2 comments/ 7264 views/ 0 favorites My Brown Dog By: GeneralBethlehem Copyright © 2006 De Rozario Jesse All rights reserved. Portions of this document may not be reproduced through any means, including, but not limited to, scanning, uploading, reproduction, transmission, and distribution via the Internet or any other means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying or recording in any form, without express permission of the author. Any reproduction or redistribution of this document must be done wholly and in its entirety. * 1 What do you mean: What? Don't you understand what I just said? My. Brown. Dog. So simple! Which part of that tri-syllabic phrase don't you understand? It's not even a complete sentence, but more of what my Second Grade teacher, Madam Follick would've called a crippled phrase. But then again, everything was crippled to her. Nice was a crippled adjective; a good day would've been termed crippled, too. She wanted fantastic inter-stellar earth-shaking days. Nice just didn't cut it. Not at all. Madam Follick had two kids. One became a fashion jernalist in Europe and died from cocaine overdose. The other stayed on good ol' home soil and embarked on a career of rape and murder for a year before he was run over by an eighty-ton tank. Not helping... Let's just agree that what I don't know of the English language, I don't know from her, okay? But back to my brown dog. Still don't get it? Fine. I'll break it down into three simple, independent parts. If I gave you any more than three, since there are only three words, I'd end up trying to explain something like row or own or even og, neither of which have anything to do with My Brown Dog as a whole, and which would only complicate matters more than I already have. Okay... Easy, now. Listen. Just listen. My—Brown—Dog. We'll start with My. Funk and Wagnall's English Dictionary (copyright date unknown...) states: Adj. or Int. A possessive form of I; of me; belonging to me; belonging to one's self; that I have, hold (in sickness or in health, till death we do part), or possess...blah blah blah blah... You understand the meaning of the first part, right? Good. We'll move on. But let me stress why he's mine. Well, simply, because I found him. I discovered him! Yes! And, most importantly, because he can't get away. Much as he detests being mine, there's nothing he can do about it. Mine he is. He's more of a hostage or piece of livestock than a pet, but he's my brown dog. Okay? Next. This color part is a bit tough for me. I know from what I remember of the Old World that brown was a color; a word used to describe or diffrenshiate or identify (It's an adjective, young man, not a color!) by the hue of light reflected into the viewer's kore-nea and so on. I don't know if it's the kore-nea or iris...or if I even spelt that right, but never mind. Flawless spelling and grammatical command, too, are other things of the Old World. But there's more. I know rainbows are curved arks of light split into twelve (or was it twenty?) distinct bands because of some supernatural force that now means as much to me as the word brown or green or iridescent blonde. The last time I saw a rainbow was on the surface, in some picture book. There might've still been a sky to see it when I was a toddler, but I don't remember. Yeah, I know blonde because our neighbor's daughter was blonde and she always got lots of attention. I think it was because of her hair (say, do your curtains match your drapes?). So, I know that color. I also know black. It's all I've been seeing lately. I'm not blind, but we'll get round to that later. We agree that he, or, it, as Madam Follick would've corrected with most adamant perswaysion, is mine, and that it is brown—what, exactly, defines brown, well, maybe we'll decide later. Forgive me if I ramble. The air down here isn't very good. It never was, but without proper air circulation or venting or any hygiene like they used to have in the Old World, things tend to decay faster...especially the air. "Here" is the fourth underground level of a car park in what used to be called, if I remember correctly, FallPark Mall. I have clear access up to the third floor using the service elevator that runs directly from the main power generator. I can...what's that word...dammit...ah, siphon. I can siphon fuel whenever the generator runs low; there are at least two hundred cars down here, more on the higher basement levels. Fuel for the generator and lift isn't a problem. It's what I might one day find waiting for me in the elevator that frightens me. You see, lately I've been having lots of dreams... I have unlimited access to the ground floor and second level by the elevator—but not the doors or windows. The air vents are all sealed, too. The air-con and lights failed at about the same second that all the exits were locked down. About midway on the third floor, debris and the collapsed fourth floor block the hallways. I guess I could probably climb over it and force my way through if I really wanted or needed to, but so far the urge hasn't arisen. It's mostly lingerie and other ladies' paraphernalia down there, anyway. There's no way out from there either. My father designed RELDS himself and never failed to impress upon us (and all guests that happened to stay for dinner or just tea on the porch) its flawlessness. The food is all in the Mega-Mart on the ground floor. It's been enough—so far. Haven't had to share with anyone. Not until this dog showed up. I've tried forcing the lift up past "3", but something blocking the shaft is wedged above the door. I like to think it is debris that tumbled into the shaft from the explosion, but the stench hints otherwise. There