by Mark Gordon
Chapter 18
The Black Dog Visits
Matt stayed in bed for three days. He was crushed by sadness, and couldn’t see any point going on. If it weren’t for Elvis he might simply have stayed in bed until he wasted away, but the dog kept him company and probably saved his life. Matt did not eat for three days, but even in his darkest hours, he couldn’t allow himself to let the dog suffer. So once a day he climbed out of bed and poured some dry kibble into the dog’s bowl, before heading straight back to his personal hell. Elvis repaid the debt by sleeping in the bed beside the boy and reminding him that he wasn’t completely alone just yet.
Matt didn't give the feeders much thought. He didn’t care if they took over the world, and he didn’t care if they found him in the night and savaged him while he slept. His despair was total and all consuming. He had given up hope of ever seeing his parents again and that hurt the most. He imagined that they were dead, because the alternative was too horrific to contemplate. His parents had loved him and they had always planned on him taking over the farm at some point, but now he didn’t know. What was the point of running the farm if there was no one to share his achievements with? What was the point of being alive in this hideous new world? What was the point of living without family or friends? For three days these thoughts weighed him down as if he was a very sick fish at the bottom of a huge, dark ocean. He wanted to be dead.
It was the most mundane of things that brought Matt back from the vice-like grip of his depression. Around midday of the fourth day a sound seeped into his consciousness that triggered a small spark in him. It was the sound of the chickens squawking to be fed. He tried to ignore their racket but when he thought of all the care and attention his mother had given them over the years, he knew that it would not be possible. Wearily, he pushed the blankets away and climbed out of bed.
Before he went to the chickens, though, he needed to use the bathroom. The sight that greeted him in the mirror was almost as disturbing as some of the sights he had seen in town. The boy that had woken up on the farm last Saturday morning was gone. This new person staring back at him was a ghost. Matt was a reasonably thin boy to begin with, but now he looked absolutely gaunt. His skin was pale and there were black rings under his glassy eyes. He looked more closely. Where had he seen this look before? Then it hit him. He remembered the photos he’d seen of soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. Their eyes looked glassy, blank, and soulless and gave away nothing but an impression of the horrors they had witnessed. 'They’re my eyes now,' he thought sadly.
By the time he got to the chickens they were frantic. Their food had run out a couple of days ago, but there was still some water in the drip feeder. He went to the shed and scooped up a bucket of pellets from the bin before pouring it on the ground outside their pen. Then he opened the coop and watched as they charged the food, devouring it enthusiastically. He left the gate open so that they could forage around the yard for worms for the rest of the day. He studied the sky, and saw a storm moving in from the southwest. Monumental thunderheads were building rapidly and soon it would be raining. He turned to go back inside, and noticed that Elvis was standing close by, watching him.
“It’s okay boy, I’m back,” he said, as Elvis wagged his tail furiously and jumped up on Matt to be embraced. For the first time in four days, he smiled.
For the rest of the afternoon Matt worked, simply because that’s what he had been brought up to do. He got the quadbike out of the shed and went out to check on the cattle. It hadn’t rained for a month, and the paddock was light on feed, so he dragged a couple of hay bales out of the nearby shed and threw them into the pen. When that was done he checked the sky again and guessed that it would be raining hard before dark. The farm could use a drenching, so a storm would be welcome. As he rode the perimeter of the paddocks, checking fences and looking for maintenance tasks to be done, his mind kept going back to the events that had unfolded in Millfield. The last few days in bed had allowed some ideas to ferment in his mind, and as he rode he had time to consider things in a more rational manner. How could so many people simply go into a state of hibernation simultaneously? Initially he had thought that maybe it was some kind of virus, but he had never heard of viruses that effected entire populations so quickly. He briefly considered some kind of mass hypnosis or mind control, but how would that be delivered? He ruled out electronic communications and the water supply because surely that would not have had such an effective coverage and apart from himself, the 'virus' had hit one hundred per cent of the town. His final hypotheses were pretty crazy, but he had to explain this or he didn’t think he would be able to move forward. His next theory was the zaniest. What if the entire earth had been blanketed by some kind of cosmic fallout that caused a zombie-like state in the population? It would certainly explain how everyone was affected simultaneously, but why would it only affect humans? Maybe it was only targeted at humans, by super-intelligent extra-terrestrial beings that needed Earth as a new home? Matt ruled that out as being too ludicrous. If you were an alien species with that kind of power, it would be easier just to kill everyone, surely?
His final theory was the one he decided to go with, simply because it seemed a little more scientific than the others, and he couldn’t think of anything else. Could it be that humans had reached plague proportions and the planet needed to cull them for life to survive on earth? Superficially, that seemed almost as outlandish as Matt’s other theories, but he knew there were some scientific beliefs out there that made this concept usable enough for him. The earth’s population had risen exponentially over the last few hundred years, and the human population was currently somewhere around twenty billion. It was up from only one billion not so long ago (a few hundred years, he guessed). On top of that, thousands of animal species were being wiped out every year. Another very recent phenomenon he knew of was the ease with which people, and animal species, were being moved around the globe. He had seen a show on The Discovery Channel that showed how whole ecosystems were being wiped out when fish, who were picked up in sea water as ballast in empty ocean going liners, were then deposited into a different system on the other side of the world, where they didn’t belong, took up residence then wiped out the fish population of the local area. Also if you considered how humans were moving viruses and diseases around via air travel, and live animal exports, it was easy to see how the world could become a huge cross-contaminated Petrie dish of disease and sickness. Maybe Mother Nature finally decided that we were just too much trouble. Matt didn’t know if that was possible, but as a boy who lived on the land he knew that animal species didn’t behave as individuals, they behaved as a group. He thought of how whales beached themselves in large numbers and how flocks of birds sometimes attacked people for no reason. Matt was locking these thoughts away when the first raindrops started to fall. He rode back down the hill, put the chickens in their coop, filled up the generator, and then went inside to the empty house.
