Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  Tears blurred her vision. She was about to get severe with herself when she suddenly noticed two more things. The first was writing on her white cast. Small writing, upside down to her sight, in red pen. Cami squinted and twisted until she could make it out:

  Your asleep. Back later!—Billy

  She smiled even as the second thing distracted her: that faint sound of a child whimpering.

  Cami inched her legs over the edge of the gurney. That was, of course, the great thing about a rigid cast: your limb was safe from further injury, unless you fell hard. She wasn’t going to fall. There was a wheelchair not far from her gurney. Carefully, holding herself up against the wall, Cami reached it, plopped herself down, and wheeled slowly away.

  The little girl lay on a gurney parked just inside a room with three other children. Between the two regular beds a woman sat asleep in a chair, head thrown back and mouth open, one hand touching each child in the beds. A second gurney had been shoved in the far corner and on it an older child, to judge from the dim outline under the blanket, also slept. But no one sat with this little girl. What was wrong with some parents?

  “Hi, sweetheart, do you need anything?” Cami whispered.

  The little girl, who looked about four, ignored her, sobbing softly. One half of her head was bandaged, covering her right cheek and eye. Cami could visualize what lay beneath and her whole body, even inside the cast, seemed to give a little shudder, like something touched by an electric current.

  “My name is Cami, what’s yours?”

  “Poo-poo,” the girl moaned, and Cami was about to become indignant at the absent parents all over again, but then she spotted the mangy stuffed kitten on the floor. Laboriously she bent and fished at it until she caught one ear.

  “Poo-poo,” the child said, snatched it from Cami, and stuck it under the covers.

  “Poo-poo just fell off the bed. He’s fine. Where’s your mommy, honey?”

  “Dead,” the little girl said, with such stark finality that Cami was startled. “Snowy ate my mommy.”

  "Ate…Snowy is…was…your dog?” Fresh horror filled her.

  “Snowy got dead, too.” The whimpering began again.

  A movement from the other bed caught her attention. A boy, nine or ten, rolled over and stared from suspicious brown eyes. “Stop bothering her!”

  “I’m not bothering, I’m…are you her brother?”

  “Yeah. Go away.”

  “I’m a nurse.”

  “Oh.” He seemed to consider this. “Then why are you in a wheelchair?”

  The woman hanging onto the other two children—hanging on for dear life is the way Cami thought of it—gave a sudden loud snore. Cami said over the noise, “A dog bit me.” Captain leaping and herself kicking and Mr. Anselm’s body…

  “Us, too,” the boy said. “What kind of dog was yours? Did anybody shoot it?”

  Cami pushed away her own memory and looked more closely at the boy, now sitting up on his gurney. One arm was in a plaster cast. His face had a sickly, pale shininess, and his eyes gleamed feverishly. She recognized what she was looking at. This child was caught in his memory of the attack, enmeshed in it, in danger of being crushed by it.

  “What kind of dog?” the boy demanded, and Cami said, “Mostly collie.”

  “Ours was a Newfoundland. He—”

  Dear God, those animals were huge. Snowy ate my mommy. And the children trying to interfere, trying to stop the attack….

  “—bit her on the neck and bit her on the head and bit her on the shoulder and—”

  The little girl whimpered louder. These children should not be together right now, even though that was standard protocol. But right now they had vastly different psychological needs, they—

  “—on the back and on the—”

  “What’s your name?” Cami said firmly. “Tell me your name.”

  “Jason.”

  “Where’s your father?”

  “No father.”

  “Okay, Jason, you come with me. I need you to…to push me down the hall. And you can tell me about Snowy, as much as you like.”

  Jason climbed easily out of his bed and walked over. Up close, his eyes shone even more wildly, darting around the room. Cami said to the girl, “You hold Poo-poo and I’ll be back soon. Okay?”

  She didn’t answer, just lay there whimpering, eyes closed.