were a lot of casualties when the doors and windows sealed. Maybe soon I might be able to force the lift up through whatever—whoever—is blocking it. Here? RELDS? Surprisingly, car seats make comfortable sleeping places, with the added perk that I never lack for choice or variety. In the beginning, I tried sampling a different seat of a different car each time, but soon lost track. I decided to stick to the black limo by the elevator. Beats me what a limo is doing parked on the fourth floor underground, but who cares? Their seats are large and warm. But quiet. Lonely. Not lonely as in sad, but the kind of solitude that makes you wish you were alone. Graveyard lonely. Lonely with too many shadows and hidden corners and places for things to hide. Until I caught the dog, I haven't seen anything else living down here. Seen. Haven't seen. But I've heard them plenty since that day the RELDS when into play. RELDS? Told you. It was my dad's last project. Stands for Radioactive Emergency Lock Down System. That's what it means, and that's what happened here. Here? That would be the fourth underground level of the FallPark Mall carpark. I've been living here for the past twelve years. 2 I don't want to leave, so don't feel sorry for me. Been down here too long, anyway. Anyway, I've forgotten what the surface looks like. What it used to look like, anyway. Whoops. Repeated that word there. Madam Follick would've had what we called a "Grand Disaster Mood." She'd scream and tug her hair and tell us not that way don't repeat the same word twice in a sentence unless you absolutely can't help it, and as much as possible not in the next one either, and—oh my God, I need a drink. Not a coffee, Beverly quit smiling 'fore I yank your lips off your face, a drink, a real drink... And a real drink she had. She kept an aluminum flask in her drawer. She'd take a quick swig and look around guiltily like she was expecting the principal Dr. Neeves to be watching her from the classroom window. Once, she forgot about it and left it in her drawer...well...she locked the drawer, but Joey brought along his Spy Set Lock Pick (Genuine! Guaranteed To Work!). Anyway, me and Billy and Joey found it. Shit, that tasted awful! Like burning piss with a dash of orange juice. Had the color, too. That was my first drink, you could say, and it was terrible. There was also this fat steel marker, only there was no ink at the nib, and there was a button that would make it vibrate real fast like...I don't know...like a washing machine on high spin. Billy told us his ma had one of those, and that she told him it was for when daddy went out of town. Whatever. I have no idea how a fat vibrating pen with no ink was supposed to replace a father. Oh boy. I'm getting carried away here. Must be the air. But the surface, whatever was up there—vibrating pens, Madam Follick, Joey's confusing mother—could now only be rubble. No, I know you don't understand. See, it all started in the late Spring of '07 (that's 2007 A.D.—I don't know when, if ever, this is going to be found...and that thought is more terrifying than what could be waiting for me in the elevator or under the cars...). Now I forgot what I was going to say. Later. When activists bombed the World Bank in the late Spring of '07, there were none who imagined the catastrophic corollaries (ha! Can't believe I remembered that word! Saw it once in my dad's TIME magazine...guess it kinda stood out to me) it would effect upon the rest of the world. No one knew how it happened. --Not how the bank was bombed—that much seemed inevitable following all the bail out loans given by the bank to the economically hit nations of the previous year—but how the terrorists managed to get their hands on nuclear weapons. It was a catastrophy like no other. It made the Asian Crash of '98 or Black Monday of '29 seem like a negligible stock market fluctuation. 'Course I only studied 'bout those in school (not from Ma'am Follick, but Ms. Wolfe, a young woman with her fresh degree who had a bad habit of showing her panties when she sat on the desk explaining to us the meaning of "inflation"). Best I can remember, there was a financial crash in mid '06, and by January '07, the GFT—Global Finanshul Trust (renamed from the International Monetary Fund at the end of '05)—had paid out over 500 trillion euros in bailout packages to eighty percent of the world's nations. Eighty. The proportion of those affected by the crisis was appalling. Downright sickening (or so my dad said). But there was nothing anyone could do about it. Prices seemed to be slipping down a well-greased slide into a pit of flames. Package after bailout fund after rescue parcels were paid out, each earmarking a "condition" by the GFT, this great and invisible monster controlling the world and its economy as if by puppet strings. And that's when someone decided they'd had enough. Walk-in suicide bombings weren't uncommon. They were like interviews. Only the ladies didn't wear short business suits and nylon stockings, but dynamite and good hemp rope to keep it all bundled together. Cars had been used, too. Buses, trucks, ships. Even planes. But whichever unhappy nation decided to throw in their cards and finally call it quits against the World Bank didn't do it in anyway complex; they simply fired a spray of Titan II-Pu missiles at the World Bank Headquarters. Pu means Plutonium. One moment, World Bank, the next, a pile of ash, disintegrated stone, and gold. Yes, gold. It's well-known that the World Bank held all the nation's reserves of currency in solid bullion (there we go again! Great word, that! Bullion! Ha-ha. "It's all coming back, it's all coming back to me now...), but none knew (except those that blew it to bits, apparently) that it was stored in their basement. When the missiles hit and turned the structure into a furnace upwards of two thousand degrees, all that lovely yellow metal flowed out into the streets—but there was no stampede of people rushing to get their hands on the gold because there wasn't a living soul within a five-mile radius of the blast, and all those for ten miles were knocked blind. That's when the real hardships began. People in First World countries experienced what post World War countries went through when the cash required for daily marketing had to be carried in a wheelbarrow. Prices jumped by the hour. Not by a few cents or a few dollars or even a few thousand dollars. Today, your Seiko might be able to buy you a can of corned beef. Tomorrow, you might need a Rolex—and if you didn't have one? Tough luck. People traded in their sports cars and summer villas and government bonds for a week's groceries, but this stopped when merchants began to realize that normalness might never return, that their backyard of accumulated Rolexes and Porsches might not even be worth the scrap metal. Not a single nation was unaffected. It seemed impossible that everyone could be hit without a single benefactor from all this—but it was happening. I mean, if someone is losing—which basically every government was—someone's gotta be gaining from it, right? Anyway (sorry, sorry!), on May 1, 2008, a global state of emergency was declared—something that'd never been done, as far as I know, since the dawn of mankind. Oil prices hit untold highs, but there was no use for it when no one had anything that used the petrol anymore. City power was shut down when governments could no longer afford to maintain the upkeep. World capitals lay frantic under a blanket of darkness. And under this blanket, chaos ruled. ATM's were raided and destroyed—not for the value of the cash, but for the paper inside that could be burned as fuel. Supermarkets and factories emptied in minutes. In global times of tribulation, mankind returned to his baser nature, seeking out only his most fundamental essentials, and intertwined just above all this anarkey, the world's governments stood teetering at the brink of nuclear war, as each blamed the other for this disaster. But though they wobbled at the edge of what could've spelt the end of humankind, did they back down? Did they try to defuse the problem in the quickest, most selfless way? No. Of course not. I was about ten years old when the first nukes hit. My mom had taken my sister and I to FallPark Mall to queue up for food handouts that our mayor had organized at most of the major shopping centers. Our city was better off than most. There was little of the rioting and looting and wanton bedlam that touched most of the others (my grammar's amazing comeback is surprising, even to me—I'd better finish this up quickly before it goes again). We still had running power in most of the major buildings, the school was still open, and, most importantly, the Police still had control of the situation. Most of this, I would say, was thanks to the well-planned control and rationing of the food. Of course, pay had stopped, and though cops may work simply for their undying loyalty sworn since Day One as a fresh recruit, few would put that responsibility above their own families. But since there was food, there was order. Didn't help much in the long run, though. If only our mayor had been the president...well, maybe this whole disaster might've been averted. On that day, somehow, I got separated from my mom and sister as they went to collect our day's rations. It was just after sundown, and, now, looking up at the lead-sealed windows above the rows of cashiers, I can still remember the fiery display of purples and magenta as the sun vanished behind the horizon for the last time I would see. All I remember is the earthquake that knocked me to the floor and the panicky commotion as thousands of people tried to escape the building before it collapsed or shut down on them. Silly, isn't it? Didn't they know they'd all be cooked alive outside? That even if they survived the initial blast, they might die weeks later after they'd slowly puked their guts out, bites at a time? Above that, if fate touched them and let them live without a sign of injury, that any future offspring might be born crippled or mutant, or, as my father stressed often enough over desert, squirming balls of flesh? Didn't these people know that? Apparently not. They didn't design RELDS, I guess. But even if they'd known, something tells me they would've tried to escape anyway. Something about the fear of being locked up—like me. I wasn't the only child separated from their parents that day—I could hear kids crying, some old as I'd been then, screaming and calling out for their parents—but I was the only one that survived. I remember the panic as five thousand people stampeded through the checkout lanes, spilling food and groceries in an explosion of confetti-like color and substance, crushing the aged and sick and children or those too shocked to move out of the way. Most of them got out, I suppose, and were incinerated by the missiles. When I woke up—hours, days later; I couldn't tell—everything was quiet. Deathly. I've never known a silence so terrifying as the night I realized that I was the only living thing left in the entire mall, that I was trapped in here, and whoever was outside would not be able to come in. It didn't take me long to figure this out—my dad designed the system, did I say, and he was proud of it. I tell you, that night, I felt like I'd gone to hell. I walked around the mall aimlessly for the first