An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  “You’re not rebuilding,” Belinda ordered. “Unless you stop this, we’re going to wipe out every Songheuser employee in Canaan Lake.”

  “I see one woman with a gun.” Victoria folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not very impressed.”

  Belinda jabbed the muzzle of the gun into Peter’s temple. “I’ll kill him!”

  “What’s one employee?” Victoria asked. “I can always hire more.”

  Belinda pulled the gun away from Peter’s head and shot it at the ceiling. “Fuck you, you corporate whore!”

  An explosion rocked the building and Peter staggered away from Belinda. The fire alarm began to scream.

  STANDISH FELL DOWN, gasping, and a hot wet tongue wiped against her face. A stream gurgled someplace nearby, and someone tugged on her arm.

  “Miss Kate? Miss Kate!”

  “I’m OK, Olive.” Standish rubbed her eyes and blinked. The air was clear here, but her eyes and lungs still stung. The skinny kid knelt beside her, mud and sticky sap and tears streaking her face. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, the dogs helped me.” Olive got to her feet. “Where did they go? There were so many dogs and now there’s just Hattie.”

  Hattie barked. Standish put her arms around the dog’s neck and breathed in her unwashed stink. She never wanted to let her go, but after a minute Hattie wriggled uncomfortably, and Standish rubbed the dog behind her ears and then got up and looked around herself. They were in a field full of red clover, and the air smelled clean and vibrantly green. A fence ran just a few feet away, and a brown cow stood there watching them sleepily. Standish turned in a half circle and realized she could see a white barn about a hundred meters away.

  Matthias stood between her and the barn, his hand clutched to his side. “Kate? Olive? Are you all right?”

  She ran to him as he crumpled to his knees. “Matthias.” She pulled his hand away. Blood ran from his side, and the silver air bolt stuck out just below his ribs. “Oh, God.”

  “You really shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.” His face tightened with pain. “Oh, this hurts.”

  She eased him to the ground. “How did you know where to find us?”

  “It was the smell.” He gave a little gasp. “We saw Joe Holder that night. He passed by us after we found Duncan. I couldn’t figure it out then, but I put it together. He was hiding the air bolt gun. That was the smell.”

  “So Joe killed Duncan.”

  “He didn’t do it alone,” Matthias corrected her. “He didn’t leave Duncan in the woods for us to find. That was the man in the boots.”

  “Rob McKidder.” Standish looked over her shoulder. “Olive, go get Mr Eames. We’ve got to get Matthias into town.”

  “I don’t want a doctor.”

  She stroked his cheek. His eyes were particularly gold at that moment, the blue circle around his iris like a piece of sky. “I’ve got to keep you alive long enough for you to tell Sheriff Vargas what you know.”

  He gave a weak smile. “Like she’d believe the word of a dog.”

  “You have to tell her everything. Not the weird stuff, but everything about Songheuser, and the election, and the agreement they made to keep you from telling everyone about their mistake.” She kept her eyes on his face, because she didn’t know where else to look. Her first aid training didn’t cover gut shots. If she applied pressure, she’d only move the bolt deeper inside him and do him more harm than good.

  “I swore I’d never tell.” Matthias reminded her. “I made a deal.”

  “And Songheuser broke it. This new property tax was written to drive the Believers out of Canaan Lake.” She squeezed his hands. “Don’t you want to be a man again, and not one of Songheuser’s dogs?”

  Standish looked up and saw Olive racing toward them, her white hair streaming behind her like some beautiful free thing. Chameli’s pink UTV was just behind her.

  THE BUILDING SHOOK AGAIN, and someone grabbed Peter by the elbow. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Niketa Shawl yanked him toward the far end of the hallway where the marketing and accounting cubicles sat. He remembered, then — the fire escape at the back of the building. He raced after her.

  Julia threw open the window. “Come on! The building’s on fire!”

  Gunfire sounded behind them, but Peter didn’t look back. He scrambled after Niketa, skidding on the metal landing outside the window.

  Someone grabbed the back of Peter’s jacket, reeling him back inside.

