The Dog Hunters: An Apocalyptic Ice Age Story Read online

  The Dog Hunters

  An apocalyptic ice age story

  JOHN SILVEIRA

  Riley Creek Books

  This story is a work of fiction. The characters, locales, and incidents portrayed in this story are products of the author’s imagination.

  Also, I worked very hard on this story. It’s copyrighted, so don’t go stealing my shit. However, you are allowed to use portions of it in reviews to say nice things about me (I’m a nice guy) and my work (it’s good).

  Published by Riley Creek Books

  The Dog Hunters

  Copyright © 2017 John Silveira

  All Rights reserved

  Chapters from Danielle Kidnapped

  Copyright © 2012 John Silveira

  All Rights reserved

  For information, please contact:

  John Silveira

  Riley Creek Books

  P.O. Box 1646

  Gold Beach, OR 97444

  [email protected]

  Cover design:

  Sammi Craig

  [email protected]

  The Dog Hunters

  Wilson woke up to sounds of whispers, moaning, and someone in the distance crying. He brought his hand out of his sleeping bag and quietly placed it on his rifle. For several seconds he couldn’t remember where he was. When he heard his grandfather stir in his sleep, on the other side of the room, he remembered: they were on the thirty-fourth floor of the Prudential Tower in Boston.

  He lay as still as he could. Moans. Crying. Ghosts. His grandfather said ghosts didn’t exist, but Wilson wasn’t so sure. The sounds continued and Wilson kept his hand on his rifle.

  There were other things that could be in the building, too, things even his grandfather feared. He listened to hear if other hunters had entered the building while he and his grandfather slept. He did not want to engage in a shootout in the Pru—or any other building, especially if it was in the dark. Sometimes he thought he heard whispering. Other times like it sounded like footsteps or people bumping into things in the dark.

  He slipped out of his sleeping bag and went to a window. Orion had already cleared the horizon. The summer sun would follow. The eastern sky was starting to get lighter.

  His grandfather told him that before the new ice age began, the ocean came to within three miles of the Prudential Tower. But it wasn’t visible anymore, not even from the top of the Pru. Looking eastward, all he could see were the snow barrens that stretched to the horizon.

  In his own twenty‑one years, the ocean had receded at the rate of more than a mile a year and each time he and his grandfather went fishing or seal hunting, the trip took longer.

  The barrens themselves were littered with the wreckage of boats and ships that had sunk during the Golden Age. Each year more of them were exposed and each was a prize for the first to cross the barrens and reach it before it was buried again, this time by snow.

  According to his grandfather, the ocean was disappearing because the world’s water was getting locked up in glaciers. His grandfather also said the glaciers would get bigger and bigger until, someday, they’d begin to move and, when they did, they’d sweep away everything in their paths including all these buildings.

  He liked his grandfather’s stories, but Wilson had never seen a glacier. And, by his own admission, neither had his grandfather. He never said this to his grandfather, but he wondered if the stories were true. The one thing Wilson was sure of was that over a hundred feet of snow covered the world from what had once been the state of New Hampshire, in the north, to Rhode Island in the south, and from the Berkshires that lay west, to the disappearing ocean due east. And more snow accumulated each year.

  The tallest buildings still stuck their heads above the snow, but his grandfather said there were thousands of smaller ones now buried. Wilson took his word for this, too. He said all the big buildings had names. There were the Gloucester, the Boylston, the Marriott, and the Weston buildings that were near the Pru. Hidden from view, on the other side of the John Hancock Tower, was the old John Hancock Building with its spire still intact.

  He and his grandfather were the only people he knew of who went inside the buildings anymore. And the only reason he went in them was because his grandfather did. Everyone else he knew said the buildings were haunted. Everyone but his grandfather. His grandfather said other people’s superstitions would keep them safe. If people won’t come into the buildings anymore, they were the safest places to sleep when they travelled. People back in the village were bothered because his grandfather didn’t believe in ghosts.

  But there were other reasons people didn’t go into the buildings: there was nothing of value in them anymore. They’d been stripped of anything that could burn or insulate, long before Wilson had been born. Many of the huts in his own village were insulated with ceiling tiles from buildings like the Pru. The office in which they had spent the night was bare except for metal filing cabinets, metal desks, and metal chairs.

  All the buildings in the city were the same, dark, bleak, and sterile, and Wilson could not imagine them ever having looked different. But his grandfather said that, before the ice age started, tens of thousands of people spent eight hours or more a day, five days a week, working in this building and the others. Wilson looked around and shuddered at the thought of wasting his life away in one of these buildings. He was glad he’d been born into the ice age.

  The stars faded as the sky got brighter. Inside, the ghostly moaning picked up. His grandfather said it was because of the wind coming through so many of the broken windows. But Wilson slipped off the safety on his rifle, just in case.

  Across the room, the old man still slept. The top of his head stuck out his sleeping bag. His hair was black with streaks of white and looked like a mixture of the world that once was and the world that was now.

