Title: Things Fall Apart
Fandom: original
Rating: PG
Length: 356 words
Content Notes: A (very strange) love letter to Ireland, featuring border collies, a different sort of zombie apocalypse, and of course, an homage to Yeats. TW/CW for suicidal ideation.
Summary: It's the dogs that save me.

It’s the dogs that save me.

When all flights were grounded, I had breathed a sigh of relief, even though I was thousands of miles from home. It had seemed like a rational approach that could set things to rights.

And maybe it would have worked. Except it wasn’t like it is in the movies. The virus was already airborne and didn’t require death to precede its onset. The vacant gaze and the shuffling walk came on with little warning. No ravenous appetite for flesh accompanied it, but this was no blessing. We were accustomed to humans becoming monsters, but the virus provided no fuel. And with no enemy in sight, there was nothing to defend. And with no known cause, there was nothing to fight.

Despair is a formidable enemy, and it sets in even more quickly in the absence of carnage. Of those who seem to be immune to the virus, most of us make the one choice that seems to be left.

I have fixated on the dogs instead. My hands shook at first. Surely, I’d thought, with no shepherd to guide them and no clear purpose, they’d soon go feral, and I would be left alone and faced with the burden of an existence absence of choice.

But it seems that generation upon generation of breeding persists. The dogs seem to have sensed a paradigm shift, and their quiet work persists as they circle around the shuffling hordes and drive them away.

When I lift my head, I see their eyes trained on me, steady, and I grasp that I am perpetually unaware if I remain uninfected or if I have become a member of the empty, limping masses. (It has been so long since I have heard my own voice, or even the gasps of my own grief).

I don’t know if the dogs are keeping the infected at bay or if they are herding me to a precipice and a merciful end.

It is no matter. The shepherds are gone but the dogs remain steady. If they lead me to the blood-dimmed tide, I will let the waves take me.