Dead dogs became mile markers as the municipal budget continued to shrink. Backstrap was always the first I passed on my commute, there on my left just after taking the ramp onto the interstate. Named him so because his right flank had been neatly peeled open, but otherwise he was in remarkably good shape. Hadn’t bloated. Hadn’t deteriorated. Healthy looking rottweiler. Strong enough to have made it across to the median. Most of the others lay along the shoulder, and few showed such resistance to decomposition. Especially not the next in line, the one I call Ol’ Pelt n’ Blood. Looks like a coyote, but it’s hard to say. Nothing much left of him even from the day he first showed up except a smashed flat pelt and a spray of red staining the concrete. Someone must’ve really got him, or else maybe nature is more eager to reclaim her loyaler subjects.

I live south of the city, so that my commute brings me first through the country, then through small towns, followed by suburbs, lower class outskirts, and finally the city proper. It was here, where the interstate is drilled like a riverbed into the earth and concrete walls rise on either side, that the first fresh kill appeared. Of course I have been seeing roadkill all my life, but this was different somehow. More vivid. As if they were sacrifices of a kind. Their full personalities left on open display.

That first I saw, deep in city territory, had been a pitbull. How it got itself into such a scenario, I could hardly say, but it looked as if it had been living and breathing just a few hours prior to the time I first passed it. I tried not to look too closely but its body marked my exit. I cringed and rounded it, but the next day it was still there, stiff and mottled but complete. After that initial drop, its conditions depleted at a much slower pace. The traffic here never slowed so no scavengers could get at it. There was no organic matter in which to shelter bugs or fungus. It was winter and the temperatures remained low. Only time worked at its specimen, time and the hot exhaust from the passing vehicles, which may have acted to mummify the poor thing.

Why did no one stop to pick it up, I asked myself each day its street-side occupation wore on. If not the owner, then some city official. Some mandate must be in place for just such a situation. Finally, a morning did come when I did not notice it. I did not even notice not noticing it until I was a couple hours into my shift and in retrospect could not recall seeing it. I breathed a sigh of relief and felt comforted once again by the idea of living in a functioning society with measures in place for every imaginable difficulty. Even if the bureaucratic machinery was slow to react, I was reassured that the necessary moves had been put into motion, but the next day it was there again. The dead dog had not been removed, but rather become such a feature of the landscape that it was invisible unless sought for.

In the end, it was never removed, only flattened so that it became impossible to distinguish the organic matter from the concrete and other detritus along the shoulder. How it happened, I can’t say. Perhaps someone had had enough of looking at it each day, and drove over it purposefully, or it could have been accidental. A texter. A drunk. A sleepy commuter. Either way, that sped things along, but, in all the time it took to decompose, several others had appeared along my route. 

It’s funny. One of the big digital billboards I pass under on my drive flashed an advertisement for Animal Control on just one of the mornings the dead dogs were really getting to me. It made me feel less alone. The dogs weren’t a subject broached in polite society, but surely I was not the only one who had noticed their drastic increase in number, and, as I said before, vitality. I even had begun to develop a little pet conspiracy theory that the dogs weren’t roadkill at all, only made to look that way, and in reality they were the disposed bodies of those poor dogs you hear about who are abducted and used to train the fighting pits. But Animal Control was on it. I could see their proud announcement from half a mile back, on the massive billboard between the interstate and the seasonal Amazon warehouse, abandoned in the post-Christmas slog of January. They would be reclaiming this area. Soon their gleaming white trucks would be once again patrolling the streets, performing their grim, janitorial duties. But no, as I neared, it proved to be merely an advertisement for a new television show, a sitcom with that title. Was it new or in its seventh season? Who knew anymore what went on in the recesses of cable television. Either way, no new order would be sweeping in to clean up our mess, so I thought why not do it myself?

“And do what with them exactly?” seemed to be the choice response.

“Put them to rest.”

They’d followed us from the earliest fires, across land bridges to new and unknown continents. They had morphed their physiology into any manner of monstrous proportions. They had changed not only their shape, but their very nature, at our request. And now we were to abandon them, splayed in total vulnerability, on the roadside?

As is often the case for visionary ideas, I was forced to take to the internet to find any adherents. My first response came from a longhair named Bobby. He was eager to join in the cause and requested that I pick him up at a certain branch of Chili’s after he got off work. I complied although his schedule was not totally agreeable. He did not get out until after eleven at night, so that we would have to work under cover of darkness. This rather defeated the purpose of the orange reflective vests I had purchased, thinking no one would question anyone doing such thankless work, especially while wearing the unofficial uniform of civil servants in the field. Do civil servants work the night shift? It gave our whole operation an immoral tinge, like those early anatomical scientists who succumbed to graverobbing in order to further their field.

