Radar barked again. I went back and lifted her out of the basket. She staggered a little, then limped to the door. She sniffed and went inside without any further hesitation.
I tried the big roll-up door, the ones the trolleys must have used, but it wouldn’t budge. I left the smaller one open for light and checked the lamps. It looked like it was going to be a dark night for Prince Sharlie and his faithful sidekick Radar, because the oil in their reservoirs was long gone. And Claudia’s three-wheeler would have to spend the night outside, because the smaller door was too narrow for it.
The wooden spokes of the spare trolley wheels were dry and splintery. I knew I could break off enough wood for a fire, and I had brought the Zippo my dad used to light his pipe, but no way was I going to build a campfire inside. It was too easy to imagine sparks landing on the old trolleys and lighting them up, leaving us with no refuge but the church-type building. Which looked rickety.
I got out a couple of cans of sardines and some of the meat Dora had packed for me. I ate and drank a Coke. Radar refused the meat, tried a sardine, then dropped it on the dusty wooden floor. She had been happy with Dora’s molasses cookies before, so I tried that. She sniffed, then turned her head away. Perky Jerky was also a no-go.
I stroked the sides of her face. “What am I going to do with you, girl?”
Fix her, I thought. If I can.
I started for the door, wanting another look at the wall surrounding the city, then had an inspiration. I went back to my pack, rummaged, and found the last few pecan sandies in a Baggie underneath my useless iPhone. I offered her one. She sniffed it carefully, took it in her mouth, and ate it. Plus three more before turning away.
Better than nothing.
4
I watched the light through the open door and occasionally went out to look around. All was still. Even the rats and crows were avoiding this part of town. I tried tossing Rades her monkey. She caught it once and gave it a few token squeaks but didn’t try bringing it back to me. She laid it between her paws and went to sleep with her nose touching it. Claudia’s liniment had helped her, but the effects had worn off and she wouldn’t take the last three pills the vet’s assistant had given me. I thought she had used up her last real burst of energy running down the spiral steps and racing to meet Dora. If I didn’t get her to the sundial soon, I’d find her not asleep but dead.
I would have played games on my phone to pass the time if it worked, but it was just a black glass rectangle. I tried restarting it, but didn’t even get the apple. There was no fairy-tale magic in the world I had come from, and no magic from my world in this one. I put it back in my pack and watched the open doorway as the white overcast light began to weaken. The three evening bells donged and I almost closed the door then, but I didn’t want to be in the dark, with nothing but Dad’s lighter to knock it back, until I had to. I kept my eye on the church （if that was what it was） across the road, and thought when I could no longer see it, I’d shut the door. The absence of birds and rats didn’t necessarily mean the absence of wolves or other predators. Claudia had told me to bolt myself in, and that was just what I intended to do.
When the church was just a dim shape in a darkening world, I decided to pull the door shut. Radar raised her head, perked her ears, and gave a low woof. I thought it was because I’d gotten up, but that wasn’t it. Old or not, her ears were better than mine. I heard it a few seconds later: a low fluttering sound, like paper caught in a fan. It approached rapidly, growing in volume until it was the sound of a rising wind. I knew what it was, and as I stood in the doorway with one hand on the three-wheeler’s seat, Radar joined me. We both watched the sky.
The monarchs came from the direction I had arbitrarily decided was the south—the direction I’d come from. They darkened the darkening sky in a cloud below the clouds. They settled on the church-type building across the way, on a few standing chimneys, on piles of rubble, and on the roof of the storage shed where Radar and I had taken shelter. The sound of them settling up there—there must have been thousands—was less a fluttering than a long drawn-out sigh.
Now I thought I understood why this part of the bombed-out wasteland seemed safe to me rather than desolate. It was safe. The monarchs had kept this one outpost in a world that had once been better, one that existed before the members of the royal family had been either assassinated or driven out.
In my world, I believed—and I wasn’t alone—all that royalty business was so much bullshit, fodder for supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer and Inside View. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, were just another family, but one that had lucked into all the right numbers in the genetic version of Mega Millions. They took down their britches when they had to shit, just like the lowliest peons.