Horror - Short
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs. No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
All rights reserved. Dog Tired Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026
DOG TIRED
“You can’t fall asleep. Come on, Babe.”
Prince’s voice shook the moment’s drowsiness into acknowledgement. Cassandra had been tipping ever closer to that abyss, skull bobbing on a loose neck, shaggy black hair dancing before her face. Quickly, as if caught with fingers in the cookie jar, she snapped her neck straight, drew back her lids, and opened the glovebox.
The wound on her arm refused to heal. It gaped, a weepy pink valley of pain. Wrapping it did not help and giving it air didn’t hurt it. She could look at it as a reminder whenever sleep attempted to steal her away.
“They don’t kick the same after a while, huh?” she asked and popped two little blue pills, recapped the orange pharma bottle, and stuffed it in with the other head altering assistants stashed in the glovebox.
Prince sniffed. His nose had been runny for three days. It got that way when he didn’t sleep. Not sleeping made his eyes go funny, too. While he drove, he saw beasts in every corner of the world ready to leap out onto the blacktop and destroy their final vestiges of hope.
A few of those beasts might’ve been real.
The beginning seemed like a lifetime ago. It was a perfect night. The half-moon glowed yellow. T-shirt weather clung to the world like static, in spite of the date on the calendar. Love was on the air. Their ears rang from the Chemical Overpass concert, the thumps, the electric guitars, that unwholesome but wholly welcome rhythm. The block was dim. A few lights along the street were out and city workers were perpetually busy with some other task. There were reports, always elsewhere, of sick people running rampant.
That was then.
“We have to stay awake. Come on, please.”
—
Prince leaned up against Cassandra seconds before perfection ceased.
Her breath had been hot in his ear as her body agreed with the goal of his body. His lips sucked at her collarbone. Her hand dug at the button of his jeans. His right index finger and middle finger rubbed at the fleshy bulb hidden amid moist flaps. Her hips jerked at his touch. The button came open and she grasped his bulging penis. Prince inhaled a deep breath. Cassandra moaned once with pleasure, and then screamed with surprised pain.
Prince tensed, jarred by the sound and motion.
From the shadows next to their doorway, a woman, dishevelled and sopping wet, had burst forth. The harried figure latched onto Cassandra with a wide mouth of jagged teeth. A scream rose as fangs broke flesh. Enraged, Prince punched at the figure threatening to repeat the injury, her frothy mouth stretched, while Cassandra pawed the door open. The woman fell after Prince’s third shot, stumbling over a broken skateboard left behind by one of the kids from the third floor apartments.
That night, Cassandra had begged to take a nap as she poked at the gaping wound, as if she hadn’t been listening to the news all week, as if she was somehow immune to the world. Prince stared into her eyes, doing his damnedest to avoid thinking about the deep scratches dug into his flesh, and said, “Babe, no.”
—
“Only like a day or two more before this is over, right?” Cassandra asked.
“Hope so.”
“Can’t be more than that, can it?”
This was a question for the gods. Prince was far from a god. Prince was a man, thirty-nine-years-old, driving a stolen Oldsmobile Alero across the country, trying to beat time. He was a man in the same T-shirt and jeans he wore to that Chemical Overpass show nine days earlier.
The stolen car reeked of mingled sweat, chocolate milk, the watered-down motor oil scent of empty Red Bull cans, and the KFC they’d collected by waving a desperate machete at four late-night high school dropouts being pretty much all there was left to be for their particular ilk.
“Do you love me?” Prince asked. It sounded romantic, a Bonny and Clyde kind of affair, but really, he was thinking about that old Meat Loaf song, wondering if it could actually get any easier to be there until a final act.
“Me love you long time,” Cassandra said, a phrase she’d offered often in the past, Full Metal Jacket style, but now without humor in her tone, gazing out onto the auburn world of dust and dead trees.
—
Folks were not happy about Prince and Cassandra when Prince stepped out of prison and whisked away the nineteen-year-old waitress saving up for a hotel management course at Bell College. Cassandra’s father forbade her leave and she made tracks all the quicker for it.
Romeo and Juliet, baby. Did parents never learn?
Then again, did fresh love never learn?
Prince wasn’t such a bad guy, she’d told her friends. Prince’s wife, Lena, had waited for him while he did his time, raising their spawn and casting aside the need to keep up any attractiveness. Marriage was a guarantee and there weren’t supposed to be options for an ex-con—them’s the breaks.
