Cadaver Dog (3 page)

“Mind your hat,” Dr. Saracen saidinside the lab.

Angie did not quite hear him. She was taking a deep breath and steadying herself against what she was about to experience. As she took a few steps forward and the outer doors shut behind her, a set of fans blew her hat off. She picked it up and pushed through the second set of doors, entering the nightmare room. The hermetically-sealed doors puckered shut like the light going out in the world so all the bad things could come out.

The Invasive Entomology Studies Lab was similar to an insect house at a zoo, except where the insect house was mostly set up to amaze and entertain viewers, the IESL was designed to store the worst bugs imaginable. Just walking into the room and being surrounded by all those bugs in their cages made Angie clench her fists and hold her arms close.

The room was covered with wall-to-wall plastic containers. Each container held a different crawling or flying nightmare. Large wolf spiders, fire ants, mantises, and bees and hornets that flitted their wings at Angie. Most of the containers were filled with wasps. Monster-headed, big-bodied, sinister-eyed black and yellow wasps. It took a special kind of person to not run screaming out of the lab. It took an even more special kind of person to work there eight hours a day.

Dr. Saracen was that special kind of person, an Alice Cooper of scientists. He wore thick, black-rimmed glasses and a surgeon’s cap with flaming tongues more commonly found on 1950s hot rods. The Harley Davidson Shovelhead in the parking lot belonged to him.

“Good morning,” Dr. Saracen said. “Would you like some coffee? I bought it at Starbucks.”

Angie reached for the coffee the way backpackers reach for a burger or Coke after a few days in the wilderness. The object was real and familiar and grounded her in an otherwise untethered reality. “You know how to bribe me, Henry. You really know.”

“You’ve been up all night and a good portion of the morning. You deserve a break, as the jingle goes, but I wanted to show you the raison d’etre for your escapades before you went to sleep.”

Dr. Saracen led Angie to a plastic see-through container. In it was the head of the zombie she had encountered earlier that morning. Half the skull was missing. Briefly, Angie remembered the officer’s shot that had removed the other side of its face.

“Gee, for me? You shouldn’t have, Henry.”

Something stirred behind the zombie. Angie knew what it was, and her heart sank. She put her Starbucks down before she dropped it.

“Jesus. It’s still alive?”

“It’s one of the largest insects in the world,” Dr. Saracen said. “Certainly longer than a goliath beetle or giant weta. As far as wasps go, only the tarantula hawk comes close. The giant crimson wasp is almost too large to sit in the palm of your hand, a distinction shared by only a small minority of insects.”

While Angie watched, a bright crimson appendage prodded the hair at the top of the head. A thin red and black insect, almost like a six-inch-long ant with disproportionately long legs, crawled on top of the head and perched there, coldly watching them. At the end of its bulbous abdomen was a long, thin stinger like the harpoon of an alien species. The wasp gently poked and prodded the human head. Angie felt that venomous stinger poking and prodding at the door to her deepest fears, fears that were being wakened from the dark recesses of evolution and returned to her brain.

“You gotta kill that thing,” Angie said. She took a step back.

“It’s no threat to us, Angie.”

“Are you kidding me? Look at the size of its stinger!”

“I want to give it to you, Angie.”

“Give it to me? Have you lost your mind? No way, Henry!” She took a few more steps back, like the final girl in a slasher film who knows what is lurking in the closet or under the bed and decides it is better to turn and run.

Dr. Saracen put a blanket over the case. With the wasp gone, at least visually, Angie breathed out. She didn’t realize she had forgotten to breathe. That wasn’t like her. She worked with dead bodies and lived out alone in the woods. She had dealt with bears and snakes and most things that would make people shit their pants.

“Sorry. I really need some sleep.”

“I know you do. But I’m not a mad scientist, Angie. I have an idea, and I think you can be part of the solution for finding and killing these things.”

“Can I say no?”

“Of course you can.”

Dr. Saracen led her to another plastic cage.

“If there’s another zombie head in there, I’m walking. I don’t care how much coffee you bought me. Your hall of horrors gives me the creeps enough as it is. How do you work here and not get the willies?”

