Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  And for all the people who, Steve knew, would understand when this was over. He had faith that they were out there, those decent people who knew that children’s lives mattered more than dogs. Not to mention those smart people who understood that unless you stopped a plague right away, you would get what the world got with Spanish flu in 1918.

  “They’ll try again,” Steve had told Keith and Ted and Cassie, “and it’ll be tonight. The jackal-lovers’ll know that FEMA will bring in more euthanizing drugs tomorrow, and they won’t wait. And the Guard won’t do any more than they did when the van was robbed.”

  The others nodded. They understood. Cassie, whose sister had been killed by an infected Rottweiler, went further. “We owe it to the dead,” she said.

  We owe it to the dead. She was right. The mastiff standing over Davey’s poor little body…

  Steve checked his weapon yet again.

  Billy sat by Cami’s hospital bed. She still slept deeply, almost a coma, and her forehead felt clammy and cold. Her pretty hair lay all limp on the pillow and the nurse wouldn’t even let him comb it.

  “You shouldn’t even be in here, Billy,” she said. “You aren’t family.”

  “Not yet,” Billy said. Turned out the nurse was Donna Somebody, who used to hang out at the Moonlight Lounge when she was home from nursing school. Billy was pretty sure he’d never done her, which was good because now Donna let him put on a paper gown and mask and sit with Cami.

  Donna said, “You two are a pair, all right. You with your arm in a sling and your head in a bandage, and Cami with her leg in a cast. I tell you, when she wakes up you’ll be the most accident-prone couple in town.”

  When she wakes up. Billy knew Donna said that to cheer him up, and her kindness moved him. She was a great girl. Maybe her and Jess… Lately, Billy wanted the whole world to be in love.

  “Look,” Donna said, “I have to take Cami for another test and you should go down to the cafeteria and eat something. Cami and I’ll be gone for over an hour. And I promise you the hospital won’t start evacuating until tomorrow.”

  “Well…”

  “Go eat, Billy.”

  He touched Cami’s hair again and went, but the thought of more cafeteria food was puke-making. Billy called Jess on his cell. “Jess, want to grab a bite? Where are you?”

  “At the CDC mess hall.”

  Billy heard something in Jess’s voice. “Why? Is something happening?”

  “Yes. No. It’s nothing, Billy.”

  Billy didn’t believe him. He’d known Jess all their lives. When Jess’s voice went flat like that, when it got that particular tone in it, something was going down.

  Donna said to go away for an hour, and everything in the hospital always took longer than they said it would. There was food in the CDC mess. Billy could eat there, check it out, and come back to the hospital. If something was happening at the CDC, maybe even something about the dog Billy had brought in, he wanted to know about it. After all, it might help Cami.

  With his good hand, he punched the elevator button for the parking garage.

  Ellie Caine inched her car into the intersection of Rutherford and Exchange. There were so many evacuees! Although not all of them were what they appeared.

  Her chest tightened with fear. Never had she imagined herself doing anything like this. But she knew she could. Nervously she checked the time on the dashboard clock. Timing was important. Jenna, her contact, had emphasized that over and over. The timing was very carefully coordinated.

  As she waited out the red light, Ellie felt in her pocket for the gun Jenna had showed her how to use. Her lips moved, rehearsing her small part in the events to come. No matter how afraid she felt, she had to do this. She would do this.

  Dogs’ lives were at stake.

  » 68

  Forty-five minutes after they’d eaten the stew mixed with yew bark, Ebenfield’s Dobermans staggered. They took a few lurching steps before their hind legs buckled and they collapsed onto the melting snow. A few minutes later both dogs went into convulsions. In the growing twilight they looked as if being jerked by unseen ropes. Neither dog made a sound, which somehow made the brutal scene worse.

  When she was sure they were both dead, Tessa picked up Ebenfield’s hammer and unbarred the cabin door. With the hammer she could shatter Ebenfield’s car window and then—she hoped—hot-wire the car. Or maybe the keys would be in the car. It’s not as if he would have feared thieves. Or—

  The dog came out of nowhere.