Parole Officer Wilma Jacobs had arranged for Prince to be a custodian at a local theater complex. It was there that he met Cassandra. It was there that his rugged facial features and prison-hard physique tempted the younger woman. It was there that the sparks first flew.
Prince had donned jeans and a tight-fitting Beck t-shirt. It was cool in a throwback kind of vibe. He’d purchased it when the world loved a Loser and had worn it three years before relocating to the clink for a six to ten stint.
Overcrowding, good behavior, and recognition of excessive sentencing traits of a certain judge sent the former failed stick-up man free from his punishment. Clean slate, a job paying minimum wage, and an obese wife with three rotten kids who acted as if they wanted all the smacks they got.
He accepted the party address. It only made sense that Prince should want to blow off from the digs for a night with a six-pack, two little MDMA pills, and a mind to touch something pretty.
Back then, they burned with passion. The passion remained, but it had shifted. There was no choice but to let it shift.
—
“How much do you love me?” Cassandra asked. She yawned and slapped her face twice. Hard.
Prince gave a sideways glance. Even sleep-deprived and dishevelled, she was the coal that burned at his core. “Cas, I’m only doing this ‘cause you make it worthwhile. I don’t go on without you. That’s how much I love you.”
“You’re such a sweetheart.” She yawned. “Where do you think we’d be right now if we’d stayed home from Chemical Overpass?”
Zillion-dollar question there. The kind of things daydreams thrive on, like knowing the lotto numbers an hour before the call, ticket in hand bought and paid for.
“Don’t know. Grab me another can, huh?”
Cassandra nodded and fished a tallboy of sugar-free Monster Energy from the discarded empties around her feet. The switch to sugar-free occurred at the last Texaco they’d pillaged because they needed a conquerable enemy. The little battles. They’d assured each other that it was the sugar and not all the other stuff that gave them migraines and made them barf high-octane soup all over the interior of the Olds.
“Crack it, huh? My fingers are, like, glued,” he said and laughed nervously. His digits had cramped in a steering wheel grip. The trick was to keep moving, eastbound to catch more tomorrows sooner. Even an hour might change the world. “Thanks.” He accepted the open can and sipped.
“If we get through this, I’m never drinking another drop of this shit in my life. Coffee neither,” Cassandra said.
Thinking ahead was good. Thinking ahead was hope.
—
When they first hit it off, before the spree or the Chemical Overpass show, they lived in a bachelor apartment in Olympia. Prince wasn’t supposed to leave the city, but his P.O. warmed and agreed to keep quiet since he’d been a model parolee and this new change was for the positive. At Delphi Trucking, Prince was still cleaning, but rigs instead of candy-coated carpets, and for fifty-cents more an hour. Cassandra waited tables at a Golden Corral. They lived stingy with plans for a white picket future and maybe even kids that weren’t trash.
Maybe just a dog to start.
Eventually, though. Eventually.
They’d put the payment up for a rundown bungalow, every damned cent they had in the accounts, and Prince felt a pride he’d never known swell in his chest. One week before they were to hold the keys, they went to the Chemical Overpass show, despite all the crazy stuff on the news. The packs. The bite victims. The stuff hard to take seriously. Besides, it was payday and the working life demanded a vent.
Plus, it was common knowledge that the media blew every dinghy into the Titanic. All that stuff about gathering up the injured for testing and slaughtering the infected on sight had to be bull. Who could believe anything the news showed anymore? The shit seemed barnyard deep. The reports about the eyes and the hair were laughable.
Were.
—
The radio hit static and Prince noticed after a few seconds. He’d become mostly disconnected. A man on the move.
“Hey, Cas?”
He looked at Cassandra, tears streamed down her cheeks. It had happened often since they’d started out. This was the longest he’d seen her go without makeup.
“I can’t do it. It almost seems better just to sleep, you know? You know?”
“Cas, no. Find us a station, some pop shit we can sing along to.”
Radio stations had grown fewer and too often nasally radio news heads bogarted the airwaves. Before, people didn’t believe what they heard. People couldn’t really take it seriously. Not until they had to, then the phrase don’t fall asleep became life.
“Recent updates confirm the early reports. A joint study underway in the Canadian Arctic suggests that the shifting lunar cycle can be blocked by natural sunlight as the…”
“We should be going north,” Cassandra said, tears drying on her beleaguered face.
“Don’t think we’d make it across the border. Find us some tunes, huh?”
She did. They sang Britney and Abba and Bowie and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hours passed and the fuel needle fell beyond E. The red light flaring, Prince pulled into a quiet Shell station with a car rental office located on the side. The lights were bright. There was a bus stop sign next to the highway, rusty and birdshot pocked. Down an asphalt path running behind the Shell was a tiny train station.
