Page 54 of The End of the World As We Know It

“And you can fuck right off,” Baker said, and went inside.

A short time later, Baker was besieged by a whanging headache. He schlepped into the kitchen to swallow some painkillers, but paused at the sink, the glass to his mouth, his gaze fixed on something in the backyard. His upper lip rose in a snarl. “You little…”

He burst out the back door and stalked toward the dik-dik, who was nosing through the charred remains of the old house. “The hell’s wrong with you? I told you to scat.”

The dik-dik recoiled, but didn’t flee. Around them, cicadas churred as though enjoying the show.

“Move!” he bellowed. “If you want food, it’s not here.” He indicated the woods. “See? All the roughage you need.”

The dik-dik peered up at him, commas of milky foam in the corners of her mouth.

He settled his hands on his hips. “If you’re thirsty, there’s a stream just over the ridge.”

The dik-dik lowered her muzzle and nudged the neck of a Jim Beam bottle. She was a tad over a foot tall, a tuft of snowy hair tacking on a couple inches. He put her at maybe ten pounds.

“Get out of here!” he shouted. Jesus, his head throbbed. It was ninety-five degrees, the humidity so thick it was like breathing chicken broth.

The dik-dik started toward him. Baker flung out his hands. “Don’t you dare.”

She stopped, her large brown eyes profound.

“Think that’ll work on me?” He grunted. “Lemme tell you what I saw on my way to town. Half a dozen dogs along Highway 24, all of them goners. That shithole where my wife used to take riding lessons? You guessed it: every horse in the paddock.”

The dik-dik watched him.

“You’re toast, little lady. Everyone is.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but he didn’t care to dwell on the exceptions. On his tour of the residential district, he’d heard more than one person weeping. From a navy-blue saltbox house near the bank had drifted anguished wails and what might have been a child’s cry for help. The worst by far was the banana-yellow Dodge pickup truck burring down Main Street, its unmuffled engine boisterous enough to draw Baker from the crypt-like general store. He’d stumbled onto the sidewalk as the pickup whipped past, and he counted it a mercy its occupants hadn’t spotted him. Because chained to the back bumper was Sheriff George Cromwell. Perhaps the sheriff had galloped behind the truck for a spell. If so, his galloping days were over. The front of his body had been chewed away by the asphalt, his legs stringy horrors, like cherry-red seaweed. The sheriff left a glistening blood trail as the Dodge thundered up Main Street, and though Baker hoped it was his imagination, he could’ve sworn he’d heard Cromwell begging the driver to stop.

The driver had been Dead Ed, the passenger his brother, Frankie. The truck wasn’t theirs, but trifling matters like legal ownership had never fazed the Dedakers, and the end of the world had done nothing to reform their habits. Baker heard the fiends cackling as the Dodge swerved onto Poplar Street, and in the four nights since, he’d heard the same cackling as he lay unsleeping in his bed.

Baker didn’t notice the dik-dik advancing until it was right under him.

“Jesus,” he gasped. He wheeled around to flee, but his legs got tangled and he performed a graceless header in the grass. He threw a frenzied glance at the animal, who kept on coming, then he blundered to his feet and beat the hastiest retreat he could manage.

To hell with that mangy creature. He was sixty-six and had no friends or family, but that didn’t mean he was ready to strangle to death on phlegm. He slammed the back door and locked it just to be sure.

He was dozing in his recliner, dreaming about his son’s first birthday, when he heard a whispery sound. Baker palmed drool from his chin and swiveled his head to discover the dik-dik loitering in the kitchen, the rubber flap in the doggy door just coming to rest.

“Out,” he said, rising. He strode down the hallway. “You can take your ass right—”

The dik-dik padded toward him. Baker went rigid, palms out to ward her off, while a nightmare reel of his town visit unspooled: a German shepherd decomposing under a haze of bluebottle flies; the stench from the looted pharmacy so putrid he had to forego the liquor aisle; Milt Markovich drooped in a rocking chair outside his barbershop, his puffy throat slit from earlobe to earlobe in a gleaming black grin.

The dik-dik ventured closer.

Baker backpedaled, overturned a coatrack to barricade the doorway, and for one ghastly moment he was certain the animal would vault it. Instead, she embarked on a leisurely ramble around the kitchen, her tiny hooves clittering on the linoleum. Baker grimaced. Of all the rooms for her to stage an occupation.

The dik-dik paused and lowered her head, her hind legs bracing wider.

“Now hold on,” he said.

She appeared to concentrate.

“Don’t you even—”

Her eyes never leaving his, the animal pissed on the floor.

Three hours later, the furry little asshole was still in his kitchen. It wasn’t the inconvenience that bothered him so much; it was her germs. Accordingly, he’d cut the air-conditioning to prevent the contagion from circulating, and the living room now hovered at a ball-sweating eighty-eight degrees. He fed the VCR a worn-out copy ofThe Thing, hoping the wintry setting would soothe him, but halfway into themovie it was still sweltering and he was obsessing about how swiftly the characters got infected.