I think I'll always remember when death frolicked across my front yard. He was graceful, swift, and hard to sit down. Kinda like a child, you know?
You might not. I'd be surprised if you did. I mean, we don't see kids around here anymore. We don't see people much in general.
I like seeing people. Breathing ones, that is. Oliver could care less – he's convinced that everyone has a story. He plops himself down next to someone – anyone – and listens to the wind whistling between the two holes created from that one bullet.
Its always one bullet, by the way. One magic, fat bullet that seems to get people. It got Steven and Katie, and it probably would have gotten Mom, Dad, and Travis too if they lived to see it. When the bullet got Katie, Steven was convinced that this magic bullet actually chases you your entire life, weaving in and out of the madness a person throws upon itself before it finally gets to you. I remember asked him if there was a cue for the bullet to finally pounce. He never really had the chance to answer.
Ollie lingered on him for days. I'll remember that, too.
Katie was the oldest by a good few years. When she wasn't fighting for our survival, she'd talk on end about what college was like. Steven, a little younger than me, said she was just like those corney textbooks you're force-fed in highschool. Katie never cared. She'd go on and on for me and Ollie, and we'd sit there just listening to her stories without much of a care. Oliver loved the sound of her voice. I liked it too, because since the third wave hit, not much sound exists. I wanted to be a singer, believe it or not; I wanted to hit Broadway after high school. Skip college altogether. That was how Katie and I met – she heard me mention something to Oliver about college, and she came over to our corner of Camp to tell me how wrong I was. Ollie liked her from day one. Her demeanor. Her hands. Lord almighty he couldn't get enough of her hands in his coat.
"What kind of dog is she?"
I told her that he was a mutt. She said something about how we all were, and I agreed. Ollie wagged his mutley tail and put a paw on her leg, gently commanding her to keep petting him.
Ollie, in his own way, was a dick. He was self-centered, not totally observant, and really, really didn't care too much for the things going on around him. Then again, that was before everything changed. Once we lost our family, he kinda eased slowly into the life of one really, really long w-a-l-k. We've been marching on since then, and I think that each step has helped him turn into a real working dog.
Not that he wasn't beforehand. Oliver is some sort of Australian Shepard and German Shepard mix, or that was always my best bet. So he knows how to work – hell, I taught him more tricks than any dog on our block. We won a competition when he was 1 and a half, where we showed off all of his tricks. He knew it all, and when I say all, I mean it all.
Everything but fetch. For the hell of life he couldn't figure out how to fetch. Dumb dog. Whatever.
It was a few weeks before he actually was able to catch something for us to eat, but even then I give the command as to when to crawl forward and when to get it. He's a good listener, that mutt, and maybe one of the best. You actually don't see a lot of dogs around these days, since most of them were just house decorations. Our other dog was a little more like that – Maggie – but she also had the age factor against her. She was a little over fourteen years old when the first wave hit. She didn't stand a chance, and she died not too long afterwards.
Poor old girl. Her breath had that horrible dog breath, and no matter how hard I scrubbed she would never stop smelling bad. Not that I didn't mind it… I miss it, nowadays. I miss the little things, like her horrible stench. You should'ov heard her fart. Jeezus Mary and Joseph she could let it rip.
But when Katie was hit, Steven panicked. He started going off on how Ollie wasn't actually doing anything but eat our resources, so I punched him square in the jaw. I'm pretty sure I broke a finger with that blow – sorry, I never really made for a good fighter – but he got the point. We went on two weeks longer before he was gone. It was a long two weeks.
Days, weeks, months? Its all hard to keep track of, especially since there isn't a value to it anymore. I try to keep track of each night I live through, partly because having something to cling on to is supposed to help you push forward… or something hippie like that. I have one of those stupid little butterfly notebooks that you give to little girls when they went to the dentist; I try to mark each time I see the moon, but I keep forgetting whether or not I've actually marked it. its hard to read my dashes anyway, but I try.
Someone somewhere said that was "the human thing to do." I remember getting all caught in the moment of the vocabulary test we took each Friday, and how each Tuesday I'd tutor for three hours but get paid for only two. In those days, it didn't really matter, but its what life revolved around. I didn't care about how much I was paid, that little kid was a sweetie.
After the first wave hit, I never saw that little kid again. she was obsessed with dogs and got along swimmingly with Ollie. He, on the other hand, wasn't too keen on sitting still for her, but he was a good boy even back then.
Ollie makes for the best company a wanderer can have. That's all we really are now, anyways. Wanderers. I stopped by a camp for a while but didn't stay because one of the drunkards who resided there tried to get to me, if you know what I mean. Ollie really proved himself that night, and once I came to my senses, I packed us up and headed out.
I don't really know where I'm going. Ollie doesn't seem to care all too much, but every now and then he doesn't get up when I call; when I turn around, he's looking at the ground like he's contemplating the universe. I can see some despair in his brown doggie eyes, and every now and then I'm pretty sure he's actually human.
But I whistle and things go back to normal.
As normal as normal is, nowadays.
It was nice when we picked up Katie and Steven, or rather, when they picked us up. Its been a while since then – approximately a month, according to my little drabbles in my butterfly notebook – and we're somewhere Eastbound. East is where my cousins were.
I try not to linger on the past since that's really the only thing you can do. My Mom and Dad never really earned the "Mom/Dad of the year" award, and as hard as it was getting on my own two feet, I was a lot luckier than most. I mean, how many teenage kids know to hide a vodka bottle from two full-grown adults? Not many, and that's a skill you can apply to any job application. Travis died alongside Mom and Dad when the oceanic masterpiece shook the planet to its core, or at least that's what I tell myself. I was visiting an uncle no one really cared for when we lost contact with the rest of the world. He told me everything was okay, but he was a fat-assed liar. I brought Ollie on the trip with me since Travis wasn't going to be home to care for him, and Uncle Paul needed someone from the family there for some cort business. We were working our way to the grocery store to swipe some chow when an earthquake pretty much broke my foot. As Ollie, Uncle Paul and I tried to keep our heads above water, we met a few interesting people passing by en route to salvation.
One pair of them, Marie and Jose from Elko, told us about the alien's needle from the sky. Marie was certain it was Jesus's doing, but Jose was quick to get to the point. Nearly all of California was lost.
I mean yeah everywhere where there was a coast or a beach was ultimately destroyed, but the only thing that mattered was my hell-home, and it was gone.
And it was gone.
Ironic, in some ways, since California was in a sick drought up until the earthquake, but whatever. What goes around, eh?
As a chick who grew up on Star Trek reruns, I was surprised by the hostility of the situation. The President was supposed to go up there and negotiate for our lives, but I guess that never really worked out… plus the intergalactic peace group hadn't been established yet on Earth, so I guess we were kinda screwed.
Don't get me wrong. I've cried and cried and cried. I've punched walls and thrown furniture and screamed.
But after doing that for days and gaining nothing from it, I tried to take my life.
That's what Uncle Paul did. He decided the court problem with his ex-wife was bad enough, so with the apocalypse he wasn't willing to sit around and wait for nature to kill him. He was going to die "on his own terms."
When I ran into his room, Ollie had beat me to it. He was sitting in a fresh pill of blood and brain from Uncle Paul, the uncle no one really cared for. He sat there and sat there, moaning on occasion and licking Paul every once in a while. I cried and sobbed and freaked out.
And once I was done, I took what I could and headed East.
That's where Ollie and I are headed no. We survived the detonation of bird shit across the planet, and we're moving to find somewhere were we can live in peace. I had family in Colorado, so that's where we're going.
OR we're gonna die trying.
Either way, I'm going to die on my own terms, thank you very much.