My Brown Dog

Copyright © 2006 De Rozario Jesse

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1

What do you mean: What?

Don't you understand what I just said?

My.

Brown.

Dog.

So simple! Which part of that tri-syllabic phrase don't you understand?

It's not even a complete sentence, but more of what my Second Grade teacher, Madam Follick would've called a crippled phrase. But then again, everything was crippled to her. Nice was a crippled adjective; a good day would've been termed crippled, too. She wanted fantastic inter-stellar earth-shaking days. Nice just didn't cut it. Not at all.

Madam Follick had two kids. One became a fashion jernalist in Europe and died from cocaine overdose. The other stayed on good ol' home soil and embarked on a career of rape and murder for a year before he was run over by an eighty-ton tank.

Not helping...

Let's just agree that what I don't know of the English language, I don't know from her, okay?

But back to my brown dog.

Still don't get it?

Fine. I'll break it down into three simple, independent parts. If I gave you any more than three, since there are only three words, I'd end up trying to explain something like row or own or even og, neither of which have anything to do with My Brown Dog as a whole, and which would only complicate matters more than I already have.

Okay...

Easy, now. Listen. Just listen.

My—Brown—Dog.

We'll start with My.

Funk and Wagnall's English Dictionary (copyright date unknown...) states:

Adj. or Int. A possessive form of I; of me; belonging to me; belonging to one's self; that I have, hold (in sickness or in health, till death we do part), or possess...blah blah blah blah...

You understand the meaning of the first part, right? Good. We'll move on. But let me stress why he's mine. Well, simply, because I found him. I discovered him! Yes! And, most importantly, because he can't get away. Much as he detests being mine, there's nothing he can do about it. Mine he is. He's more of a hostage or piece of livestock than a pet, but he's my brown dog.

Okay?

Next.

This color part is a bit tough for me. I know from what I remember of the Old World that brown was a color; a word used to describe or diffrenshiate or identify (It's an adjective, young man, not a color!) by the hue of light reflected into the viewer's kore-nea and so on. I don't know if it's the kore-nea or iris...or if I even spelt that right, but never mind. Flawless spelling and grammatical command, too, are other things of the Old World. But there's more.

I know rainbows are curved arks of light split into twelve (or was it twenty?) distinct bands because of some supernatural force that now means as much to me as the word brown or green or iridescent blonde. The last time I saw a rainbow was on the surface, in some picture book. There might've still been a sky to see it when I was a toddler, but I don't remember. Yeah, I know blonde because our neighbor's daughter was blonde and she always got lots of attention. I think it was because of her hair (say, do your curtains match your drapes?). So, I know that color.

I also know black.

It's all I've been seeing lately.

I'm not blind, but we'll get round to that later.

We agree that he, or, it, as Madam Follick would've corrected with most adamant perswaysion, is mine, and that it is brown—what, exactly, defines brown, well, maybe we'll decide later.

Forgive me if I ramble. The air down here isn't very good. It never was, but without proper air circulation or venting or any hygiene like they used to have in the Old World, things tend to decay faster...especially the air.

"Here" is the fourth underground level of a car park in what used to be called, if I remember correctly, FallPark Mall. I have clear access up to the third floor using the service elevator that runs directly from the main power generator. I can...what's that word...dammit...ah, siphon. I can siphon fuel whenever the generator runs low; there are at least two hundred cars down here, more on the higher basement levels. Fuel for the generator and lift isn't a problem. It's what I might one day find waiting for me in the elevator that frightens me.

You see, lately I've been having lots of dreams...

I have unlimited access to the ground floor and second level by the elevator—but not the doors or windows. The air vents are all sealed, too. The air-con and lights failed at about the same second that all the exits were locked down.

About midway on the third floor, debris and the collapsed fourth floor block the hallways. I guess I could probably climb over it and force my way through if I really wanted or needed to, but so far the urge hasn't arisen. It's mostly lingerie and other ladies' paraphernalia down there, anyway. There's no way out from there either. My father designed RELDS himself and never failed to impress upon us (and all guests that happened to stay for dinner or just tea on the porch) its flawlessness.