couple hours—exploring it, I guess—like a boy already dead. Writers and literary professionals have oft said that, but I felt it that night: That night, I was dead. I still was when I found my mother's body. It was hard to tell who it was in the darkness; most of her body was on the floor behind a food counter. But then I recognized her bag—she was holding it in one outstretched arm like an advertising model. It was the bag with the deer horns that my father had given her the previous Christmas before he went sky diving sans parachute from the top of a skyscraper. I moved closer to where she lay, rounding the long aluminum counter that had hid most of her body. Someone—something—was hunched over her body. It was shivering. Shaking. God, it was quivering as bad as Ma'am Follick's vibrator had that dry spring afternoon. I could tell it was moving, alive, but the fear that grasped my mind refused all comprehensive thought from flowing. I thought the stooped thing was drinking her blood. But as my feet drove me closer, the thing looked up, looked at me, then began to scream. Human screams. Even when I moved closer still and identified my twenty-year-old sister, Anne, and she should've recognized me, she didn't stop screaming. It was as if she'd forgotten who I was. It was possible. Her mind had always been frail since our father killed himself, and those shadows didn't make my identification any easier. I put my arms out to embrace her and comfort her—hell, to comfort each other. I was as scared as she was. Maybe even more. Everything was alien and frightful. But her cries turned to screams of terror and she backed away. Her heel caught on my dead mother's cheek and Anne fell. She was back on her feet in a blink, still screaming and crying, still not recognizing me as her brother—or a fellow human being at all for that matter—and still trying to get as far away as possible. In the mad bleakness of that moment, when anything seemed possible—anything, anything at all—I accepted the fact that she had gone insane. I stopped advancing. Her sniveling lessened, but she still didn't recognize me. She regarded me with the fearful uncertainty of a frightened animal facing a predator. She was bigger than me...but...whatever. She wasn't human anymore. I think for a moment, just one, there was a flash of recognition. I saw something in her eyes—something higher, more intelligent—before she turned and fled. I didn't go after her. She ran down the checkout aisle and disappeared down the row of Pampers and Johnson's Baby Oil. My Brown Dog Though I explored every accessible corner of the mall when I returned to the ground floor, I never saw her again. I don't know where she could've gone. Maybe her baser, animal instinct found a route out that I still haven't discovered, or maybe she crawled into a corner to die—giving up all hope. Maybe her corpse is the one that blocks the elevator. Or perhaps she still stalks these grounds unseen and undetected, watching me...waiting...waiting for whatever it is something like her waits for. But after seeing the dead body of my mother, watching as my sister went insane and abandoned me, there was little else for a ten-year-old to do but give up and die. I didn't know how to do that, so I cried. I ran and I cried, ran and ran until I found that I was down four levels underground, deep in the dark bowels of the mall where nothing else walked or lived or breathed, where I could be alone in my misery. And there I cried like no other child ever did before. I cried for my mother, the loss of my mother and my sister, but deep down I think I cried for more. Perhaps even then I cried for the loss of my sanity and the knowledge that on the surface there was nothing but death. Maybe I was the only survivor in the whole city or the whole country... Maybe, just maybe, I was the last of the whole human race. The magnitude of this possibility caught my breath for a moment, but it was too large, too painful and overwhelming. It all came tumbling back down on me and I continued to weep. I must've got over it slowly, somehow, at least for long enough to scrounge for food and the other daily necessities of life. Thank God our mayor knew what he was doing—even if it meant only that a single fourth grade student would be left with enough canned food and preserved groceries to last him nine gazillion years. When at last I returned to the ground floor in my right mind, realizing and knowing what I was doing, there seemed no reason for me to have lived. There was nothing left for me here but fear. I got the elevator working so I wouldn't have to walk down that spiral staircase where I felt something was always waiting for me round the next corner. But even then, elevators could be worse. What if, I oft imagined, I was to see the door open and find someone, something, staring back out at me, grinning? Maybe the thing my sister turned into. Maybe worse. Or, if in the middle of the night, the elevator were to run...moving up and down...up and down...all by itself. A short circuit was impossible. The mechanics of the lift simply did not allow that. And so, having all these logged at the back of my mind, I charted out the limits and borders of my territory that belonged exclusively to Yours Truly. I thought I was back to my normal self, but under the circumstances, how normal could that have been? I guess I was much worse than I thought, because it was weeks before I noticed that my mother's body—along with the other dozen that had been there that night of the bombing—were gone. Just...gone. They weren't where I remembered them to be. Maybe the dogs took them away. 3 It was around the same time of my acceptance to reality that I began