Pavlov's Dogs

by Snell, D. L.

  Lowering his head, the Dog slowed its breathing and relaxed. The Change happened, fur and extra body mass sloughing off and flowing from his pores in a thick river of ectoplasmic goo. He gritted his teeth as bones rearranged themselves into a more human frame.

  There, in front of the bus stood Alpha McLoughlin. He raised a hand in a wave.

  “Hey, in there,” he said. “You’re Ken, right? I’m... well, I guess I’m just Mac.”

  “Hey,” Ken said in a small voice. “How are things?”

  “Bad. Things are bad. You should know there isn’t another rescue mission coming. I think I’m it, and you can see how my bosses took that news.” He kicked the messy corpse of the other Dog. “So wherever you’re headed, I’d like to help. I bring a unique skill set to the table.”

  “We just saw you kill your enemy with your own piss,” Julius said. “Damn skippy, you’ve got a skill set.”

  Ken nodded at the Alpha Dog. “Okay. All in favor?”

  The bus nearly shook with the volume of the “Aye” that came back.

  Giving Mac a thumbs-up, Ken smiled. “Mazel tov, it’s a Dog.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  DONOVAN’S EYES TICKED back and forth between the picture-in-picture squares on the touchscreen marked Sigma 23 and Alpha McLoughlin.

  The Alpha had just got done urinating on the windshield of a bus.

  Sigma 23, Sigma 23.

  Donovan tried to remember which one was Sigma 23. He hoped to God it wasn’t Theta Kaiser’s. Theta Kaiser had enough reason to be infuriated.

  It was very clear that McLoughlin was baiting the more inexperienced Dog with the scent of his piss. The old Alpha was leading the Sigma by its nose—right into a trap.

  “Territorial, isn’t he?” asked Summer Chan, watching over Donovan’s shoulder as McLoughlin tore the other Dog apart.

  Every time Chan talked about the Dogs, she sounded like some creepily enthusiastic nature photographer engrossed in an epic battle between two maned lions.

  “He is,” Donovan said through gritted teeth.

  The Sigma fell down in a puddle of his own blood and then stared blankly along the same plane as the concrete. Donovan could see the rubble onscreen, and in it, barely discernible, bodies, just pale shapes.

  Then the darkness of death spread through the twenty-third Sigma’s brain and onto the screen.

  “You should have sent more than one,” Summer Chan said, almost startling the neurotech.

  Donovan put a fist to his mouth to think. Then suddenly he rolled his chair around Summer Chan and started pulling the white instruction manuals off the shelf of Dr. Crispin’s Wall.

  ’

  Kaiser heard the guard let someone into Kennel 1. He didn’t get up from his bed. The hormone deprivation was making him feel neutered. But he also sensed that the feeling was slowly going away.

  For the last half hour he had been lying there, staring down the nearest corridor and listening to the shouts coming from somewhere else in the obedience school that Crispin had built underground.

  The shouts, at their faintest, sounded like Kaiser’s old Master barking commands. The warren of tunnels echoed with memories. He hated the smell of it down here. The musty stink of the underground, the faint ammonia of old fear-saturated piss.

  Footsteps fell sharply as someone approached the Theta Dog’s kennel. Sharp, professional shoes.

  “Donovan,” Kaiser said before he could even see the man—before the man could even see him.

  The footsteps paused, but only briefly. Then Donovan finished his march and stood in front of Kaiser’s cell, hands folded behind his back.

  “Attention!”

  “Hmph,” Kaiser said, like a dog letting out a cocky chuff.

  “Theta Kaiser—up!”

  The Theta Dog still hadn’t looked in Donovan’s direction, still hadn’t even moved from his bed. “Didn’t you hear, Doc? They promoted me to Epsilon.”

  Donovan glanced down the hallway connecting this cellblock to Kennel 2. He could hear the voices of the quarantined down there. Could hear that loud immigrant, his insolent mouth.

  He turned his attention back to the matter at hand.

  “Theta Kaiser, I seem to remember promising that your imprisonment would be only temporary.”

  Kaiser took his time before answering. “I never remember promises, Doc. No point.”

