How long?
Dog whined again and started off through the thin, dead, swamp trees.
Follow him, the man told himself. Your friend knows where to go for safety.
He stumbled after Dog, occasionally stopping for a few ragged breaths, trying to make as little noise as possible, cringing when some dead stick snapped in the darkness. He followed Dog through the night along the remains of a sandy-bottomed stream, and then up out of the stream and across a carpet of dead, ash-gray leaves.
The man reached out without thinking and grabbed the rusty iron railing that ran alongside the dusty stone steps leading up and out of the swamp.
It was the touch of night-cold iron that made him realize he was holding onto it. Holding onto something that could lead him out of the dead swamp. He clung to it for a moment and knew… knew there wasn’t much left in him.
He reached up to wipe cold sweat from his forehead and found the dried blood.
Oh… he thought.
Dog whined from the top of the stairs.
Slowly, the man began to haul himself up their steep length, pushing away thoughts of sleep and the edge of the gorge that was big enough to take him.
I can’t leave my friend here now, he thought and smiled up at Dog who beat the air wildly with his tail.
This is all my fault.
At the top of the stairs, the man saw a small empty parking lot ringed by an ancient mesh fence, and beyond lay the building he’d been looking for.
He went to one knee. Dog came up and licked his face.
“Of course,” said the man. “You’ve been searching all these years with me. You were looking too. All that time.”
In the distance, another pack of dogs began to bay and howl, like savage coyotes whooped and called in the night. The man knew the Mohawk’d Dogeaters had them by the thick straps of their large leather leashes, following the scent that would bring them straight here.
Dog bounded off across the parking lot and up the steps of the building.
The man stood and followed, knowing this would be the last search. Knowing what he would find. He climbed the wide steps, knowing that beyond the double doors of this place he’d find nothing. Again.
Nothing but….
Crumbling shelves.
Ashes in a fire pit.
Bones.
And nothing.
The double door was bricked over with cinderblocks. The man looked about. So were all the windows that usually ringed such places.
It wasn’t a large building, and they walked its circumference, finding each and every entrance sealed.
In the distance the Dogeaters were closing. Now they were down along the bottom of the dead swamp, casting about for his trail, baying and shouting bloody murder.
Dog began to growl and whine all at once.
“I know…” said the man, and couldn’t think of what he knew except that they were surrounded and out of options.
He looked up at the roof and thought, That’s all we have left.
Dropping to the ground and removing the pack, he fished for an old orange electrical cord he’d found long ago. For a moment he began to swoon as the blackness tried to consume his vision. Tried to consume him. The howling of the Dogeaters became distant and hollow all at once.
And then he was back.
Quickly he made a harness for Dog and tied the other end around his ruck.
“Stay,” he told Dog as he shouldered his pack once more. “Stay.”
He pulled himself up onto a low concrete wall and then reached out for the side of the building. He breathed deep and began to find handholds that would take him up toward the lip, knowing there would be a moment when he would need strength to pull himself off the ground and onto the roof.
That moment came. It came and he was holding onto the lip of the one-story building, knowing that to fall was to break something he could not afford to pay for. A leg. A hip. An arm. Anything would be a death sentence. Anything was beyond his ability to pay.
The baying of the Dogeaters along the sandy bottom of the dried-up stream reminded him that he was already under another death sentence.
“What does one more matter,” he chuckled deliriously and began to pull. He pulled and knew his strength would not be enough. Maybe if he dropped the pack. But the cord was attached to the pack. To drop the pack was to leave his friend.
“That,” he grunted, as an icy sweat broke out along the fiery iron coursing through his shoulders, “will not happen.”
But as much as he tried to pull—and he knew his strength was fading and there was not more than the smallest bit of it left—he could not gain the lip of the roof.
Some massive dog sent up a howl in the night.
Down near the steps, thought the man.
Its companions began to moan. He could hear the low, harsh grunts of the men who held the thick leather leashes. The Dogeaters.
He thought of the gorge that would take him. Of the fall into it.
It was big enough.
“Please…” he grunted. “For my friend who found me when I was lost and ready to give up.”
He almost screamed as he tried once more and instead exhaled a gusty, “please.”
And he was over the lip, feeling the ancient grit of the roof on his palms. He lay there panting, knowing that he’d pulled some muscle that could never be made right again. He struggled out of his pack and grasped the cord.
He looked down at his friend.
His friend who had found him in the night.
Dog barked.
And the man began to haul his friend up onto the roof.
They lay there for hours, silent as the Dogeaters followed the trail and called and called again into the last of the night. In time, in the early hours, they’d gone off on some new scent.
The man and the dog waited.
Knowing maybe one of the Dogeaters had remained in the shadows to watch and wait.
Dawn came and when the man was sure no one had remained—or if they had, they’d gone off—he got to his feet. The day would be beautiful. Golden light filtered down through the ancient eucalyptus giants that seemed to be everywhere.
In the center of the roof was an old hatch.
“Let’s go down inside, Dog. Even if there’s nothing left, it’s safe for us.”
He broke the old lock with his crowbar and peered down into the darkness.
There was a smell.
Like one he’d never smelled before.
Not death.
Not ash.
Not decay.
Not bones.
He’d smelled those all his days.
Sweet and almost heavy.
And his heart began to beat as he remembered the day she’d held one under his nose.
“I love their smell,” she’d told him one winter’s night, late, when he could not sleep in the refugee camp and there was no food, but she’d found something else to pass the long hours of the night.
“These are our past,” she’d said to the little boy he once was.
Saint Maggie.
The girl who was becoming her.
He carried Dog down into the dark. At the bottom of the stairs he lowered his pack and pulled out his tin of matches. He struck one.
He could hear Dog panting in the darkness.
They were standing in a small hallway. The floor was smooth. Linoleum. Clean except for the dust.
And that sweet heavy smell was almost overpowering down here.
Like it was a dream. Or dreams. Or all the dreams one could imagine. Dreams in sleep that seem so real, they must be. That the world inside the dream is the world and there’s no memory of the one where the sleeper waits for morning.
So real.
At the end of the small hallway was a gray door.
They walked forward, and the man pushed open the door and saw the tremble in his own hand as he heard a soft hiss.