Cadaver Dog (12 page)

Murder watched everyone escape the rock slide, his head cocked to one side as if he were seeing monkeys try to build an airplane.

“Oh, shut up,” Angie said. She took one of his paws and checked his pads for signs of scratches. They weren’t cracked, but they were dusty. Angie wished she had some water to wipe the dust off. She also wished she had some water for her throat, which felt like it was covered in dust. She guessed that the smoke in the air was compounding the problem, but there was nothing she could do about it on the top of a mountain pass. Maybe if they passed a mountain stream, or more likely, old water bottles or coke cans. In the wild, even crossing backcountry, she knew she was more likely to find liquid from trash than from a pond or stream. Millions of backpackers tended to leave their mark.

As soon as the others got off the rock slide, Murder’s tail began wagging eagerly with anticipation of continuing the hunt. She gave him the command, and he ran off into the underbrush. Then he came back and showed them the trail.

Murder turned to his right, coming down the near side of the pass. Farther down the mountain, like ghosts in the dark, Angie saw signs of civilization. Little lights like will-o’-the-wisps appeared in the darkness below them. The going down was much easier at this point because the ground was soft, but this didn’t comfort Angie much. Every step brought her closer to the zombie.

“Oh, thank God,” Ernest said when they came out onto macadam, the first tangible mark of civilization in more than a day. Ernest kneeled down and kissed the little two-lane highway. “Now I just need a hotel and a double cheeseburger and I will never complain about anything again.”

“I think this is where the Wolf should take over,” Angie said. “Murder had issues with roads the last time I ran him.”

Ernest nodded and turned on the Wolf’s Active Tracking System. The robot spun around in circles for a minute (long enough for Angie to briefly question whether or not Murder had taken them off the trail).

“Why do they call it the Wolf?” Angie asked Rawls. “Does it stand for something?”

Rawls shrugged. “They stopped using acronyms about ten or twenty years ago. I think they call it the Wolf because of its tracking capabilities and people say it looks kind of like a wolf, but if you ask me, it looks like a big headless donkey.”

Angie chuckled as the robot walked down the road. For the first time, she realized she was thankful for the damn thing. It handled the road much better than Murder. As a team, they worked well together. If the rest of the world could be convinced of that, maybe there was something to the teams working in tandem rather than against each other; they might have a good solution to the zombie problem. The search party followed the robot around a bend and came across a convenience store with a gas station.

Ernest handed the tablet to Rawls and jogged to the store. Fire trucks and 4x4s were the only vehicles in the parking lot. A few wildland firefighters stood around eating sandwiches and drinking water. They were covered in sweat and soot and red Rockies dust.

As Rawls and Angie and Murder walked up to the store with the Wolf, the crew stopped lunching to watch the strange party. It wasn’t every day you saw three people followed by a dog holding a stuffed chicken in its mouth, followed by a robot. Angie could care less. She had not realized how parched her throat was until she saw the water bottles in the hands of the firefighters. Her throat constricted reactively and her whole body begged for water. When they walked inside, they found Ernest already sucking down a bottle of H
2
O. Beef jerky and a fried pie were stuffed in his pockets.

Before the store clerk could say “Dogs aren’t allowed here,” Angie barked, “Service dog.” The clerk didn’t question her anymore. He had the dreary, hazy look of a man who was just waiting for the late shift to be done or his job to be evacuated. Angie grabbed a couple of water bottles and a honey bun and met Rawls and Ernest.

“The readings were really strong,” Rawls said. “I think we may be close.”

“Did you check the fluctuations, though?” Ernest said. “I saw what you saw, but the levels are all over the place. Up high, down low. I think something is screwing with it.”

“Could be the road. Roads can eat up scent in some areas and soak it in others,” Angie suggested while she twisted open a squeeze bottle and squirted water into her hand for Murder to drink. He lapped up the liquid until a small puddle formed on the laminate. He sat down in the water, but continued to nudge Angie for more.