  “Not you, Bajowski!” Joe Holder grinned madly, his blue eyes wide. He threw Peter against the wall. “You stay here and face what you’ve done.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” Peter shouted. “GreenOne’s setting off explosives!”

  Joe’s fist drove into Peter’s stomach, doubling him over. The air went out of him.

  “They’re here because of you.” Joe grabbed Peter’s hair and jerked him upright. “I saw your notes. I know you want to bring Songheuser down.”

  Peter fought to catch his breath. “I just want… to stop… the test,” he gasped.

  “You’re a fucking ecoterrorist just like your tree-hugging boyfriend.” Joe’s fist smashed into Peter’s face and the gash on Peter’s cheek split open with a hot spurt of blood.

  Peter thought he might throw up from the pain. Smoke was beginning to fill the hallway, rising up from the floor below. The building rocked again, something vital inside it crumpling loudly.

  Joe leaned in closer, an eggy stink coming off his breath. “I’m going to leave you here to die, Bajowski. I should have done it the night we took out Chambers, but I thought you’d have gone back to Earth by now.” He gave one of his nasty chuckles and then shoved Peter sideways.

  Peter hit the floor and felt his head spin. He could just see Holder squeezing out the fire escape. He had to catch up with him. The bastard had killed Duncan.

  He pushed himself to his knees. The air was too thick to breathe. He could hear the siren at the VFD calling for help.

  He grabbed the windowsill.

  Below him, a dog howled.

  “Bajowski! You’ve got to get out of here!” Brett Takas came out of the smoke, Belinda thrown over his shoulder and Victoria Wallace behind him. She squeezed past the security officer and climbed over the windowsill, her pumps clanging on the fire escape.

  Peter pulled himself upright, coughing. Eyes streaming, he climbed out beside Wallace.

  “Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

  “Help!” someone screamed, their voice so high-pitched that for a second Peter didn’t realize it was Joe Holder. A big brown dog had him by the arm, blood running down its muzzle.

  An explosion rocked the building, blowing out the window on the other side of the fire escape, the sound so loud the whole world went silent. Peter grabbed the railing, his head spinning.

  Everything moved at half speed as his rattled head spun in the strange silence. The color seeped out of things; shapes distorted. The brown dog shaking Joe’s arm became for a second a stocky man with a red-stained mouth and a cross burned purple on his side. A woman in head-to-toe green tried to run out of the parking lot but a gray and white dog leaped on her. Her mouth moved in silence; the dog ripped and tore without a sound; the woman squeezed off two silent shots at the sky in a dying reflex. The woman’s blood was a cloudy white, the juice of a Christ’s finger plant.

  Peter couldn’t move. The part of him that analyzed and measured had gone quiet in the blast, and his mind flailed to make sense of what he saw. Men became dogs, women became plants, reality twitched and struggled like a caterpillar resisting metamorphosis, like bread yearning to become body, like wine on the brink of becoming blood.

  He squeezed shut his eyes, unwilling to see any more. He was hallucinating, his brain rattled by the sheer volume of the explosion.

  There is no God, he reminded himself. There are no saints. There is no magic.

  Then he felt a sensation grip him someplace deep inside, the ki
nd of sensation his rational mind (which was stirring now and would certainly free him from this moment of insanity in a few seconds) would discount as a passing pressure on his vagus nerve, but which at this moment felt like the bass resonance of a cry vaster and greater than any he’d ever heard. The vibration spoke not in words but in crushing, painful certainty.

  For a second, Peter knew that Huginn cried out and that its voice meant transubstantiation, and that if he believed that deeply enough, he’d change just as thoroughly as Belinda and her GreenOne friends.

  A horn honked.

  He snapped out of his trance with a gasp.

  “Peter! Brett!”

  “Who’s in that UTV?” Wallace pointed to the red vehicle easing its way beneath the fire escape.

  Peter shook his head in disbelief. “It’s Julia and Niketa.”

  “Come on!” Niketa shouted up at them.

  Despite his burden, Brett moved the fastest, but Peter was right behind him, his legs carrying him back into the world he understood.

