The Last Dog on Earth

by Adrian J. Walker

  There are no good or bad bits, not any more, just existence. Pure and deadly existence fuelled by the will to kill.

  I feel like … I feel …

  Nothing feels the same any more. I have been liberated from the dog I once was. My days were once filled with fruitless questions and aimless walks that left me lost in long grass, drifting on thoughts with no beginnings or endings. Wasted days.

  Now my questions are asked and answered, my decisions posed and made. Hunger – eat. Fatigue – sleep. Alarm – wake. Whistle – run. Straight lines, straight edges, sharp as blades. Even smell now serves a purpose. Scent belongs to creatures I am told to hunt.

  It is true, I do sometimes wake at night and lift my head in the dark, searching for something: a human shape shifting in the moonlight, the urgent smell of rook bones and sack cloth, and the sound of two hearts beating. But these are just ghosts that evaporate in the darkness, until the only smell is of the fretful dreams of sleeping hounds, and the only sound is the rattling of a flag in the wind outside.

  We are there in the yard. Waiting, waiting, waiting …

  Then at last the door opens and a unit of troops marches out before us, resplendent in their purple jackets. And up onto the podium for our morning address steps a shining light showering us with warmth and the closest thing to pleasure we ever have. It is Her. And She is here to give us our orders.

  The last dog on earth? What a fool I used to be. There are thousands of us here, all with one job: to chase down the ones who need chasing down.

  It was hard at first. A raging storm of pain, despair and confusion. I howled through it all, with no idea where I was and no idea what I was supposed to be doing. My lines were torn apart and burned until nothing made sense, and my mind became a whirlwind of untethered thoughts and feelings. Sticks, boots and fists were my constants – the only things I could rely on.

  I howled and I howled and I howled.

  And then, one morning, I woke feeling different. I was hard, focussed, uncarved. The storm in my mind had finally been swept away, and now all was calm, all was simple. I knew what I had to do, and nothing else mattered.

  And what’s more, I finally knew what made you tick.

  Protection

  REGINALD

  Our friend, Mr Jag, was quite correct; we were in a sorting prison. And my old chuckling friend in the other place was right too; the sorting was to be done by swabbing alone. This was the one rule to which the guards kept. I don’t know why – perhaps it was a way of keeping order in the ranks, or perhaps it was merely something concrete, however brittle – passed down by the superiors to keep their troops engaged in whatever twisted societal ideals they were using to fuel their campaign.

  As I have said, to this day I have no idea what insanities that man or his generals wreaked upon the world and I never will, but, whatever this rule was, it was not to be broken. Our fate relied on those flimsy, plastic devices.

  One morning the guards woke us early and ordered us to stand. We formed ragged lines and traipsed through the broken hall until we found ourselves outside in blinding fog-smeared sunlight. We were in a space that had once comprised the western aisle of the cathedral, the paved entrance and a crescent of tall buildings leading to Ludgate Hill, but which now resembled a wide training yard bordered by enormous barbed wire fences and the blackened remains of the Georgian facades beyond. In the centre of this yard stood two towers flanking the cathedral’s steps, now separated from the main building by empty space. The soot-stained statue of Queen Anne stood between them, looking dismally away.

  The air was close and eerily quiet as we wandered the yard with Aisha held tightly between us. My eyes were drawn to the walls where I saw low timber stacks covered with tarpaulin. Charlie saw them too.

  ‘What are they building?’ whispered Charlie.

  ‘Just keep Aisha close,’ I replied.

  We were herded into long queues, each of which ended at a trestle table. I peered ahead from our place near the back and realised, with dread, the reason why. At each table was a guard brandishing a swabber.

  Suddenly we felt like drug mules at airport security.

  ‘Don’t draw attention,’ I said. ‘Try to keep calm.’

  ‘Keep calm?’ hissed Charlie. ‘You know she won’t …’

  Charlie stopped as she noticed Aisha looking up at her, and placed a trembling hand on her head. I lay mine next to it.

  ‘I won’t let them,’ I whispered. ‘I won’t.’

