“Is Sam around?” Westerly asked, scanning the aisles. He noticed that all the dog food was gone. Bixby must have gotten word that it was infected.
“Nope.” Bixby shook his head. He folded a stick of gum into his mouth and started chewing. “I left him at home today.”
“You did? Why?”
“No reason,” Bixby said. He stared hard at Westerly. He had a look on his face that Westerly had never seen before. Usually Bixby was polite, smiling—even jovial every now and then. His brown eyes always had a sparkle. Today, that sparkle was gone. He almost looked as if he were about to challenge Westerly to a fight. “What's going on? You think he's got that disease people keep talking about? POS or whatever?”
Westerly shook his head. He started to feel queasy. “Well, I don't know. Is he sick? Does he seem dizzy? Has he been staggering at all? Drooling more than usual?”
Bixby leaned across the counter. He stopped chewing the gum. “You want to tell me what this is about?” he asked.
“It's just …” Westerly's mind raced. Sam must be sick. Of course he was. But Westerly had been counting on Sam. Sam was the only other dog besides Daisy he knew for miles. He'd seen a couple of other dogs around town over the years, but he'd never met the owners. And yes, it was insane to think that of all the dogs in the world, Sam would somehow be miraculously immune—but Westerly wasn't exactly thinking like a sane person. Not with Jasmine on the rug at home. Just a few weeks ago, Sam had looked so healthy, and Westerly didn't know where else he could possibly turn….
“It's just what?” Bixby demanded.
Westerly looked Bixby straight in the eye. “Listen, Joe. I don't know if you know this, but I'm a scientist. I worked with—”
“I know all about it,” Bixby interrupted.
Westerly blinked. “You do?”
“Yup. You worked at Portland U., but you got fired. So you moved out here.”
Any warm feelings Westerly might have once had for Joe Bixby died right there.
“Look, I want to help Sam and Jasmine, but I need to find a dog that's healthy and get it to Portland University,” Westerly said. “Do you know of any?”
Bixby laughed. The sound was brisk and harsh, like a slap. “You really do keep to yourself, don't you?” he muttered.
“What do you mean?” Westerly asked. He felt sick to his stomach again, even though he wasn't sure why.
“There aren't any dogs left in this town,” Bixby said. He lowered his voice and glanced around the deserted store. “They're all dead. Either that or they've been rounded up by the government. A couple of folks around here have even taken to shooting dogs or beating them to death because they're scared of getting bit. So if I were you, I wouldn't come around asking a lot of questions about dogs. I'd just keep Jasmine at home and pray.”
Westerly turned and bolted out the door.
He could still hear Bixby talking about prayer as he gunned the engine and tore back down the empty highway.
The scent was almost impossible to detect at first, but in time, it grew stronger. Jack's sense of smell was her most powerful tool. A whiff on a fallen tree branch, a sudden shift in the breeze … She was getting close. With each footstep, her starved and beaten body begged for a moment's rest. She hadn't slept; she'd barely eaten—just some measly scraps on the side of the road. But her desire to reach the boy overpowered the suffering.
So did her fear.
She was being hunted.
Every human she'd encountered since her escape had threatened her in some way. Some chased her. Some hurled rocks at her. All of them barked at her. The wild was terrifying—even more so than the dark place. She slunk through the shadows, hiding even as she tracked the scent. But the boy would protect her. He would protect her the way he always had….
CDC press release published in all major
newspapers on the West Coast, July 22
PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE TO POS (PSYCHOTIC OUTBURST SYNDROME)
What should I do if I own a dog?
As of this morning, by emergency order of the governors of California, Oregon, and Washington, you are required to register with the CDC if you own a dog. The CDC will pick up your dog and have it tested for POS at one of the quarantine centers established in these states. A complete list of phone numbers and locations is available on the next page. We continue to receive reports of people hiding their dogs in their basements, hiring people to shoot their dogs, or otherwise trying to keep their dog ownership a secret. It has also been alleged that several towns have formed vigilante groups whose sole purpose is to hunt down dogs. Not only are both these things against the law, they are extremely dangerous.
