Chase

by Linwood Barclay

  He sought shelter in the woods again before enjoying his takeout meal. He was careful to chew the wieners well so there was no risk of one of them getting caught in his throat. The meal was enough to make Chipper forget, at least for a few moments, all that he had been through.

  He was happy.

  And wasn’t that exactly why the White Coats wanted to put him down? To end his life? He wasn’t supposed to feel happy. He wasn’t supposed to feel sad. He wasn’t supposed to feel anything.

  He was just supposed to do his job.

  And where would he have performed this job, if he had turned out the way they’d wanted him to? Where would they have sent him? China? Russia? Maybe someplace right here at home where they suspected some kind of nefarious activity going on? Someplace where a dog could hang around unnoticed, pick up things, overhear things, in a way no human being could?

  Better to think about moving on.

  So once he’d downed the wieners, he proceeded further into the forest. If his GPS program was to be trusted—and he had no reason to think it shouldn’t be—sooner or later he would come out onto a road. If he followed it west, it would take him where he wanted to be.

  He definitely had more of a spring in his step now. He moved confidently through the forest. Walking for a while, then running. Enjoying the thousands of different scents. Trees, flowers, animals, bugs, the earth beneath his paws.

  There was a slight wind coming from the west, and with it came a variety of different smells. Rotting food. He could smell fish and vegetables and meat and all kinds of other things. Even some smoke, which suggested that some of these things were being burned. These were the types of smells a person would find pretty disgusting, but for Chipper it made the atmosphere all that much richer.

  More stinky stuff! Love it!

  He was tempted to go see where the smells were coming from, but he’d already lost enough time recovering from the bus incident, sleeping and finding food. And besides, he was nearly at the road.

  Chipper emerged from the woods, stopped, looked left and then right. He’d come upon a gravel road. With the exception of an approaching pickup truck in the distance, trailing dust in its wake, there was no traffic.

  The dog came up to the shoulder of the road, intending to trot along in a westerly direction.

  Behind him, the truck got closer.

  Chipper was beginning to feel…excited. He was almost at his destination. He wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got there, but he’d play things as they came. He’d been doing that all day and it had been working out pretty well for him.

  He couldn’t wait to— AHHHHH!

  There was suddenly an awful buzzing in Chipper’s brain. Not his real brain, not the one he was born with, but something was going on with one of his attachments. An unbearable, internal screeching. It was akin to having a food processor whirring between one’s ears on the highest setting.

  He knew what was going on.

  It was the White Coats.

  They were trying to lock in on him. They were trying to initiate a reconnection.

  He felt as though his head would explode.

  And as the screeching continued, Chipper began to stumble. He became disoriented. His four legs had stopped working the way they were supposed to. He took a couple of sideways steps, then one forward, then one back.

  What his eyes allowed him to see became distorted. The world turned upside down, then righted itself, then went sideways.

  Chipper stumbled further into the middle of the road.

  A horn blared.

  Brakes squealed.

  He was so close.

  Aunt Flo had been furious when Jeff got back to the camp.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded to know when he came through the door of her house.

  “Just out,” he said. “I wasn’t gone all that long.”

  “Really? Really?” She’d made her hands into fists and had them jabbed into her hips, elbows out. It was her favourite stance. She was leaning against the kitchen counter in front of the sink. A lock of hair had slipped free of one of her bobby pins and was hanging across one eye. “I want you to come with me,” she said.

  Aunt Flo went to grab for Jeff’s arm but he headed for the door too quickly for her. If there was something she wanted him to see, fine, but he wasn’t going to let her physically drag him to it.

  “This way!” she said. “If you hadn’t been goofing off, you’d have known what was going on here.”

  She led him to the roofless enclosure where all the cans of garbage were kept, and filled, before they were taken to the dump. She opened the slatted wood door and said, “Behold.”

  Oh, wow.

  Three of the trash cans had been tipped over, the lids removed, and the green bags dragged out and torn open. Food scraps and dirty napkins and all sorts of other disgusting things were spread across the ground.

  “Uh oh,” Jeff said.

  “Uh oh, indeed,” Aunt Flo said. “Looks like somebody forgot to snap the lids on tight. You’ve turned this into a raccoon restaurant.”

  Jeff had to admit it was possible. The raccoons around here were pretty smart, no doubt about that. They were like safecrackers when it came to getting into garbage cans.

  “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” Aunt Flo said, then turned around and walked back to the house.

  There were a lot of disgusting things in the world, but few were as disgusting as the guts of a garbage bag. As Jeff got closer he could see chicken bones and fish heads and coffee grounds and something oozy leaking out of one of the torn bags that looked like it could be blood from some kind of alien.

  Jeff thought he might puke.

  But somehow he kept the contents of his stomach in place while he shoveled all the mess into brand new trash bags. Then he went and got Aunt Flo’s old pickup truck so that he could load everything into the back.

  And then he was off to the dump.

  Even though he’d already made dozens of trips down this road without any problems, Jeff still worried that one of these days he would be stopped by the police and arrested for driving without a license. He thought Aunt Flo didn’t worry about his being arrested mainly because it wouldn’t be happening to her.

