by Sean Little
Em looked great, as she always did. She was in the plain red dress, sleeveless, that she wore to a Christmas party we had attended at a friend’s house last year. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail. She was paler than I remembered, almost too white. She was an Irish redhead, with smooth skin that showed her veins too clearly for her own tastes, but now she was a smooth alabaster with no visible flaws in her skin, just endless smooth edges. She looked surreal, actually. I tried to blink her away, but I couldn’t. She sat in the chair, facing the fire and humming a strange little melody. I couldn’t place the song, at first. She was singing her own rendition of it. It was familiar to me, probably one of those 80’s songs she always listened to when we drove around in her car. I finally recognized the song. It was Tears for Fears, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
“You rule the world now, Twist,” she said to me. Her voice was haunting, as if she was speaking through a tunnel. It was a hollow voice, but maintained a slight shimmer, like jangling keys. “How does it feel?”
I paused for the longest time, expecting the apparition to clear from vision, but when she didn’t, I forced myself to answer. “Fine, I guess. I didn’t expect it to be so...dull.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t look back at me. The fact that I couldn’t see her face was starting to worry me. I’d seen enough horror movies to know that in moments like this, the ghost-vision would suddenly spin around and there’d be black voids where the eyes should be, or she’d be a skull-faced demon or something. She was humming her song again, idly rubbing her fingertips on the arm of my comfy chair.
“I miss you, Twist,” she said.
“I miss you, too,” I said. I wrapped one of my blankets around me and left my bed, half-blind from sleep and darkness. I stumbled toward the fire, keeping a respectable distance from the vision. “Everyone is gone,” I said.
“I know. Some of them are here.”
“Some of them?”
“I’ve only seen a few,” she said. “It’s a big place.”
“Where is it?”
“Where you go when you leave. It’s nice, if a little dull. You should be here.”
Those words hit me like a brick to the teeth. I should be there. Why am I not there? Why am I still in Sun Prairie? Alone? I circled around Emily, seeing her face. I breathed a sigh of relief when it noticed it was her face, her real face, albeit a smoothed like her arms and neck were, and extremely pale. She didn’t look at me. She stared downward, toward the base of the flames. There was a sadness to her that I’d never seen before, an aura of melancholy. It made me want to hug her, hold her to my chest. I was scared, though. I was confused and worried. I finally broke the silence. “Are you alright?”
She didn’t flinch or turn. Her eyes remained focused on the flames. I looked closer and realized that her green eyes weren’t normal. They were dulled, almost black. The flames reflected in her eyes like they were mirrors. “I’m neither alright, nor not alright,” she said. For the briefest of moments, the corners of her mouth curled ever so slightly, almost a smirk. “And neither are you.”
I picked up a pair of logs to toss into the flames and when I turned back, the chair was empty. She had vanished. The humming stopped as suddenly as a thunderclap and whatever sleep-induced spirit I had summoned was gone. I felt cold inside and no heat could reach this cold. I wasn’t scared anymore, so to speak, but I didn’t feel right about how things were. I felt like I was being watched again, but this time it was by the eyes of my parents, of Emily and her family, of my friends and teachers from high school. I went back to bed and settled uneasily under the covers, tucking them around my head and eyes so that only my mouth and nose were visible.
I didn’t sleep. I laid awake and listened to the pop and crackle of the logs in the hearth, my ears straining for any sound that could be deemed out of the ordinary. At some point I must have drifted off, though. I was awoken by a dog full-on licking my mouth with a flat, wide tongue. Which is gross. He has breath that can only be described as Dog Breath, but with extra ass and a hint of stale, dry food.
