THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG

Baskerville and I hunted the woods and streets and fields of a dying world. He was bigger now, more muscular, because I’d spent some days making armor for him. Dogs couldn’t become zombies, as far as I knew, but they could be killed. So I made him a suit of leather armor fitted out with studs and spikes and blades. He didn’t have the full rig on all the time, but enough of it so that he added extra mass to support it. He even had a helmet.

At first I thought I was going to have to muzzle him so that he didn’t bite any of the dead. If he did that then his mouth would be a danger for me to be anywhere near. But Baskerville had some kind of instinctual abhorrence to dead flesh. He wouldn’t bite any of it, and I later found out that if we came upon someone who’d been bitten but wasn’t presenting with symptoms, the dog knew it. He’d growl and stay at a distance. That saved my ass a lot of times.

We hadn’t yet gone west to Nevada. I knew I’d get around to it, but I was stalling. We’d been back to my uncle’s farm a dozen times, trying to pick up the scent of Junie or the baby. Or anything. But Baskerville only sat and howled. I did that sometimes, too.

There were travelers, refugees, wanderers out in the storm. We met a bunch of those. Most were deep inside a bubble of their own PTSD. Gone mad or gone feral, or just . . . gone. Some were cool, though. I met a guy named Billy Trout, a reporter from Stebbins, the little town where the plague started. He was stuck with a bunch of school buses that had been killed by the EMPS. The buses were filled with kids, and Trout was taking care of them while waiting for his girlfriend, a local cop named Dez Fox, to find him. Her bus had gotten separated from a convoy before the power was blown out. The plan had been to take the kids to the post-apocalyptic version of the Promised Land, Asheville. Rumors were that people had made a successful stand there and were trying to build something. A community.

I helped Trout fortify his place and then moved on.

Then I ran into Dez Fox, who was in real trouble. She was something. A fiery redneck blonde badass who took no prisoners and cut no one any slack. I liked her in about the same way you can like a pit bull. We fell in together because she was protecting her bus of kids against a bunch of assholes who—and I’m not joking here—called themselves the NKK, the Nu Klux Klan. No, it doesn’t make any sense no matter hard you stare at it.