  Cami got Jason out of the room. She started to push the wheels of her chair but Jason seized the chair with his good hand, nearly tipping her over. Strength, she suspected, born of almost intolerable tension. She said emphatically, “Be careful, Jason. Wheel me this way. It’s a short distance and then you can tell me what happened. All of it."

  “Okay!”

  She guided him toward the meditation chapel at the end of the hall, hoping that it wasn’t filled with gurneys. With the hope came another feeling: an easing of her own horror. This child needed her. That steadied her, always steadied her. It was why she’d become a nurse.

  If she could help him and his little sister, Cami herself might be all right.

  » 31

  Jess said to Billy, “Why don’t you have anything to eat in your refrigerator?"

  “I do,” Billy said. “Don’t I?”

  “Bottle of catsup, bottle of mustard, and two more six-packs.”

  “So what’s your problem? There’s a pizza in the freezer. I think.”

  Jess had spent Saturday night at Billy’s, a sobering experience. After the FBI had finished grilling him at Tessa’s house, an agent had driven Jess home. As Jess was stripping for the shower, Billy called from the hospital, sounding remarkably cheerful for someone who’d been shot. “They’re throwing me outta here, Jess. Can you come get me?”

  Jess groaned. “Can’t one of your girls do it?”

  “I’m done with all of them. Met the sweetest angel you ever saw, right here in the bone shop. Can you come right now?”

  “Call Suzanne.” A man who’d been shot in the line of duty—there’s nothing Suzanne would like better. She’d eat Billy up.

  “Not me, not that little tart,” Billy said virtuously. “You come, Jess.”

  So he’d driven his own car, the seldom used and very battered Ford, to the hospital, picked up Billy, driven him home, and then had a beer with him. The beer turned into two, then a lot more than two, and Jess woke on Billy’s floor after troubling dreams he couldn’t quite remember. Billy’s second-floor apartment, which faced the animal control offices across the street, consisted of one large room pre-furnished with a sofa bed that was never closed, some mismatched and ramshackle chairs, a table with one leg propped up on a tuna-fish can, and a gorgeous teak gun cabinet filled with assorted weaponry. Jess had slept on the floor in a none-too-clean sleeping bag.

  He microwaved the pizza for breakfast. Billy, arm in a cast and sling, watched closely. “So what happened?”

  “About what? Jesus, Billy, don’t you ever clean your microwave?”

  “No. What happened to make you look like a dog turd? And aren’t you going in to work?”

  “Yes. Now shut up and don’t ask me anything else.” Jess yanked out the pizza. Hot tomato sauce burned his hand.

  “It was that FBI agent, wasn’t it?” Billy said. “Her shooting up Victor Balonov. Stupid fucking feds—don’t they see she had to shoot?”

  Maddox had told Jess not to say anything about Tessa, not anything at all, not to anyone. Jess was tempted to do so just from sheer perversity, but he recognized how childish that would be, and anyway, anyone who expected Billy to keep a confidence was certifiable. So all he said was, “I don’t know what they think.”

  “Well, it seems to me that the…listen."

  A moment later Jess heard it, too: dogs, baying singly and then together. A lot of dogs—a very lot—had not been at home when Animal Control tried to pick them up. The dogs had suddenly “run away” or “died two months ago” or “were spending the week with my kids at my ex-husband’s in North Carolina.”r />
  The baying grew louder. Billy said quietly, “They formed packs. Hunting.”

  Jess peered out the kitchen window. On this side of town, comparatively flat farmland gave way to woods and ridges rising up the mountains. Somewhere in that early morning light, Maryland Guardsmen ringed the town—but how close together? And with what cover?

  “Let’s hope those soldier boys know enough to keep guard from trees,” Billy said. “The Guard posted singly or in pairs, Jess?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jess cut the pizza in half and dumped one section in front of Billy, who picked it up awkwardly with his left hand. Last night’s beer bottles littered the table. The sound of the dog pack suddenly changed. Not baying anymore. Lower noises, spaced apart, calling.

  “They’ve got something surrounded,” Billy said. “Fuck Victor Balonov, din’t he just have to hit my right arm—Jess, look."