  But whatever heroics I may have been planning on bungling were not necessary that day. We had barely shuffled forward five spaces before we heard voices raised ahead. Our guard was banging his swabber against the table and, finally, he hurled it to the floor and thrust his hands upon his hips.

  ‘Faulty swabber,’ I murmured. ‘Like the one in the pub.’

  He barked for our queue to merge in with the one to our right, but it appeared that a similar situation had occurred there too. Soon, all of the guards at the tables were standing up, either engrossed in a frustrated examination of their malfunctioning equipment or having long since abandoned it. We stood for a moment, the guards wavering on a decision. Then they corralled us back inside, pushing us more roughly than they had on the way out.

  ‘Surely they must have more?’ said Charlie.

  They did have more. Lots more. Every day we repeated the same journey outside, joined the same queues and waited for our fate to finally be dealt. And every time Charlie and I performed the same dance. We watched the flow of people and positioned ourselves so that we joined a queue as far back as possible. Then we endured the half-hour or so of barely concealed panic, and I prepared myself for the red light I was sure would come when it was Aisha’s turn, and for whatever pointless theatrics I would perform when it did – tipped tables, flailing punches, doomed runs at the barbed wire with her in my arms.

  We would watch our queue shortening to the sound of beeps or chirps and the ones ahead were led one way or the other, and then there would come a time at which the swabbers would fail, and finally we would be led back inside, hearts thundering.

  Occasionally a guard patrolling the halls would pick out an individual for a random test. Sometimes they would fail like the ones outside, but on more than one occasion we saw a family or a couple or a mother and child divided, and the shrieks would echo like hawks in the shattered dome above.

  They chipped away at us. The queues shortened and, gradually, the population of St Paul’s slowly diminished.

  And through this torturous period, Charlie and I performed our dance. Our life became a well-rehearsed routine of hope and calculation. We put everything into keeping Aisha hidden as much as possible, in case a guard caught sight of her and fancied his chances with a fresh swabber. We negotiated our ways to the backs of the queues and, if we saw a guard approaching our corner, shuffled around so that Aisha was hidden from view. Our every waking moment was dedicated to keeping her invisible.

  But we knew it was only a matter of time.

  The nights were never good but one was particularly bad.

  In the echo chamber of the cathedral’s split dome no sound was forgiven. Whispers, groans, sobs and footsteps cast ripples in the air like sand in a pool, and the tide of a thousand murmurs moved restlessly through our dreams. But on this night, the familiar background wash was punctuated by loud yelps, screams and wails, which we recognised as the agonies of yet more pairings broken apart. As well as the disturbances inside the cathedral we heard them further afield: faraway cries of dissent, shouts from the guards, boots stumbling on gravel, and several deep, concussive thuds. Something was happening.

  There were dogs too, snapping, growling, barking. At one point in the early dawn Aisha raised her head.

  ‘Linn-kaa,’ she said, looking through me, still in a dream.

  I lay awake, thinking of my dog.

  It had taken me a while to think of a name for him. In the end the answer came to me in a dream. I had fallen asleep
on the sofa one afternoon in autumn, exhausted after another night of him whining and scratching at my door. In the dream I was Paul Gascoigne in the closing stages of the England v West Germany Semi-Final of the 1990 World Cup – the only football match I ever knew. At this point in the game he begins to cry, because of a yellow card that would prohibit him from playing in the next match. It is a somewhat iconic moment in English football history, I believe, primarily because of how Gary Lineker, the English striker, reacts. Within the emotional hubbub of the scene, he is caught on camera, making protective circles of his teammate while mouthing to his manager, Bobby Robson, on the sidelines. ‘Have a word,’ he seems to say. ‘You need to have a word.’

  He cares for his teammate. He cares for his team. It’s the moment I always watch out for.

  In the dream I was crying, only not for the same reasons as poor Paul. I could hear the crowd’s roars and whistles, see the press cameras flash and smell the sweat of a ninety-minute match in the jersey I was weeping into.