The visions continued though. It wasn’t every night. It might only be once in a while, and most of the time it was fleeting, the merest of glimpses. It was rarely as pronounced as it was when I saw Em in the chair. I would see her standing at the edge of the trees watching me from a distance. When I squinted to see her clearer, she wasn’t there. I would see my parents out of the corner of my eye in the library, my dad with his arm around my mom’s shoulders, mom with her hands clasped to her chest in that way she did when she was proud of me for something. When I turned to face them, there was only a stack of containers and a bag of garbage that was waiting to be carried to a dumpster somewhere. Once, I saw my English teacher, Mr. Varney. He was wearing his red-and-white Sun Prairie polo. He had about thirty polo shirts, all of which were SP gear in some way, and he wore a different one every day, rotating through the stack until it was time to start over. Varney was chewing on the end of a pen, like how he did when he was helping a student with a paper. He looked up at me and said, “You’re doin’ fine, B. Keep it up!” He called everyone by their first initial. When I tried to answer him, he was gone.
Honestly, I started to think I had snapped. I tried to make sense of what was happening. I read books on psychology and schizophrenia (just in case that’s what it was). I even considered seeking out some antipsychotic medications to level me off and treat the hallucinations. I found a passage in an older book about the psychology of grief that said it was perfectly natural for someone who hadn’t quite come to terms with the passing of a loved one to see the said loved one in glimpses, or even to hold conversations with them as if they were in the room. That made me feel better, somewhat. I felt less like I was losing my marbles and more like the month of February was starting to get to me.
I was still grieving. I knew that. It was hard to stop. Check that--it was impossible to stop. I had no real way of moving past it. Every day was a constant reminder that everyone I knew was dead, I wasn’t, and everything I did was only a distraction. I couldn’t talk out my feelings with anyone, save Rowdy, and the Lab’s only means of responding constructively was to thump his tail on the furniture and knock over anything sitting too close to the edge of a coffee table. I realized that moving away from Wisconsin might help me move on with whatever sort of life I was going to have. It would be a clean break, a new beginning. I also knew (thanks to the books) that I was going to have to get some closure on the situation before I left, or else I might not be able to move past the situation and it would complicate my life in the South.
The weather wasn’t helping, mind you. I hate the cold; I believe this has been established definitively previously to this. I always did hate the cold. Growing up in Wisco as I did, I was well-acquainted with a wide variety of cold weather warriors who delighted in winter sports and ice fishing. I never understood that mindset. Why would anyone wrap up in overalls and sit on a frozen lake in sub-zero temps in order to auger through foot-thick ice to yank unsuspecting trout to their doom? Even worse were the cross-country skiing people. If you’ve never been skiing, picture something strenuous like marathons or long-distance cycling, and then add freezing temperatures and full-on body sweating. Who gets up in the morning and thinks, “Gee, I’d like to be sweating a jungle waterfall down my back and freezing my nuts off at the same time!” I’m a fan of heat. If you get trapped outside on the hottest day of the summer in Wisconsin, you can find shade in a tree, chill out, and you’ll live. You might not be comfortable, but you’ll be alive. Get trapped outside in Wisconsin on the coldest day of the year and you die. End of story. Summer wins. I’ve never walked outside in the middle of Summer, had the hair in my nose freeze, and gritted my teeth so hard that my temples felt like they might explode. In the worst of summer, you walk out and think, “Geez, it’s hot.” In the worst of the winter, you go outside and that wind cuts through your clothes like a razor and you pray for a quick death.
&nb
sp; I think I’ve made my point. Winter sucks balls.
I walked out to the shed the morning after my Emily hallucination and carved off a thick cut of beef for my dinner that night. I made mental notes of the dog tracks around the yard. There were a lot of them. The pack was coming out at night, and they were still trying to break into my beef storage unit. I could see a lot of scratches in the wood. The shed was made out of good plywood, but it was still just plywood. Dog claws, especially claws that hadn’t been trimmed in months, were wearing it away. They had been working at the wood at night. I couldn’t see the shed from my little annex nook, and although I could hear them when they barked and howled, I hadn’t known how badly they were working the wood. They smelled the meat and wanted it. It wasn’t going to run from them. It wasn’t going to attack them. Dogs were pack hunters, yes--but they are also scavengers and scavenging was much, much easier. Another day or three, and the dogs would easily wear some sort of hole through the door. I had to do something.
