Jack and the Rabid Dog

Jack’s cinema vérité point of view zooms down long concrete hallways with vaulted ceilings. He races down a corridor, approaching a closed vault door guarded on either side by an armed soldier. As Jack passses between them, the older of the two turns and looks directly at him, sending shivers of terror through whatever form this is, but he passes, without resistance, through the door without any sort of alarm being sounded.

He finds himself in a large chamber full of people and video monitors. Men and women sit at long desks, similar to NASA Mission Control, and at first that’s where he thinks he is. There are some computer-like devices on the desks, but most of the people have fixed gazes and are gesturing in the empty air in front of them. Jack notices that each person in the room, from the additional armed guards in the back, to the technicians, to the stern-looking man sitting at a high desk, overseeing the scene, has a flat metal disc, the size of a coin, set into their temple.

The jovial demeanor of the assembled make him think their jubilation is the result of a successful shuttle launch or similar achievement, but when a nearby technician rubs his finger across the metal disc and points to one of the larger monitors, seemingly sending a feed for the others to view, the first horrible realization dawns on Jack. Turning to look at the screen he sees war.

Human conflict has been savage since cave-dwellers fought with sticks and stones, yet Jack believed that the highest tier of human brutality must have an upper limit that would soon be reached. The horrors displayed on the monitors prove that notion to be incorrect, as humanity’s imagination is never more fertile than when it dreams up new vectors of suffering.

The screens feature scenes beyond Jack’s comprehension. His perspective darts from melting flesh and bone to writhing masses of people afflicted with some unnaturally fast-moving disease, whose skin erupts with boils which burst, releasing their bloody insides to pool beneath them in a rising tide. Everywhere he looks are grevious wounds, burning people, others tearing each other apart bare-handed. The drone-footage features no audio, and the cheers of the people in the vault provide an incongruous soundtrack to the various onslaughts.

Wrestling his gaze away from the monitors, Jack finds himself floating toward the man whose desk dominates the room. As he approaches he sees what, at first, appears to be the presidential seal of the United States affixed to the front, but discerns that instead of an eagle, it features an aggressive looking goat beneath crossed longswords. Jack’s point of view is drawn up, above and behind the man. Something that Jack cannot quite discern about him floods him with terror. Then he sees what is on the man’s desk.

Jack screamed in his dream, but awakening with a start, found his unspeakable terror expressed by only a feeble, moaning exhalation. Laying in bed, drenched with sweat, he struggled to his senses, wide awake at 3 AM again. It was the third night in a row featuring this particular nightmare, each instance drawing him closer to the man in the dream around whom the fear coalesced. The thing on the desk, in particular, formed some focal point of terror. He dared not return to sleep.

Jack’s rational mind suspected that this was just the result of stress brought on by new fatherhood. He was alone with his infant son for the first time while his wife was away on business, but the visceral realness of the recurring dream insisted to him that it was somehow more than that. Plus, the context of the nightmare, some future war fought with terrible weapons, didn’t seem to involve Jack Jr. at all, unless it was just generalized anxiety about the state of the world his child was likely to inherit. Still, it felt like a premonition.

Reflecting on the final moments of the dream, Jack has the sense of a small wooden frame, but can’t conceive of what about it was so terrifying, or why it seemed so familiar. He wanted a cigarette, and he knew there was half a pack in the glovebox of his grandpa’s truck. They were certainly stale, having been there since the last time he’d gone up to the lake with his brothers two summers before, but he had quit when Maggie’d gotten pregnant, and so he fought with the urge as he changed out of his soaked bedclothes.

Standing over his son’s crib, which he had moved into the bedroom after the first nightmare, Jack wondered how, even though he was doing something that biology, evolution, and his parents had prepared him to do, he still felt so lost and afraid. Part of it was Maggie’s absence. She was smarter than him and answers came quickly to her, which was why she was off in Zaire or Zimbabwe at the behest of the tech company she worked for. She’d been granted two years of maternity leave, but, nine months in, when a situation arose involving rare earth elements in some far off corner of Africa, a generous offer from her bosses had been impossible to refuse.

Maggie was passionate about her job, always eager to discuss what amazing new technologies might arrive if enough of certain hard-to-find elements could be sourced. As a geochemist she had expected to work for the US Geologic Survey after acquiring her doctorate, but, after being headhunted, a lucrative offer from the tech giant had changed those plans. Despite all that, Jack knew she was struggling with being away from her family, and he wondered how she was sleeping. His bad dreams had started the night after they’d last had contact, before she set off into the jungle or savannah or wherever she was going.

Corporate beefs and security concerns prevented her team from using competing satellite internet services, and her own company’s efforts in that endeavor were lagging behind, so their ability to communicate was limited. At least Jack Jr. is sleeping well, Jack thought to himself as he looked at his slumbering child, who seemed to discern his father’s presence, as he opened his eyes for the briefest of moments to look at his dad before offering a little gurgle and turning away to show the crescent-shaped skunk-spot on the back of his head.

Jack could scarcely believe how much he worried about his son, who was so vulnerable, helpless and new. He and Maggie rarely argued, despite coming from wildly different backgrounds, having been raised in wildly different ways. Her parents were San Francisco intellectuals, whereas his owned a lumber mill in the Pacific Northwest. They certainly would have never met had the tech giant’s corporate headquarters not been built nearby, and even so, the chances were slim. Of the thousands of employees that had flooded the area over the past two decades, few had ever had cause to come in search of lumber, as almost all their needs could be met on the campus or among the new housing developments that had sprung up.

