The Teens Are Loose

The day started out normally enough, Nora was at the city zoo with her friends, not because she liked the animals but because it was an excuse to get away from her ever suffocating parents. The teens bounced from enclosure to enclosure, not really looking at anything in particular just following the herd of people that flowed through the crowded pathways. Chatting about the latest episode of their favorite show, who liked who and other such teenage nonsense. The girls paused in front of the elephant enclosure where the keepers were hosing down the massive beasts, Nora wrinkled her nose, they smelled terrible. As they stood amid the gaggle of tourists, who were 'oohing' and 'aahing' over the elephants' performance (if you could call it that, they just stood there stinking to high heaven), Nora noticed a squirrel scamper toward her. She moved a step away from it, still, it dodged the forest of legs and made a beeline for her, she shook her foot at it, 'shoo', the furry rodent stopped, tilted his head and then darted back the way he came. Stupid animal. 

As the herd around her started to pressed on, she hurried to catch up with her friends, they were laughing about something. Nora had missed the joke but chuckled along with them anyway, her mind floating back to the squirrel, it wasn't the first time she'd been approached by a random animal in the past few months. It wasn't something she talked about or even wanted to acknowledge, animals were gross and dirty in her mind and their sudden interest in her was a mild inconvenience. Pulling her attention back to the conversation as they stopped in front of yet another stinking animal enclosure, wild dogs, that was dumb, she saw wild dogs all over the city, increasingly lately actually. Stray, the word she was looking for was stray, not wild. She took a closer look at the plaque that held the scientific nonsense that teenagers never read, her eyes went directly to the picture of a mottled canine, an African Wild Dog. It was so ugly, Nora thought to herself, not unlike the stray dogs she saw in the city but these ones smelled a lot worse. She scanned the yard for a sign of the stinking beast but she didn't see anything except for some pumpkins hanging from a gnarled tree in the center of the enclosure. The strangeness of seeing the bright orange orbs hanging from the low branches stirred something inside her, they fascinated her. She stared at them, unmoving intruders in an otherwise familiar landscape. Without thinking the teenager pushed against the metal bar that separated the mass of humans from the concrete barrier that abruptly dropped off into the yard. Eyes fixed on the intruders, she effortlessly ducked below the horizontal metal bar and then perched herself on the concrete wall. She heard voices behind her and felt someone grab at her shirt but her focus was so complete it barely registered. The feeling of being grabbed pissed her off, she didn't want anyone to touch her, she lunged forward, away from the grabbing hands. Down she fell, almost ten feet to the dirt floor of the wild dog yard, landing strangely enough on her feet, all four of them. Two, she had two feet and two hands, dummy. The landing jarred her back to reality, she blinked and took in the scene before her, no less than six ugly mottled dogs trotted toward her, teeth bared, ready to eat her soft lumpy body. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears as she stumbled backward until her back hit a wall, that's when everything went black. 


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Somewhere to her left a bird sang, no that wasn't a bird that was... her phone? Yes, her phone was ringing, a stupid chirpy tune that had come preprogrammed on her smartphone. It never made that sound, all her friends and family had their own unique ringtone. Nora opened her eyes, taking a minute to sort out the blur that clouded her vision, she was home, in her bed. Her head throbbed as she rolled over, kicking off blankets, reaching for her phone that normally rested on a bedside table, her hand came up empty. The ringing stopped, they must have hung up, Nora sat up slowly and looked around her dimly lit room, nothing out of the ordinary, no indication of the chaos that was happening just outside her front door. She picked up her phone which was sitting her desk by the door and pulled up the home screen. THIRTY FIVEmissed calls and twenty-two voicemails! Nora punched in her passcode and listened as frantic voices of her friends came through, was she ok? Then strangers voices, screaming, angry, telling her to go back to where she came from, threatening her. What the hell? She hung up without finishing the messages. Her head hurt and the last thing she remembered was being at the zoo with her friends, what the hell was going on? She sat back on her bed and pulled up her social media account which was also flooded with messages, more of the same, pleas from friends and family, hateful bullshit from complete strangers. As she scrolled a video popped up, some idiot at the zoo had fallen into the wild dog pen, figures more stupidity from the masses but as she watched the shaking cell phone video she realized the moron in the enclosure was her. What the fuck?! She watched as she landed on all fours like some sort of cat and then the wild dogs surrounded her and she fainted. Stupidly she sat there in horror, waiting for the dogs to rip her to shreds, instead something miraculous happened. Each dog laid down, nose to tail, forming a semi-circle around her unconscious form. Ok, seriously, what the fuck was going on?! She scrolled frantically through more pages, more videos, everything depicting the same series of events. Nora threw her phone across the room, yeah, that'll make everything go away, it shattered as it impacted with her dresser.

A knock on her door, 'Nora? Nora, sweety are you ok?', her mother, there was something in her voice that Nora couldn't place, it almost sounded like she was afraid of something. Afraid of Nora? She screamed at her mother, 'LEAVE ME ALONE!' and scrambled into her closet, curling up in the far corner and rocking herself back and forth. What the fuck was going on?! She closed her eyes and prayed to no god in particular, perhaps it was the god of teenage ignorance, 'oh god, make it go away, it didn't happen. I'm normal, I'm normal, I'm normal.' Maybe if she said it enough, it would be true?