Ava

Ava flung herself at her mother and waited for Dad to shoot the dog.

'I won't let bad people get near you. That's why we've got this gun,' Dad had told her. Ava thought they had bullets, because she had been taught to load a gun and that guns wouldn't fire without them. She waited for her eardrums to sting, but no shot came.

Four ravens stared from atop a telephone line.

Dad laughed. He swept the dog up in his arms and carried it back to their four-seat car with dents alongside it and one flat tire.

'Roger, don't give it too much...' Mum said as he fed the dog and gave it some of their water. The dog devoured the food. When Dad closed the trunk and it realised there would be no more, it became skittish. Ava thought Dad would let the dog go back to living somewhere among these buildings, with twined plants reaching up the side of them. But he caught the dog by the scruff of its neck, opened the car door and fumbled for something on the floor. They had a coil of rope that Mum kept telling her not to play with, because they might have use for it. Dad got one end of the rope and tied a noose around the dog's neck. Ava frowned. They were always whispering about not enough food when they thought she couldn't hear, so it seemed silly to feed the dog then not let it live. But Dad explained it wasn't a noose that tightened.

They got back in the car and Ava sat beside the dog in the back seat and saw that Dad was right: no matter how hard she tugged at the rope, the dog would not stop licking her feet. The dog laid its head in her lap, fur tickling the goose bumps through the tears in her jeans. She decided to call it Kadie.

*

Not a week later they came upon the house where they were staying now. Dad said that their maps showed no cities nearby, but Ava also remembered him saying maps weren't reliable. There weren't any new cities, but some places weren't there anymore, and other cities were abandoned. Some smaller towns and villages had become self-sustaining communities that made collective decisions. Others had leaders and trade. But cities were desolate places, where gangs roamed. They looked for things to eat, and sometimes traded with other gangs or towns which let them get close enough to barter.

Her friend Macy had told her tales of gangs who ate humans, but Ava didn't believe her. No-one was that cruel.

When they arrived at the house, Dad went in with his shotgun and a knife he'd kept in his belt since they left the community. She waited in the car with Mum and wasn't allowed inside until the sun had almost completed its daily journey, and fractals grew on the windshield.

While Ava explored the house with Kadie, her parents stayed in the kitchen to whisper like they did the night they'd left all of her friends behind. Behind the house she found a fenced garden. The fence had fallen over in some places, but the yard was full of grass and vegetables, apart from a plot in the corner where the plants had been ripped up and the earth overturned. When Kadie began digging there, Dad got awfully annoyed and made her whimper.

But that was months ago, and these days Ava and Kadie spent their days playing around the house, and in the garden — just not near that plot of overturned dirt where the flowers and grass wouldn't grow. They seldom spent time in the room her parents gave her, because it was a boy's room, and had toys she didn't want.

'They're not mine. We can't throw them away. He'll want to play with them when he gets back,' she said, when her father tried to clear the toys away. Mum ran out of the room and Dad went too quiet.

When she was sent to bed, Ava let her feet stretch outside the duvet so Kadie could warm them. The dog would snuggle up to her until Ava got annoyed by the foul breath and shoved it back to the foot end. Ava told Kadie about her friends Macy and Faylinn from the village they left, and about her parents arguing when they thought she was asleep. Kadie lay on the pine floor while Ava made lines in her fur and let her woof at the things that upset her — and she understood that this was why her father had brought the dog along.