Dogs of War

by Jonathan Maberry

  Not even pins and needles.

  The monster lay sprawled across my chest, and together we were smashed against the base of the big tree.

  Both of us ruined.

  In the woods I could hear the rest of them coming. Howling out that strange roar, crashing through the brush. I flopped my right hand around until I found the handle of the laptop case. No idea where my gun was. The machine that lay across me twitched as something shorted, then it settled heavy on my chest. Too heavy.

  The other WarDogs were coming, and I was slipping into the big, big, black.

  But something held me there on the edge. Not pain. Not need. No, it was a sound. A buzz. Not the squelch of the WarDog sending its battle data. This was different, softer.

  The flutter of wings.

  I looked up and saw a pigeon land on a tree branch. Gray feathers with black bands. Beady little eyes that rotated toward me and went click, click, click.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY

  THE BAIN ESTATE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 12:37 PM

  Bunny, Top, and Cole staggered out of the house into another firefight. Brick Anderson and a squad of DMS shooters were waging a firefight with the WarDogs. Several of the metal beasts were down, but the others were firing. The Junkyard lay on its side, smoke and fire curling upward from every window. There was no sign of Lydia Rose.

  More of the WarDogs were joining the fight, galloping like red-eyed hellhounds from somewhere behind the house. Top glanced at Cole and Bunny.

  “You locked and loaded?”

  “Hooah,” said Bunny.

  “Hoo-fucking-ah,” said Cole.

  And they began firing as they ran.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE

  THE DOG PARK

  WASHINGTON STATE

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 12:43 PM

  I woke in total darkness. It was bright daylight, but not for me. Maybe not ever again. I wasn’t dead, though. I was alive.

  Alive?

  Maybe. Not entirely sure I wanted to be. Everything hurt. My hair hurt. My molecules hurt. Which was absolutely wonderful. I’m not a philosopher or a psychic, but I’m pretty sure ghosts don’t feel pain. Not even zombies. I did. All sorts of pain. I was a catalog of different kinds of pain. My feet and legs felt as if I’d been kickboxing a porcupine, and lost badly. The muscles in my right arm were mashed and hating the experience. My groin was sending me hate mail, and I don’t even remember why that part of me was sore. The walls of my chest felt as if I was caught in a vise and someone was very slowly but very deliberately turning the handle.

  My left arm? Well, it still wasn’t talking to me. Not good.

  My head was worse. When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t sure if it was dark or if I was blind. There were separate sharp and very specific pains in my right cheek, right eye socket, across my forehead, my nose, and several important teeth. And my scalp felt weird and tingly in a way that I could neither explain nor enjoy.

  The dead thing lay sprawled across me. Two hundred pounds of it. Slack and filled with all sorts of angles and edges that stuck into me. Breathing was a challenge, and I knew that I wasn’t doing enough of it. Some of the light-headedness I felt, and a large chunk of the raging headache, was, I was certain, from oxygen deprivation. Even though the thing was dead, it was crushing the air out of me, stopping me from breathing, making me sick and weak. Maybe killing me.

  If I couldn’t move it, then maybe it had killed me. Death is certain. We all know that, but sometimes the fucker takes his time. He strolls toward you out of the dark, slouching his way in your direction so that you can feel every possible second of dread. Maybe there’s a point where he’s so close that he blots out the skies and doesn’t let you see a sliver of hope.

  How much did I see lying there in the dark?

  Then I realized that the darkness was because there was something in my eyes. Over my face. I smelled it then. Machine oil.

  I tried to blink it away and shake it away, but the darkness lingered, staining the world. A diminished vision came back very slowly. The Modern Man saw nothing. The Cop was on the fence because he played the odds and the odds blew. The Killer lay there and bared his teeth. Most of the time I hated and feared that part of me. Most of the time I’m the Cop, the investigator, the rational solver of problems. When the Killer takes over and the other parts of me are shunted to the side, very bad things happen. Granted, the shit has to be actively hitting the fan before he even wakes up, but he always wakes up wanting to turn the blackness red. There are no rules, no laws, no compassion, and no limits except death.

