Tails of the Apocalypse (19 page)

She knew it, too. Keena stretched upward and licked my face. She snuggled into me and rested her head on my shoulder. Her breathing became shallow and ragged. I knew this was the end. Finally, after all the destruction and loss of life. After the washing away of the Watchers and the drowning of His other creations, I began to weep. Not for all or any of that. But for Keena.

I wept for Keena.

Some have said that you see your life pass before your eyes at the end, but I did not. I saw hers. Every moment we had shared together played out in my head. My own flood, a flood of tears, came as she huffed her last breath. I kissed her on the end of her nose as I inhaled her last sigh. I clutched her tightly and told her I loved her. The sobs became louder and more violent and for the first time I knew what real love was. How losing one so close can devastate your heart.

Losing Keena broke me in two.

I held my friend as blackness surrounded my vision. Then all was silent and dark.

The hollow emptiness of death.

I awoke. The quiet was the first thing I noticed. I had become so accustomed to the rushing sound of water that the silence was deafening.

Then I heard the birds.

As my vision cleared, I remembered my friend and found her still lying across my chest with her head on my shoulder. The emotions of loss consumed me again. I cradled her stiff body in my arms and headed down the chute to try and escape the mountain tomb. The shaft was wet, but no longer standing in water. I could see bright sunshine beaming down from the outside.

I stood in the mouth of the cave and stared at the devastation and destruction.

How did I survive?

Why me?

Why not her?

The guilt was almost too much to bear. Why had the air been too thin for her but allowed me to survive? Did my heritage as a half-Shining One protect me somehow?

What about all the others like me? Did they survive? As I stepped into the world once again, holding my friend in my arms, I wondered if I would ever know.

Under the warm, baking sunlight, the waters receded quickly. Perhaps the Creator, having cleansed the world, was anxious to uncover its beauty again.

I made my way carefully down the hill, holding her body close. The thought consumed me: she must be laid to rest properly. I walked for miles that day, searching what used to be our fertile valley and surrounding forest for a proper place for her.

Utter devastation.

I walked until I could no longer feel my feet. In the fading twilight, I reached the end of the valley, a place that was known among the Watchers as the Spirit Road. I had never walked the Road before, but as the sun set along the horizon, I felt compelled to take it. Somehow, it would lead me to Keena’s final resting place. This I knew.

As I stepped onto the Road, a rushing wind whirled around me, lifted me up. My stomach lurched, and I experienced the sensation of falling into a black abyss. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

I found myself standing in a peaceful grove in the warm, afternoon sun. But had it not been sundown only moments before? Had more time passed than I knew? Or had I simply appeared elsewhere upon the Earth, a place where the sun was high and shining? My surroundings were completely unfamiliar, but I remembered the old stories of the travelers, and I knew that I was in a place as enchanted as my companion was.

I had found Keena’s resting place.

I stood in the midst of hallowed ground, clutching my most faithful companion, the closest thing to my heart. I had traveled the Spirit Road to the place my heart most desired: a final home for Keena. I stood among the wreckage of what used to be an oak grove, still soaking from the Creator’s wrath. The acorns crunched under my feet and the air fairly crackled with the energy surrounding the intersections of the ley lines of the Earth. The sacred oaks would grow back, I knew. The earth would reclaim what was hers, and the world would have a new birth. The world that had been taken from Keena, the world for which she had mourned so achingly. And from here, upon this hill, Keena would see it all renewed.

I circled the mound to find the perfect spot. When I marked it, I took out the pouch that held the preparations. The ashes of the sacred nine, a pure silver trowel, a beeswax candle—I used these ingredients to sanctify the ground.

The sun began its gentle descent, and when the hill was bathed in the gloaming that is the time between times, I laid her in the hallowed ground. The sun’s rays shone against the horizon, and in this miraculous moment between night and day, I sprinkled the hallowed earth over Keena.

I made three sunwise circles around the hill and declared the spot forever sacred ground. Little did I know that the magic I cast on that hill would last so long, be so strong, even unto the present day.

The land was desolate when I laid her here, but look at it now. The grove that regrew following the Great Flood is ancient once more. Now your people, the Earthborn have built a community of homes here—the place of the Final Stand that is yet to come.

Remember what I told you, dear one, at the beginning? The world is rarely as it seems. You look to the stars and think you know all there is to know. You look to the depths of the sea and assume that by cataloging the variations of life, you are the master of your domain. But what about the war that rages beyond your ken? What about the legends of old that occupy the collective unconscious of your people, the truths that dare to escape the dark recesses of your dream-self?

Well, now you know a small portion of what is. I pray you take heed of your surroundings. Visit this grove when you can. If you sit quietly, you can still hear Keena’s lament whispering through the ancient oaks. Though I have never seen her—and oh! I wish I had—I have heard it said that on a moonlit night, the shape of a great hound can be seen circling the mound, standing watch. And waiting. Waiting for something that is most certainly coming.

Here among the sacred oaks of Weston.

Earlier this year, my friend Chris Pourteau started talking about this passion project that ultimately became the collection you are now holding. When he first released “Unconditional” as a stand-alone story, we all knew he was onto something unique and, frankly, quite special. There is something stirred deep within our hearts when we think of the most unimaginable catastrophes and how our four-legged companions show unconditional love in those times. I think these stories stir us to be better than we are.

