User:Dotcomaphobe/Boogie Bear
Boogie Bear
Memories. I can remember the first time I saw sunlight. Stiffly lumbering out of my mother’s den in the first spring of my life. I remember the smells, too. Wet earth, new growth. My mother didn’t survive that winter. My siblings and I took her strength, and she gave it willingly. Trouble was, we didn’t know how to survive without her.
We foraged for a while, eating berries and scavenging dead things in the forests. Soon I was all alone, as we are usually solitary creatures. Near the end of fall, I found myself in a small town in North Carolina. As I ate out of a trash can outside of a dirty house in an overgrown yard one evening, I felt myself being watched. An old man was sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch. He saw my apprehension, and calmly lit a tobacco pipe. “My name’s Auggie. What’s yours?”
Auggie was a spry 72 year old man. Balding, wrinkled, but full of youthful exuberance and charm. I liked him immediately. When I didn’t run away, he began to play an old acoustic guitar, and sing a slow song that made me think of friendship, and love. I couldn’t help but be moved by it, and I started to sway back and forth, and hum deep within my chest. Auggie’s mouth fell open, and we both realized what we had found: counterparts of the soul.
He played more songs for me, and I learned to dance. I’d give a roar during the fast songs, and clap my paws and sway to the slow ones. Eventually, people heard of how “that crazy old man trained a bear to dance.” Auggie would always tell them, “I didn’t train him; he dances because the music makes him.” People began to come from miles around to see us. We never made any money; we just loved to sing, and to dance. I remember flashes of light as people took our picture. I remember children screaming, then staring, then laughing and dancing with me.
We traveled, then. Anywhere we were asked for, we went. I’ve been on a lot of trains with the old man. He always slept near me in the cargo boxes, always wearing his patchwork clothes, and his worn shoes.
I awoke one day on the train to see our next destination. We were scheduled to appear at a park in some town that looked exactly like every other town we’d been in. We had arrived a day early, and decided to sleep in the park overnight. Auggie called it “Sleeping in God’s bed, with a blanket of stars and a pillow of earth.” I miss that old man.
I woke up the next morning. He never did. He just passed on, in his sleep, under those beautiful stars.
The one thing that I’m most grateful for is that the plague in this new town, Malton, never woke him up. He didn’t come back, like so many others have done. They don’t smell right. You can tell they were human, but they smell like the end of all life. I fought off the ones that I came across in the next few days that followed. Made my way past blockade and siege, living and dead alike. I kept telling myself to keep moving. As long as I was moving I wasn’t thinking about Auggie, about this new strange town where the carrion dead struggle to live again. I was wandering aimlessly when I found the zoo. What better place for a lone bear? The humans here share food, and medicine. There was even a pit to lay my body down in each night. Time will tell if I can call Malton home. In the meantime, I have found a group that will have me.
But I will never dance again. The music is gone, and so is the magic.
08-20-07
So, now the Zoo is being attacked by the Militant Order of Barhah. I've been a zombie for several days now, swaying back and forth in the church waiting for a revive. Once in a while I'll pop out and take a bite of a MOB SOB just to keep them on their toes. Rotting bear smells awful, by the way.
08-22-07
I'm not a zombie anymore. I've been trying to find a toolbox so I can help rebuild, but the goddamn auto shop doesn't seem to have any. I've wasted so much AP trying to find one, I deserve to be killed again. But I feel like I need to do my part, and since I'm out of ammo, I've got no choice but to support our side during this long new siege.
08-29-07
Zombie AGAIN. I've run away to restock on supplies. The Zoo is getting bashed in left and right by whatever you want to call the jackass zombies. Rage... taking... over....