“I’m sorry you had to get this thirsty, boy,” Angie said and opened another bottle and squeezed it into her hand. While she watered her dog, she half-listened to Rawls and Ernest talk shop about the robot. She’d never understood electronics and schematics and things like that.

Once Murder finished drinking, she emptied another bottle down her throat, too. Angie handed the clerk some cash, and they walked outside. Firefighters sat on the ground or leaned against the store with their weary legs relaxed and dirty hands holding sandwiches and water bottles.

One of the firefighters raised his hand to them. The wrinkles in his long fingers stood out because of the soot and grime worked into them. To Angie, he looked like the human doppelganger to a Muppet band member, the one with the shaggy moustache and big eyebrows.

“Y’all searching for that girl, aintcha?” he asked in the loose drawl of a man from the deep South. Angie thought of Southern rock bands from the 70s, and again of that one Muppet. What was his name? Bopper? Bipper? She realized she had to stop drilling down that well when it dawned on her that she hadn’t answered him yet.

“We were,” Ernest said for her, “but the search was called off for up here.”

“That’s old news, brother,” the firefighter said. “We were just watching that report. The one about the ongoing search for the little girl abducted by a zombie. That girl’s mama’s been all over television pleadin’ for somebody to find her. They said the search was now up here, too. That’s y’all, I’m guessin’.”

Ernest nodded. “Not three hours ago we were told to cease operations.”

The man smiled. His skin crinkled like wrapping paper. “The communications mill goes around and around, don’t it? It’s always like that at an incident. Who said this, who said that.”

The firefighter brushed his hands off on his pants, then Ernest and Rawls helped the man to his feet. His brush coat was tied around his waist. He collected his gloves and hard hat, and held his hand out to Angie’s dog.

From behind his chicken, Murder sniffed the firefighter’s fingers for any leftover sandwich.

“Nice dog. What breed is he?”

“Awesomeness.”

“I used to have one of them, too.” He laughed. “Let me show you where we’re operating.”

He took them to the fire truck, a modified Freightliner, and pulled up an electronic map on the slide-out monitor on the side of the truck. He showed them the escape routes and camps being used to fight fires in the area.

“Shit,” Angie said. “The zombie’s taking us down into the fire.”

“Well then, be careful. You may have hunted lots of things, but you ain’t never tangled with a beast until you’ve tangled with a wildfire. Always keep three corners of escape around you. If you get too close, pull out. Don’t worry about the zombie. That damned thing won’t stick around there much longer. Even hell’s too hot for it.”

“Not unless it’s already buried the girl and is leading us away from the lair.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I understand,” the firefighter said.

“There is a theory that abductees are being used as food for larvae of the crimson wasp.”

The firefighter took a minute to absorb the blow Angie had dealt him. He was a hardened firefighter, a man who had fought hundreds, if not thousands of battles with the red-bellied beast. He had probably seen animals trapped and incinerated, the suffering of people who had lost their homes to the fires. He might have seen people die in the flames, even wildland firefighters. But he‘d surely never heard anything like this before.

Ernest was getting that sickened look again. “It’s just a theory,” Angie told them. “It hasn’t been proven.”

“That’s one fucked up theory,” Rawls said.

The firefighter made a choking sound in his throat, then walked to the other side of the truck, wiggling his finger at them to follow him. He opened a compartment on the side of the truck and handed each one of them a firefighter’s outfit with brush coat, pants, goggles, and hard hat. He put water bottles in their packs then handed Angie a radio as he took her hat, “for safekeeping.”

“We don’t need one, actually,” Ernest said. “The radios we’ve been using aren’t functioning properly out here.”

“These are better. We’re on channel 58.2. You find that little girl, and you call us. My name is Lloyd. We’ll come get you wherever you are. Just bring that little girl back, though.”

Angie nodded and shook the man’s hand.

“You need to go now. If the zombie is heading toward the fire, it may have dropped the girl already.”

