Freedom Is For Dogs

    Henri looked out the window onto the brave new world that greeted the morning sun.  It still seemed very familiar, though everything was now quiet.  Long shadows crept up the walls of the buildings across the street as pinkish light found his face.  He blinked at its intensity.

    The corpses still littered the dirt road that ran through town, as dew kissed the cars that wouldn't work and the plants that hung in the window boxes below.  The real corpses, that is.  The ones that couldn't hop up and chase you if they knew you were there.

    And that pack of dogs was back.  They'd tug at the bodies and go riotous rounds over the pieces that broke off.  He'd learned to hate those mongrels.  They carried on like they'd forgotten that people, just like the ones they were gnawing on, used to provide for them. 

    They were loud, too. 

    Mostly though, Henri suspected that he hated them because they were free. While he was relegated to cringing indoors for fear of being set upon by ghouls, those mutts went unmolested.  The living dead seemed to have no use for animals, aside from coming to blows now and then over the not-so-living dead.  For the most part they left one another alone.

    "Fucking dogs."

    "I like them," Frederic offered in response.

    "Oh?"  Henri seemed impatient.  "And why is that, do you suppose?"

    "They remind me of when we could walk wherever we wanted.  Whenever we wanted."

    Henri turned from the window and started cleaning his gun.  "I can't remember anymore."

    "The dogs remind me." Frederic stared out at them moving up the street.  "They remind me of more peaceful times."

    The pack stopped briefly to squabble over another cadaver.

    Henri peeked again over the windowsill.  "Frederic, they are eating people!"

    He nodded his head but his expression didn't change.  He just watched the dogs dive into their prize.  Slowly, he put his rifle to his shoulder.  "That may be the case, but they're at least some sign of life."

    Henri positioned himself and his own weapon at the window now.  He had seen them as well.  Not the dogs, but those things.  A few of them had staggered stupidly into view at the far end of the road.

    "You've seen them too?"  Frederic's face hardened.

    "Yeah," replied Henri.  "Let's feed some dogs."