Impending doom-doom-doooooooom

Mom’s voice came from outside the wall of legs. “C’mon, Oscar, it’s time to go.”

“I’m busy,” I said, using the same excuse she uses to overrule me when I want to go for a walk. I backed deeper under the table and checked the floor for crumbs, cleverly moving my collar out of her accomplices’ grabbing range. I didn’t see the problem with my plan until it was too late. 

The leash! 

Mom’s shoe reached under the table and hooked the loop. I clamped my butt to the floor and braced all four legs. The leash pulled taut and my collar dug into my neck. 

“Come on, adventure calls,” Mom grunted. 

The smooth floor betrayed me as the leash pulled me toward the wall of legs against my will. “But people are still eating,” I begged. Two unmatched legs pulled aside and the leash dragged me into the light.

Mom kept pulling me toward the door. Without turning around, she raised her free arm and shouted, “Bye everybody!” 

“Bye Oscar!” my collies called after me. The last thing I saw before the door closed were my collies’ hands petting the air above their heads.

Mom stalked purposefully toward the car kennel, careful to keep her eyes on the sidewalk in front of her. I could never get used to how everyone in the City put on an invisibility cloak as soon as they stepped into the street. Mom’s invisibility cloak covered me, too. No matter how hard I tried to catch someone’s eye, no hands ever reached down to pat me and no strangers’ voices told me how cute I was. 

“Boo!” A stray human popped out of a doorway, waving his arms and howling. 

I jumped behind Mom so he would eat her first, but Mom walked past him as if he were a ghost. She simply stepped aside as casually as if she were avoiding broken glass on the sidewalk. The stray drifted on to start an argument with a parking meter instead.

Now that we were alone, I finally had time to ask the question that had been bugging me all day. “Why’s everyone so scared of that boat?” I asked. “What’s on it? Pirates? Ghosts?”

“Its passengers have a virus that no one’s ever seen before. It’s killing people and they don’t know how to contain it.” 

TV and movies are a great way to learn about things no one’s ever seen before. I’d seen this movie and knew just how to fix it. “All they have to do is get on the lifeboats and make sure the virus doesn’t come with them,” I said. “It’s like in Titanic when Billy Zane heroically uses his gun to keep the lifeboat safe from that little girl with the sniffles. When all the good guys are on lifeboats, you just have to sink the ship with the bad guys on it. Easy peasy.”

“A virus isn’t something you can drown or wave a gun at, Spud.” Mom calls me Spud because my body is the same shape and hardness as an uncooked potato. My official breed is potato beast, but Spud is easier to say. “Viruses live inside people and ride from person to person in invisible droplets. Sometimes you don’t even know that someone’s got it until it’s already spread. Then it’s too late.”

“Ah. It’s invisible you say?” I asked knowingly. I’m an expert at sniffing out invisible villains and barking at them any time I detect one, especially in the middle of the night. “You’re talking about a boogeyman. Or… not a man. A boogeyvirus.”

Mom didn’t even slow down to appreciate my wisdom. “They want everyone to stay on the boat so they won’t bring the virus ashore and spread it to the rest of the country. Luckily, we’ll be long gone by the time the boat germs spread to the rest of the population. Since it needs people to spread, the safest place we can be is where there are no people.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean by the staying away from people part?” 

Mom wiped her wallet against the box next to the car kennel door until it clicked. When she opened door, the familiar smell of human pee filled my nose.

“It won’t last long, sadly,” she said.

Sadly-sadly-sadly, the stairwell echoed. 

“This is just one of those things that they make up on TV so life seems more exciting,” Mom went on. “A handful of people will get sick and the news will make a big deal about it for a couple of weeks until the next scandal comes along. Don’t worry.”

Worry-worry-worry, reassured the echo. 

“What if the evil has already gotten off the boat while no one was looking?” I asked. 

“You remember that emergency meeting last week? Apparently all you have to do is wash your hands.” Mom pulled out the keys and the Wagon’s lights waved hello. 

“Aren’t you supposed to do that anyway?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Mom said, like I’d agreed with her rather than asking a question. “It’s just to fill airtime. Since we’re gonna be out of town, we’ll miss the whole thing.”

Despite what she told Boss Charming, Mom didn’t like going out of her way for anything, so it was strange that she decided to start our desert adventure in the rainforest of Oregon. There was nothing desert-like about the atmosphere the next morning when Mom burst into the Wagon as soggy as if she’d showered in her clothes. She plugged the key into its slot behind the driving wheel and set the blowers to dryer mode. I had an urge to shake out my fur just looking at her. 

“You don’t actually plan to go out in this, do you?”

Mom glowered at the waterfall pouring down the front window. “It’s important to keep your commitments.” 

“Yeah, but you hate Oregon.”

“I don’t hate Oregon. I just don’t like that they don’t let me pump my own gas. What kind of place makes it illegal to do something for yourself just so some poor soul can make 11 dollars an hour sitting in the rain waiting for me?”

