Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
How could a dog survive all of this? I don’t want to know the answer to that. I can hear the clicking of padded feet and claws on the linoleum and tile of the clinic, approaching us, coming to investigate what’s happened in the supply room. I feel sick. No creature alive could be good. Nothing left in this world is good.
Lexi slowly shines her light on the doorway and we both look at what has become of the dogs of the world. I feel my ribs constrict, my throat, and my face tightening up in horror as I look at the creature coming to stand in the doorway, knowing that calling it a dog would be such a disservice to dogs of the world or their memory. I stare at it, horrified. The creature stares at the light in Lexi’s hand, mesmerized for a moment and I have no idea what we’re supposed to do. Standing in the light, it’s more hideous than it could possibly have been in the darkness.
It was once a Rottweiler, or at least that’s what I assume from the build of the dog and what little flesh remains. There’s little coloring to the creature, because most of the hair has fallen off of it, just like the humans that have turned into those zombies have slowly lost most of their hair. It stands gaunt, shaking, and completely feral. Long strands of saliva drip from its jaws, hanging in ropey, black globs that dangle down by the dog’s paws that are blackened from blood, and gore, and filth. Some of the claws are missing from the dog’s paws, but the bones are exposed. As for the face, it again reminds me of syphilis, as I look at all the flesh that has rotted away from the face, or is hanging off. It might be from fighting with other dogs or just being reckless, but most of the flesh around the nose and the lips of the dog are completely gone. Exposed bone and teeth stick out, drenched with sickly saliva and black, clotted blood. It snarls at us and snaps its jaws toward us, barking in a strange, wheezing sound.
I’m afraid to move. I don’t want this thing to come any closer. Slowly and cautiously, I reach behind my back, belaying any fast movements so the dog won’t be worked up into a frenzy. I feel the handle of my Sig. I look over and see that Lexi is cautiously doing the same thing, following my lead. I’m glad that for once she’s using her head. Drawing my Sig, I slowly leave it at my side, trying to keep calm. I have to keep my heart rate down. I have to keep in control. The dog keeps barking at us and I can feel my nerves shaking. Dogs are smart hunters, they’re fast, and they’re a lot more terrifying to me than mindless humans shrieking and charging.
The dog lowers down on its legs, crouching, definitely getting ready to charge into the darkness as its legs shake with anticipation and weakness. Before it can charge, however, I watch the light whirling through the darkness and the flashlight slams into the dog, causing it to jump to the side. I take aim, but Lexi is much faster than I am. I hear her gun go off with a loud bang and a flash of light as my ears start ringing. The dog flinches, taking the first bullet in the back, but Lexi isn’t willing to stop there. She squeezes the trigger again and watches as the dog’s earless head explodes. I watch what’s left of the dog heave backwards through the doorway into the operating room whence it came. I almost feel bad for the creature. Staring at the now empty doorway, I watch as Lexi lets out a sigh of relief. How could this happen to a dog? How were these things turning into these types of monstrous creatures? Whatever the cause, I now know that it isn’t confined to humans.
I look at Lexi through the darkness, the flashlight shining on another wall and keeping us in the pale, dim light. She looks relieved, grateful that we made it out of that without there being any serious trouble as we edge our way out of the room.
Muted clicking on the linoleum breaks the constant ringing in my ears and causes my blood to freeze yet again and I can see the terror in Lexi’s eyes as well. It’s not just one dog this time. There are more coming toward us, as they begin growling and snarling and snapping their teeth. We both turn to look at the door, hearing the peculiar gurgling of their sniffing as they investigate their dead friend. In seconds, I can hear the tearing of flesh and chewing, the sickly, wet sounds that make my skin crawl. From what I can tell in the dim light through the doorway, there are two of the dogs. And they can see us. I raise my Sig as the nearest of the dogs begins to growl.
