The County Dog was an old grey mare who wasn’t what she used to
be. But She was all we had.
It was a lonely world that we had created for ourselves. From the
beginning of time, Humankind had sought to communicate with an
Otherkind; at one time S/He had other species of humanoids to
converse and trade with and among; but these the early modern humans
killed, for reasons that are as unfathomable as they are no doubt
appalling. So humankind felt alone, and ever more lonely, even among
the lower orders of animals which still thrived alongside us for
hundreds of millenia.
Yet we scarcely could ever be said to have been good stewards to
these, our stupid cousins. We beat them and enslaved them; and for
untold thousands of years, we even ate them. For sport, we
killed them, and we mutilated their bodies afterward.
And when one day we decided that we were sick and tired of living
among so many dumb creatures, none of which we held out any hope for
communicating with to any remarkable extent, we started the wholesale
slaughter of them. Just because we wanted to be alone, to live at
peace, and in quiet solitude. We humans had thought we knew what we
wanted, and in our desperate, lonesome misery, we got it.
It had been years and years ago, after the last great Depression,
that Humankind finally put an end to the vast majority of all those
other pesky species they found themselves sharing the planet with.
What was left now was mostly a collection of stragglers and
has-beens, plus a few true, hardy survivors. Of those, only a few
people had ever been granted access to see them. Of the rest, well,
most people saw them from time to time. Or one of them, anyway.
Usually on the weekends, and sometimes after dinner on
weeknights.
One time a group of people who called themselves
"the sciencists" announced that there were only about
35,000 non-human fauna left. These were scattered across the globe,
put on display in various regions, districts, counties, and states
(depending on where you happened to come from). And they represented
roughly 9,000 species.
What humans missed most about all those
extinct, or nearly-extinct Animals, was the Dog. This most sacred of
all the creatures was so scarce that only about 130 existed in all of
the United States of Amerigo (for instance).
The thing about Dogs was that they had for thousands of years
provided humans with a very special kind of companionship, one that
few other Animals could claim to give. Monkeys could sign crudely,
and dolphins could follow fairly complex commands; but it was the
lowly, wordless Dog that Humankind communicated with the best of them
all.
So, what we had left, we simply called
"Dogs."
In my state, Ohia, in the USA, we had
80-some counties, and in each one of those was a County Dog. Most of
these were a variety of other creatures, such as snakes, elk, some
bugs, a chicken or two, zebras, bull elephants, ostriches, one camel,
and assorted sheep. There was one Dog, up near Cleaveland. Most of
the states had at least one. One state, New Hampster, had none.
Californ Yeehaw had three; so did Texis and Al-Axa.
Needless
to say, the Real Dogs were the most popular of the County Dogs.
So there was Merissa and Kyle and me. My name’s Davij. We were all
sitting around on a Saturday night, trying
to think of things to do. Last weekend we did practically nothing,
just sat around and ate pretzels and played racing games on the video
console. This time we were even more desperate, Merissa having smashed
the gaming block in a frenzy just Wednesday evening. She could be a
little aggressive like that at times.
Kyle said that he heard somewhere that there was a new Dog, a real
one, at a fairgrounds in Mary Land.
"So the fuck what,
Kyle? We got one up in Cleaveland!" said Merissa, looking
uninterested and in fact barely looking up from her mag-o-zeen
article.
"But this one’s different. They say it’s the
first new Dog ever. As in, there’s no others like it anywhere
else in the World!"
Kyle was known to believe just about anything he heard. The
problem was that about half the time, what he heard turned out to be,
inexplicably, true.
I’d previously been having a better time,
as usual among these two (when we weren’t having sex), staring at the
dust on the blue-green walls of our little dingy 14th-floor
walk-up apartment, but I just had to put my two cents in. "Just
what the hell you think that means, anyway? And where did you hear
that from?"
"Chat."
