Dog Eat Dog

Richard rose to his feet, stretching and immediately regretting it. His shoulder still ached fiercely from his fall the evening before. He rotated it gently, and paced around the rooftop of the overgrown bank as he did so, trying to work some feeling back into his body. Even after several years of sleeping in trees and on rooftops, he still wasn’t used to the stiffness that he woke to every morning.

“Oh good,” came a small voice from off to his left. Richard pivoted swiftly, his good right hand jumping to the knife at his belt. The teenage girl that he had rescued was crouched near the edge of the roof. She had what looked like his rope in her hands and was tying it to something, though he couldn’t see what it was from where he stood. She glanced over her shoulder at him again and smiled. It was a lopsided smile that faded a bit when she saw his hand on his knife. “Relax, it’s just me.”

Richard grunted and let his hands fall to his sides.

“You don’t say much, do you?” she asked, rising and turning to face him. She crossed her arms in front of her and frowned at him. “Well?”

Richard shrugged and shook his head. “Not really. I haven’t had anyone to talk to in a long time.”

The girl’s expression softened. She bit her lip, then seemed to come to a decision and stuck out her hand. “Well now you have. I’m Sara.”

He hesitated, but then took her hand in his. She had small hands, but they were callused and worn, suggesting that she wasn’t quite the stranger to survival techniques that he had guessed she might be when he had first seen her fleeing from wild dogs the night before. “Richard,” he replied and shook her hand.

“There,” she said. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”

He cracked the faintest of smiles and withdrew his hand. “So… what’re you working on over there?”

Her face broke into a broad grin, and she stepped aside to show him her handiwork. There was revealed a reasonably large piece of smoked meat tied about with his rope.

“One of the dogs is still trapped in the bank down there.”

“So?” Richard asked. His mind was already beginning to track her reasoning, but he wasn’t sure of the purpose behind it. “It shouldn’t be able to get up here. Wouldn’t it be better save that in case you need to distract the dogs outside while you get away?”

“I wasn’t planning to get away just yet.” Sara gestured to a small green backpack. “I was planning to get us some more food for later.”

Richard thought back to the rescue the night before. She hadn’t had a bag with her then. He noticed the pale blue sneakers wiggling on her feet now and recalled she hadn’t been wearing those yesterday either. In fact, she had been missing a shoe when he helped her out of the tree.

Ignoring for a moment, her prospective hunting technique of dragging a piece of meat on a rope, Richard asked her, “Where did you get all this stuff?”

She shrugged casually and pointed down into the structure. “Dead people.” She considered and then added, “mostly dead people anyway. The meat was out of your pack, and I’m pretty sure the rope was yours.”

“How did you get the rope back if the dog is still down there?” Richard asked, perplexed.

“It was snagged on part of a tree growing out of the lobby. I shimmied out on a branch and grabbed it without the dog noticing I was up there.”

Richard thought that must be pretty unlikely unless the girl was a lot quieter than he suspected. Then again, he considered, she did all this while I was asleep and I never noticed her moving around either. Maybe she is quieter than she looks.

“I have to say, I’m not crazy about you digging through my bag.” Truth be told, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but he knew that wasting it would be a real problem. “What are you planning to do?”

“Just setting a trap for the dog. Soon we’ll have plenty of fresh meat, and as long as you cook it well enough, you should be fine.”

Richard wasn’t overly excited about dog meat, but these days you couldn’t be too picky. He’d spent three weeks eating nothing but squirrel a while back, and at least dog was better than that.

“Alright,” he agreed. “What can I do to help?”

“Watch and learn,” she exclaimed.

Sara tossed the meat-end of the rope down through the skylight and slowly lowered it down toward the lobby. Richard looked on in fascinated horror as the rope reached down to a little ways above the lobby floor. With a tremendous bay, the dog bolted out from wherever it had been hiding and hurled itself at the meat, which was dangling just out of its reach.

“Now what?” Richard asked.

Sara tied off the rope to an overhanging branch, checking to be sure the dog couldn’t reach the prominent morsel. Once she was satisfied, she walked casually over to the edge of the roof and began to muscle a broad flat chunk of broken concrete over toward the skylight.

“Now,” she grunted. Richard hurried over to help her. He helped her lift the slab and together they shuffled it over next to the hole. As they set it down, Richard could see the dog still running and leaping for the meat, bumping it just enough to set the rope swinging, but not enough to get a proper hold on the offering.

Sara flopped down on top of the cement block and said more clearly, “now we give the dog a couple minutes to wear itself out, and then we set the meat down so it can get to it. When it lays down to eat…” she pantomimed tossing the concrete block over the edge.

“You want to crush the dog with a big rock?”

She nodded and Richard found himself simultaneously disturbed and impressed. It was a brilliant, if somewhat messy plan, but her calm and calculated approach worried him more than a little.

“Well alright then.”

A few moments later, the dog had ceased with its grand leaps and was now making only small weaving bunny hops. Sara untied the rope and dropped the hunk of meat to the ground. The dog collapsed gratefully next to it and began to feed. A few seconds later there was a tremendous and wet-sounding crunch. Sara and Richard looked down approvingly at their work.

“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” Richard said, feeling strangely exhilarated, despite the pang of guilty squeamishness in his guts.

“Usually with rabbits, but the principal is pretty much the same.”

They walked down the stairs together, remaining cautious in case there were other dogs they hadn’t seen, but they reached the lobby without incident. Richard pulled on a pair of workman’s gloves from his pack and cleared the debris out of the crushed dog carcass.

“I think that rock may have been a bit much from that high up,” he said after a few moments. Sara agreed with him and they spent the next hour alternately keeping watch and collecting what bits of the dog were still useable. Richard did his best to save his rope as well and eventually ended up having to cut several feet off the end that were just too ruined to bother saving.

“Well, that’s certainly one way of doing it.”

“It’s worked out pretty well so far.” Sara replied.

“We’d better get this smoked fast and get out of here.”

“Why? This seems like a great spot.”

“It is. That’s the problem. And now that there’s a dead animal in the lobby, we’re going to get scavengers. And once we have scavengers we’re going to get predators.”

“Which means trouble,” Sara finished for him. “I get it.”

“Trouble,” Richard agreed, “and quite possibly other people.”

They both knew that other people could quite possibly be worse than predators. Together they gathered up their belongings and the meat they had been able to gather which was wrapped in a thick towel that Richard had in his pack. He smiled over at her as they pulled the stairwell door closed being them and for a moment it was like his sister was still with him. He added a tally to his short list of blessings, and followed her back to the roof for the first warm meal either of them had eaten in weeks.