Rabid, Bid, Id

Echo could always sniff out the bond between mother and child. It was lactic, metallic, and salty for simple meals, sweat, tears. But something was rotting in Anita now, decomposing healthy notes in her relationship to Sam. Echo smelled carefully and with increasing worry.

She withdrew to her bedroom at first. Sam sat at the kitchen table, face hidden in his dexterous paws, and made barking sounds. A saline sadness filled Echo’s nostrils and he responded. Sam threw a slipper and led him to the basement by the collar.

‘Shut up, Echo, for fuck’s sake,’ he said, pointing him down the steps into the moist darkness. ‘They’ll come and take you if they hear, you understand?’

Echo didn’t quite understand. He only knew some words: walk, dinner, fuck’s sake. ‘Fuck’s sake’ was never good news.

In the basement, he heard scratching in the walls. He pinned down the wet mouse scent and followed its movements out of boredom. When he dozed, he dreamed of stale, stagnant lakes. Finally, Sam opened the door. ‘Come on, then. But no echo.’

***

Mother had retreated with a fever that was lighting her up from inside like a jack-o-lantern. She was hollow and ghostly. I had hope.

I heard her moan and thrash in the bedding. I waited. My bedroom didn’t lock, so I took a sleeping bag to the bathroom downstairs and latched the door behind me.

They didn’t come, not for her, not for Echo. Their visits had become sparser and more rushed. The neighbourhood emptied. I had kept my rifle loaded by the front door in case of any other visitors, but I started carrying it with me around the house now mother was indisposed. Sometimes we’d hear a staccato of shots outside, desperate lyrics over the steady cricket beat.

When mother emerged from the bedroom on the third day like a half-resurrected Lazarus, she begged me to shoot her. Please, Sam, she pleaded. She went for the sink, poured a glass of water. As she brought it to her lips, her arm shook violently. The glass clinked on the worktop, still full.

‘Look, Sam, look.’ She retched. ‘I can’t even drink water no more.’

I’d heard tales of survival, even through the neurological stage. I told her so. I had hope.

‘What if it’s not worth it for me,’ she replied. ‘Not worth it.’

She begged again in the morning, this time to strap her to the bed at least, to let her ride or die.

‘What if you…’

‘Die like this?’ She finished for me. Her eyes rounded on something behind me. ‘Don’t touch my boy,’ she whispered. ‘You do look so much like him, Sam.’

Then she stopped understanding language. She just screamed incoherently. She haunted every room in a slow drunken waddle. She whispered something about fog, something about a car. She told me father used to rape her but back then, it was just called sex. I lost all capacity to worry about inspectors, infected, injustice. She couldn’t understand me back. I had hope.

I must have fallen asleep on my watch at the kitchen table. The bathroom floor and a rabid mother and the end of the world didn’t make for a good night’s sleep. I awoke to Echo’s yapping and growling, grabbed the rifle and ran to the living room.

She was chasing in a deadly game of tag, growling and foaming at the mouth. He hid under the couch and she fell to her knees with a thud. He cried and emerged on the other side, running straight to me.

She lay on the floor, limbs akimbo. Her skirt was hiked up and I could see pubic hair, sparser now she’d grown older.

‘Please,’ she whispered. Her eyes were bloodshot. ‘My Sam.’

I put the rifle to my cheek.

‘I love you,’ she said.

Echo made that mournful moan he always did when we said that. We would taunt him about how love hurt, set him off again and again and laugh. Even now, mother smiled.

I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.

***

They said goodbye to Anita in the night. Sam had been digging and barking, digging and barking, wiping his nose, then letting the weird water flow. Echo’s paw hurt. He tried to dig, too, but Sam shooed him.

‘Get back inside!’

He responded in kind. Sam flashed the whites of his eyes and stiffened over the shovel. He looked around cautiously. Only crickets.

‘I can’t lose you, too, mate. Get the hell out, Echo. Inside. INSIDE.’ He used that voice that made Echo feel like his head was in a vice.

They came just before dawn. Sam shoved Echo in a closet, held his jaw closed. ‘This is important, OK? No scratching. No repeating. Noecho. NOECHO. Oh my god.’

He smelled like fear: sour, urgent, and black. Echo understood.

***

They heard his stupid yelp and came for him. There is no dog, I told them. What was that sound, then? Don’t know, I shrugged. The dog has long run off. So maybe a coyote. Coyotes are dead, they said. Nice try. Where’s your mother? We have two people on record.