"Chat doesn’t
know shit," I screamed, at no one in particular. I think we all
knew the story there, and if not, I didn’t feel like going into
it.
"So says you," said Kyle, indignant. "But
everyone at work always asks him first about this kind of stuff. They
say his dad used to be one of the Sciencists!" He was picking
his nose and fooling around with the pale red plastic cap of his
raspberry ice-drink.
"And…?"
"He was.
I heard the same thing myself, from Emersin," claimed Merissa.
Whatever. Yeah. Alright, whatever. So what? That makes him an
expert?
After a pause: "Whatever. Yeah. Alright,
whatever. So what? That makes him some kind of instant, automatic
expert or something?" I was fuming.
It made no sense. A new dog? Like, a new breed? But how? There
were too few Real Dogs left to take any chances at moving them. The
last time it was attempted, the poor thing – a nervous little
cocker spaniel – died in transit. Things were getting
desperate, but there was, at least, just a little frozen spermatozoa
left with which to artificially inseminate the females that were
left. But in just a couple more generations, that would be the end of
that.
I had thought I’d heard that some “alternatives”
were being looked into. In theory, at any rate. But no idea that
anything had been carried out.
"Hey, you dumbasses. Why
don’t you look it up on the news?" (From Merissa, who always was
the real brains of our little outfit.)
So we looked it
up. It was true, all right. They had assembled a team of Sciencists
together to come up with a way to keep the Dog Race alive somehow.
What they had done was engineered a brand new Dog! Whatever
that means. The thought just creeped me out… but just like a
bad skycar wreck, I couldn’t just ignore it.
We scrambled like
eggs to get together all our gear: prayer hats, robes, and boots. I
threw on my cape and out we went. We jumped into my car, an old
Benz-o-matic Creeper. It was ancient; ran on wheels, like most
people’s cars still did. It was mostly rust and melt, but it still
ran, generally speaking.
We knew where we were going from the
news machine. It was at the fairgrounds outside of Beth’s Da. It
would be about 6 hours from Klumbus, where we lived.
The drive
was long, and between radio stations we sang old-time rock-songs and
tried to remember the names of all the Celebrities. Kyle won, with
26. I had 17, and Merissa had 19. Kyle watched a lot more teevee, so
that’s why he was only 6 away from naming them all.
Somewhere
outside of Beth’s Da, we crossed Route 671. ("That’s five worse
than the Devil’s number!" shrieked Kyle, ever the panicker.)
There was a line of cars crossing under the road. I knew from when I
was a kid and came this way that there was a fairgrounds around here.
If memory served, then those cars were, the way I figured it, about
five miles’ worth of screaming, kicking kids, drunk uncles, flummoxed
fathers, and sleepy girls. Five miles! It was about 10
Clockings-A’Night, though, which was pretty much the evening
primetime, since most people tended to get off their day shifts about
8N, ate at about 9N, and then went to see the County Dog after
dinner. Still, that was an awful lot of fucking people!
About
a half hour later, we were there. We pulled into a Changing Station
to change into our Dogging Clothes. Kyle and Merissa started getting
all frisky until I elbowed Kyle in the ribs. "Remember where we
are, dipshit," I cried. Merissa looked slightly embarrassed, and
we continued changing in silence. The air was stifling. It was
mid-summer, and it was humid out. I swatted a gnat from in front of
my face. Gnats and a couple other insects were among the only other
"common" animals left. They were dwindling, too, to be
sure, but some things never change. Human nature being what it is and
all.
On our way back to the car, we noticed something
peculiar. Under the lemon-yellow of the parking lot lights, there was
nothing but blacktop and those phosphor-green lines that tell you
where to park among the other vehicles. And that was it. There were
maybe 15 cars in the whole lot, and doubtless at least ten of those
were employees’ cars. Let me tell you, that was spooky to see. Even
on an off day, the lots are always pretty full. Go figure! With only
one County Dog every few hundred square miles, that’s the Place To
Go. But why was the lot so empty? This was supposed to be something
special, was it not?