Hunting the pack, or shooting a few of them was the first answer in my head. That’s what the post-apocalyptic era was going to mean, wasn’t it? Survival of the fittest. Kill or be killed. If someone was threatening my food supply, and therefore my future and my life, I had to act. However, the prospect of sniping dogs made me queasy. I didn’t want to kill them if I didn’t have to kill them.
I could reinforce the plywood where they were wearing it away, but that was only a temporary fix. Maybe they’d get bored and give up if they continually worked the wood and never go through. Maybe they could take up hunting animals like they were supposed to, rather than trying to rely on humans like they had. If I’d had the time and energy, I would have fed every dog I could, but I knew that would be a losing proposition in the end. I could barely take care of Rowdy and myself, let alone adding a full pack of large-breed dogs to the mix. They were going to have to be self-sufficient without putting my stores of food in jeopardy.
I put on my cold-weather gear and prepared to do some work to prepare for the coming night. I went to two nearby houses and removed an aluminum storm door from its hinges from each and brought them back to the library. I used a thick coil of climbing rope to tie the doors over the original shed doors--the part of the shed that had been worn away the most. That aluminum wouldn’t give as easily as the wood. They could claw that door until their hearts were content.
I wished I’d had the foresight to build a fence that summer. A good fence could have helped matters. Instead, I got a shovel from a nearby garage and shoveled snow around three sides of the shed, piling it as high as I could and patting it down to discourage the dogs from going after the wood. I banked the snow and smoothed it out, with a plan to try to get it to near roof level. It was hard, backbreaking work, though. The weeks of cold-weather isolation and downtime had weakened me. I was sweating a lot in my arctic gear, but given the temperatures, I didn’t dare remove anything. I knew I would freeze in short order. After two hours of work, I needed a break. I went inside, took off my gear, and had a leisurely lunch with the dog. After lunch, it was only around minus-five degrees, so I brought Rowdy out with me to finish the snow walls.
Creating good walls was slow-going. The top layers of snow were powder-fine and more apt to catch wind and blow as I threw it than land where I wanted it to land. The bottom layers were heavy and dense, almost as much ice as snow. After an hour, it was clear that I wasn’t getting nearly as much done as I had initially hoped, and Rowdy was desperate to go back inside. I let him into the annex so he could warm his old bones by the fire, and I returned to the project at hand. The physical work helped to alleviate my tensions, and it felt good to be doing something other than staring at a fire and hearing the voices of the dead in the back of my mind. I was turning my shed into a well-fortified little snow hut.
As the sun dipped lower in the sky, I felt the temperature start to descend with it. There was a significant change in the air as the temperatures crawled into the negative double-digits. The wind began to pick up as well, blowing that cold through my expensive parka and snowpants. Anywhere there was the slightest chink in my cold weather armor, I felt the sting of cold. I had to hurry to finish. I hustled to throw more snow on the left side of the shed. It was nearly to the roof line. I’d scraped a considerable area around the hut bare, exposing the frozen ground.
Somewhere behind me, I heard a short, stifled yip. A half-bark. I froze in place, a spade of snow hefted in my hands. I slowly turned and looked over my shoulder. There was a dog pack watching me. They milled around in a group, but they were concentrating on what I was doing. I saw Labs, Retrievers, a few Pits, a Saint Bernard, and handful of mutts, some showing coats that designated them having Husky or Malamute lineage. My heart rate elevated drastically. I had no idea how these dogs might react, if they would react at all. They might be friendly. They might not. I’d left the shotgun in the library. I was weaponless, save for the shovel. Casually, I tossed the snow I had in my shovel onto the sloping mound and planted the shovel head in the snow. Without turning my back on the dogs, I started moving toward the library at a leisurely pace. Show no fear, I thought. Be an alpha.
Be an alpha. What a stupid phrase. In my life before everyone died, I was a pretty milquetoast dude. I wrestled, sure, but I wasn’t very good. I lost more than I won. I played football, sure, but I sat the bench for most of the games. I was a natural beta. I was never one to complain at a restaurant. I didn’t get into stupid arguments if there was a chance punches might be thrown. Was I supposed to suddenly turn into a Jason Bourne-type superhero just because I was forging a life for myself while alone in the frozen north? I could pretend to be an alpha all I wanted, but it wouldn’t change who I was at heart.
