Dogs (31 page)
Authors: Nancy Kress
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Medical, #General, #Science Fiction, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Fiction
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At just after midnight, Ellie Caine sat slumped in a chair in her living room. On her lap rested Music's rawhide bone. Ellie had sat in the same position for hours, not eating or sleeping. What was the point? She was too depressed to even turn on the TV.
Butterfly was dead, the other three greyhounds lost to her. Locked up. Not deadâif they were dead, Ellie would know. In her heart she'd know.
She fingered the rawhide bone. Other toys littered the floor: Song's favorite ball, a stuffed alligator that Butterfly loved. Every time she looked at them, Ellie felt like crying all over again, but she had no tears left.
When the phone rang, Ellie jumped. Few people ever called her, usually just telemarketers, and not at midnight. Whoâ¦
“Ellie Caine? Is this Ellie Caine?”
“Yes.”
“Ellie, my name is Jenna, you don't know me. I got your name from Larry Campos at the Greyhound Rescue League in Frederick. He said you adopted four greyhounds and are really zealous for the League.”
“Yes⦔
“Well, I live in Tyler, like you, and I have dogs I love.
Had
dogs. Jess Langstrom took my English setters last week and they were
not
infected. Now we have this awful announcement from the White House andâ”
“What announcement? What are you talking about?”
“You haven't had the TV on?”
“No!”
Jenna said, “The president has ordered all the confiscated dogs in Tyler killedâsick and well dogs!âand the town evacuated, starting tomorrow. Because of that dog that crashed through a window and attacked a little boy.”
Ellie hadn't heard about that either, but her mind barely registered it. All the dogs in Tyler killed! All!
“Some of us won't permit that,” Jenna said, her voice hardening. “Our pets aren't infected and we won't let them be murdered. Even the infected dogs shouldn't die because the CDC might come up with a cure. So we. Will. Not. Permit. This.”
Ellie stood very still, clutching the phone. A strange emotion leapt through her. Hope.
“What are you going to do?”
“Are you with us?”
“Yes! Oh, yes!”
“Larry vouched for you. Our organization is still pretty loose, and we don't have much time, but we're going to free our dogs. Do you own a gun?”
“No. But I can shoot.” Her father had shown her once, fifteen years ago, the one time he'd paid any attention to her at all. Surely she could remember what he'd demonstrated.
“Good. Stay at home all day tomorrow and I'll call again with instructions. We're still getting our plans together. But I can tell you thisâno uninfected dog in Tyler is going to die. Not one. Bye for now.”
Ellie stood blinking in the middle of her kitchen. So much to take in. There would be danger, and she had never been particularly brave. But for Song and Chimes and Music, she could dare anything, even take on the government. And it wasn't like the government had ever done all that much for her. It hadn't protected her against her father or ever helped her find a job or sent her checks like those welfare deadbeats. Ellie Caine had always been on her own, and the greyhounds had given her all the love and comfort she ever got. She could do whatever was necessary to save them.
In her mind she rehearsed the steps to load, cock, and aim a gun.
Steve Harper stared at his TV. It was barely six in the morning, but he couldn't sleep. He'd spent the night in his recliner, dozing fitfully, only to wake from nightmares about Davey.
The brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva...
Davey's toys spilled from the toy box in the corner; Steve hadn't been able to bring himself to remove them. Plastic stacking rings, red and blue and yellow. The dump truck. A stuffed pig. The miniature plastic baseball bat.
Whatever was on TV wasn't making enough distracting noise. Steve flipped through channels, coming to CNN. “âin Tyler, Maryland. Scott Lurie, FEMA director, announced last night that all dogs in Tyler will be euthanized in an attempt to control the canine plague. Many consider this a long-overdue move toâ”
Damn right! Steve sat up straighter and clenched his fists. If they'd done that immediately, maybe more people wouldn't have died the way Davey did. Wusses. But at least they were doing it now.
“âemergency evacuation from Tyler. Volunteers from Tyler itself will help coordinate the evacuation. FEMA said it would provide buses for those unable toâ”
An evacuation. That made sense. And they needed volunteers, probably to make sure no half-assed idiot tried to smuggle a dog out of town in their luggage. Steve could do that. And he fucking sure needed to do something.
Since DiBella had put him on temporary suspension, the only constructive thing he'd done was shoot that dog on Herlinger Street right out from under Jess Langstrom. Putting a bullet in at least one canine killer had been satisfying, but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough, to discharge his rage or grief. He needed to do
something
.