“You always know where you are when it comes to bugs,” Dr. Saracen said. “There are no gray areas. They are a lot like you in that way. You’ve always been pretty straight-forward.”

She didn’t know what to do with a complement from the strange man who worked with wasps, so she smiled politely. “Thanks, I think.”

He pulled out the plastic container and set it on the table. “This is the emerald wasp, ampulex compressa. It is the source of all our woes.”

Dr. Saracen went to an aquarium in the corner of the room and opened a small screen window at the top. Inside lay egg cartons full of cockroaches. He grabbed one roach with a pair of tongs, closed the lid, and took the cockroach back to the cage. He opened a door and dropped the cockroach into the cage.

“The wasp stings the cockroach in the neck, inhibiting its escape reflex. Then it steers it, like a zombie, back to its burrowing hole. The zombified cockroach is complicit the entire time. Once inside, the wasp lays an egg on the cockroach and then leaves.”

“That is disgusting,” Angie said, “And that’s coming from a person who trains dogs to find dead people.”

“You haven’t heard the really heinous part—the most important part. The larvae feed on the cockroach. They live off it for four to five days until they are ready to pupate.”

“I’m going to puke.”

“The cockroach is still alive as the larvae eat it from the inside out.”

“Ew. Ewww. Dr. Saracen? Do you kiss your wife with that mouth?”

“Mrs. Saracen was born with a genetic defect that made her overly sensitive in the lips. I never kiss her there.”

Angie waved her hands in front of her. “I feel like I’ve driven into some strange TMI nightmare. I don’t want to learn anything more from you.”

“It is a nightmare, Angie, and it
is
disgusting, but you have to hear this because people like you and I understand the value of these facts no matter how much we wish we could unlearn them. These things,” and he went back to the cage of the giant crimson wasp “Are essentially supersized emerald wasps. Instead of cockroaches, though, they attach themselves to dead bodies. They sting the heart, causing it to convulse and pump. Then they sting the submandibular gland located at the base of the mouth. The venom reacts with the enzymes there, so that when it bites someone like you, it stings like a hornet’s nest. After all that, they fix their stinger to the cerebellum, and use it to ‘drive’ the corpse. This makes sense because the cerebellum is where body motion, both somatic and automatic, is controlled. But here’s what isn’t being reported:  these wasps don’t lead the dead bodies to their burrowing hole, and they don’t lay eggs in them. We know this because we find the zombies discarded later, with holes in their necks from where the wasp was controlling them.”

“So if not the dead body, then what?”

“It hasn’t been proven yet, but based on the modus operandi of the emerald wasp, we suspect the dead body is being used as a vehicle to catch other people and turn them into pupae food. If that is true, they would be stealing the elderly or preferably children, who are easier to control.”

The image of a little girl with a toothy scar on her face came to Angie. “You got to be kidding me, Henry. Why isn’t anyone reporting on this?”

“It’s an unrealized theory that would panic people unnecessarily. Nobody has found a burrow yet. This is where I think you could help us, Angie. Train a dog to track zombies. You could find the wasps before they take anyone. You could find their burrows.”

“Why not use the robots?”

“Robots are prioritized to catching zombies, and between that and repair, they don’t have time for this kind of work. It may seem otherwise, but the world is still behind the curve on these things.”

Angie thought about the possibilities of what could be found in the wasp’s burrowing hole. “No way. I can’t. You have to know what you can tolerate, and I can tolerate finding people shot in the face or their heads smashed in with shovels or just left out in the woods for a week, but half-eaten people who are still alive with bugs in them? I can’t do that, Henry.”

“If everyone shirked away from the calamity, if nobody charged into the burning building while everyone else was running out, there would be a lot less good in the world. I think that if you stop and think about it, Angie, you know you are the right person for this. And I think you will do it because you now know what we think these bugs are doing to people, and you won’t stand for it.”

Angie thought of the hospital, of Dr. Rivera and his immense gratitude for hunting zombies, and the little eight-year old getting stitches on her face.

“I’m a mean old bitch, Henry. Maybe I don’t think it’s worth it.”

