a pitchfork and wife donning a look of forlorn. In the background is their farmhouse. Maddie’s rendition also had a house there, only it was my house, or our house, I should say. The difference between the classic work and hers, other than the gas masks, was at the bottom of the page. A patchwork of dogs all surrounded the people, each one of their heads encircled with an angel’s halo. It was hauntingly beautiful. She pointed to the people wearing the masks,
“That’s me and you,” which is what I had already surmised, given the fact that the taller of the people had a mask crowned with goat horns, though I wasn’t holding a pitchfork like in American Gothic, but my sword instead. I gently took the pad from her hands to look at it even closer.
“Maddie, kid, that’s amazing…Did someone teach you how to draw?” She just shrugged her shoulders, it was now the common reply to questions she didn’t really want to answer. I then recalled her telling me she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up. She would undoubtedly make a fine art teacher. As I doted over that drawing like a proud father, a part of me couldn’t help but be sad. I kept thinking about the fact that possibly no one would ever see her talents except for me. And my vision of her pushing thirty years of age, standing in front of wide-eyed students wanting to learn how to better their craft was something that would possibly never happen. It just didn’t sit well with me. Why did the world have to die?
I was suddenly jolted from my elated daze by the dogs all going into a barking fit. Maddie jumped up from the table and grabbed her sword. I spun round just in time to see an entire phalanx of dogs running a beeline towards the road to meet a small group of zombies so far up the way that I could barely make them out with the naked eye. Maddie and I really didn’t have to lift a finger. The dogs met the threat within one minute. I could see the misting explosions of the dead as the dogs ripped through them and sent them flying into pieces. Soon, everything was silent once more. It troubled me, I hadn’t seen any of the dead around here for quite so
me time. Perhaps they were starting to flood back out of the cities, out into the country where they could possibly find more flesh. I guess that wasn’t a bad thing in a sense. Maybe it would thin the numbers in the town. Another thought recurred to me right then, my realization of just how much the dogs now loathed the zombies. They absolutely hated them. They looked at them as the threat they were and it now seemed biologically programmed within them to attack and kill without mercy. They were behaving much like the zombies with a hive mentality of ‘kill the dead on sight’ And that’s when I began to feel a tick more confident about the insane plan I had brewing upstairs. It was time to start setting things into motion.
With Dog All Things are Possible
The first thing we needed were dogs, lots of them. And to be fair, we already had that by normal standards, but the numbers just wouldn’t do. Maddie and I set out for miles in every direction, each day, driving the back roads slowly with a small pack of our own following us around. The combination of the dogs, our constant whistling, and of course, the rattling of buckets full of food drove them out of hiding. We would lead them back to the homestead every evening and let them join the full force of the other mutts. And each night the same thing would take place, all the newcomers would drop dead from the fleas infection at some point and the next evening they’d play Lazarus and rise from the grave, reborn as green-eyed zombie killers. Each time it got a little easier to watch. You knew they were coming back, but there was that deeply embedded human empathy that always made you question what was happening. That tinge of loss you felt when you saw something pass away. It was quite impossible to drive off entirely.
After a week of scouting the backroads, we’d managed to amass over one hundred new dogs. Hell, some of them had found the place on their own while we were out, much like the dogs that had come there before them. Our total number was now topping three-hundred, and I felt that that was ample, so I began to launch the next stage of the plan. We went out on further home raiding expeditions, securing ropes, chains, steel, aluminum, just anything I thought would be of use to the upcoming siege. I then began toiling away in the garage from before dawn till past dusk, fabricating while I gave Maddie the task of saliva harvesting from our legion of dogs. I hammered, screwed and welded while she gathered, poured, and stocked. The following day I was fitting us both with an array of body armor. Homemade gauntlets and shin guards forged from steel rodding and hose clamps sewed with thick canvas backings. I then constructed the rings, no not the rings of power you Middle Earth nerds, the rings that would protect Maddie and I far more than the makeshift armor I had been dishing out. I fashioned metal just a tad larger than our waist lines. They were steel belts in a sense that had a hinge on one end and a latch on the other, and three eyelets evenly placed around their perimeter.
“What is it?” Maddie asked as I fitted hers round her waist.
“A dog halo.” I just came up with that one on the fly. But that really was an apt name for it. I handed her some leashes and collars.
