The Last Dog on Earth

by Adrian J. Walker

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Over here.’

  We all turned to see. Our owners had formed a circle, and not just with themselves, but with others too. You usually see dog walkers having little chats together on The Rye, but this was something else. There were twenty of them, thirty, maybe more, some with dogs – even those we knew had no business being on The Rye – those without dogs, runners, parents with children, every colour face you like: black, white, brown, yellow, pink, red, all congregating together, all talking, some with their arms flying, some arguing, some consoling the ones who’d lost it.

  And swarming from them all in icy tendrils on the breeze was the thick smell of voles.

  Sirens sounded up the street, then from far away I could hear voices floating in, roaring.

  ‘What the devil?’ said Jeremy.

  And suddenly it wasn’t so beautiful any more. Suddenly it felt like everything was about to change. And take it from me, for a dog, that’s just about the worst feeling in the world. We have to know where the lines run. Where things are, when things happen, the good bits and the bad bits. That’s what makes us happy – nice neat lines and no changes, thank you very much. But when those lines get mixed up or removed, it’s no joke. It feels like someone’s taking a piss in your soul.

  Our tails went down, and we all just wanted to be at our masters’ legs. We all wanted to be in that safe space we called home.

  The second bit I remember was much worse.

  The year had dwindled, winter letting spring have a go, then summer yawning in with all its promises of long days and snoozes in the sun. Except this time there were no such promises. My lines had been taken away. Life wasn’t the same any more.

  The days were full of the sound of shouting, mostly from outside, but also from the television, which was permanently on. Usually I didn’t mind this, but now I hid from it. It was just a blur of the same things again and again – that flag waving, and those purple jackets, bold letters and loud voices telling people how things were going to be from now on, and pictures showing what happened to those who didn’t agree.

  Down on the street there were loud engines and gunshots that made me dive beneath the sofa, where I spent much of the time in those days, it has to be said. My skyline – my most favourite thing – changed beyond recognition. There was always at least one explosion a day, sometimes more. A distant boom, the windows rattling and Reg looking out as flames and a black plume rose in the sky. Then, as the smoke cleared, either a ragged scar in a rooftop, or another building falling. Soon, Reg kept the curtains closed. It was hot, and stifling, and dark.

  Most of the time we just stayed inside, and on the rare occasions when Reg took me to The Rye, I hardly ever saw the others.

  This last day I did, though, if only for a second.

  It was June, and a warm drizzle swept down from One Tree Hill as we reached the park entrance. The air was full of mist – or smoke, it was hard to tell any more. I could feel the electricity before we saw anything; the unmistakable fizz of humans with purpose, meeting a turning point. Like before, there were more gathered there than usual. Someone had set up a makeshift stage by the picnic area, and a West Indian woman with long braids and a rainbow hat was talking on a megaphone. I could smell meat cooking, and there were cups being handed out. The woman’s words were urgent, full of kindness and strength. I could taste the steaming crowd around her, surging with citrus, blood and steel. No voles any more – this was the smell of fresh hope.

  Before long the southern field of The Rye was packed, the long grass, untended since the previous summer, stamped down by the boots of those marching towards the podium and scurrying with the feet of children, and dogs.

  ‘Lineker!’ I heard a familiar voice calling. I looked up and saw a gaunt figure trotting through the mist. He looked so thin I hardly recognised him at first, and his coat was dull and shabby and crusted with filth.

  ‘Jez,’ I said, sniffing his backside. ‘Blahdy ’ell, mate, what’s happened to you?’

  Jeremy looked me up and down and offered his nose half-heartedly at my rear.

  ‘Lean times, old friend,’ he said. ‘Lean times. I can see you’re struggling too.’

  Dogs don’t do mirrors in the same way as you do, so it had been a long time since I’d given myself a once-over. I did so then, and saw that he was right. I was thin too, and the hair on my paws seemed a little sparser than I would have liked.