  It was Ebenfield’s third dog, the female Doberman that Tessa thought had run off. It hurtled out of the gloom almost before Tessa saw it. Tessa screamed and instinctively struck out, swinging her arm with all her strength. The hammer connected with the dog’s neck.

  The Doberman fell heavily to the ground, screaming a noise that Tessa would have thought dogs couldn’t make, a high-pitch scream like a tortured child. Tessa ran, hoping the dog was too injured to follow. But after a moment the dog was up and pursuing. The moment was barely enough; Tessa flung open the door to Ebenfield’s car and herself into it, slamming the door hard. A nanosecond later the Doberman smashed into the side of the car hard enough to dent it.

  If Ebenfield had locked his car, Tessa would be dead.

  No, not Ebenfield, she realized dazedly. Ruzbihan’s men had searched the car, taking everything incriminating, just as they’d searched the cabin. The glove compartment gaped open and the contents of a first-aid kit lay strewn over all the seats. For the second time, Tessa owed her life to Ruzbihan’s al-Ashan’s thugs.

  The Doberman threw itself at the car once more, then seemed to realize this was hopeless. It raced around the shed where Tessa had lain amid dog turds and rats and Ebenfield’s smell and he had tried to… All at once, a huge and irrational rage filled her, the pent-up accumulation of everything that had happened. Everything, from Salah’s pointless death onward. The rage was frightening in its intensity, a red mist soaking her brain. The keys were in the ignition. She started the car and hit the accelerator.

  The car leapt forward as Tessa yanked the wheel to follow the Doberman. She made a wide circle in the clearing and then jammed her foot on the gas, aiming straight at the wooden shed.

  The Doberman looked up as Tessa drove straight at her. The dog didn’t move. Why didn’t she move? The car slammed into the dog at maybe twenty miles per hour and kept going, pushing into the shed wall.

  Tessa’s teeth rattled in her head as she hit the steering wheel hard. The red mist vanished. Stupid, stupid—she could have killed herself! But although her chest ached where it had hit the wheel, she didn’t seem to be seriously injured. All this she realized in the second before she turned off the engine and sat, panting and trembling, the car halfway through the shed wall.

  Eventually she got out. A flashlight was among the items the blue-eyed Brit hadn’t deigned to confiscate. In its conical beam Tessa saw the squashed body of the Doberman between the car’s grill and the shed. And something else: the hole that the dog had dug, trying to burrow under the shed wall. The shed rested on an ancient, unsuspected concrete foundation, but that hadn’t stopped the Doberman. Tessa saw how it had scraped and scraped at the crumbling concrete. It must have worked hour after tireless hour, bloodying its paws, ignoring Tessa in the cabin and even the smell of the stew she’d dumped out the window.

  The Doberman had been trying to get at her puppy inside.

  Tessa went around to the shed door. The puppy was dead, frozen.

  She went back into the cabin and carried the box with the other two puppies out to the car, careful to not let them nip her fingers. Wedging the box into the trunk, she got back in the car and started down the mountain, to find her way back to civilization.

  » 69

  7:20 and full dark.

  Ellie peeked again at the illuminated dial on her watch. She wasn’t supposed to do that, but after one fast glimpse she lowered the sleeve of her coat over the watch, and anyway nobody could see her crou
ched here, not behind these bushes and in her dark clothing and ski masks. Nobody could see any of them. They waited in parked cars, behind building, in the woods. Ellie didn’t know how many people. Jenna had simply said, “Lots.”

  7:25.

  She, on the other hand, could see everything. Floodlights on tall poles showed her “Tent A,” where the infected dogs were, Tent B, smaller tents, all the soldiers with rifles. The killing fields. That’s what this was, yes—a killing field.

  Her chest tightened, as if someone squeezed it with a vise.

  7:28.

  Ellie closed her eyes and covered them with her gloved hand as she’d been instructed, in order to adjust her pupils to darkness.

  Now she couldn’t peek at her watch. But she didn’t need to. All she needed to do was wait for the signal.

  The lights in the mess tent went out. Jess said, “What the—” and spilled his fresh cup of coffee. A tremendous noise began, bludgeoning him: the siren from the power factory.

