Episode 1

The Hounds

I was determined that it was O.K. that the government was making a big deal out of nothing. Like the tornado sirens that were never followed by a tornado, flood warnings, and ‘terrorist attacks’ that never manifested. I had a test the next week. It was finals week. I went to the corner store and bought as much dry food as I could fit in my dorm room. My room had the prefect set up, a microwave sitting on top of a yellowish mini-fridge. The brown counter top was bursting with ramen noodle packages and the fridge was stuffed with energy drinks and vitamin water. I felt prepared for the next few final weeks. I studied most of my days and avoided classmates as much as I could. That day, I decided to take a nap at three in the afternoon. As I laid on my mattress that lacked sheets I noticed the tears on its light-blue box spring. Then I noticed that the clouds seem to find a permanent home here, lingering above campus. I thought; haven’t heard the cheerful bird songs in days. Come to think of it… I haven’t heard much lately. The parties that never stopped across the hall seem to have ended—finally!

I changed my voice mail message to “I’ll talk to you when finals are over.” I must have a had hundreds of messages by now. 70% of them were from my boyfriend JAMES. We had been together (on and off) as-long-as I could remember. We’d met when we were 15 years old, and well, we’ve been together ever since. He’s not into change and I’m not into confrontation so we went to different schools. He stayed in Michigan and I moved down to Florida, it’s nicer here. I would have a tan on those skinny pale bones if I didn’t have so much studying to do. The goal is to get into the medical school down here. James wanted to be a wildlife biologist, somewhere up north was his plan. We were two busy individuals, so it’s a perfect situation. When someone asked me if I was single, I don’t have to lie and say that I’m not! James called me a lot, but my parents usually understood that I needed to study. This time they had left 55 messages on my phone. I didn’t get why they keep calling me. “IT’S FINALS WEEK PEOPLE.” I thought.

Now it’s been a few days of quietness. “It’s too quiet here. It’s like everybody has left. The reconstruction on this third floor has stopped for no good reason. Maybe I should go to the store and watch the news or something, a break from microbiology is not such a bad thing.” I thought to myself.

I decided finally open my dorm room door. As the door creaked open, a loud howl came from down the hall and a white animal rushed toward my door. I closed the door fast and ran toward the fire exit through my window. I rushed down the stairs thinking that the large dog-ish creature was following me. I stumbled and ran into a person—a guy on the fire escape. We didn’t talk or pause we just ran down the stairs, seemed like we were running for similar reasons. After going down the three floors we realized that nothing is following us.

I thought we needed to get out of this place then I asked: “Do you have a car?”

He said: “yeah! I don’t have much gas though I’ve been driving for few days to come here and see my girlfriend. She hasn’t answered my calls. You think she would after the horrifying news.”

“What news?” I asked confused.

“The…the ‘outbreak of the creatures’ the white hounds.” He replied with a sarcastic voice.

“So I wasn’t imagining? The… the…”

“It looks like they’ve evacuated the campus, didn’t you notice?” He asked.

“Well I have a bathroom and a microwave in my dorm room. It’s still being renovated, my floor that is, so no one wanted to live up here but me and those partiers across the hall. We get to do whatever we want since we are more isolated from the other floors of the building.”

He scratched the back of his head and nodded then said while looking distracted: “Well, I’m ahhh… call me ‘T’.” After a brief pause he continued: “So let’s find a car with good mileage per gallon and lots of gas, shall we?” I nodded. We walked around the campus’s parking lot till we found a hybrid car with over half a tank of gas. He said: “Well these are hard to hot-wire.” I looked under the car and found a spare key under a hidden spot.

I smiled saying: “My boyfriend has this model, he’s always said that it’s stupid to leave your keys there because it’s a known ‘secret spot’ in these models for keys”.

“Well I’m glad this person didn’t think so.” Said Tee. We got in the car and as Tee started driving we wondered about our destination. Where will we go? We weren’t sure. As far as this car can take us, that seemed to be the plan for now.