Chapter 4

I found the husky at an abandoned veterinary clinic on the east side of town.

I'd never been to that district. It was too far away, and the round trip meant crossing three zombie-infested zones. But that day, for whatever reason, my feet carried me there anyway.

The clinic was half collapsed, its sign hanging crooked, covered in bullet holes and claw marks from zombies.

I searched for a long time and found a husky under a fallen cage.

He was so thin that every rib showed, his coat matted into clumps. Yet when he saw me, he actually wagged his tail.

He wagged so hard his whole back end swung with it.

I crouched to look at him and he licked my hand.

"Were you left behind too?" He tilted his head and licked me again.

I broke off the last ration bar in my pack for him. He swallowed it in two gulps, then got up and limped after me. For three hours, through three zombie zones, he followed me all the way back to the base.

The administrator saw me again.

This time there was a grubby husky behind me, limping, wagging, unapologetically scruffy-looking.

"You picked up another dog?" The administrator's mouth twitched.

I didn't answer. I bent down, picked the husky up, and headed for my cubicle.

He weighed almost nothing in my arms. His tail never stopped wagging, and the tip brushed my chin, tickling me.

It struck me suddenly that I hadn't felt this in a long time.

The new dog had a name. Doofus.

It wasn't that I had a wild imagination. The dog just fit the image too perfectly, with a face that screamed, "I'm going to wreck this place any second now," even though he didn't have the strength to do any real damage.

Doofus healed quickly, far faster than a certain wolf who'd mooched ration bars off me for two full weeks before recovering.

He was back on his feet by the third day, brave enough to attack my shoes by the fifth, and by the seventh he had learned to sit outside the mess hall and stare at everyone in the food line with watery blue eyes until they relented and gave him a piece of a dinner roll.

"That dog of yours is adorable," said the woman who lived next door.

"Mm." I took a bite of my ration bar. "At least he knows how to charm people."

Unlike certain wolves, who did nothing but glare and snarl at me and wouldn't even wag a tail properly.

That night, Doofus sat beside the bed with my shoe in his mouth while I stared at the crack in the ceiling. A question occurred to me: why did I keep comparing Doofus to that wolf?

Was it because Doofus had come to me after he left? Or had I been looking for a point of comparison, something to prove that those two weeks hadn't been a hallucination?