“Pretty quiet,” Prince said, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. “Grab the shooter, maybe things aren’t so good.”
“Let’s go on then,” Cassandra said.
The gas gage told the story of choices lacking. Besides, they’d gathered arms. Things should be easier.
“Babe.”
It was a slaughterhouse inside. Blood smeared up walls and bits of meat accented scarlet puddles on the tile floor. The bodies that ought to be there were not there. That was so much worse than finding corpses. Outside, a clamor announced action and instinctively, Cassandra and Prince ducked amid the potato chips and the wiper blades. Hearts rattling like janitor keys. Cassandra’s breaths inched toward hyperventilation.
“No, git! Fuck! Fu—aaah!” a voice shouted from outside.
The wet snapping and slopping accompanied a pack of growls. Cassandra leaned to look out onto the parking lot. Six enormous wolves lapped at a blood puddle in between bites of flesh torn from bone.
A whine left Cassandra’s mouth. A single wolf lifted its head to consider the lot peripheries. It bent back down to munch only to stop again. It spun around fully this time and Cassandra jumped out of view. The rack behind her bounced, items shimmying toward the tips of their tines.
The gentle click of paws on tarmac approached.
“Cas, Cas, you have to be quiet,” Prince whispered.
Cas’ breath whipped out of her mouth like hurricane bleats, sounding almost sexual. She squeaked as a warm weight touched her arm and then face.
Prince leaned in, his hand over her mouth, eyes meeting her gaze. “Cas, babe, do you love me?”
Heart slowing, breaths easing, Cassandra nodded. At the door, the clicks neared and then fell against the glass. Loud snorts of inhalation announced that the wolf suspected something. A paw reared and landed with a horrendous bang against the glass of the door.
The glass cracked. And again. Pieces clanged to the ground.
Prince and Cassandra embraced one another as if it was to be the last time. Tears streamed from four eyes as if they shared a single set of ducts.
More glass fell. The snorting, sniffing mongrel inched its snout within, paw crunching through fallen glass.
Far away, a wolf howled.
The nearby sniffing ceased…then resumed.
Two wolves howled then, both in the distance.
The sniffing hitched.
The paws prattled away.
Prince and Cassandra remained a statue until the adrenaline that had stiffened their bodies melted and they softened.
“Load up. Come on,” Prince said.
The news outlets had used words like packs and roaming. Again, some things really don’t sink until they’re there in full color and texture, growling, snarling, snapping, and you feel that blood trickling.
“Quiet, get what we need and we’ll take a rental,” Prince whispered. “Come on, faster, load up.”
The rental smelled fresh and wonderful. For a few minutes, Prince drove like a Sunday man skipping church to drink in the real glory of a day off work. The radio lowered and Prince came back around to the exhausted plight that had become his existence.
Cassandra stiffened. A hand latched onto Prince’s forearm. He shot her a look.
“Listen,” Cassandra said, voice tremoring.
Prince opened his mouth to ask and then snapped it closed.
As gently and quietly as was possible, Prince wheeled the roomy Ford Escape to the shoulder. It was nearly black outside and he was all jitters, coming down again. Too much of a good thing wears and soon that good thing can’t compete with a bad thing.
Prince looked at Cassandra. Her eyes had massive bluish bags beneath them. They were wide with fright. At least a good scare raised the heartrate. A safe scare. Scared was good for staying awake.
But this? This was a bad scare.
Still, same result.
Hearts pounded.
There was somebody or something snoring in the cargo hold of the vehicle. It was an enviable sound. It was a terrifying sound. No regular sleep could withstand a carjacking.
“This is bad,” Cassandra whispered. “Should we run?”
“On foot? No,” Prince snapped, thinking.
“Please don’t. I can’t. I can’t.” Cassandra shook her head, sweat matted hair moving very little.
“I know… Do you love me?”
She nodded, eyes closed.
“Open your eyes. You’re gonna get behind the wheel. I’m gonna open the hatch.”
Cassandra grimaced.
“If it’s already… If it’s already… I’ll scream and then shoot it, but I can’t shoot it in the back, I’ll hit the gas tank and we won’t get anywhere with fuel leaking. After I shoot it, I’ll get in the back before it has its head on straight. If it’s not already…changed, I won’t shoot. I’ll get it out and jump in, then you drive. Got it?”
“I can’t leave you.”
“Cas, do you love me?”