Where should I go if I'm worried that I'm sick?
Please report immediately to a hospital or quarantine center. If you are incapacitated in any way, call the number below and an ambulance will be sent to pick you up. Hospitals are adjusting as best they can to the sudden surge in demand for care. Patience and restraint are required. You may have heard stories of the public hoarding antibiotics or rabies vaccines. The CDC does not recommend either, as no medicine has yet been proven effective in fighting POS.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Crash!
Logan's eyes flew open. He bolted upright.
He had absolutely no idea where he was. Sleep still clung to him in a heavy, uncomfortable way, like wet clothes. He was much too groggy to make any sense of his surroundings. All he saw was gray mist.
Gradually, he realized that his clothes really were wet.
He was cold, too. He shivered and blinked. Something had woken him up. A big crash, like a falling tree branch …
Oh, right. He remembered now. He was in the woods. Specifically, he was lost in the woods. And apparently branches were falling around him.
Great. Just great. In about three seconds, one would probably smack him on the head. It would either kill him or give him lifelong amnesia—in which case he would end up wandering into some weird place and getting brainwashed by one of those bizarre, starry-eyed religious cults, the Brothers and Sisters of UFO Eternity or something, and he'd live out the rest of his days with a name like Shadrach, eating wheat germ in a remote mountain compound and never remembering anything.
If he even got that far.
Logan scowled and rubbed his bleary eyes. He blinked until his vision cleared. Being able to see didn't do much good, though. He was still shrouded in fog. He stood up straight and tried to dust off his soggy jeans and T-shirt. That didn't do much good, either. He was damp and filthy. His stomach rumbled. Hunger was starting to pick at him in a pretty irritating way. Thirst, too. (Which was doubly annoying since it was so wet.) Sergeant Bell's spaghetti had run out yesterday. At this point, a big bowl of wheat germ didn't even sound so bad.
“So,” he whispered. He sounded like an eighty-year-old man. “This is what running away is all about.”
For three days, Logan had been stumbling around the mountains with a plastic garbage bag full of worthless junk, trying in vain to figure out which way was west— so he could find the stupid dirt road that led back to the highway that could take him home. But no. He couldn't. Because he couldn't find the stupid sun. Leave it to Private Moore, Maggot First Class, to run away the night before a long stretch of lousy weather.
The first day, it had poured. The second day, it had drizzled. And now, well … now it just seemed to have settled into a nice thick fog. The sun was still nowhere to be seen, of course. Oh, no. It could be anywhere. Here, there, up, down … there was no telling.
If only Jack were with him. All those dumb training books talked about how dogs were supposed to have these built-in homing devices so they could basically sniff their way back home no matter what the weather—
Crackle, crackle, crack …smash!
Logan flinched. There it was again. This time it sounded like more than just a branch falling. It sounded like a tree. Logan heard the wood splintering as the trunk hit the forest floor.
The farther he ran, the more the fog started to clear. He also began to notice other sounds: animals scurrying through the brush, the babbling of a stream, the plop-plop of something falling into water….
The trees abruptly disappeared.
Logan stopped. He found himself surrounded by stumps.
He stared at them curiously. They were all squat and pointed, like sharpened pencils or a village of miniature tepees. He looked around. A couple of long, skinny tree trunks lay at his feet. Each one looked as though several bites had been taken out of it. They reminded him of half-eaten corn on the cob. He shook his head. If this had been done by a lumberjack, he was the weirdest lumberjack Logan had ever—
Plop-plop.
Logan squinted through the fog toward the stream's edge—just in time to see a furry brown creature with stumpy legs waddle into the water.
Plop-plop.