  “We have a problem.”

  “The Alpha Dog?”

  “No.” Donovan said it too quickly, almost cutting the Theta off. “No, the Alpha Dog is no longer a threat.”

  Kaiser didn’t respond, and Donovan was hoping his lie had taken seed.

  “Our problem is the quarantined.”

  Donovan knew Theta Kaiser could hear the people, begging for their lives on the other side of Crispin’s lair. Those people in Kennel 2.

  “I need you to take care of them.”

  “Ah. So it turns out you’re just like him.”

  The neurotech frowned. “Who? The Alpha?”

  “You know, Dr. Donovan, if you’re asking me to kill somebody for you, come at me point-blank. Don’t dance around it with some sorry euphemism like ‘put them down.’ That’s what the old man used to do.”

  Donovan now understood who he was talking about. He said nothing and glanced once more toward the other kennel.

  That loudmouth in quarantine was hollering for cerveza and beer as if they were two separate things—as if he hoped to gain more from some unsuspecting fool.

  Donovan flinched when he turned back around, finding Kaiser suddenly standing at the bars of his cage. The Dog stared him down like a captive panther stalking a child at the zoo.

  “Say it,” Kaiser urged him. “Order me to kill them for—”

  “You need to know that I can terminate you at any second,” Donovan interrupted, suddenly spouting off at the mouth again. He let it happen this time, still surprised at what was coming out of himself, but trusting the fervor to get him what he was after. “All I have to do is flash the right signal to the camera inside your brain, and my assistant back at Command will see it on the monitor, and then she’ll push a little red button. And then do you know what will happen, Theta Kaiser?”

  Donovan, hands still folded behind his back, got right up in Kaiser’s face at the bars.

  “I’ll tell you what will happen. The same thing that happened to Theta Dunne. The same thing that happened to Alpha McLoughlin. Now, look: you are going to march right down to the quarantine, and you’re going to kill every single last one of those people. For me. Is that clear?”

  Kaiser gauged Donovan’s eyes and Donovan did everything he could not to look away or seem surprised by his own words. He had come on strong and now he only had to sustain it.

  “Yes, sir,” Kaiser said with a smug smile.

  Donovan nodded and stepped up to the card scanner and numpad. He released the Dog from his cage, and Kaiser marched right out into the hall and down the corridor, unwittingly granting Donovan a chance to lag behind and try to calm his trembling hand.

  In the corridor to Kennel 2, Kaiser stopped at one of the doors. He let himself into the room.

  “Kaiser, heel,” Donovan said. He knew from reading some of the manuals that Crispin had instilled in the Dogs basic voice-activated commands. Good old-fashioned Pavlovian conditioning, with a pain response triggered by any kind of disobedience.

  Kaiser didn’t heel.

  The room looked to Donovan like a space for physical education, except for the far bank of cupboards, which looked more suited to a classroom where nurses taught CPR.

  Kaiser opened one of the cupboards and a body fell out. Some kind of no-bite dummy. A number was stenciled on its chest with a Greek Sigma preceding it.

  Kaiser threw the dummy across the floor and pulled out more fake bodies stenciled with names. Donovan noticed more than a few bite marks on the dummies the Theta was casting aside, but nothing compared to the last dummy he pulled out.

  Most of its
arm and torso had been gnawed off, and its throat had been ripped out so that the head flopped around. Donovan was not surprised to see the name stenciled on the doll’s chest.

  “The point you’re making is moot,” said the neurotech. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  Kaiser set the doll lovingly back into the empty cupboard and propped it up in a sitting position. Its head hung down. “’Lo, Doc,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Then, of his own volition, Kaiser left, and as Donovan went after him, he glimpsed one of the dummies on the floor, noticed the prominent name on its chest:

  MCLOUGHLIN

  The dummy looked as if teeth had never touched it.

  ’

  “Aw, look,” Jorge said as Kaiser and Donovan entered the cell block of Kennel 2. “Isn’t it cute? I remember when my mommy would take me to the humane society. Or is this more like a mommy-daughter outing to the zoo?”

  Kaiser headed for Jorge’s cell first.

