by Doug Goodman
With Murder in tow, Steve took Angie around the end of the storage units. He pointed to the camera. Said, “The zombie was picked up by a security guard watching a feed from that camera. It walked through here.”
“Direction of travel?”
Steve pointed toward the mountains.
“Of course. Are we sure it was a zombie?”
“Pale dude in a suit with grass in the hair. Camera caught the wasp clutching the backside of his head. Is there anything you need from me?”
“No. I’ll let Murder loose and we’ll see what happens.”
Steve took a few steps back and pulled out his camera phone. Angie stiffened.
“Uh, nobody videos my dog working.”
“Director’s orders, Angie. Sorry.”
Angie checked for wind and lighting, then decided to start Murder from the far side of the units and work toward the point last seen. The scent would blow at Murder once he entered the scent area.
As she moved her dog into the starting position, she said, “Is it on?” When he nodded, she continued, saying “The number one thing you need to know is that if you get in my dog’s way, it invalidates the entire search. Could you stand over there?” She pointed away from where she thought the trail would be. Like a scolded child submitting to the authority of his mother, Steve Rangel stood where she told him. He took a few extra steps to make sure he was not in her way.
Murder did not need Angie’s command to search. He had been pushing against the collar she was holding while she chastised Steve. Murder had already dropped his toy chicken as his nose darted around. Angie noticed absently that the chicken’s white underbelly was turning a nice shade of red. Despite the dog’s enthusiasm, Angie commanded Murder to search anyways, and released her grip on his collar.
Murder pushed forward a few steps, then his nose dropped like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner to the dirt and gravel in front of the storage units. His tail wavered in the air like a Homecoming Queen waving to the crowd from atop a cheap float. Crossing the units, he walked behind Angie. He turned back the opposite direction and moved away from the safe womb of the light and into the dark unknown of the fields.
“He’s giving me a negative,” she told the camera as Murder turned toward the fields, “meaning in this case that the fresher trail is back this way, which we know from the security guard’s video recordings.”
This side of the mountain was full of rocks that pushed out of the ground like the tips of icebergs. The nose at the end of Murder’s scarred muzzle picked around them, searching for scent in the little dirt clumps and grass patches between the rocks. As he made his way up the mountainside, his pace increased. His tail climbed higher and tighter in the air.
He hunched for a second, took a few quick breaths, then launched into the trail. Angie could hear Steve Rangel huffing as he chased after them. For a moment, she thought of how “found footage” his camera must look right now, and it made her giggle inside.
She caught up to Murder as he was turning away from the mountain and back toward the road. She stopped him and put him on lead, then offered him something to drink. He turned his head away from the water bottle and toward the road. When she didn’t react quickly enough, he glowered at her. Angie was taken back. She’d never had a dog glower at her before. She didn’t need a dog translating collar to interpret what he was saying. Get out of my way and let me do my job!
She stayed out of Murder’s way. The blue and black dog with part of an ear missing walked out onto the macadam and turned around. He sniffed the air, then came back to her. Angie got a sinking feeling in her gut. They hadn’t worked a road yet. For an experienced dog, a road was no problem. The dog worked the scent on the sides almost automatically. But new scenting dogs, like Murder, wanted the scent to be in the middle of the street, which it never was.
Even Steve Rangel noticed the dog’s bewilderment.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“Shut up!” she said. “He’s just working this out.”
“Working what out?”
“He’s never run on an asphalt road before. I told the Director he still needed more training.”
She kneeled down and hoped that Murder would pick up on the technique. On camera was not the time to learn.
“C’mon, boy. You can do it,” she told Murder and gave him a good couple of hearty pats on his ribs. She took him down the road ten yards and set him up there. Murder sniffed around, then looked to Angie for help. She did the same thing in the other three corners of the road. Murder wasn’t picking it up. He was getting the alien abduction look—when the dog looks at the sky as if the scent may be drifting up there as if aliens had abducted the source and ascended into the heavens with it. It was a sign of a done dog.