The food is all in the Mega-Mart on the ground floor. It's been enough—so far. Haven't had to share with anyone.

Not until this dog showed up.

I've tried forcing the lift up past "3", but something blocking the shaft is wedged above the door. I like to think it is debris that tumbled into the shaft from the explosion, but the stench hints otherwise. There were a lot of casualties when the doors and windows sealed.

Maybe soon I might be able to force the lift up through whatever—whoever—is blocking it.

Here?

RELDS?

Surprisingly, car seats make comfortable sleeping places, with the added perk that I never lack for choice or variety. In the beginning, I tried sampling a different seat of a different car each time, but soon lost track. I decided to stick to the black limo by the elevator. Beats me what a limo is doing parked on the fourth floor underground, but who cares? Their seats are large and warm. But quiet. Lonely. Not lonely as in sad, but the kind of solitude that makes you wish you were alone. Graveyard lonely. Lonely with too many shadows and hidden corners and places for things to hide.

Until I caught the dog, I haven't seen anything else living down here. Seen.

Haven't seen.

But I've heard them plenty since that day the RELDS when into play.

RELDS? Told you. It was my dad's last project. Stands for Radioactive Emergency Lock Down System. That's what it means, and that's what happened here.

Here? That would be the fourth underground level of the FallPark Mall carpark.

I've been living here for the past twelve years.

2

I don't want to leave, so don't feel sorry for me. Been down here too long, anyway.

Anyway, I've forgotten what the surface looks like. What it used to look like, anyway. Whoops. Repeated that word there. Madam Follick would've had what we called a "Grand Disaster Mood." She'd scream and tug her hair and tell us not that way don't repeat the same word twice in a sentence unless you absolutely can't help it, and as much as possible not in the next one either, and—oh my God, I need a drink. Not a coffee, Beverly quit smiling 'fore I yank your lips off your face, a drink, a real drink...

And a real drink she had. She kept an aluminum flask in her drawer. She'd take a quick swig and look around guiltily like she was expecting the principal Dr. Neeves to be watching her from the classroom window. Once, she forgot about it and left it in her drawer...well...she locked the drawer, but Joey brought along his Spy Set Lock Pick (Genuine! Guaranteed To Work!).

Anyway, me and Billy and Joey found it. Shit, that tasted awful! Like burning piss with a dash of orange juice. Had the color, too. That was my first drink, you could say, and it was terrible. There was also this fat steel marker, only there was no ink at the nib, and there was a button that would make it vibrate real fast like...I don't know...like a washing machine on high spin. Billy told us his ma had one of those, and that she told him it was for when daddy went out of town. Whatever. I have no idea how a fat vibrating pen with no ink was supposed to replace a father.

Oh boy. I'm getting carried away here. Must be the air. But the surface, whatever was up there—vibrating pens, Madam Follick, Joey's confusing mother—could now only be rubble.

No, I know you don't understand.

See, it all started in the late Spring of '07 (that's 2007 A.D.—I don't know when, if ever, this is going to be found...and that thought is more terrifying than what could be waiting for me in the elevator or under the cars...).

Now I forgot what I was going to say.

Later.

When activists bombed the World Bank in the late Spring of '07, there were none who imagined the catastrophic corollaries (ha! Can't believe I remembered that word! Saw it once in my dad's TIME magazine...guess it kinda stood out to me) it would effect upon the rest of the world. No one knew how it happened. --Not how the bank was bombed—that much seemed inevitable following all the bail out loans given by the bank to the economically hit nations of the previous year—but how the terrorists managed to get their hands on nuclear weapons.

It was a catastrophy like no other. It made the Asian Crash of '98 or Black Monday of '29 seem like a negligible stock market fluctuation. 'Course I only studied 'bout those in school (not from Ma'am Follick, but Ms. Wolfe, a young woman with her fresh degree who had a bad habit of showing her panties when she sat on the desk explaining to us the meaning of "inflation").

