Free Tails of the Apocalypse by David Adams, Nick Cole, Michael Bunker, David Bruns, E. E. Giorgi, Deirdre Gould, Jennifer Ellis, Stefan Bolz, Harlow C. Fallon, Hank Garner, Todd Barselow, Chris Pourteau Page B

squashing seven billion people. But I never liked to think about what would happen to all those dogs.
    In this corner of the universe, it turns out they helped a little girl through the loss of everything she knew.

Protector
    by Stefan Bolz
     
     
    The fire had separated him from his pack. The wolves had made their way east, across the great plains and toward the lower mountains. They traveled around the city. Even though there was food there, they dared not go too close. Meat was rare, and wolf meat was considered a delicacy. They wouldn’t have survived.
    When the thunder came and fire began to rain from the sky, the earth shook under them in great tremors. He was still too small to run as fast as they did. So he and his sister, cubs and not yet fully certain on their feet, fell behind. His mother’s eyes commanded them to follow whenever she turned her head back to find them. He understood but couldn’t go any faster, as hard as he tried. His sister, slightly bigger and stronger already, had a good twenty feet on him. But even she couldn’t reach the others.
    His mother slowed down and his sister caught up to her. Through the raging fire and the thunderous sounds around him, he saw his mother pick up his sibling by the neck. She looked at him once more, then turned and disappeared into the storm. His howling didn’t reach farther than the wind.
    * * *
    His nose couldn’t find them anymore. The acrid smoke overwhelmed his senses. As he drifted farther and farther away from his mother’s path, trying to escape the maze of fire that enclosed him, his feet suddenly stepped into emptiness. He fell down an embankment, tumbling over and over to land in a small reservoir of water. The fire above him leapt across the narrow creek bed to the other side, the heat scorching the parts of his fur not covered by water.
    And there he waited. In the days that followed, he never forgot his mother’s eyes as she’d turned, his sister safe in her jaws, to find safety for the pack. He saw her face when he looked up at the sky at night, and she was there when he closed his eyes to sleep. He’d never been alone. No previous experience had prepared him for it. He felt the pain of it, raw and unremitting. It ached worse than the growing hunger in his belly.
    When the rain came, the creek swelled up, and he found a low section of the embankment to climb up. He ran across the plains, his nose picking up his mother’s fading scent. He didn’t have to go far. He saw her, recognized her shape and that of his sister—blackened remnants, coated in ash on the charred ground. The whole pack lay there with them in death.
    He held watch for two days. It was his hunger that drove him away in the end. It took the night and half the next day before the ground beneath his paws was no longer burned, before the desert grasses began to peek through the blackened soil.
    He was dizzy and half-starved when he came upon the settlement. It lay in a valley before him, with the sun shining on the small lake surrounded by makeshift tents and hastily erected huts.
    Somewhere in his mind he remembered his mother’s warning, her fear of places like this one, where wolf flesh was prized. But his exhaustion had taken over, and finding food was his only instinct. He trotted along the creek bed, watching the slow-flowing water for any signs of fish. He’d been with his mother when she’d caught them in the past, but he’d never done it himself.
    He didn’t see the trap. It was set inside a patch of ferns in a narrow area between the creek and a large outcropping of rock. If he’d been protected by the wisdom of the pack, or older and more experienced himself, he would have seen it or smelled the human imprint on it. But he was young and hungry and alone.
    The sudden, piercing pain obliterated his hunger, inundated his senses completely. Panicking, he tried to pull away from the iron claws that ripped through the muscles and tendons of his front leg. His cries