by Mark Tufo
“This isn’t all about you, Cat.”
She looked at me as if to say, ‘When did that happen?’.
“I’m starving, Riley.”
I looked sternly at her.
“And the baby needs help,” she added hastily when she realized I didn’t like her first response, or her second for that matter. The baby did need help and I had to admit I was hungry too.
Jessie was pulling the car off the hard pathway and onto a smaller dirt path. She sat for long seconds just staring at the house. She took a deep breath, shut the car off and got out. I watched as she looked into the rear of the car at Zach. She seemed to be hesitating on whether to leave him there or take him with her. She thought it through and decided to let sleeping babies lay, I jumped out before she had a chance to shut the door.
“Riley, stay in the car. I just want to see if there is anyone here and if we need to leave in a hurry I don’t want to have to wait for you.”
I moved farther away from the door. She got the point.
“Fine, but you stay close,” she told me as she quietly shut the door to the wheeler. “I don’t like this place, Riley.”
I didn’t either; it smelled like rot and human excrement. I saw something walk by the windows, just a darker shadow against the dark inside. Jessie did not see it, my hackles were raised and I pulled my lip up in a threatening manner.
“You see something, Riley?” Jessie asked. “Was it a zombie?”
“Worse,” came a voice from the now open door in the front of the house.
Jess turned to run.
“Don’t even think about it,” The male voice said menacingly. “I’ll shoot you where you stand. Wouldn’t be the first, won’t be the last—that’s the benefit of being the first house after the desert or the last one before going in.” He laughed.
“Mister, we’re just looking for some help,” Jessie said, turning back around, her hands raised.
“That’s the problem, everybody’s always looking for some help. Did you see a sign that said ‘Help here’?”
“Sir, my brother is sick.”
“Get him the fuck outta here then. I don’t want no zombies on my property!”
“It’s not like that, not that kind of sick,” she entreated.
“Do you see the word hospital anywhere?” he yelled.
“Please,” she begged. “Just a little food and water, maybe some medicine.”
“What do you have for me?” he said. “Or am I just ‘apposed to give that to you out of the kindness of my heart?”
“I… I don’t have anything,” Jessie said hesitantly.
“Oh, I think you do. Turn around for me.”
“Please.”
“Do it!” he yelled. “Umm, nice,” he said as Jessie did a small circle. “I’d trade for some of that.”
“We’ll just get going,” Jessie said, nearly crying now.
“You’re on my property now, you’ll leave when I say you can. Come closer.”
“Please,” Jessie said as she slowly inched forward.
I moved with her.
“Tell the fucking mutt to stay put or I’ll shoot him out of principle.”
“Ri… Riley, stay,” Jessie said.
I didn’t know what was going on, the man said he would trade some food, but he said it with an edge to his voice and I could smell excitement and dominance on him. It was not a healthy combination. Jessie moved a foot closer and so did I. I was going to make sure she was alright. I heard part of the fire stick move that normally came before the metal bees. Jessie stopped and so did I.
“I’m going to blow that damned dog’s head clean off if he takes another step,” the man said.
“He?” I snorted. “You threaten me and my pack mate and call me a ‘he’?” I was barking as I charged, the metal bee whined past my ear, by the time the man was able to make the loud clicking noise again I had already latched onto his leg. His screams of pain increased as I bit down harder. I had a firm grip on the front of his leg; I could feel as my teeth punctured through his fake skins and into him.
I kept biting, the man’s screams increasing in volume and pitch. I could feel the bone in his leg starting to yield.
“No!” Jessie screamed. The man had somehow held onto his fire stick and was bringing it to bear on me.
I could hear Jessie running toward me to help, I bit as hard as my jaw would allow and shook my head from side to side. The fire stick fell to my side as the man toppled over. He was bellowing for the bitch that had whelped him. I finally let him go when he stopped moving.
“Riley, are you alright?” Jessie asked as she came to a skidding stop next to me. “You broke his leg,” she said with what I smelled was a fair amount of appreciation.
“What now? What now?” she asked nervously. “We should just go. There’s probably more of them.”
I sniffed long and hard inside the house, there had been others but not for a while. I walked in, we needed food.
“Riley, what are you doing?” Jessie asked from the front step of the door. The man was moaning loudly.
I turned my head, hoping she would follow; she bent down and picked up the fire stick. She pointed it at the man on the ground then cautiously came in after me. Jessie opened the fridge and then quickly slammed it shut when the stench of things long rotten came out. I could have spent a little while longer exploring the scents but I understood about Jessie, two-leggers where very peculiar in what they liked to smell.
There is nothing quite like understanding your pack mates by sniffing at their offal, but the two-leggers were always lighting the small flowery smelling fires or spraying cans of scents that were supposed to make the ‘bad’ smells go away but are far worse than anything me or even Ben-Ben had ever produced. Maybe not the cat though, that thing stunk.
Jessie was on the far side of the kitchen going through the wooden food holders. “Food,” she said excitedly. She moved away from the shelves with food and started to pull different things out until she found what she was looking for.