Chapter Fifteen
I don’t even have a chance to make out what kind of dogs are charging at us. I can hear their clicking nails and I can see their naked, trembling bodies in the LED’s light, but they’re too fast and they’re too determined. Everything feels like it’s coming down around me, crashing into the ground and shattering into a thousand little failures. It was supposed to be an easy run. It was a small town without a large population and a relatively secluded cache to raid. How did it all end up like this? How did everything fall apart so quickly and so randomly? Zombie dogs? Those weren’t even a thing that we’ve run across on our journey. How were we supposed to know about them? This is so unfair.
Lexi wastes no time. She fires her pistol again, dropping the first dog in a single blow. The loud bang fills the room again, nearly deafening me in the process. I see the muzzle flash for an instant, a single strobe illuminating the rest of the world and I see the mangled, rotting face of the third dog, charging straight for me. The light vanishes and so does the dog. In the darkness a shadow lunges, and I know that I am done.
Instead of teeth tearing off my flesh, I feel the bulk of the dog’s body slamming into my abdomen, hitting my wound and driving me back and to the floor as fire explodes in my belly. The pain is overwhelming and as the dog leaps atop me, snapping and growling, I feel the Sig fly from my hand in the wave of nausea and agony that rushes over me like a tidal wave of pure suffering, and I grasp with my bare hands to defend myself, feeling its flesh peeling away with my grasp. My mouth is stretched open, twisted in a mask of torment, trying to scream, but my throat is locked, keeping all the air inside of me.
The creature’s jaws are snapping and its legs are digging furiously, trying to gain purchase. Kicking, I skid back and slamming my head into one of the cupboards, I see a luminous flash of white and for a moment my vision is gone. Blindly I thrash and kick, ripping at it with my fingers as gore rains down on me as it continues to snap and flail in an attempt to get at my throat. I catch the creature with a knee, sending it sprawling beside me, and I’m finally able to get a breath as my vision is restored in time to witness it struggling to get back on its feet. As it does so, I gulp in air and better position myself, wanting to keep the creature away from me as long as possible. Where the hell is Lexi? Why isn’t she helping me right now? The thought of there being other dogs plagues me and I try to listen over the snarling and the scratching of nails on the linoleum. The beast lunges for me and reaching out, I feebly try to stiff-arm the beast from getting to me.
It’s useless. The strength of the creature easily trumps mine and I feel my arm giving beneath the weight of the beast. Grabbing onto the creature’s throat, just behind the snapping jaws with both hands, I hold it at bay as my fingers slowly and inevitably begin sinking into its rotting flesh. I focus every last drop of strength I have on keeping the beast away from me, my muscles screaming out against me, exhausted by everything leading up to this point. As my muscles fail, the beast slowly comes nearer and nearer as I witness Lexi diving away from me in the darkened room.
I can feel the saliva dripping from feral teeth, pooling on my face as I squirm to get away from the dog, but there’s nowhere to go. I can feel the cold goo falling on my face and into my mouth and can taste the months of slow rot dripping from the monster’s face. There’s blood and something more substantial, like puss-ridden, rotting flesh falling on my face. I can feel the coagulated, blackened blood hitting me, sitting on my face, and filling my mouth as I silently scream. The whole thing makes me want to vomit but I just gurgle and choke on it, hacking and gagging at the very thought of having it inside of me. I want to scream. I want to vomit. I have the energy for neither. Feeling my arms fail, I await the inevitable as the dog's tooth-filled maw closes those last inches to rip into my throat.
Finally, the shot rings out and my ears go back to ringing as the beast's full weight falls upon my chest, its teeth brushing my throat. But it isn’t moving. I quickly hurl the dog away, squirming to safety, but I can hardly move. My lungs feel like they’re bursting and my heart is pounding faster than a drum giving the order to charge. I choke and cough, blood and puss spew from my lips as I try to get control of myself, but everything hurts. The pain is overwhelming and I cannot bear to move. I feel like my legs are paralyzed and it’s spreading. My head is screaming, whirling in a maelstrom of agony while I fight to remain conscious, but it’s no use. My wound is killing me. The dog was too much. Why did I come here? Why didn’t I just let myself bleed out? This is too much. The pain is suffocating.