Dr. Saracen stood back and waited a minute while Angie went through the process in her head.

“All my dogs are being used on something.”

“What about Waylon? He’s already the perfect cadaver dog. How hard would it be to go from finding dead bodies to finding dead bodies that move?”

“You don’t want to track the body. You want to track what is unique. For that, I’d rather not use Waylon. It’s not worth the risk of him getting it mixed up in his head. I do have this one dog, but he’s never worked out. I will see what I can do.”

She left the building ten minutes later with a dead wasp in a cardboard box.

Chapter Two

Angie lived at the end of a dirt road in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Her house was a tan brick home with an attached carport. It was designed simply, with little thought to “curbside appeal.” Angie’s neglect of the foundation problems and cobwebs dangling from the ceiling did nothing to improve the overall look of the house.

Angie woke in her bed, still in the same jeans and tank top from the day before. She threw her arm up to block the bright sun and wished she’d had enough strength to close the blinds before she flung herself into bed.

The soft sound of a spy or burglar going through her trash as quietly as possible summoned her from bed. She stumbled out of the bedroom and found a line of wrappers and shredded paper napkins drawn from a toppled trash can. Waylon had been digging through her trash can as expertly as an archaeologist recovering a lost artifact. He had licked the inside of a metallic burger wrapper until he buffed it to a nice, glossy sheen.

“Waylon, cut it out.” Angie grabbed the wrapper and stuffed it back deep into the can. Waylon wagged his tail hopefully. She pulled on her boots and called him to the door as she went outside. Waylon followed her happily out to the barn. As she approached the barn, a chorus of barks rang out.

“I’m coming, boys!” she shouted. “Sorry I’m late with breakfast. Mama had a long night.”

She opened the doors. Inside were twelve kennels. Two of the cages were empty. She put Waylon back in his kennel, then gathered the food bowls and took them to the barn kitchen. Each dog got two scoops of chow and a vitamin. Once they were fed, she went and made herself some coffee and scrambled eggs.

All afternoon she worked with the dogs. She ran some retrieval exercises with a dog named Bama that she was being paid to turn into a certified gun dog. A couple in Colorado City were paying her to obedience train their Golden Retriever, a young and vivacious pup they named Scuba for some unknown reason. Then she did some work with an arson dog she was selling to a fire department in North Dakota. The dog’s name was Skippy. She also trained a forensics dog named Jake for the NYPD. Also for the NYPD were her bomb dogs, Cash and Hank (Waylon’s brothers—the breeder wanted all the littermates to be named for outlaw country stars). Cash and Hank worked in a special warehouse built for training bomb dogs. While the dogs worked in one area, she had a large open pen where the other dogs could relax and play and run around. It was like a small dog park with pools and toys and a few trees. After working the bomb dogs, Angie took a break and logged all their training.

The sun was starting to disappear behind the mountains, and she hadn’t yet had time to work her breeding dogs, two Labradors she was planning to show in a few months. She also had a lot of cleaning up to do after her dogs. Of course, that wasn’t the only thing she was avoiding. The other thing was lying in a cardboard box with her training tools in the warehouse storeroom.

She put her pen down and went to the storeroom where she kept random equipment that didn’t need to be scent-proofed. The box sat on a side shelf where she could not accidentally bump into it or knock it over. She knew what she would find in there, the dead carcass of the giant wasp. But she didn’t want to open it. Even though she knew it was dead (if it was alive, it would have crawled away by now), she hesitated to open the box.

“Don’t be a pussy,” she told herself. “It’s just a dead bug.” She felt silly being this reluctant to open a box with a dead thing in it. How many times had she worked with body parts to train her dogs? She had a whole deep freezer full of human remains. So she had no reason to be so squeamish around a dead bug.

She told herself she was putting on her work gloves because she was handling remains and not because she was holding a box with a giant wasp inside.