I shot her dead, I said. Yesterday.

They wanted to see her grave. And whether she’d bitten me. I took them to the mound in the backyard and as for the inspection of me I told them to fuck off. But they checked anyway.

***

There was yelling and thudding and an almost unbearable urge to run to Sam’s defence. Anita’s old smell, purple notes of lavender and wrinkly skin hung in the closet. Echo licked his paw better. More thuds came, this time boots running up and down the house. Then a long nothing. And then Sam opened the door, naked and furless, and let more water flow while he clutched Echo in his lap. He barked some more, but Echo remained silent. Noecho, he remembered. Noecho.

***

Sam put Echo in a muzzle and harness. Insult and injury. The harness chafed Echo’s belly as they limped towards the edge of the woods.

‘Bet you love that, don’t you, doggy,’ Sam muttered. ‘One with nature.’

The air thickened. Echo’s nose was attacked by pine needles and old, stale pee.

Sam retrieved his compass and a piece of paper out of his huge bag. ‘Don’t talk to me now,’ he smiled. He looked something awful. ‘I need to focus.’

They walked slowly through the undergrowth. Sam made signs on his sheet. They stopped by a creek at sundown. Echo’s paw still hurt.

‘Think this will be our postcode. What do you think, Echo?’

Echo expressed his opinion, and for the first time in so long, Sam didn’t tell him off.

They set up camp. One worked frantically to put the tent up, the other ran in circles, trailed orbits around the site, explored with his nose.

***

I had to protect the damn dog. Our borrowed time had ticked over. They became desperate now, killing what wouldn’t die itself.

This was fine, for now. I could make my way back into town for supplies in an hour, maybe a little longer. Scavenging, navigating, ducking and diving, breaking into empty homes, another hour. Then back again. A three-hour round trip, every two weeks or so. I’d have to get more blankets, a tick collar for Echo, a camping stove, shampoo. I had started a wish list.

I wondered how many people might be left, but the thought wouldn’t ever solidify. It’d back up like bile. I thought about my friends that stopped calling and those that couldn’t when signal cut out, and even touched a vague thought of mother like a loose tooth. Just like she taught me. Just feel it gently, Sammy. The tongue is the strongest muscle, so you be careful, child. She also said that whenever I talked back to her.

We lived peacefully. Echo took to finding berries and calling me over to pick them. I took to keeping us alive. If ever the canvas of the tent billowed like a whale’s gut and I felt swallowed, drifting, and insane, Echo would shift in his sleep and bring me right back. If ever I cried, he barked back softly.

***

The paw healed fine.

Sam would sometimes disappear for the day, and Echo paced restlessly and dreamed of that night he was shut in the closet. One time, Sam came back with a deep cut on his arm. Another, he shut himself in the tent for hours.

Echo didn’t understand why the bite reignited. Nothing to see but itch, heat, and no amount of licking to ease the weird sensation. He remembered Anita’s eyes, how she closed her mouth around his paw. How he yelped and ran, how Sam made the rifle bang, how Anita’s scent stiffened and faded.

He vomited deep in the woods. He didn’t sleep well. Sometimes he dreamed of that day again, except this time, Anita didn’t bite him. She kissed him, but her lips held poison.

Protect Sam. Stay close to Sam. This was Echo’s mission.

Anita started peeking out from behind tree trunks. She would call him over. He knew she wasn’t real, then he didn’t.

***

I marked days on the calendar. Two months, five days. Survival occupied most of my mind now. The improvements we could make to our station. Apocalypse deluxe.

Echo seemed a little under the weather, so I got doggy medication for food poisoning in town next time, and nearly got shot. I fed it to him with all the pride in the world, of which there was almost none left.

I had hope.

***

Sam rolled over and pushed Echo in his sleep, and suddenly teeth were out. Echo had felt so weak, so foggy, and Sam barely even noticed. Here was this guy, crushing his tail when he just needed, really needed to sleep.

The canvas entrance shuffled and Anita’s kind old face drifted in the darkness. Echo put his teeth away, terrified. He had never wanted to bite Sam. Something in his belly smelled foreign, like a parasite. Like Anita in her last days.

‘It’s time, Echo. Come with me,’ she said.

He went.

***

I screamed his name until I lost my voice. Scenes played in my head without permission. A fox hole. Were there any foxes left? An angry badger. Walked away too far and couldn’t find his way back. Ate a poison berry.

I picked up random branches. I kicked clumps of moss. I wished I was dead.

The woods stood thick. They sounded no echo.