“I hope this is strong enough,” she said as opened the bag up and started to shove all sorts of two-legger canned food into it. My mouth started to water just thinking about what might be in those cans, not all cans mind you, some of them have horrible smelling things that make my nose burn, like what the humans call onions or peppers. I don’t know why anyone would want to eat those things. I shook a little just thinking about the time the Daniel cub had given me a handful. He had laughed for a long time while I tried to rinse the taste out of my mouth, but I was a fast-learning puppy. He never did find the toy he had received the day before, I chewed it up and Alpha female had discovered it, she threw it into a bag much like Jessie was using now.
“Bad girl, Riley!” Alpha had said to me. “Maybe Danny will learn to pick his things up now. I’ve told him puppies chew things.” She had gently reached out and stroked my muzzle. She had said mad words but her tone and actions said otherwise. I would miss my den mother mightily.
My head whipped around when I heard the man begin to groan, Jessie also looked. Her eyes got wide as the fear in her bloomed.
“We should leave, Riley,” Jessie said, almost letting go of the bag with the food.
“My leg!” the man screamed. “I… I think it’s broken,” he wailed. “You fucking did this to me!” He pointed at Jess. She turned to see if there was another way out of the house, besides an ‘outside looker’ there wasn’t.
Jess ran over and fumbled with something on the window and tried to push it open. “It’s painted shut, Riley. Shit. Shit.”
“I’m gonna fucking kill you!” the man said, propping up on his hands and dragging himself toward the food room.
Jessie looked close to panicking; I started barking loudly, that got the man’s attention. His eyes now took on that wide fear stare. “Don’t… don’t you come any closer,” Jessie said, her voice wavering, but I wasn’t sure if the man even heard her, his eyes were locked on mine. I threw in a deep growl just fo
r good measure.
“Keep that mutt away from me,” the man said, now backing away.
I advanced on him.
“Just watch him, Riley. Rip his throat out if he moves,” Jess said as she started to shove more things into the bag.
“That’s my stuff, you can’t just take it,” the man said. “You come into my house, your mutt breaks my leg and now you’re stealing my food?”
“And pointing your gun at me and forcing me into your house, that’s acceptable?” Jess asked.
“Hey, nothing’s for free and I… I was just kidding. I would have let you go.”
“Before or after you had done to me as you wished?”
“It… it was just a joke,” he lied again. The words he spoke did not match what he meant, even I could tell that. “You’ve got to at least help me splint my leg. You’re as good as murdering me if you don’t.”
Jessie was hesitating and I thought maybe even considering his request. There was no way I was going to let her get within arm’s reach of the man, he was not a good two-legger.
“I can’t,” Jessie said as she swung the bag over her shoulder. She headed down the long room toward him then abruptly stopped and headed back to the food room. I heard the hard metal of the things the humans used to eat with clattering about on the floor and then Jessie said, ‘aha’ and came back down the long room. She skirted around the man’s legs and pushed the door open. “Almost forgot a can opener. Come on, Riley, we need to get out of here,” she said.
“When I get better I’m going to hunt you down and cut your throat, but not before I make that fucking mutt of yours watch me do all sorts of things to you that would make a demon blush.” He laughed.
Jessie quickly shut the door, but we were back in the car with the doors closed before we stopped hearing his laughter.
“Wet meat!” Ben-Ben said triumphantly as he stuck his nose inside the bag Jess had placed in the back.
“Are you both okay?” Patches asked me as Jessie got the car started and headed back out onto the hard pathway.
“Do you really care?” I snapped back.
“In so much as I either needed Jessie to open the car door so I could get out or her ability to get food so I eat, so yes I cared.”
“There was a bad two-legger in there. He wanted to hurt Jessie.”
“You stupid dog, you say that as if he’s the only one. It’s been my experience that two-leggers are more like that man than those that were in our house.”
“Maybe to you because you’re a cat. But most two-leggers just want to scratch behind my ears or sometimes give me a treat. The large dog area…”
“The park,” the smart-ass cat filled in.
“The large dog area,” I emphasized. “There were always lots of humans and they were always so nice.”
“Not the ones I’ve seen, Dog. Have you ever come across another two-legger without the alpha male or female?”
I thought about it for a long time and except for the cubs, I had never interacted with other two-leggers before. Sure I had barked at bunches, way over twenty-two but never sat there and played with any of them. “No,” I said sheepishly as if that made me a bad dog.
“The humans pretend a lot of things when they are around other humans.”
“Pretend?” I asked her.
“Lying,” she explained.
“The two-leggers are lying when they said they liked me?” I asked, astonished. Why had I never picked up on this before?
“Oh, I’m sure one or two of the idiots liked you, I don’t know why but there are some dog lovers, but most of them would throw a rock at you before they’d ever pet behind your ears.”
“You speak the truth, Cat?” I asked, turning around to see if I could sense that all she spoke was real, but her eyes were difficult to see in the dark and it was nearly impossible to tell what the oversized rodent was thinking anyway.
“They are unlike any other animal, they are even worse than dogs. They will say one thing while they are doing something else.
“We must stay away from two-leggers!” I nearly shouted.
“It won’t be easy, Jessie will seek them out. They find comfort among their own kind.”
