In the night she carried the runt away from the sleeping pack. It was the poor thing’s only hope. Its last chance. She’d given birth to a full litter in the remains of a bombed-out hospital where the pack had been hunting that winter. Five survived; one had two heads and didn’t. The others were starting to bully the tiniest. The runt. They’d bully it to death.
She knew.
It was the way of dogs.
But there was a memory in her. A memory of a different way deep down inside of her. She’d been a part of something she couldn’t articulate and could barely remember. Men. Women. People and dogs. Together. Living along the heat-blasted roads and in the blackened forests that would never grow again. Until they’d met other people. And then the people she’d lived with were no more. She’d escaped in the chaos of loud bangs and repeated metallic cackles.
Fire and screaming.
She’d escaped and in time she’d joined the pack. And they’d hunted the lone stragglers of men who seemed to be fewer and fewer in the days after the world was gone. The pack had even hunted bear and wolves and other dogs. And for a time she forgot the ways of men. The pats. The scraps tossed by firelight. The rubs for deeds done well. The darkness beyond the firelight around which the humans murmured or sometimes wept for what was lost, or softly sang old commercial jingles throughout the cold nights that were especially long in those times.
The firelight.
The pack had argued that gray, rainy, wet day before she’d taken the runt. There was a man making his way along the big road. But there was also a pack of wild pigs. Many, by sign and scent. Sucklings were easy pickings, and the pack had argued violently over which way to go. The Alpha, a big, iron-gray pit with demonic eyes, had been challenged. His challenger had been that night’s meal.
And she’d watched her own young bully the runt as the pack tore at what little the challenger provided. Imitating the big pit who had fathered them. That night, as the pack slept, she picked up the mewling runt by the neck and carried him out into the wind and the rain and darkness that smelled always of ash and death. She carried him across a desiccated plain thrashed by a howling, sand-filled wind that skirled like a nightmare’s scream. She carried him and ignored his feeble protests and his chubby-pawed battings. Sniffing the air, waiting, then moving on, she carried him.
And in time she caught the scent and smelled the smoke and remembered firelight. The smoke went with the firelight. Men gathered around firelight. Men, some men, were good to dogs and could make use of even a runt like she’d once been. Like the one she held between her teeth now, in the darkness.
Men could be good friends.
She found the stranger in the remains of a leaning gas station. The firelight glowed from within, and she crawled on her belly through the darkness until she could smell the lean rabbit the man had killed. She watched him motionlessly staring into the fire. She waited.
The pup whined.
She opened her jaw and released him to the dust. And slowly she began to nudge him forward. At first he didn’t want to go. He simply refused to budge, to leave her and her warmth. And then she nipped at him and he began to waddle forward and into the firelight. Crying for the loss of the only love ever known. Crying because the world was ending once more, again.
And when the man turned and saw the pup, he did not see her out there in the night, watching still. For a long while she watched from the darkness. Watched as the man stared at her mewling runt. Watched as the stranger mumbled to himself and then rose.
What he would do next she didn’t know, but she knew… she knew it had once been something she’d been a part of.
It was the only way. Her runt would never survive within the pack. And a mother is still a mother.
No matter what.
And always.
She watched from within the cold cloak of a howling night as the man bent, held out his weathered hand and waited for her pup. She watched as an ancient thing written into the language of all their DNA began again.
And it was a lost memory found to her.
And….
She knew the pup would live now.
He’d been alone for a long time.
Too long.
Too long since he’d crossed the wastes east of Saint Maggie’s home along the coast. His home. The only home he’d ever known. Too long since he’d steered clear of the craziness the mad wanderers he sometimes encountered called El Lay as he quested. Sent forth, like the others. Sent forth to find what was lost. Sent forth to find the past, if it still lived, breathed, existed.
Sent forth for some hope that the past might still provide.
He’d killed twelve men in his travels because he’d had to. The worn shotgun was down to three shells and who knew if they’d go when they were needed most in a clinch. He wore the gun on his back amidst the clutter of his patchwork armor and road-mended scraps as he crossed the Mojave and the Valley of Death.
In Vegas he’d found silence and nothing.
Nothing that remained of the past.
Nothing in the big rooms he’d searched.
Everything had been burned.
Not even a scrap that something might be written on.
Not even a page.
He’d walked down into the southwest and searched every corpse of a town for a specific building like he’d been taught to look for. Always the finding was the same. The remains of an old fire. Fires. The empty spaces along the crumbling shelves where the past had once waited. Waited to be had for the easy taking. Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
And gone again.
Years passed.
Men died.
He loved a blind woman once, but she wouldn’t leave her people and so he’d continued on in search of the past.
What had happened to them all? he wondered one black dusk when the map didn’t match the landscape and the night screamed again like a howling savage, angry at a world that had destroyed itself for no reason that made sense anymore.
What happened to them all?
Mac.
Teddy.
The others.
What happened to them all? Those who’d been sent forth. Orphans who’d been rescued on that last day.
And in the past two years, as he’d headed back west with no past in his ruck to bring back to the last home on the coast, he hadn’t spoken a word.
Who was there to speak to?
The blackened stubble of once-houses stretching off to the horizon like endless tombstones.
The mutie-blind pigs who hunted him beyond the valley that a big highway had once run through. Where he’d seen the bomb crater from five miles off atop the ridge that led down into it.
The bombs that destroyed the world on the day he was just a little boy on a bus.
He heard the distant sirens from that day again. In his mind. After all those years. The day he was just five and an orphan. The day Saint Maggie had rescued them all, all the orphans, in a stuck bus for “such a time as this,” as Miss Wanda had told the girl who was becoming Saint Maggie.
“How don’t you know, girl…” dying Miss Wanda had cried. “How don’t you know you weren’t meant for such a time as this?”
That was… thought the once-orphan man standing atop the ridge, looking down into the massive crater that the had-to-be-a-hundred-kiloton warhead, musta-been, had left in what had once been an interstate all those years ago….
Thirty years ago….
Thirty-five years….
Maybe even thirty-eight.
Which makes me….
He hadn’t said a word in the two years since the crater.
Who was there to speak to?
He’d crossed the Sonoran Desert and seen a village alongside another highway. They’d given him corn tortillas and offered him shelter, but he hadn’t stayed. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think of any words that would mean anything.