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SKILORD
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Live free or Die
Mar 2002
time: 05:35
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His paw smeared down across the window again, wiping away a line of mist from the window. He had been panting determinedly for hours, coating the window with a thick layer of mist, now he could enjoy the fruits of his labor.
I hoped it was a joke, his jokes were usually pretty good, enough to make me grin and, Lord knew, that was a feat in this day and age. My old, wrinkled and stained lab coat hung about me, I held a beer lazily in my right hand as it drooped desperately towards the floor.
His sloppy writing began to appear.
’Why did Beethoven kill his chicken?’
I could hear the paw slap the cement floor on the other side of the window, behind the short stub of cement that supported it, a few moments later I would see the face of the only friend I had left. It was an eager face, proud of whatever nonsense it had scribbled across the window. Tongue was lolling out of a misshapen jaw, black coat was glistening against the overhead lights, his tail was wagging expectantly as I tried to guess his riddle.
“I dunno, why did he?”
’It kept saying ‘Bach.’.’
I tried to grin, for the dog’s sake, but it was probably not enough, he’d gotten good at guessing when my emotions were illegitimate, we had spent hours there, staring dully at each other, studying poems. He stared at me, his tail slowing to a halt.
There had been a time when that would have been enough to earn him more attention, more doting than I could give him alone, he was still young enough to remember. The dog began to walk around the wall that held the window up, inspecting me with a curious turn of his head. The poor beast was terribly inbred, the left side of his jaw jutted out at an odd angle. It didn’t seem to cause him any pain, but the doctors had offered to fix it for him anyway. In the beginning nothing had been denied to him, nothing had been denied to him right until the end. He had hurried to his window, rushing against them, I can still remember the words.
’No, this is who I am. Do not deny me the right to be myself.’
He was an odd dog, he would have been odd if he were a person. He was undoubtedly intelligent, but eccentric, but as one of the blessed that was his liberty I supposed. The dog had earned it, freeing himself from that Tennessee farm when he began to write messages on their windows. He had watched the farmer’s child learn to read, he had taught himself from the table scraps of knowledge he had stolen. The farmer had, at the child’s insistence that the dog not be shot, called the pound to remove it. The dogcatcher had begun the long process that had led the dog to the facility. We had spent a year studying him, breeding him and experimenting as though he were still an animal. Maybe he still was. One of the scientists, I can’t remember his name anymore but he had always been a happy, plump man, always ready with a smile, he said that the dog had a poet’s soul, such blatant romantic idealism. He said he pitied the beast, that it would loose itself fully into the tide of its beliefs and never come up for air.
I never doubted the truth of the plump man’s words, less so now, when I know how far those ideals drove him.
He was examining me now, his brown eyes almost looking through me. Usually someone would wonder at that moment whether or not the beast was more than a beast, whether there was a soul lurking somewhere in the dark inside. His eyes glittered with the intelligence we had worked so hard to breed into his descendants, they had failed to receive it and we shipped them away. His tongue drooped out of the misshapen jaw.
“What do you want?”
The dog hurried back to the window, he had hardly used up any of the fog that he had put there. In the old days we had had machines to fog it up for him.
’You’re remembering again, aren’t you?’
I could only smile at this; I was probably one of the last humans left who could remember. Whatever had gone wrong on that day had left the rest dead and dying. The old lab had worked as a bomb shelter, it was underground and out away from most of where the bombs had fallen. Radiation poisoning had still been a problem, though, and sickness. Then there were the crazed people, the cancerous and mutated images of humanity from what was left of outside, they hadn’t been too kind towards the scientists who had ventured out. They had broken in a couple of times, but Doctor Elbrech had fixed that before he too submitted to the poisoning from one too many trips out. There were no contacts from the government; there were no humans, only the demon specters who haunted the outdoors. They died slowly of the radiation that they wallowed in, they nursed radioactive burns with bandages, they fought for food and they died. Most of the men had killed themselves out of despair, I was the only one left with the will to live. I had a large room full of unspoiled rations and we had lived together for two years, me and the dog, alone.
We sat alone, he was a mockery of man, built by man to a higher level than he deserved, but I counted him a better friend than those scarred and shattered remnants of humanity. Here was one who could understand my words, respond in kind. This dog was more man than the men outdoors, those parodies; it occurred to me, were more dog than he.
“Why am I still here? Why haven’t I just killed myself too?”
The dog stared at me for a moment, ‘You’re afraid.’
I frowned, how true, the thought of my fear brought the self loathing trickling up, I hated myself for the life I was too afraid to steal from myself.
‘Death be not proud…’
I shook my head, “Though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” I finished the couplet.
‘John Donne.’
“Holy Sonnet 10,” I replied, we had a rather large collection of poetry, the dog had always loved poetry and we had spent the last two lonely years among the minds of the poets. The men who had lived and died happily, without having to wonder if the radiation would kill them or whether something was lurking somehow outdoors, prying at the handle, learning, growing stronger. Using our tools against us. Using our tools against me.
Such ambition we had had before the malignant hacker had broken into the Department of Defense’s computers, before he had managed to rig everything together, managed to launch all of our warheads without ever consulting the president, without it going through the hundred precautions that we had put in place. I couldn’t imagine how they could have, it should have been impossible. They had been smart, smarter than us all. Now they were probably dead. This was no solace. He was just another corpse amid the rubble, another life that would not be there to rebuild humanity. Now he’s almost certainly dead too; I can’t imagine why he did such a thing. His final message was all that we had, it had been sent to every conceivable email address three minutes before the strike. In a facility that does nothing more than study a dog, email is checked frequently, a printed copy of the email sat defiant under a well dusted computer monitor. I didn’t need to read it, I knew what it said.
