His boots crunched on the concrete as his soles broke up the day old ice. He pulled up his scarf as the wind picked up.
Come on, dog, go already.
The scene around him was completely insane: there were no cars on the streets (save for the ones that came to a stop at the curb) nor were there any other people out. He glanced at his phone. The time read 8:23.
Wow. Almost 8:30 in the morning and the and we are the only things moving.
With that thought came another blast of wind that seemed to shoot up his jacket
For the love of all things holy! Just go, dog!
he hadn’t cared to check the time before walking out the door, so he wasn’t quite sure how long he had been out there, but it had to have been at least twenty minutes. All that was clear was that the dog needed to go and he was the one that had to do it.
A slight jealousy lit in his chest as he realized that his wife was probably sitting in their warm house right now, probably wearing three layers of socks, under a blanket, drinking a nice tall cup of coffee.
Lucky.
This was supposedly the coldest November day in Seattle history, registering a walloping 3 degrees. Fahrenheit. Before the wind chill. Throw that into a city that was just pummeled with snow for three straight days and what do you get?
A cold. No cars. Frost bite. No busses. The flu. No people. Pneumonia. Frozen roads. A work-from-home day.
Seriously dog. This is ridiculous.
He took a look down the street again; still nothing. Usually in the time it took him to walk his dog down this street he would have seen at least three busses and countless cars.
I guess people are being smart today.
The crunching continued as he plowed forward, putting his head down to try and block some of the wind from hitting him in the face.
This scarf is doing nothing.
Suddenly the dog stopped.
This is it! Good, now I can go get warmed up.
But the dog didn’t move. She just stared back the way they had come.
“Come on, doofus. Let’s keep mov –“
The dog let out a low growl, the hair on her back beginning to stand up. He turned around to see what she was getting so upset about.
There was nothing there.
There must be a squirrel back there.
He started to get nervous. She only growled at other animals, and there wasn’t anything out right now.
And that was all it took for his imagination to take off:
What if? What if there is someone armed back there, prepared and ready to strike the minute I turn around to go home? A serial killer, maybe. There’s a rumor of a nearby insane asylum. How much weather would it take to get the security shut down? I should walk the other way. Cross the street? It could be another animal. Maybe the cold pushed some sort of rabid, wild animal out of the hills down into the city looking for food. Maybe the look of this place is truly what it was: and apocalypse, and there are now a group of zombie-like creatures roaming the Earth looking for a tasty snack.
He knelt down and scratched her chin. “You’re losing it,” he said, pretending it was to the dog. Her response was the continued growling into the darkness.
He suddenly realized that his pants were really cold. He stood up quickly, trying to get the frozen denim away from his thighs as quickly as he could. A pair of ski pants was definitely in order if this weather was going to keep up.