  Yeah, he wasn’t about giving up. As long as there was breath in my body—however shallow—he was ready to fight. Anxious to fight.

  “Get … up…”

  Not sure which one of us said that. All of us, maybe. Sometimes I don’t even understand the dynamic, and it’s my own weird head.

  The voice was an old man’s croak whispering from a dust-dry throat.

  I had one hand to work with, and a pair of legs that, so far, would only twitch. Fun times. Sure, I can do that. Nothing to it. Lift a two-hundred-pound thing off me. Nothing to it. Stop being a pussy, Ledger, and get going.

  On the other hand, the darkness in my brain was starting to soften, to become comfortable. Maybe it would be so much easier to stop trying to find a little light in the world and close my eyes. If I did, I knew I’d be able to see something. Junie would be there. My memories of her were so clear, so strong. My beautiful woman. Part retro hippie, part conspiracy-theory nut, part world-saving technologies expert. All woman, all person, all incredible. My eyelids drifted shut and she was there. I knew her so well. It was my joy and pleasure to have mapped the landscape of her, from the bottomless and complex blue of her intelligent eyes, to the splash of freckles across her upper breasts, to the bullet scar on her lower abdomen, to the calluses on her artist hands, to the feet that, despite everything, were always planted firmly on the ground. I knew her pilgrim soul and her artist’s eye, and her humanist heart, and her genius insight. I knew her as my best friend, as my lover, as my love.

  When I let the soft darkness push my eyelids closed, she was there. Of course she was there. Ready, I knew, to tell me that it was okay, to let me know that my fighting was done, that the pain was over, that I was allowed to finally lie down and rest. Forever rest.

  I reached for her and spoke her name.

  “Junie…”

  And she smiled at me and bent to whisper in my ear.

  She said, Get your fucking ass up, you lazy asshole.

  I blinked my eyes open.

  Okay, not what I was expecting.

  The oily blackness was still there, but it was not absolute. Far above me, leering down at me through the branches of the big tree, was the sun.

  No, there were two of them. That was weird. Two trees also. How odd.

  Joe, whispered Junie, and I swear to God I could feel the cool tips of her fingers stroke my cheek the way she does in the morning when we wake. Joe, get up.

  “I … can’t…” I said, and it came out as a weak whimper.

  You have to.

  “No…”

  Try, she said. Please … you can’t let me down.

  But that wasn’t really what she said. I knew it, even though I tried to lie to myself. It was the Killer in me who heard her real words. Heard and understood.

  What she said was, You can’t let them win.

  Tears filled my eyes.

  I forced my right hand to move, to rise from the dirt where it lay, to slap like a dead mackerel against the shoulder of the dead thing that was killing me, to find a grip, to push.

  Two WarDogs burst from the shadowy wall of the forest as I raised my gun.

  And then something shot past me, coming in from the left, attacking the left-hand WarDog from the side. A white missile that struck the big machine with terrible force and knocked it over.

  No. Not a missile.
/>   “Ghost!”

  I yelled out his name even as I opened fire on the second machine. I shoved the dead WarDog off of me and struggled to my feet, sick and dizzy.

  “Ghost,” I yelled. “Rip, rip, rip.”

  He knew that command and knew it well. We had trained for a hundred different scenarios—of hunting and searching, of pursuit and escape, of nonviolent control and combat slaughter. Rip meant to let the wolf that lives inside the dog have its way, to take the throat and tear away the life. It worked on humans, and when I saw Ghost clamp his titanium teeth on the bundle of coaxial cables I knew it would work on these robots. Sparks flew and Ghost yelped, but he kept tearing.

  I staggered and dropped to my knees but I fired, and I think falling saved my life as a burst of bullets punched through the air inches from my head. I fired and fired, shooting wildly but hitting it over and over. And then Ghost was up and running toward it, desperate to save me, desperate to kill. The WarDog tried to turn, to adjust its angle of fire, but it was too late. I’d damaged it, and Ghost tore its throat out.