  They both crowded near the kitchen window. A doe broke from the woods, speeding straight toward Billy’s complex. It seemed to Jess that he could feel her panic right through the glass, a vibration like lightening in summer air. At the last minute the doe swerved and ran around the side of the building, toward the road. Two dogs raced out of the trees. A German shepherd and—Jesus!—a Bernese mountain dog the size of a small arm chair.

  Jess’s gun lay on the table. He grabbed it while Billy tore open the window. But when Jess got back, the dogs had followed the doe around to the front of the apartment building.

  By the time he and Billy reached the front door, the doe lay thrashing on the ground, blood staining the small patches of snow. Five dogs tore at her: the shepherd, the Bernese mountain, two mutts, and a small terrier of some type. “Right there in the front yard!” Billy said, and there was a note of admiration in his voice, so dumb-ass and so Billy that Jess scowled at him. People had appeared in doorways along the corridor and at the top of the stairs to the second floor. Some stupid woman kept screaming. Somehow in Jess’s mind the screaming became the doe’s, not human. He opened the door, stepped out on the porch, and fired.

  “Damn! Missed!” Billy said. “Maybe you need lessons from that FBI girl.”

  The dogs had scattered at the sound of the gun—all except two. The Bernese mountain turned and charged directly at Jess.

  He threw himself backward into the hallway and slammed the door. It was metal, the better to thwart thieves, but the entire thing shuddered when a hundred pounds of enraged dog hit it. Instinctively, Jess leaned against the door. The screaming around him had intensified. Billy howled, “Shut up!” which only added to the noise.

  The Bernese turned and followed the rest of the pack into the woods, except for the terrier cowering under the bank of mailboxes by the road.

  Cautiously Jess opened the door, gun ready (like it had done him a lot of good so far!). There was something different about this dog. It had hunted with the pack, or maybe just trailed it, but it wasn’t attacking now. Nor was it trying any longer to feed on the mangled doe. Jess took a careful step forward, then another, then two more. The dog under the mailbox neither attacked nor bolted. Not far out of puppyhood, it had short, wiry, shit-brown hair, a flat-topped head, and overly long legs, a genuine mixed ancestry that somehow gave it the look of a tipsy end table.

  “Hey, boy,” Jess said experimentally, ready to shoot if he had to.

  The dog wagged its stubby tail.

  Then, as if remembering that Jess was the enemy, it turned and raced across the road, around the Animal-Control building, and into the woods where the rest of the pack had gone.

  “You coulda got that one, at least!” Billy called derisively. But Jess wasn’t listening. He’d gotten close enough to the misshapen dog to see its eyes. The animal hadn’t been aggressive, but its light-brown eyes nonetheless had that same milky film as the dogs that had been mangling people for days now. The terrier-mix was infected, all right—but not vicious. Just what Dr. Latkin had said the scientists might be able to use to find a defense against this disease.

  Finding that small misbegotten terrier had suddenly become Jess’s number-one priority.

  » 32

  Steve Harper slammed into DiBella’s office, the notice in his hand. “What the hell is this shit, Don?”

  The sheriff stood, but calmly. “It should be clear what it is, Steve. You’re on temporary suspension.”

  “Now? When we need everybody possible on the street, shutting down these fucking dogs?”

  DiBella searched among the debris on his messy desk. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in way too long. Well, guess what—nobody else was sleeping either. This was a fucking crisis.

  DiBella found the paper he was looking for. “You signed off on this statement, Steve. You really shot an uninfected dog less than two feet from its owner?”

  “I didn’t know it was uninfected!”

  “She said she told you so.”

  Steve slammed his right fist into his left palm. “So what? They lie, you know that, they just want to protect their damn pets no matter who else dies. We should shoot every fucking dog on sight!”

  DiBella gazed at him, and all at once Steve heard himself. So he wasn’t advocating the “temperate and appropriate response”—so what? The time for a temperate response wasn’t in the middle of a natural disaster!

