The Return (14 page)

They walked through the door together, from the bright light of the sun to the stale air and darkness of the shelter. Humans sat hunched on low beds lined up, row upon row, throughout the huge space. Along the walls were bright stripes of color, and hoops drooping netting like the ones Shep's boy used to play under. Dim lights fizzed on the ceiling and the whole place reeked of socks.

Shep heard the happy yips and barks of his former packmates echoing throughout the space.
They found their families
, he thought happily. Some humans pushed past Shep to the door with smiles on their faces, only to turn back into the shelter, mouths slack and faces stricken. Shep wondered which of these was Higgins's master, or Virgil's, or Snoop's. He wanted to lick their hands and explain what happened, but he had to leave the granting of such comfort in the paws of the Great Wolf.

Callie's nose hit the ground. Shep followed her curly tail as she snuffled between the rows of beds. He needed to make sure she was safe before he went his own way. Fuzz followed close on his tail.

The room hummed with life. Shep saw how the humans had tried to make dens out of these flat, narrow cots the way his pack had scratched the pillows together in the boat. Blankets were tented over poles to create walls and beds were pushed together to mark where a family nested. As Shep passed, the people looked at him not with fear — he smelled no anxiety from them — but with wonder, like he was the Great Wolf himself visiting from the sky. A few reached out tentative fingers, desperate for the feel of fur. Shep wondered how many of them had left dogs behind and how many would return home to find they'd lost their homes and their pets with them.

“Callie!”

A little girl sprang over a bed, wild hair whipping behind her.

“My girl!” yipped Callie, tail waving.

The girl wrapped her thin arms around Callie. Callie leapt at her face, licking her over and over. The girl mumbled things in a soft, sweet voice as she stroked Callie's fur. Shep saw tears running down her face.

After a few heartbeats, the girl noticed Shep. She smiled and said something. She stretched out a hand. Not wanting to scare the girl, Shep waved his tail and lowered his head. The girl wiggled her fingers, and he chanced a quick lick of her fingertips. The girl smiled.

Callie was panting and wagging her tail so hard her rump waved with it. The girl hoisted Callie up into her arms and walked down a row of beds. Shep followed, not ready to let Callie out of his sight.

The girl stopped at a sagging bed piled with bags. On it sat a tired, sad-looking woman. When she saw Callie, she burst into tears. Shep wondered if she was sad to see Callie, but then the woman stretched her arms out, took Callie from the girl, and hugged Callie to her chest. The girl wrapped her arms around the two of them and Shep saw that a family had just been made whole.

The three untangled themselves. Callie sat on her girl's lap as the mother examined Callie's paws and face. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks and she kept mumbling the same sounds with a trembling smile on her lips. Callie looked back at Shep, eyes warm and happy, a smile on her jowls.

“Go find your family,” she yipped. “You brought me home, just like you promised.”

“I'll see you tonight?” Shep woofed.

“Every night,” she said.

Shep padded forward. The girl thought he was coming to woof with her, so she stroked his scruff and said something in a soft voice. Shep licked Callie's head, and she licked his nose. Then he turned and trotted away before he lost the strength to leave her. He heard Fuzz meow to her behind him, and Callie respond in cat-speak.

That crazy yapper
, Shep thought to himself, smiling.

 

Shep scented the ground, as Callie had. For several rows, he smelled nothing, but then he caught a whiff of his boy. He followed the tiny trail of scent to a group of beds, but they were empty. No bags were piled alongside the cots; an empty plastic bottle jutted from under a corner of the bare mattress; one white sock with a hole near the toe was caught under the bed's metal leg — it was the only remnant left of his boy.

Fuzz hopped onto the bed, his tiny nose twitching. “Smell strong,” he hissed. “Boy here not long ago.”

“Why would he leave?” Shep yipped.

“Maybe go home?” Fuzz meowed.

Home
, Shep thought, a warm feeling rippling through his body.

“Let's go find him,” Shep woofed.