  Jorge’s eyes grew much wider, but he held his ground.

  Donovan glanced at the two other cells, which held the man with cancer and a teenaged girl respectively. He looked away before either of them could make eye contact.

  He was glad the loudmouth would be first.

  Kaiser stepped right up to Jorge’s bars and said, “I’ll save you till last. So you can watch.” And then the Dog turned and ran his fingers along the bars as he walked to the next cell.

  The teenager curled up in her corner, sobbing hysterically—screaming. Donovan covered his ears. He would do anything to stop that fucking screaming!

  Kaiser walked slower past her cage, still running his finger along the bars while he grinned at her and tracked her with his eyes.

  “Hey, puto,” Jorge said, pressing his head between the bars as far as it would go, trying to see down the cellblock toward the Theta. “You’re really going to pick on a girl? You’re that much of a carpet wetter?”

  Kaiser didn’t let Jorge’s insults distract him. He crept past the wailing teenager’s cage to the next one.

  Donovan kept his hands held tightly behind his back, feeling his palms grow sweaty.

  “Hey!” Jorge shouted at Kaiser over the girl’s crying. “I bet your mom was a mangy bitch! You know what that makes you?”

  Kaiser stopped at the cancer man’s cell and grinned in at the living skeleton staring back.

  “Please,” the man said, almost wheezing. “Please don’t.”

  Donovan felt a brief stab of vindication. Back at the quarantine, this cancer man had showed a complacent disregard for death. And for life. Now he was begging to be spared.

  “Open the cell, Doc,” Kaiser said without taking his eyes off the man.

  Jorge started outright screaming and hurling insults and obscenities at the Dog, trying his best to earn the first bite.

  “Mangy stray! Mom’s not the lady, but the tramp!”

  Donovan almost turned and walked out of the kennel—he couldn’t handle the noise. It was giving him a headache.

  “Doctor!”

  Donovan suddenly was moving forward, as if compelled by his own Pavlovian conditioning, and he couldn’t believe he was reacting so quickly to Kaiser’s command. He took out the keycard that Jaden had made for him, and he slid it in the card reader, then punched in a security code on the pad.

  The lock clicked and the barred door opened. Kaiser pushed through it and walked inside.

  “Please,” the dying man said, holding up a hand and cowering back on his bed. “Please!”

  Theta Kaiser punched him in the throat and stopped his pitiful cries. Kaiser then grabbed the gurgling man by the neck and bashed his head against the concrete wall again and again. After a few dull smacks, the man’s scalp left a smattering of blood, and then another, and then a splat, but Kaiser kept going until the blood was flinging everywhere each time he slammed the head forward and yanked it back, throwing red cast-off stains all over, even across Kaiser’s face.

  The bone began to crack.

  With each strike of meat against rock, Kaiser twitched, and somewhere hidden in the cries from the other cells, he could hear Crispin shouting from somewhere far away—“No, Kaiser! Bad!” He could taste a phantom of a cloth-and-plastic doll, could feel his Master’s hand striking him each time he bit down and worried at the thing.

  The twinge emitted by the Pavlovian chip felt eerily like Crispin’s punitive hand.

  “Stop it,” Donovan said. He had managed a whisper. Certainly not loud enough to be heard over the loudmouth idiot and the shrieking caged bird.

  Kaiser just kept bashing the man’s skull, and twitching each time like a broken record, bashing until there was practically no hard structure left beneath the cancer man’s scalp.

  “Stop it!” Donovan yelled. “Stop!”

  Jorge kept yelling himself hoarse, and Donovan just couldn’t take it anymore. He stalked right up to the immigrant’s cell, pulled the gun he had taken from Crispin’s office, and from the force and pressure and absentmindedness of shouting “Shut the fuck up!” he accidentally tightened his finger on the trigger.

  The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space.

  Everyone fell silent, except for the girl, who whimpered quietly on her bed.

  Donovan, shaking with adrenaline, noticed the gaping wound on the side of Jorge’s head. Slowly, dazed, Jorge reached up and felt his face. He pulled his hand away and looked at his fingers, which were smudged black from the powder burn the bullet had left along his cheek.