  Jeff remembered what his father used to say about his older sister, Flo. How when they were growing up, she was always talking him into doing things she considered too risky to tackle herself. If her kite were stuck in a tree, she’d send her little brother up the trunk to retrieve it. Same thing when her Frisbee landed on the roof. Once, she talked him into stealing a bag of Fritos from the corner store when she was consumed with a junk food craving, and had no money.

  So during the drive to the dump, Jeff kept glancing into the rear-view mirror, expecting to see a flashing red light accompanied by the whoop of a siren. He wondered whether some jail time wouldn’t be just the rest he needed. Sitting behind bars might be a heck of a lot nicer than living under Aunt Flo’s roof.

  At least for a while.

  The truck rumbled along the gravel road to the dump, dust stirring up behind it. Jeff fiddled with the radio—the truck was so old that there were actual push buttons for the individual stations—in a vain attempt to find something good to listen to. None of the buttons had been set to anything he liked—Aunt Flo was a country and western fan—so he had to turn the knob manually to find anything someone under a hundred might listen to.

  Between glancing at the radio and checking his mirror for the police, Jeff didn’t have his eyes on the actual road as much as he should.

  He had just landed on a station playing something with a really good beat to it and was tapping his fingers on the top of the steering wheel when he saw something suddenly dart in front of the truck.

  It had come out of the tall grasses on the right shoulder. Something black, with some white in it.

  He thumped the horn as he moved his foot from the gas to the brake. He’d slammed it so hard he thought he’d snap the
pedal off. The truck skidded to a halt on the gravel, back end fishtailing, the dust trail enveloping the vehicle and wafting in through the windows. Jeff coughed a couple of times as he waved away the dust in front of his face.

  He had no idea what he’d hit, or if he’d actually hit anything at all. But that combination of black and white fur had given him a start. What if he’d run over a skunk? What if it was about to unleash the biggest fart the Canfield area had ever smelled? If Aunt Flo thought the garbage was a stinky mess, just wait till he brought her truck back reeking of skunk juice.

  But no, what he’d seen was not a skunk. He’d seen it only for a fraction of a second, but it was way too big to be a skunk.

  Jeff was going to have to screw up his courage and check out what it was.

  He opened the door, stepped out of the truck, and came around the front very slowly.

  His heart sank.

  It was a dog.

  Not just any dog, but a dog that looked a lot like Pepper. It wasn’t Pepper—he could tell that right away from the black and white markings, but it was the same kind of dog.

  A border collie, mostly black, with a bit of white fur on his snout and under his neck and on his legs. Or hers. He didn’t know if it was a he or a she.

  “Oh man, I’m so sorry!” he said to the dog.

  The dog was lying on his side, and Jeff thought maybe he was dead because his eyes were closed, but then he saw his chest pump up and down. He was still breathing!

  Jeff knelt down and gently lay his hand on his side. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’re going to be all right!”

  Of course, Jeff knew no such thing, but what else was he going to say? He continued moving his hand over him, tentatively checking to see whether anything was broken. There was no blood, and nothing about the dog looked bent out of shape. Jeff looked at the bumper of the pickup, and while there was no blood, there was a tiny wisp of black fur stuck to it. So the truck must have hit him, but maybe it had been nothing more than a nudge, not a serious blow. Jeff had hit those brakes fast and hard.

  Jeff got his face right up next to the dog’s, but struggled to focus as he found himself blinking away tears.

  “Please don’t die,” Jeff said as a tear rolled down his cheek. “Please be okay.”

  The dog’s chest continued to go up and down, but other than that there was no sign of life.

  Jeff started crying harder. This dog reminded him so much of Pepper. The dog he’d loved with all his heart that had been taken away from him, and if that weren’t bad enough, now it looked like maybe he was going to be a dog murderer.

  A tear dropped from his cheek and landed on the dog’s black nose.

  And it twitched.

  “Hey,” Jeff said, and sniffed.

  The nose twitched some more. Jeff stroked the dog’s side soothingly.

  And then, one eye fluttered open.

  “Yes!” Jeff said. “You’re alive! You got hit. You ran across the road and I almost ran you right over. I hit the brakes. I hit ’em fast as I could. But you can’t run into the road like that!”

  The open eye blinked.

  “Does anything hurt? Did anything get broken? Huh? Whose dog are you, anyway?”

  Jeff felt around under the dog’s jaw, looking for tags. He found a collar under the fur, but no tags.

  “I’m going to try and lift you up, okay?” Jeff said. “You shout out if it starts to hurt.”

  Jeff slipped his arms under the dog and ever so slowly lifted him off the gravel. If anything hurt, he wasn’t showing it. He was limp in the boy’s arms.

  “Gonna take care of you,” Jeff said. “I’m going to make sure you’re okay. And I’ll find your owner. We’re going to make it okay.”

  Jeff came around the passenger side of the truck, managed to open the door, and carefully set the dog on the passenger seat.

  The dog made a small whimpering sound as Jeff slipped his arms out from under him.

  “You’re going to be okay. I promise.”