That I could understand.
“What about Justin? The boy she would press faces with? She seeks him out.”
“Better than most, I suppose,” she answered, thinking carefully. “We are going to have to protect her.”
“We?” I asked. “Since when did you begin to care?”
“My ability to survive is greatly improved with all of you around. It may not be entirely to my liking, but it is what I have right now.”
“You always know the right thing to say,” I told her.
“My hands are shaking,” Jessie said aloud. “That was so close, he was going to kill me. And you saved me, Riley,” Jessie said as she stopped the car and petted my head gently. “Thank you.” She placed her hands on either side of my face and looked into my eyes. “You guys keep saving my life and I haven’t even fed you yet.”
***
“Humans are good, Cat,” Ben-Ben said as he licked clean the can of what Jessie called stew. “You don’t know anything.” He finished, looking up, his snout covered in stew goo.
“This one is, I agree,” she answered, shielding her stew can from Ben-Ben’s eager nose. “Get out!” she said loudly, “You already ate!”
“Why are you taking so long? Do you need some help with it?” Ben-Ben asked as he began to push her out of the way.
“You move any closer to my food and I’m sticking my claws in you!”
Ben-Ben immediately backed up, his rear end pressed up against the car outside viewer. “Is this far enough away?” he asked with genuine terror.
“Outside would be preferable but that’s far enough away for now,” Patches said with a small note of humor.
She began to tease him as she would take a small bite of her food, slowly chew it and then meticulously clean off her whiskers. Ben-Ben was leaving a small pool of drool as he kept staring at her food can. I had also finished mine and the hurting part of the hunger was mostly gone, but I could have eaten another can. I wasn’t going to let the cat know that, though.
Jessie had the baby outside and was walking around the car with him in her arms; she was talking animatedly as she got him to eat some food. He smelled and looked better. I still didn’t feel good about him.
As if Patches knew what I was thinking, she spoke. “The baby is not well.”
“I am not in the mood to listen to you anymore, Cat.” I was angry because I thought she might be smarter, that she really didn’t need any of us and that she was pointing out something I feared. It wasn’t truly her fault, but all the same I was tired of it. Of her.
“Nevertheless, the baby, I fear, is going to die.”
I jumped in the backseat, her can of food spilled onto the floor, I revealed my teeth, I was within a whiskers’ length from her head. The cat was afraid and I was happy for it. “Do not trifle with me, Cat, there is nowhere for you to hide now.”
I’ll give the cat credit she stood her ground, the hair on her back was raised and I knew she had her claws ready for action, I could kill her, but she would draw blood.
“I see things, Riley, things humans and dogs do not,” she said, trying her best to move slightly to get her dangerous claws up if she needed to.
“I can smell things you can’t even dream exist,” I spat out.
“Riley, I’m sure you can. This has nothing to do with your nose. The infant carries a cloud around itself like a fake skin.”
“The white softness in the sky that hides the burning disc sometimes?” I asked.
“No, this is black. And not like rain clouds.”
“Why can I not see this?”
“George believed me.”
“He did?” I asked, my lips slipping back into their normal place.
“Do you remember when Alpha Male’s sire came to stay with us?”
/> “I was still a puppy, but he was always so nice to me, he used to play with me for hours.”
“He came to be with his pack before he died, I told George as much. It is something the humans called a custom; they care for each other before they pass over.”
“Pass over to where?”
“We’ll talk about that later. But I told George and he didn’t try to rip my face off because of it. He loved the Alpha’s sire and made sure to spend as much time as he could with the old two-legger before he went for good.”
“I kind of remember that, I just figured it was because the human was giving him extra snacks.”
“I knew when George was getting close too.”
“You did? Did you tell him?”
“No, but he realized what was going on when I started spending more time with him.”
“I wish George was here.”
“Can I eat the wet meat?” Ben-Ben asked, staring intently at the spilled food.
“No!” Patches and I said at the same time.
Ben-Ben whined and sat back down, his eyes skipping back and forth between me and Patches and the food.
“Does the cloud always mean a passing?” I asked the cat. Her lack of response told me what I needed to know. Ben-Ben, at some point while I was thinking about this, had got onto the floor of the car and was slowly crawling toward the stew.
This time I left him alone as I turned and hopped back into the front so I could think about what the cat had told me. Jessie was straight ahead, frowning at the baby who was refusing anymore food.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next morning I awoke not because the burning disc was shining in my eyes but rather the heat inside the wheeler. I was panting heavily and my mouth felt like I had the cat shoved in there. Jessie was still sleeping but she was again bathed in salty water. Ben-Ben’s tongue was hanging out and he was looking directly at me.
“I’m sorry, Riley, I really had to go,” Ben-Ben said apologetically.
“What is wrong with dogs?” Patches said, moving even closer to her door if that was even possible.
“Ben-Ben, really? You did that in the car?” I would have berated him further but the baby cub looked even more unwell, his skin color looked bad, his breathing was shallow and instead of leaking water like Jessie he was shivering with cold. I was about to bark and warn Jessie, but Ben-Ben’s stink had at least the benefit of that.
