Page 104 of The End of the World As We Know It
She just looks back at me, tired. “Don’t fight them,” she says. “When they come for you, lie down and be sad.”
I jump up and down, screaming. I will never do that! I will fight them until I die!
Tak Tak Tak comes back when the sun is going down. Even though I can’t see it, there are no windows where we are, I still feel it moving through the sky. He is limping and covered in cuts. The VISITOR holds me back from the entrance with a buzzing stick that burns and hurts. There’s something wrong with the VISITOR. A sweet rot beneath his skin. Sickness. He puts Tak Tak Tak back in our cage. He wipes his brow and staggers as he goes away along the corridor. We never see that VISITOR again.
As soon as the VISITOR is gone, I go to Tak Tak Tak, lick him and kiss him and give him love. He just lies there. He won’t speak to me. I cry because this feels almost as bad as being alone.
When the door opens again, it is a different VISITOR. This one is young and sweating and female. I hurl myself against the mesh, snarling.
“Stop,” the golden dog says. She’s dying now. I can smell her insides rotting. She lies at the back of her cage. “They’ll think you’re sick. They want the sick angry ones.”
But I don’t care what she says. I want to hurt the VISITOR for what he’s done to my brother. The VISITOR looks at me and Tak Tak Tak. Tak Tak Tak is curled in the back of the cage and doesn’t move. I throw myself against the mesh again and again.
The VISITOR takes me. She is strong for someone so small. I am dragged through the dark, along ways and passages and then shoved through a door. It slams closed behind me.
The light is blinding, white hot on my eyes after the dark. I am in a wire enclosure. Another cage, but much bigger than the tiny oneI have shared with Tak Tak Tak these last few days. It is loud.Badloud. Screaming recorded voices blare from the walls. Beyond the wire, there is a dark place. The floor is covered in sawdust. There’s blood mixed in. I trot around the perimeter of the cage, trying to find a weak point where I can get out. Maybe I can dig. I scuffle through the sawdust, but it’s concrete underneath. A small object is thrown up by my forepaws. I bend to sniff it. It’s a long canine tooth that has been torn out at the root. I think about eating it, but regretfully decide that it is not MEAT. I have not had MEAT for some time. Being underground has taken time from me, I don’t know how long it has been since they fed us the maggot MEAT, and I am hungry.
I see there are dead VISITORS strewn along the rows of seats beyond the wire. One of them moves, then another, and I see that actually two of them are alive. One I don’t know, and the female who brought me here.
“Where’s Frank?” the male asks the female.
“Dead,” she says. “It’s just us now.” She strokes the leg of the dead VISITOR beside her. Then she takes a shining thing from her pocket and suddenly there is blood on the other living VISITOR’s face. He stares at her, tastes it, and then puts his fingers into the red slick and strokes it down her face in a gleaming line. He does it again. They start to laugh, covered in blood. “To the end of everything,” the female says.
“I’ll get the GIANT,” the male says. “Let’s watch some fun before our time comes.”
The door into the cage opens again and something comes through—a big black dog, twice my height. It is the weight of a bear. It is very sick. Strings of bloody snot and drool fall from its muzzle. It has forgotten everything it ever knew.
The two VISITORS get on their hind legs and roar. The big black dog roars, too, and comes at me with parted jaws. I leap high in the air. It is big and strong, but confused. I dance and twist out of its way. Its hot breath follows me. It is almost fun. I am laughing atthe dog. The dog cries and roars and leaps at me. The VISITORS scream with delight.
I dance and leap and run until I am tired, and still the big black dog follows. I leap a little less high each time, and its jaws come closer and closer, snapping the air behind me.
The jaws crunch onto the scruff of my neck and the dog picks me up like Ee Ee Eee used to. But the dog is not carrying me with a mother’s kindness. It shakes me like a rat. I twist once more with the last of my energy and fasten my teeth in its vulnerable throat. Blood runs everywhere. The VISITORS are frenzied, shrieking with joy.
The black dog is MEAT and I tear chunks from it even as it lives. It’s bad MEAT because of the sickness, but I will eat anything at this point. I am so hungry. The light is so bright and the roaring so loud and I am alone, which my kind should never be, and the lights and the screaming and the bloody faces of the VISITORS get into my brain, and I realize, yes, this is what it feels like to be insane. It happened to Tak Tak Tak, and if I stay here much longer, it will happen to me.
The loop goes around my neck, and they pull me away from the MEAT. I am yanked through the dark.Clanggoes the cage. Tak Tak Tak lies sad and crazy in the corner. I nose him. “I understand,” I tell him. “That is a place with no brothers and sisters.”
“They like to watch the pets fight,” the golden dog says from the next-door cage. She is nearly dead. “He especially likes to watch the dogs who played with kids and fetched the newspaper to kill each other.”
“I thought they loved their pets,” I say.
“These days everyone kills what they love,” she says. “To prove they’re not afraid.”
The golden dog dies soon after saying this and it’s quiet for a time.
I nose Tak Tak Tak and try to talk to him. But there’s no sign he hears me. He cowers in a pile and makes no reply. “Like the RABBIT,” I keep saying. “Remember the RABBIT?”
I tense as footsteps come down the hall. It is the male VISITORwho comes again. He’s not interested in Tak Tak Tak anymore; Tak Tak Tak is quiet like a dead thing. I bite and snarl and dart, avoiding the loop and the stick. He’s so busy with me he doesn’t notice Tak Tak Tak creeping along the side of the cage, not until Tak Tak Tak is upon him. Only an idiot would have not seen that coming. But the VISITOR is beginning to be sick. He doesn’t know it yet, but I can smell it. Also, he is an idiot. Even though we have not eaten for some time we are stronger than him because we are not sick. The blood of his throat makes a spray in the air.
Tak Tak Tak and I leap over the VISITOR. He is twitching and clutching his neck. We race through the dark, following our noses toward the fresh air. Our claws slip on viscera. It is leaking from some dead VISITORS sitting in a neat row against the wall. I wonder if they were made to fight one another, too. We quickly run past them. We come out of the door, and we run and run through the city.
They forgot that we are not dogs. We areLycaon pictusand we were eating the VISITORS thousands of years ago, long before they learned to put us in cages. The sickness does not get us because we are not dog or human, and we will live a long time, while their lungs turn to liquid and their eyes lose their light.
Since we have been underground, the city has started to rot. The streets are filled with the dead. But there is something else, too. Tak Tak Tak and I follow the call of the something, something that lies beyond the sickness and the concrete. It grows stronger as the buildings thin out, as we come near it.
We don’t stop at dark, we don’t even stop as hunger eats us, as the sweet stench of the bodies calls to us. Everything here is MEAT now. But we are done with this place.
We reach it at the beginning of the second day, as the light rises over the world and the city ends. We are at the edge of a great golden place. This is what has been pulling at us, all this time.