She opened the box lid and looked inside. The giant black and red markings of the crimson wasp stared back at her. Angie dropped the box and jumped back. She had to catch her heart in her throat and push it back where it belonged. It was dead, but that didn’t make the wasp any less intimidating. There was something about the markings of a wasp, something that pulled at her and told her to run. She forced her fears down and picked up the box. She took it into the yard and dropped it there. Then she grabbed some treats and went to the barn.

Normally the dogs would begin jumping and barking when Angie entered the barn, but this time they stayed silent, like they could smell the wasp’s scent on her gloves, and they feared it. Some stayed lying down, and a few got up and walked to their door, but most ignored her.

Angie went to the last kennel in the barn. Lying in the kennel was a blue-and-black dog with short hair and folded ears. Scars streaked across the dog’s muzzle like cracks in driftwood. A piece of the left ear was missing, like it had been ripped or bit off. The dog lay there chewing on a stuffed chicken. Long ago the stuffing had been removed from the chicken by the dog, and the toy’s yellow velvet had been transformed to the color of dirt.

“Murder,” she said, and the dog raised its head and cocked it to one side, the stuffed chicken hanging like a dead body in the jaws of a giant dog-monster. Angie opened the door and went inside. She kneeled down beside the mutt (she thought he was part Labrador and maybe Blue Tick, but she was guessing there) and petted his head. Murder pressed his head into Angie’s hand and dipped it so that she could better rub behind his ears.

“I’ve tried you as a gun dog and as a cadaver dog and you wouldn’t take to either. But ever since I found you half-dead on that road, I’ve thought you were meant for something. I think I might have found it.”

She walked out of the kennel, and Murder followed at her side, chicken in mouth.

Once outside, Angie stopped and waited. She had left the open cardboard box in the middle of the grass between the house and the barn and the warehouse. There was nothing she could do here. It was all dog instinct. Either the dog would take to the smell, or he wouldn’t.

Without looking to Angie, Murder dropped the chicken at his feet. He took a few steps forward, then whoofed at the box. He waited a moment, then sniffed the air. The dog looked to Angie for reassurance, but she gave him none. For this part, Murder was on his own.

Murder took another few steps, then paused. His body swayed gently from side to side, like a prize fighter trying to decide how best to take down his opponent. A jab? An uppercut? He gave the air another sniff, then took a few more steps. He was almost on top of the box when one of the other dogs barked from the open pen area. Murder turned his head, then ran to the other dogs and barked his happy reply.

“Shit!” She knew better than to have the other dogs out while she was introducing scent. Working with a wasp was really getting her off her game.

Angie opened the gate to let Murder go play, but he ran back to grab his chicken first.

“Of course,” she teased. “Can’t go anywhere without your chicken.”

She put up the box and went inside.

The next morning, Angie woke up so early the dark was as thin as the last inch of dirt on a grave. The only sound was the knocking of a woodpecker in the forest behind her home. She left the other dogs in their kennels and started with Murder. She took him, chicken in tow, out into the field where she worked directionals with gun dogs. This time, there would be no distractions. The open box sat in the middle of the field, the lid at its side. Murder dropped his toy beside Angie and entered the area, this time with more confidence. He walked up toward the box, then stopped about three feet away. For a moment he seemed to waiver with what to do next. Just as Angie was about to say something encouraging, Murder turned around and trotted back to her.

Angie’s heart sank. An inexperienced trainer may have tried to force the issue, but Angie knew that a good working dog worked because it enjoyed the job. It was play for him. And if the dog didn’t like what he was smelling now, he wouldn’t like trailing it later. By turning about-face, Murder might as well have been making puking noises and pleading Angie to never take him back. But then the dog did something curious. Murder retrieved his chicken from beside Angie and brought it to the box. He plopped down on the box lid and started chewing on his chicken.

“Good boy,” Angie said, the realization of what the dog was doing dawning on her. Murder perked up when he heard her. His tail thumped on the ground. She handed him a treat, which was greedily inhaled. Murder picked up the chicken and stuck his nose in the box.

“Good boy!” Angie cheered, this time with much more enthusiasm. Success!

She petted Murder all over his blue-and-black hide. The dog spun around on her to get the full effect of the rubdown. Angie spent a few more minutes feeding him treats every time he stuck his nose in the box, then stopped with a really big reward with so much petting that Murder rolled on his belly and opened his mouth, his tongue hanging out.

