Chapter 11

I thought I may never stop. I thought maybe I would stay trapped in the rhythm of walking forever, for the rest of my life and beyond, as though I had surrendered my body to a restless spirit that seemed to know exactly where it was going even though I was clueless. I was marching purposefully onward when something extracted me out of the trance, something as startling and sudden as broken glass. Except instead of broken glass, it was really more like a yelp, followed by a dull, sickening thud. I was facing an abandoned set of railroad tracks, and the sound had come from behind a dilapidated old train car that was overturned to my left. I looked over without turning my head, and before I even realized it, I found myself charging heedlessly towards the noise.
Within seconds I was laying over a pale, gaunt man, my hands wrapped around his throat. Behind us was a squirming bundle about the size of a young child. The way it was wrapped up reminded me of a body bag or something. I didn't know who or what was in it, but I was pretty sure that the guy beneath me wasn't exactly innocent. He was as white as a shop-window dummy in New York City and I was feeling a little hostile towards sickly-looking city dummies who could make any living thing yelp in anguish like that.
Pain is like a mental ambush.
I slammed his head into the cement beneath us, not hard enough to actually hurt him, but enough to let him know I was serious. He just gazed at me with this kind of sickening fear, like I was actually going to do something to destroy him somehow. I realized that if I indulged in my anger any further then I'd be just as bad as the currently helpless New York City dummy. I shook my head down at him, trying to signify to him that he wasn't worth me losing my grip on my humanity. I pushed myself to my feet, not particularly caring about whether or not I stepped on his fingers. He stood up cautiously and I started towards him. He turned on his heels and took off over the railroad tracks. Half of me wanted to chase the bastard, but the other half was more concerned with the thing squirming in the body bag.
I jogged over to it, hoping to god that it wasn't going to attack me. Part of me was convinced it might be a child or something and I had just let a violent kidnapper escape freely into the streets of Pennsylvania. Once I ultimately got the courage to take my chances of being attacked, or, at the very least, becoming even more deeply nauseated, I somehow clumsily managed to unwrap it. Two terrified eyes caught mine. The intensity of their fear made my soul lurch. At first I was convinced that the eyes were human and that I really had let a kidnapper run free. Upon further inspection however, I realized that the eyes belonged to a greyhound. It was shivering like mad, and before I thought to try reaching my hand out to it, we simply stared at each other. I could practically feel the waves of fear and bewilderment rolling from it, but all I could do was try to maintain a composed state of mind and project the most positive portrayal of my energy as possible. I imagined it was possible to replace all the anxiety and terror it was feeling with a state of peace and trust, hoping that it was possible to coax it from one to the other. I tried to come across as trustworthy beyond my limited range of action.
Eventually, I reached my hand out slowly and just left it there, waiting for a reaction from the greyhound. After what seemed like years of patient coaxing and the two of us looking at each other, it inched towards me and sniffed, then licked, my hand. My heart swelled at the breakthrough, although I realized as it was happening that the dog could barely walk. I nearly moaned out loud empathetically, but I bit it back, fearing that it might startle it away. I realized after a quick, unprofessional examination that it was both in awful shape and that it was female. I lifted her up with ease because she was pathetically underweight and we took off toward my apartment, attracting gawks from a menagerie of people who wouldn't have given me a second glance if I were curled up in the gutter. I didn't care. All I knew was that I needed to get back to the apartment because, as annoying as it was for me to admit it, I needed Echo.
...Damn it.