  I sat back and looked down at my gun. The slide was locked back, and I had no more magazines. Ghost turned from the second WarDog and snarled. Beyond him three more were emerging from the woods. The day had suddenly gotten weirdly bright except around the edges, and there was too much noise in the air. I saw the pigeon from before go flying past me, and in a daze I looked up at it and saw it vanish against the bulk of a much larger bird. A bird that roared. A bird that spat fire.

  At the edge of the field the three WarDogs vanished inside a ball of burning fire as Bird Dog swept toward them, guns and rockets raining hell down on the beasts.

  I lay back on the grass and felt Ghost’s hot, rough tongue licking my face.

  A voice said, “Joe … Joe!”

  And then Rudy was bending over me. And Bird Dog. Other people, too, but I was having trouble with names. I grabbed Rudy’s shirt, pulled him close, whispered into his ear.

  “Laptop,” I wheezed. “Control codes. WarDogs. Uplink.”

  At least that’s what I think I said. Those were the words in my head, but the world was getting swimmy, and soon it went away entirely.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO

  THE BAIN ESTATE

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  TUESDAY, MAY 2, 12:51 PM

  Top Sims watched the dogs fall. They just fell.

  There were eleven of them still able to fight. Eleven monsters and not enough bullets to kill them. Brick was hurt. Two of his people were down, dead or badly hurt. Top could see Lydia Rose leaning against the Junkyard, her face singed, hair wild, one arm hanging limp, blood running from her ears. She saw Top and smiled that dazzling smile of hers.

  He nodded.

  Tracy Cole and Bunny stood looking down at one of the WarDogs.

  “What … what happened to them?” asked Cole.

  Bug answered her, answered them all, speaking through the team channel via the earbuds. He told them about the control code for the WarDogs. It also worked on the remaining bomb drones. Thousands of them all over the world simply stopped, their motors shutting down.

  Dead.

  Like so many good people.

  Like so many bad people.

  Top saw Bunny raise his head and look past him toward the house. The roof was smoking and flames were licking at the windows. A figure stood in the shattered front doorway, clothes torn and covered with blood and dirt. A big, blocky man who stood in the doorway of a burning house, polishing his glasses on a swatch of cloth torn from a silk robe. Inside the house, there were small explosions.

  Mr. Church put on his glasses and walked across the lawn. He limped slightly and there were cuts on his face. He made no comment at all as he walked past the fallen WarDogs. Church stopped in front of Top. They exchanged a long, silent moment. Then Top stood slowly to attention. So did Bunny. So did Cole. They all saluted him.

  Church smiled. “We don’t do that in the DMS,” he said, but he returned the salute anyway. He nodded to them, and they watched him walk over to where Brick Anderson was tending the wounded.

  EPILOGUE

  1.

  I sat on a picnic table and watched another wave of helicopters come in above the trees. Ghost lay on his side next to me, wrapped in field dressings, panting, weak. Alive. Rudy came out of a tent with two cups of coffee, handed me one, and sat down. I sipped the coffee.

  “Tastes like horse piss,” I said.

  “And you’d know that how?” he asked.

  I drank some more.

  Everything hurt. Inside and out. But, despite what Rudy promised would be a mild concussion, some cracked ribs, a sprained wrist, and more cuts than I can count, he said I was fine.

  “Fine” being a relative term.

  The helos touched down in the field and troops deployed. National Guard and DMS. Another fifty or sixty of them to add to the two hundred already on the ground. The only way you could tell the difference between our people and the Guard was that the DMS agents were in Hammer Suits and the Guardsmen all wore white hazmat gear.

  All along one side of the camp’s main road were rows of bodies under sheets. Every single one of the scientists, every soldier with chips, every staff member. Those who hadn’t killed one another had been killed by the WarDogs. This was the world being brutally efficient.

  I saw three figures climb down from one of the choppers. Two men, one taller than the other, and a woman. They spotted me and came running. Top and Bunny, and with them was a battered, bloody, smiling Tracy Cole.

  Also alive.

  Rudy put a hand on my shoulder.