  “HOLY CRAP,” Chameli blurted. Six police cars sat in the street outside the office, while the Canaan Lake volunteer fire department worked to put out the flames bursting out the front of the building. A dog ran by, its muzzle streaked with gore.

  “Keep going,” Standish ordered from the backseat. She squeezed Matthias’s fingers. “Hold on, Matthias. We’re almost there.”

  Metal shrieked as the skybridge between the office and the mill snapped in half. Glass and wood tumbled down behind them, blocking Main Street.

  Songheuser was being punished right now. But it wouldn’t be enough unless the world knew the whole truth about the company.

  “There — Sheriff Vargas!” Standish shouted.

  Sheriff Vargas was leading a man in a green jacket to her cruiser. She shoved him inside and stopped to check her hand unit.

  Chameli pulled up beside the sheriff. “Sheriff!” she bellowed. “We need you right away!”

  The dull rumble of a chopper filled the air. Smoke rose up from dozens of spots along Main Street. The town looked like a war zone.

  A UTV in Songheuser’s white and blue skidded to a stop behind them. A handsome black man leaped out of the driver’s side. “Bajowski? Where are you?” he shouted.

  Peter stepped out of the crowd. “I’m here, Mark!”

  “I got half the drones called off, but I couldn’t override the others. If there was somebody out there—”

  But Standish didn’t have time to listen to their conversation. She let go of Matthias’s hand and opened the door. “Sheriff Vargas! This man needs to talk to you. And he needs a doctor right away.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. Matthias had turned the color of fine paper, his eyes like holes in his cheeks. Blood poured down his side.

  Sheriff Vargas hurried toward her. “Standish? You all right?”

  “Yeah.” She pulled the plastic bag with the air bolt gun out of her coat pocket. “I found something for you.”

  Vargas took it carefully and tucked it under her arm. She leaned into the car. “Matthias. Tell me what you need.”

  Standish stepped backward to give them room. Her knees wobbled beneath her. She didn’t understand any of the madness around her, the people shouting, the crash and boom of falling metal. A part of her was still back in the woods facing those dogs.

  “Standish.” Peter squeezed her shoulder. “Is Matthias OK?”

  His eye had swollen shut completely, and blood ran down his cheek. She shook her head. She couldn’t even talk.

  “Get him out of here,” Sheriff Vargas called out, and a paramedic rolled a gurney up and eased Matthias onto it. He gasped with pain.

  Standish pulled away from Peter and grabbed Matthias’s hand. “You’ll be OK, right? You can’t die, remember.”

  He smiled a pure happy smile. “I told the sheriff,” he said. “I broke my promise to Songheuser. Hepzibah will be glad.”

  Standish grabbed his hands. “Don’t leave me, friend.”

  “Do you hear that?” His eyes looked past her, the pupils vast. “Do you hear that voice?”

  Then his face went slack and still.

  My wife listened to God more closely than I did. She realized that God created not in individual words, but in great sentences and paragraphs. Each world is its own Good Book, its own wisdom text.

  It is time to give Huginn a careful reading. Who knows what we might become if we only pay attention to the words of our new world?

  — from THE COLLECTED WISDOM OF MW WILLIAMS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  HEPZIBAH CRAWLED AWAY from the man who had once been her husband — the man who was no longer truly a man. She coughed again and again and a fine spray of red speckled the ground ahead of her. Something was really wrong with her lungs. She didn’t think she had much time left.

  She pulled herself upright using the shed door. There they were, her caterpillars and her bees. She had worked hard to tend them, but no one else had ever cared about her little project. If she died, they would, too.

  She opened the latch on the caterpillar’s case. “Time to find your own way, little ones,” she said, or tried to say. She pulled open the gate on the nearest hive and then sank to the ground, gasping for air.

  It was sunny out, she realized. For the first time since they had come to Huginn, the sun was shining. It filled the shed doorway, touching her legs and warming them.

  A leather bird settled on a fern across from the doorway, holding something blue in its talons. She wanted to shoo it away, but it just sat there, its nostrils opening and closing at her. The scrap of blue in its grip looked almost like an orchid. The leather bird lowered the flower to its stomach slit and sucked it inside.