  There was a cheer from the crowd and we looked up to see hands in the air. Some of the two-plates had banners and flags. And smiles, too. Hungry smiles.

  ‘Any idea what’s happening?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but it feels good, doesn’t it? Smells good?’

  I barked in agreement.

  ‘Half of ruddy Peckham must be here, wouldn’t you say?’ said Jeremy. ‘Not to mention East Dulwich, Nunhead, Forest Hill. It’s packed. Something’s happening, definitely.’

  We looked at each other, having arrived at the same thought.

  ‘Find the others?’ I said.

  Jeremy looked up at his owner, who was shuffling forwards, trying to get a closer look. Reg was doing the same.

  ‘Don’t expect they’ll mind if we’re gone for a minute,’ said Jeremy. He looked back at me, tail wagging. ‘You’re on.’

  We darted through legs, following scents, trying to pick up on something. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before we got the waxy, veal-like aroma of Scapa, followed by the tripe of Wally. Before we knew it, we’d found them both sitting in a clearing by a log at the edges of the crowd. They all looked just as skinny as us.

  Joyous barks, tails wagging faster than I thought possible, sniffing and bounding and rolling. What with all the excitement of the roaring crowd, and that smell of lemons and metal and blood, and the sound of laughter coming from the stage, and the shaft of sunlight that broke through at the same time, the sight of each other was like heaven falling down upon us all. We scampered about the clearing, yelling for joy, certain that this was the end of something, and the beginning of something else; that things would get back to normal soon.

  But the feeling only lasted a moment. I stopped to sit down and catch my breath, and as I did I looked between them – Jeremy, Pebble, Wally, Wonky and, finally, Scapa. But when my eyes landed on hers, she did a strange thing. She jumped and cowered in fright, looking up and to the right, as if some invisible hand had struck her. Within the space of a second, we were all doing the same. Sometimes, when you’re deep in The Howl, events have a way of making themselves known before they’ve arrived.

  I could feel the air tighten and relieve itself of noise. The crowd seemed to hush, the roars of approval silenced in an instant, like a trapdoor opening beneath them. They turned towards the city skyline, and the woman speaking turned to look upwards too.

  We took one last look at each other, my pack and I, one last look to keep close, but it wasn’t long enough, and it never would be. I wanted to scream, to run, to burst through it all and escape from the moment as it drew nearer. But there was no escape.

  The sky lit up in a furious blaze of white light, and shuddered with an upside-down thump as if all of the air was being sucked from my ears. And then I was running, falling, tumbling away down the hill, away from the pack, away to find Reg, as the ground rumbled beneath me.

  Another Life

  REGINALD HARDY’S JOURNAL

  4TH DECEMBER 2021

  I am afraid I may have spoken too soon; Bertha is struggling. I have been trying to ignore the jiggering sound all night, but there’s no getting around it – the generator needs some attention.

  It is a fairly simple fix, of course; a couple of new bearings should do it. The only problem is that I have a feeling the only place I shall find such bearings is on the outer reaches of my operational boundary – an extremity to which, happily, I have had neither the necessity nor the desire to stray since before the bombs.

  The first was only a tiddler by all accounts. From what I heard it was 100
tons, just a fraction of what landed on Hiroshima. Ground zero was Kings Cross Station, the resulting blast and fireball taking out most of Regent’s Park, Camden, the British Library, the British Museum, Great Ormond Street …

  The second one was a touch bigger and above ground too, so it packed more of a punch. It made short work of Westminster, removed a hefty slice from Buckingham Palace, and turned St James’s Park into a swamp. A third and fourth – little ones again – detonated near Canary Wharf. I saw those from the flat: spectacular to watch those banks crumble like dust.

  They were not enough to flatten London, but they did rob it of power. The grid was still running then (just) but down on the ground we had frazzled substations, melted cables and blown fuses by the bucketload. So, for electricians like me, business was booming. Every mushroom cloud, you might say.