“I’m going to take him back and have him run it again.”
“Okay, Angie.” Steve waited for her to leave before calling in the Wolf team.
As Angie escorted Murder back to the storage units, the blue-and-black dog with a piece of ear missing stopped and stiffened, then backpedaled off the trail. He moved between Angie and some unknown threat, pushing her off the trail, too. Angie stopped and tried to aim her flashlight on what was bothering Murder. Shadows were moving in the dark space between the end of the storage unit lights and the beam of her flashlight. A tiny pale light floated toward them. Then Angie heard it. Click-clacking, almost like typewriter strikes or a spindle in a treadmill that keeps knocking into something. The noise came closer, and Murder growled.
“Easy, Murder,” Angie told him.
Then one of the young techs emerged from darkness. He was skinny and full of the confidence of a recent college graduate. He held a tablet; its reflection on his face had been the small floating light she had seen. He was using the tablet to monitor the robot, one of the department’s new Wolfs. Even in the dark there was no mistaking the size of the robot. The Wolf was like an armored Swiss Mountain Dog, or a small warhorse from medieval times. Its polished hull gleaned even in the night. The beast was headless except for small cameras mounted inside a frame where its neck would sit. A stiff carriage wrapped over plastic siding that protected its innards from damage. The company logo for Mueller Engineering had been painted to the side of the robot, along with a picture of an angry wolf’s head biting down on a zombie between its teeth.
Underneath this massive carriage, four oddly equine legs supported the Wolf. Those jittery legs constantly punched the ground, like a newborn colt so unsure of the world that it puts its feet everywhere, just to make certain not to miss anything. Murder barked at the robot, instigating the guard’s question of “will he bite?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Angie said. Because how could a dog owner know if their dog was going to bite a robot? It shouldn’t, but neither she nor the dog had ever encountered a robot Wolf before.
Having his answer, the tech pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose and returned his study to the robot’s readings on the tablet. In fact, he was paying so little attention to the world around him that he tripped on a rock and nearly fell face-forward into the ground. He righted himself by flailing his arms in large pinwheels. He looked back to see if Angie was going to laugh. She suddenly found a lot of interest in all the nothing that Murder was doing. She grinned at Murder, who was grinning back at her.
Angie breaked Murder and handed him his toy chicken. He rolled it in his mouth till he found the holding spot that he liked, then they both followed the robot down the path they had already been tracking. Steve was waiting for the Wolf at the road. The robot spun in two directions on the pavement, then paused a moment.
“The Wolf is compiling the trace amounts of scent and comparing them to the wasp’s signature,” the Wolf handler told Steve, who was still videotaping with his camera. The handler’s eyebrows arched. “And we have a direction.”
The Wolf led them down the road away from the storage units. Steve asked Angie, “Could you take point and ensure that no cars crash into our ten
million dollar robot?”
While Angie and Murder ran ahead of the machine to watch for cars, the Wolf marched one hundred yards down the macadam at a brisk pace. When it came to a t-intersection in the road, the robot stopped and ran through its procedure again. This time, it turned in all four directions, then paused to process the information.
Once it had located the scent’s direction with 100% accuracy (a self-auditing algorithm determined the accuracy), the Wolf turned toward the intersecting road. The road led along a forested ridge. Bighorn sheep watched them suspiciously from the rocky ledges. They jumped fearfully along the rocks only when the Wolf started its brisk march in their direction. Angie and Murder again took point, making sure to stay ahead of the robot.
Under the cover of the trees, Murder began to get excited again. He seemed to walk with more purpose and shine. Angie figured he was picking up scent from the trail again, and said so to Steve and the tech, who just shrugged. Why would they care? As far as they were concerned, the robot had proved itself better than the dog. Whether the dog reacted to anything did not matter.