Best I can remember, there was a financial crash in mid '06, and by January '07, the GFT—Global Finanshul Trust (renamed from the International Monetary Fund at the end of '05)—had paid out over 500 trillion euros in bailout packages to eighty percent of the world's nations. Eighty. The proportion of those affected by the crisis was appalling. Downright sickening (or so my dad said). But there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Prices seemed to be slipping down a well-greased slide into a pit of flames. Package after bailout fund after rescue parcels were paid out, each earmarking a "condition" by the GFT, this great and invisible monster controlling the world and its economy as if by puppet strings.

And that's when someone decided they'd had enough.

Walk-in suicide bombings weren't uncommon. They were like interviews. Only the ladies didn't wear short business suits and nylon stockings, but dynamite and good hemp rope to keep it all bundled together.

Cars had been used, too. Buses, trucks, ships. Even planes.

But whichever unhappy nation decided to throw in their cards and finally call it quits against the World Bank didn't do it in anyway complex; they simply fired a spray of Titan II-Pu missiles at the World Bank Headquarters. Pu means Plutonium. One moment, World Bank, the next, a pile of ash, disintegrated stone, and gold.

Yes, gold. It's well-known that the World Bank held all the nation's reserves of currency in solid bullion (there we go again! Great word, that! Bullion! Ha-ha. "It's all coming back, it's all coming back to me now...), but none knew (except those that blew it to bits, apparently) that it was stored in their basement.

When the missiles hit and turned the structure into a furnace upwards of two thousand degrees, all that lovely yellow metal flowed out into the streets—but there was no stampede of people rushing to get their hands on the gold because there wasn't a living soul within a five-mile radius of the blast, and all those for ten miles were knocked blind.

That's when the real hardships began.

People in First World countries experienced what post World War countries went through when the cash required for daily marketing had to be carried in a wheelbarrow. Prices jumped by the hour. Not by a few cents or a few dollars or even a few thousand dollars. Today, your Seiko might be able to buy you a can of corned beef. Tomorrow, you might need a Rolex—and if you didn't have one? Tough luck. People traded in their sports cars and summer villas and government bonds for a week's groceries, but this stopped when merchants began to realize that normalness might never return, that their backyard of accumulated Rolexes and Porsches might not even be worth the scrap metal.

Not a single nation was unaffected. It seemed impossible that everyone could be hit without a single benefactor from all this—but it was happening. I mean, if someone is losing—which basically every government was—someone's gotta be gaining from it, right?

Anyway (sorry, sorry!), on May 1, 2008, a global state of emergency was declared—something that'd never been done, as far as I know, since the dawn of mankind.

Oil prices hit untold highs, but there was no use for it when no one had anything that used the petrol anymore. City power was shut down when governments could no longer afford to maintain the upkeep.

World capitals lay frantic under a blanket of darkness. And under this blanket, chaos ruled. ATM's were raided and destroyed—not for the value of the cash, but for the paper inside that could be burned as fuel. Supermarkets and factories emptied in minutes. In global times of tribulation, mankind returned to his baser nature, seeking out only his most fundamental essentials, and intertwined just above all this anarkey, the world's governments stood teetering at the brink of nuclear war, as each blamed the other for this disaster. But though they wobbled at the edge of what could've spelt the end of humankind, did they back down? Did they try to defuse the problem in the quickest, most selfless way? No.

Of course not.

I was about ten years old when the first nukes hit.

My mom had taken my sister and I to FallPark Mall to queue up for food handouts that our mayor had organized at most of the major shopping centers. Our city was better off than most. There was little of the rioting and looting and wanton bedlam that touched most of the others (my grammar's amazing comeback is surprising, even to me—I'd better finish this up quickly before it goes again). We still had running power in most of the major buildings, the school was still open, and, most importantly, the Police still had control of the situation. Most of this, I would say, was thanks to the well-planned control and rationing of the food. Of course, pay had stopped, and though cops may work simply for their undying loyalty sworn since Day One as a fresh recruit, few would put that responsibility above their own families. But since there was food, there was order.