The darkness that washes over me is something that I’m not even aware of. There’s no Lexi, no dead, rotting dogs, and there’s no medicine to worry about. All I know is that there’s nothing. I’m not even aware of the nothing. Death sinks in like a cold, unwelcomed guest, hijacking everything and telling me exactly how things are going to go now. I’m not even aware that I’m unconscious until I open my eyes.
Perhaps that’s what death is like. Maybe there is nothing after death. Maybe it’s like passing out, where there’s no dreaming, no anything. We just shut off and we don’t know any better. Instead of opening my eyes, maybe I just keep them closed forever. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I hope there’s more to death than the emptiness of unconsciousness. I blink in the darkness and can hear someone crying.
The sound of crying in the darkness is unnerving and uncomfortable. In fact, whoever is crying has a hold of me and I can feel the sobs rippling and shaking through my body. The distant crying feels like it’s coming closer, but I’m not sure if that’s true or just a figment of my imagination.
“I’m so sorry,” I hear a voice in the darkness. “I’m so sorry, Val.”
It takes a moment for me to recognize the voice. The pain washes over my mind again, reminding me that I’ve probably just torn every stitch that I made, thanks to the dog, and now I’m going to be bleeding again, something I thought I was over. No, instead, the pain is pulsing through my body, like it’s running diagnostics on my nervous system, seeing what’s working and what isn’t at the moment. I feel a jolt here and a pinch there, as if being prodded by alien invaders. I just remain still, hoping that it’ll go away. But there is just darkness and pain. Darkness, and pain, and Lexi’s voice.
“I should have told you about Greg,” I hear Lexi confess and that immediately pulls me away from the pain riddling my body, gripping me and holding me to consciousness. Her tone is all wrong. It is drenched with regret. It strikes me that Lexi thinks I’m dead. For a moment, I stop to wonder how long it is exactly that I’ve been unconscious. How long has she been here confessing to me and I’ve just been sleeping through it? The thought of it is infuriating to me. What was she saying about Greg? “I should have told you he was Charlie’s dad, but I was so scared. How could I do that to you? How was I supposed to tell my sister that I’m in love with her boyfriend and that we have a child together? I couldn’t. I’m so sorry, Val. I’m so fucking sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.”
She thinks I’m dead. The thought occurs to me suddenly when I realize that the pressure around my head is that my head is cradled in her lap. She’s watching over my corpse, mortified that she got me killed. I feel like I’m in the middle of a really tight spot. I know that it’s dishonest, but I want to hear this. I feel the anger snarling inside of me, roiling to life, making me want to punch her, to knock her to the ground and strangle the life out of her. She deserves nothing less, and then I want to go sink an axe into Greg. She’s nothing but a betrayer and a liar to me. My own sister. She took the man I love and turned him against me, not that he isn’t to blame for this. He deserves the blame. I should let his fucking leg rot off.
But here she sits. Having taken my boyfriend and had a baby with him, a baby she let poor Noah think was his own, and having taken everything I have left in life, she sits here weeping over my death. She thinks I’m dead and now has everything she could possibly want. She has my boyfriend and my nephew all to herself and she’s in her moment of victory, but she’s here crying over my death. She could be making her way back to Greg right now, but she’s here. She loves me enough to stay here with me and feels badly enough that she thinks that she should confess what she’s done to a corpse. I don’t know what to make of that.
Everything is such a mix of emotions. Why would she do all of this? I don’t know what to do with the information I have right now. I feel like I’m dead inside, like everything has broken. Everything that I thought I knew is a lie now. Everything has just gone up in smoke and flame and I’m the big idiot in the room. I’m just a joke to everyone. I’m just something that they laugh at. I hate them. I feel like such an idiot.
