Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  But not for much longer. A New Order is coming. The soft elite shall fall, and the true men come out of the shadows and rule. I am owed this. I have earned it.

  More later.

  Richard

  “Ma’am, are you almost finished? I got a term paper due tomorrow.”

  Tessa looked up at the girl. Thin, tall, shy, with accusing blue eyes. The same blue, she thought numbly and irrelevantly, as the eyes of the Brit shooter in London. Small world.

  “Just let me print this, and…just let me print it in private, okay?”

  The girl moved to the side of the computer station, but kept staring balefully at Tessa. She hit PRINT, heard the communal printer whirr behind her, and was about to log off when the PC announced, “You’ve got mail!” The girl sighed.

  Madame,

  I have received what follows from frère Luc-Claude of our order. Since you have said your French is not good, I will tell you what he tells to me.

  Tessa glanced at the message reprinted at bottom of the email; it was long, detailed, and in complex French. She returned to Abbé LeFort’s summary.

  Richard Ebenfield was indeed with les Frères de l’Espoir céleste in Mogumbutuno two years ago. He was very ill and our order cared for him until he recovered. He told frère Luc-Claude that he has been into the jungle, at a village besieged by wild dogs. There Richard was bitten. When he came to les frères, he had a very strong fever but this passed away after some days and Richard once more left. He seemed then once more healthy. Frère Luc-Claude has not seen him ever since. He adds only that in his fever Richard said many violent things about both the United States and the man named Salah.

  I wish you success under God in your endeavors.

  Abbé Guillaume LeFort

  les Frères de l’Espoir céleste

  The girl whined, “It’s a term paper on Faulkner. And he's hard.”

  “Just another few minutes,” Tessa said, and somehow the words came out normally. The girl scowled and flounced off.

  She printed the email. The girl reappeared with a middle-aged woman. “Ma’am,” the librarian said, “there’s a ten-minute limit on use of the Internet connections, and Sarah here says you’ve exceeded your limit. Is that true?”

  “No,” Tessa said. “I’ve got two minutes left.” She had no idea how long she’d been on.

  “Sarah, dear, I think you can wait two more minutes.”

  “She’s lying! She’s been on longer than ten minutes already!”

  Tessa forwarded both Ebenfield’s and the abbé’s email to Maddox with the heading “VERY IMPORTANT” She signed off, grabbed her printouts, and matched the girl’s scowl. She wanted to tell the brat, “I hope you flunk your SAT’s.” She didn’t say it; she’d already drawn enough attention to herself.

  Tessa drove back to a public phone. Using one of her phone cards, she called Maddox’s cell. He answered instantly.

  “John, Tessa again. I just sent you email. See that the medical information gets to that CDC doctor, Laskit or whatever his name was. Tell him to watch the dog-bite victims who didn’t die, looking out for high fever. And—”

  “Tessa, where are you?”

  “—and find Ebenfield.” She hung up. Nowhere near time for a trace.

  She parked the Toyota on a carefully-chosen residential street, where it was less likely to be noticed overnight than in the supermarket parking lot, and walked through the cold winter night to her ratty motel. The TV was broken. Too exhausted to look for a bar with a television, she fell into bed and slept like a stone, without dreams.

  INTERIM

  He sat alone in his house, smoking, gazing out the window. The foliage was withered and sere. It would come back in the spring, of course, but spring seemed, at that moment, a long time away.

  It was not supposed to come to this.

  He had been very careful. Launching the rapid but still meticulous investigation since the woman’s visit, since she had planted the suspicion. He had used every resource at his command, gathering information until he was sure, hoping all the while that he was mistaken. Hoping that no one connected to him could be that stupid. And, when he finally knew there had been no mistake, enduring the heartache.

  It was not supposed to come to this, and he did not want to do what was required.

  But his flesh, his bone, his blood…his son.

  Ruzbihan al-Ashan stubbed out the cigarette, picked up the house phone, and gave the order.

  WEDNESDAY

  » 50

  Cami woke with a headache worse than she had ever had in her life.

