Sour bread.
Pickled mushrooms, again and again. Always these fucking pickles.
The girl glared across the table at the four or five others.
No one glared back. They were unfazed.
The old man even smiled.
“You all creep me out,” the girl said. “What are you, fucking ghosts?”
Speaking, of course, in Japanese.
Would you like some more? the old lady asked in Russian.
The old lady didn’t only cook for the girl, and she didn’t only cook for the pseudo family. The old lady spent her time in the kitchen preparing large quantities of food not meant for human consumption. Dog food. This Dead Town, which had been left empty ever since the Russian Federation abandoned it, was now home to a few people and an even larger nonhuman population.
A few dozen dogs.
Kept in special kennels outside.
Left exposed to the atmosphere, in this region of bitter winters, to keep them wild. So that their fighting instincts wouldn’t dull. Often the old lady cooked mutton for the dogs. She had a store of it that she bought in large quantities and kept in an underground freezer. Every other day she would take some out and cook it. Mutton legs, mutton heads, mutton skin, mutton fat. She used just a few spices. Enough to give a slight Central Asian flavor. This, too, was supposed to keep the dogs wild. To keep them from forgetting the odor of flesh.
This way, they wouldn’t hesitate to attack a living person.
The old lady’s “Russian dog food” recipe had been carefully thought out.
The dogs also drank milk, sheep’s milk.
The girl watched from the spacious first-floor room with the fireplace as the dogs wolfed down their meal. Stared at them across a distance of a few dozen meters. The windowpanes were clouded from the heat inside, but she had swept three fingers down the glass and peered out through those three lines. She had used her right hand, moving it in a furious sweep…her fingers held together, a single motion. After that, she stared out without moving, absolutely still. She had known it was time because she heard the dogs barking. She knew the others were feeding the dogs because there was no one in the room. Woof woof. A few dogs started barking. The girl watched them. The middle-aged women were carrying over a giant pot of milk, together. An enormous silver pot that reminded her of school lunch. Fucking lunch ladies, she thought, for the fucking dogs. That’s why they had to take the pot to the kennel. It would say MILK on the calendar.
The dogs were barking wildly. GIVE IT TO US! they seemed to be saying.
GIVE IT TO US! GIVE US MILK!
Released from their cages, the dogs devoured the milk. Clouds of white breath rose from their mouths, drops of white milk dribbled down. Fucking Russians, the girl thought. Fucking eat anything as long as it’s got fucking nutrients. Middle-class shit dogs.
Too much white. Your breath. Your slobber.
Assholes.
Such a fucking cold color!
But she went on watching them through the glass. She kept cursing them in her thoughts, but she was a hostage, what else could she do? She had to watch the dogs. She would watch as they ate, and then she would watch them exercise in the exercise grounds. Exercise. A field day for dogs. Or maybe…they’re practicing for doggie field day, she thought. Their exercise—or maybe their practicing—went on for two hours every morning. And that was just the morning.
The dogs were being trained.
In different ways. They were given different tasks. There were also various breeds of dogs. The only two the girl had seen before were Doberman pinschers and German shepherds. She didn’t recognize most of them. They weren’t like the Western dogs she knew. They looked sort of odd, somehow—their bodies. Most were mid-sized with ears that stood straight up, pretty long hair, muscular hind legs. Their coats were all different colors, and yet they seemed, overall, to make sense together. Ten to twenty of them probably had the same blood running in their veins.
…blood?
The girl began to sense something, a sort of authoritative aura, in the ten to twenty similar dogs. I bet you cost a lot, you shits, she thought, getting angry.
I bet you’ve got good parents.
The dogs barked, and the training got under way. The girl stared fixedly at them, unmoving, as they ran around. Caught somewhere between the dogs’ dynamism and the girl’s stasis was a man, or rather two men, exposed to the same minus-twenty-degree air as the dogs. Two men out there with the dogs on the exercise grounds, directing their movements.
They called constantly to the animals.
The old man most of all.
The old man led. He was training the dogs to fight, to attack. The dogs were fast. When he gave the sign, they dashed off at about forty miles an hour. Ran as hard as they could toward their target and leapt at him, hit him, took him down. The second man was the target. He stood some distance away, dressed in protective gear. The bald man, the old lady’s son. Not that his face was visible. He had a helmet on that covered his entire head. His throat, too, was wrapped in two or three protective layers. That was what the dogs aimed for. Biting, twisting, dragging him down. Ordinarily, such protective outfits only covered the arms and trunk. Because as a rule, war and police dogs are trained to go for the wrists. Their primary goal is to disarm, to “kill” only the target’s wrists. That wasn’t how the old man trained his dogs. His aim was different. He didn’t want his dogs to kill the target’s wrists, he wanted them to kill the target. To lunge at his face, his throat. To maul. To kill.
Again and again, they repeated the simple exercise.
Learning to kill. That was it. As quickly and precisely as possible.
Clearly when one of those dogs got up its speed, it had all the momentum it needed to hurl itself at its target and take him down, rolling and twisting, biting clear through his neck. Those dogs had the force they needed to detach a head from its body.
