In the mosquito-buzzing heat within the shade of a massive, fallen eucalyptus giant that’d crushed three one-story houses all at once and long ago, the man dropped his pack and shed his patchwork armor for the day.
They were high up on a hill looking down into a bowl of residential ruin almost forty years gone. A planned community that had never planned for the end of the world.
“This was the last place, Dog,” he almost seemed to cry. “Further up the road and we get to El Lay, and everyone knows to stay clear of the madness that comes from there. Direct hit. Everyone knows that.”
Dog lay down next to him.
The man rubbed the velvet fuzz of the chocolate-brown sides of Dog.
“They find us in there and it won’t be good.” But what he really meant is that it wouldn’t be good for his friend.
“We’ll go back out into the desert, to the east, and skirt wide. After that, I don’t know where to look anymore. Maybe it’s all gone,” he said, staring out into the ruin and wondering about all those people that had lived there. What had they been like? Had they survived? Were they these Dogeaters?
He saw it.
Saw the type of building he was told to look for. Saw it far down there along the dim remains of an old road that wound along a hill above the dead swamp. Well within the borders of the Dogeaters.
All the years he’d been searching, he raged at himself that night, how many times had he found the exact same type of building. Just like he’d been taught to. And how many times had it been empty? Just fire pits and bones. Not a scrap of the past left in them.
“Every time,” he muttered within the vine-overgrown remains of an ancient family room that was scoured and brittle. An old, blackened family portrait still hung askew on one of the two walls that remained.
Every time.
They watched the fireplace and the fire within. In the night, an old owl hooted from the rafter of some nearby tract home, barely upright after forty years of hard sun and bitter winter.
He did not sleep that night. Late, when the moon was fat and low in the sky, he awoke and stood looking down into the valley once more.
Could he return and tell them he’d done his best? Searched everywhere to find the past? Could he?
He remembered her, Maggie. They’d called her Saint Maggie. But he had known her as just Maggie. He remembered the heavy smell of too-sweet flowers on her when she’d first scooped him up as the Doomsday horn rang out over the city and everyone fled. As fighter jets streaked across the sky and cars smashed into one another.
He remembered her running and saying, “I’m doing my best.”
Like it was a chant.
Like it was an explanation.
Like it was a prayer.
In the morning the man donned his armor and checked the last three shells. He loaded two and kept one in his jacket pocket.
“I gotta,” he told Dog. “I gotta do my best. I gotta go down there… and see.”
Dog had just returned from chasing something in the groves of the sweet-smelling giants that had collapsed across the old places.
“If we don’t find the past then they, back home, they ain’t got no future, buddy.” He hoisted his old ruck on his back once more. The old ruck that contained the transmitter he could use if ever he found the past. The times he’d shouldered its burden were uncountable. How many more times would he do it again?
And he could not help but think that today might be his last. Just as he’d thought every day.
They crossed crumbling terraces and followed overgrown streets down into the bowl of the old places. At noon, near an old intersection where large buildings had all burned down, he heard the bark in the silence. It came from an overgrown hill they were passing beneath. The man’s hand went to the worn stock of his shotgun as Dog tensed. The bark had been so harsh and sharp and sudden, it was as though it had come from nearby. And even now in the silence, its echo seemed to resonate down the long lanes of destruction.
A moment later it was answered. Not far off. A few streets over maybe.
And then another.
And another.
“C’mon, let’s move, buddy,” said the man, breaking into a trot.
The slope of the land was now leading downhill into a large section of smashed and broken houses. Their splintered roofs and jagged beams thrust upward like shadows against the dying afternoon. Behind them, a ragged chorus of harsh barking sharply broke the still air.
The man urged Dog on, his own breath coming in heaving puffs as his old boots knocked against the crumbling pavement of the sidewalk they ran along.
“In there,” he shouted, pointing toward the catastrophic wreckage that seemed the worst they’d seen in this place. As though all the houses had been crushed instead of burned or blown away. Dog followed a rabbit trail into the mess, and the man, just before getting to his knees to crawl in, turned and saw them coming.
Dogs. Big, mean, lean, wide-jawed dogs that raced forward, straining at big leather leashes held by rangy men painted in mud stripes beneath the Mohawks on their shaven heads. They waved jagged clubs and came on, ululating in sudden glee.
The man knew he’d been seen.
He turned and scrambled into the labyrinth, following Dog through ancient spider webs and past jagged split lumber and jutting metal.
The rabbit trail went on and on and the man wasn’t convinced it was a warren so much as a series of narrow spaces between the extensive rubble.
What if we find a bobcat in here, he thought, and remembered the one that had stared him down once from the top of a road alongside some train tracks he’d been following. The thing had radiated menace and, yes, evil.
But what was there left to do but follow Dog? And so he did and when he got lost, there would be Dog, snouting his way back through the dark and leading him on further into the maze.
The sounds of the men and dogs faded, and when they came out of the chaos of debris, it was full moonlight and early night. They sat in an ancient drainage ditch, drinking the last of their water. On the hillsides all around, lone torches bumped up and down, and at times packs of wild dogs began to bay.
They followed the old drainage ditch down into the dead swamp that was calcified mud and piles of dust and debris. The man led them along, looking for the landmarks he’d spotted from the hills. The landmarks that lay next to the building he’d been searching for, for what seemed all his life.
The count of all his days.
He stumbled on an exposed root and face planted into the dust. He was exhausted. He got to his knees and knew it was a just a matter of time before the Dogeaters found them.
A matter of time.
Dog was back, licking his face. Reminding him to step away from the edge. To step back from the gorge.
Because that’s where you were, weren’t you? he asked himself. At the gorge again.
He stood, his mind swimming, wondering if he’d banged his head in the stumble. He checked the shotgun and reminded himself that the three shells could not be counted on. Dog paced back and forth, whining slightly.
The man stared up and about. Nothing in the night was familiar, and the moon had already crossed over into the other part of the sky. Soon it would be blackest night, and what would they be able to find then? His mind was suddenly terror-struck.
Stop, he told himself.
But nothing looked familiar and how long had he lain in the dust?