I love stories about strange people and places. For a couple of years now, I’ve been building a fictional place called Weston, Mississippi. Each of my books have been set there, and each story has at its core the fact that the veil between this world and another is somehow thinner in Weston than in most places. Chris challenged me to tie “Keena’s Lament” to my larger world, and the idea for this tale was born.

I’m fascinated with legends and myths that seem to transcend cultural groups and specific places. Almost every culture has some sort of ancient flood story. There are also stories about creatures that came from the heavens and mixed with the people of Earth. These offspring became the demigods, the heroes of old, the Nephilim; they’ve been called many names. In most of these legends, these otherworldly creatures were destroyed in floods or other disasters. I wanted to tell one of these stories from the opposite viewpoint that you’re likely familiar with. I began to wonder what it would have been like for these creatures to experience an apocalyptic event. Would they also be blessed with the companionship of one of our four-legged friends?

“Keena’s Lament” is a piece of ancient backstory that gives a glimpse into one of the reasons Weston is such a strange place. In my latest book,
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
, a character named Crowley has uncovered others of these ancient stories. He sets out to manipulate the power of this place for his own diabolical ends. But a man and his dog—different characters from the Watcher and Keena in this story—stand in his way.

If you’d like to learn more about me and my work, you can find my other books at
hankgarner.com
, as well as listen to the weekly podcast I host called the
Author Stories Podcast
.

In the night she carried the runt away
from the sleeping pack. It was the poor thing’s only hope. Its last chance. She’d given birth to a full litter in the remains of a bombed-out hospital where the pack had been hunting that winter. Five survived; one had two heads and didn’t. The others were starting to bully the tiniest. The runt. They’d bully it to death.

She knew.

It was the way of dogs.

But there was a memory in her. A memory of a different way deep down inside of her. She’d been a part of something she couldn’t articulate and could barely remember. Men. Women. People and dogs. Together. Living along the heat-blasted roads and in the blackened forests that would never grow again. Until they’d met other people. And then the people she’d lived with were no more. She’d escaped in the chaos of loud bangs and repeated metallic cackles.

Fire and screaming.

She’d escaped and in time she’d joined the pack. And they’d hunted the lone stragglers of men who seemed to be fewer and fewer in the days after the world was gone. The pack had even hunted bear and wolves and other dogs. And for a time she forgot the ways of men. The pats. The scraps tossed by firelight. The rubs for deeds done well. The darkness beyond the firelight around which the humans murmured or sometimes wept for what was lost, or softly sang old commercial jingles throughout the cold nights that were especially long in those times.

The firelight.

The pack had argued that gray, rainy, wet day before she’d taken the runt. There was a man making his way along the big road. But there was also a pack of wild pigs. Many, by sign and scent. Sucklings were easy pickings, and the pack had argued violently over which way to go. The Alpha, a big, iron-gray pit with demonic eyes, had been challenged. His challenger had been that night’s meal.

And she’d watched her own young bully the runt as the pack tore at what little the challenger provided. Imitating the big pit who had fathered them. That night, as the pack slept, she picked up the mewling runt by the neck and carried him out into the wind and the rain and darkness that smelled always of ash and death. She carried him across a desiccated plain thrashed by a howling, sand-filled wind that skirled like a nightmare’s scream. She carried him and ignored his feeble protests and his chubby-pawed battings. Sniffing the air, waiting, then moving on, she carried him.

And in time she caught the scent and smelled the smoke and remembered firelight. The smoke went with the firelight. Men gathered around firelight. Men, some men, were good to dogs and could make use of even a runt like she’d once been. Like the one she held between her teeth now, in the darkness.

Men could be good friends.

She found the stranger in the remains of a leaning gas station. The firelight glowed from within, and she crawled on her belly through the darkness until she could smell the lean rabbit the man had killed. She watched him motionlessly staring into the fire. She waited.

The pup whined.

She opened her jaw and released him to the dust. And slowly she began to nudge him forward. At first he didn’t want to go. He simply refused to budge, to leave her and her warmth. And then she nipped at him and he began to waddle forward and into the firelight. Crying for the loss of the only love ever known. Crying because the world was ending once more, again.

And when the man turned and saw the pup, he did not see her out there in the night, watching still. For a long while she watched from the darkness. Watched as the man stared at her mewling runt. Watched as the stranger mumbled to himself and then rose.

What he would do next she didn’t know, but she knew … she knew it had once been something she’d been a part of.

It was the only way. Her runt would never survive within the pack. And a mother is still a mother.

No matter what.

And always.

She watched from within the cold cloak of a howling night as the man bent, held out his weathered hand and waited for her pup. She watched as an ancient thing written into the language of all their DNA began again.

And it was a lost memory found to her.

And….

She knew the pup would live now.

He’d been alone for a long time.

Too long.

Too long since he’d crossed the wastes east of Saint Maggie’s home along the coast. His home. The only home he’d ever known. Too long since he’d steered clear of the craziness the mad wanderers he sometimes encountered called El Lay as he quested. Sent forth, like the others. Sent forth to find what was lost. Sent forth to find the past, if it still lived, breathed, existed.