HOPE CHRONICLES – CHAPTER TWO

Let me tell you about my hound.

I found her when I broke into an abandoned warehouse while avoiding a Zombie horde. It was early into the Crash and the Zombies were focused entirely on gratification of short term urges: I am hungry right now and I can’t image planting some food or taking care of some livestock, so FEED ME!

Double face palm for this lack of forward planning.

There was a goddamn full blooded Irish Wolfhound, in place like Texas no less, in the building’s rear room. She was emaciated and had managed to survive by drinking the puddles of water that came in through holes in the structure. Half crazed by hunger and lack of human contact, chained to a wall, abandoned by her owner, still trying to guard the building, she stood her post faithfully until the biological imperative of survival overrode her breeding and her training.

She ate the warehouse cat and everything within reach of her chain. Even what was probably the remains of her owner.

How different, really, was the vast majority of humanity from this hound, at that point, in the choices they were making?

God must still love me because this warehouse serviced veterinary supplies, including, Jesus my beads, dog food and pet medicines. There were even some comfy doggie beds. The Zombies had mostly stripped the place of what a human might eat or use but were either too proud or too stupid to use stuff originally intended for animals. Bad for them, good for me.

With some tools and several more broken fingernails later, I managed to get her collar off and was rewarded with a quart of doggy slobber and kisses. Yeah, girl, I know how you feel, even if you’ve got fleas, I thought.

We bonded while sharing cans of dog food. That’s me, Taste Taster of Doom. My favorite was Chop House Bone Steak Flavor ™ as it had a nice sauce I could mop up with some little cakes I made from stale crackers from the lunch room. My hound favored Chop House Rotisserie Chicken™.n

Actually, when heated up over a small fire, it wasn’t too bad. It was already cooked after all. I did draw the line at the cat food.

A girl’s got to have some standards, after all.

I treated us both for fleas, clipped our nails and we got a good (but cold) B.A.T.H using the doggie shampoo. Just like a trip to the spa with the girls, aha, aha.

About 1 week into my hiding out there, we awoke to the sound of a crowbar being applied to an interior locked door. I grabbed the hound and retreated further into the warehouse. I really didn’t want to kill anybody, having no prior experience with doing so. I did have a crowbar and a machete, as well as a good working knowledge of anatomy, but, yuck, no, I didn’t want to kill anybody.

It’s amazing how much you can hate doing something and become very good at it when your survival is at stake.

Two Zombies had forced the door, gotten through my impromptu barricade and began to ransack the supplies I had gathered from the warehouse. What they weren’t going to steal, they looked intent on destroying. I couldn’t see any guns, but one was wearing an oversized leather duster. An M1 tank could have been hiding under there.

My hound transformed from statue-like stillness to ravening wolf in 2 heartbeats, all muscle and fangs and speed. All 150 pounds of her slammed Duster man to the ground and ripped his throat out. Just like that. The second zombie whipped out her crowbar and ran for my hound with, amazingly, more murder and insanity in her eyes that what was probably her baseline.

Ran to kill one of the few beings that had not tried to kill me, eat me, or rob me since this whole shitstorm went down.

No, I was not going to let one of these Zombies take anything more from me. It was as simple as that. No, never again. This far and no further. No fucking way.

“No” is awesomely powerful word.

In 2 heartbeats I cast away a lifetime of healing people, of following the rules, of being an Official Good Person. It wasn’t a heart pounding red hot rage. It was a cold as zero kelvin kind of fury, calm and steady, running like a silent river of black ice through my soul. I swam in that river, drank its dark waters and emerged a being transformed. Into what I was not totally sure, but it was a being that was going to end this threat right here and right now. I closed the distance with my crowbar in my left hand and my machete in my right.

I was not screaming incoherently.

Blocking her crowbar strike with one of mine, I swung my machete towards her neck. She tried to block with her left arm but my hound was now busy turning that arm to hamburger. Striking at your enemy’s neck isn’t as easy as you might think. Or maybe my machete was dull, whatever, but once I struck I had to finish the job. You don’t leave wounded animals, you just don’t, even if they have been trying to kill you.

I stood in that dilapidated warehouse, with two dead Zombies at my feet, ALIVE, with the blood dripping from my machete and the jaws of my hound, and I felt for the first time, a spark of hope that I might survive this nightmare and get to my family and our retreat.

Hope, huh, now there’s a name for the Apocalypse.

I looked at my hound and said, “I christen you ‘Most Almighty Zombie Killer’. ZK for short”.

She chuffed in reply, the doggie version of an eyeroll, before scratching at an errant flea.

Well, it sounded good to me.