Cadaver Dog (8 page)

“You can’t fix the world through horse whispering and doggie massage, Dad.”

“Oh? I guess not.”

They unsaddled their horses, then went into his house. It was an old house with no air conditioning and no heating except for the large circular fire built in the middle of the house. A large overhead duct carried the heat to the bedrooms. The coals were little more than dying embers.

“You hungry?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to.”

“Dad, c’mon!”

He pushed his hat back on his forehead. “Angie, you don’t have to be an animal behavior expert to know that something is bothering you. Do you want me to wait until you are ready to tell me, or do you want to tell me?”

She sat down on one of his old chairs. They were thirty or forty years old and felt hard on her butt. “They want me to fail.”

Her father sat down opposite her and folded his hands and waited for her to tell her story.

Angie said, “Animal Control says no dog can track a wasp. They want to use robots, and they want me to use Murder to track wasps just to prove that robots can do it better.”

“Maybe they can do it better.”

“Dad! You’re not helping.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Angie. That’s kind of a crapshoot. I hope they’re paying you.”

“They are.”

Angie didn’t say anything more. Her father waited.

“I wish you’d stop doing that, Dad. I’m not one of your animals.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“Just, I don’t know.”

He moved to the chair next to her and put his arm around his daughter. “I’m in your corner,” he said.

“I know,” she said, and she reached out to hold him.

“And besides, if they really think that a bunch of nuts and bolts are going to easily out-track you and Murder, they are some pretty big fools. They are in for a nice surprise. I’ve seen you and him working. You have a bond, and that’s not something you can easily replicate with an algorithm.”

“Dad, stop.”

“You started this.” He got up and took some hotdogs out of the refrigerator.

“I remember when you were a kid, and I was working cattle in—where was that? Calder?”

“Casper.”

“That’s right. Casper, Wyoming. Had you on your first cutting horse when you were six years old. You decided you were going to walk to Mexico because you heard another ranch hand’s kids talking about how much better Mexico was, even though the kid was too young to know Mexico from Delaware. So you decided to leave in the middle of the night. I’d never been so scared in my life. I had the entire ranch out looking for you. I was convinced you had tried to befriend a bear and gotten killed. But it wasn’t a bear you found. It was puppies. And you came back with these pups from God-knows where in your hands. I was so happy to see you. Then I realized that like the pups, you were covered head-to-toe with fleas.”

“You can’t ever leave that part out?”

“No, ma’am. That’s the punch line. Besides, it says a lot about you and your dedication. I may worry about many things when it comes to you, but these robots? They haven’t got a chance.”

Angie smiled.

“So when you going to find a guy?” her dad teased.

Chapter Six

The first call from Animal Control came at two in the morning. On her way to incident command, she received a second call that the officers had already found and disposed of the zombie. Angie turned her pickup around and went home, but she couldn’t get back to sleep.

The second call was the same.

Angie caught herself staying up late at night, waiting for her cellphone to ring. Crimson wasps, Dr. Saracen had explained, prefer to work at night when the people who would notice them were still asleep. Angie chose “Sympathy for the Devil” for the Animal Control callout number.

A week had gone by since the last callout. Wildfires had finally seemed to flare up in her part of the world. Driving to dog shows she would sometimes pass trucks full of wilderness firefighter hotshots or hear the humming of an air tanker flying to its target to drop a load of fire retardant. At one confirmation show, she made an arrangement to breed her bitch, Lizzy, to a stud in Wyoming. The pairing was a good match. The stud was a champion just like her bitch.

She read up on zombies, learning about swarms and the timeline of the zombie (they can stay “reanimated” up to 120 hours, but usually never made it past 72 before the corpse became useless). She read about the blood transfusion of zombies. Since funeral parlors removed the blood from a body after death, the first objective of a wasp was to put new blood into the body. Hence why zombies went for jugulars and drank blood. Drinking the wrong blood was not a huge concern of the wasp; most blood transfusion health issues became “fatal” to a zombie after the wasp’s 72-hour occupation.

At night she dreamed of shambling bodies lurking outside her home. Because the zombies in her dreams had been drinking the wrong blood type, her nightmares were hunched over like old, diseased trees. The monstrous insects and their undead vehicles were searching for her. Banging on the walls of her house while Angie’s dogs barked from within. One of the damned things always got in. She was never sure how, but she heard it moving in her house. Her dogs ran once the creature entered her bedroom, forcing Angie to lock herself in her bathroom. She waited there in the dark while it tried the knob, then curled its pale fingers under the door space. It disappeared, so she got down on her hands and knees and looked out the door space. A hungry, black and red eye looked back at her from across the space.