“Hang tight,” she told Murder and kept him at her side. Another fifty yards up the ridge, and they crested a hill.
“The scent is getting stronger,” the handler announced as he reviewed the Wolf’s readings. “We should be almost on top of it.”
Angie came over the side of the hill. At the bottom of the hill was a Jeep Wrangler. Debris had exploded all over the ditch. The Jeep had swerved in its lane and collided with a tree. Two bodies hung limply to the side between the Jeep and the tree. Angie gasped, then ran down the hill, not waiting for Animal Control, the robot, or even her dog.
As she checked the driver’s pulse, he coughed. There was blood up and down the man’s body. He looked at Angie as if she were a shadow behind glass bricks.
“I…I…”
“Try not to talk,” she told the man. He looked to be in his mid-30s. There were groceries in the seat next to him and spilled out in the road, too. This was the debris that Angie had seen from the top of the hill.
A very low growl ushered out of Murder’s throat, a growl she had never heard from him before, but one she recognized instantly. The completely un-animalian sound of a thick exoskeleton striking metal came from the hood of the Jeep. There was no mistaking the red and black pattern of the giant crimson wasp, or the shape of its black hooked stinger. Angie threw her water bottle at the creature. And the scariest vision she had had seen in years was that of the water bottle bouncing off the wasp’s carapace like it was nothing, and the wasp crawling closer to her and the injured driver. Bugs were supposed to be affected by objects. They were supposed to be small and crunchy and squishy at the same time, not solid and sturdy. The sound, and the realization it brought with it, somehow removed the wasp from the foreign world it came from and deposited it into her very tangible reality. Angie screamed.
Murder barked savagely at the wasp. Angie feared he would attack the bug. She didn’t know what effect that stinger would have on Murder, and she refused to gamble with his life. Her body moved with adrenaline-soaked speed. Angie pulled her pistol, a standard Beretta 92, from her holster and aimed it at the nasty creature, her hand gently shaking. The wasp only crawled closer in response, as if daring her to defy it.
She pulled the trigger and the gun screamed out fire.
Bull’s-eye.
Somehow she severed the wasp’s head from its body without blowing the wasp into a hundred pieces. Its head rolled off the car, but its carapace continued to walk, turning in circles until it collapsed under its own weight.
Behind the wasp, a young girl’s dead eyes stared back at Angie.
Chapter Seven
Angie stayed in bed the next day, only getting up to feed the dogs and let them out into the pens. She was suspended temporarily while Animal Control conducted an investigation.
She tried to eat an apple in the kitchen, but the dead girl was smashed against the other side of the table. The autopsy would show that the child was killed by the Jeep collision, but if she wasn’t already dead, Angie would have killed her with the bullet that shot the wasp. Angie tossed the apple into the trash can and cussed and wiped away her tears.
After working her dogs, she drove into Jack Calf to buy groceries. She bought salad stuffs and lemonade and ice cream because it was hot outside—at least that’s the reason she told herself. Then she stopped at the feed store to pick up dog food. She ordered four fifty-pound bags, paid for them, and then backed her F-150 up to the loading dock. A lean man with blue eyes was loading the truck and watching Angie with sideways glances. Angie stared at a truck with some fender damage. The dead girl was there. A Mississippi delta of blood drained from the bullet hole she had put in the girl’s forehead.
“Hey,” the blue-eyed man said. The word filled the air as comfortably as the man fit into his jeans.
Angie glanced at him, then looked back at the dead girl. She got in the truck and turned on the radio and waited for the blue-eyed man to finish loading her truck. He came around when he was finished, but she left before he could say anything to her.
It was like this. She tried to eat in town, but the dead girl was smashed into a corner booth, so Angie got her lunch to go. She tried shopping at the Everything’s A Buck store, but her hands started to shake when the dead girl took her money.
“Stop it,” she told the dead girl. “Stop following me. I don’t need this shit.”
