Luanne is our last neighbor. I don’t ever see her in the daytime, and Dad says it’s because she’s busy working, but Dad is a bad liar because nobody goes to work anymore. No, I’m pretty sure Luanne is like Dad. Only worse. Instead of beer cans it’s probably hard liquor in glass bottles, long-necked, canting against each other like dizzy swans.
I only ever see her around sunset, when she walks Charlie—Charlie who is small and close to the ground, Charlie who grunts and whimpers pitifully at the sounds that come from the forest, Charlie who slobbers helpless at the end of his leash. Whenever I see him I remember last summer, back when I begged Dad to get me a dog, back when not having a dog was my biggest problem.
But then I learned I wouldn’t be going to seventh grade in September after all. And then they shut down the highways and the price of oil went up by ten times ten and Mom left on horseback for Nosleep City. She never came back, not that we thought she would. Those cities are open mouths.
And then the mountains started lighting up red at night, unknown figures setting fires in the darkness. Dad tried to tell me they looked like slices of pepperoni on burnt pizza, to make me less scared, but they don’t. They look like eyes. After nightfall the bare slopes are fever-bright with them, glowing scarlet through the deathlike haze. I wonder if that’s why Luanne goes out after dark to walk Charlie. So the two of them can watch the fires flickering into being one after the next, proof of life in another place.
A few weeks ago, before the broadcasts stopped and the television became just another useless box, I saw a massive skull on TV, long and slender, lying in the dust, surrounded by the bombed-out wreckage of Nosleep City. The camera didn’t linger on it long enough for me to be sure, but it looked like it might have been a horse’s.
One evening I’m watching Luanne and Charlie take their nightly walk down the driveway. Without warning, Charlie yanks his leash out of Luanne’s hand. The old woman lands hard on her ass on the gravel, shrieking at me to catch Charlie before he runs away.
But Charlie doesn’t seem like he wants to run away. He slows down when he reaches me and circles me, mouth open, dark eyes turning orange as they reflect the sunset, blinking in astonishment.
He can’t be that old. Only seven or eight…maybe older if he’s as malnourished as he looks from his protruding ribs. I wonder if I’m the only person he’s ever seen besides Luanne.
She’s flat on her back, not getting up any time soon. I know Dad’s on his back too, in the house, head full of beer and the ghost of my mom’s desperate voice and the horse head lying stripped of flesh on a ruined street in New York City, before it was called Nosleep City, before it lost its name.
Charlie is still looking up at me, panting, his tongue hanging out. I crouch down and run my fingers over his collar. It’s plain, without even a nametag. It’s fastened too tight around his throat, ruching up the skin underneath it like a rug, and without thinking I click it open. It falls to the dirt, and beneath it there’s a red rash that makes my own neck itch in sympathy.
“Why didn’t you undo it yourself?” I ask. But I’m smiling, because that’s like asking Dad why he didn’t drive north as soon as gas prices went up. Or asking Mom why she fled to a city that, for months already, no one had come back from. Logic doesn’t exist anymore.
Charlie shrugs, but he’s smiling too. His mouth falls open and I see that his teeth have been filed to points. A string of drool drips from one corner of his lips. Gross, I think, and raise my own hand to my mouth.
He mimics my movement. Brings one of his hands up to his chin, wipes the drool away. His nails are long, his knuckles red. He sniffs and growls low in his throat as he looks back at Luanne.
“You want to kill her?” I whisper, and I swear he can understand me. Well, why wouldn’t he understand me? He can hear as well as anyone else.
It would be beautiful, in a way. I could watch him rip out the throat of the woman who kept him captive for so long, and then stand guard over this dead landscape as he runs after the shrinking sun, into the glaring mountains.
But I’ve got a better idea.
I dart back into the house. Dad’s holed up in his study, probably eight beers deep, and I know if I stay here long enough I’ll be stumbling in on his dead body one day. I grab some rope from the shed and return to the scene outside.
It doesn’t just look like blood, with the firelight of sunset—it smells like it too. The taste of metal floats through the air onto my tongue. Charlie raises his head from Luanne’s corpse as I approach, and his mouth is dripping blood.
I don’t slow down. I kick him in the side, knocking his skinny body onto the ground. Then I wrap the rope around his throat and pull it tight, not enough to choke him, but with a knot intricate enough that he won’t be able to untie it with his hands. Then I pull him up again.
New direction is pumping through my blood. Now I’m not alone anymore. Now I’ve got someone with me who will do more than lie around and drink poison and wait to die.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go look for Mom.”
