Volume 6: Dead Dogwood Avenue Blues: Nathaniel's Journeys Part 2

Dead Dogwood Avenue Blues: Nathaniel’s Journeys Part 2
by Scott Thurlow

Nathaniel was entering another abandoned suburb.  He could tell by the silence as he approached it.  It was a natural type, just quiet enough.  No trouble should be around to impede his usual search and scavenge methods.  He went about to the normal spots, where people most often left goods unused in their homes, or fled without taking them.  Nathaniel found a few remaining intact and usable items (batteries and duct tape being some of the more prized of such) which he packed neatly away in his bag before continuing his ransack of the dead town.

As he went on to the next house, he almost tripped over something.  Lying by the side of a shallow ditch was a dead dog.  Its eyes had been picked out by carrion-feeders of one kind or the other.  Its tongue lolled out from the side of its mouth.  Blood or bile matted its tattered greasy black fur, slicking it down in ratty clumps.  Nathaniel glanced up at the street sign on the corner without really knowing why.  It proclaimed the street he was on: Dogwood Avenue.  Nathaniel didn’t see many dogwood trees around the neighborhood, but that sign, named such, and the dog itself, was bringing another memory rushing back to him.

It was the time Nathaniel found himself being chased by a wild pack of formerly family dogs.  There were four of them.  In the wake of the structural breakdown caused by the human infection, household pets were rediscovering their ancient instincts.  Foremost, that they didn’t really need humans to keep them fed after all.  At least, not with dog food.  Friendly Fido furiously and fearsomely went ferociously feral.  Nathaniel stumbled into this new reality as he was searching for useable utilities, performing the same task he currently was.  It seemed things in life were constantly trying to eat Nathaniel.  Then, as now, he often wondered if it would ever end.

The town Nathaniel found himself in at the time was a nondescript, generic, mediocre America type of place.  He remembered then how closely it resembled his hometown much in a way.  Nathaniel had never really noticed how alike all of them were, until he had to go from each to the next.  “Americana”--approximations of the cherished idea of The American Dream.  All packaged and produced wholesale across the country.  (Even the dogs were mostly indistinguishable from each other.)  Then abandoned en masse when the dream roller-coasted away into a nightmare, one also shared by the entire world.

Nathaniel had been salvaging what he could from the wreckage of that crushed, destroyed dream, to continue living to mourn its demise.  He remembered sifting through scraps of anything useful left by those swallowed up by its death-rattle, when had just enough time to look up at the noise (a noise which didn’t sound like the infected, but was nevertheless alarming) and see the surprisingly speedy pace by which the pack was advancing on him.  It was all strangely familiar to him at the time.  Déjà vu of impending doom, but this time via rabid canines.

He had left his car too far away to easily retreat to, so he ran in the other direction, back across the lawn and around to the other side of the nearest house.  In its backyard was an above-ground pool and patio set.  As generically manufactured as the rest of the town itself.  Nathaniel ran towards it without a second thought.  He had to hastily avoid tripping over a faded white plastic lawn chair that was in his path.  The lead dog followed at his heels as his momentum brought him to the edge of the pool, then up, over, and into it.  Nathaniel flopped into the water with a splash as the dog made its own remarkably timed leap and followed him in.

There was a half-deflated polka-dotted plastic seahorse in the pool that Nathaniel tried pathetically using to fight the hound at first.  When it bit through the float toy in half, ripping it from Nathaniel’s grip, he found himself grappling barehanded with the beast.  He managed to quickly wrap his hands around its neck and halt it before its jaws could close in on him.  A flash vision of Anna flew in front of his eyes, before his attention was snapped back to the fierce animal.

With no other options in sight, and feeling the instinct rise up in him, Nathaniel plunged the dog’s head under as forcefully as he could manage, submerging it under the grimy water.  He wasn’t sure exactly how long, but it didn’t seem like much more than a minute or two before the dog ceased its rage and bobbed lifelessly beside him, like the sadly shredded seahorse, in the water.  The other three still surrounded the pool yipping and snarling incessantly.  Nathaniel had no time to cry over a dead dog.  He looked around and spotted an elaborate children’s playset in the next backyard, beyond the short picket fence that separated the two homes.  With the now depleted pack watching and hungrily tracking his every move, Nathaniel balanced up on the edge of the pool and readied himself to jump.  His clothes dripped scummy water and he shook himself off as best he could before having to make his next move.

