We Are Awake

One of the giant, black towers comes up above the treeline, dark as a finger of coal and riding up to the clouds in the corner of the man’s eye—a phantom—but he focuses on the deer at the end of his ironsights. Right now there is a headwind, so the animal can’t smell him, and it can’t see him either because it is busy eating mushrooms.

He pushes all the air out of his lungs and fires. Canopies rustle as a murder of crows take to the sky cawing and swarming in a seething black mass below the giant, black tower. The deer drops dead. A lung shot.

The man lowers his rifle in satisfaction. “Dog!” He calls out to the forest. “You can come out now!”

Dog does. Panting, tail wagging, she comes out from behind a tree and sits herself down in front of him.

“Good girl.” He says.

Dog looks at the dead deer, then back at the man. She cocks her head inquisitively, her black ears erect. Her ears are the only part of her that’s black and the man is fine with that. He casts an uneasy look towards the black tower, creeping up over the treetops like it expects to sneak up on him. Has it gotten closer?

“That’s right.” The man says to Dog. “Dinner.”

Dinner is tough and gamy, all muscle, but the man doesn’t mind—add a little salt and anything’s a delicacy. Certainly Dog doesn’t mind. “You should be eating this raw.” The man tells her, as he cooks her leg of deer over the campfire. “Like a real animal.”

Dog is drooling.

“Where’s your sense of wildness?” It has become night quick enough, with all the stars above their heads except for the black ravine in the sky that stretches up to a crescent moon and eats the light like a dark god. “Wildery. You know you ought to be more wild. Like a real wolf. What would you do without me? Hunt your own food? I don’t think so…”

Dog isn’t very responsive, so the man just sighs and gives her the leg of deer, which she tears into eagerly.

“How close are we, do you think?” He asks her, squatting down with his chin resting in his hands. “City can’t be that much further away.”

Dog doesn’t answer, but he forgives her for it anyway. She’s eating, after all.

The man wakes up screaming the next morning. When he comes to and looks around the fire is just a whisper of ash without even an ember left to give, and Dog is staring at him with her unflinching blue eyes, used to this by now.

The sun is too high in the sky.

“We overslept.” He tells Dog. “Hurry up, pack your bags, it’s time to go.”

He feels better once they start moving again, the sounds of the forest calm his nerves and eventually the terror in him begins to recede once more. It’s on hold. “I’ve got to keep my head on straight and think.” He tells Dog, padding along beside him. “What will the other humans think if I go around acting like this, hm?”

Dog is wisely silent. The man knows that he is being too optimistic. Other humans. The giant black thorn that sticks out from the earth is fading into the distance now, but he is sure that more will come over the horizon.

He puts his hand in his pocket and the feel of cool metal is reassuring to him. Grounding.

They reach the city. The forest doesn’t thin out or dwindle, it simply continues unperturbed into the streets and around the buildings, like a flood of green. The asphalt of the roads is cracked and sprung with weeds, the skyscrapers sit still like the giant, empty shells of great beasts that have moved on long ago. If anybody is here, they aren’t making an effort to show themselves.

He looks at Dog. She looks unsure, but remains silent, and keeps by his side when he starts forward.

They are walking down the road when far ahead in the distance a stag bounds out of a clutter of trees, its antlers like two golden hands or wings. Dog pants and wags her tail.

“No, no.” Says the man. “We still gotta finish the leftovers first.” He smacks the heavy rucksack he carries on his back. “No sense in senseless killing.”

Dog is disappointed.

Then something else comes from the trees, scuttling out like a spider. The man frowns as the giant black thing passes by on its five pairs of grey arms.

They continue, and just a little further ahead graffitied in red to the side of a building, is a huge arrow pointing up the street.

OTHER HUMANS. WE ARE HERE. WE ARE AWAKE. FOLLOW THE ARROWS.

Says red text beneath the arrow. The man lets out an amazed laugh. He looks between the arrow and dog, throws his hands up in the air but keeps his cheer silent. “Yes! Yes! We did it Dog, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew there were other people around!” He grabs Dog’s paws in his hands and does a little dance. Dog barks.

He smiles up at the red arrow. “I knew I wasn’t alone. What’d I tell you, Dog?”

They follow more red arrows down streets claimed by green. Above them is only the sun. No black interruptions. The man could sing.

Eventually, the arrows lead them to a large, abandoned warehouse.

INSIDE. WE ARE HERE.

Red words declare.

Taking a deep breath, the man enters. It takes him a few steps to realize that Dog isn’t following. He turns around to look at her. “What?”

She whimpers, sitting at the entrance.

“What, what is it?” And then he looks down into the dirt. There are tracks there. Bear tracks. Recently made. “Oh, come on!” He tells Dog. “Don’t worry, it’s gone now.”

Dog whines and barks.

“Hey, the hell’s a matter with you? It’s fine, now come on!”

