7
It was getting dark and I was far from home. That alone was trouble. With everything I’d seen by that point, I should have known better. But I lived by scavenging and I had to go where the best pickings were. On the corner of Mahoning Avenue and South Glenellen there was a St. Vinnie’s depot where they stockpiled food for the needy. I had given a guy a. 38 pistol for the information. He was leaving the city, he didn’t care about the food.
So there I was.
I went into the depot by breaking a window in the alley. I slipped through, found the food with no problem. There were no crazies or mutants about so it was easy pickings. I loaded my bag with canned food, boxes of pasta, tins of deviled ham, the works. My sack was full and I was a happy little gutter rat. I had just bought myself a few more weeks of life.
When I came out the sun was going down.
And when the sun goes down, all the night things slink out, all the predators and meat-eaters, headhunters and bone-collectors and bloodsuckers. On the sidewalk was a dog. It was just sitting there. A mangy, dirty golden retriever that was missing half an ear. His coat was crusty with dried blood. He looked up at me, laid back his ears and growled.
I could have shot him.
Maybe if I had instead of playing good Samaritan, I would have been home before the trouble started. But I felt sorry for that dog. He wasn’t rabid. I could see that. Nor did he look infected with anything or mutated. I took a chance. I talked to him in very soothing tones. He calmed down right away. He wagged his tail and made a whining sound in his throat. And those eyes…Jesus…if you’ve ever had a retriever you know how they can look at you with the saddest eyes in creation, arching their eyebrows and looking so human you could cry.
That’s what this fella did.
“It’s okay, boy,” I told him. “I won’t hurt you. Maybe you can come live with me, eh? We can take care of each other.”
He wagged his tail, still watching me. He was a good dog. I was willing to bet he’d been a family pet. Retrievers are great dogs…gentle, easy with kids, incredibly patient and loyal. I knew this old warhound had been of that variety. I got down on my knees by him and made a peace offering: a Slim Jim. One of those processed beef sticks. You know the kind. The dog loved it. He gobbled it right down so I gave him a second and a third and I had a friend for life. I could have cried because I had finally found someone-or something-to care about that I knew would care for me, too. That’s the thing about a dog. You can love men and women, but the human breed is a selfish one and they’ll hurt you if they get the chance. But not a dog. You feed them and care for them and they’ll love you to death, follow you straight into hell without question, and tear the balls off anyone that threatens you. That’s loyalty. Try and find that in a human being. Good luck.
So I had myself a pal.
But it was getting dark. Time to boogie. I walked away down the sidewalk, knowing I had about four blocks to go, but the dog didn’t follow me. He just sat there on the sidewalk looking forlorn, destitute, and unhappy. “Well, come on!” I said, slapping my leg. He bolted after me, rubbing his snout against my leg, leaping around with the sort of pure joy only a dog knows.
We had a few more Slim Jims. I scratched his ears. I chatted with him. Then, as the shadows grew long, we both got very quiet as we stalked through what was very much enemy territory. The dog was hearing things, smelling things, sensing things. I felt more invulnerable than ever with him by my side: nothing can sneak up on a retriever when they’re wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
About two blocks from my building, the dog stopped.
He perked up his ears…well, one of them anyway…and cocked his head. He began sniffing the ground. He made a low growling sound of alarm in his throat. He had caught wind of something and he did not like it.
I urged him on and there, standing on the sidewalk in a pool of moonlight, was a little girl. She was just a little slip of a thing with pigtails and the filthy remains of a blue jumper. I figured she was maybe eight years old, something like that. The dog went wild, snapping and howling, just beside myself.
“Quiet,” I told him. I looked to the girl. “Honey, what are you doing out this late? It’s not safe…it’s…”
That’s about as far as I got. For right then I got a good look at her and something in my guts pulled up in fear. This was no little girl. Her eyes were bright and yellow, luminous, and her face was a seamed and corded fright mask, an awful grayish-blue in color. She held up hands to me, her mouth opening and revealing a set of tiny hooked teeth of the sort that were designed to seize prey and hold onto it. Steam was rising from her and there was a sound of crackling energy like static electricity in a blanket.
A shrill piping noise came from her mouth, growing in volume until it was nearly hypersonic, painful to hear. She drifted forward, a low pulsating glow enveloping her, sparking with nuclear waste. She did not walk, she drifted, hot radioactive steam boiling from her, leaving a flickering misty trail in her wake.
She would have had me.
I fell back and fired twice and missed with both rounds. But the dog wasn’t about to let her get me, God bless him. He howled and charged, leaping right at her with jaws wide for attack. She enfolded him in her arms and he let out a wild, shrieking whine of pain. The dog literally burned up in her arms. It blazed with a cool blue fire, smoking and blistering, shriveling down to a blackened, smoldering thing right before my eyes. There was a hot, violent stink of cremated dog…then he fell from her arms, burning bones and blowing gray ash.
By then I was running. She did not come after me and by the time I got home and into my building I was shaking so badly I couldn’t even hold the glass of whiskey I tried to pour down my throat. That poor dog. I would never forget him…what he did for me and what that irradiated wraith did to him.
After that, whenever I saw a dog that wasn’t rabid, infected, or mutated, I gave him food, water, anything I could. And also after that, I shot the Children on sight. For if there are ghouls haunting the graveyard of this world, then they are the Children.
8
One thing I got used to very quickly were the corpses.
Because they were literally everywhere. The city itself wasn’t much more than a blasted, broken corpse itself. There had been so much fighting between the National Guard and private militias that entire neighborhoods were burned out, buildings collapsed from heavy firepower. Avenues were congested with rubble and the blackened carapaces of vehicles. Telephone poles had been knocked over and lay tangled in the knotted mesh of their own wires.
And everywhere in the urban graveyard…bodies.
By April, the corpse wagon system had broken down entirely and the dead were left wherever they had fallen or were thrown.
They were the only raw materials the city had left and they were in abundance. In whole and in part. Some rotted down skeletons, others burned to blackened husks, and many more swollen up green in the sun, clouds of meatflies rising and descending, feeding and laying their eggs. It wasn’t unusual to see the dead moving, shivering, because they were so infested with maggots. Many corpses had been gnawed upon. Probably rats. But other things, too, that only came out when the sun went down.
The heavy snows that had buried Youngstown had melted almost overnight, leaving standing pools of water throughout the city in which waterlogged bodies floated. The heavy rains had washed them into yards and doorways, created rivers of them that lapped up against storefronts. And what amazed me the most?and maybe frightened me, too?was that I and the other survivors paid the heaped human remains very little attention. We scavenged amongst them and hopped over them and kicked them aside, and the only time they were avoided was because of the disease vectors they might be carrying.
After awhile, you got used to anything.
So given that the city was inundated with the unburied dead in every possible stage of decomposition, it really was no surprise that nature in her endless creativity had now spawned mutants that took advantage of all the