  Ordinarily she didn’t get sick. At her high school graduation, she’d won the perfect attendance award for never missing a single day from kindergarten through grade twelve. Nor had she ever called in sick to work, not even once, and she’d been a little shocked at the nurses who called in to take “mental health days.” But now Cami felt really awful.

  Getting out of bed only made her head hurt worse. Throwing off the bedclothes—they were so hot!—she stumbled into the bathroom and groped in the medicine cabinet for her thermometer. One hundred one point five.

  She barely made it to the toilet to vomit.

  It might be some kind of flu. Or an infection from the bite of Mr. Anselm’s dog. Or…oh, dear Lord, no…something transmitted by the bite, something unknown. If so—

  She vomited again.

  Her head feeling as if it would shatter, Cami made it back to the bedroom. Her nightgown was soaked with sweat. She got it off and pulled on a light T-shirt plus sweat pants, all that would fit over the dressings on her leg. Almost immediately sweat soaked the tee. She lay on the bed and fumbled for the phone.

  “Billy? It’s—”

  “Cami! ’Morning, beautiful!”

  “I’m sorry to bother you so early—” What time was it? She had no idea. “—but I—”

  “What is it? What’s wrong, darlin’?”

  “I’m…I’m sick. I have to go to the ER and I can’t drive. I’m sorry to bother you but—”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Just stay still and…and do whatever it is you’re supposed to. I’ll get Jess and we’ll be right there.”

  She lay on the bed, feeling the sweat bead and roll down her forehead, her breasts, her belly. The door…she had to unlock the front door for Billy and Jess. He was so good to come get her…this was probably just the flu, the flu season wasn’t really over yet although it had been a light year for flu oh she was so hot! She had to unlock the door for Billy had to get up and unlock the door…Billy and Jess so good to come right away—

  But it wasn’t Jess who came. Billy alone burst through the door, making so much noise that Cami’s headache spiked into unbearable pain and she cried out from her slumped position against the wall. Billy stopped, stared, and then knelt beside her.

  “Well, you really are hurtin’, nurse Cami,” he said in the softest voice she’d ever heard from him. “But it’s gonna be okay, everything’s gonna be just fine, darlin’. Now I can’t lift you, worse luck with my damn arm, but I’m gonna pull you up slowly and you’re gonna lean on me down to the car. Can you do that, beautiful? Here we go.”

  He got them both through the door, down the steps, outside. The cold air felt wonderful. But she didn’t have on a coat or shoes…when had she put slippers on? Had Billy done it? She couldn’t remember. Billy was easing her into the car, Billy was—

  “Where’s Jess?”

  “Not home. I’m driving you.” The car lurched forward as Billy maneuvered it with his left hand on the steering wheel.

  “But I have to see Allen! I promised!”

  Billy scowled. “Who’s Allen?”

  “Allen! I promised! At the hospital!”

  Billy’s face cleared. “Oh, the kid. Right.”

  “I promised! I promised!”

  Something was wrong; someone was screaming. And then she cried, “Fire!” because all at once flames were dancing along her arms, red and blue and orange and
cold…but the weird thing was that they didn’t hurt. How could flames not hurt? The car went forward. Belle…was Belle all right? Why were there flames? She had to see Allen, she’d promised!

  “Steady, Cami, we’re here,” somebody said, and the flames surged once more before someone did something and she slid down into the blessed cool dark.

  Billy was scared.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been scared. Not when this dog plague had started with young A.J. Wright and his dad’s pit bull. Not even when that fucking lunatic Victor Balonov had shot Billy. But turning Cami, twitching and raving about Allen, over to the ER nurse, Billy was terrified.

  The ER was full of people again, and Billy recognized nearly all of them. They were the same people who had come in with dog bites and had since gone home, been moved upstairs to ICU, or died. Now here they were back again, minus the dead ones, and most of them were screaming or twitching or raving like Cami. There was old Mrs. Carby and the Wingerson kid and Jayne Steadman and one of the little Gladwell twins…

  Everybody who got bit was now getting sick.