I had to admit, though, working at night did give the benefit of a less populous interstate. It proved much easier to pull over and subsequently merge back into the flow of traffic at such a time.

“Mind if I smoke?” Bobby asked, already motioning to roll down his window. I gave him the okay and cracked my own as we pulled out of the casual eatery’s parking lot and headed for the highway. In the extended cab, I had a box of the heaviest duty black trash bags on the market, two fresh pairs of work gloves, and in the bed a pair of shovels. I was wearing coveralls and rubber boots. Bobby had baggy black slacks, his kitchen necessitated non-slip clunkers, and an ill-fitting black polo as well as a rubber apron.

“Took it from the dishroom,” he explained. “Thought it might be helpful for this line of work.”

“Good,” I nodded. “Good thinking. And thanks again for helping me out with this. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to find someone.”

“Don’t mention it, boss. Not many people know the shit that I know.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a war going on. The first skirmishes of apocalypse. You know how animals sense things before we do. Fly away before an earthquake, or a hurricane. They are more in-tuned. Got to pay attention. Zoomancy, that’s what it is. Monkeys and dogs, they are aligning on opposing sides. The final encounter is coming, but it will be no heaven and hell horseshit. Hell is heaven’s great lie. It will be heaven and earth. What do you think all this UFO business has been recently, brother? Heaven is preparing their invasion. The occupying forces are being activated. The animals, the whole natural order, that is not the earth. That is heaven, still obeying heaven’s rhythms, God’s commands. Only we have disobeyed. Only we have rebelled. We are what they call the great Satan. Us and our single ally, Canis lupus familiaris. Monkeys remained in the garden, our dearest cousins would not follow us into the wilderness. They remained behind the protection of the cherubim with his flaming sword. Only Dog followed alongside. And now they are paying the price. Have you seen the news? Two hundred and fifty of them slaughtered by monkeys in India. Every dog in the village, dragged to the rooftops by God’s little vermin! I spit on them. I spit on their holy, mindless zeal. I spit on that whole vile lot. We owe this to Dog, for they are our brothers, for only they would face damnation at our side, and only they will be there when the final lines are drawn. Our fallen brothers, our only friends.”

I wondered what Bobby would make of the coyotes, of which there were more than just Ol’ Pelt n’ Blood. Would he feel moved at all by their similar features, or would he consider them a rude apeing, God’s clowns? I did not get the chance to learn, nor did I get the opportunity to rescue Backstrap that first night, as I so dearly wished to, for Bobby’s workplace was situated in such a way that to reach him would have meant driving past nearly a dozen other fallen. Instead we bagged a pair of mangled mutts. They might have been fellow escapees from a single backyard, so closely together were they struck down.

Not wanting to overburden our workload, we drove the two out to a nearby park and found a secluded place in which to start digging. It took up much of the rest of the night, so that the first softening of dawn arrived to assist us in tucking our comrades into the ground.

“From dust we came and to dust we return,” Bobby spoke over the grave, “and, if not for one another, dust is all we would have. Rest easy, dear friends.”

Our workload and then some was refreshed daily, so that our nightly progression seemed almost pointless. Some mornings, I swear, the same dog I had buried the night before once again lay in the place we had removed him from. Although, to be honest, this could have had been due to the sleep deprivation, for the only sleep I was getting tended to be the few hours I could grab between the end of my shift and the end of Bobby’s, for in an effort to undo some of the day’s killing, we worked as long as possible each night. Sometimes I would go straight from yet another funeral in the secret cemetery to work without even a chance to shower.

Affairs at home were being neglected. My houseplants, for example, had been left to fend for themselves, but under the influence of Bobby’s musings the vegetable kingdom was becoming a primordial enemy. Cultivated plants were something of a prisoner of war, forced at gunpoint to provide food and ornamentation for us, but at heart loyal only to God, same as cattle, chicken, goats, and all other so-called domesticated beings, but none more so than cats who I learned from Bobby were the spies of God. Anything that smacked of order, in fact, was an agent of God. This included all machines, such as the truck we sat in together during all our time together. Vehicles were naturally attracted towards dogs. Chaos, Bobby said, was just a slur for Play, which was both humanity and Dog’s natural state, and the antithesis of God who was the arch-stickler of the universe.

“Humanity is at its lowest whenever it tries to enforce order. That is playing the enemy’s game. A certain amount of order can be put up with, when it is work necessary to one’s livelihood, and the livelihood of one’s community, one’s playmates. But so much order is just order for the sake of order. It’s a perversion of play, acting out something with all the fun sucked out of it.”