to hear the dogs. Let me tell you how The Coming of the Dogs saved my life. It was soon after I discovered the missing corpses of my mother that I heavily contemplated...well, I wasn't sure how to do it, being only about ten or eleven then...but I wanted to end it all. There wasn't any reason to live if I was the only human left on the planet—in the city, at least—and doomed to be trapped forever in a nuclear-safe building sealed tighter than an aquarium. Whoever—fate, God, the ghost of JFK—planned this, didn't plan it. They planned everything else and forgot about a little boy imprisoned in a shopping mall. I tried starving myself, but that took too long. Too discouraging, and instinct took over. I devised a fool-proof (or, should I say, coward-proof) method to choke myself to death—of all things, I felt triumphant. The noose was around my neck on the morning I heard the dogs. I first thought it was something like those people who come back to life tell about angels or bells and stuff like that. Didn't know why, but I thought, well, maybe I got dogs. Fitting. I killed that thought. Stepped on its head and crushed it to smithereens. The sound was from something outside. Whatever nuclear mutant monster it could be, it was real—not a strange phenomenon in my head or the queer workings of water or air in pipes and overhead air ducts. There was nothing to run the water or churn the air, anyway. The sheer curiosity gave me the will to live. The sound didn't come from inside the building—not yet, anyway. It was outside. I was sure of it. Something outside. Not dogs. No, dogs wouldn't have been the right name for them, but after those weeks or months or maybe it was already years of not having spoken to another human being or read or written a single word or alphabet, I'd forgotten what to call them. Dog was the only word I could remember. Dog. A creature mostly associated with barking, and these creatures outside—whatever they were—most definitely made a lot of noise. Man's best friend? Well, no, that's where they didn't fit. I didn't want to be friends with something that was continuously outside trying to get in, scratching, pounding, breaking against the windows and doors. If I had known what was going to come through those doors on that fourth night of Sleeping On Ground Level, I would have proceeded with the rope idea. Even when I couldn't hear them, I began to fear where I walked, always turning my head sharply at the slightest sound until I thought I should just wait one day for them and let them catch me. So that's what I did. I began to spend my nights (to say "sleep" would be dishonest) upstairs, in the giant hall of the checkout area. It was spooky. Vastly lonely. The fear up here was different from the one I'd felt those years sleeping forty feet under the earth. Down there, I could huddle in a car, and though the darkness and lumpy shapes of dead automobiles stretched out for what seemed like parsecs in every direction, the shell of my car was the boundaries. My sanctuary. Like the safety a blanket provides on those cold, quiet nights when something stalks under your bed or in the closet. For me, the thing was everywhere. Under every car and behind every pillar and inside every unidentifiable shape or shadow. But in my car, I was safe. On the ground level, all that changed. The shadows and figures and darkness were the same—the windows sealed off most of the light—but there was no safety boundary where I could retreat when the fear threatened to overwhelm me. I spent the first three nights awake and sweating, standing on top of a tall table that I'd dragged to the center of the hall. I remained there the whole night and stood sentry, turning at every noise or scuttle, searching for that thing I felt was sneaking to my table through the corridors of rubble and vacant furniture, reaching up the table to grab my ankle. As long as saw it before it touched me, I would be safe. For those first three nights, I forgot all about the dogs. And then on the fourth night, they found their way in. 4 Ten years. Ten long, dark years spent in the solitary confinement of the world's largest cell. Ten years wandering aimlessly hour after hour, day after day, until time stretched so thinly that it snapped and dropped me into the empty space of eternity, falling forever down to all ends, until the very reaches of sanity, alone, waiting, but always falling. And always dark. And now these creatures sought to disturb my peace. There were two that first night. They entered with caution, but not quite stealth, sniffing the air, senses pricked. They stayed close to each other and didn't enter very far. They were on the third floor looking over the balcony, surveying the clutter and rubble below, but though I was standing on a table in the center of the room, they couldn't see me. Despite the dark, I could see them. They were always next to each other, very close, touching and rubbing as if they communicated through sensory contact. A few sounds were exchanged—horribly familiar sounding noises, but nothing I could make out—but for the better part, the two creatures went about in silence. They reminded me of an old movie I'd seen when was younger. Jurassic Park. In a scene towards the end, a pair of intelligent two-legged dinosaurs chased two children into a kitchen. The reptiles sniffed, surveyed, clicked and chattered, but always remained close, as if breaking contact might result in their quick and violent death. That movie frightened me very much when I saw it. So did these things. But I stood still and watched them. After a few minutes, they left. At first, something argued that I could cohabit this building with them if all they wanted