Raina’s heart beat hard against her chest. Footsteps smacked outside the house, then faded, leaving nothing behind but the patter of the rain. After a few minutes, she got out her two-liter and drank some water. She waited half an hour before sliding from beneath the bed to check the windows. The alley was clear.
She couldn’t go north for help after all. Because she’d forgotten all about the dogs in the cages at her mom’s hospital. And if she’d forgotten them, then maybe everyone else had, too. She walked west toward the ocean she couldn’t see. It had stopped raining, but the streets smelled good for the first time since the sickness.
Something scraped behind her. She turned, tensing to run. The black dog stood on the cracked concrete, head tilted to the side.
“You can come with me,” she said. “But you better keep up.”
A mile later, he was still with her. Sometimes he trotted ahead, head swiveling every time a crow flapped from a tree. His nails didn’t click as he walked. He was so quiet Raina decided his name should be Knife.
She saw two people on her way to the hospital, but she hid behind bushes until they went away. At the intersection on PCH, cars clogged the lanes. Most were empty, but in a few, bodies sat behind the wheel, their flesh puffy and dark. Raina moved past them as quietly as she could.
The animal hospital’s front doors were locked. So were the dented metal doors downstairs. She trudged back up the slope to the front and pressed her nose to the glass. Knife joined her, nose twitching. If someone had locked the doors, maybe they’d taken the dogs out of the cages, too. But she wasn’t sure people were doing what they were supposed to anymore. Not after what she’d seen at the hospital.
She walked down the sloped parking lot to get one of the rocks from the landscaping and bash out the glass in the front door. She picked up a round stone and turned back. One of the second floor windows was open.
She walked beneath it, Knife trotting beside her. “Hello?”
No one came. There were some trash cans in the parking lot, but even if she stacked them, they wouldn’t be high enough to reach. Inside the window ledge, a hand crank jutted up. Raina frowned and went to the box at the front doors where they kept the slip leads. She took out a tangle of them, tying them together until she had a rope twelve feet long with a loop at the end. She went back to the window, twirled the rope, and slung it at the crank.
It took her dozens of tries before she snagged it. She tested the line, then set down her pack and climbed. Near the top, her arms began to shake. She hauled herself inside and dropped to the floor of a veterinarian’s office.
She went downstairs and unlocked the outer door. Knife ambled in, hopping up the steps behind her. The room with the cages smelled like pee and poop and something even worse. When she walked inside, the dogs lifted their heads and began to whine.
Not all of them stirred to greet her. A pug and a German shepherd lay flat in their cages. Their skin was the same temperature as the room.
One by one, she let the others out. There were twelve in all, from a big golden lab to a tiny tan Chihuahua. They crowded around her, whining and yowling, licking her hands and legs. Knife moved back, watching in concern. Raina opened the door to the large room, where her mom’s friends used to bathe and inspect the animals, and filled shallow plastic trays with water. The dogs lapped greedily.
From the other side of the room, a cat meowed like there was no hope. Raina jogged to the other room of cages, where eight cats stared at her from behind the thin metal bars that enclosed them. She had to let them out, but if she did that, she was afraid the dogs would eat them.
Raina stepped away, pressing her back to the wall. The dogs needed to be fed and cleaned. Some of them had chewed wounds in their paws and needed the medicine her mom used to give them. She should clean out the cages and take the dogs outside, in case they needed to use the bathroom. There was so much to do, and she didn’t know if she could do it. Abruptly, she felt very young. Why had the adults left the animals to die?
She clenched her teeth. Maybe the adults had been too scared or too stupid. But she was there now. And she was the only one the animals had.
“Don’t worry, kitties,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
If they were full of food, the dogs wouldn’t want to eat the cats. Raina got a bag of kibbles from the shelves out front and filled two of the plastic trays. As soon as she set the first one down, the dogs lunged for it, growling and menacing each other with their fangs. She set down the second tub. Soon, they’d each found a place, crunching away. While they ate, she carried the pug and then the German shepherd outside. There was nowhere to bury them, so she took them down the ramp to the underground parking of the motel next door.
Upstairs, a schnauzer had barfed on the floor, but it was already cleaning it up. While the dogs sniffed around, she brought water and kibbles to the cats. Some of them hissed at her and most of them didn’t want to eat.
Raina had known lots of cats in her neighborhood. Some had liked to be petted, but most slunk away when she came near. They liked to be by themselves. Three cat carriers were stacked against the wall. She went out back to set out food and water, then brought the cats outside one by one. They all ran away.
She’d thought to keep the dogs inside, but seeing the cats scatter to their freedom, Raina knew she had to bring the dogs out, too. Or she would be no better than the people who’d kept her in school against her will. Who’d abandoned the animals in the first place?
Upstairs, she whistled to the dogs and led them outside. Knife stood beside her, watching the others click around the parking lot to sniff and pee. The schnauzer and a terrier climbed the incline to the road and strutted away, but the others stayed close, stealing the cat food she’d brought out or flopping in the sun. When she opened the door, they filed back inside and clattered up the stairs.
“Okay,” she said to Knife. “Looks like we’re staying.”
The first thing she did was clean the cages. The second thing she did was wash the dogs. The third thing she did was go to the motel and get sheets to shape beds for them.
And the fourth thing she did was name them.
There was Brick the golden lab and Eggplant the pug. There was Dragon, the little one with long black tufts on her ears and tail who never backed down. The Chihuahuas, Cloud and Mean and Mouse, who scattered whenever there was a loud noise. Smile the retriever. And the mutts, Tooth and Tough.
And there was Knife.
For food, there were dozens of bags and hundreds of cans in the hospital, but Raina knew no one would ever bring them more. And she needed people food, too. There was a Target store up the street her mom had sometimes gone to on the way home. Raina fed the dogs and brought them out to the bathroom, then got Knife, who went everywhere with her, and walked up the hill to the Target.
She got a red shopping cart and pushed it up and down the aisles. The tile floor was cluttered with kid’s clothes and containers of hand soap people had knocked down and left there. Every single scrap of people food was gone. Raina’s head flushed with hot blood. How could they have been so greedy? To take everything? She hoped whoever had taken it all had been found by the man who’d tried to find out if she was alone, or the other one who’d chased her in the street.
Abruptly, a cold tingle soothed her blood. She wasn’t the only one out there. The others would be hungry, too. And there was no one left to stop them from taking whatever they wanted.
The people food was gone, but there were shelves and shelves of dog food. Too much for one trip. Or even two. She loaded bags into the cart and headed out of the store. On the smooth tile of the aisles, the cart hadn’t been too loud, but out on the pavement, it rattled so badly Raina wanted to scream at it to stop. At the hospital, she wrestled the bags of dog food inside and stashed the cart in the motel’s underground parking, far away from where she’d covered the pug and shepherd.