  I remember those few weeks running around trying to get to every job. Absolute pandemonium. Most of the work was impossible to complete, but I saw it as my duty to try. It was easy at first because the streets were suddenly quiet, as if the shock had made the population shrink inside like molluscs. To some extent I expect it was a misplaced fear of fallout that kept people indoors, but the prevailing wind was from the south and I knew enough about blast zones and radiation levels to know that the chances of being affected were fairly slim. I took a calculated risk.

  Either way, the streets were mine, and I whizzed my Transit around them like a pinball on an open table. It was a joyful time, really – if you leave aside the threat of nuclear cataclysm and social collapse, of course.

  My freedom was, however, brief. The panic, confusion and fear those dirty great bombs caused – what they were designed to cause, in retrospect – soon set in. Reality ensued, plans were formed, and somewhere within that woeful, muddled aftermath, an exodus began; the good people of London fled their homes.

  I was turning onto Queen’s Road when I saw the first car leave. The driver – a worn-out looking chap with bags under his eyes and hair like a wind-ravaged haystack – was hunched by necessity over the wheel, the rest of the vehicle bulging with his family and their many possessions. Two mattresses were strapped to the roof, and perched upon them, lashed down with two bungie cords, was – of all things – a washing machine.

  I watched them roar past, looking rather comical as they careered around the corner and sailed off to whatever new life they had planned – presumably one in which automatic garment cleaning was still a high priority.

  Such sights grew in regularity as the idea spread. Panic exploded exponentially as more and more people loaded up and took to the streets – a chain reaction as unstoppable as the ones that had caused the whole mess in the first place.

  After a week or so of clogged roundabouts and the air thick with fumes and car horns, the streets gradually grew quiet. Tower blocks and tenements were drained of life. The shops and offices were shut, unguarded. The mansions of Dulwich were locked up and boarded against looters as if the owners had merely taken an extended break to Barbados or whatever tax havens they kept their second homes in.

  Three years on and those windows are still covered in planks.

  People ran away. And you might say they were perfectly right to (I know she would have) because those bombs really were just the start.

  Everyone knew who was behind it. Deep down they did. At first there was all the pomp and flag-waving from that mob down the Wheatsheaf. ‘Effing terrorists!’ they shouted out on the streets, beers in hand. ‘Effing Muslims! Enough is enough!’ and all that tripe. But they knew. We all knew. It was him.

  For the life of me I could not tell you what that man stood for or what he wanted. I will be the first to admit that I am not a great political mind – each to his own is about as much of an opinion as I can muster – but I will listen to them, these people who get it into their heads that they can run things better than the last, or that they have thought of some bold new direction for us, or that they care more than the others, or that they understand the common man, or that they won’t take it lying down any more. Or any of that twaddle. I will listen to them, just to give them a chance and see if anything they say chimes with me.

  But not that man. I switched him off whenever I saw him on the television, which was all the time towards the end. There was something about him that made my blood run cold, him and that haircut of his, and that smile like a bank manager offering you a loan, and those gorillas lining up behind him in their purple jackets and gold plumes. Remote, off, gone.

  I ran into some of his boys a few times. They called themselves the BU, but most just called them Purples on account of their jackets. It was after the exodus and I was doing my rounds, seeing if I could pick up some spare parts in Denmark Hill – a little close to my border, it must be said, but these were desperate times – and as I turned onto a side street, there they were, blocking the road with their big Purple van. Five of them were lined up in front of it, guns across those ridiculous jackets of theirs. They saw me and I stopped, letting the engine run while I decided on a suitable course of action.

  Run, Reginald? Or remain calm?

  I had no reason to run. But still.

  Behind them was a trail of people. Women, children, men, white, black, brown. They were all cuffed together and, one by one, they were swabbed.