  ‘Have a word,’ I heard, and looked up. It was Gary Lineker, standing right in front of me. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You need to have a word, Reginald. Have a word, all right?’

  Then Gary Lineker started to lick my face. This somehow brought me happiness, and a roar from the crowd. When I opened my eyes, of course, it was my dog, wagging his tail and lapping at my chops. I laughed and said his name out loud.

  There in that dark cathedral I tried to focus on this happy memory and ignore the other miserable ones grief was already stockpiling for me: the lost face on the riverside, the lonely figure howling in the mist at the observatory, even the shameful tail-flittering cower he had made as a pup whenever he’d made a mess in the flat. I gripped Aisha’s hand to remind myself of the reason why I had left him behind, and clung to the notion that, somewhere in that alien canine mind, there might have been some glimmer of understanding.

  At some deep hour after midnight I woke to rearrange myself on the mattress – the twin huddle of Charlie and Aisha having conspired to push me to its furthest edge. As I crawled back, I heard rowdy shouts from beyond the pillar. Some of the guards were drunk and stumbling about the cathedral, laughing and hollering as they went. There were yelps and groans from the slumbering bodies over which they were clearly trampling.

  ‘What’s happening?’ murmured Charlie, sitting up. The disturbance quickly woke the rest behind the pillar, and we waited in anxious silence, sharing looks of consternation over what this might mean for us. Only Aisha seemed unafraid, looking up into the darkness with her usual stolid expression. I wished I had a fraction of whatever she had because I was shaking like a leaf.

  ‘Cooee,’ crooned one of the guards. His voice was deep and fat; produced by what was obviously an enormous larynx that made him sound like a slowed-down cassette tape, so his attempt at falsetto created a truly horrifying effect, like an excitable troll.

  ‘Wakey, wakey.’

  There were chuckles and a few clumsy crashes.

  ‘Who wants to play a game, eh?’

  The noise grew near, echoing terribly from the walls above us, and beneath it was a click, click, click. At first I could not place it, but then came a dreadfully familiar sound: the unmistakeable chirp of a swabber.

  ‘Anybody want to play a game?’

  Charlie and I gripped Aisha between us, pushing her down as if to squash her from existence. David did the same with Clifford, as did a man named Pete who had a large brood. I saw Duncan’s swollen face caught in moonlight, eyes wide and trembling.

  ‘How about you, eh?’

  His voice drew near.

  ‘You? How about you? Or how about …’

  There was a scrape and a shuffle and a face sprang out of the darkness, pale and clammy and lit up in the upward beam of a flashlight.

  ‘In here?’

  We shrank against the walls as he pushed his way in and his two cohorts stumbled after him. Both were young. One had ginger hair and a cock-eyed, drunken leer pasted over his bumfluffed face. The other was a young woman who seemed nervous and unsure of herself, preferring to hang in the shadows behind.

  ‘Oooooh,’ said their captain, looking around. ‘Nice little place you’ve got here. Very cosy.’

  He was as big as his voice had suggested, with the dense bulk of a man who had spent his life a slave to his own chromosomes.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ he said, eyelids flapping in independent blinks. He held the swabber aloft. ‘A swabber, this.’ He regarded it in the low light, swaying and struggling with some slow-moving thought.

  ‘Now I know you all might think we’re not very nice in here – nasty p’raps – but I can assure you, we are not what you think. We’re not … not fucking barbarians.’

  He swung to his underlings behind. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  The ginger one murmured something in agreement. His captain nodded appreciatively and turned back.

  ‘For example, these things, these swabbers here, they’re what we use to, you know, check you all out. See what’s what, wheat from the chaff and all that.’ He curled his lip and gave that great, noisy sigh of the drunkard. ‘Processing, you understand? Science, see? These things tell us who’s right and who’s wrong. We’re not allowed to decide for ourselves. We’re not allowed to process anyone unless they fail a swab test. That’s the rules. Whether we like them or not.’

  His face darkened and he stood there looking glumly around the walls. ‘Problem is, most of them are fucked.’