Cassandra nodded emphatically, childishly.
Prince wanted to wrap her up and take her away from everything. He couldn’t imagine a self not connected to this woman. If there was a god, it lived in the light her smile shined.
“Love me and do as I say.”
Prince reached back for the rifle and exited the vehicle. Cassandra climbed over the center console and got behind the wheel.
Fingers pressed against the handle, Prince counted twenty good breaths, nerving himself, imagining all the horrors that might be behind the door. Paused. A fresh terror encompassed his world. What lay behind the door was in with Cassandra. This gave him all the strength that he needed to act.
The hatch swung upwards. There was a bundled figure. Blood pooled on the floor, beneath a cotton-covered nub. The figure had lost a hand. Lost it viciously most likely. Prince lifted his eyes to meet Cassandra’s in the rearview. It was a moment’s glance. Eyes fell back onto the stowaway.
As if unravelling before an audience, the figure stretched. It was a boy and his breathing changed as his lids snapped open. Golden and shimmery, those irises glowed the truth of the matter. The injury was no accident. The boy had been bitten. A monster had stolen his hand. Instantly upon waking, the changes darkened the boy’s flesh with a coat of incredibly coarse fur. This boy bore the infection and was about to wear it like a fresh new birthday suit.
It was like the woman outside the apartment building. Prince thought it was a fur coat at first. After the bite and the scratch, what the news said rang a million truths.
This boy was a monster as was that woman, as those beasts in the gas station lot were. Quickly, Prince tossed the shotgun into the backseat, grabbed onto the boy and yanked him out of the cargo hold while he continued the brief metamorphosis. The boy landed in a cloud of dust and snapped a slobbery jaw, fully formed in the matter of three heartbeats.
“Drive!” Prince screeched as he leapt over the ravenous canine figure.
Prince felt a mouth land on his steel-toed boot as Cassandra stamped the gas, sending dust and gravel shooting out in their wake. The wolf that was once a small boy chased after the vehicle in a race he’d never match once Cassandra hit forty miles an hour.
“Tell me you’re okay!” Cassandra shouted.
Prince had been watching the world through the open hatch door. Lost in the motion.
“Stop, I’ll close this then come up there.”
“Oh, thank god. I can’t. I can’t drive!” she wailed.
The pain in her voice was awful. It had only been worse when it was new. Back then, the news still called the infected people men and women. Those who witnessed the infected and managed to get away unscathed had a more colloquial name for them, a silly name, an impossible name, the only befitting name: Werewolf.
You’ve got to see one to believe one.
Night was full and the moon was high outside the window. Prince stared forward, losing himself again in the yellow lines dancing up the middle of the highway and the shapes jutting from corners of his eyes, beyond where the headlamps reached.
“Cas, do you love me?” he asked.
There was no answer.
“Cas?” Prince turned to face her.
Outside their apartment after the show, the werewolf bit Cassandra on the arm and scratched a mean groove into Prince’s shoulder before Prince stabbed out with three prison-yard perfected jabs. Even nine days earlier, there were lunar cycle theories. If you stayed awake long enough, the infection passed harmlessly. Twenty-five days was a tall order, if the bite came at the beginning of the cycle. The scientists were miles behind understanding this thing and how it came to exist.
Prince and Cassandra met infection well after the halfway point of the assumed lunar cycle.
There was a possibility.
There was a chance.
Love and will, baby.
Love is worth fighting for, always was and always will be. They could drive until the end of time.
“Cas?” Prince whispered, jaw line protruding at his bristled cheeks as he ground his teeth.
Cassandra snored gently, head leaning against the window.
He had choices. There was a possibility that he might yank open the door, pull her out, and be on his way. Unlikely. There was also the rifle. A single shot to her sleeping head would do it, no questions.
“Why?” Prince whispered and pulled the Ford to the shoulder.
He closed his eyes and waited, wired and lapping against a sleepy shore, but never quite beaching. Fraught mind wandering, he thought of his life in two parts.
Loser. Lover.
Loser. Lover.
A groan of self-pity and undeniable agony left his tight lips.
The snoring ceased. If she awoke before he slept… Prince peeked out his right eye.
Drool ran down Cassandra’s jaw, dangling from the coarse grey fur. Her gaze seared glowing spots into his re-closed eyelids like sparklers on a July night. Her shirt had stretched and her arms had lengthened into skinny legs. Talon-like claws jutted from each fingertip.
“Please, Cas. Let me fall asleep. I’ll sleep and we’ll do this one togeth—”
XX