Angie woke up covered in sweat. The phone was ringing. Sympathy for the Devil.

She met Animal Control at a storage unit that stood outside of town like an island of light in an ocean of darkness. Typical modified pickup Animal Control vehicles sat in the parking lot, but there was also a white truck, like a delivery truck (
or SWAT truck
, Angie thought). The giant truck stood out like a white buffalo. In the middle of the vehicles stood Steve Rangel, as effervescent as though this was mid-morning and his Rockies had won last night. He waved Angie over.

“So this is the first one, Angie. I can’t wait to see your dog in action. Listen, an hour ago the security guard working the storage unit reported that he saw a zombie on his video feed. It was walking hand-in-hand with another person.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” one of the Animal Control Officers said. He was a young man who looked maybe old enough to have graduated high school.

“We’ve all heard rumors,” Steve Rangel said. “That doesn’t mean we change our tactic. You guys prep the Wolf. Angie, we can set you up right on the oogie-boogie’s trail.”

With Murder in tow, Steve took Angie around the end of the storage units. He pointed to the camera. Said, “The zombie was picked up by a security guard watching a feed from that camera. It walked through here.”

“Direction of travel?”

Steve pointed toward the mountains.

“Of course. Are we sure it was a zombie?”

“Pale dude in a suit with grass in the hair. Camera caught the wasp clutching the backside of his head. Is there anything you need from me?”

“No. I’ll let Murder loose and we’ll see what happens.”

Steve took a few steps back and pulled out his camera phone. Angie stiffened.

“Uh, nobody videos my dog working.”

“Director’s orders, Angie. Sorry.”

Angie checked for wind and lighting, then decided to start Murder from the far side of the units and work toward the point last seen. The scent would blow at Murder once he entered the scent area.

As she moved her dog into the starting position, she said, “Is it on?” When he nodded, she continued, saying “The number one thing you need to know is that if you get in my dog’s way, it invalidates the entire search. Could you stand over there?” She pointed away from where she thought the trail would be. Like a scolded child submitting to the authority of his mother, Steve Rangel stood where she told him. He took a few extra steps to make sure he was not in her way.

Murder did not need Angie’s command to search. He had been pushing against the collar she was holding while she chastised Steve. Murder had already dropped his toy chicken as his nose darted around. Angie noticed absently that the chicken’s white underbelly was turning a nice shade of red. Despite the dog’s enthusiasm, Angie commanded Murder to search anyways, and released her grip on his collar.

Murder pushed forward a few steps, then his nose dropped like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner to the dirt and gravel in front of the storage units. His tail wavered in the air like a Homecoming Queen waving to the crowd from atop a cheap float. Crossing the units, he walked behind Angie. He turned back the opposite direction and moved away from the safe womb of the light and into the dark unknown of the fields.

“He’s giving me a negative,” she told the camera as Murder turned toward the fields, “meaning in this case that the fresher trail is back this way, which we know from the security guard’s video recordings.”

This side of the mountain was full of rocks that pushed out of the ground like the tips of icebergs. The nose at the end of Murder’s scarred muzzle picked around them, searching for scent in the little dirt clumps and grass patches between the rocks. As he made his way up the mountainside, his pace increased. His tail climbed higher and tighter in the air.

He hunched for a second, took a few quick breaths, then launched into the trail. Angie could hear Steve Rangel huffing as he chased after them. For a moment, she thought of how “found footage” his camera must look right now, and it made her giggle inside.

She caught up to Murder as he was turning away from the mountain and back toward the road. She stopped him and put him on lead, then offered him something to drink. He turned his head away from the water bottle and toward the road. When she didn’t react quickly enough, he glowered at her. Angie was taken back. She’d never had a dog glower at her before. She didn’t need a dog translating collar to interpret what he was saying.
Get out of my way and let me do my job!

She stayed out of Murder’s way. The blue and black dog with part of an ear missing walked out onto the macadam and turned around. He sniffed the air, then came back to her. Angie got a sinking feeling in her gut. They hadn’t worked a road yet. For an experienced dog, a road was no problem. The dog worked the scent on the sides almost automatically. But new scenting dogs, like Murder, wanted the scent to be in the middle of the street, which it never was.

Even Steve Rangel noticed the dog’s bewilderment.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Shut up!” she said. “He’s just working this out.”

“Working what out?”

“He’s never run on an asphalt road before. I told the Director he still needed more training.”

She kneeled down and hoped that Murder would pick up on the technique. On camera was not the time to learn.

