The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs ^{KELLY JENNINGS}

Here’s another story that is exactly what it says it is….

Raised in New Orleans, Kelly Jennings is a member and cofounder of the Boston Mountain Writers Group. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology The Other Half of the Sky. Her first novel, Broken Slate, was published in 2011; her second novel, Fault Lines, will be published in 2018. Find her on Twitter @delagar.

I was nine years old when I got my first dog. He was a real surprise, since Moms and Pop kept saying I was too young for a dog. I’d forget to feed him, I’d lose interest, he’d spend his days chained in the yard. I kept saying no, no, never, only I believed them when they turned their heads away and said nope.

Then, best morning ever, my birthday morning, they drop Elvis onto my bed, wiggling and warm and lapping all over my face.

He was a great dog. A Weimaraner/border collie mix, silky gray with floppy ears and a white splotch on his chin, like he’d been drinking milk. Very smart and very fast. We lived in town, like everyone, and weren’t supposed to cross into the woods—it was posted, big signs, PRIVATE LAND NO TRESPASSING NO HUNTING. Elvis and I knew how to get under the fence, though, down there by the interstate.

The woods were all overgrown farms, bought out years before by some rich folk, I forget which. I always pictured them living in New York, or Paris. Somewhere far from Arkansas. They never came around, anyway. I was never afraid they’d catch Elvis and me on their land.

The woods were crisscrossed with crumbling farm roads and rusting railroad tracks, the overgrown remnants of hayfields. Farmhouses and barns loomed from the pines and oaks. Elvis loved the long, straight stretches of farm road best. He loved nothing better than to run. At nine I couldn’t keep up with him. Later on I almost could.

He hunted, too, rabbits and squirrel. He could outrun rabbits and snatch birds right out of the air. I took the rabbits home to Moms. She didn’t like squirrel, but sometimes I took them to Mr. Elias down the road. Moms was glad for the meat. So was Mr. Elias. Everyone talks how wonderful it was before the Invaders came, but I remember.

Once when Elvis brought me a bird, a grackle, it wasn’t dead. It lay in my hand a second, warm and still, and then sudden as that leapt away. Elvis and I watched it wheel and soar, free against the blue sky, watched it disappear across the trees.

When we left for the Refugee Camp, I had to leave Elvis behind.

I didn’t want to. The buses didn’t take pets. When I found that out, I wanted to give our tickets to someone else, or at least my ticket. My pop hit me when I said this. He’d never hit me in my life before, but he hit me then. Smacked me in the head, and then grabbed me around the middle and dragged me on the bus. I was too stunned to fight him.

Left Elvis in the parking lot.

To tell you the truth, I still cry about that sometimes, after all these years, after everything that’s happened, Elvis running after that bus, trying to catch up to me.

Sally, my second dog, a Rottweiler/pit bull mix, ugly as sin, I acquired during the Resistance.

Resistance. That’s nearly as funny as Refugee Camp.

But lots of us who survived the Camps did have the notion we could fight the Invaders, especially those of us who were young and stupid. We took to the mountains and the leveled cities, any place the Invaders hadn’t built their domes. Militias and Resistance units formed.

Everyone knew the other route you could take—besides starving inside or outside of the Camps, I mean. Everyone knew you could apply to be taken in. If you had the right constellation of skills, the Invaders would accept you, make you a kind of pet human. An Adjunct, they called it. Unfortunately, the box of skills they asked for—facility with languages; musical training (vocal, woodwinds, brass); sculpting; visual arts—none of this was anything I had acquired.

I joined a Resistance unit in the Boston Mountains. I think we lasted half a year. It’s hard to fight a civilization that’s capable of leaping across galaxies and rebuilding planets (they were reshaping Earth to be more suitable to their needs, cooler, dimmer, new trees and grasses) with the equivalent of stone knives and bearskins, to quote my captain.

I don’t know why bearskins.

Sally was our watchdog. She was great, too. Dogs heard the least whine of the Invaders’ drones or patrol squids coming in. She knew not to bark, just to give a little huff.

But when they raided our camp, she stood her ground, trying to hold them off. They shot her down same as they shot every human what didn’t run like a rabbit.

This one doesn’t have a name.

The winter after my unit was wiped out, I was starving in a cave deep in the Boston Mountains. The rabbits and squirrel had about been hunted out by then. When the snow let me—it was snow more often than not, thanks to what the Invaders were doing to our weather—I made my way to one of the nearby towns that had been plowed under and scavenged for food or gear. One of these trips, I came across a half-grown pup, wandered off from his mama, probably.

I coaxed him over, hit him with a rock, and ate him for the next three days.

When summer came, I headed for the Rockies. From the few other survivors, I’d heard the Invaders weren’t interested in the high reaches—that if you could get to the big mountains, they’d leave you alone.

In truth, I didn’t expect to find anything out there. Since I was twelve years old, I had lost everything and everyone I loved. I figured this salvation was yet another lie, one more pipe dream to get us through the last gasp. But I knew I couldn’t survive another winter in that cave. So I traded the last of my canned beans to Sid over there in Jasper for one of the mountain bikes she’d rebuilt and set out. I had a sleeping bag, a compass, a fighting knife, and a camp knife. You couldn’t use combustion engines or guns. Anything else, the Invaders would mostly ignore you.

Mostly.

I didn’t have much trouble. This was six years after the Invaders now, and the winters on the plains were brutal. You survived by going Adjunct or by digging in and joining in. Anyone too mean or too stupid to do one of those had long since been killed off, either by the Invaders or his neighbors.