  Hepzibah toppled sideways. Pink foam dribbled out of the corner of her mouth and she could no longer see the leather bird but only the tree branches above. They were full of flowers, beautiful blue and white and yellow flowers, and there were purple plant-looking things she’d never seen before, and some other leathery thing like a big-eared snake. There was so much up in the trees that she’d never noticed.

  A leather bird swooped over a branch and bit off a flower, then flapped away at top speed. They ate flowers, she thought. Flowers, not blood. God had made them ugly, but there was more to their lives than their ugly exteriors. The ugliness and evil she saw, she had projected onto them from her own imagination.

  “Hepzibah, please be all right,” Matthias begged. She couldn’t see him, only the sky and the trees and the creatures she’d never seen before today. He sounded like himself again, at least a little, and that gave her hope that he would not be a dog forever.

  “I’m all right,” she whispered. The fear and pain had dribbled out of her with her life’s blood, and all that remained was a warm sense of goodness. She would be with God very soon, and all of this would make sense.

  A little green caterpillar crawled purposefully in front of her face, its humble shape filling her vision. They had come to Huginn expecting Eden, but she saw now that God had other plans for them and this place. Even that caterpillar had a better sense of those plans than they’d had.

  I’m going home, she thought, her chest no longer rising or falling.

  No, I am home. I am.

  And then the caterpillar was gone, leaving only the sky filled with branches, and flowers, blue flowers like butterflies, and a thousand unnamed members of God’s creation.

  “STANDISH! Wait up!”

  Peter ran toward her and was glad to see her stop for him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  The sun shone bright on the field of crosses and blue saints. The dry season had arrived, and with it a kind of peace had settled over Canaan Lake. He had missed her the past few weeks. He understood why she’d gone, but he’d walked by her house every day, wishing she was there. “I didn’t know you were back from Space City.”

  “I couldn’t miss Matthias’s funeral. Besides, my psychologist said it was important for me t
o get back to my normal life as soon as possible. I’ve got some new meds and I’m feeling pretty good.”

  He felt good, too, although he wasn’t sure how he could explain that to Standish. They had set out to punish Songheuser, and yet the company continued on the same as ever. But somehow that failure didn’t sting.

  He opened his mouth and closed it again, unsure how to talk to her without their enemy to unite them. They walked slowly. People filed past them, headed for the grave site, but they were still early, and the day was too beautiful to be rushed.

  “Joe Holder’s in jail,” Peter began. “The prints on the air bolt gun are probably enough to put him away, although his little confession to me will help. I wish Victoria was getting punished for something. It was all her idea, after all.”

  Standish shook her head. “People like her never pay for what they do. Songheuser will see to that.” There was bitterness in her voice, but not as much as he had feared.

  He stopped and put his hands in his pockets. The sun might have been bright, but the wind had a chill to it. “So what are you going to do now? I mean, you can’t want to work for Songheuser after all this.”

  She stooped to pick up a fallen cross. “I talked to a lawyer. Sounds like I can get a share of that class action lawsuit money. That’ll last a little while.”

  “But your visa. Victoria will—”

  “Sheriff Vargas said she’d keep an eye on Songheuser, even vouch for me. They won’t kick me off Huginn too soon.” Standish pushed the cross back into place. Its crossbeam had slanted in the process, and she patiently adjusted it.

  He cleared his throat. “About Vargas. How did she know to call for backup? She had all those cops and paramedics there just when things started getting crazy.”

  “It was Dewey.” Standish gave up on fixing the cross and stood up. “I guess all my messages freaked her out, and she called Sheriff Vargas.”

  “Thank goodness for Dewey,” he said.

  She looked down at Hattie, rubbing the dog’s ears. It was something he’d seen her do a thousand times, but he’d never seen her look so casual about it. Maybe her new medication had taken some of the tension out of her. “Yes, thank goodness for Dewey. I thought about leaving Canaan Lake after all of that. She reminded me that I didn’t just come here because of Songheuser. I came here to find a new life.”