Cleaver

by McCloud, Wes

  I raised the boom high until he was dangling about fifteen feet from the ground. I wanted to make sure he was plenty high enough that the dogs couldn’t reach him. One bite and we’d have to start this whole damn mess over again. Maddie just didn’t have that kind of time.

  I’m barely past the bridge near the house, when I see a river of dogs flooding through the field. I expected it to happen, but it was quite something to actually witness. They’re barking is so loud it drowns out the drone of the F800 I’m now bringing to a stop near the mouth of the driveway. Maddie and I both lean out the open windows to look back at the pandemonium that is three hundred-fifty-plus dogs trying to crawl over one another to get one bite into the flesh of this dangling deadbag. It’s a magnificent sight. I look back towards the house; not one dog is sitting in the yard or on the porch or anywhere, they are all here, unknowingly being bent to my will by their own ferocity towards the enemy. They are all here except for ten dogs. Ten dogs we sat aside this morning, in pet carriers.

  I pulled down the drive and Maddie and I fetch all ten dogs inside their cages and secure them to the truck bed, right behind the cab. Just as the others, they too are freaking out about the presence of the zombie dangling on high. I swear they’re two seconds away from chewing right through the steel to get a piece of him. But we need these dogs for a different purpose. They are our halo dogs, the ones we’ll tether to us when we wade into the horde behind the army of dogs. I knew we had to set them aside before we brought that zombie back. Trying to fish them out of hundreds of raging mutts would have proved impossible.

  Backing up and getting myself pointed back towards the road takes a minute from the fault of all the dogs scrambling around me. Soon though, I get righted and I head off. I keep staring towards the house in the rearview. Memories of the things that had happened since this madness started playing on a terrifying loop, but they were soon outweighed by the good times. The memories of my grandparents. Of summer fishing trips and Christmas eves by the fire. Life was still there even though no one was inside. And in that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever see the place again. I shed a small tear beneath my mask, thinking of grandpa and grandma, and all the dogs I buried in a mass grave in the yard. I thought about Pete, the giant slayer with a taste for zombie dick ( you thought I was done mentioning that, didn’t you? ) He would have loved this war campaign we were about to embark on. All the monstrosities this world now called home, and that dog died by the hands of humans. It almost made me wonder if I really cared if anyone else was still out there.

  With caution, I start the slow and arduous journey towards town. I make a point to take corners as slowly as possible because the inertia causes the zombie to go swinging back and forth. The fear is, it’s going to knock him loose, and that’s the last damn thing I want. But all in all, the plan is working like a charm. The dogs just keep jumping and following the truck with no break in stride. I’m like the pied piper, leading all the rats out of town. Only they’re dogs, and I’m leading them into town, and my pipe is a legless zombie…Okay it’s a bad analogy, but you know what I mean.

  I keep looking over and Maddie; she’s always focused straight ahead. I can’t tell how she’s doing because of her mask, but I can only imagine it’s not good. I place a hand on her leg and squeeze; she looks over at me.

  “You sure you’re ready for this, kid?” She nods her head without hesitation. Jesus, she’s fearless. Wish I could say the same. I also wish I could say the trip felt like an eternity, but it didn’t. When you’re not looking forward to something, time flies, when you want something, time almost seems to walk backwards.

  What seems like minutes, falls down and we’re already at the edge of the town, right by the park we overlooked on our last visit. The anxiety and the adrenaline begin to flood my body as we make the slow descent down to the edge of the park near the base of the glacier outcropping. There’s a turn and the route points you right into main street. That’s where we stop and start the enticement. I nod to Maddie as I kill the engine and we both rip our masks up and start screaming and hollering like we’re being murdered. I start blasting the horn of the truck over and over, my eyes fixated to the road before us that slowly fills up with glistening, red bodies running right towards us. There they are. The unholy, horde of screeching beasts I kept seeing every night before I went to bed. They owned the town. It was time to take it from them. The petrifying lamentations of the dead’s bloodlust is met with the sound of hundreds of snarling and barking dogs. I watch as our army takes off to meet them head-on and it’s the most goddamn beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. A wall of rotten blood begins detonating ten feet into the air across the horizon in front of us as we watch the dogs begin to lay them to waste. Our jaws both drop in the awe of the spectacle. My heart is racing with a silent excitement, I want to cheer the mutts on as I watch them devastate the enemy, but we have jobs too.

