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Taking care of the dog helped.
Trying to come up with a name for him was good. Especially when she kept trying different names on him to see if he’d respond to one.
The dog was big. Really big.
More than twice as big as her. The last time Rags had stood on her bathroom scale, she was eighty-six pounds. She’d lost weight since. Too much, really.
The dog had to be at least twice as heavy as she’d been on that day.
He was pretty. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. Rags loved dogs, and she could usually spot what breeds made up a mix. The Langstons next door had owned a cockapoo and a Labradoodle.
PomPom had been a . . .
No.
No. Don’t go there.
She told herself that fifty times a day. Most days she listened. Some days, no matter how much she did to her body or how much she crammed into her head, she couldn’t help but go down that road.
It was on those days that she really learned how to scream.
It was on those days that she learned how to scream quietly. Into her backpack, into her hands. Sometimes into the crook of her arm when she huddled under a b
ush and smothered every single sound so the dead wouldn’t find her.
It was a survival skill. One of the things she had to learn.
The dog, though.
The new dog. The dog she’d saved and who’d saved her. He was something else. Not a combination of a couple of miniature breeds. He was a brute. Rags thought that he was at least half white shepherd and half Irish wolfhound. Fur the color of dirty snow. Lots of teeth, lots of muscle.
The dog had been trapped in a wrecked car. There was no driver, no passengers. No one alive or dead. Just the dog.
Big. Wild-eyed. More than half-starved. Looking like a monster, like a werewolf from a horror movie.
When Rags first saw him, she almost broke and ran. She was instantly afraid of him, like she was taught to be afraid of things. Mom and Dad had been really good at teaching her to be afraid of stuff. People she didn’t know. Animals. Bugs. The outdoors.
Stuff.
Since everything went crazy, Rags had become afraid of a lot more. The dead, of course. She always had to be afraid of them. They were never afraid of her.
Other things. Scavengers. Especially the male scavengers. Rags was young, but she wasn’t naive.
Wild animals, too. When the end came, someone must have let the animals out of their cages at the zoos. Maybe in circuses, too. There were all kinds of things out there. She saw a tiger chasing a deer once. And a pair of zebras running along the side of a highway. There were monkeys in the trees, and last week she saw a pack of the dead hunkered down around a dead giraffe. Eating it.
The dead would eat anything.
Rags had met survivors who thought that the dead only went after people, but that was not true. They’d eat anything.
Being on the road, being out in the world, taught Rags the truth. The dead would eat anything as long as it was alive, or if it had just died. She didn’t understand that. No one she knew did. Just like she didn’t know why the dead would stop eating a person while they were mostly still whole, but they’d eat an animal all the way down to the bones.
It made no sense to her.
A lot of things made no sense.
Like why she’d let the big dog out of that car.
She shouldn’t have.
