He didn’t answer. His legs were longer than hers, and now he was practically pulling her down the street. The fog had come up on the lake, and heavy paws of it crept along the beach and up the side streets. Visibility by her place would be negligible.
“Hey, you’re not going to make it,” Peter called after them. “Go back to the bar.”
Hattie stopped walking and turned to face the other direction: up Main Street, toward Cemetery Hill. Standish shook off Brett’s grip and caught Hattie’s collar. “What’s wrong, girl?”
Hattie growled.
“Get back inside!” Peter shouted.
A volley of barking cascaded down the hill toward them, a wild baying like nothing Standish had ever heard before. She stood frozen, stunned by the sound. Could dogs really make that kind of a noise?
Then Peter grabbed her arm and yanked her nearly off her feet. “Move it!”
Brett raced past them and threw open the door to Heinrich’s. He held it wide. “Come on!”
Hattie leaped up the three shallow stairs, and Standish ran after her. Something snarled behind her and then they were inside, Brett slamming shut the door and bracing it with all his corded strength. Peter set his shoulder against the door, too. A horrible thud shook it and both men, and then claws scrabbled and scraped against the wood. Hattie dropped into a crouch, the thick ruff of hair across her shoulders bristling, her growl low and terrifyingly fierce.
All the sound had gone out of the bar. There was only Hattie growling and Brett’s loud breathing and the squeal of claws against horsetail wood. Standish hoped like hell it was as strong as people claimed it was.
Then somewhere outside someone screamed, the deep hoarse cry of someone in real pain.
The pressure on the door stopped and the scratching went with it. Standish sagged. Thank God. Thank God it had gone.
“Shit.” Peter thumped his fist against the door. “We’ve got to go back out there.”
“Are you crazy?” Standish asked. “That dog nearly broke down the door.”
“Yeah, and somebody’s out there. You heard them.”
“None of us know what to do,” Brett said. “If we go back out there, we’ll be just another mess for the cops to clean up.”
Peter shook his head. “Sheriff Vargas is on her own — Deputy Wu went to Jawbone Flats. What if she’s not at the station?”
“We can call her—” Brett began, but Peter kept shaking his head.
“You heard that scream.” He pushed Brett aside and reached for the door handle. “We can’t just let somebody die.”
“I’ll come,” Standish blurted out. She knelt and stroked Hattie’s neck. The dog’s sturdy body trembled beneath her touch. “Stay, girl.”
“You’re not taking the dog?” Brett’s voice was incredulous.
“She’s an assistance dog. What’s she going to do, calm them down?” She realized Peter had already gone outside and she squeezed out the door before Hattie could realize she was being left behind.
“Hang on,” Brett called out, but she was already running to catch up with Peter.
Just ahead, Peter paused. The fog had already swallowed up Main Street.
“The sound came from the west,” Standish said. “Not far.”
Brett fell in step behind them. “I’m unarmed. What about you, Pete?”
“Do you hear that?” Peter hissed.
She paused. Brett’s chin bumped into the back of her head. They all stood motionless, listening. The fog and night seemed to swallow every sound, as if Standish was suspended in space itself. Vertigo washed over her. Why had she left Hattie back in the bar?
Then she caught the bubbling, ragged sound that Peter had heard. “Somebody’s hurt over there,” she whispered.
Peter ran toward the sound, and she and Brett followed, slogging through the dark. Then the street lights winked back on, and searing white light blasted from the sign over the door of the next bar. “What’s going on out there?” someone shouted.
They didn’t need to answer. In the pitiless light, the body in the road looked not broken but shabby, the ordinary shape of a drunk passed out in the open. Only up close did the blood show. Peter dropped to his knees in the mud. “Hey, man, are you OK?”
A gurgle and wheeze instead of an answer. Something must have distracted the dogs or else they would have finished ripping the man’s throat out — the left side of the man’s face hung open, his white teeth showing between the pulp of blood and meat.
Standish’s stomach turned over. Dogs had done this. Dogs that had once been pets and now gone wild. Dogs that could have been like Hattie, once.