“C’mon, boy. You can do it,” she told Murder and gave him a good couple of hearty pats on his ribs. She took him down the road ten yards and set him up there. Murder sniffed around, then looked to Angie for help. She did the same thing in the other three corners of the road. Murder wasn’t picking it up. He was getting the alien abduction look—when the dog looks at the sky as if the scent may be drifting up there as if aliens had abducted the source and ascended into the heavens with it. It was a sign of a done dog.

“I’m going to take him back and have him run it again.”

“Okay, Angie.” Steve waited for her to leave before calling in the Wolf team.

As Angie escorted Murder back to the storage units, the blue-and-black dog with a piece of ear missing stopped and stiffened, then backpedaled off the trail. He moved between Angie and some unknown threat, pushing her off the trail, too. Angie stopped and tried to aim her flashlight on what was bothering Murder. Shadows were moving in the dark space between the end of the storage unit lights and the beam of her flashlight. A tiny pale light floated toward them. Then Angie heard it. Click-clacking, almost like typewriter strikes or a spindle in a treadmill that keeps knocking into something. The noise came closer, and Murder growled.

“Easy, Murder,” Angie told him.

Then one of the young techs emerged from darkness. He was skinny and full of the confidence of a recent college graduate. He held a tablet; its reflection on his face had been the small floating light she had seen. He was using the tablet to monitor the robot, one of the department’s new Wolfs. Even in the dark there was no mistaking the size of the robot. The Wolf was like an armored Swiss Mountain Dog, or a small warhorse from medieval times. Its polished hull gleaned even in the night. The beast was headless except for small cameras mounted inside a frame where its neck would sit. A stiff carriage wrapped over plastic siding that protected its innards from damage. The company logo for Mueller Engineering had been painted to the side of the robot, along with a picture of an angry wolf’s head biting down on a zombie between its teeth.

Underneath this massive carriage, four oddly equine legs supported the Wolf. Those jittery legs constantly punched the ground, like a newborn colt so unsure of the world that it puts its feet everywhere, just to make certain not to miss anything. Murder barked at the robot, instigating the guard’s question of “will he bite?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Angie said. Because how could a dog owner know if their dog was going to bite a robot? It shouldn’t, but neither she nor the dog had ever encountered a robot Wolf before.

Having his answer, the tech pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose and returned his study to the robot’s readings on the tablet. In fact, he was paying so little attention to the world around him that he tripped on a rock and nearly fell face-forward into the ground. He righted himself by flailing his arms in large pinwheels. He looked back to see if Angie was going to laugh. She suddenly found a lot of interest in all the nothing that Murder was doing. She grinned at Murder, who was grinning back at her.

Angie breaked Murder and handed him his toy chicken. He rolled it in his mouth till he found the holding spot that he liked, then they both followed the robot down the path they had already been tracking. Steve was waiting for the Wolf at the road. The robot spun in two directions on the pavement, then paused a moment.

“The Wolf is compiling the trace amounts of scent and comparing them to the wasp’s signature,” the Wolf handler told Steve, who was still videotaping with his camera. The handler’s eyebrows arched. “And we have a direction.”

The Wolf led them down the road away from the storage units. Steve asked Angie, “Could you take point and ensure that no cars crash into our ten million dollar robot?”

While Angie and Murder ran ahead of the machine to watch for cars, the Wolf marched one hundred yards down the macadam at a brisk pace. When it came to a t-intersection in the road, the robot stopped and ran through its procedure again. This time, it turned in all four directions, then paused to process the information.

Once it had located the scent’s direction with 100% accuracy (a self-auditing algorithm determined the accuracy), the Wolf turned toward the intersecting road. The road led along a forested ridge. Bighorn sheep watched them suspiciously from the rocky ledges. They jumped fearfully along the rocks only when the Wolf started its brisk march in their direction. Angie and Murder again took point, making sure to stay ahead of the robot.

Under the cover of the trees, Murder began to get excited again. He seemed to walk with more purpose and shine. Angie figured he was picking up scent from the trail again, and said so to Steve and the tech, who just shrugged. Why would they care? As far as they were concerned, the robot had proved itself better than the dog. Whether the dog reacted to anything did not matter.

“Hang tight,” she told Murder and kept him at her side. Another fifty yards up the ridge, and they crested a hill.

“The scent is getting stronger,” the handler announced as he reviewed the Wolf’s readings. “We should be almost on top of it.”

Angie came over the side of the hill. At the bottom of the hill was a Jeep Wrangler. Debris had exploded all over the ditch. The Jeep had swerved in its lane and collided with a tree. Two bodies hung limply to the side between the Jeep and the tree. Angie gasped, then ran down the hill, not waiting for Animal Control, the robot, or even her dog.

As she checked the driver’s pulse, he coughed. There was blood up and down the man’s body. He looked at Angie as if she were a shadow behind glass bricks.