Bones bounded after it, crashing through overturned display racks, leaping over fallen mannequins to retrieve the hat. He brought it back and dropped it on the top of her left shoe.
The tail kept wagging.
As Rags bent to pick up the hat, she told herself that this wasn’t smart, that they needed to stay focused and to keep hunting for supplies, clothes, and food.
Instead, she and Bones played fetch for nearly an hour. With hats. With fuzzy slippers. With balled-up socks.
The next day Rags and Bones went in search of a pet store.
The store had been looted. Hungry people will eat pet food if they can’t get anything better. The shelves were bare of cans and bags. The cages had been torn open and most were splashed with blood. Either the hungry dead or the hungry living had been here.
The rest of the stuff was there, though.
Rags found a whole bunch of bright-green tennis balls, and she stuffed several of these into her backpack. Bones insisted that they play with one of them, and an hour blurred by. Rags laughed a lot because Bones acted like a big puppy when he was playing fetch. He was clumsy and pretended to hunt the ball.
None of the dog beds were big enough for him. People had taken all of those. But she found a set of saddlebags that buckled around the dog’s barrel chest. She filled the pockets with toys, flea and tick medicine, and two bags of gluten-free dog treats that had been accidentally kicked under the front counter. She gave three of them to Bones, who nuzzled her afterward like he was in heaven.
Every day after that she took time to play with Bones. No matter where or how far she threw one of the fuzzy green balls, the big dog found it and brought it back.
He paid her back by helping her find food. He had an amazing nose, and he could scout up items she missed. In stores, in homes. Boxes of peanut butter crackers in a cabinet in an accountant’s office. A box of instant rice in a cupboard of a house that had clearly been searched. Even canned food, which was something Rags couldn’t understand. How could the dog smell food in sealed cans? She certainly couldn’t.
Between the two of them, they survived. They both put on a little weight, and eating better helped them get stronger. Rags was still thin, but over time she became wiry rather than merely skinny.
Sometimes Bones went out hunting alone and came back with blood on his muzzle. Rags hoped that it was animal blood. There were rabbits and squirrels and raccoons everywhere. If Bones was hunting like that, then it was okay. That was natural, even if it was a little disgusting.
But Rags remembered what Bones had done to those cannibal scavengers. She made sure that she washed the dog’s face of every last drop of blood before she’d let the animal cuddle up with her.
She washed his coat and applied the flea medicine. She found heartworm medicine and gave him regular doses.
She fell in love with the brute, and he clearly loved her.
Bones appointed
himself her protector. He proved it many times.
Once, when they were creeping along the border between Northside and Japantown, Bones began growling very quietly. No barks. She hadn’t heard him bark at all. Not once. But that growl stopped Rags in her tracks. The dog flattened out and crawled to the edge of a parked car and peered under it, so Rags dropped down and looked to see what it was.
A line of dead people were walking up the street. Why they were there or what they were following, Rags never found out. Sometimes the dead just walked. Mostly they didn’t; mostly they stopped moving if there was nothing for them to do, nothing to hunt or chase. A few, though, always seemed to be in motion.
Rags and Bones lay there and watched them. Nine of the dead. Adults and kids. Black and white, and a couple of Latinos. All of them pretty much gray now. Walking in a loose pack down Empire Street as if they had somewhere to go.
They didn’t hear the growls. Bones did it very quietly and stopped as soon as it was clear Rags was seeing what he wanted her to see.
It was like that.
The dead passed, and then the two of them got up and went in a different direction.
Another time there was pack of men. Survivors for sure, and maybe scavengers. Or maybe something else. They didn’t look as crazed as the cannibals, but they did not look friendly. Or safe. There were two really big men and a few others. One man had snow-white hair but he was young, probably no more than thirty. So many muscles, and a face that scared the crap out of Rags. Guns in holsters, knives strapped everywhere. And he looked around him with sharp, dangerous eyes. Red eyes. An albino, Rags thought, though she had never met one before.
The other big man was a few inches shorter but every bit as broad-shouldered and mean-looking. He had black hair and lots of scars, and instead of a gun or knife, he carried a two-foot-long length of black pipe wrapped in electrician’s tape.
The other men were no prizes either, but compared to the two big men, they seemed less important. Followers, thought Rags.
Bones had heard them coming and immediately took her wrist between his teeth and pulled her off the street. That was something he did, and even with all those fangs, he never once broke the skin or left a mark. She would only have gotten hurt if she’d tried to pull away. Rags didn’t. She’d come to trust Bones. So she let him pull her into a burned-out beauty shop, and they crouched together in the shadows, watching as the men walked down the center of the street. They walked with the kind of bold confidence people had when they were afraid of absolutely nothing and absolutely no one. Not the living and not the dead.
The men talked in normal voices. No whispers. They made crude, disgusting jokes, and they laughed like donkeys. Rags hated them on sight. She feared them too. If they weren’t cannibal scavengers, then they were clearly dangerous in some other way. If it hadn’t been for Bones, she might have walked right into them.
Beside her, Bones bared his teeth in a silent snarl of animal hate. If he was afraid too, he showed it in a different way. The hairs on his spine stood up, though, and he did not blink once until the men had passed the store and moved on down the street.