“Oh, shit,” Brett murmured. “Look at those fancy ass cowboy boots. That’s Rob McKidder.” He reached out for the man’s hand. “You’ll be OK, Rob,” he said, in a louder voice. “You’re going to be just fine.”
The wheeze climbed in pitch and then there was a bubbling, a thick frothy bubbling, and Standish had to turn away before she vomited.
A siren sounded from the direction of the mill. But if it was an ambulance, Standish thought it might be too late.
The concepts that a solitary thinker delves into are the work of language, a higher level of language than mere communication. Is there morality, analysis, measurement, or logic without language? Do such things even exist outside of the language-using mind? Of course not. They are concepts built out of other concepts, not out of the stuff of the world. Language is the way we, alone of all the animals, create.
— from THE COLLECTED WISDOM OF MW WILLIAMS
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHAT A NIGHT. What a shitty night. Peter rested his forehead against a greasy cupboard door and waited for the coffee to finish perking. He could feel eyes on him as people passed by the kitchenette’s doorway, but he kept his attention focused on the pot with its trickling stream of hot life.
He leaned back enough to slip a hand into the cupboard and grope for a mug. Had he slept at all last night? It seemed like every time he slipped into dreams, he saw the gaping hole where Rob McKidder’s cheek used to be or he saw the dogs pouring down the hill. Pouring: that was the only word for the way they moved. They weren’t a bunch of dogs running together; they were one mass of hunger and evil sweeping down over the town, like a flood or a tsunami or a wall of flame. He pressed the cool ceramic of the mug to his cheek. He’d never demonized the dogs before, not like the others in town, but now he understood it. Those things weren’t dogs, not like his grandma’s little fluffball with his crooked smile and long pink tongue, not even like Kate Standish’s white shepherd.
Peter filled the mug at the sink and gulped back the water. Part of it, he knew, was that he’d never seen a dead person before. Not a real dead person. Old people in their padded coffins didn’t count. Their bodies looked clean and fresh, the blood and pain wiped away and painted over, and the long span of their lives balanced out the loss. It was impossible to feel truly bad for someone in their nineties, laying there surrounded by tokens of the rich life they’d led. They’d gotten their full measure of breathing and loving and laughing, and it was only right that they went out and made room for the rest of the living.
But Rob McKidder had been Peter’s age. Peter had seen him regularly at office functions, those interminable safety meetings Songheuser was always making them attend, and outside of his bad taste in boots, Rob seemed like a good enough guy. He talked a lot about his girl, a PR type working on Luna and hoping for a position with Nagata or Taaffe-Heinecken, maybe Songheuser if she got lucky. Only now she’d never come here. Who’d want to live on the planet that had killed her boyfriend?
The coffeemaker made a chug and gasp, indicating it had finished its work (horribly like the sounds that had come out of Rob McKidder last night), and Peter reached for the pot. His wrist trembled as he poured.
He caught movement in the corner of his eye and recognized the bottled red hair approaching — it was that insufferable gossip from accounting. He slid the coffee pot back onto the wa
rmer and hurried out of the kitchenette, giving her a smile with tightly compressed lips. Let her think he was too emotionally scarred by the discovery of Rob McKidder’s body to talk about the whole thing. Better to be thought delicate than have to listen to her probing questions disguised as concern. Or worse, be trapped inside the kitchen when Niketa arrived. They’d broken up five months ago, but that still didn’t make it any less awkward to be in the same room as her.
Ignoring the elevators, he hurried upstairs to his office. Work. If he wanted to stop thinking about last night, work was the thing.
He crossed to the rain-streaked window on the far wall to check the terrariums on the sill. The oldest tank, full of broken rock and gravel, needed no attention. The opalescent spheres of Huginn’s puffball just kept growing, slowly overwhelming the larger chunks of basalt while the rock-eater lichen spun out pink and yellow strands at its own quiet pace. He occasionally misted them, but so far was content to observe the process.