  I closed my eyes.

  2.

  The cleanup is going to take years. Maybe a lot of years. That’s scary, but there are no shortcuts. After all, it took Zephyr Bain and her people years to set it all up.

  MindReader had absorbed all of Calpurnia’s operating systems, all of her data. We now had to manage it, coordinating with governments that don’t like us, with tribal areas, in the face of regional hatreds and class wars. We had to force a mutual cooperation or face a mutual destruction. There’s a civics lesson in there somewhere.

  At first we didn’t know how big the operation was until Bug began dissecting Calpurnia’s data. This was massive, multinational, multigenerational, with tendrils digging down into the soil of the past. Zephyr Bain was an apprentice of the evilest, most corrupt, most destructive people I have ever met or even heard about.

  “What happened to her?” I asked Rudy. “Was she born bad? Was she crazy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If Nicodemus—or John the Revelator—was mentoring her since she was six, then did the kid ever have a chance to become anyone other than the maniac she turned out to be?”

  He sipped his bad coffee. “It’s not that simple.”

  Of course it wasn’t, and the truth might be so elusive we’d never catch it. Sometimes it is. Which sucks.

  We went back to the DMS, and we lived inside the wasp nest of politics and culture shock that was the aftermath of this thing. We had to dig deep and take another look at the empires of the Seven Kings, the Jakobys, Mother Night, and others. Looking for anything we missed. Looking for seeds of hate buried in the collective soil of our global community. At least now we had a new and far more powerful MindReader to help. Unlike when we dismantled those other organizations, though, Calpurnia had given us the names and details of every single person who worked for Zephyr. The guilty, the questionable, and the innocent patsies. We had them all. Aunt Sallie said that this was going to create an entirely new kind of law, both prosecutorial and defensive. Whatever. Not my thing. I’ll read about it in the papers. Or maybe they’ll make a movie.

  I had bigger fish to fry.

  3.

  The death toll for Havoc could have reached four billion.

  The actual number of people who died was 41,811. Some idiots on the news tried to spin that as a victory, saying that the world got lucky.
That God’s mercy was felt. Blah-blah-blah.

  I want to punch them. I want to knock their caps out and blacken their eyes and drag them by the hair to the funerals, to the mass graves, to the houses of families all over who are sitting in silent homes, clutching their grief because it is all they have left of their loved ones.

  Forty-one thousand people died. Whole families, whole towns.

  Three and a half billion people were infected and required some level of medical attention, monitoring, and care. The cleanup will cost five trillion dollars.

  Lucky?

  Go fuck yourself.

  Mercy?

  Where?

  4.

  What happened to Nicodemus?

  Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve tried many times to get a straight answer out of Church, but he won’t be pinned down. All he’ll say is “We won.”

  Which isn’t really an answer, is it?

  5.

  Bug’s gotten very weird on us.

  Not because he’s the hero of this thing—which he unquestionably is. No, I think the knowledge that computer consciousness is a reality has him freaked. He spends absurd amounts of time writing code for Q1 that no one else ever gets to see.

  One time I said that it was kind of sad that Calpurnia was actually dead. He looked at me very funny and smiled. Just a little. But he didn’t say anything.

  6.

  As for the DMS?

  We’re back, baby. With MindReader more powerful than ever, we’ve been racking up one win after another. Echo Team is still shy of warm bodies, but there are a couple of cops Cole recommended. Pete Smith and Brenden Tate. Standup guys, and so far they’re kicking ass in training. Just need a new sniper and we’ll be back to operational strength. Though, Sam tells me that Duffy is one hell of a shot, so maybe all our scouting is done.

  Lydia Rose is back to work. She has some scars to brag about and her arm is out of the cast. It’s possible that I have the toughest secretary in the free world.

  Junie is home. Rudy is home with Circe and the baby.

  Oh, and somehow Banshee, Rudy’s dog, is pregnant. Not sure how that happened, but I have a bad feeling some of the pups are going to have white fur. Lilith, Violin, and Circe will probably want to kill me, but what the hell.