  Swabbing was their means of assessing us – sorting the wheat from the chaff, you might say. They carried these devices like breathalysers with a clear plastic probe on the end. If they had a reason to suspect you as an undesirable, then they stopped you, placed the probe upon your tongue and waited while the machine performed its tests and announced your fate. A green light and a chirp was good news. Red light and a low beep – not so good.

  I found a pile of them once, abandoned in a skip, so I took a few home to open them up, see what was what. I discovered very little – inside was a circuit board attached to a loose, empty vial, a leaking battery and a fragile probe all attached to one another with shoddy soldering and flimsy wires. No wonder they had been abandoned. There was nothing I could salvage from them, so I replaced them in the skip and went on my way, still none the wiser about what dreadful chemical reactions went on inside, or what an ‘undesirable’ meant.

  All I know is I was never selected for swabbing, so I can only assume that my fifty-two-year-old, balding, overweight, white-skinned, male appearance was – somehow – ‘desirable’.

  But this lot, unfortunately, were not. Red lights and beeps all round. I watched as they were herded into the van, heads hanging in miserable silence.

  One of the guards removed his sunglasses when he saw me looking and made some remark to his friend who laughed. The others laughed too, but their smiles fell away when the first one took a step towards me. I made my decision, put the van into reverse and pressed hard on the accelerator pedal, spinning around the corner and whipping it into first, just like they do in the films. I never looked back.

  I have not seen anyone with the letters BU on their shirt for a long time. But then again, neither have I set foot near the edge of my domain, so I have reasons to be cautious.

  Still, I am a trained electrician and I know full well when a generator needs new bearings. So it is off to the shops we shall go.

  Smell

  LINEKER

  I knew something was up straight away. First off, Reg was awake before me, which never happens. I heard a bang and jumped up, straight into attack pose I was, growling, thought, We’ve got company! Right then, Lineker, smarten up, son, time to get busy, get involved. I was a bit excited if I’m honest; intruder or not, it would be the first human I’d seen in ages, apart from Reg, but … no. It was just him. The door was open and he was out in the stairwell banging on that thing with a hammer. His flashlight wobbled in the dark.

  Felt a bit sheepish then, I can tell you. Bit useless. Cowered a bit, little whimper, tail down and all that. After all, if there’s one thing a dog’s supposed to bring to the table, it’s a bit of security, isn’t it? So what
fucking use am I if I can’t be relied on to wake up at the same time as my master? Not a good bit to start the day with. Not at all.

  Still, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and turned my mind instead to the question of why he might be up so early. I thought I’d take a look, and try to make amends in the process. I had a shake, jumped down from the sofa and went out.

  When he’s out there with that thing in the morning, it’s usually to start it. A few tweaks, a few switches, nice firm tug on the cord and it’s away. Noisy thing, didn’t like it at first but I got used to it, especially once I’d worked out that it meant heat and light. But it wasn’t making any noise now, and Reg was hammering away on that thing like he wanted to murder it.

  I whimpered and sniffed his trousers, but he shouted at me, so I slunk away into the corner feeling like he must be pissed off at me for sleeping in. Then he shouted even louder at the machine, which made me feel better. It was the machine’s fault. Stupid fucking thing, it wasn’t even awake yet, even with all that hammering! Must be properly sick, I thought.

  After a few more clangs and tweaks and a pull on the cord brought nothing, Reg kicked the side of the machine and stormed back inside. The beast give a sad wobble in the dying glow of his flashlight. Felt a bit sorry for it, if I’m honest. Then I followed Reg back inside.

  It was winter and cold and I was getting hungry, but I didn’t feel like asking him for food. He was busy marching around the flat, opening curtains, looking out and shaking his head, swearing, banging into walls, knocking things over, opening cupboards and shoving supplies into his bag. I watched him, worried about his mood, but also feeling a tingle of excitement in my paws and nose. I hadn’t seen him pack like this for a good while.

  I looked out through the window. Anaemic light was slithering from the sun, and I watched those distant buildings crawl out from the darkness like great, unknowable beasts, and I wondered, were we going for a little adventure?