I can only think of one thing to do. “Why?” I ask her, my voice cutting through the darkness and startling her. Her whole body jerks at the sound of my voice and it sends ripples of pain shooting down through me. My body isn’t ready to move just yet. She does everything in her power to stop herself from screaming, but I know that I got the jump on her, which is all that matters to me right now. I want her to feel dread and terror and panic. I want her to know that no matter what she does, her sister is going to the grave knowing exactly what she did. That’s a burden that will hang over her head for the rest of her life and without seizing this chance, she’ll regret it for however long she endures this world. I look at her and feel no sympathy, no mercy for her. This is her one chance to explain herself to me and I want her to take it. I genuinely want her to be a good person.
“Because I was jealous,” Lexi says to me with a voice that is trembling, terrified of me. I don’t care that she’s scared, she should be. Fear is the natural reaction to this sort of circumstance.
I think about her words, think about what she’s saying and I feel nothing but terrible anger inside of me. It makes me quiver with rage at the sound of it. Jealous? What could she possibly mean by that? What did she ever have to be jealous of me for? I have had nothing that would ever make Lexi seem less of a person than I am. In fact, Lexi is the girl who had all the adventures, who made the late night outings with boys and friends while I stayed home, tucked away in bed. She was always the outgoing and the adventurous one who left me feeling like I was the one missing out. If there is anyone sitting in this darkness who should be jealous, it should be me.
“You were always the better one,” Lexi tells me, stammering and stumbling over her words like a drunk trying to find her footing. “Dad always loved you best because you had the perfect grades and you were the one to get an academic scholarship, and you always had the better outlook on life and the better prospects. And when you got Greg, it looked like you had the better boyfriend even. It just all seemed so unfair and I was so jealous of you. I wanted just a taste of the world that you had and it broke my heart every time I looked at the two of you and saw how happy you were together here at the end of everything and I got jealous. I knew you would run away with him to some great place and just leave me behind. I just got so jealous of everything you had that I wanted a man to look at me like Greg looked at you and I didn’t want Noah anymore. I wanted a real man, like the one you had found. So I decided to try and take him.”
Try, that’s such a funny word. You try at something with the hopes of succeeding. There’s always a possibility of failure when it comes to the word ‘try’. She succeeded in taking my boyfriend. She succeeded in taking him and convincing him to have sex with her and have a baby with her. I feel sick to my stomach and this time, it isn’t because of the wound in my abdomen. I pull myself up, feeling the shooting pain in my stomach as I move, but I don’t care. I bear it and keep pushing myself away from her because I can’t even stand the thought of her right now. I scuttle across the darkened room until I feel my back hitting the cupboard.
“One night,” her voice is distant, feeling like she’s lost in a memory right now as she’s talking to me. The darkness consumes her, swallowing her and keeping her hidden from me. All I see is the black silhouette of her. “We were all sitting around, drinking and laughing. Noah wasn’t hanging out with us, I think he was sick or something. Either way, you went to bed early and Greg was hanging out, completely drunk. After Skye disappeared, we started flirting and the next thing I know, we were having sex in the upstairs living room. I was certain that we were going to get caught. I just wanted to make you hurt and make you realize that I could have anything you had, but that was when I realized I liked it, that I liked spending time with Greg. I guess he liked it too, because we started hanging out a lot, usually in the morning when Noah was busy with his daily tasks and you were still sleeping.”
I fight my body’s urges to black out or vomit. I can’t stand the thought of it. I want to claw out her eyes or do something terrible to her. I want to get revenge for all of this. I want to scream and shout at the top of my lungs. Why couldn’t I have died without knowing this? Why am I still alive? I didn’t think things could get worse, not like this, not so terribly horrible like this. Why can’t things just be simple here at the end?
“I used to get so jealous of the time you’d spend together with him,” Lexi confesses to me bitterly. “So I would sneak into the closet next to your room and watch the two of you have sex or just spend time together. I would get so mad and envious that it was making me crazy. I feel so terrible.”
I feel like I’m going to die. I think about all the mornings I would wake up without Greg next to me, with him somewhere searching for work or things to do, always claiming that he was helping someone before he would tell me that he loved me or he would kiss me. I want to throw up every kiss that he spent on me, that he wasted on me. I want to scream at her. I want to explode and rid myself of everything that has to do with them. It makes me sick just thinking about the two of them together.