So the dog was broken, and bleeding, and reeking of rot, and Zack stared at it like maybe it was his own fault that the dog existed. Like maybe he'd imagined it into being with his stupid, traitorous mind.
Its legs were shattered. Its eye was pulped. It was breathing like a haunted flute — wheezing out little corpse-scented sobs. Next to it was a girl, or what had once been a girl, or what the world had made of her after she'd made the mistake of existing outside a faction. She was about twelve. Dead. Crushed like a cigarette butt. If she'd been lucky, it had been fast. But nobody was ever lucky anymore. Not out here.
They were escapees, probably. They'd tried to run, which was adorable and dumb and punishable by death. The wilderness didn't care who you were. Maybe it was the Adults that got them — you know, the ones who grew up wrong. Who hit a certain age and turned into slavering monsters, because in this world growing up means going feral. Or it could've been mutants. Or scavengers. Or Blood. It was always Blood in the end.
Zack was ten, which meant he hadn't started mutating yet, physically or philosophically. He was still small enough to pass unnoticed, but big enough to be given a wrench and told to "clean up." He was part of The Dirties — capital T, capital D — a wasteland family cult that taught you loyalty by beating it into your teeth and calling it love. And Blood? Blood was more than their leader. Blood was the prophet, the father, the ideology, the algorithm, the reason any of them still pretended to have hope. You were born, you bled, you obeyed, and then you walked into exile to lose your name and maybe your soul.
That was the way things worked. That was The Truth.™
Except Zack had a secret. A cartoon-shaped, dead-world-colored, paper-scented secret.
Months ago — like, before this dog, before this body, before the last dozen body-disposal missions — Zack had found a book. It had no value: not edible, not burnable, not weaponizable. It was full of little drawings and strange words and one weirdly clean dog. The boy in the book was named Charlie Brown, and he was poor, and sad, and still somehow hopeful. He had a kite, a baseball glove, and a dog named Snoopy who pretended to be a flying ace and slept on the roof of his house and didn't bleed from the eyes. That dog never whimpered. That dog dreamed.
Zack had shown it to no one. Not even his sleepmates in the Dirt Zone. He couldn't read, but he'd memorized the lines his classmate whispered to him before that classmate was disappeared. The book was called Peanuts. It made Zack want things. Dangerous things. Abstract things. Like "friendship." Like "fun."
Now this real dog — mangled and dying and absolutely, catastrophically not-Snoopy — was in front of him, and Zack was being asked to do what he always did: clean up the mess. No questions. No emotions. No dreams.
But something itched.
What if he... didn't?
What if he named the dog? What if he fixed its legs and fed it scavenged cans of not-meat and trained it to sniff out radiation pockets and mutants and lie at his feet like in the cartoon he wasn't supposed to remember?
What if he ran?
He could do it. He could steal some rations, strap the dog to his back, vanish into the undergrowth and become a myth. The boy and his dog, like some pre-war folktale. He could be the story.
Except he wouldn't.
Because the girl was right there, and her face looked like she'd tried to be the story too. And now her story was done. She had dreamed, probably. And now she was fertilizer.
Zack felt something tear — not in the air, not in the dog, but in him. Something old and dumb and dangerous. Something that made your chest ache and your fingers twitch.
It was grief.
Which was just a prelude to guilt.
He pulled out the wrench.
It wasn't his first time. Wouldn't be his last. But it was the first time it hurt like this. The first time the pain didn't stay in the body being hit. The first time the guilt seeped into his bones before the blow even landed.
The dog whimpered again, soft and pathetic, like it forgave him already.
"I'm sorry," Zack whispered. "I love you, Snoopy."
And then he killed the dog.
Because dreaming is for kids.
And in this world, there are no more kids.
Only survivors.
Only Dirties.
Only ghosts.