“I want you to go out there and choose three dogs close to the same size. Ones you trust, and ones that are small. Leash them up and bring them back here.” She just nodded and went to her task. I’m sure her head was rife with questions, but she didn’t spill any to me. She just waded out into the army of mutts and began carefully choosing. The dog haloes I forged were meant to tether three dogs to one person. It would serve as a ring of protection from the dead if they got too close. Since the dogs were all mindlessly running after zombies, they would no doubt leave us standing there with our pants round our ankles. These haloes would keep a group of dogs with us at all times, and since it kept our hands free, we could still swing our swords. Each dog would be clasped by a leash to one of the three eyelets on the band. It was important to have equal leash lengths, and equal dog sizes because the dogs would be surrounding you, and the more balanced it all was, the better. You certainly wouldn’t want a great dane on one end and two chihuahuas on another. And why did I want her to pick small dogs? Well first off, small dogs seemed to be the biggest assholes on the planet, they would no doubt be the most ferocious at fending off the dead. Secondly, they would be controllable, eight to twelve pound dogs weren’t going to knock you down. And lastly, they were short, if we were going to be wielding swords they would be safe on the ground below the swinging. I know, I know, I’m a goddamn genius.
Soon enough, Maddie had rounded up her trio. She had picked out a pug, a wiener dog, and some fox terrier mix. I helped her attach the dogs to her belt and then let her walk around with them.
“How’s that feel?”
“Weird,” she said as the she stumbled around the driveway with the dogs weaving around her like mad, little imps. I instructed her to keep working with them as I went to the task of picking out my dogs. I needed a dream team. Just like America had in 1992. Remember that? The greatest sports team ever assembled? All of our best NBA players joined forces and steamrolled over every country in the Olympics. Good times, well not for the other countries, but yeah, back when Americans all seemed proud to be Americans. Anyway, I needed my own dream team, but I only needed three players. I picked a grungy looking shi-tzu, a dapple wiener dog, and sketchy chihuahua mix. I named them all respectively, Harry Bird, Patrick Chewing, and Snarls Barkly. We basically had to spend the next few days teaching these dogs how to mind on their leashes. During this whole plan I’d seemed to have forgotten that dogs had a mind of their own, especially little ones. Soon though, it seemed they were getting the hang of it well enough to not get us killed, but then again, we weren’t neck deep in zombies, so how they’d operate in that mess was anyone’s guess.
The next phase was one that I’d been dreading. It was the logistics of just how in the hell I was going to get hundreds of dogs transported into town in order to even enact this campaign. I was thinking about loading them into various different semis and trailers and having this ominous caravan of rolling steel ready to deliver true death to the dead, but it just wasn’t feasible. There was no way to fit that many dogs into a tractor trailer safely, and if we took two, I’d have to teach Maddie how to drive an eighteen-wheeler which I barely knew how to do myself. Even then, I doubt there’d be enough room, especially given the fact that almost fifty more dogs had shown up in the past few days. I then started thinking up ways to make a multi-tiered shelf system in a semi bed and load the dogs up onto different levels. It was an engineering nightmare, one we didn’t have the time or resources for. I was overthinking this entire mess. There had to be a simpler way to get them all into town. The idea came to me a few days later after I crumpled up most of the plans I’d drawn out and tossed them into the burn barrel. I saw Maddie halfway down the drive with a squeaky toy dangling on the end of a leash. She would let it hang then snap it back up and laugh as half a dozen dogs tried getting ahold of it. She then slung it over her shoulder and ran down the drive and into the yard to me with an army of mutts at her backside.
“Kid, you’re a genius.”
She brushed the hair from her face, “I am?”
“Yep. Jump in the Bronco, we’re going for a ride.”
We drove up and down the roads surrounding for an hour or so, my eyes desperately searching for something that I could use for this newfound scheme. I mainly searched the farms but then an epiphany hit. About five miles north of the house there was a brickyard. They’d been there for years, probably since the 60’s, firing their own brick from scratch that they made from the rock in the adjacent rock pit across the bridge over Route 10. I pulled into the place and looked into the first building. There she sat in all her dual-tired glory, an F800 crane truck complete with a long stake bed. She was perfect; just what we needed. I found the keys in the office and slowly drove her home with Maddie piloting the Bronco close to my bumper. Poor kid was all over the road, but I’d taught her enough basic driving in the past weeks that she managed to make it back without running into a telephone pole. To this point, I still hadn’t sat Maddie
down and explained to her exactly what we were doing. I guess there was a part of me that was afraid she’d run off, and I didn’t blame her. I was asking her to follow behind me as I unleashed an extermination squad of now three hundred-ftfty dogs into the heart of the city. And the fact that I expected that all to go off without a hitch, was quite possibly the dumbest thing I’d ever had in my head. It was quite dangerous ( obviously ) and taking her along seemed, in good part, an extremely selfish thing to do. I had to make sure she was 100% okay with following me into that potential death trap. So after I spent the remainder of that day getting the hang of the controls on the crane truck, I pulled her earphones off long enough to tell her what I was planning. After thoroughly explaining all of the dangers involved, she looked at me and nodded. Quite honestly, I expected no less from her. I was all she had as she was all I had, I suppose if we met our fate together then that was just that. Still, that nagging, burning of guilt singed my conscience every night when my head hit the pillow. I knew she’d follow me anywhere, so in that regard, was my campaign fair? In the end, I convinced myself that having that town was worth the risks that came with clearing it out.