It was so quiet that we could hear each other breathing as if our
lungs were great bellows in some ancient cathedral in the middle of,
I don’t know, wherever they had cathedrals at. Spain or whatever.
You have to remember that we didn’t have things like birds or
crickets and stuff in those days. So any noise had to come from
either people, or machines. And neither category was active on this
night, in this place.
Merissa looked nervous and pale. “Whaddya suppose things
just didn’t work out for some reason?” she warbled.
“I don’t know. Something different is going on, that’s for
sure,” I replied. It really didn’t matter what I said at that
moment; I only wanted to fill the air with something.
“Davij, that’s it! We’re at
the wrong place, I bet! That’s why the other fairgrounds were so
busy… duh!” cried Kyle. But we all saw the screen.
Three different news sites all specified the exact same location. And
they were all confirmed to the last 30 minutes.
We were standing by the car by
this point, staring around and trying to decide what to do. Across
the parking lot (Kyle pointing out), someone was coming out and
leaving. We watched the car speed off. Whoever was at the wheel was
driving like a maniac.
“Stupid fucking drunks!”
screamed Merissa, nervously cracking open a half-pint of Old
Mountaineer’s Apple Rum, right before swigging about half of it right
down and passing it blindly to me and Kyle.
I took a good swig, and started
the car. The path from the Changing Station was well-worn and long.
It felt like ten minutes before we came out and into the mouth of the
main lot. Only the car’s wheels over the gravelly road kept us
company for that short eternity.
For some reason I will
never be able to explain, we parked at the end of the lot anyway,
rather than up front. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it was just a force
of habit. We walked the whole way to the entrance, about 200 meters
or so of empty silence. We didn’t say a word, either; just walked,
hand in hand, staring in crazy-eyed wonder at the heavy blankness of
the parking lot.
We got our tickets, 235 credits each (about
30 more than back home, I noted), and went inside. Unsurprisingly
(considering the state of the empty lot we’d just walked through,
otherwise yes, very surprisingly), there were no lines inside
either. A beeline to the traditional green-and-orange County Dog tent
got made that night.
What I saw when we got inside stole away
my wonder and left me with some pretty clear answers. How often does
that happen to you?
There were about a dozen or so
people in line. The air smelled of stench, but it was a little bit
different from the normal hay-and-shit, County Dog variety of stench.
In a cage to the center of the tent was the Animal. It was a Dog, all
right, but not a natural one. This one was made of the parts of other
animals. It had a pig’s tail, a fox’s snout, the top of its head and
ears were some kind of fat deer or something, and most of its legs
looked like they came from some kind of large cat, like a cougar or a
puma or something. The body was definitely wrong. It looked like it
might have been a goat. Except that it also looked as if somebody had
forgotten that real Dogs don’t actually have wings, and made a
rather hasty adjustment. It was the shoulder blades – they just
seemed wrong somehow, like they were too high or something. It looked
like they may have forgotten about installing a neck to the poor,
wretched Thing; although up close, there may have been something
there after all. The whole thing was a melange of different shades of
oranges and browns and grays. It was striped, and it was spotted, and
it had disturbingly mottled hair in all the weirdest places.
But
the line kept going, and people went up to Pet the creature, and to
offer it gifts of beans, simulated meats, jellies and breads. Each
client carried their little votive candle up and blew it out at the
right moment, asking the County Dog for its blessings and advice,
then spitting into their prayer hats and stomping them with their
shrine boots, bending over in a bow toward the creature’s head; and
each left with the same astonished look on their face.
Nobody
in line was speaking, not even us. By the time we got to the front of
the line, we were all visibly quite distressed. I am not ashamed to
admit that Kyle even had tears in his eyes. Maybe I did, too. I
really don’t remember that.
I will never forget what that
County Dog said to me that night.
