A Dog Named Job by Peter Biles

The city of Nodding had built the eight bullet trains in case the day of the bomb ever came, and when the day did come, to the horror of all, Jennings was at Pet Smart to buy dog food.

Catastrophes happen in history books. That’s what everybody in town unconsciously assumed. They happen to other people in other countries, not ours. They happen to strangers in faraway lands. Jennings spent a few years on the Oklahoma-Kansas border as a child. Tornadoes scarred the springtime earth every April but tended to demolish other towns in the region—never his. This amounted to the law of basic narcissism and knew that. He did. It wasn’t rational to assume the worst could never happen to him, but the unspoken law had more or less stood the test of time over his thirty-three years. Now the eight trains, each pointing due north, took off their wrapping paper and began to flood with passengers.

He stood outside Pet Smart with the dog food over his shoulder, like he was a nomad at the tail-end of a caravan in the desert, when the first siren started, the line of cars began to bunch and extend like a contorted spring along the fast-food chains, outlet stores, and broken-down warehouses with the plywood covering the windows serving as early premonitions of the inevitable. The missiles were on their way, and some people—the temperamentally fearful and conspiratorial—had already gotten the heck out of dodge.

Jennings leaped into his car, avoiding the cars that caterwauled through the lot, and decided without second thought that he would race to get Job, his ancient greyhound, before heading to the train station. He also wanted to grab some other treasures from the sinking ship if he could. He was like Lot’s wife, looking back on the doomed city and about to become a pillar of salt. He took deep breaths as he waited for the light to turn green and the horns honked, people shrieked, and the sky adopted an imaginary green shade that reflected everyone’s inner guts. It was finally happening. No more drills, no more conjectures, no more jaded warnings of the end of the world. This was the real deal.

The eight trains were long and spacious enough, supposedly, to fit all thirty thousand people in town. They could also bolt off to 300 miles per hour in just seconds, heading straight for Canada, with titanium-layered exteriors that were supposed to reject vestiges of radiation. Jennings wondered though, as he pulled into the driveway of his rental house, if there would be enough time for everyone to even board. There was no time to wonder for long.He raced inside the front door with the dog food over his shoulder and yapped, “Job! Job! Here Job!”

He set the food down by the door and the dog’s empty metal bowl and checked his phone. He had no relatives in town, thankfully. Most of them still lived down in Little Rock except for his younger sister, who was just finishing up her undergraduate studies at the University of Florida. He hoped the swamp was immune from danger.

“Where are ya, buddy? We gotta go!”

He fluttered into the kitchen. Egg remains still crusted the edges of an iron skillet. The pleasant gray light from the morning had matured into a full-on apricot sun dance. It was an otherwise perfect afternoon. The checked tile hearkened back to Cold War days when every kid in America was taught that ducking beneath a desk would shelter them from the atomic blast. The fridge was speckled with photos of family reunions, Christmas cards, his brother Jody’s wedding, and Job.

“C’mere boy!” Typically, the dog would be laying in front of the backdoor on his faded blue pad. Now the pad was empty, matted down by years of dog dreams with a sediment of gray fur making pale waves on its edges.

“Job!”

He ran upstairs and knocked a painting off the wall. The sirens must have scared the dog blind. The ancient pup only ran to safety during thunderstorms. The last time the sky had spat hail, Job managed to limp up the stairs and cuddle at the foot of the bed while Jennings slept through the whole affair. So far, though, the room yielded no sign of canine. His bed was an unmade tangle of blue covers and sheets. A phone call rattled in his pocket from his mother. He answered it briskly as he looked under the bed and tossed the closet door open with his foot.

“Honey, oh honey, are you out of there? Please tell me you’re safe!”

“Hey, Mom. I’m all right. It’ll be all right. I’m on my way to the trains, like everybody else. You guys all right?”

“Well, we’re out of the radius, but we’re just worried sick for you. And if the grid gets hit—”

“I’m fine. It’ll be fine.”

“Oh honey, please let us know the second you’re out of the blast range.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I will. Tell Jody he still owes me a hundred bucks when you see him. I’m coming down to collect.” The humor failed at the release. His mother said, “Ohh” and then he hung up after a quick, “Love you.”

Job wasn’t under the bed nor in the closet. He wasn’t slumping in the bathroom, and he wasn’t crimped in the hot water compartment. He wasn’t passed out in the tiny patch of backyard, and he wasn’t anywhere in the living room. Jennings even checked under the sink.

“What in the world? Job! Job!”

Job had showed up on Jennings’ doorstep three years earlier in a thunderstorm, looking so skinny, pitiful, and friendless that his new owner decided on something Biblical to do him proper homage. Jennings liked to say that he was dropped off by cruel men as a gift from God. Maybe both things can be true at the same time.

The sirens’ whine, meantime, grew to an even higher pitch, as if the authorities were trying to rack up the dread. The President said just last week that if the enemy pressed the button, decided go full-on World War III, people in vulnerable locations would only have minutes to escape. Thank God, he said, the spending bill to develop high-speed trains of escape town with over 20,000 people.

“Job!”

He had to take the hunt outside. His apartment included a staircase, but overall was narrow as a beanstalk and hid just a few nooks and crannies big enough for a scared dog to fit in.