Didn't help much in the long run, though. If only our mayor had been the president...well, maybe this whole disaster might've been averted.

On that day, somehow, I got separated from my mom and sister as they went to collect our day's rations. It was just after sundown, and, now, looking up at the lead-sealed windows above the rows of cashiers, I can still remember the fiery display of purples and magenta as the sun vanished behind the horizon for the last time I would see.

All I remember is the earthquake that knocked me to the floor and the panicky commotion as thousands of people tried to escape the building before it collapsed or shut down on them. Silly, isn't it? Didn't they know they'd all be cooked alive outside? That even if they survived the initial blast, they might die weeks later after they'd slowly puked their guts out, bites at a time? Above that, if fate touched them and let them live without a sign of injury, that any future offspring might be born crippled or mutant, or, as my father stressed often enough over desert, squirming balls of flesh? Didn't these people know that?

Apparently not. They didn't design RELDS, I guess. But even if they'd known, something tells me they would've tried to escape anyway. Something about the fear of being locked up—like me.

I wasn't the only child separated from their parents that day—I could hear kids crying, some old as I'd been then, screaming and calling out for their parents—but I was the only one that survived.

I remember the panic as five thousand people stampeded through the checkout lanes, spilling food and groceries in an explosion of confetti-like color and substance, crushing the aged and sick and children or those too shocked to move out of the way. Most of them got out, I suppose, and were incinerated by the missiles.

When I woke up—hours, days later; I couldn't tell—everything was quiet. Deathly. I've never known a silence so terrifying as the night I realized that I was the only living thing left in the entire mall, that I was trapped in here, and whoever was outside would not be able to come in. It didn't take me long to figure this out—my dad designed the system, did I say, and he was proud of it. I tell you, that night, I felt like I'd gone to hell.

I walked around the mall aimlessly for the first couple hours—exploring it, I guess—like a boy already dead. Writers and literary professionals have oft said that, but I felt it that night: That night, I was dead.

I still was when I found my mother's body.

It was hard to tell who it was in the darkness; most of her body was on the floor behind a food counter. But then I recognized her bag—she was holding it in one outstretched arm like an advertising model. It was the bag with the deer horns that my father had given her the previous Christmas before he went sky diving sans parachute from the top of a skyscraper. I moved closer to where she lay, rounding the long aluminum counter that had hid most of her body.

Someone—something—was hunched over her body.

It was shivering.

Shaking. God, it was quivering as bad as Ma'am Follick's vibrator had that dry spring afternoon. I could tell it was moving, alive, but the fear that grasped my mind refused all comprehensive thought from flowing.

I thought the stooped thing was drinking her blood.

But as my feet drove me closer, the thing looked up, looked at me, then began to scream. Human screams. Even when I moved closer still and identified my twenty-year-old sister, Anne, and she should've recognized me, she didn't stop screaming. It was as if she'd forgotten who I was.

It was possible. Her mind had always been frail since our father killed himself, and those shadows didn't make my identification any easier. I put my arms out to embrace her and comfort her—hell, to comfort each other. I was as scared as she was. Maybe even more. Everything was alien and frightful. But her cries turned to screams of terror and she backed away. Her heel caught on my dead mother's cheek and Anne fell.

She was back on her feet in a blink, still screaming and crying, still not recognizing me as her brother—or a fellow human being at all for that matter—and still trying to get as far away as possible. In the mad bleakness of that moment, when anything seemed possible—anything, anything at all—I accepted the fact that she had gone insane.

I stopped advancing.

Her sniveling lessened, but she still didn't recognize me. She regarded me with the fearful uncertainty of a frightened animal facing a predator. She was bigger than me...but...whatever. She wasn't human anymore. I think for a moment, just one, there was a flash of recognition. I saw something in her eyes—something higher, more intelligent—before she turned and fled.

I didn't go after her.

She ran down the checkout aisle and disappeared down the row of Pampers and Johnson's Baby Oil.