  Frantically he lurched in the direction of the door, crashing into a table until he remembered the flashlight, standard equipment for checking out skunks under houses, in his pocket. In its beam he gained the door and then stopped cold as he glimpsed, in sweeping conical flashes, the scene across the road. People running from everywhere, yelling their lungs out even as the siren blared, storming the dog tents. And the floodlight gone, all of the lights gone—

  All at once Jess recalled picking up Gabe Bruhler’s dog, an uninfected beagle. Gabe had argued and protested and resisted. And Gabe Bruhler was chief engineer at the #47 Cahoctin Power substation.

  The young animal handlers in Tent B had pressured Jess to leave.

  The siren and screaming—confuse the scene as much as possible, make it hard for the Guards to hear orders.

  This was big.

  And then he was running across the street, shining his ineffectual beam of light ahead of him, until someone rammed into him and snatched the flashlight away. “No lights!” the man cried, and was gone. A gunshot sounded, disconcertingly close, and Jess hit the ground.

  Oh, God, no…the Guards had opened fire.

  Jess crawled forward. There wasn’t another rifle crack right away—were the Guards equipped with night-vision goggles and were they putting them on? The blackness was nearly total, as if they all scrabbled around at the bottom of a deep mine.

  Another gunshot, farther away.

  Jess kept crawling toward Tent B. He bumped into a boot and was hauled abruptly to his feet. A gun jammed into his ribs. “Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I’m not armed! I’m with the CDC!”

  The soldier’s voice was young and scared. “Mr. Langstrom?”

  “Yes!” Jess had no idea who he was.

  “Get out of here!”

  He dropped Jess, and Jess kept crawling.

  A sudden, brief flash of light—from where?—gave him a nightmare glimpse of the field. People grappled with soldiers or ran blindly, crashing into each other. The faint light disappeared, then appeared again, then disappeared, and Jess realized it came from a flap of canvas on Tent B, swiftly being opened and then closed. From the slit poured dogs, racing wildly away. Another gun fired.

  A dog leapt over him and kept going. Then another.

  Another shot, and a high, agonized scream. Were these people firing on the Maryland Guard? Or the Guard on them? There was no way to tell what was happening, it was hellish bedlam, and only one thing was clear: the dogs were loose again. The handlers in Tent B were part of this…whatever it was.

  The tent flap briefly opened, and before it closed, more dogs tore out. Then the light inside the tent ceased. Jess kept crawling forward. Someone stepped on his hand and he rolled away before whoever it was could fire downward.

  He bumped into something…the tent wall. He felt along it until, a few feet on, he came to the door, opened it, and ducked inside, surprised to not find the door guarded. Were the soldiers already overpowered? Dead?

  The inside of the tent was very faintly illuminated, and Jess realized his mistake. This wasn’t Tent B. The light came from the screen of a laptop, which must have switched itself to battery. It lit close-together walls and a single big dog cage. This was the tent Joe Latkin had taken Jess to earlier this afternoon, with the West Virginia Doberman that had been attacking empty air.

  He looked at the Doberman now and drew a sharp breath.

  Steve Harper crouched low and raced in a zig-zag pattern through the lethal chaos, running interference for Keith Rubelski. The black-out had come as a surprise but a great one; he and Keith wore military-issue night-vision goggles. Somewhere to each side of them were Ted and Cassie, just in case, but Steve knew now that he and Keith wouldn’t need them. They had it covered, unless one of the bozos firing out there hit them. But no shot could touch him, he could feel that certainty like a holy truth. Not now, when they were so close to justice.

  Keith yelled something over the shouting and screaming, but Steve didn’t catch it. A bullet whizzed past him and instantly he dropped, pulling Keith down with him and then shielding Keith with his own body. Something crashed into them…a fucking dog.

  The rage was like a hot iron to his brain. But there was no time for rage, either.

  He got Keith moving again. The closer they got to Tent B, the more the screaming and gunfire was behind them. All the jackal-lovers were at Tent A, fumbling and shooting and screaming and letting loose the uninfected dogs.