Didn’t mean I had no trouble. It’s always some stray—stray coyote, stray human.

Maybe two weeks in, coming up to Ogallah, I was by a stream, baking a fish for lunch in a little campfire, when I looked up to see Liza.

I never did know what sort of dog she was. Some Jack Russell mix maybe. She was in awful shape, partly from being old, mostly from losing whoever had owned her before the Invaders came. She still wore a collar, a nice blue leather one with her name on a brass plate. Someone had loved her once. Now she was bone-skinny, two toes missing entirely, nearly all her teeth gone.

But she ate half my fish politely, climbed into my lap, and went to sleep. And she was tiny enough to fit into the basket of my bike. I sighed and took her along.

She lived all the way to the mountains. She loved riding in that basket, ears flying, barking at the birds. She made friends with people when I stopped at farms to trade—more than once, I’m sure she got me a better deal. And twice she warned me, growling, in time for me to hide from strays prowling past at night on the road.

She died in Olney Springs, just as we reached the Rockies. I buried her there.

When I showed up here at the ranch, Sara herself interviewed me, asking what I could do.

“Not much,” I admitted. “I can hunt. And I’m good with dogs.”

Luckily the ranch needed hunters. Game’s scarce with the climate shift. According to Isra, who keeps our greenhouse, the vegetation sown by the Invaders is displacing our native plants down on the plains. Isra used to be an ecologist for the state up here before the Invaders. She says that invasive species almost always displace native species. She says if they’d brought animals, we’d be losing a lot faster.

Down in the flatlands, it’s not just the cattle gone, but the deer and rabbits and every other kind of animal what needs plants to survive. Isra says when the plants go, we go. Sure, we can live on meat, she says, but what does meat live on?

This ranch didn’t used to be a working ranch—it belonged to some actor who spent a week or two on it every five or six years, Sara says, skiing or hunting. Sara used to run his kitchens. She runs those of us living here now. We’re up to thirty-five as of midsummer: fourteen men, eighteen women, and the three kids. And six dogs.

Snowbear is my dog. I got her out hunting.

What I mostly hunt is strays. Oh, also Bighorns, when they come down looking to feed, and I run traps for rabbits and rodents; but especially in the early years we had problems with strays. Sara has the roads and towns posted with instructions about what to do if you cross onto our land. Anyone who didn’t follow those rules, Sara said, we had to consider them strays.

The Invaders’ plants haven’t reached us yet. It’s still native grasses and trees up here, bright green Earth moss, not that bizarre orange crap. On the other hand, with the climate change, we get snow ten months out of twelve now. And colder summers every year. But we still have gardens; we can still hunt. So every year, until just lately, we got strays up from the plains; and every year they were more desperate.

This particular stray was over to the Tolman place. A young one, not more than twelve or thirteen. The Tolman house burned down years ago now. The stray was holed up in what was left of the stables, with an open fire going right there where anyone could see it. Just inviting Invader drones, the young idiot.

I didn’t like clearing him, since maybe the issue was he couldn’t read—plenty of those who came up after the Invasion can’t—but when I called out, he picked up a gun. An actual handgun. Because the fire wasn’t enough, I guess. Stood up, too, giving me a clear target. At least it was quick.

When I went to salvage the arrowhead, the gun was a rusted bit of junk. He didn’t have much of use in his gear, either—a knife, a packet of dried cherries, and a bag filled with dead puppies. Except for Snowbear, who wasn’t quite dead.

Snowbear’s a Samoyed, smart and tough, and a fine hunter, though it’s not anyone up from the plains to hunt for three years running now. Merle argues with Sara, he wants to send out an expedition, through the mountains, even down to the plains. “What if we’re the last ones left?” he says.

Sara says she’s in no hurry to learn the truth concerning that particular possibility.

Isra thinks we are the only ones left. I can tell by how she stays quiet when Sara and Merle are having this argument one more time. Or… she thinks even if we aren’t the last already, we will be the last soon enough.

Me, I’m not so sure. See, it wasn’t just the cherries, though tell me where anyone’s getting cherries this far past the Invasion? And it wasn’t just how well fed that kid was, for a stray. It’s the puppies. Five dead puppies, and Snowbear, all of them purebred Samoyed. Nine years past the Invasion.

Could be the stray was an Adjunct, or I guess he’d have to be the child of Adjunct, run off from an Invader dome. No one’s come out of the domes, though, that we know of.

Could be the Invaders are breeding Samoyeds. Except when you think what Samoyed are good for—hunting in the snow, surviving in this arctic cold, with their thick coats that can be harvested for making clothing and blankets—well, that seems more like something we’d do, out here in the snowy wastes. Not them, in their climate-controlled domes.

I think about all this when Snowbear and I are out on a hunt, climbing up to Red Rock or walking the river, snow silting down and the world so quiet around us. What I think is, someone else must have survived, somewhere. Someone who can feed their children well. Someone with greenhouses large enough for cherry trees. Someone who can afford to breed dogs.

Sometimes, when I’m standing up on Red Rock looking out across the frozen world, I think like Merle, that we should try to find these other people, while we still can. I think if someone else is out there, maybe we aren’t, after all, doomed.

Or at least not yet.

Then Snowbear comes bounding through the trees, swift as a dove from the gray sky, her black eyes bright, letting me know she’s got the scent of something hot, and we go hunt it down, one more time.