  He didn’t seem to feel or notice the bite it had taken out of the back of his ear.

  The smell of cordite was thick and oppressive in Donovan’s nose. “Shut up,” he said, swinging the gun over to point at the girl. “Just... stop.”

  He spotted Kaiser from the corner of his eye and whirled around. The Dog was now moving down the kennel to the girl’s cell. He stopped and grinned in at her, and she started wailing again at the sight of his manic bloody face.

  “Kaiser,” Donovan said, “that’s...”

  He couldn’t finish the thought. He had to close his mouth and swallow, or else vomit up the rest of the words. The taste of acid burning the back of his throat reminded him too much of the taste of Dr. Crispin’s death.

  Kaiser wasn’t listening anyway.

  The Theta growled at the girl, and she screamed.

  “Kaiser, stop!”

  The Dog slammed against the bars and roared—and then stumbled back as yet another gunshot rang out in Kennel 2.

  “I said stop!” Donovan shouted, gun still smoking in his hand.

  Kaiser hunched over and grabbed at his thigh where the bullet had gone in. He was panting and sweating, and some of the sweat ran pink with the cancer man’s blood.

  Donovan could see the bullet hole in the Dog’s flesh, and realized his mistake a second too late—Kaiser wouldn’t be able to heal rapidly in the absence of the hormone overflow.

  But then the wound started to spit out the bullet.

  Kaiser picked out the slug and let it drop to the concrete. The wound seemed to stop healing after that, but it wasn’t bleeding as badly as it should have been, and Donovan now had no doubt that it would heal faster than any normal man’s wound, even without hormone therapy.

  Something had changed.

  Theta Kaiser looked up at Donovan, grinning, grimacing, sweating from the pain. He climbed to his feet and, towering over Donovan, took a step toward him.

  “Don’t,” Donovan said, sticking the gun in the Dog’s face. “One little wave into the camera,” he said. “Remember that.”

  Kaiser wiped the blood off his chin. Still grinning, he said, “Yep, just like him.” Then he turned around and started hobbling back toward his cage in Kennel 1.

  ’

  Donovan stood at the door to Command, staring down into a little cooler full of ice. Crispin’s eyeball stared back up at him from a plastic bag.

  He hated touching it. Hated it even more that the eye seemed to alwa
ys be watching him.

  Donovan fished out the bag and opened it. He used the plastic like a glove as he held Crispin’s eye up to the retinal scan. The door to Command clicked open.

  Donovan took the cooler inside.

  Summer Chan immediately jumped up from a stack of instruction manuals she had been leafing through at her desk. She took the cooler from Donovan and immediately moved to put the eye in the little personal refrigerator.

  Donovan stepped up to the manual that Chan had left open on her blotter. Using a cutaway of a Dog’s skull, the left page illustrated how one branch of the Pavlovian implant monitored brain-activity patterns in the left-prefrontal cortex, specifically the parts related to aggressive cognitions and effects.

  “Have you found it yet?” Donovan asked, turning a page.

  Chan shut the refrigerator and said, “Nothing’s caught my eye.”

  Donovan cursed and threw the manual, then turned to the screens. Sitting on the cot in his cell, the Theta Dog was looking down on the head of the doctor who was currently patching up the gunshot wound in his leg.

  At least Donovan had been able to control Kaiser with bullets and threats. But he knew that con would only work for so long.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “HOLY JESUS,” KEN SAID, taking a test step on his newly-wrapped ankle. “And right after he turned you guys around, he died?”

  Mac nodded, now looking fully human, dressed in a pair of sweatpants he’d gone out and found on their way to the machine shop. “Crispin was killed,” he said, putting down a box of water jugs harder than he had to. “He was gutted by my new third-in-command.”

  “A lot of that going around,” Kelly said, standing from wrapping Ken’s ankle and dusting her hands together. “I guess there isn’t going to be a better time to tell you, Ken.”

  He turned to her. “I guess not. Thank you for not making me ask again.”

  Catching Julius’s eye, Kelly tilted her head away. The old man put down his sack of canned food and herded the group of survivors away. “Right over here, folks. Let me show you to your new living quarters.”