  Helplessly he watched Cami being wheeled away. Now there was probably something in her brain, like Dr. Latkin said was in the dogs’ brains. Oh, Christ, were all the infected people going to die? Or—and this was what twisted Billy’s stomach into what felt like the mother of all knots—were they going to start acting like the infected dogs, trying to bite people and so spread the disease?

  And if people could get the plague—if that could happen, Billy couldn’t imagine what on God’s green-and-shit-smeared Earth could happen next.

  » 51

  Jess woke late on Wednesday, to gunfire.

  He leapt out of bed and hit the floor before his sleep-clogged brain registered that the shots were outside, close but not immediately outside his window. They’d been rapid-fire, as if from an automatic weapon—the Guards? Some maniac with an AK-47? Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since the bombing of the Stop ’n’ Shop, and FEMA had not returned the uninfected dogs to their owners.

  9:30 A.M. He’d slept through his alarm. Or turned it off in his sleep, or something.

  Throwing on yesterday’s jeans and sweater, lacing up his boots with unsteady fingers, Jess grabbed his gun and raced to the front door. The snowy street outside was deserted and absolutely quiet. He saw nothing amiss. But then he heard a single dog, somewhere a few streets over. It was giving out the single saddest sound a dog can make, two or three quick barks ending in a long howl, what some people called the “death howl” of a dog in mourning.

  Jess got into his truck and drove to look for the dog. The Guard troops that circled Tyler like a noose weren’t evident in this residential section, but neither was anyone else. Jess’s was the only vehicle disturbing the pristine layer of snow on the street. But he saw curtains pulled back and faces at windows as he passed.

  He found the dog, a brown-and-white beagle, sitting on its haunches on the open front porch of a house that appeared to be deserted. Soggy newspapers dotted lawn. Some people had chosen to leave Tyler as soon as the epidemic had started, even when that meant leaving pets behind. The beagle howled again, a long mournful cry with no hint of aggression in it. Its coat was filthy; blood spotted one hind leg. Somewhere the beagle had lost its collar. Jess wasn’t close enough to see if its eyes were filmed with white.

  He called the Animal Control office on his cell. “Suzanne, I need—”

  “Where are you? We’re backed up with calls!”

  “Overslept. I’ll be in soon but right now I need a dog I.D. for 627 Herlinger Street. Get it off the computer.”

  “Okay, 627 Herlinger…That’s the Dorsey residence. They show a licensed male two-year-old beagle named Hearsay.”

  “Hearsay?”

  “Maybe he’s a lawyer?”

  Jess buckled on his protective gear, got a medium-sized crate from his truck, and started toward the house, gun in his right hand and crate in his left. Hearsay turned and wagged his tail. His brown eyes were clear. In all Jess’s years working with animals, beagles were about the only breed he hadn’t seen bite anybody. He always thought that if he ever got another dog, it would be a beagle.

  “Hey, Hearsay. Here, good dog.”

  The beagle wagged his tail harder and tried to drag himself toward Jess. It was obvious that his bloody hind leg hurt him. Jess was three or four feet from the dog, just setting down the crate, when a single shot sounded. Hearsay screamed and dropped. A pool of blood spread onto the porch.

  Jess wheeled around and shouted, “Who fired that!” A nanosecond later it occurred to him that he was a target and there was an armed nut out there, but he didn’t move. Scanning the street, he saw nothing. The shooter was hidden.

  His cell rang, an unfamiliar number. Even before he answered, he knew.

  “Langstrom,” a male voice said, “If you and the whole damn federal government can’t kill these vicious dogs, we’ll do it for you. No more kids are going to die because you guys won’t do what you fucking well should,” Click.

  Jess stood motionless. The voice was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it. DiBella could have the call traced.

  The cell rang again, but this time he recognized the number: Latkin. “Jess? Joe Latkin. Listen, my team and I spent all night with that spaniel you brought us, the one killed with the hiker in West Virginia. Thank God the media haven’t got that yet. The spaniel wasn’t infected, but the neck-bite area held the virus in saliva, and it seems to have come from a primary, not a secondary.”