‘Now is the time that worth is established. Now will the world be wiped clean of thousands of years worth of treachery and distrust and now mankind will be fused together, for they have no options but these: join as brothers or die.’
Three minutes later humanity had been shattered, a final, ironic chapter to the human histories. Claiming his intentions peaceful, he destroyed us. Now he too was probably dead. I shook my head. Three years later it was painfully clear which option we had elected to take and it was a sad commentary on mankind, or at least the handful that could still be counted men, the invisible and distant handful that often existed in nothing more substantial than the fevered dreams of a survivor. I was mankind, for all I knew. Were the bastard children, the outdoor mockeries of humanity to be called men? Was the dog? I was all that remained, a bitter artifact of a once great and mighty race.
’Don’t bother with it Tim,’ the smeared glass read, ‘nothing we can change now, read me some Poe.’
The dog didn’t seem to care about the entire thing, he was as calloused as he was smart. A talking dog, a writing dog at least, I shook my head, he had been worth a fortune. I pulled out Poe.
The dog loved poetry, he wanted it read to him because he liked the noise of poetry, not the words. He was also fond of the macabre. He loved Poe.
“Lo! 'tis a gala night,” I paused, looking to the dog for approval, “Within the lonesome latter years!”
I continued the poem, my voice rising and quivering the dog’s tail trashing behind him.
I swept through the middle triumphantly, finding myself finally at the end,
“That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’ And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”
I paused on those lines, staring at them. Poe would never know of the bombs that were scattered across the countryside, Poe would never come close to this Conquering worm compared to what my generation had seen. The antiquated impudence, the arrogance, it shook me and I gritted my teeth angrily in the moments before the tears began.
The dog made a whining, sympathetic noise and licked my hair covered cheek sloppily before striding back across the cement, back around the cement stub that held his window upright. The window was filthy, someone used to clean it. Maybe it had been the same machines that had fogged it for him, I can’t remember. No one did it anymore.
His paw dashed determinedly from letter to letter, ’Can I make a confession?’
“Go ahead.”
’It wasn’t a worm.’
The words were perplexing up there, meaningless, “What do you mean?”
The dog was looking at me through the dirty window; he shook his head and disappeared.
I stood up, shouted his name, walked the cold, painful distance to the back of the window. The dog was pushing something back with his nose.
It was a laptop computer, and behind it, trailing the dog, was the biggest and crudest keyboard I had ever seen.
-
My eyes are open now as I stand, shuddering to a halt, in the middle of the wasteland. A scarred sunset begins to bleed in the west, behind me. I started running a month ago, after he told me. I couldn’t live with that monster anymore. We had fought after he told me. I threw my fist into his window, the explanation still etched on it. I cut myself badly there. He was reduced to nothing but a dog without that window, I might bleed, but he was placed back into the dominion of animals. I leapt at him with all the fury and madness that I had built up in me. He ran, he hid. I picked up his ancient and cracked laptop and hurled it across the stained cement floor, leaving circuitry and wires scattered on the floor. I looked around, staring into every corner of the facility. He hadn’t disappeared, he had to be in some corner, curled under some box, he was a smart bastard, and it was almost as though he wasn’t there anymore. In my mind he dashed through every shadow, barking mockingly as I darted after him in vain. Paranoia began to settle into my mind, I turned quickly --feeling the warm wet breaths on the backs of my knees-- I found nothing. I kicked boxes, I screamed his cursed name, I lit fires and hurried, desperate, from room to room, only to return to find not an inferno, but only bitter and meaningless ashes. I couldn’t see him, but as surely as I knew there were survivors in some distant corner of the earth, I knew he was there.
But that I couldn’t see him didn’t change anything; I knew he was there somewhere. I wasn’t ready to face the fact that I might see him again. Let him bark out his poetry now, let him open his own rations. I don’t care if he dies. He’s nothing but an animal.
He had judged, he wrote to me before the fury. He had seen what we had been, our boundless potential and our cruel past. He had been disappointed with us. He had never intended for the destruction he had caused he had only wanted to kill most of us and he had meant to leave the lab untouched, he had wanted some to live, to carry the potential past our violent and cruel histories.
I’m in the middle of what used to be a field, I haven’t eaten in a week. The water’s bad out here and I know it’s killing me. I haven’t seen any of the freakish parodies of mankind, who is to say that the radiation hasn’t killed them all by now? I’m a skeleton now, my doctor’s robes hang loosely about me.
The dog had had a dream. A perfect world where mankind stepped forward to be free, where we would put all of our woes and our hatreds in the past, where we would have no choice. The dog had had a good dream, even I have to admit this while I stumble across the rocky soil that the realization of which dream had made. It’s been three years. No one has lifted themselves up to grasp the dream yet.
I fall to the ground, my knees are bent and for a moment I imagine it looks like I'm bowing. My face is turned sidewise as it strikes the ground with a final, powerful, thud. A thin trickle of blood begins to seep out.
A worm inches boldly in front of me.
Last edited by SKILORD on 04-05-2004 at 07:30
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14-04-2004 05:46
I was watching it with a bunch of people on my friend's computer and as each minute passed, another person groaned, got up and left. After 10 minutes, no one was left watching it so we just shut it off. All I remember is a freakishly fat guy with big tits going around hugging people and blubbering all the while.
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