They were just getting warmed up.
Next they were paired in two-dog attack formations. One dog would aim for the thighs and stop the target; the other would kill it. The dogs were assigned roles in accordance with their personalities. The old man assessed their characters and paired them in shifting teams. A and B. C and D. E and F. C and B. A and F. The dogs were trained in the more sophisticated technique of firearm recovery as well, both singly and in pairs. The old man taught them to recognize the scent of gunpowder. He trained each dog to lunge first at a target’s wrists, as in a standard disarmament, and then, when the gun fell to the ground, to pick it up and carry it straight back to its master in its mouth.
Instinctively, the dogs tended to progress in a straight line toward their targets, or by the shortest possible route. This was an unimpeachable method, at least as far as orthodox attacks were concerned. Hardly a man alive would have the presence of mind to shoot a mid-sized dog barreling straight at him at forty miles an hour—to calmly raise his gun, train his sights on the animal…forget it. And yet sometimes the old man forced them to go against this instinct. At a sign from him, the dogs abandoned their straight lines, progressed instead in a series of Zs. They would bound off to one side, then dash at an angle, then dart sideways again, all the while moving in on the target. This unorthodox attack made it reasonably likely that they would survive even in the face of an enemy armed with a machine gun trying to spray them with bullets.
And all this effort aimed at taking out a single target—a single person, the prey—was only basic training. It was just an energetic warm-up.
Half an hour into training, the old man had the dogs put their training to use.
This was the real stuff.
Ten dogs were assigned a four-story building, one of the many in this deserted Dead Town, and the command was given. Take it. The dogs scattered in all directions, rehear
sed the motions of herding people into the building, cornering them. The dogs scaled the stairs, sprang through doors and windows, in and out, all the while barking. They moved in a sort of formation, in collaboration, like three sheepdogs guiding a herd of several dozen sheep. They acquired the ability to “cleanse” a building within a set time frame.
They practiced jumping. The old man had them wait at attention along one of the roads that crisscrossed the Dead Town. A car came driving along, and they jumped on top, jumped over. Or they ran around it. They forced the driver to slow down, jumped onto the hood. This, ultimately, was their goal. To block the windshield, obscure the driver’s view, make the driver lose control.
To cause havoc in urban environments.
To do battle in the cities.
Here in the Dead Town, they were learning. Little by little.
The old man handled the dogs so masterfully it seemed, looking on, as though he were not merely training the dogs, but honing their intellect. Little by little. Gradually each dog came to understand its particular specialty. If a ladder stood leaning against a wall, the dogs darted up it. They also learned to climb trees. They would wait in the foliage, keeping still, biding their time, until their prey came along, until a person walked directly underneath, and then they would pounce, they would attack.
This morning, they were learning to carry burning branches, torches. For seven days now they had been engaged in this task. Learning to be arsonists.
The dogs learned “subversive activities.”
All at once, the twenty-some-odd dogs froze. They turned and faced the same direction, growling. In warning. An intruder had appeared on the field. The old man commanded them, with a single clipped word, stop. Don’t attack. A few of the dogs kept growling, so the old man called them by name.
“Asha, down! Ptashko, down! Ponka, down!”
Each dog obeyed instantly as its name was called.
“Aldebaran!”
One last dog, scolded, fell silent.
Now all the dogs were crouching on the ground, staring at the intruder, at the girl who had put on her coat and come outside. She stood seven or eight meters away from the old man.
“What, are those fucking dog names? Call ’em Pooch or something,” she spat.
In Japanese.
Easy, stay there, the man ordered the dogs in Russian.
They understood.
What the fuck are you doing? I came to watch you, asshole. Playing around with your dogs. Don’t fucking stop, she said in Japanese.
Well, well, this is a surprise, the old man said, walking over. What is it, little girl? Are you interested in my dogs?
Don’t fucking come near me, gramps, said the girl.
If you like dogs, the old man continued, maybe later I’ll show you the doghouse.
It’s fucking winter out, you senile dick.
There are puppies.
I fucking told you not to come near me. Don’t fuck with me.
But the girl made no move to leave. The old man was right in front of her now, standing still, ready to talk. To have a conversation, in Japanese and Russian, that would communicate nothing. The girl glared up at the old man. The difference between their heights was about the size of an adult dog, foot to shoulder.
You’re quite an interesting little girl, the old man said.
Yeah, fuck you too. You’re probably calling me a brat in Russian, I know. Whatever, senile old dick, the girl replied. Someday I’m gonna fucking kill you.
The old man grinned. Smiled. For real.
“Huh?” the old man exclaimed suddenly. He wasn’t talking to the girl. He had looked away, sensing something. His face was turned up now, he was gazing up into the air, just as the girl was gazing up at him. The four-story building. The deserted building where the ten dogs had been training, learning to herd, to corner. A silhouette on the roof. A dog in outline.
The dog stepped quietly, calmly to the edge.
He was gazing down, it seemed, at the old man and the girl.