  “Hold tight!” I scream to Maddie. We both pull our mask back over our faces and I plow the gas till we’re at the far end of the park. I then make a u-turn and begin screaming right towards the base of the hill where the path leads up the mini-mountain in front of us. We hit the incline so hard it jars our asses right out of the seat for a second. The dire shade of Maddie’s white knuckles match mine as we lurch onwards, the gravity of the hill’s steepness pushing us back into our seats so hard we can barely breathe. But still, I mash the pedal. I downshift until we’re in the lowest gear possible. This climb is probably the dumbest idea of the whole plan, but I stick with it. The truck’s stiff suspension is bouncing us everywhere, the tires spin, and traction wanes, but still we ascend. Soon, I can see the skyline and the steel monster levels out. We both breathe a collective sigh of relief as I swing the vehicle parallel with the cliff’s edge and start into phase two of the siege. I plant the outriggers down and hand Maddie a pair of binoculars to keep watch as I plant myself into the seat of the gun. The valley below me is alive with maddening, screeching honks and devilish barks that refract off the very side of the cliff I’m now aiming over. It’s absolute pandemonium below, a battle that looks like something right out of Middle Earth, and I have skybox seats. The drone of the gun buzzing to life pulses through my bones and sets my heart alight. I point it down into the forwarding mass ahead of the main line of dogs and I just start making the heavens rain. The range and the power of this weapon is horrifying. The streets come alive with explosions of crimson chaos as the pulses of the gun cut a path through the army of the dead, causing geysers of body parts and innards to go violently flying into the air. It’s gorgeous, and I am now possessed. The gun once again turns me into a mindless monster with nothing flowing through my veins but the brackish blood of revenge and ruin. I am God up here, and I am ending them by the hundreds with every swing of the pulsing barrel ahead. The more I gun down, the more I realize just how vast they are in number. The last time I perched up here, it seemed like I was looking at nearly ten-thousand. But as my gaze drifted atop the barrel, I began to wonder if it were twice that number as I watched them flood in like fire ants from the side streets and main highway beyond. Still, I keep firing and firing. I had no idea how many rounds this thing had. I knew it wasn’t shooting bullets, it was some sort of explosive, electrical pulse. But even that had to have an expiration. Right then and there I heard a women’s voice coo and it made me flinch. “50 percent” It wasn’t Maddie, the gun was talking to me. “40 percent” And I didn’t like what she was saying. “30 percent” Still, I kept my finger buried.

  “Cleaver!” Maddie screams. I let go of the gun and begin shaking. “Zero Percent. Gun Depleted. Initiating Recharge.” I look to Maddie and she points down to the southeast, around the backside of the hill. I saw them there, a large chunk of the dead had broken off and were now slithering around the other side of the park, where the main line of dogs weren’t. I jumped off the truck just in time to see the horde at the base of the hill far below. They knew we were up here, and they were coming fast. I
started backing away and was startled by the sound of the zombie that still dangled from the hook above. The line had rolled down and he was nearly face to face with me. I snarled and spun him round and used Orion to hack his arms off, he fell with a splat and rolled right over the side of the cliff. He dropped two-hundred fifty feet to the ground below. And that’s when the idea came.

  “Come here!” I quickly motioned for Maddie. She ran up and I began tethering her to the hook using a backpack she had on. She went to speak, but I cut her short. “Just trust me!” I ran over to the controls and moved the boom till she was dangling over the edge of the cliff, some twenty-odd feet out and away. The dogs we still had in the crates started going off in the bed, they could sense the dead’s ascent up the hill. I turned just in time to see a wall of them smashing through the trees and undergrowth, gunning right for me. I jumped to the base of the boom and quickly began inching my way across it to where Maddie dangled like a worm on a hook.