  The sky continued to get brighter until the summer sun peeked over the horizon and the darkness between the buildings stubbornly began to give way to the sunrise. Due east he saw there were people moving on the snow. A camp. He brought his rifle up and looked through the scope. There were two tents and at least ten people. They must have arrived during the night after he and his grandfather had gone to sleep. Fishermen, he guessed.

  In his peripheral vision, he saw something moving on the snow below. He aimed his scope down there and saw dogs. That’s what he and his grandfather had come to hunt. He looked back to the fishing camp. The way they were casually breaking down their tents, they didn’t know the dogs were there. He used the scope to watch the dogs again.

  His grandfather said people used to keep dogs as pets and claimed to have had several when he was a boy. Wilson smiled. No sane person would keep a dog now. They were wild and certainly not worth what they had to eat to stay alive.

  Though fresh dog meat was needed back in the village, he decided to let his grandfather sleep. The old man would want to wait until the fishermen were committed to crossing the snow barrens before they left the Pru, anyway. It was too dangerous to be down there until they did.

  He watched one of the dogs tug at a piece of facing that had fallen from one of the buildings. An end of the slab stuck out of the snow while the other end was held fast by the crust. The beast pulled it, working it back and forth, until it was free. Then it dragged it across the snow. Wilson was surprised at its strength. It would be dangerous to encounter a pack of dogs without a rifle.

  The rest of the pack rooted in the hole. Wilson knew they were looking for rats. They foraged until, as if on an invisible command, the whole pack set out and headed north.

  As morning light poured into the building, Wilson quietly left the
office and carefully made his way through a darkened corridor. He let the muzzle of his rifle lead the way, but paused now and then to listen. He didn’t want to walk into a surprise visitor. Something caught his eye. There were old rodent droppings on the floor near one of the old file cabinets. He stared at them for a moment then moved on.

  He reached an office on the north side of the building and from there watched the pack cross the old Back Bay and the Charles River into what had once been Cambridge. The pack was going in the direction he and his grandfather planned on taking to go home. His grandfather would want to know when he woke up.

  He made his way back and stopped again where the rodent droppings were. They had to be old, from years ago. There’d be no reason for rats to be where he and his grandfather had camped on the thirty-fourth floor. Not now when there was nothing for them to eat. He moved them with his foot. The turds crumbled like dust. They were old. Decades old. He continued on but stopped and went back.

  He moved the cabinet a little, without making noise. Behind it was an old rat’s nest. There were babies in it, dead for more than two decades. The nest was made with some fibers and scraps of paper. There were two small booklets dragged there by the rats as nesting material. They’d been gnawed on. But they were paper and that made them valuable. He picked them up and leafed through them before he pocketed them and made his way back to the office where his grandfather still slept.

  At the window he looked back down on the chunk of facing the dog had dragged. It easily weighed more than he and his grandfather did together.

  He glanced back at his grandfather to make sure he was still sleeping before he reached inside his jacket pocket and took out the computer chip. He ran his fingers over its sharp pins. They were like teeth. The old man disapproved of this thing he used to jokingly call a talisman before it began to annoy him. But Wilson liked it. He didn’t know exactly how they were used, but in its own way, it was pretty. And then there were the stories of the power computer chips once held, powers that sounded like magic. His grandfather said it wasn’t magic. But he couldn’t explain how they worked, either. Wilson chose to remain open-minded.

  He returned the chip to his pocket and brought his rifle up to watch the fishermen again. They were-well armed. He wondered if they were from Framingham, a village to the west that still supported a large settlement. The Framinghammers had killed his father along with several others from his village when Wilson was a boy. Over the last four years, he’d killed two of them with the rifle he now held in his hands. He thought about taking a shot through one of the broken windows. But the fishermen were about a thousand yards away and it was problematic that he’d score a hit at this distance. It could also be dangerous if the fishermen figured out where the shot came from and they trapped him and his grandfather in the building. Last, of course, was that he couldn’t afford to waste a shot; every round, hit or miss, was a cartridge gone forever.

  “What’s down there, son?”

  The voice startled him and he looked back. His grandfather was awake and had propped himself up on one elbow. He was slow to get up in the morning. Wilson wondered how many more trips he’d be able to make.

  “Looks like one of the inland settlements arrived last night. They’re getting ready to cross the barrens. They’re probably going fishing.”

  “Do they have any vehicles?” his grandfather asked.

  No one had vehicles anymore. There was no fuel. There was no way to maintain them. But Wilson’s grandfather always asked. Vehicles were a part of his time, an age he still had one foot in, and that he would long for, for the rest of his life. But it was gone forever.

  Wilson had never seen any of these vehicles his grandfather talked about—automobiles and trucks—except for pictures in the books back in the village and in the immobile, rusting wrecks occasionally uncovered by slides and freak melts.