“The rain is another excellent reason not to come to Oregon,” I reminded her.

“I know, I know. I fell for it. But there aren’t that many races that allow dogs. Once I saw the pictures, I couldn’t resist.” She woke up the Witch that Lives in her Phone and held up the screen to show me an endless dry sea covered in waves of sand. 

The Witch was always scheming to steal Mom’s attention and telling lies to lure us into disaster. The old cool picture prank was one of the Witch’s favorites. Mom fell for it every time. She’s a sucker for dramatic landscapes, so the temptation of a sandscape where she wouldn’t have to follow anyone else’s path was an irresistible Mom trap. This time the Witch’s dastardly plan would backfire for sure, though, because like all wicked witches, the one in Mom’s phone was allergic to water. 

“See?” Mom held up the Witch to show me a droopy runner and a whole lot of sand. “The website said we would run through sand dunes. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“You think doom sounds like fun?” 

Mom petted the Witch’s screen fondly as her thought bubble inflated with possibilities. “I bet they’re not that big, though, and we’ll mostly see them from a distance while we run on a paved beach path or something.” 

She tapped the screen and a squiggly line filled the Witch’s face. Mom squinted at it like she was peering into a crystal ball. “Look, the course is almost completely flat.”

“It looks like a porcupine with its hackles up,” I said. 

“That’s just because of how flat it is.” Mom always believed what the Witch said rather than what she could see with her own eyes. “When there are no major hills, it makes little inconsequential stuff look like a big deal.” 

“How long is this race?” I asked suspiciously. If the Witch could lie about hills, maybe the length of the line was a lie, too. 

“It’s a 25K,” Mom said, without explaining how long that was.

I’ve been a runner since I was practically a puppy, so I knew that the kay meant kill-mom-meters. Killmometers are like miles, except they’re imaginary. While a mile always beeps in the same place no matter how many times you run there, killmometers are for special occasions, and grow or shrink depending on how hard the race is.

“How long will it take us to run twenny-five kay?” I asked.

“Less than 3 hours on a course this flat,” she calculated, “even if we stop to take a lot of pictures.” 

“Oh goody! A three hour tour! Nothing ever goes wrong on a three hour tour,” I wagged. 

Mom reached into the sack she’d brought back from the rain. She pulled out a bunch of pins hooked together like a tiny keychain and a piece of paper. She peeled through layers of shirts and jackets before finally pinning the paper to her shorts, where it would be visible no matter how hot or cold it was. Finally, she pulled a plastic bag from the secret compartment under the front window and zipped the Witch inside where she would stay dry even if Mom and I didn’t. 

Mom unscrewed the key from its slot and sat for a moment listening to the rain on the roof. “3, 2, 1…” She paused as if she’d forgotten her line. “3, 2, 1, GO!” She reached for the door and dove into the rain before she lost her nerve, pulling me along on the leash behind her.

Mom and I stood apart from the people-pack gathered near the starting line. They huddled together like the penguin pod in that nature documentary, taking turns in the warm spot in the middle. “No, you’re faster. You go in front of me,” one would say, pushing a fellow racer toward the edge to take their spot in the middle. “I’m only using it as a training run. You go ahead, I insist,” said the next runner, pushing the first out of the way and cozying into the center of the huddle. 

“Why don’t we smoosh in with the other people where it’s warm?” I shivered.

“Because you think they’re all here to see you,” Mom said, like she thought they weren’t. “And I don’t think it’s a good idea to pack in so close with that many people right now.”

Mom always preferred to freeze alone than stay warm together, but lately everybody was saying that sort of thing. I shook off the rain and looked longingly at all the runners making friends without me. Together they made an umbrella for each other, but a dog and his Mom aren’t enough to make an umbrella all on their own. 

“Don’t worry, Mom. It’s safe,” I told her. “It’s called herd immunity.”

She gave me a funny look. “What the heck is herd immunity?” 

I’d learned about herd immunity late one night from one of those documentaries that plays after Mom’s show ends and she’s too asleep to turn it off. Anything that I couldn’t learn by watching Mom I learned from TV. 

“You know how wildebeests run in groups so that it’s harder for the lion to pick just one of them? Herd immunity is science’s word for safety in groups. ” Smarts are how Mom shows dominance, so it was fun to be the one who knew about science for a change. I tried not to let my tail wag as I ’splained, “It works on raindrops, too. See? The rain can’t find the people who are bunched together, so it’s all falling on me instead.” 

Just then, a man walked to the far side of the starting line and shouted something at the crowd. They all turned away from the warm spot to look at him as he howled a word… then another… then another… When he barked the loudest word of all, the pack spilled over the starting line where they turned back into individual runners. I shook the wet out of my fur one last time and waited for the last person to cross the line so Mom would tell me to on-your-mark, get-set, go. 

Can’t wait to see what happens next? No Place Like Alone is available on Amazon!

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