As they left the safety of the convenience store with its nest of firefighters, Angie couldn’t help but notice the smoke thickening in the air. She could smell the heat and ash on her tongue. She wondered how long ago Murder had first begun to taste it.

As the Wolf led them along the winding mountain road, Angie scratched her head (the hard hat felt uncomfortable and awkward, and she wished they could develop a more-hat-like version of a hard hat). She thought about her dog’s nose. It was being used much more than she ever intended this early in Murder’s career. She had found that most dogs had a limited optimum working time before their affectivity tapered off, much like people. This was one area where the Wolf had a definite advantage over Murder, she hated to concede.

She also wondered about the dryness of the air and its effect on the scent. Right now, the smoke was keeping the scent low to the ground, like a lid on a giant pan. With nowhere to go, it stayed in place. But at a certain point, the heat would burn the scent as easily as it burned everything else. She didn’t want to think what she’d have to tell people like Lloyd when that happened.

“Floyd Pepper!” she shouted.

Ernest didn’t look back, but Rawls raised his eyebrow.

“The Muppet. That firefighter, Lloyd, looks just like the Muppet. You know, the one with no eyes and the Sgt. Pepper outfit.”

“Oookay,” Rawls said with suspicion, not sure what she was driving at.

She gave her impression of the Muppet’s laugh. No light bulb brightened over Rawls’ head. “Never mind.”

After half an hour of following the Wolf, Angie looked around and said, “Haven’t we been here before?”

She recognized a rock formation that seemed very similar to one they had passed before.

“We’re not lost,” Ernest said.

“Check your maps. I will check the trail up ahead for tracks. If we see our footprints, then we’ve been here before.”

At the same time that everyone stopped, Murder whined to Angie. He wasn’t the whining kind of dog, but he was also under a lot more stress than most dogs. To Murder, this may have all just been the greatest version of Capture the Flag ever invented (except with a zombie as the flag), but that still took its toll. She decided to stop and assess his health after she verified the tracks.

As she walked ahead of the Wolf, Murder barked at her. It was a loud, sharp bark. Angie sensed tension in it. Maybe their closeness to the fires was getting to him. Murder was not a veteran dog yet, though he was surely proving his worth. It was possible the wildfire was (for good reason) bothering him.

“Calm down, Murder. It’s just a wilderness fire.” The words sounded strange in her head, but how often had she said something strange to a dog? As in,
let’s go find a dead guy,
or
let’s go track a zombie?

Angie kneeled down to examine the tracks. She started by studying the crushed leaves and pine needles under an incandescent flashlight. LEDs threw too much light on the tracks to read them easily, kind of like white-washing an image. The devil was in the shadows.

Murder barked again from behind his chicken.

Angie looked up from the trail to glare at him for misbehaving. His message had been received, and he needed to get used to fires. It wasn’t like this would be the last forest fire in Colorado.

She wondered if she had unintentionally conditioned a response in Murder when he dragged her away from the fire that had almost engulfed the Wolf. She had thanked him effusively. Maybe too effusively.

As she considered this, a shadow moved in the darkness, and she got that sinking feeling in her stomach. She couldn’t tell if there were two shadows but she hoped there were.

“Zombie!” Angie yelled as she jumped to her feet. The sound came dry out of her mouth, so she shouted again. While she yelled, Murder charged into the night. She chased him, hoping Ernest and Rawls were behind her.

In front of Angie, the dark silhouette of a bride ran, leaping over rocks and sidestepping fallen branches. Angie was amazed at how well the creature could run for an undead corpse. Its gait had a hobbling effect, like the legs didn’t quite go where they should, and the upper torso swayed like a pendulum. But it did this all so swiftly, it was able to stay upright. Angie thought of a toddler, still learning to control its faculties. Somewhere on the back of the undead woman’s head, Angie knew a wasp was half-implanted to her brain. The thought of that long stinger protruding through the base of the skull and into the brain made Angie shiver despite the heat.