I could’ve brought the dog through the house, I guess, but this was a house we’d skipped. I’d seen the woman who didn’t ever wave lying on the floor through the window.
The dog was a mix, not big. Brown, maybe some lab in there, likely some pit, but some other breed too, keeping it smallish. When I first walked up to the gate, the dog came hauling up to the fence and barked. I could see its agitation through the slats. After a few seconds of that it whined with anxiety like it wanted to see me. When I pulled myself up to look over at it, it wagged its tail and twirled around in circles. God knew how hungry and frightened the thing must have been. “I’m getting you out, okay? Hold on.” The dog sat at my voice, tail wiping the concrete, clearing away an arc of leaves.
I snapped off the fence lock with the bolt cutters. The dog nosed through the opening, shoving its way out as I unhinged it. It spazzed and ran around me, leaping, licking. I put my hands on it and it sat and I took a look at the dulled tag on the collar. Maggie. “Hey, Maggie. That you barking your ass off, Maggie? Yes, I know it was you.” I talked baby-talk to her and she nuzzled my legs. I bent down and she leaned into my body and I held her. Her body shook.
Maggie followed me home. Kodie and Bass stood in the yard. They buried the worried looks on their faces as I approached once they saw Maggie running up to them.
We all went in and fed her people food. The dog ate in huge inhaling gulps and drank water from a mixing bowl for a minute straight, her metal tag clinking the bowl. Maggie replete and belching, Kodie and I sat at the kitchen counter bar and said nothing as the sun fell on All Saints Day. The Day of the Dead. We waited. Bass sat at the ham radio and listened like a SETI scientist listens to the cosmos, from time to time making calls out to the void. Loud, unnerving static assaulted our ears.
The fear of inertia fell over me. Maggie stirred at our feet. The Utopia voices, the Mexico City voices, the last we’d heard, had long ago stopped coming over. We flipped on the TV, radio, phones and laptop just for grins, but of course browsers decried errors, mobile phones found no towers, landlines dead. The only life was from the radio, some nameless station with ads still looping, one for car insurance, one for fast food.
The Earth spun. We rode it.
Lord of the Flies was still on the chair where Bass had left it. I stood at the huge front picture window watching the darkness, knowing I looked like a skewerable fish in a bowl to them, purposefully stood there as counterfeit sacrifice, in a dare—c’mon. An eldritch half-moon hung above gnarled live oaks. Celestial bodies shone bright without city light to blot them. In the window’s reflection, I watched Kodie pick up the book, thumb it so that air lifted her bangs, close it. She pivoted to me, and I watched her reflection approach, felt the heat of her once she arrived beside me, smelled her hot cinnamon gum.
We looked at each other’s figures in the window. Kodie slipped her hand into mine, then got on her toes so that her mouth hovered before my ear and she whispered through the ham’s cosmos static, “We’re still here.”
My last kiss with her was before we fell asleep that night. Our teeth clicked as we pressed harder into each other, moving our heads back and forth, scoping and hoping for more, to get beyond the limitations of skin, muscle, bone, tongue. Trying to climb inside each other.
The first stone comes sometime after midnight.
Having never reset it after turning on the generators at about five in the afternoon, the clock blinks 7:19 7:19 7:19. Kodie slumbers on her side, her back to me, her curves like a cello silhouetted against the window. The static’s roaring in the front of the house. Bass listening for patterns in all that negative space. Beyond that, the low hum of the generators.
Maggie’s bark somewhere inside the house makes me sit up. Kodie does too. We grip each other’s forearms.
Before you realize the power’s out, there’s silence. All that booming static is gone. That drumming generator hum falls off. Even the dog goes quiet, her alarmist duties disrupted. The Utopia guy, Chris, had told us that dogs and the kids don’t like each other. Maggie was here not only to let us know something wicked this way comes. Maybe she could thwart it.
Maggie resumes her baying. Moonbeams slant in and pool on the floor. Bass’s footfalls thud down the hall. He jostles the locked knob. “Hey, guys! I think—” and that’s when we hear the first crash of glass somewhere in the front of the house.
Maggie’s barking augments to communicating more than something’s here; it warns stay away or I’ll rip your lungs out. She’s in the room where the stone came through. Kodie says, “They’re trying to get in.”
I open the door to Bastian. “Let’s get the guns,” he says in a clipped whisper. I nod, but what I really want to do is find Maggie as she’s the one on point. Bass jogs through the house ahead of me and starts grabbing weapons in the living room. I pick up Martin’s glock from the nightstand.
“Stay here,” I say. The hall brightens as Bass looks for things with his flashlight. I grab a flashlight from the line of them set on the entryway table, jog it back to Kodie and toss it on the bed. “Don’t use it yet,” I tell her.
“I’m not staying here.”
We join Bass in the living room, his flashlight beaming around the floor on guns, boxes of bullets. “Turn it off,” I tell him. “They’re watching.” But for the moonlight, the room goes pitch dark. Maggie starts in again with volleys of barks, running from room to room now, her nails skidding and clicking on the wood floors. That’s all we hear in the dark besides our breathing—Maggie’s barks, growls and skittering, the pads of her feet trying to achieve purchase with each new directional change corresponding to their movements and smells. She’s everywhere, playing whack-a-mole, going from window to window to door to door, making sure they know she’s omnipresent and against the very idea of their encroachments.
This goes on for a long minute. Nobody says anything but Maggie who starts winding down, just growling and pacing. The dining room window is the one that’s broken, a huge picture window, now with a grapefruit-sized hole in it, splinters radiating around it. High-quality double-paned tempered glass. Martin reminded us all of this often enough, especially when it iced once a year. Kodie, Bass, Maggie and I are all in the dining room looking at the hole, feeling the air. We smell smoke in that air.
I turned around and looked for the stone that must be on the floor right behind us. “Smoke?” Kodie asks, that bowie knife in hand.
“What’s burning?” Bass whispers.
I find the stone. It’s fist-sized, heavy, water-riven smooth. I hold it to my side. My throat constricts and dries.
It all happens so fast:
Maggie panting at our feet, we all stop scanning the windows to focus on the one with the hole in it, and the vaguest glow way in the distance. We look at it with idiot-moth reverence.
Maggie tears into shouting yowls, making us all jump, barking with such ferocity that her body crouches. She slides back with each bark.
In answer, we hear the children roar as one.
One booming burst that comes from all around us. How many of them, a thousand, more. No knowing.
All of us grab at each other’s arms and shudder and crouch. Maggie rages at their movements in the dark. They roar again, higher in pitch, wet-sounding. You can hear the little children among them, screaming in perfect unison with the rest.