  DiBella said, “This is about Davey, isn’t it? Your judgment is impaired just now. That’s natural, given…everything. But I can’t have you out there in the field like this. The temporary suspension stands.”

  “But—”

  “That’s all. Leave your badge and gun at the desk.”

  Steve slammed out of DiBella’s office. DiBella was an idiot. Now, when every officer was urgently needed on the street, now in the middle of a huge threat… “This is about Davey.”

  Of course it was about Davey. Everything was about Davey. Steve couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t console his mother, who’d lost her only grandchild. When he stopped working, stopped moving for ten minutes, all he could see was the brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s body… What did DiBella expect Steve to do with his rage if he couldn’t help rid Tyler of the dogs destroying it?

  What?

  » 33

  When Tessa’s latest ride let her out at Terminal A of Baltimore-Washington Airport, she found a phone bank and stuck in her credit card—no help for it, this time. She was nearly out of cash. Maddox would trace it, but not instantly.

  Still no answer at Aisha’s Geneva apartment, so Tessa called the World Health Organization. It was past noon in Switzerland, and even on a Sunday someone should be answering. Global medical emergencies did not cease during weekends.

  “Organisation mondiale de la Santé.”

  “Do you speak English?” Tessa asked.

  “Yes. May I help you?” The French accent was strong.

  “I need to reach Dr. Aisha Jamilla bin Mohammed Mahjoub. This is her sister-in-law in America and there is a family emergency. It’s urgent, involving her mother, Fatima. I must speak to her immediately.”

  “Dr. Mahjoub…one moment, s’il vous plaît…She has gone on assignment from Headquarters.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I cannot give to you that information.”

  A sensible safety precaution. Under any other circumstances, Tessa would have approved. “Please, I need to reach her…it’s her mother. Is she somewhere reachable by phone? Can you give her a message?”

  “Yes, that I may do.”

  “Tell her—tell her right away—to call Tessa about her mother, Fatima. Call at this number.” Tessa read off the pay-phone number, adding the international code for the United States.

  “I will do this.”

  “Thank you.” She tried to sound urgent but not annoyed. The FBI kept airport spotters at BWI. Maddox could have her picked up in two minutes if he knew she was here. She sat, in Jess’s too-big coat and her own sunglasses, in the chair closest to
the phone bank, reading an abandoned copy of the Baltimore Sun.

  DOG PLAGUE DEATH TOLL AT 36

  PRESIDENT DECLARES FEDERAL DISASTER AREA “FINDING THE PATHOGEN DOESN'T MEAN FINDING THE CURE,” SAYS TOP CDC INVESTIGATOR

  MUTATION OR TERRORIST ACT?

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  Aisha called forty-five minutes later. “Tessa! Qu’est-ce que c’est? They said…maman…”

  “It’s not Fatima,” Tessa said quickly. “I had to say that to get WHO to contact you, but it is urgent, Aisha, as urgent as possible. You know of the dog plague here in Maryland?”

  “Of course.” She sounded bewildered but there was a sharp undertone of resentment as well, and Tessa realized how badly she’d scared Aisha. “We at Who were notified about the plague by the CDC, and now it is on CNN as well. We are sending observers, but not me, I am now—”

  “I was in the middle of the plague. I live in Tyler, Maryland, now. And I’ve been getting email messages with cryptic references—”

  “ ‘Cryptic’?”

  It was rare that Aisha didn’t understand an English word, but it happened. All at once, unbidden, a memory took over Tessa’s mind and Salah was solidly before her in his gray suit, curly black hair, dark expressive eyes:

  “You look so dapper tonight, Salah.”

  “'Dapper’? What is ‘dapper’?”

  “Tessa? Are you there?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Strange messages, with references to dogs, from Richard Ebenfield. He was—”

  “I know who he is.” Said in a tone that could freeze glaciers.

  “Aisha, he sent Salah email with the word ‘dog’ in Arabic, over and over, three months ago. Long before the plague broke.”

  “The plague?” Now Aisha sounded bewildered again. “Richard could have nothing to do with this dog plague.”

  “Why not?”