  “C’mon! We’re right here!” I screamed at the horde of the dead as they reached the truck. They didn’t once slow their steps. Like the possessed animals they were, they began jumping out to get us, but we were too far out. I reached Maddie and held her hand as we watched hundreds of the dead jump and fall over the cliff, exploding onto the rocks below. They came and they came and they came. So many in number they began to form a hill of dead at the bottom some ten feet in height. Finally, the wave stopped. For a few minutes I watched the now empty cliff edge until I deemed it safe to scale my way back down the boom to the safety of the truck. I worked the controls as fast as I could and got Maddie back on solid ground. I returned to the gun but it was doing nothing now. Every time I tried to touch the trigger the same robotic voice would admonish me “Charging.”

  “Shit! SHIT!” I punched the side of it. “Okay…okay. Let’s get the dogs,” I pointed to the crates. We quickly got the dogs out one by one and began tethering them to us respectively till we each had three surrounding us for protection. For an added bonus, we both donned backpacks front and back and placed one dog each into them like baby bjorns to have even closer protection from the dead. Yes, it looked as ridiculous as it sounded.

  We just couldn’t stay up there. I had no idea how, or if, that gun was ever going to charge and sitting there with our thumbs up our asses would definitely get us killed. We had to get back down the hill and figure it out from there. We loaded up on our saliva-filled squirt guns and began the decent back into the chaos below. We’re not even halfway back down and I see another small wave of dead coming up. I look back to Maddie,

  “Stay calm! Let the dogs do the work!” Stay calm? Did that seriously just come out of my mouth? That’s something you tell someone who’s about to take a driving exam, not someone who has fifty flesh-eating monsters running up a hill at them. I start letting them have it with the squirt guns and the exploding starts. Every bastard who manages to get by that, is met with a deadly ankle, knee, or dick bite from the little monsters surrounding me. Snarls Barkley, Patrick Chewing, and Harry Bird are proving to be the true dream team I needed. I keep glancing back at Maddie, she’s doing great.

  If you were paying attention, this is about where I started this whole story. Remember? I was going to come back to this part? Surprise, it’s here. We’re three-quarters the way down and making good headway, that was until my dumbass tripped. All I remember was spinning sky and earth, and the feeling of five dogs being squeezed against me on my reckless descent to the bottom. I can hear Maddie screaming out to me, but that all falls to the wayside as I see dozens of the dead standing over me honking and screeching. Luckily, the dogs are as conscious as I am and they start jumping up and laying into these bastards. I’m reaching for more squirtguns, but they all went flying away on the trip down. I try getting up, but the dogs and I are a tangled mess. I managed to get Orion loose and cut one of the dogs free. She goes flying. Picture a wiener dog going ballistic, biting the shit out of everything within paws reach. Actually, if you know any wiener dogs, this won’t be hard to picture at all. I stand up on shaking legs and start hacking. I decapitate one and spill the guts of another, all the while, I’m fighting off vertigo that threatens to end me faster than these deadbags. Suddenly, more and more zombies just start bubbling and splitting apart and I realize Maddie is there, raining down sweet dog spit with her guns.

  We clear the immediate area and then make our way round the side of the mini-mountain to try and reach the safety of the dog army we’d unleashed not that long ago. What I saw was ghastly, yet heartwarming. Mounds upon mounds of dead body parts littered main street, and beyond that was a wall of tails on writhing hindquarters, the dogs were cutting a path right into the center of town.

  Maddie and I began scaling the body parts with our haloing dogs in tow. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. It wasn’t that solid. There were times we almost sunk right down to our waste in the slippery piles of rot before us. We were out of breath by the time we got through the first wave of the fallen dead. We ran and caught up with the dogs who were now almost two blocks in, that’s when we started meeting up with the dead yet again. Now and again, a dozen would break through the lines of the raging dogs and we’d have to contend with them. This is what it had to have felt like in the middle of medieval war, sans dogs, perhaps. It was indescribable chaos. My ears were now humming with the sounds of death and dogs, and screaming monsters. Still, we held fast. I remembered the shotgun was still strapped to me. I called out to Maddie behind.

  “The balloons!” She had the idea of making some water balloons, or rather spit balloons, as part of our arsenal. I had an idea. She tossed me one from her bag. I then chucked it high and ahead, and shot it from the sky with the gun. The mist rained down and I watched with awe as an explosion of blood blotted out the view of the town square beyond.