They returned through the door, Shep shuffling along as fast as his broken body would let him. Once on the street, Shep tried to recall the path of wandering he and Callie had taken that sun — so long ago, cycles ago, in a different city entirely, it seemed. He knew they had turned away from the cold winds, and so he lumbered toward them, turning when necessary ever toward sunrise. He knew that much: that he lived toward the cold winds, toward sunrise.

This part of the city was still in the ruined state the storm had left it in. Hunks of trash remained strewn across the streets, wilted now after so many suns. Dead leaves and branches coated the sand piles so that they looked like huge, alien creatures snoozing in the sun. Buildings creaked and groaned as if impatient to tumble into the piles of broken stone they were destined to become.

Shep despaired of ever being able to find his home amidst all this destruction. But then he found a familiar-smelling building. Then another. Even the devastation of the wave could not raze every landmark. He turned one corner and recognized a building down the street. Fuzz loped in front of him, nosing the pointiest bits of rubble and sharpest scraps of metal from Shep's shambling path.

Shep's heart raced in his chest. He thought of what he would do once he got to his building. He would run up the stairs to his den and his family would be waiting inside. The woman would be holding a huge bowl of kibble laced with gravy and bits of meat. The man would have his hands on the boy's shoulders. The wave would certainly have washed away the mess Shep had made in the kitchen, so there would be no reason for any of them to be angry. His boy would run to him — of course he would — but Shep would not forget to say hello to the man and the woman. He would nose Fuzz in front of them and hopefully they would understand that Fuzz was a part of their family now.

Shep saw his street — one more block and he would be before his building. His paws burned against the stone and his breath came in ragged, painful pants, but he had to keep going. He was almost home.
I'm here, Boy!

And then Shep saw that something was terribly wrong.

His den building, the one that smelled of all the humans who had lived there over the cycles, stood before him, but half of it was a crumbled pile of stones. The front wall ended a few stretches above Shep's head and the side wall, which had led to the alley, was completely missing. The stairwell rose like a curling stone and metal plant into the sky. Shep pawed at the door and it opened with a whine.

“Should Fuzz go in?” the cat mewed.

“No,” Shep grunted. “There's nothing here for me now.”

What fur-brained fantasy did he succumb to, thinking that his home would have been spared when every other building in this drowned city had been destroyed? Of course his home was gone. Of course his family left the shelter. Of course he'd been abandoned again.

The cat looked at Shep with his intense cat-eyes. He purred and nuzzled his head against Shep's leg. “Shep-dog not fuzz head to hope home survive,” he meowed.

Shep wagged his tail. “This pile of stones isn't my home,” he woofed.

The cat glanced up at him and purred louder.

Shep allowed his legs to rest, slumping into a sit against the door frame. “I guess we're forming that pack after all,” Shep grunted. “Though we'd better wait until I can stand for more than a heartbeat before beginning recruitment.”

Fuzz sat and wrapped his tail around his paws. “Shep-dog give up so easy?” he meowed.

Shep sighed. Was it really giving up to admit that the storm had beaten him? Wasn't there some point at which struggling on was just completely fur-brained? How would he find his family now? They weren't at the shelter; their den had been washed away.

“I guess we could go to the dog catchers back at the big kennel,” Shep woofed. “Maybe my boy will come looking for me there?”

He glanced at Fuzz, and the cat nodded his head.

Shep sniffed the door frame, taking in that familiar scent one last time. “Good-bye,” he snuffled.

The two friends padded slowly down the ruined street.

 

The sun was falling in the sky. Shep was realistic about how far he could travel, given his crippled condition: It would take them at least two suns to reach the kennel. They needed to find a safe place to rest for the night.

“Fuzz find den,” the cat meowed.

“I know a place,” Shep woofed. “I'd like to see the old run one last time.”

The Park opened off the street like a refuge from the stone. Some of its trees had fallen, but many still waved their branches in the breeze. Junk littered the grass; paper and plastic bags tumbled across the empty space like leaves. But even ruined, in the golden light of late midsun, Shep could feel the power that this place once held for him. This was where he first felt happiness.