The tank beside it needed more care. He’d tried to replicate the forest floor in this one, a much more complicated task. The horsetail fronds he secured to the screened lid needed constant replacement as they shriveled in the office air, and he worried the falling needles would get moldy, suffocating the delicate pseudo-club mosses. The tiny plants had not evolved to cope with molds or mildews, but such organisms had been brought over on the skin and foods of the very first humans. The nasty invaders found Huginn much to their liking.
As did the caterpillar he’d found out in Sector 12, he discovered. As a rare sun break lit up the room, he could see the green chrysalis the creature had woven in the corner of the tank, a dark blob silhouetted in the light. Peter pressed his forehead against the glass, peering at the thing. The leathery pod gave away none of its secrets.
It was like Huginn that way, he thought. Duncan had lured him to the forested world with images of tree scooters and pink fungi, and Peter had discovered almost nothing of meaning beyond the growth habits of its pseudotrees. If only he was free to do real research instead of maximizing Songheuser’s lumber production.
The hand unit on Peter’s desk chirped. Peter sighed and flopped down in his desk chair. He reached for his coffee cup. That ringtone he knew. It never meant good news.
“Mark!” He took a long drink. The background busy-ness of Central Office sounded over a flurry of typing. Mark Allen’s face filled the screen, his shaved black head gleaming like it had been freshly polished. It probably had. Despite a PhD in forestry and a master’s in botany, the man spent zero time in the field.
“Hey, Peter, how’s your morning going?” Songheuser’s head of forestry had always managed to convey that hearty cheer Peter associated with a certain breed of Norteamericanos who played softball after work and ran for office in their fifties. They used academics to rake in business connections and made money without even trying. In his youth, Peter had often played up his Oxford pedigree just to remind them he was too good to play their games. But out here, who gave a damn? Huginn was Huginn, and no degree changed the fact that Mark was in charge.
“Good.” He didn’t bother mentioning last night’s dog attack. Mark didn’t want to hear about stuff like that.
“Listen, buddy — you know we’ve just gotten access to Sector 14, right? Well, we’d really like to get some eyes on the ground. That Sector 12 survey can wait.” Mark’s brown eyes looked serious, but not too serious. If he ever ran for office, he’d be an instant win.
“Sector 14? Not Sector 13?” Peter found a survey map underneath his coffee cup and pulled it closer. Sectors 13 and 14 ran behind the big farming estates at the end of the lake. He couldn’t see a single access road headed into 14.
“All in good time,” Mark said. “Anyway, it’s probably pretty similar stuff — mixture of capralis and forestis, lots of undergrowth, plenty of little critters for you check out. Aerial surveys aren’t giving us what we need, but I know I can count on you.”
Peter tapped the map. “14’s got no major waterways. You’re not going to find hardly any capralis out there. I don’t see why the company’s making it a priority.”
“We have our reasons.” The man’s smile spread, his teeth lighting up his face like Christmas tree lights. “Anyway, we’re counting on you. You go out there, you document what you find, and you file regular reports. Easy stuff.”
It wasn’t any different from what Peter was doing in 12, but it meant trading an area with blended ecosystems for one with a monotonous stand of forest. It wouldn’t do much for his research, that was for sure.
“One more thing, Peter.” Mark threw it out like it was an aside. “What you find out there is for my eyes only. Just company policy on new land tracts. No big deal. Got it?”
Peter put down the map. “I got it.”
“Great! Well, I’ll be in touch.”
The screen snapped off. Peter sat there, his skin prickling.
Mark’s eyes only.
Nothing he’d ever found had been classified. So what the hell did the company expect to find out there?
STANDISH SAT AT HER DESK, screwdriver in one hand, hand unit propped up in front of her. “Dewey, it was easily the weirdest moment of my life. I mean, even before I got Hattie, I liked dogs. But out there, I couldn’t even move. I just stood there, staring at them.”
Dewey’s face moved in closer so that it filled the screen. Her gold eyeshadow was like sunshine, and right at that moment Standish wished it really were. Sunshine. Clean, bright, warm sunshine: that’s what she needed after a night like the last. “But you’re OK, right?”
“Yeah, Peter grabbed me just in time. I couldn’t believe it when he wanted to go back out there. The man either has steel balls or he’s nuts.”