  There were still airplanes, and Wilson had seen dozens in his lifetime. They came from the south, along the old coastline, then returned along the same route. His grandfather said they were government planes, what government there was left. When his grandfather heard their low throaty approach, he would grab a dark blanket, rush from the hut and wave it wildly. Often, the planes dipped low and tipped their wings. But each year there were fewer flyovers. Then there were none. They hadn’t seen a plane in over a year. Less and less of his grandfather’s day survived.

  “They’ve got some drags for their equipment,” Wilson said. “They’ve got slaves to pull them.”

  The old man no longer shuddered when he heard the word “slave.” There were two slaves back in their village. A man and a woman found starving to death. For food and shelter, they willingly entered into bondage. They were treated well, but they had to work hard. And they owned nothing. If Wilson and his grandfather were caught on one of their trips, slavery could be their fate, though Wilson thought it would be better to go down fighting than to become a slave. He was sure his grandfather would fight to the end, too, but the old man once said, “You never know what you’re going to do until you do it.”

  Wilson crossed the office, set up the pack stove and started a small fire with bits of paper and wood, then sat back to watch it grow. His grandfather watched. The old man was six foot‑four and thin. He often told Wilson he was unfit for life in the new ice age. Wilson, on the other hand, was built like his mother: small, stocky, and blond, ideal features for the new world the old man often told him. And like his grandmother, the old man’s late wife, Wilson was quick but introspective, and always ready to smile. The old man was proud of his grandson. Born into the ice age, Wilson was completely at home.

  From the backpack near his sleeping bag, Wilson took a pan, a can of tomato sauce, and a rolled paper package. He opened the can, dipped his fingers in and licked them. The sauce was old and metallic tasting. Another survivor from the Golden Age that was about to disappear. He poured the sauce into the pan and placed it over the fire. From his pocket he took four small potatoes and deftly sliced them into thin shavings to cook them quicker. From the paper package he removed some dried dog strips, medallions of seal meat, and dried Atlantic salmon along with seaweeds he and his grandfather had gathered on one of their fishing expeditions. He placed them in the sauce and added water from his canteen. He rolled the paper package back up and stuck it into his pack.

  Every fishing expedition required the search for edible seaweeds. His grandfather said they needed them for their nutrients—vitamins and minerals. Seaweeds were also the only plants people in the village saw anymore—except for those grown in the hydroponic gardens his grandfather ingeniously rigged in the village huts. Every family had its own garden, built in sheds, and sheltered from the elements. His grandfather called them greenhouses. Wilson wondered why, because they weren’t green.

  He and his grandfather grew herbs, tomatoes, beans, and potatoes in theirs. Wilson had read about corn, rice, and wheat, but he’d never seen them. He’d never even seen a real tree, either, other than the remains of a few when they were temporarily exposed on the side of a hill after a snow slide had bared them up north in what had once been a city called Haverhill.

  Vitamins and minerals. More magic. But his grandfather said, “It isn’t magic, it’s science.” But Wilson had never seen these vitamins and minerals and, again, by his own admission, neither had his grandfather. In fact, he said they couldn’t be seen, even with a magnifying glass. Wilson was sure it didn’t hurt to believe they were magic.

  “Anything else down there?” his grandfather asked.

  “Dogs. But they’re gone, now.”

  “Which way did they go?” the old man asked.

  “The direction of home.”

  “Good. How many?”

  “Nine,” Wilson replied.

  “Nine? I haven’t seen a pack that size in years. How long can they last?” Wilson knew he was talking about dogs in general. “There’s not much left for them to live on. The rats are getting scarcer. Maybe they’re finding b
ig game somewhere.” He was silent for a moment. Big game was an empty hope. Everything was dying before the sweep of the ice age and all that survived in these latitudes were men, dogs, rats, some sea birds, and whatever was still in the ocean. “We’ll follow them,” he said.

  “I found some books on the other side of the building,” Wilson said, and he took the two small books out of his pocket.

  The value books now assumed was no longer because of the printed word, but because of their paper content, and paper burned. Books had become nearly nonexistent. His grandfather frequently said much would be lost to future ages simply because paper burned. He’d told Wilson it was the written word that held civilization together and provided continuity. “And that’s what’s disappearing,” the old man often said. “It’s not these cities and the buildings they contain; it’s the soul of civilization that’s disappearing every time we burn another page.”

  This mattered little to Wilson, but it bothered his grandfather and it was a singular source of pride to the old man that he had taught Wilson to read. Wilson was one of the few born into the ice age that could.

  He handed his grandfather the two books. “They’re full of numbers,” he said.

  The old man opened and examined them for several moments while Wilson waited for him to interpret them.

  “They’re plans for a company insurance program,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  His grandfather fanned the pages of one booklet. “The company that occupied this set of offices had set up an insurance program for its employees. For instance, this here book contains calculations of life insurance benefits based on wages earned. It’s not information we can use. Take ‘em. We can use them for tinder.”

  “What were life insurance benefits?”

  “Well, if you had one of these policies, and you died, they would pay money to your beneficiaries.”