was to explore and sniff and hang around from time to time. But that's not all they wanted. They came in at all hours of the day or night, barging in and making horrid, horrid racket! Noise I'd never heard such quantity or volume in all the ten years that I'd been living in this peaceful solitude! There were sometimes two, sometimes half a dozen, but never one, and never did they come in quietly and respectfully, minding the possible presence of spirits of those that'd perished here, like my mother, or even something that might be alive in here! What, did they think that nothing could possibly overcome them? That because they were creatures of the night and the dark—creatures of this new, lavalite world—that they were invincible? I may have been living alone with no reason to defend myself, but my lifelong terror of solitude or the dark sharpened a honed sense of defense in me. If they wanted opposition, if they demanded attention, if their arrogance required fixing, I would give it to them. Like hell I would! Fix them good and proper. Dogs! Now I recall another reason why I named them so: Because dogs are oft used as the scapegoat to symbolize dirty, humble creatures—creatures with neither self-respect nor hygiene nor civility. Not the lowest on the food chain, or even the intelligence chain, but the crudest of all those so-called "higher" animals. Higher indeed! Man's Best Friend indeed! Their very presence desecrated the aura of this crypt that served both my mother and sister. I'd show them! After I discovered how they got in (through a one-way door behind the rubble on the third floor—I couldn't have got out that way, so no regrets), I barred up the entrance with heavy furniture and whatever means I could find. It should've deterred them. It should've given them a sign that something else was already here—something that didn't want them as company. But did they take the hint? On their next trespassing expedition, they came in greater numbers, combing the entire building below the third level as if looking for something. Didn't they understand that something blocked up the door on purpose? I thought so. And now they were looking for that something. I tailed them from afar. They left after a couple hours, disappointed, in the dark. One of them felt a little adventurous and trailed behind the others. I cornered it and smashed its skull with a block of conkreet. The others never missed—so it seemed, for they never returned—but I soon discovered I had a problem on my hands. The problem of a dead body in my domain, something to pollute and decay and stink up my marvelous environment. This angered me. A lot. I looked at it—dead, sprawled on the cold marble floor in a slowly expanding circle of warm red blood, and sudden thrill came over me. Maybe the thrill of the hunt and the kill, but it was something more than that underneath. It was instinct. Meat. Fresh meat. After a decade of eating salted corn beef and canned sardines, this was a Heaven-sent gift, straight from the gods as far as I was concerned. Tools weren't a problem. Neither was fire. That night, I dragged the body to my underground limo and feasted. I feasted like a starving glutton savage coming upon food after weeks of drifting in the open sea. The fire was giant, alive, and I cooked the creature whole. Its flesh was sweet. A bit tough, but it was delicious and a gratifying reminder of what my life had been before this nightmare. I would've eaten it even if it had the texture of leather. When I was satisfied, I ate more, and then, hunched over the burnt carcass like a caveman over his hunt, I wept. Memories flooded back as if dam somewhere in my mind had collapsed. Memories of what I'd been, what my life had been, of my mother, and my sister, and the whole world before this state—this state where the Land Out There must now be overrun with these creatures. When my reminiscing was over, I buried the remainder in the core shaft of the elevator. It was deep in there. It still had another hundred feet before my refuse filled it and I would have to find another. God knows why they left so much space beneath. But that night heralded the start of a new lifestyle for me. I gave up on ever leaving this place. This was home now to me. Going out into the world would be dangerous—and what would the point be? At least this way, I would go on with the sweet memory of the way the world had been. Sunrises. Noisy streets with bustling traffic. Parks and ponds and gardens. Rows of neat, matching suburban homes like the one that used to be mine. Starbucks! Oh, God, just that word brought back such memories. Fated, faded memories, like old yellowing photographs. But that was how I wanted to remember my world. Even with all its imperfections and badness, it was still my world. Not this. I didn't want to go outside and have those images written over with the reality of a nightmare. Life went on. I hunted the intruders on occasion, ate what I could, dumped the rest. Too bad I didn't have a freezer. The creatures learned; after awhile, they stayed away. People say that being alone too long can drive you crazy, and I suppose it's true. Being down here drove me crazy—I almost leapt off a balcony with a rope round my neck, remember?