“Peter? You don’t mean Peter Bajowski, do you?” Dewey frowned. “The biologist? I’ve heard he’s kind of weird.”
“Sure he is.” Standish put down the screwdriver, since there was no use pretending to work. “Here’s the thing, Dew. Those dogs killed somebody. They ripped out his throat, right there in the fucking street. That could have been me. One minute later, and it would have been me.”
“So you’re lucky as hell.”
“Yeah, I guess. It makes me wonder if I’m doing the right thing, coming here. I mean, I like it. I like my place, I like the food, and Hattie loves having all this space to run around. It’s good for her. But a man got killed right in the street, and people—” she realized her voice was climbing, so she forced herself to take a breath “—people here at work are just like, ‘That’s why we don’t like dogs.’ That’s fucked up, don’t you think?”
“Well, don’t hold Canaan Lake against the whole planet. If you keep your head down and work hard, you can always transfer to Space City.” Dewey raised a finger with a sparkling nail. “Speaking of which, I was thinking maybe you could come into town sometime soon. Have lunch with me in a real restaurant with no wild animals waiting outside. Catch up.”
Dewey’s cheer sounded forced. Standish picked up the hand unit, as if she could pull her in closer and get a better sense of what was running through her brain. Dewey’s eyes flicked away for a second, then cut back to the screen.
“Everything OK?”
“Yeah, I just… really want to see you. There’s something I want to talk to you about.” She looked worried for a second, and Standish squeezed the hand unit tighter. Her mind went to a thousand bad scenarios: cancer, a new boyfriend that didn’t like knowing his girl used to be a boy, deportation, cutbacks at work. If it wasn’t something that bad, Dewey would just say it flat-out.
She couldn’t handle it if something happened to Dewey.
An icon on the bottom corner of the screen flashed green. “Shit. Got a work call.” She paused, thinking fast. “I’ll come out next weekend, OK? Unless you want to talk earlier. You can call me any time.”
“OK. Next weekend sounds good.”
“I love you,” Standish reminded her.
“Love you, too.” Her face
moved closer for a second, then vanished into blank screen. Dewey could have been anywhere in the galaxy right then, back on Earth, on a spaceship, anyplace at all. Standish knew only about eighty kilometers separated her from her best friend, but right now, that distance seemed impossibly huge.
The green icon flashed again, and with a sigh, she took the call.
“AH! Ms Standish. Thanks for getting here so quickly. It’s almost impossible to get any work done without wireless.” The woman beamed at Standish for an uncomfortably long moment and then put out her hand. “Winnie Gonzales. Chief Administrator for the Canaan Lake School District.”
Standish raised a dirty palm. “I’m not sure you want to shake. I slipped in the parking lot.” She looked around the small complex of arch-roofed buildings. It shared a strong resemblance with military and science outposts everywhere, from the cheap plastic of its Quonset hut-looking structures to the chainlink fence outlining the grounds. A few scrawny pine trees, imported from Earth, struggled to grow in the Huginn soil. “Canaan Lake has its own school district?”
Winnie chuckled nervously. “You’re very amusing, Ms Standish. Now if you don’t mind coming this way, you’ll find the utilities area in the back of the upper school building.” She eyed Hattie. “Your dog won’t disturb anyone, will it? People are pretty worried about dogs after last night.”
Standish pointed at the green vest she’d reluctantly brought out of storage and put on Hattie. People needed to know that Hattie was nothing like those wild dogs. Nothing.
“She’s a trained assistance dog. You can trust her more than most humans.”
“Well.” Winnie laughed again. Her laugh was as thin as she was. The administrator urged Standish along the path running between the two largest buildings. Mud seeped between the plastic planks that someone had installed as a kind of boardwalk. Winnie’s pumps skidded in the slick stuff, utterly the wrong shoes for anything but a carpeted office building.
She stopped at the lean-to at the back of the biggest building. “Here.” She opened the padlock and threw open the door. Multi-legged creatures scurried away from the sun’s light. “I’m sure you can make sense of this. If you could just let me know when you’ve finished, I’ll come back and lock up.”
An Oath of Dogs Page 8