The cashier didn’t know what to say. She held the instant meal in her hands for a second, waited, then placed the meal in Angie’s bags. Angie always brought her own bags.
Angie went home and put away the food, backed her truck up to the barn and unloaded the fifty-pound bags herself. Then she worked the dogs in the warehouse and in the field. They had an off-day—probably because she was having an off-day. She put them in the large pen and went to take a shower.
Angie was not a fan of showers. They gave her time to peruse her chicken legs and skinny, scarecrow face. Stop beating yourself up, it’s not that bad, she told herself. Or maybe it was. Her skin was a moonscape of sun spots and scars.
Half-way through the shower she saw the shadow of the dead girl on the other side of the curtain.
After toweling off and finding some comfortable sweats, Angie went back and flopped down on the couch. She turned into her pillows and tried to ignore the world and the criticisms in her head. Then the dogs started barking. This wasn’t unusual. They were dogs. But there was a lot of movement in those barks. They were coming from everywhere. And they were joyous, damnit.
One of the dogs scratched at her door.
“I’m going to kill every last one of you,” Angie threatened as she opened the door.
Murder sat at the door, his chicken in his mouth. His tail was wagging with the exuberance of an escaped convict returning home to his folks. Behind him, ten dogs were running back and forth at full speed. Another one had hiked a leg over her flower bushes. They were day lilies she had been trying to get to grow there, but she wasn’t much of a green thumb. Dogs stomping through them didn’t help, though.
“Get back in the pen!” Angie bellowed. Dogs everywhere lost about three inches of confidence and slunk back toward the pen. Even Murder retreated with them. Once all the dogs were back in the pen, she reached down for a twisty tie she kept curled around one of the fence posts for such occasion. She never knew when an owner was untruthful about his dog’s Houdini skills. As she reached down, Murder leaped up and popped the lock, then he sat back down, a big grin shining from behind his chicken. His tail wagged furiously.
She grabbed the sloppy chicken out of his mouth and held it up high. Murder yipped a mix of amusement and pain. He hoped she would give it back. She tossed it in the pen, and he chased it down, growling at another Labrador who thought it might be his ball.
While Murder chased his toy, Angie turned to the dead girl. She was standing in the middle of the yard with the Mississippi delta of blood o
n her face.
“You need to leave now,” Angie said.
“I’ll come back,” the girl said.
Angie nodded. “But not for a while.”
Angie knew that eventually the child would return. When she least expected it, Angie would see the girl. Maybe she would see the girl in a crowd, maybe sitting in a Jeep stopped at a traffic light, or maybe the girl would wait for her in the forest. Some bodies never go away.
A week later, Dr. Saracen called.
“What’s up?” She was working dogs again. This time she had two on a sit-stay command. She had a stopwatch in the other hand. Three minutes had passed.
“Good news. The king has called you back to the Crusade.”
“What are you saying?”
“Suspension’s over.”
“Oh. Good.”
“How are you and Murder doing?” Dr. Saracen asked.
“Not bad.” She pulled a tennis ball out of her pocket and rolled it between the retrievers. Nothing.
“You know how novel it was that you found the girl, right?”
Angie turned her back on the dogs. “I was just helping the robot.”
“I saw the video. You think you failed, but I think you could counter that the robot was following you until it got to the street. Did you notice that you and Murder were following a curling trail out of the storage units?”
“I think I put something like that in my write-up.”
“And did you see how the robot handled changes in direction? It follows a process of turning to different sides. Suffice it to say, that if the robot was following a curling trail all its own, I would expect it to do more of those turn-about maneuvers. But it did not.”
“Well, thanks, Henry. BOO!” she yelled as she turned on the dogs. They were as resolute as Windsor Palace guards.
“Are you working with canines?”
“Stay command. They’re doing well. So not that I don’t enjoy talking, but why the call, Henry?”
“Actually, I am trying to work myself to it. I’ve got bad news. The director wants to see you.”