“Are you saying we should quit our jobs and do this full time?”

“No,” Bobby said, looking at me in surprise. “I’m just talking shit. I’m not crazy. I know you got to work. I know you need money. For now, at least. I’m just saying the way things are.” And so we continued on the way we had been: clearing and re-clearing the few mile strip of the highway south of Bobby’s place of employment. On the days I made it back home, and so followed my old route to work, I was reminded of how little progress we were making. Backstrap remained in his place along the median, not quite as remarkably preserved, but still appearing intact. OPB, however, had practically disappeared, although something of him must have been tethered to the spot, for once, in passing, a shard of him fluttered into the cab, a sneering sort of grin bringing visions of Backstrap still living, skirting through neighborhoods, light on his paws, seemingly with a destination in mind. He does not stop to sniff at the manifold smells along the way. The possum in the street, splayed in glorious fashion, many of her ripe innards on full display, a bouquet of hidden red things still warm against the night’s cement does not distract him from his mission. Backstrap cuts a corner through an unfenced yard, even crosses a bridge, and finally reaches the place he has in mind. Bravely he crosses the access road and sets foot on the highway, one lane, two lane, three lane, four and onto that island of grass where he lays down to die. This is my body, Ol’ Pelt n’ Blood mimicked in Backstrap’s voice, broken for you, and then OPB’s presence exploded into a swarm of laughter and swung back out of the cab to hover over the barely visible blood stain a few miles back. 

I rubbed my eyes and vowed to take a night off soon, to get some more sleep.

“There’s a reason we say doggy heaven as opposed to just heaven when a dog dies,” Bobby said that night. “Of course they aren’t allowed in God’s heaven. They have sworn allegiance to us and become his enemy. His opposite. Just look at their names, the same three letters in reverse.”

“Isn’t there something we can do,” I found myself asking the line cook, not really feeling up to another one of his metaphysical insights. “I mean, something to address the disease and not merely the symptoms?” Our little hidden cemetery was filling up. Soon we would be on the hunt for a new burial ground, but tonight the bed of the truck is loaded with three body bags, and so we make room.

“If you figure that out, boss, let me know.”

After dropping Bobby off, I pulled over for donuts and a Coke. The sun was just beginning to crack the horizon. I spat on its light as my heart raced and stomach clenched in frustration. We have betrayed them, was all I could think as I watched the early morning dogwalkers traversing surrounding suburbia. We have created a world in which they cannot survive unless they are in bondage. Tied up on leashes. Staked in yards. Held in solitary confinement within our homes for ten hours a day and ignored upon return.

It is too much. I put the truck in gear, pulled away from the donut shop, and headed for home. There was something I must do. It was not something that would undo any of this, but it was a debt of honor that had to be paid.

Backstrap was lighter than I expected. His perfectly preserved exterior concealed the nothingness left within. I fought the urge to feel angry at him for this. He had become something of an inspiration for me, a noble symbol, an irrefutable denial of death’s prowess. But it had all been for show. When I lifted him from the grass, there was nothing to him, his skin just a jacket of tough leather around a pocket of humid air. Maggots squirmed in the damp brown impression his body had made in the grass. I got him into one of the trash bags although there was nothing left to leak and he was so light that I was afraid he might blow out of the bed if I gained enough speed.

In the park, I buried him with the others, digging in the broad light of morning as joggers passed by. My orange reflective vest and the obscurance of distance proved cover enough, for no one disturbed me in my duty. When the grave was complete, I laid the black bag within and cut the plastic open then I began the task of laying the heavy earth back on top.

When Backstrap comes to, as if out of a long trance, it has dimmed to dusk and the park has grown borderless. He emerges from a patch of trees to find the field expands beyond where the neighborhood once stood, and in its place is gathered a strange pack: a labrador, a corgi, several German shepherds, a little yorkie, and several mangy-looking mutts. They seem to be glowing faintly in the fading light, and beckoning him towards them with playful bows and snorts. He takes a step in their direction, and then another, and soon he is running; they are all running, running through the boundless parklands as rabbits dart amongst their paws. He reaches to snatch at one’s neck, but just misses as it speeds away. He digs his old paws into the dirt and veers after it, gaining on it in the moonlight, only losing it when the earth opens up to usher the rabbit within, slamming shut behind. Drats, the rottweiler thinks as he returns to his new pack.

In all the excitement, he’d neglected the inaugural greeting, but now that the rabbits have gone, he sets his nose to sniffing, and raises his tail to better accommodate the others’ snouts.

Jacob Austin is a Texas-based essayist and fiction writer. His published work is collected at jacobottoaustin.com.