  For a moment I thought he may have forgotten what he had been intending on doing, but suddenly he grinned and held the swabber up again.

  ‘This one’s not though. It’s on its way out, but I reckon it’s got one more bite in it. I thought shame to waste it. Right? So I decided we’d play a game.’

  He jabbed a thumb at his chest. ‘You see, I know,’ he whispered, nodding. ‘I know who’s right and wrong; I don’t need these things to tell me, and I bet you –’ he swung his finger around the room ‘– I can get this swabber’s light to turn red by choosing the right one of you to try it on. If I lose, you can all go back to beddy-byes, night-night, but if I win … well, if I win then we get to do a little processing right here, right now.’

  He looked around, head wobbling. ‘Sound like fun? ’Course it does.’ A sudden guttural announcement brought a fist to his chest. ‘Pardon me, now, only question is –’ he narrowed his eyes ‘– who to pick?’

  He prowled the walls, clicking the button of his swabber with every step. ‘You? Nah … you? Nah …’

  Pete stood up. ‘Me,’ he said. He was a little rough around the edges, bald and thickset. He’d already been in a couple of tussles with the guard. His wife was a skinny, greasy-haired woman named Anna, who I sometimes watched. Although she spent much of her time in a state of nervous exhaustion, she had a particular smile which she only displayed when talking to one of her children. It looked like it had sprung from another, happier life. She flinched at her husband’s words and buried her children’s heads into her breast.

  The guard met Pete eye to eye. ‘I don’t think so, mate. Sit down.’

  But the big man stood his ground. ‘Do it on me.’

  ‘I said sit down!’ The guard dealt Pete a splintering headbutt that sent him staggering against the wall. Covering his nose, he slid down to his mattress, where Anna pulled him close.

  The young female guard stepped from the shadows. ‘Sir, please.’

  ‘What?’ snapped her superior, still fuming red.

  ‘Please, we shouldn’t. This is—’

  ‘Shouldn’t?’

  The captain marched unsteadily to the door until he was glaring down at the girl. She was barely in her twenties. ‘I decide who should and shouldn’t, understand?’ said the captain.

  There was silence.

  ‘UNDERSTAND?’ the captain screamed, and she nodded, trembling.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now fuck off back to the mess if you don’t wan
t to be here.’

  She looked around at us, turned tail and ran, leaving her ginger comrade grinning with delight.

  ‘Now,’ said the captain, turning back with a fresh grimace. ‘Who’s it going to be?’

  He walked around, shining his torch in each face, closing in on us.

  ‘Not you … or you … or you …’

  As the beam swung towards Aisha, I sprang to my feet, ignoring the pain bursting in my knee.

  ‘Me,’ I yelled, a little louder than I had expected. ‘Try it on me. Go on.’

  He swung the beam in my face.

  ‘I dare you,’ I said, a little quieter.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Why?’

  Why indeed.

  ‘I, er, because I believe I have a rich family heritage, all sorts of interesting alliances in there down the line, proper melting pot, I am, Italian, Russian, French, why I believe an Indian gentleman once …’

  ‘So why would you want to be swabbed?’

  I hesitated as he scanned me with his torch.

  ‘Eh?’ he said.

  ‘I …’

  ‘Unless of course …’

  His beam crept down to our mattress, landing on Aisha. She sat ablaze in the light, exposed to the world. My heart lurched.

  ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘Now, that’s more like it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, reaching for her. ‘Please.’

  With a lazy shove he sent me flying backwards, tripping over David and Clifford’s mattress and landing in a heap on the stone floor. Charlie screamed, and as I scrabbled to my feet I saw her being pulled away by the ginger guard and reaching for Aisha as the captain crouched before her. The room was full of nervous shuffles and moans of despair.

  ‘This won’t hurt, little girl,’ said the captain, waiting for the swabber to charge. The light came on, and the guard gripped Aisha’s mouth to open it. She stared back in terror.

  ‘No!’ I cried, but just as I was struggling back I saw a shadow flit before me. Duncan was on his feet and in a flash he had snatched the swabber from the captain’s hand.