As teenagers, Jack and his brothers had gone to poke around the developments under construction. Their parents were peeved at the fact that all the wood being used by the tech giant was being shipped in from Canada, instead of sourced locally. Wandering among the modern, partially built homes, Jack was struck by how sterile they felt, especially the furnished ones. There were a few different models, to avoid a monopoly house appearance, but after visiting five or six identical layouts, Jack began to feel a disorienting sense of deja vu.

He contrasted this with his favorite place in the world, his grandfather’s log cabin, which was filled with the bric-a-brac and relics of a lifetime, where mounted fish and photographs filled the walls, touchstones for memories or stories passed down through the generations. Years later, adding a 5x7” photo to the wall would serve as a milestone for him, representing three generations of enjoyment. The picture featured his new family by the lake, with Jack Jr. swaddled in Maggie’s arms and Jack Sr. hugging her from behind.

James, the oldest brother, had brought a magic marker to the development and wanted to scrawl nasty messages on the walls, something Jack had mixed feelings about, but the sight of a slowly moving SUV with “SECURITY” emblazoned on the side making its way through the neighborhood caused a change of plans. As they rode their bikes back in silence, Jack decided that the tech people were probably boring and it was unlikely he’d find anything in common with them, a sentiment he had held onto into adulthood, until Maggie had strolled into the lumber yard looking for live-edge western red cedar to make bookshelves. She’d found ones she liked and when Jack delivered them the next afternoon she’d offered him a glass of Prosecco, and he’d sat in her house, with the smell of cedar in the air, unsure if it was one he’d been in before, possessed of that same uncomfortable deja vu he had experienced while younger, but not caring, as he was falling in love while bubbles popped on his tongue.

The courtship wasn’t easy, as Maggie was always flying off to some far flung destination. She promised it would be worth it, not just for them, but for everyone, if she could just find more of these substances that would unlock new breakthroughs in computing, medicine, entertainment, and quite literally every aspect of human life. Jack wasn’t quite so gung-ho about the prospect. He’d been to see clear-cut mountainsides and witnessed how erosion can fill a valley with muddy slop that could suck a laced boot right off your foot, making the process of reseeding too onerous to be profitable, despite how evident it was that speed in this endeavor was critical. For Jack, the jury was still out on the idea of modern progress.

Maggie had done wonders in making her house unlike the others in the neighborhood, but Jack had still felt a pang of guilt when he’d moved in six months before the wedding. This was definitely upward mobility, and it was much needed, as the mill had struggled for years, but it still required mental gymnastics, as it felt like he was being untrue to some part of himself. Haunted by this feeling for years now, he had vowed to at least be true to his family.

One thing he and Maggie had argued about was whether or not to have Jack Jr. implanted with a TrackerTag. The devices were made by Maggie’s company and she insisted they were safe, but something about surveilling a child, even for their own good, might rob them of something unspoken that previous generations had taken for granted, not even knowing it existed, or so it seemed to Jack. Despite his wife’s insistence to the contrary, he refused to accept that the technology was merely an advanced baby monitor.

After making sure his son was sleeping soundly again, Jack disappointed himself by making his way outside to his grandfather’s truck, which existed as a touchstone for some of the best memories of his life. Maybe it was the lingering bad vibes from the dream, but this time the truck reminded him of the day he and his brothers had been swimming when a snarling, foaming dog had emerged from the woods. The older boys had leaped into the water and swam out to the dock that floated a hundred feet offshore, but Jack, paralyzed with fear, had stood his ground until his grandpa, who had seen the scene unfolding from the cabin, appeared with his rifle in hand and put down the dog.

Afterwards, with Jack in hysterics, the dog’s body had been loaded into the back of the truck. Decades later, smoking a stale cigarette in the crisp night air, looking into the now empty bed of the pickup, he reflected on how quickly time moves, and how sometimes hard decisions have to be made in less than an instant. He thought about his grandfather’s gun in the closet, not far from where his sleeping son lay, and wondered if, put to the test, he would have the presence of mind and fortitude that his grandfather seemed to possess in great reserves.

For the next several days Jack passed through life as if in a dream, robbed of sleep by the nightmare awakening him each night at 3am. Scenes of war seemed projected on his eyelids, appearing each time he blinked, but even more haunting was the fear that coalesced around the man at the desk. He found himself short-tempered with his son and his brothers at the mill. Part of him was glad Maggie didn’t call, as he knew his frustration and exhaustion would make him start a fight.

He was consumed with the idea that what he was experiencing was not just a dream, but a truthful look at a terrible future, one he might not be around to see, but which Jack Jr. was set to inherit. He felt, if not responsible, at least complicit, and began to make manic plans in his head as to how he could change the trajectory of history.

On the thirteenth night of nightmares some manner of clarity was reached. Jack’s slumbering subconscious was finally able to resolve the details that escaped him. Behind the man at the desk he saw the crescent shaped skunk spot on the back of the man’s head. The shock of the realization brought the item on the desk into focus. It was the picture of Jack, Maggie, and their son at the lake, the one hanging on the wall of grandpa’s cabin. Jack awoke and his mind turned again to the rabid dog.