There might be something here after all
, Angie thought. She was so excited with the breakthrough and the implication of his response, the near-perfect recall, that she could hardly concentrate the rest of the day.

Angie only needed to imprint Murder once more since he had gone through imprinting with human remains and bomb detection and the start was the same for each discipline. First, the dog had to develop its vocabulary. Cadaver dogs had to be able to identify human blood, tissue, and bone. Bomb detection dogs had to learn the different components to make a bomb. (It was a popular misconception that bomb dogs actually detected bombs.)  Every time the dog put its nose over the specific chemical, the dog was rewarded. With wasp-hunting, or “zombie-hunting,” Murder only had the one smell to imprint upon. Once he understood the concept of being rewarded for finding a wasp, he could begin tracking.

Angie started the search phase of Murder’s training by hiding the box behind the corner of the warehouse or behind the trunk of a really thick tree. Murder found them easily, running straight to the box. Then she moved the box out on a path leading into the woods. Each time she placed it off to the right side of the path, and each time Murder found the box, coming back for his chicken. She praised him, then moved the box farther away. After about four attempts, she got what she was hoping for. She placed the box behind a tree on the left side of the path. Murder flew past the box. He spun around, confused as to why the box wasn’t where he thought it should be. Murder stuck his nose in the air, turned around, and went to the box. Then he came sprinting back for his chew toy. He barked as he ran toward her, a brief shout of displeasure because Angie had tricked him.

Angie beamed. Murder was tracking the wasp.

Once Murder knew the game, it was only a matter of extending the game and presenting him with new challenges. In her mind, Angie started to map out a training plan that would slowly introduce new challenges to Murder, concluding with tracking the wasp to buried locations, which were her best determination for what they might encounter in the field. She wished she had a larva to track. That would be a better source material than the wasp, but the whole point to this was that nobody had found giant crimson wasp larvae yet. Hell, almost nobody knew the larvae existed, and even then, they only existed in theory since none had been seen or documented.

Within three to four months, if everything went well, she predicted she could have Murder field-ready. If he learned well, she could have him ready in only two to three months.

She should have known better.

A family had dropped off their dog, a friendly six-month-old bull terrier named Vader, for a three-week intensive obedience training course. The kids, who had brought donuts with them, left their bag of donuts on the outside table by the porch. After they left and Angie put Vader away, she brought out Murder to work in the front yard where the family had walked. The idea was to challenge him with new smells. The trail was short because she was introducing a new challenge. It led across her front yard and to the carport, where the wasp was hiding behind her pickup. But as soon as Angie commanded Murder to go search by saying “Find buzz,” he turned away from working dog to crazy, unhinged dog with a food disorder. Seventy pounds of dog charged directly for the donuts.

Angie yelled after Murder. He leaped up on the table and stuffed his head deep into the bag of donuts. His body jerked rhythmically as he inhaled any leftover donuts.

“Murder! Off!” Angie yelled. The bag of donuts rose in the air and turned from side to side. Murder shook off the bag like a bad cold and galloped up to Angie, grinning with glee. His grin looked maniacal, like a joker hiding a deadly trick. The dog had no evil intentions. He just a lip disfigurement on one side that gave him a sawtooth grin and made him look absolutely diabolical whenever he was overly happy, like he was now with the donuts. She commanded him to sit. He circled her, his butt wagging feverishly, but he did not sit. She waited and glared, her finger pointed to where his butt needed to be resting. Murder circled her again, but this time he rose up and licked Angie’s face like it was covered in icing.

It took every ounce of control she could muster not to laugh. Later, she would pride herself on her stoicism in the face of such disobedience. Right then, though, she screamed her disgruntlement. It was a sound more than anything else. No words were given. None were needed. Murder knew he was wrong, but he didn’t want to admit it.

Murder was a distraction dog. If he had the chance, he would use every opportunity to find food instead of anything else. So Angie pulled back on his wasp training and concentrated on helping him to overcome his distractions.