  Jeff closed the door and ran around to the other side of the truck. He had to take this dog someplace where he could look after him, but he couldn’t take him home. Aunt Flo hated dogs.

  At that moment, Jeff thought of Emily’s train station.

  That was perfect! He would take the dog there.

  “I know where I can take you,” Jeff said. “I know a safe place.”

  Daggert’s cell phone rang.

  “What?” he said. After leaving the bus station and hunting around Canfield for the dog, he, Bailey and Crawford had spent the night in a cheap motel. Now they were up, sitting in a diner, plotting their next step over a second cup of coffee.

  “It’s Wilkins, sir,” a man said.

  “Wilkins? Who the hell are you?”

  “I work in the control room, sir. I’ve worked for you for four years.”

  “Oh yes, Watson. What is it you want?”

  “I have good news and bad news.”

  Daggert gritted his teeth. “Bad news first.”

  “We lost contact with the target. We’d almost reestablished it, but then it was gone. We think there was some kind of impact, that the animal may have had a serious fall, or even been hit by something.”

  “Hit by what?”

  “Don’t know. But it was enough to disrupt the circuitry, at least momentarily.”

  “And you have good news?”

  “Yes. Just before we lost our connection, we were able to pinpoint a more tentative location.”

  “Yes?”

  “The dog is near Canfield.”

  “I already knew that, Watkins.”

  “Wilkins, sir.”

  “The dog got off a bus in Canfield. We’re still in Canfield. Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “We narrowed the dog’s location to be west of the town. We did a GPS overlay and it was in the vicinity of the local garbage dump.”

  “The dump?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s not far from where you are now.”

  Daggert thought about that. It made sense. A dump would be a good place for the animal to hide out, and scrounge some food. Plus, there’d be rats. A magnificent buffet, if you were a dog.

  “Send me that location,” Daggert said.

  “Yes, s—”

  Daggert ended the call. “Leave your coffee,” he said to the other two. “We’re going to the dump.”

  Jeff remembered that when Emily first showed him the train station, she’d pointed to a narrow, overgrown road that led in from the main one that went to Canfield. He trolled slowly along that route, and when he was roughly between the turnoff to Flo’s Cabins and Shady Acres Resort, he kept his eye out for a possible way in.

  Before long, Jeff noticed a rusted gate hanging between two wood posts and pulled off to the side of the road.

  Jeff said to the dog, “You wait here. I’m just going to check something.”

  Chipper moved his head slightly at the sound of the boy’s voice. He found comfort in it. He’d been watching him closely as he lay on the seat next to him. He saw features he recognized in the boy’s face. The way his nose turned up slightly at the end. His blue eyes. Something about the way he held his head.

  Yes, this is the one, Chipper thought. He hadn’t wanted to get hit by his pickup truck, but it had saved him a lot of time tracking him down.

  Jeff leapt out of the truck and walked across the gravel shoulder to the gate. A length of chain had been looped around a hook to hold it in place, but there was no lock. He unwound the chain to free the gate and pushed it back, which wasn’t easy, since it had to be forced over grass that had grown two feet high. And the rusted hinges didn’t help much, either. This gate hadn’t been opened in years, that was pretty clear.

  Jeff got back in the truck, drove down the lane far enough to clear the gate, then went back and closed it, hooking it back up the way he’d found it.

  Chipper sat up far enough in the seat to watch him do all this. He wanted t
o find a way to talk to him, explain things to him, but there wasn’t any way he could do that right now. He’d have to give that some thought.

  Jeff took the road very slowly. The tall trees on either side more or less defined it, but it didn’t look like anyone had been down here in years. Parts of the road had washed out, exposing large rocks. It must have been quite a trick, years ago, getting that train station down here. It would have to have been on a flatbed truck, and taken off with a large crane. There had to have been enough room to get all that equipment down here at one time, but in the intervening years the forest had nearly reclaimed this road. And Jeff was guessing the road itself had been in a lot better shape back then. It was a good thing he was in a truck with lots of clearance; otherwise the undercarriage would have bottomed out on the rocks and bumps.

  The road curved gently through the woods, and when Jeff didn’t see the station after two hundred yards, he started to wonder if he’d taken the wrong laneway in. But then, there it was!

  The trees opened up and the railroad station was there before him.

  “Okay, pal,” Jeff said to the dog. “We’re here.”

  He jumped out of the truck, came around to the other side, opened the door and once again carefully scooped the dog into his arms. He was a dead weight, totally limp, but he probably wasn’t much more than twenty or thirty pounds, so he wasn’t hard to carry.

  While he felt even more comforted in the boy’s arms, Chipper now wondered whether he had made a mistake. He didn’t want those people from The Institute finding him here and putting the boy in danger. But when the truck had bumped him, he’d sensed that anything The Institute might be using to track him had been disabled.

  He hoped so.

  Jeff got the station door open. As he stepped inside, a tiny, grey mouse scurried along one of the dirty baseboards and out of sight. He slowly carried the dog up the stairs to the second floor, careful not to press hard on the steps Emily had said were weak, and set him in the oversized beanbag chair that Emily had told him was her special place. Jeff reshaped the chair slightly so the dog wasn’t curled up in a hole.