The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man

by W. Bruce Cameron

  Being called out publicly as a plagiarist was humiliating, but it gave enough shock and awe to the rest of the freshmen that the problem was far less prevalent on this campus than at other, gentler schools.

  The probations would be erased from their records by the end of the semester, and the grades—few of them would get better than a D on the essay—would also be mitigated by more papers and more tests that were designed to the academic purpose of learning and not the enculturating purpose of boot camp.

  “All right. The last great glaciation, approximately thirty thousand years ago.” The slide on the screen behind Morby flashed a map of Europe. “This was, beyond a doubt, the most dramatic time in the history of our species. You think we have climate change issues today? We’re talking about temperature fluctuations in the extreme, up to seven degrees Celsius year to year. You could bounce from a fairly normal period to years in which the ice never melted, not even in summer. Trees were bulldozed by the advancing ice, uprooting us from our arboreal environment and driving us out onto the steppes, where we served as hunters and hunted, predator and prey.”

  A new slide went up behind him: a drawing of an enormous cave lion, almost the size of a bear, rendered by the artist to appear ready to pounce. The animal had a face something like a cougar, but was covered with a shaggy, light gray coat to protect it from the elements.

  “Look at the size of this thing! When we examine bones from that era, we see that many of the most dreadful creatures were monsters compared to today. So when we went hunting, we not only had to compete with lions, bears, giant hyenas, wolves, and other tooth-and-claw animals, we had to run from them.”

  Grudgingly, they were giving Morby their full attention.

  “We also had to compete with this fellow.” A slide went up of a Neanderthal standing next to a modern human. “Look at him. Bigger, stronger, and with a larger brain. Yet here we are today, running the planet, when by all indications this guy’s descendants should be in the literal driver’s seat. Why us, then? To paraphrase Faulkner, how did we not only endure, but prevail?”

  Morby put up his favorite slide of the lecture and glanced with a knowing smile over to where his TA, Tommy, normally sat. His smile wavered—Tommy’s seat was empty. Very odd, to miss this delicious day. The professor shrugged it off and turned back to the slide. It was a wonderful photograph of some recently discovered cave art dating back to the Aurignacian era. There was a jumble of shapes; more than one artist had plied his skills over the years, painting reindeer and elk and lions over one another in a crazy two-dimensional prehistoric stampede, but for Professor Morby there was really only one image: the young man in the middle, holding the end of what was unmistakably a leash, leading to what was unmistakably a red collar, around the neck of what was unmistakably an enormous canine. A domesticated wolf.

  “As you will discover,” Morby said almost reverently, “I have my own theories.”

  He and Tommy would have exchanged another glance at this juncture—the point at which some of the students, recognizing the artwork from their textbooks, would suddenly make the connection and look up in surprise: Hey, Morby wrote this thing.

  There would be no faking their way through their reading assignments in this class, not with the author evaluating their comprehension. So they’d focus, many of them detesting the subject so much that when, about halfway through the textbook, they did stumble across Morby’s theory, the one on which his entire career had been built, they’d largely miss the significance.

  “We have no written record of this, the most dangerous time for mankind, we have only our conjectures, based on the fossil record. Have we unearthed every skeleton of every species that walked the land and swam the waters? Probably not. Can we describe the topography of the landscape before the ice sculpted it into its current shape? No, no more than we can say precisely what hills and valleys existed under what the glaciers eventually turned into Lake Michigan. But we can say this: They were us, these humans. They had our brains. They weren’t as tall and they didn’t live as long, but there’s no reason to suppose they didn’t have language. They just didn’t have symbols—or at least, symbols that have survived the eons. So remember that, when you read of the harsh challenges facing prehistoric man. They were us.”

  And then something unprecedented occurred: A single set of doors in the back banged open and, like a deputy set on serving a warrant, Tommy the TA marched in. Ignoring the freshman necks craned to see him and the freshman mouths gaping open at the bold interruption, Tommy came straight down the aisle, his eyes shining.