He was able to just clear the fence as the dogs came howling behind him.  Nathaniel headed towards the red slide of the playset.  He didn’t see at first the number of other dead and half-eaten smaller animals scattered in this yard.  Squirrels, rabbits, what looked like a calico cat, all reduced to bloody leftovers and gnawed bones.  Nathaniel skirted around them to the playset and ran to the slide, shimmying upwards while grabbing its edges for balance.  When Nathaniel made it to the top, the dogs jumped and slid down it in vain a couple of tries (luckily his damp clothes had slicked the slide, making the dogs’ task more difficult) before settling on pacing and snapping impatiently around the perimeter of the playset itself.  He looked then to the screen door at the back of the house he was at.  It stood ever so slightly ajar.  He couldn’t make out much more of the view inside.  Nathaniel felt it was his best hope though, far better than being trapped outside on top of the playset.  He gauged the quickest way off the slide and through the door and into what would hopefully be a safer place.

Nathaniel wasn’t quite fast enough to slam the door shut completely behind him.  A single member of the pack had made it through inside with him.  Nathaniel dove to the side of the first piece of furniture he saw, a bland cream colored couch.  The dog wasn’t prepared for this and carried a bit past the couch, skidded across the tile floor as it tried to halt itself, before finally bouncing off a kitchen cabinet.  It let out a wounded yelp.  Nathaniel decided to act while the mutt was still stunned.  He ran towards what he figured was the hallway leading to the front door of the house.  The dog recovered itself and rapidly resumed its course, but Nathaniel had reached the exit ahead of it with seconds to spare.  Shutting the lock into place behind him, he slammed the door and found himself back outside, on the front steps of the home.

The remaining two dogs had apparently plotted his course and were not interested in giving up the chase any time soon.  They were waiting for him just outside.  Nathaniel decided the house trick had worked once and still seemed the safest option.  He ran in a beeline to the backyard of the neighboring house to see if it or any others had also been left open.

It took him a few more houses before he spied another open back door.  Nathaniel zig-zagged this time across the yard, hoping to confuse the dogs, or at least tire them out, as he himself was expending much more energy than he was originally expecting to on this excursion.  For this attempt, he tried to purposefully lead the dog through the door with him, hoping to be better prepared for his next action.  What he was not prepared for was the sight inside.

Nathaniel had indeed managed to successfully trap himself in with yet another dog.  Inside this second house however was a circus of another kind.  If when it rains, it pours, then today it seemed to be a hurricane of canines and felines.  Dozens of cats wandered the house, or lounged on pieces of furniture.  Some mewed but most milled about or looked lazily up from their resting perches.  That is, before they got wind of the hungry hound that had entered their domain.  The interior erupted into chaos, the cats scattered in all directions as the dog tried to decide which one it most wanted to chase, abandoning Nathaniel as intensely as it had started hunting him.  Nathaniel locked this dog alone in the house with the army of cats.  It might have been a fair fight.  Either way, he was left with just one canine assailant on his trail now.

With the faint sounds of the animal orgy he had just created and left emanating from the house, Nathan saw that the last dog awaited him patiently in the street.  It stalked back and forth, no longer rushing blindly at him, having had time to recover itself.  Now, it was intensely focused on Nathaniel, despite its successive loss of pack mates.  Perhaps it had decided to see this battle to the bitter end out of a sense of revenge, so bent did the animal seem to be on finishing the pursuit.  It glared and growled menacingly at him from a short distance away.  Nathaniel knew it would soon spring and frantically surveyed his surroundings for an escape.

A few yards away, he could make out a shed of some kind.  It appeared quite sturdy.  Another staple of middle class home owning.  The metal door swung open and shut a few times, banging in the breeze, then settled.  He headed towards it.  The dog sensed his intentions and was on his trail in seconds.

In a turn of maneuvers that worked out again in his favor, Nathaniel reached the door and grabbed its edge, slamming it shut behind him in one smooth series of motions.  He heard it click into place.  He was safe, for the moment.  Protected by what appeared to be a well-stocked gardening enthusiast’s or construction worker’s supply shed.  Shovels, rakes, and a variety of other implements of all shapes and sizes hung adorning its walls and shelves.  Two chainsaws, one larger and the other smaller, leaned side by side in a corner.  A number of two-by-fours and a table saw lay across a wooden workbench.  Outside the shed, the last dog was wildly jumping and pounding against the door, barking nonstop and producing a raucous riot of noise.

