Dog Boy

38

It had taken me a while to process what had happened. The hours after the riot had felt numb in my mind, feeling more vague and dreamlike than actual reality.

Once all there. we did a lot of talking about what needed to be done. It seemed that thankfully, while I'd felt in the moment like I was overreacting in getting everyone off school property, it had likely saved a lot of canis people from getting injured. Nearly everyone who was a club regular had gotten out alright - and while some of us had gotten into the thick of the riot, most weren't in the areas with active fighting going on, and had gotten out without more than a bruise.

Douglas however, wasn't so lucky. He had been beaten up badly. He was at the hospital, and his life wasn't in danger or anything, but when I called his family, they hadn't been entirely forthcoming about his condition. It seemed like they were too shaken by the experience to feel like discussing it anymore. I did learn however, that someone in the mob had engaged in the barbaric act of using an electric razor to try to shave the fur off of several canis people - including Douglas, who'd gotten hit by them a few times.

All of these feelings of grief and worry were mixed together with a guilty feeling of satisfaction. Horace and his gang had been fighting nonstop the whole time, and he and several of his friends were apparently in intensive care. I resisted the urge to smile at their circumstance - that would've been heartless - but it was hard not to feel like they got what they deserved.

I doubted that it would change them though. Both canis and normal people were going to grow more in conflict with each other from this, I was certain. It wasn't as if this was an isolated incident. There was friction at higher levels of society - the kind of thing that I avoided being up to date with. Debates in government about if businesses had the right to deny us service. Arguing over whether we could be allowed free movement in public when many it seemed, still were able to infect others.

That was something that I was not looking forward to. All those people Horace and the pack had bitten were at risk of transforming - and I had no idea how those people were going to react. Would we see a whole other faction of canis people form, filled with self hatred? I had seen such communities online. Maybe they would get bullied, and be lured in by Horace and his friends - that is, if Horace and his friends weren't expelled.

After those few minutes I gave myself after we got to the park, I immediately got back to work. I talked with my friends about how we could improve the club - and the most obvious solution was to take the club away from school. We decided that meeting at the soccer complex, with the weather getting warmer, was a decent option. We were also getting more types of people, ones who wanted athletic activities rather than just playing board games. This led us to talking about more types of activities we could do. It was a nice small distraction to take our minds off of everything that had happened.

But we still needed to address it - we talked about how when we went back to school, we would work on finding any of the people who'd contracted canis in the riot, and try to be friendly to them. In the past, we'd mostly just waited for people to come to us, but maybe it was time to be more proactive. It wasn't just about trying to keep those new canis people from exacerbating conflict, but I really wanted to legitimately help anyone who was going through the painful experience.

This highlighted a new problem however. When we had all fled to the park after the riot, we'd noticed very quickly that so many new people were here. We'd seen them before at school. Loners who didn't want to talk to anyone - and we wanted to keep them safe. We did our best to talk with them, ask them if they needed anything, and told them about our online group. It was nice being able to help more canis people - but the club was starting to get large.

We realized then, that we needed to get the club more organized, starting with making firm club leadership. I knew that it was coming, but it still left me slightly stunned when everyone suggested I be the club president. I'd basically been the de facto club leader before, but now it only highlighted in my mind the responsibility that I had. I pushed my slight anxiety aside though, and got right to work with the others about formal roles that needed to be filled.

As we decided everything, there was the unspoken fact running through our heads - that we needed to be more organized in general. Not just to better help people cope with the difficulties of being canis - but also to protect people in an emergency - like if this ever happened again.

I shuddered at the thought, but it was there nonetheless.