Page 103 of The End of the World As We Know It

BLOOD. MEAT. MEATMEATMEAT

We go through the city, during the next few days. The city is not for us. All that’s here are bones and things baked so hard by the heat that they are no longer MEAT. We catch rats as we go, which is easy. There are so many of them. They try to tell us tales in their dry dirty voices, but we don’t listen. We eat them, delicious brains first, cracked out of their little skulls. Everywhere there are empty things—houses, cars, suitcases. Trails of objects wind through the streets, tracking the path of the fled VISITORS.

Something’s calling to us, sand and space and savanna. We knowit’s there, beyond the tall concrete. We sleep in doorways, entrances to underground places. We don’t go into the underground places. Once, twice, then the desert sun rises again and we have long miles in our legs yet to spend. Sometimes we catch the scent of living VISITORS, but there aren’t too many of them. Once we see one. She lies half in and half out of a doorway, shaking so hard it looks like a dance. It reminds me of Ee Ee Eee and I feel sad. I smell the sadness on Tak Tak Tak, too, so we hurry on. We don’t even want her for MEAT.

Sunrise. Ahead, the cool smell of water creeps through the early air. We’re thirsty, so we hurry toward it. “I have been thinking,” Tak Tak Tak says as he leaps through the stream of the burst pipeline, kicking up spray and snapping at the glistening drops of water as the sunshine makes them into jewels. We play in the water like this, under the blank buildings, in the empty street. When we are panting, tongues lolling, I say,

“What have you been thinking?”

“We need wives,” he says, shaking himself and grinning.

“Yes, I want a wife.” Now I can’t think about anything else. WIFE. I remember the spicy scent of the Dholes before they escaped.

“Ee Ee Eee has told us that our kind of pack is led by one mated pair,” Tak Tak Tak says. “We can even lead as two pairs, I think. Us and our wives. But we need a pack.”

He’s right. We’re lonely, just the two of us. We kiss each other and wag and play all the time. But two is not enough. I whine. PACK. I stop as something comes on the air.

“Wait,” I tell Tak Tak Tak quickly with my nose. “Hide.” We are gone in a flash, behind some garbage cans. We watch the street. I really am summoning things with my mind, I think, because a familiar shape trots across, stepping delicately through rubble and the dead. She’s like us. Four paws. Muzzle. Good shape, smart nose. Not an idiot like a rabbit or some such. She is the color of ripe grass on the plains in the last of the golden sun.

WIFE?I ask silently.

Not WIFE, Tak Tak Tak says sadly. And I feel it, too—there are some things in her scent that are the same as ours, but not like the Dholes—not enough for her to be a wife, or make pups.

MEAT?I ask.

Might as well talk to her first.

Whatever. I’m so full of rat I couldn’t anyway.

We step out into the crossroads. “YOU,” I say, and start to give the ancient greeting, “HAIL FELLOW, WELL M—”

She turns her head, and there’s a bad smell on her, I catch it now, it fills my nostrils. Now there’s a quick sharp pain in my right side. By me, Tak Tak Tak whistles. He’s hit, too. We go down into darkness.

“Wake up, Chachacha,” Tak Tak Tak is saying. “Wake up.”

Dark and animals. It smells like home, in that way. But this is not home. It’s a small place, hot, surrounded by wire mesh, so cramped that Tak Tak Tak and I can barely turn around. Someone is crying nearby in a cage. They are all sick. It’s the same mineral tang of—something—we smelled on the golden dog in the streets. Something opens above us, a hole in the cage, and MEAT flops down wet on the concrete next to us. It’s not fresh, there are maggots in it, but that’s all right, little maggots are bursts of flavor. We eat quickly, giving each other an equal share.

“At least we are together,” I say to Tak Tak Tak with my nose. He gives me love back. I try not to imagine how terrible it would be to be in this place alone.

I say to the dog crying next to us, “Who are you?” It’s the golden dog. I wonder how I could have missed it, the scent of wrongness about her. She just cries. We try to scent-talk with her, with our noses. She hacks loud and rough like she’s got a bone in her throat.

Tak Tak Tak tries again. He asks her, “What is this place?”

“It’s the________,” she says, and the thing she says is so terribleI don’t think there’s a name for it, for our kind. Maybe the closest would bethe butcher. Orthe killing floor.

“Sleep,” I say to Tak Tak Tak. “No more talking. We save our strength. I think we’re going to need it.”

A VISITOR comes down the aisle between the cages. He pokes a stick into the cages. Most of the dogs just cry and try to back away, but one or two, the sicker ones, have gone somewhere else in their minds. A big brown dog bares his teeth, mucus streaming from his nose, which I can see is dry with sickness. He snarls, and the sound is insane, wrung from the depths of him. He has lost himself.

The VISITOR withdraws the stick and I see it has a loop on it at the end. He puts the loop around the brown dog’s neck and takes the brown dog out of the cage. The dog dances and growls, strangling on the end of the stick. The man takes the brown dog away. They disappear through a metal door at the far end of the room.

The brown dog does not come back. No more food comes. We sleep, we dream of great, wild golden spaces and blue skies that we have never seen. All of our kind have these dreams. It’s the place we came from. We dream of delicious meats that we have never tasted, of hunts we have never been on, of brothers and sisters we have never known.

I wake to Tak Tak Tak trilling loudly in alarm. I start up and I know right away that there’s too much space in our cage. Tak Tak Tak is outside the wire. His throat is squeezed tight. The VISITOR has him on the end of the stick. I trill and shout to him. He twists like a fish on a line. I scream and yell, but the VISITOR takes him away and he vanishes.

I cry and yell. What if Tak Tak Tak doesn’t come back, like the brown dog? I turn and turn in the cage and trill until the golden dog next to me snaps and snarls for me to shut up. She’s much sicker now, I can see that. Her coat is dull and strings of greenish mucus dangle from her nose. The whites of her eyes are red as blood.

I snarl back and try to bite her through the mesh. “Tell me what happened to my brother.”