Beavers. Logan's cracked lips curled in a smile. Of course. What had he been thinking? Oregon was the Beaver State. Not the Weird Lumberjack State. Logan had just never seen any beavers up close, in the wild. Whenever he'd gone hiking in the past, he had always stuck to the trails. Beavers tended to stay away from trails.
He dropped the garbage bag and walked up to the stream.
“Wow,” he murmured.
A massive dam had been built across it, maybe thirty feet long and eight feet deep. It was sloppy looking, like a giant bird's nest—with leaves and branches sticking out all over the place—but it did what it was supposed to do. The water level on one side of it was a good three feet higher than the water level on the other side. It was really pretty incredible. That little fur ball he'd just seen was less than half the size of Jack. How could something like that create something like this?
Logan bent down beside the stream and cupped his hands, slurping up water in big gulps, splashing it all over his face. It tasted cold and fresh. He could feel the wetness going all the way through him. He'd never imagined plain old water could be so good.
When he'd finally had enough, he stood up straight again. He was breathing hard. He felt a little light-headed.
Okay. He wasn't thirsty anymore, but he was still hungry. Very hungry. He was probably hungrier than he'd ever been in his life. So hungry that he would even have sunk so low as to eat tuna fish, which he'd always refused to eat on the grounds that it looked and smelled like cat food. Unfortunately, he didn't have any tuna fish.
He glanced back at the garbage bag. He should have risked waking up Sergeant Bell to get a fishing rod. He had no way of catching any fish now, tuna or otherwise.
Unless … Logan gnawed on his lip and stared at the beaver dam, thinking.
He was no beaver expert, but the way he figured it, beavers probably didn't build dams so they'd have a nice place to swim. They probably built dams to catch things that flowed downstream. Like fish, for instance.
Or maybe not.
The point was, fish probably did get caught in that dam. Which meant that Logan could catch some as well. He just had to make a fishing net.
Logan dashed back to the bag and dumped everything in it onto the ground. Then he took the big carving knife he'd swiped from the Alpha Base kitchen and carefully punched a bunch of tiny holes into the bottom of the bag—about twenty in all, no bigger than the tip of a pen. As soon as he was done, he cut four small pieces of rope, each about as long as a shoelace. (So Sergeant Bell had been right about needing rope. Imagine that.)
Then he started hunting for sticks. In less than two minutes he found what he needed: four strong, thick sticks that were all a foot long or so.
Using the pieces of rope, he tied the branches together to form a square. Then he fit the square into the open end of the bag. He punctured the rim of the bag with the sharp ends of the branches and tied a few extra knots in the plastic so that the bag wouldn't fall off the square.
There, Logan said to himself.
Now he had a net: one that was a foot wide and would always stay open. He walked upstream a little way, away from the dam, then tied what remained of the rope—about ten feet—to one of the sticks. With that, he tossed the net into the water.
It landed with a small splash.
The rope stretched tight, like a leash. The force of the current made the end of the bag balloon out behind the square, just like a parachute. Perfect. Logan could see it all underwater: a big, empty garbage bag that would soon fill with fish. He had to smile. The LMMFN (Logan Moore Makeshift Fishing Net) wasn't nearly as state-of-the-art as the LMMRC, but it would do the job.
He was in the woods, after all. You had to do what you could.
* * *
Within a couple of hours (by Logan's estimate—he wasn't wearing a watch), he'd caught three fish. The LMMFN was a huge success.
As soon as a fish would swim into the bag, he'd yank the bag back to shore. That was the easy part. The hard part was actually getting the fish out of the bag. They'd squirm in his fingers and usually slip back into the black plastic netting about a hundred times. Logan ended up getting soaking wet. Then they'd flop around in the dirt beside him for a few minutes until they were dead. Too bad Jack wasn't with him. If she saw those fish flopping around, she'd probably go crazy. He laughed once, remembering the way she'd pounced on the baseball mitt and whipped it around in her jaws….