Nathaniel looked around at the items contained in the shed and thought for a minute.  He then selected a medium sized hammer and a small pair of recently sharpened hedge shears.  He crept to the door, slowly unlocked it and kicked it open with more force than he thought he had in him.  There was nothing there.  A split second later, the last feral canine pounced on him, barreling in unseen from the side.  Nathaniel dropped the hammer as he was knocked off balance by the force of the dog crashing into him.  He fell and rolled, tumbling across the ground with it, attempting to grapple it in the same way as the one in the pool; but finding the circumstances and field of battle much more to his disadvantage this time.

The tangle of Nathaniel and dog came undone a few feet away from the shed.  Nathaniel realized in an instant that he still gripped the shears in his other hand.  He had just enough time to glance up as the dog came snapping back at him.  He lashed out and slashed at its snout.  As a splatter of its blood hit his face, Nathaniel saw that his wild swipe had caught the thing low across the throat with the shears, and mercifully ended its life.  Nathaniel flopped back as the dog’s dead weight fell on top of him.  He coughed, then rolled aside and pushed the carcass off.

Nathaniel sat up.  He was panting like a dog himself with exertion, and finally starting to feel the chill seep into him from his wet clothes.  But all seemed quiet again.  He glanced about.  Nothing new appeared to be menacing him just then.  Nathaniel got up to check himself.  He had had suffered some cuts and bruises in the struggles, but was otherwise unhurt.  His travel pack was sealed and no supplies seemed to be ruined.  He had survived the bizarre battle.

Nathaniel looked over again to the dog whose throat he was forced to slice open moments ago.  He leaned over to inspect its collar and attached tag.  At first he thought it read: Rex but upon closer examination, he could make out it was actually: Max.

“Sorry Max, old boy, but it was going to be either you or me,” Nathaniel quietly mumbled as an apology to the slain canine lying beside him.  He realized he was actually (albeit a bit guiltily) relieved that everything had turned out the way it did, versus some of the many alternatives.

Nathaniel wondered at the time if anyone else had ever had to dispose of attacking animals in any such manners.  He supposed it was possible, but as far as he knew, he was probably the only person in the world who could make the claim.  It wasn’t exactly the most comforting feeling in the world, but it seemed like something to Nathaniel.  He would see many more things beyond duels with wild dogs, and ponder the same type of question many times.  But for that day, he had escaped the animals and had to concern himself with the next unforeseen peril.  He gathered himself up and prepared to finally exit the dead town, which was now populated with four more canine carcasses.

Before he left, Nathaniel reached back over to the one lying by the shed and carefully removed its collar.  “Sorry again, Max,” he said as he patted its unmoving body.  He put the tag in his pocket, perhaps for luck, or so he told himself then.  He decided that he would take the shears with him as well.  He stashed them in his pack and headed back.

As he trudged cautiously to his car, after checking all the way for hidden attackers of any species, Nathaniel found himself wondering also how many other freshly formed wild packs of previously tame dogs had come running through how many other neighborhood yards.  He also wondered whom they had belonged to, and what their former owners might make of the fate their pets had met at his unwitting hands.  Most likely they would’ve behaved in the same manner as the dogs themselves, or worse.

Nathaniel looked down again at the dead dog presently lying in the ditch of Dogwood Avenue and reached in his left pocket.  He pulled out Max’s tag, though the name had become barely legible on the cheap metal’s dull surface.  It served as a reminder that unexpected danger was always lurking.  It was not something he reflected particularly fondly upon, but it still taught him valuable lessons about the new state of the world.  He dug out his watch from his pack and glanced at it.  He did not have any more time to think further about dogs or dogwood, or the lack thereof either.  There were no more dogs, dead or otherwise, to be seen this day, in this faceless town, on the wayside of Dogwood Avenue.  Nathaniel thew the tag down alongside the dog’s rotted body.  Then, he departed the town, like he had from so many others, all so much alike.  He knew fully well that, in some way, every dog has its day.