Finally, Dog gives in and follows, but she keeps her head low and casts wary glances about the dark warehouse.

The man fingers the piece of metal in his pocket as he walks. “Hello?” He calls out hopefully into the dark, at giant steel drums that once served a purpose but now sit as forgotten relics, wide and black in the shadows. “Is anybody there?”

Dog whines again, but the man presses forward. He is so close. After all these years he is so close.

“Hello?” He calls out again. This time, something answers. From behind one of the steel drums comes a great growling, like thunder. Something you hear in your bones.

The huge, shaggy shape lumbers out from behind one of the drums, two tiny balls of fur following it.

“Oh, shit.” Says the man.

The mother grizzly roars.

“Dog! Run!” The man calls out, and he turns and bolts. He does not know where he is going until he sees a raised catwalk in the dark, and then he heads for that. Behind him he can hear—no, he can feel the bear’s lumbering steps, each an earthquake as she gets closer and closer. He jumps for the catwalk. His hands grip the metal. And the grizzly swats him down.

“Fuck!” He falls to the ground in a heap, all the air pushed from his chest. Then the bear is over him, snorting and snarling and growling. He screams and brings his arms vainly over his face, and feels claws tear into them.

Then he hears something else snarl, and the grizzly bear roars. It is off him in a second, and the man doesn’t understand until he sees Dog, facing down the massive animal with a tuft of torn hair in her mouth.

“Dog! No!” He struggles to get out his rifle. Loads it. It’s too late; the bear mauls Dog and she yelps. “No!” The man screams, aims, and the retort of gunfire echoes throughout the abandoned building, deafening him. When he comes to he hears the two cubs crying as they wobble off, confused and afraid. He gets drunkenly to his feet, ignoring the gaping wounds in his forearms, and approaches Dog, who is breathing shallowly next to the corpse of the bear. Four red lines color her red fur.

“Dog? Dog, oh,” the man falls to his knees before her. She doesn’t lift her head, but one blue eye turns to look at him. Then it looks away. Dog’s breathing slows. “Dog! Dog! Hey, Dog! Dog you came back for me thank you but you gotta get up, we gotta go! We gotta go, Dog, we gotta go!” He pulls Dog towards him. Her breath is faint, she is mostly limp. He shakes her. “Dog! Dog wake up! No! You can’t go to sleep too, you can’t!” He’s choking on his own tears, rocking back and forth. “Dog! Get up! Dog, answer me! We haven’t finished the leftovers yet we haven’t finished,” and then he can’t even speak anymore because he is crying too hard. “I’ll get you that stag. I’ll get you a fresh new stag… so just answer…” But she doesn’t say anything to the man.

The wolf named Dog dies in his arms.

After a long time, when he stands up, he shouts at the empty room. “That’s off-fucking limits! That isn’t allowed!” Everything is dark and looming and totally unresponsive, like the shadow of a gravestone. “It isn’t right! That’s not fair!”

He looks around, tears still in his eyes, and sees the last red arrow. It is in a little patch of light, pointing to a room with windows, sunlight streaming in. He stumbles towards it. “Hello? Help. You have to help, you have to help my dog, she’s hurt.”

Inside there is a mannequin wearing a top hat. Red words on the window behind it read:

SAYONARA, SUCKERS. GO TO THE BLACK TOWER, HIPPIES.

“That isn’t funny!” The man screams at it. “That isn’t fucking funny, that’s not a funny joke!” He falls to the ground and cries for the second time that day, this time for himself, because beyond the window, from this angle, he can see the black spire rising over the tops of buildings, far away.

A sound comes from behind him. A clatter.

Here it is, that black thing. “Oh, hey,” it says, rather conversationally, and the man doesn’t need to turn to see its black robes and grey arms, “you’re still here.”

“Yes.” His voice is as dry and dead as the corpse of a moth.

“Would you like me to take you to one of the towers now?” The Dream-Keeper asks. And then, more softly, “Are you ready to go?”

The man can see them now, in those black towers, people in the thousands, the millions, billions, all sleeping in their black graves.

“Nothing will hurt anymore.” The Dream-Keeper says. “You’ll have good dreams. You’ll forget about anything sad or painful, that’s what you made them for.”

The man feels the weight in his pocket like an anchor. He takes it out, brushes his fingers over the heart shaped locket, then flips it open to the face of his son. He remembers. It wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It was against the goddamn rules of the universe.

“I don’t want to forget.”

“Well, that’s your choice.” The Dream-Keeper says sadly. “But we’ll be waiting for you. And it leaves then, with a rush of black, the room is more full because it makes places empty it doesn’t fill them.

The man cries silently over his locket for a long time. Then he gets up. He leaves the warehouse with Dog in his arms. He’ll bury her.

Is anyone out there? Is anyone still awake? Will they suffer with him here, in the real world?

He looks up at that black tower of terror.