 When he stumbled out the door, the last of the cars on the neighborhood block swerved around the corner, losing a coffee thermos out the passenger window as it zinged perilously close to the green street sign. It was a blue Honda Civic, slightly rusted at the hub caps, decorated with a Yellowstone National Park sticker on the dusty metal rump. He stopped on the driveway, Birkenstocks sideways on his feet, and gaped. It happened to be his car swerving, hitting the curb and going airborne until rattling back down and vanishing in the mid-afternoon ooze of sunshine. His car, his escape mode. He’d left the keys on the front seat, figuring he’d be in and out with the dog in a couple of minutes, and a passerby must’ve capitalized on the crisis and felt justified to save his own skin from destruction. For a moment, for several moments—a pure wasted minute, maybe—Jennings gaped at the empty street, saw his empty driveway in a quivering shade of red, and finally walked back inside.

His adrenaline seemed to reach a boiling point. All of his fight or flight impulses tipped over the edges of his mental membranes and then stultified. He couldn’t seem to move anymore. In a punch, the old adage, that other people might get their car stolen on the edge of a nuclear apocalypse, evaporated. He went upstairs and looked out the window. He could actually see the eight golden trains two miles away, all lined up and gleaming, with the remaining dozens of passengers going all aboard for what might be the final ride of their lives. He ran back downstairs.
“Job,” he whispered. “Oh Job, where are you?”

Back outside, he jogged to the end of the block and peered down the road leading downtown. Empty as an old Christmas stocking. He banged on someone’s front door. He even tried the lock on a nearby Sedan. Next, he flailed down the road and screamed for help, which was probably what he should have done right after the car was stolen. No one came out of their doors. No shop owner peered through the tinted glass. Where were all of the homesteaders hiding in their basements filled to the brim with gallons of water and gasoline? They were too far under to hear him. He called Sam from work. It instantly went to voicemail. He called five other friends in the area, all who failed to pick up. Everyone must have figured that their friends had all the necessary means of escape.

His final solution was to collapse in the middle of the street by Tommy’s Bagel Stand and let his forehead touch the cool, shadowed cement. “Oh God,” he whispered. “Dear God.” The sirens had stopped now, replaced by a sinister form of silence that eventually evolved into a quiet rustling of the lines of ornamental pear trees planted up and down the sidewalks.

When he looked up, to his left, he was faced with the wooden doors of a chapel he passed every day on his way to work but had never actually entered. He wasn’t particularly religious, although he’d been raised Methodist and always appreciated the high-domed curvatures of the church, the wooden arches and beams, the infinite wisdom of saints imbued in the sunlit puzzle pieces of the mosaic windows. He hurried inside the chapel, shocked it wasn’t locked too, and took a seat at the back of the sanctuary, quietly sweating.

Maybe his childhood memories of church spurred him to go inside. Maybe a part of him imagined Job would be in here, wagging a tail at the altar, waiting for the end—welcoming it with open paws. He didn’t want to go back home, though, and felt as though somehow these ancient stone slabs might do better to protect him from the atomic blast than even the deepest cellar in the ground. This was the temple of wishful thinking, anyway, was it not? What better place was there to pretend that all was well and all manner of things shall be well?

He sat there, shivering, bowing his head, sometimes looking at the gleaming, colored windows and the wood cross about the choir chamber at the front of the room. He checked his phone to find that it had died, and that the screen had cracked from when he’d dropped it earlier on the streets trying to call people. No, he was alone now—alone with light and silence. The missiles were coming, though. He could almost hear their distant whines as they seared through outer space before dipping downward toward Earth. They were supposed to hit just five miles east of the town. From that distance, the explosion would more than just level old Nodding. It would instantaneously turn it into a flat grid of dust. He would be an imprint on the earthy floor—maybe the only human dust shadow in the whole ghost town.

He figured now was the time to pray. He bowed his head, mouthed the words that he was sorry—for what, he wasn’t sure—and then, to his shock, heard a door open and shut at the front of the sanctuary. His felt the impulse to hide behind the pew, which he did, only to peek over its edge a moment later to see an old man dressed in white pastoral robes holding a silver vase of water. He had long gray hair, a bulbous beard that sprayed out in its own atomic blast, and was humming to himself. He went up to a pair of plants by the communion table and watered each of them with equity. He turned to a basin by the pulpit, which was ornately carved from some deep-hued pine and included a little mahogany staircase and poured the rest of the water into it. He picked up a duster from the front pew and dusted the communion table. And then, he held a hymnal up to his face and sang “All Creatures of Our God and King,” all five verses, in a low soprano that rang off the ceilings and sunk into the stone walls. It seemed like a normal afternoon to him. It was just another light-filled day. The only other thing he did was get down on his knees on the blue carpet behind the communion table, pray out loud that God would have mercy, and then slip back inside to what was apparently his little office cove.

Should he knock? Should he replace the old man on the altar and pray, too?

 Jennings got up to go to the altar, as if there were some holy incense for him to bathe in. Or maybe he would divert course, go into the office, and speak to the priest just to have the company of another person before the end of the world. But he stopped at the sound of scratching at the door behind him, followed by an oddly familiar whimper. He only ever heard that small sound during thunderstorms when he lay in bed with the bedroom door closed. Jennings turned around and opened the front door to find Job the dog with his head bowed, gray, matted hair looking almost identical to the locks of the old churchman. The sirens were still silent, a bird chirped in the boughs above his head, and the unmistakable whistling of a train sounded a mile away, getting closer.

Peter Biles

Image: a silver train leaving the station from Freepik