—but then the creatures came along. No doubt if you met me now in person, you'd find me a little asentrik, but I'm not crazy. Life was good in a way. Tolerable. And the dogs kept it interesting. And then the little brown dog came. My brown dog. And that spelt the end. 5 Now I sit in the ground floor of my fourth floor basement, writing this by my limo's headlights. The creature, my brown dog, is chained up to an old red fire hydrant, but it's dead already. I killed it first thing. No talking or teasing like with most of the others. This one terrified me, because it wasn't full grown like the others. I'm hurrying to get this done. I feel something overpowering me, taking over my mind. Not lunacy or the final straw being snapped before my mind removes itself altogether from reality, but something worse, something in the opposite direction—an awareness. I feel...how do I put this...I can't find the right words. It feels that all along since The Coming of the Dogs, it's all been wrong. The hunting and the killing and the eating. Most of all, the eating. Wrong. There's something wrong with the dogs, something that's been that way since the first time I saw or heard them, something that I should've known at once but failed to realize. What exactly it is I haven't figured it out yet, but I don't think I want to. The thought of that truth scares me. It scares me horribly. I can't say what it is I missed...but the dawn of that revelation is creeping up on me. I don't think I can stop it. It's coming closer, and so are they. They ignored it when some of their pack when missing or turned up dead. Even if they found cooked and eaten corpses, they left it alone and fled in fear. I would have done the same... There, again, that something nagging in the corner of my mind. The same...do the same... These wayward suggestions haven't quietened and crawled deeper into the shadows of my thought, but become bolder, standing in brighter light. I don't want to see them. I can't. I can't hold out much longer before I remember...or realize...and that'll be the end. I can feel my mind straining—like a beam under great pressure—and this final realization will snap it. But not only is this terrible truth coming. The dogs are coming, too. This time, with purpose. Vengeance. They didn't care too much when I killed the grown members, but now, I've caught a...whatever you call it. Not a puppy, because they aren't really dogs, but their young. They're coming to rescue it, and pay out in kind to whatever killed it when they realize it's dead. I heard them out there this morning—hundreds of them—gathering and making these horrible, excited noises. They sound like wolves in a feeding frenzy. And I don't know how, but I understood that they mean to destroy this building. Destroy it. My home. Gone to dust. And they will kill me, too. That's why I must hurry. I know I could hide out and elude them for awhile. I could live. But I don't want to live in a world where dogs have the power to destroy structures created by human hands. I don't want to live in a world where a human is hunted down by dogs instead of the other way around. My time has come. Our time. I guess I really was the last human on Earth, and for some reason, this doesn't amaze me. But I will go down fighting. I've planted traps at the entrance and along all possible routes down here. If, at last, they reach me, if their intelligence has evolved so highly that they can evade the traps and corner me, I will flee to my elevator. I pray the body blocking the way would've decayed enough by now so I can break through. After that? I don't know. Something tells me I won't make it out of here alive, and I don't really want to. If this is to be my end, let that end be fantastic! Let them come, attack me, bite me, tear me to pieces, but I want to see the sky before I die! My death is inevitable now, so let it be marvelous! I can hear them on the third floor. They're inside. I have to end this. To whoever finds this: My name is... My name MY name is tiwwwwwivyufjghsoooor... Never mind. The horror is real, but I can't remember my name. Doesn't matter. I am the last living human being of Miter Metro 73553, current population: 1. If you're reading this, then my worst fears were false, and I am not the last living person on this planet. I had a mother and a sister. I can't remember if I loved them, but I must've. The bombs killed my mother. Something else took Anne. I am twenty-two years old, and I've been living in the fourth level basement of FallPark Mall for the past twelve years. It's hot down here in the basement, the light from the car is dying, and the creatures are coming. They're coming to find me and kill me, but most of all to rescue their young. I don't regret killing it. I should say him, though. I know it's a...oh, God, no, not a boy, please...him because it...uggh! There! Again! I don't think I can hold out any longer! That pain in my head. That sense of knowing growing inside my brain...it will burst soon and spill out that fearsome knowledge. But I know it's a him because...ugh, God, my head... I know because he told me. He told me, in the same way he told me not to hurt him and that he wanted to go home to his mommy and daddy, told me he wasn't a dog, but a boy. A boy! Can you believe that? The creatures speak our language, but I didn't believe him. Of course not! How could I? Though I can understand him...it, for conscience sake I must call him it...it's the same tone as The Intruders. The Dogs. Those who came in with their strange skins and walking on two legs and all their trappings, calling out, searching, not calling my name but calling in the human language for anyone who might be foolish enough and fall for their trick. They came in, shining their bright lights—creatures with searchlights—calling out in our language, walking on two legs...oh, God, I don't think I can stand it anymore, that thing coming to remind me, make me realize...the world is overrun by them, I've been eating them, and now I killed their child—no! not child, their boy—no no no their young, the it! I killed the brown boy my brown dog brown like me and mine because I