My eyes flutter open to a...dog. I sit up from my comfy couch. I must have passed out on the couch out of exhaustion, I was working late last night at the grocery store. My dog, a golden retriever, was licking my face and jumping all around me. 

“Easy boy, alright, FETCH!”

I throw a tennis ball and he leaps into the air, catching it in his mouth, and returning. I throw the ball once more and get up to go to the bathroom. I walk past practically nothing when I do, the sad fact about minimum wage is you can’t afford much. My apartment is barren, spare a couch, a TV, a bookshelf, and a cabinet. As I walk, my left leg feels very stiff. I suppose I will have to loosen my prosthetic soon if I want to walk comfortably. 

I walk past a closet door hanging slightly ajar and I spot my old military uniform, dusty and grimy. My superior officers would have killed me if I wore that in the Middle East. Have a perfect outfit they said, it has to be pristine. I walk up to the uniform and trace my fingers down the name stitched into the cloth. “Mardov Evette” it reads.

I open the door to see...a rifle pointed at my face, I yell and back up only for the rifle to be gone. I stumble into the bathroom, turn on the faucet, splash the cold water onto my face, and stare at myself in the mirror. I look awful. 

My eyes are sullen, my hair is receding, my skin is pale, and my brown eyes are turning dull, and my light brown hair is beginning to turn gray.

“Snap out of it, you are here, you are home. There are no rifles, there are no soldiers, just you.”

Behind me in the mirror is a soldier dressed in military uniform...with his head completely blown off. Just...standing there.

“SNAP OUT OF IT!”

I slap myself as hard as I can, feeling the sting and following numbness on my cheek. The soldier is gone. I am fine. I am here. I am sane. 

I turn off the faucet and exit the bathroom to find my dog staring at me. The tennis ball is gone. He does not jump, he does not move, he just stares. I stare into his deep brown eyes. I wait for him to do something, but instead, he just continues to stare. 

“Want some food buddy?

I go to the kitchen, but of course we are out of dog food. Out of all food really. The fridge only has condiments, and the shelves only have dried pasta.

“I really should go on a shopping spree, huh buddy?”

I turn to look at my dog, and there he is again, just staring. In fact, I don’t think he has even moved. He just turned his head, continuing to stare at me. The longer I stare back, I begin to see something. A fire. A red flame burns in his eyes, the color of blood. I know it well. I have seen the look before. The look of something alive that is filled with bloodlust. 

“Come on, stop it, you know this isn’t real.”

I blink, I turn away, I slap myself. However, all of this is to no avail. My dog continues to stare at me, the red only getting deeper. I slowly begin to back up, my stomach beginning to clench. My hands begin to shake. My legs begin to wobble. I reach for my knife rack. 

When my hands reached for the knives, my dog sprinted towards me immediately, snarling. At the same time, my TV blares to life with an emergency announcement. A female news anchor begins to talk, “Numerous reports are coming in, it seems as if animals are becoming hostile!”

My dog bites down on my prosthetic leg as I grab a 10 inch knife from the rack. My dog backs up and jumps yet again, slamming into my torso, knocking me onto the ground. He begins to paw at my torso and his head goes for my deck. I punch my dog's head, and he flies off me.

“Come on boy, please, stop!”

My dog's eyes are now completely red. They only have one thought. Kill me. He barrels towards me yet again, and I swing my knife in a downward arc and it plunges into my dog's head. Blood and wet dog brains spurt onto my hand, and my dog convulses before finally falling, slumped onto the ground, his legs at odd angles. I gasp and look at my hands. They are covered in blood. I look up and see where my dog was, a middle eastern child is now. I scream and run out of the apartment, opening the door and rushing outside. I need to get out of this apartment complex. The sky is red, and multiple families are trying to exit as well, however, every single one of them is filled with bullet holes. There is blood everywhere. The sky begins to bleed. My neck stings, and I slap it to find a ruined carcass of bug. The stinging brings me back to my senses. Families are still rushing, but the sky is filled with insects, and blood still filles everywhere. Many families have bites of different animals. I see a mother clutching her dead baby, their head ravaged in half by a dog bite. Another man is missing an eye, presumably from a smaller animal eating his eyes out.

Multiple people are playing the news on phones and radios. I continue to hear the female news anchor.

“Death tolls are skyrocketing, multiple politicians are being found dead in their homes, Australia is under total collapse, the Empire State Building has collapsed entirely from multiple cars crashing into it due to pigeons crashing through glass. I am being instructed to tell you to find a safe place underground and hide out for as long as possible. The only country that is not being affected by this cataclysm is Iraq.”

I finally make it to the exit of the apartment complex, running out into the street. Mountain lions, skunks, and raccoons are making their way onto the streets and attacking anything that comes close to them. 

I feel a tug at my shirt, as a man I recognize as my senior officer urgently is trying to speak to me. His name is Lieutenant James Marshall, and he is yelling at me.

“SOLDIER! WE HAVE A SAFE HAVEN. COME WITH ME!”

He begins to jog, and I jog with him, but his pace is insanely quick. He shows me into a cellar that was built into the ground, I open up the wooden door, and step down the stone steps, closing the hatch with me. I hear the click of a lock, and hear another voice outside, “Welp, that’s it for storage. Glad we could finally clear up all our junk.”

I continue to make my way down the stairs to find...furniture? The Lieutenant, previously behind me, is nowhere to be seen. That is when I finally remembered.

Lieutenant James Marshall is dead.

3 Weeks Later

“Charles, get your camera ready, we have to report on this, this can even make it to the front page, LETS GO!”

My cameraman, Charles, quickly throws his equipment in the van as I begin to drive. I push my blond hair out of my eyes as I speed down the road towards some random town in California. It takes us 2 hours of driving, but we finally make it.

“CHARLES, GET OUT THE CAMERA, WE ARE ABOUT TO GO LIVE!”

Charles immediately pulls out a camera, hooks it up to the news station, and begins to record.

“We are coming to you live from California, where we have finally found famed Mardov Evette. Evette was last seen sprinting down the streets of Sacramento, screaming. At his house, we found a dead dog stabbed with a rusty knife. It seems Evette ran all the way to this poor family's house and sealed himself in their basement storage. However, the storage was locked by the family on account of the entrance to said basement being accessible outside. 3 weeks later, the family has opened the basement to find Evette dead, lying on a sofa, dead. Morticians are currently investigating what caused this, and the best autopsies can get is that when Evette died, he was suffering PTSD

And hallucinations.”