  No time.

  They slit the canvas of Tent A on the side farthest from the door and crawled through. The tent seemed empty, an unexpected piece of luck but it made sense. All the handlers were helping with the supposedly uninfected dogs. Steve switched on his flashlight and he and Keith made their way swiftly to the center of the tent. All around them dogs snarled and leapt and barked, and the brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s body...

  “Hey, Steve, you all right? Stay with me, man!”

  “I’m on it,” Steve got out. He left Keith setting the charge and made a swift tour of the tent to make sure it was empty. He passed several cages where the dogs lay quiet, despite the incredible noise—what the fuck was that all about, how could they lie so still in the middle of—

  He spotted the girl.

  She crouched behind a dog’s cage, curled into a little ball, terrified eyes outward. As soon as she saw Steve she started screaming. He grabbed her and dragged her along, not bothering to explain. She was the only one in the tent, somehow not included in the others’ plans. That might have made him feel tender toward her fear but she kept on screaming, and eventually he growled at her, “Be quiet! No one’s going to hurt you!”

  He met Keith back at the slit in the canvas and they plunged through, Steve still dragging the girl.

  Ed charged with the others toward Tent B. He stumbled and for a moment fear grabbed him, but then he was on his feet again and it was all right even though he couldn’t see anything. But the tent was over there, just straight ahead, and he could get this done. He could do anything. Hadn’t he made Cora go away?

  Good ol’ Jake!

  Jake deserved his help, all the dogs deserved his help (but Jake was infected he isn’t in Tent B whispered a small part of his mind), all the dogs deserved life not death he could get this done nobody was going to tell them what to do with their own property—

  Someone was screaming and someone was shooting and Ed didn’t know which way to turn. Just keep going, this way, no that way, it was so fucking dark—

  Suddenly all the lights went on.

  Jess stared incredulously at the Doberman in the cage. It lay staring at him, completely still, as calm as if there were not shouting and gunfire and death rising to a crescendo ten feet away beyond the tent walls. And yet the animal wasn’t dead. Its white-filmed eyes followed Jess as he moved, and Jess could see in the light from the computer screen that the dog breathed.

  He picked up the metal chair beside the
desk, thrust one leg through the bars of the cage, and poked the Doberman. Nothing. Jess poked harder. The dog registered no reaction.

  Not dead, not asleep. The disease had entered some new phase, maybe, starting with the first dogs affected. That was why Jess had heard so little baying or barking all day from the dogs still at large in Tyler. Like this one, they’d started to go inert, each on its own virus-given schedule. And all the savagery outside, the shooting and killing—

  Soon no dog would be a threat at all. Now the savagery now was all human.

  Jess ran outside. “Stop!” he screamed, and a part of him knew this was the most futile act of his life, a pointless howl. No one could hear him or see him, no one knew he was there. “Stop! Stop! Stop!"

  Two figures, bent low to the ground, zig-zagged by him. Jess heard one shout, “No, this way now!” and an electric jolt went through him. The voice was the one he’d heard on his cell phone as he stood on the steps and watched a harmless beagle named Hearsay die at his feet: “If you and the whole damn federal government can’t kill these vicious dogs, we’ll do it for you.”

  The two figures raced off into the darkness.

  The lights came on.

  Ed staggered to his knees. In the sudden shocking light he could see a woman holding her gun in one shaking hand. All that was visible within her ski mask were two eyes, wild and crazy like Cora’s had been during a fight, Cora you won’t get me—

  “You won’t get me!” he screamed and, still on his knees, drew his own gun. Before he could aim it, she shivered and—

  —disoriented by the sudden light—there wasn’t supposed to be light!—and terrified that he would kill her before she rescued Song and Chime and Music and Butterfly her wonderful greyhounds no no no—

  Ellie Caine fired. She got him square in the face.

  The lights were back on. Those jackal-lovers were so inept they hadn’t sabotaged the back-up generators. Or maybe they had tried to and the Guards overpowered them. Either way, the floodlights blazed over a field chaotic with running people, prone bodies, dogs. Steve saw a Guard down. Hell to pay.