Dogscape, The Jackalbeest

My name is Arthur Lewis Jennings, I'm from Seattle, Washington, and I'm sixty two years old.

For four years my wife Bianca and I have been walking through this godforsaken hellhole. I used to love dogs. We had a golden retriever named Mack, once. He was the best dog I'd ever had before he disappeared into that mass that was overtaking our neighborhood. We had a twelve year old daughter too, Amy, but we put her on one of the ships that was evacuating from our town. Headed straight for Hawaii, they said, they'd come right back for the rest of us. It's been four goddamn years since then. While society is still keeping mostly intact even in this new world, you can see where things are falling apart. People have gathered into bands and even tribes. Even more have gone mad. I've already had to kill nine people to keep them away from my Bianca, each of their faces on Viet Cong soldiers as I shot them down in my nightmares.

I seem to be one of the few people today that have actual books, most of what else I've seen was blood written on hide. In my backpack I have a copy of the Holy Bible, A Connecticut Yankee, House of Leaves, and Watership Down. The only other person I've seen with more than one book was two years ago, a man named William dragging a cart full of them over the unsteady carpet of dogs. I would have helped him if he didn't have blood all over his front.

I tried to dig into one of the dog towers to see what was inside, convincing myself that the dogs I hacked aside with my trusty ax can't really feel pain. Even with most of their spine severed, those soundlessly wagging tails and kicking feet didn't stop until they were completely severed from the rest. There was so much blood, but I got far enough in to see that the dogs had carpeted themselves to the cement and brick of buildings. With more digging, I found a window, but all I could find were more dogs piled inside, coalesced into the now familiar biomass. I'm sure there are plenty of things inside, like a table or maybe even a chair if I cleared it all away, but it would be far too much work. It looked like the biomass kept growing, so it wouldn't be long before the room would be overtaken and filled once again. The concrete seemed to be weakening under the dogs, anyway.

I killed any free-roaming dog I came across, we drank its blood and burned fur to cook its flesh. It's come to the point they started to taste like chicken under the acrid taste of burnt hair. It was only until recently that Bianca and I tried eating the puppies that grew from the dogtrees as we've seen the others do. It wasn't as bad I thought it would be, even with its blood getting soaked up into my beard, its flesh not at all like meat like I thought it'd be. Bianca didn't seem to care for them, though. She only drank from the mass of teats only because we haven't once found any sort of water source since it all started. Even if we travel back West again, I wouldn't be surprised if all we can see now are dogs.

But I don't even know what we're doing now. We just have to keep moving, keep from being absorbed in the biomass. I tried to build a small hut from dogs once, just to get out from under that goddamn sun. Lashing bone and skin with the thin sinew taken from the dogtrees and the carpet, I had managed to get a roof up with four poles before it started sinking into the ground, being reabsorbed into the biomass. Afterward, when the hut was was gone, I hacked and chopped at where it disappeared in a fit of rage, only stopping until I had dug waist-deep into the carpet and was standing in a pool of blood and mashed flesh. Since then, Bianca has become more and more distant, shutting herself away while I cussed and hollered at anything that looked sentient that wasn't her. It wasn't supposed to be like this. We were supposed to retire and live out our days together once Amy left for college or something. Hopefully live long enough to see our grandkids. I'm too old for this shit.

Today we came across something we've never seen before. We could smell it before we saw it, a massive pit and a giant dog head at the bottom. It looked like one of those African wild dogs, unlike the other domestic dogs that made up the biomass. What was something like that doing on the American West Coast? I only had a few more moments before it opened its eyes and began scrambling out of its rank womb. Jesus Christ the thing was as big as a horse. It revealed a large umbilical cord connected to its belly and groin while it shook itself out. Before I could tell Bianca to get back while I grabbed my ax, it was already on top of us. My ax stuck into the side of its neck before it knocked me aside, trampling me while it grabbed my wife of thirty four years by the arm. She screamed for me while I scrambled back onto my feet to chase that motherfucker down and make its skull into a goddamn codpiece, but it jumped back into the pit, where they were both swallowed up. Its entrance wasn't like the rest of the carpet, it was clenched tight and didn't give way even to to my ax.

That night I cried longer and harder than I've ever cried in my life. Without Bianca, I no longer had any reason for living. I know my daughter would never come back to this hell. So I will wait for it until it comes back, then I'll crush that fucker's face in as soon as it opens up again. After that, I don't know. I guess I'll just lie down and let the world consume me, too.