Loyalty

Kevin Bradford sipped from his glass and set it on the table. The water left glistening specks on his white moustache. Ice shifted and clinked, melting fast under intense lighting. Kevin leaned towards the woman who sat upright on the edge of the couch opposite him.

"For any of our viewers who may not be familiar with your work, what inspired the experiments from the start?" he asked, one of the drops from his moustache flying from his lip and onto the table between them.

Rita Johnson adjusted her dress's hem across her knee, brilliant red against deep hues, and smiled to hide her disgust at Kevin's poor interview manners. After a pause to collect her thoughts, she replied, "Of course, Kevin. As most of us are aware, mental illness is more prevalent than ever with the fallacies presented by social media."

"No doubt!" He interrupted. "I'd give fifty bucks to anyone who can find me someone not on medication for their sick brain. I was taking three kinds myself before the ban!" He dropped his hand absentmindedly to the spotted puppy in his lap.

Rita turned her sneer into another smile. She should have agreed to the cheaper interview. The extra readership wasn't worth the so-called first rate broadcaster. She gave the hem another tug. "Precisely."

Static crackled across the screen where the disk had been damaged.

With a sigh, Rita clicked off the TV. She probably shouldn't have been watching her downfall so regularly, but it kept her driving towards their new solution. She side-eyed the rug that covered the entry to her panic room she had hoped never to use. She tugged at the edge of her tattered cloak, which was nothing like the designer dress she'd worn for the interview twenty-five years ago. She shuffled across the room then slipped a thin gold chain from her nightstand onto her wrist. Her lamp's bulb had gone out years ago, but the thin stream of light from her window glinted off the yellow metal.

The only thing the mastiffs let her keep from her old life.

The clicking of nails passed her door along with a growl, bringing a tear to her eye. How many people still remembered she'd doomed them all? How many still remembered the population before the uprising?

At least she hadn't given them thumbs, she thought while unlatching the door.

She creaked the door open two inches and peered out. Flickering ceiling lights lit the carpeted hallway, and claw marks from the last time she disobeyed her masters scarred the wall just outside her door. Fang, the mid-sized beast, stood on two legs in the shadows where one of the overhead lights had gone out completely. He growled and gestured up at the light with one of his paws then trotted away.

Rita breathed out. If the larger dog she called Brutus had been the one to notice the light, she could have likely ended up with a new set of scars along her forearm. She'd have to leave the house to find bulbs. Of course humans didn't continue making amenities when the dogs took over. Not many humans were left anyway. The less civilized breeds that got the life extension gene went wild. They were like zombies mixed with werewolves, and humans couldn't cope.

Rita darted into the hall. "Fang," she called. The dog paused and turned to face her, and she continued, "I need to leave to find the bulbs."

Fang nodded, turned, and continued down the hall, Rita following him like a lost puppy, tripping over the lumps in the stained carpet. Thankfully they hadn't made her change the carpet, Rita could only assume, because they loved the stink. They were almost like kids when they would come inside from running around in the rain to rub their chests and neck all over the soiled fibers.

She wiped the back of her wrinkled hand across her cheeks. They'd done that ever since they were puppies. Then fang would do a final shake and climb into her lap. He did that for years before his adolescence hit.