  “I don’t understand that, doctor.” And why was Latkin telling Jess? He scanned the street for something, anything, that might tell him where the shooter was. Nothing.

  “Let me give it to you briefly,” Latkin said. “The virus is highly mutable, which shows through the way it manifests in different animals. There are very tiny changes with each transmission. It’s called branching, and it lets us construct a diagram: A bit B, and B bit C and D and F, and then C bit G and so on. It’s not a perfect history but it’s not bad, either. We think your King Charles spaniel was bitten by the original source of the plague, not by another dog somewhere down the line.”

  Jess tried to concentrate. “You mean the Doberman captured in West Virginia was the source of the plague?”

  Yes. But that Doberman wasn't the one that bit the spaniel. The salivas don’t match.”

  “You mean there’s another source out there?”

  “Yes. Another primary source of the virus. And I need you and DiBella, plus whoever else you trust one hundred percent, to go look for it.”

  “Why me, Joe? God, you’ve told the FBI and FEMA, right? The feds’ll comb those hills.”

  “Yes. But they won’t know where to look because they don’t know the terrain, and they won’t get anyone to tell them anything because they don’t know the people. Scott Lurie won’t use local help, Maryland or West Virginian, because he’s a supercilious son-of-a-bitch who thinks you’re all a bunch of bumpkins. I’m outside my own sphere of authority here, but God, I can’t work if they won’t let me get at the right material! I need you to go back up to West Virginia and find that other dog. You know animals, and you know whom you can trust to look along with you. I need that other primary source.”

  “Is it another Doberman?”

  “Can’t tell. Can you? You saw the hiker.”

  Jess said, “It could be any big breed. But I looked at her carefully and I didn’t see any hairs, and the spaniel’s neck was snapped with a single shake, so probably a short-hair with really strong jaws.”

  “See what I mean? You know what you’re doing. How many FBI agents would know all that? Do you know what story the family of the dead hiker was told? That she was killed by a bear.”

  Jess thought of the West Virginia medical examiner, the undertaker who would prepare the corpse, the family who would view her for identification of the body. A bear, my ass. That story would dissolve like sugar in rain.

 
Latkin said, “Will you do it, Jess?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Bye.”

  Jess put Hearsay’s body in the crate. From his truck he called DiBella, told him what had happened, and read him the phone number from his cell’s call record. DiBella swore for a full, creative fifteen seconds. “Jess, last night we broke up a bad fight at the Moonlight Lounge. Dennis Riley and them want their dogs back. The other group of drunks wanted every last dog in Tyler killed yesterday to keep the people safe. The fight got really ugly. FEMA hasn’t returned the uninfected dogs like the bombers demanded—well, Lurie can’t do that, of course. But FEMA’s just making the whole situation worse by locking the whole town up tighter than a virgin’s ass… I’ll get on that phone number.”

  “Thanks, Don.”

  Jess drove to the Animal Control office. He saw no one on the deserted streets but he could feel eyes on him, hear uncaptured dogs baying in the distance, could smell the tension like fumes in the air, gasoline too close to way too many sparks.

  » 52

  Tessa woke early Wednesday morning, hiked to the library, and waited impatiently for it to open. A different librarian was on duty and, this time, the local kids were in school instead of waiting to use the Internet. She had email from both Maddox and Ebenfield. Maddox merely repeated his demand that she come inside. Ebenfield’s email was in the form of a 200-kilobyte attachment. At least fifty pages.

  She scanned it quickly, grimacing. It was a political screed, railing against the United States government, big corporations, the corrupt medical establishment, political parties, and science. Tessa caught phrases here and there: “soft-bellied elite,” “godless values,” “corruption at the core,” “suffering of the poor,” “necessary downfall,” “choosing easy pleasure over hard necessity,” “duty to destroy.” She’d heard this mish-mash before, from other domestic terrorists. Different lyrics, same tune.