caught him and chained him here but he's not a dog not a dog he's not a dog, they never were oh my god oh my god that can't be true that can't be right! How did I mistake them in the beginning then hunt them and kill them and ohh...I can feel something pushing my guts up into my throat...I can hear them coming this way now...I ate them. For two years I've been eating them can't can't could've have happened...the last confirmation I need is a look in the mirror at my own reflection. I haven't done that in years, but I know that if I do, it will be the same face as the ones I've been killing. My Brown Dog I deserve to die. I deserve to die horribly. The traps won't catch them of course...too obvious a human would see them...they'll come and kill me. They won't eat me but fill me full of lead and bury me in the dirt and— HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO WRONG? My death is here...I might as well wait for it. I can't hide, not from them. They've brought dogs of their own, real dogs, bloodhounds and smelling dogs... Wait...the lift...the elevator...why am I still writing this? The elevator...I have to know... 6 From the Miter Metro 73553 Herald, Friday, October 2nd, 2020 (page 1): JONES' BOY FOUND DEAD: MYSTERY KILLER TURNS SURPRISES In the early hours of dawn this morning, Metro Police stormed the locked down shopping center, FallPark Mall, after heavy suspicions pointed to it being a hideout for the prime suspect of the string of grisly murders and disappearances from Miter Metro 73553 in the past two years. After combing through the decaying rubble of the collapsing building that had been locked down by faulty Radioactive Emergency Lock Down System (RELDS) applications in October 2008, the SWAT Team discovered the body of seven-year-old Danny Jones, who'd been reported missing by his parents two days earlier. The boy was pronounced dead on site. Police have declined further comment, saying that the details are not an issue of public concern. Police spokesman, Lieutenant Lewis A. Jeffery, says that the routes to the basements were blocked with "childish, ludicrous booby-traps." Team Leader, Sgt. Dave Polley, declined to elaborate, but commented that "whoever thought marbles and trip wires could stop the Metro SWAT" were "seriously mistaken." Sgt. Dave's team pursued the suspect, who'd presumably fled the scene shortly after the Police stormed in. They found him at the highest level of the twelve-storey building. He was standing in the see-through glass elevator, gazing out into the slowly waking metropolitan of downtown Ruther Street. Sgt. Dave says the suspect turned on them when they confronted him, and his team was forced to "subdue" him. The suspect was pronounced dead on the spot. Lab records have identified the twenty-one-year-old male Caucasian as Roberts Dunnow, son of the late Steven K. Dunnow. Ironically, it was his father who designed the RELDS and committed suicide shortly before the FallPark Mall Tragedy. Even now, interrogators are piecing together what may be one of the most startling stories of the decade. According to sources, Roberts was trapped inside the FallPark Mall when its faulty RELDS locked the building down because of a nearby structure undergoing demolition in October 2008. The sound and shockwaves of the blast apparently triggered the false RELDS Alarm. Most of the people inside the building at the time of the system failure were able to evacuate, and the rest were subsequently rescued by search teams. It seems that Roberts was trapped in the building, where he managed to "escape" all rescue attempts and searches. For twelve years, he has been living in the prison-like confines of FallPark Mall, surviving on preserved food from a Mega Mall. Police have attributed the disappearances of Barlow Matthews, Joseph Philips, Stevie H. Berkely, Layla Rochester, Elaine Roderford, Jonathan and Crystal Sheares, Aaron Bergaway, McClean O'Brien, Andrew Nelly, Rodriguez Frederick, Nelson Roddicks, Burms Laetia, Victor Callahan, Roland D'Maggio, Leroy Patch, the murders of George Pert, Charlaine Adams, Lisa Bowlé, Cathy Perkins, Allen Trolls—the corpse of the last having been found cooked and partially eaten—and, lastly, the kidnapping and murder of Danny Jones, to Roberts Dunnow, who allegedly committed these crimes over the past two years. Police have closed the cases on all sixteen disappearances and six murders. Sgt. Dave reports that before Dunnow attacked them, the last words he said were, "The sky! The sky is still blue!" And then, "How could I have been so wrong?" Then Dunnow attacked them and police had no choice but to use lethal force against him. Members of the team on-site refused to comment, but one of them said that he'd "never seen eyes so wild and fearful. It was as if [Roberts Dunnow] he just realized a great and terrible understanding." Roberts's older sister, Anne, a doctor at Metro's St. Joseph's Hospital, was at the scene to identify the body. Lieutenant Jeffery says he hopes this "closes the book on this gruesome saga." Real Estate mogul, Richard Gibbons, says he will now continue his plans to demolish FallPark Mall, what he calls "Metro's Landmark of Terror." * Jesse De Rozario Singapore, September 2004 * Copyright © 2006 De Rozario Jesse All rights reserved. Portions of this document may not be reproduced through any means, including, but not limited to, scanning, uploading, reproduction, transmission, and distribution via the Internet or any other means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying or recording in any form, without express permission of the author. Any reproduction or redistribution of this document must be done wholly and in its entirety.