“Come on,” Shep woofed. “We can sleep in the dog run.”

They loped into the Park and over to the posts that marked the boundary of the old dog run. The metal mesh of the fence's walls was bent or missing. Even in his broken condition, Shep was able to hop over the scrap that remained into the enclosure.

The storm had washed away most of the obstacles in the run, though a few poles still jutted from the dirt. There was the corner where the water hose used to create a muddy swimming hole. And over there, the pole with the trash that always smelled of scat. Beside a bent stretch of fence was the palm tree Frizzle had tried to claim — toppled now —

“Fuzz see human on tree,” the cat meowed.

Shep couldn't believe his nose, wouldn't believe it. He sniffed again, then hobbled and limped to the palm.

Shep stopped in front of the person — his boy. His boy sat on the broken trunk, his knees pulled up to his chest and arms around his legs. His head rested on his knees.

“Boy?” Shep woofed. His bark was tremulous and his tail waved.

The boy looked up. His face was dirty and sad. He looked older, like the two moons that had passed were more like cycles. And then a smile cracked across his lips and his eyes opened wide.

“Shep!” he cried, falling forward off the tree and tackling Shep. “Oh, Shep!” he said, hugging Shep's neck like he would never let him go.

“Boy!” Shep woofed. “I can't believe I found you!” He licked the boy's face, wanting to clean it of all its dirt, of all the pain he saw written across the boy's skin.

The boy sobbed, soaking Shep's fur with his tears. His fingers clenched Shep's scruff and he muttered into Shep's fur. Shep could tell the boy was unloading to him all that he'd been through over the last moon-cycles. And Shep knew now that he could handle anything the boy needed him to hold.

“I'm here now, Boy,” Shep snuffled. “I will protect you.”

It's what an alpha does.

The dogs were on her the heartbeat Pumpkin set paw in the Park.

“You have to bark what happened next!” one particularly boisterous Boston terrier puppy yipped.

“Great Wolf!” Pumpkin barked. “Give me a chance to take off my leash, DeeDee!”

The terrier hopped back, bouncing with excitement. “New story!” she cried. “New story!”

The small dogs, and even some of the big ones from the other side of the fence, collected in the shade of the giant banyan tree. They sat or lay down in the grass, licking their chops and watching Pumpkin as she settled herself near the base of the trunk.

Pumpkin liked to howl her tales under the spreading branches of the old banyan. It had somehow survived the storm, as had Pumpkin and her stories. Though so much had been destroyed and then torn apart and dragged away and built over and remade, this tree stood as a reminder of the drowned city that was.

“Now,” Pumpkin woofed, “where did we leave off?”

She had barked the tales so many times by this age, she often forgot her place in any given woofing. But she was an old timer now and such things were becoming more common. A chew toy she swore she buried under the pink throw pillow would vanish from existence; she forgot to eat her kibble all morning and would find herself suddenly starving in the early afternoon.
It's such a bother, growing old.

“Shep and the dog pack had just crossed the canal and fought off the giant lizards!” barked a bright-eyed pup — a mix of breeds that had mushed into something uniquely adorable.

“Oh, yes,” Pumpkin yipped. “So, are you all ready to hear about what happened when they met Blaze?” She smiled at the group of snouts surrounding her, all eyes glued to her muzzle.

Pumpkin had started woofing the stories as a way to connect with the other dogs on the show circuit. Over the cycles, her tales became more famous than her flowing tail! Dogs would howl from across the grooming area for her to bark the legend of the Great Wolf or some other story. But she had long since retired from the show circuit, having won enough trophies to fill a whole wall in her mistress's den. Now, she had to admit, she barked the tales in the Park to recapture a little of that attention. It was always nice to get back in the spotlight.

“Please!” DeeDee whined. All the others echoed her excitement with howls and wagging tails.

“Well, huddle closer, dear packmates,” Pumpkin barked, clearing her snout, “and I'll tell you the tale of Shep and Callie and all the other fearless Dogs of the Drowned City….”