The dogs, as if sensing my internal panic, because moving toward me, toward the shed. They trotted through the snow as a unit, a particularly large Staffordshire Terrier at the lead. I couldn’t read their mentality. I didn’t sense threat from them, but I didn’t sense curiosity or joy, either. With a subtle shift, I quickened my pace slightly. The dogs did not seem to adjust. They were closing in though. They’d had roughly a hundred yards to cover. I had only about thirty to get back to the main door of the library, but they moved through the snow easily. With about ten yards to go, I dropped all pretense of being casual and I sprinted for all I was worth to the door. I flung it open to step inside, but a bolt of barking yellow fur blasted past me.
Rowdy had heard the pack from the annex and he’d forced the doors open. The annex doors were not locked, and they didn’t take much to open. There were lever handles on the doors, not knobs, so a dog who wanted to open them could easily rise up on his back legs and bring down one of the levers with a paw and free himself. I hadn’t even considered that Rowdy would be in the foyer. I had thought, at worst, he would be pacing the annex nervously.
Rowdy raced toward the group, barking madly. The pack reacted as you would expect a pack of bonded dogs to react to aggression. The early night air filled with the angry sound of barking and snarls. Rowdy launched himself into the thick of the pack, a crazed protector on a quixotic mission. I screamed his name, but he didn’t hear it. The pack swirled around him and there was a blur of motion and color, savage growls and shrieks.
The shotgun was across the library, but I moved like my feet had wings. I was there in back in a heartbeat, nervous, fearful sweat bursting from every pore in my body. I lunged back into the cold, pushing the hood of the parka off my head and jacking the forestock to load the weapon. I screamed at the top of my lungs and rushed toward the mob. I couldn’t see Rowdy in the swirl of snapping, biting fur.
I pulled the trigger and the gun released like a dragon, firing a blast of noise, fire, and smoke into the night. I pumped the shotgun again and fired a second time. The dog pack scattered like pinballs. They turned and sprinted away from the noise, bumping into each other and careening into other directions as they did. In seconds, they were scattered. An angry, defiant, and bloody Labrador stood watchi
ng them go, seething for a fight.
Rowdy was hurt, but he was still on his feet. Dark red stains matted the fur around his neck and near his rump. A cut on his upper maw was dripping blood. His mouth was stained dark and he appeared to be missing a canine tooth. He maintained his defensive posture, a hunched fighting stance, until the last dog had disappeared into the darkness. Only then did he recognize me and relax, turning once again into the dopey blond fluffball I had grown to love. He pushed his big head into my thigh, looking for attention. His tail started to wag.
“Good dog,” was all I could think to say. I reached down and scratched his neck and shoulders in a place where there was no blood. He seemed to enjoy that.
Rowdy limped back to the library with me and made a beeline for his bed by the fire. He didn’t turn around to walk it down, only flopped over onto his side. His head lolled. I pushed his water bowl closer to him and he gave the water a half-hearted lick, but that was it. Like constricting tendrils of a creeping vine, fear gripped my heart hard. This was my only friend. I don’t mean that melodramatically like some teenage girl who thinks her cat is her only friend in the world; Rowdy was the only living thing to which I’d had any sort of contact or relationship with since the previous May, nearly a year of complete and total isolation with only this dog as my wingman and confidant.
I tried to stifle the fear and I dug out gauze and sutures, topical anesthetics and ointments. I didn’t know if you could put Neosporin on a dog, but I had to try something. I knelt by his side and ran my hand over the injuries, trying to get a feel for their severity. I knew I needed to stitch his lip back together at the very least.
“Easy, boy,” I said. Rowdy seemed to know that I wasn’t going to hurt him. He reclined his head and closed his eyes with a heavy, weary sigh. I tried to work quickly, as he was bleeding heavily from the gash in his muzzle. I put gauze on the wound to staunch the bleeding temporarily and then moved to get a suture kit and some ointments and bandages. As I arranged my things to work quickly, Rowdy suddenly stiffened and gave a great heaving sigh, and then went slack.