Slightly larger than the other dogs, he lacked their youthfulness. That much was clear even at a distance. But he had something else in its place. Authority, a commanding presence. That, too, was clear even at this distance. “Belka,” the old man said.
The dog didn’t respond.
He’s old, really old, the old man told the girl. Same as me. But he’s not deaf.
Once again, the old man called to the dog, somewhat louder. “Belka, why don’t you bark?”
This time the dog replied. Uuoof. Just once, quietly. To the old man and the girl.
By then the girl was looking up at the roof too. All of a sudden, she was pissed. She felt as if the old man had ordered the fucking dog to bark at her, and it had. She was furious.
“Hey, gramps,” she said, ignoring the dog. The old man sensed the forcefulness of her tone. He turned to face her. She looked him straight in the eye and continued, “I fucking hate you more than anything. Fucking Roosky. Drop dead.”
Drop dead, she said. In Japanese. Shi-ne.
The old man paused, as if he were reflecting on what she had said. And then he repeated the sounds of the Japanese word she had spoken.
“SHE-neh.”
“Senile dick. Don’t fucking converse with me.”
1957
Dogs, dogs, where are you now?
Mainland USA, 1957. Fate unites two lineages. On the one hand, the purebred Sumer; on the other, the mongrel Ice. Both were bitches, each having borne more than one litter.
Sumer was gorgeous. Her skull and muzzle were of equal length, et cetera, et cetera—she was the perfect embodiment of the purebred German shepherd standard. She hadn’t lost her looks, even now that she was getting old. There she was, in a cage, in a kennel, in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois.
Ice was frightening. Her father had been a Hokkaido dog, her mother a Siberian husky, and one of her grandmothers was a Samoyed. She had a face like a fox’s with brilliant blue eyes, a sturdy bone structure, hair on her back that the wind whipped like a mane. She looked odd, even eerie, resembling the standard image of no breed. No one owned her. She roamed freely across a wide swath of Minnesota, bound by nothing. Until they came after her with rifles.
Sumer bore puppies who were contenders to the throne. Any number of them, blessed creatures with everything going for them, expected by dint of their distinguished lineage to dominate the dog shows. She was getting on in age, but the planned mating continued; she got pregnant and gave birth again and again and raised her pups until they were four or five months old. She was, in short, a mother.
Ice obeyed her instincts, mating with pet dogs in residential developments when she was in heat, absorbing into her own bloodline the strengths of dogs whose looks and personalities suited hers. The puppies she gave birth to were another step away from purity. Their looks were unclassifiable; they had a dangerous, untamed strength. Ice led her children, and she led those of the other dogs in her pack. Five dogs from the team that had once pulled a sled in Far North Alaska and their children. They were all “wild dogs” now, regarded with unease by the humans, and she was the top dog. The leader of the pack.
A beautiful German shepherd who was, above all, a mother.
A freakish mongrel who was a mother, yes, but also a queen.
Queen of the freaks, of the monsters.
Ice, Ice—they came after you with rifles. The townspeople despised you. They hated you, and they hated your pack. Human society could not countenance your existence. You were evil. Monsters stalking the towns. Dogs unleashed were beasts, natural that they be destroyed. But you were not destroyed. You were too clever. Sometimes you retreated into the mountains, sometimes you set upon the towns. You never rested for long. Because to do so was dan
gerous. Because you felt how dangerous it could be. Though you had no knowledge of this—of course you didn’t—the blood that coursed through your father’s veins was the blood of a victor. You were descended from a long line of Hokkaido dogs who kept to this side of the line. Survivors. For thousands of years, the Ainu, the natives of Hokkaido, had used your ancestors to hunt large game. Your ancestors were the hunters. Hokkaido dogs who fought with bears and lived. These were your ancestors. Hokkaido dogs who brought down mighty deer. These were your ancestors. Every one of them survived the process of unnatural selection that hunting became. They had made it, they abided on this side of the line. And so you understood. You understood what it was to be on the side of the hunters, and you made sense of it all. You could almost tell what people were going to do before they did it. There was no way they would ever eliminate you.
Every bullet the rifles fired was another wasted bullet.
IDIOTS, you said. And you told the pack you led, WE WILL NOT BE CAUGHT.
WE WILL KEEP RUNNING.
Yes, you kept running. You “wild dogs” ran and ran, dashed ahead the way you had in Far North Alaska, over the land, over the fields of snow, over the ice floes. Minneapolis was far behind you now. You roamed through Minnesota, but you did not go north. The situation—their attempts to eradicate you, and your evasions—led you in an altogether different direction. You headed south. Yes, south. Do you grasp what that means? You, Ice, and you, former sled dogs, members of Ice’s pack, you were banished from the land of your birth, sent far, far to the south, and now, of necessity, you moved further south.
Do you understand what that means? It means this: destiny.
The pack had swelled to a few dozen. A pack of monsters, “wild dogs,” growing ever more mongrelized, following the dictates of Ice’s wisdom, her instinct, obeying the queen as they ran up and down, hither and yon, across a region that spanned four states, southern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois.
You galloped.
You lived. You ran like lightning. You weren’t going to die.
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