  “More! More!” She just started tossing them over me like clay pigeons into the forwarding legions ahead, and I kept the downpour of death raining until all the balloons were exhausted. Speaking of exhausted, that was soon becoming a problem. Not with the dogs, but with us. I kept looking behind me and noticed Maddie was beginning to limp and struggle along. She was already sick and I was afraid she’d be kissing the red streets within minutes if we didn’t do something. Ahead, was the towering spire of one of the larger churches downtown and I made it a point to head straight for it. Soon, I felt the sweet and cool kiss of shadow from the building. I turned to Maddie,

  “Let them go!” I began cutting loose my dogs and dumping the other two from the backpacks. She did the same and we barreled into the building and locked the doors behind us. It was eerily quiet, and even more unnerving was the muffled sounds of the raging war still going on just outside the hallowed walls. The inside was beautiful, awash with walls of gorgeous stained glass. It was peaceful there. No evil lurked in the shadows.

  We made our way up the stairs and into the bell tower above. We took off our masks and sat there in silence while we watched on for another two hours as the dogs rid the town of every last zombie like the rats they were.

  Right about the time the sun began to drop down below the buildings of the square, we heard the last dog bark, and there was silence. It was a hauntingly beautiful serenade of nothingness. The dead, at least all the ones in and around town, were now gone. They were in hell, where they belonged, right beside Christmas music and cantaloupes. Maddie and I looked at one another. Her eyes had lost their light. She was fading inside. Time once again became the monster and not the zombies. I helped her down the steps and into the body-littered streets beyond. There were dogs everywhere there meeting us, their tails wagging; coats were stained to the darkest shade of crimson. They were no longer the ferocious dead-slayers, but the mutts I had all grown to love. We owed them everything and could never repay them for what they’d done for us. But dogs being dogs, I am quite sure they weren’t keeping score. All they wanted was a loving pat on the head, a bit of food, and a place to call home.

  We made our way
to the edge of the town square where a fancy sign scrawled out the name of the town. The moniker was now meaningless to anyone. There was a beaten city maintenance truck near us that had spilled out dozens of cans of spray paint. I picked one up and handed it to Maddie.

  “Here, you rename it whatever you want. It’s all ours now.” She shook the can for a bit as she thought and pondered. She then began spraying away. In gorgeous, flowing letters she wrote “Dogtown – Population 355” It was clever and oddly heartwarming, but the number itself was a cold reminder of just how far the world had fallen. Especially given the fact that we only made up two of that number. I was quickly reminded that the town wasn’t ours, it did in fact belong to the dogs. We may have set the ball in motion, but they did most the work. Maddie looked at me.

  “Cleaver…am I a Jedi now?”

  I nodded and smiled, but it was soon erased as I watched her eyes roll back in her head. All I heard was the sound of the spray can as it fell from her hand and clanged against the concrete below along with her crumpling body. Everything seemed to go silent and slow as I ran to her and scooped her up in my arms. Life was fleeting and fragile and, above all, unfair. She was gone. I returned to the homestead and buried her next to the dogs we had lost. I know that’s what she would have wanted, to be there, next to them forever, with the beauty of the rolling winds sweeping across the yard they all once played upon. Caressing them into the ether, into heaven, into forever…Just kidding, Maddie didn’t die. Oh my god, you were crying, weren’t you? Haha! No, it was scary but thanks to the books in the library and the medicine from the hospital, I nursed her back to health. In a week, she was back to being…well, Maddie, listening to her cassette player ( She had a whole bunch of new music thanks to the music store on Oak Street ) and playing with dogs, and drawing beautiful things I could only dream of drawing. I just love her so much. And the dogs? Well after a week of settling in, lots of them took up their own residence in open doored houses, back yards, and breeze ways, they seemed to be neighbors now more than roommates. A couple dozen of the original dogs, June and Jeff, included of course, stayed around and lived in our house. I told Maddie she could have her own house, but she didn’t want one. She insisted she’d lived with me. Which I was perfectly fine with. We settled in a beautiful, older home down on Main St. It had been remodeled years ago and I remembered always admiring it every time I passed by. It was one of a few houses that still had a working generator. Still, I knew that power may not last forever, I was doing my due diligence to learn as much as I could about solar and get us going on that.