His smile quickly faded. There was no point in thinking about Jack. If he wanted to see her again, he had to figure out a way to get home first. And if he was going to do that, he had to eat.
He dragged the LMMFN from the water.
The fish weren't very big. They were all pretty skinny and less than a foot long. A lot less, actually. Whatever. He wasn't in a position to be picky. There was plenty of meat on them to make a nice breakfast. Or lunch. Or whatever meal it was.
Now the only problem was finding enough dry wood to build a fire.
Man, he thought, frowning. He should have swiped Perry's lighter after all. He had only a single box of kitchen matches, and there weren't that many left. He glanced around the woods. There had to be—
A shadow jumped in the fog.
Logan held his breath.
His pulse quickened. There was some rustling there, some movement maybe a hundred feet away. It was an animal. And it definitely wasn't a beaver. It was big, sort of dark … a wolf, maybe?
It was coming right toward Logan. Not that fast—but not that slowly, either. It was limping a little, staggering, even … it was nothing more than a silhouette with a tail.
A wolflike silhouette.
Logan didn't move. He couldn't. Fear had frozen him solid. A wolf is stalking me. The way he saw it, he had two choices. He could dive into the stream, or he could stay still.
The wolf barked.
Wait a second. Logan's pulse snapped into overdrive.
That bark.
It was as if his body had suddenly been jammed into a giant electrical socket and the switch had been thrown. That bark. Logan didn't even have to glimpse her bedraggled auburn fur or those liquid brown eyes or those skinny legs. The bark was enough.
But this was impossible. There was no way she could be here— here, in the middle of the Cascades—not unless Robert and Mom had somehow tracked him down. Or maybe he was still asleep….
“Jack?” he said. His voice cracked a little.
And then she was jumping on him, wagging her tail, breathing her stinky dog breath right into his face—and he knew he was awake. Dreams didn't include bad breath.
“Okay, girl,” he gasped, laughing. “Easy. Easy, there—”
His laughter stopped.
All four of Jack's legs were bloody. They were dotted with oozing sores. Her paws were in tatters. She
lay down beside Logan and shuddered a couple of times, panting. Drool fell from her jowls in big white globs. She was a wreck.
“What happened to you, girl?” Logan whispered.
Jack whimpered softly.
“Okay. Okay, don't worry. I'll—”
Crack!
Logan looked up with a start. That wasn't the sound of a tree falling. It was short and sharp and loud, like a rifle shot. It echoed all around him, so that he couldn't tell where it had come from. There was no way Sergeant Bell would come looking for him with a gun, was there? The guy was pretty whacked out, but still …
Crack!
Something whizzed by Logan's head. A branch on the other side of the stream snapped and fell into the water. What the—
Logan ducked down, panting as hard as Jack. His eyes were like saucers. All right. That was a bullet. No doubt about it. He had to stop. To think. Rewind. Start over. If he'd been scared when he thought a wolf was stalking him … he didn't know what he was now. Actually, that wasn't true. He was on the verge of passing out.
“Hey!” he shouted into the mist. “Don't shoot! Don't shoot!”
Jack whimpered again. She glanced at Logan, then sniffed at the LMMFN. She must have smelled the fish because she crawled right through the opening and curled up inside it.
Several seconds later, two men in hunting caps and orange vests appeared out of the fog.
“Hello?” one of them yelled. “Anybody there?”
“Yeah!” Logan shouted back. He stood up and raised both hands over his head. His knees wobbled. “I'm right here! Don't shoot!”
The men drew closer. Both of them looked angry. And both were carrying rifles.
“What are you doing out here, kid?” one of them asked.
“I, uh …” Logan swallowed. It probably wasn't a good idea to tell them he was a runaway. In fact, that would be a very, very stupid idea. “I'm just doing a little fishing. I live … I live down the stream a little ways.”
“In Mitchell?” the second one asked. He sounded suspicious.
Logan nodded. “Yeah. In Mitchell.”
The Last Dog on Earth Page 11