  Morby pulled in a breath and held it, his heart suddenly pounding. Tommy read the question on his face and nodded with delight, bounding up the short set of stairs to join the professor on the stage. He reached out and placed his hand on the microphone to shield their conversation, while a low murmur began to build in the crowd.

  “I just hung up with Beauchamp,” Tommy said, something like triumph threading tension into his voice.

  “They found her,” Morby whispered, a shiver traveling up his spine.

  Tommy nodded exultantly. “They found her,” he affirmed.

  The two men, teacher and pupil, mentor and student, stared at each other in amazement over what they’d just dared to say. Then, slowly returning to his role as professor, Morby turned to face his class. Tommy’s hand dropped away from the microphone.

  “Gentlemen and ladies, this is Mr. Rooker, my assistant. He will complete today’s lecture and will be leading the class for the next week or two. I have something I need to tend to. I need to catch a plane.”

  * * *

  Seventy-two hours later, Morby was crouched over a dig site, the earth peeled back to reveal the treasures underneath. Standing above him were a French graduate student named Jean Claude and Morby’s longtime friend and collaborator, Bernard Beauchamp. Before him, the dirt brushed away with strokes as careful as an artist applying paint to canvas, lay the skeleton of a homo sapien—a male, late twenties or early thirties, by the looks of him. The body was nearly intact, a beautiful find—someone long ago had taken care to inter this corpse with respect and even love.

  But it was what lay next to the human that was so remarkable: an enormous canine, larger than any modern wolf Morby had ever seen. Carbon dating would confirm what the professor already knew to be true: The man and the wolf had been buried together.

  Beauchamp was grinning because Morby was weeping. He put a hand out and gripped Morby’s arm.

  “Tu avais raison mon ami.” You were right, my friend.

  Jean Claude, looking barely older than the freshmen from the lecture hall, had driven Morby the four hours it had taken to get to the dig site and knew only that the American was good friends with his boss. He was a little bewildered, now, watching the two men wrestling with such profound emotion.

  “Regardez le cou. Ne te vois?” Morby whispered. Look at the neck. See?

  “Red,” Beauchamp nodded, answering in heavily accented English.

  All soft organic matter had been leached away by the greedy demands of the soils and their denizens, though in return the bones had been gifted minerals that had helped preserve them. Whatever might have been looped across the wolf’s neck had been lost forever, but the ferrous iron that had decorated that loop still remained, a thread of dusky red. Just as it appeared in the cave painting.

  “What is it? A wolf? Or a dog?” Jean Claude asked, mimicking the quiet tones of the other men.

  “A wolf, but also a dog,” Beauchamp murmured.

  “No,” Morby corrected after a moment. “Not a dog. The dog.” He turned to Jean Claude. “You’ve found the very first dog.”

  Jean Claude contemplated this. Morby wondered if the young man saw what Morby saw, what Beauchamp saw: fossil evidence of a turning point in human history. No: to mimic the sentence structure he’d just used, not a turning point, the turning point. When we went from enduring to prevailing.

  “But then, who is the man? Why
was he buried with the dog?”

  Morby stood, his knees snapping back into position. He slapped his palms on his sides, raising dust in the afternoon sun.

  “Well yes, that is the question,” Morby agreed.

  Who is the man?

  BY W. BRUCE CAMERON

  The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man

  The Dogs of Christmas

  A Dog’s Purpose

  A Dog’s Journey

  Emory’s Gift

  8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter

  How to Remodel a Man

  8 Simple Rules for Marrying My Daughter

  About the Author

  W. BRUCE CAMERON is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of A Dog’s Purpose and A Dog’s Journey. He lives in California.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE MIDNIGHT PLAN OF THE REPO MAN

  Copyright © 2014 Cameron Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art © Shutterstock

  Cover design by Jeff Miller, Faceout Studio

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

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  ISBN 978-0-7653-7748-7 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-5590-8 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466855908

  First Edition: October 2014