Just let anybody try to get a fucking dog past
his
checkpoint.
Del heard the announcement on the radio while he fixed Brenda's breakfast. He felt a pang for Folly, sweet little dog that she was. But the government had to think about everybody, had to look at the big picture. And maybe leaving Tyler would be for the best for him and Brenda, too. As long as they could switch Brenda's chemo to Frederickâand the doctor said just yesterday that they couldâit might be better to be there with Chrissy. Their daughter always cheered up Del and kept Brenda interested in scrapbooking and all those other crafts they both liked. Yes, an evacuation was a good idea.
He was glad the government was finally bringing the crisis to a close.
Tessa, stiff and aching, woke on the floor of Ebenfield's cabin. Slowly she stood, stretching her sore body. Ebenfield's scabrous smell still hung in the small space. In the corner, the puppies whined in their box.
Outside, all was quiet.
She climbed onto the bed and untacked one corner of the blanket over the window. Bright sunlight struck her eyes; the window faced south, the only direction not thickly covered with pines. It was at least midmorning. Overnight the cold front had passed and it was maybe forty degrees out there, maybe more. Water dripped from pine boughs. Ebenfield's car was pulled up under trees about thirty feet from the cabin, but open space lay between. The keys were either in his car or in a pocket on his mangled body. Tessa couldn't see any of the dogsâhad they run off?
She heated water, mashed it into dry dog food, and put the mixture in the box. The puppies ate it eagerly. After she heated and ate a can of stew, she combed the cabin, inch by inch, looking for papers, CD-ROMs, memory stick, anything that Ebenfield might have hidden and Ruzbihan's men missed. Nothing.
Then she had to pee. The cabin had no chemical toilet; Ebenfield must have gone outside. Since that wasn't an option until she was sure where the dogs were, Tessa used a corner of the cabin, grimacing. As she finished, she climbed on the bed and peeked outside.
Two of the dogs stood between her and the car, facing the cabin window. Against the white snow their dark bodies bulked even larger than she remembered. When they glimpsed her face at the window, their ears pricked forward and muscles rippled in their powerful back legs, but they made no sound. The milky white film over their eyes made them look blind, but their heads followed her every shift in position.
The only way she was going to get out of this cabin was to kill them.
Oh, right. With what?
The dogs moved closer, and Tessa had to fight the impulse to leap backward off the bed. She was safe enough insideâbut not indefinitely. She'd found no spare canister of propane, and the stew and figs wouldn't last very long.
The dogs began to act weird.
First one, then the other, began snapping at empty air. Abruptly the larger dog leapt two feet off the ground and closed his powerful jaws on nothing. He did it again, this time with a twist in the air, as if to bite squarely into something slightly off-center from his leap. The other animal did the same, slavering and gnashing its fangs. The entire performance took place in total silence. Again and again they leapt, bit, fell, ignoring each other, neither of them looking at Tessa. What on Earthâ
The dogs were attacking something that wasn't there.
Gooseflesh rose on Tessa's neck. There was something eerie, almost frightening, about the scene. The dogs whirling, jumping, biting at nothingâit was somehow worse than if there
had
been something solid there to attack. The animals' utter silence only deepened the eeriness, removing the dogs from their own nature and turning them into creatures moving in some unseen, spectral realm. Ghost dogs, half in this world and half in another, attacking demons visible to only their demented, filmy eyesâ¦
Were they maybe hallucinating?
Could
dogs hallucinate?
A long shiver ran through her body, clear from neck to legs.
Ebenfield
. He'd been bitten in Africa by infected dogs. Initially, Frère Luc-Claude had said, Ebenfield had developed a high fever, then a coma, and then seeming recovery. But if the virus had remained in his brainâand some viruses could do that, Tessa knewâwhat then? Had the virus gone on eating slowly at Ebenfield's mind? Turning him into a human and therefore more complex version of these dogsâinto an animal that senselessly fears, hates, attacks?
By his end, Ebenfield, like the dogs, had believed things that did not exist. He'd believed himself to be superior to Salah, an alpha male if there ever was one. A top dog.
In Arabic, the adjective went after the noun. Not “dogs firstâ“first dog.”
Tessa stepped off the bed, sat on the edge, and allowed herself a moment to calm her breathing. All of this was speculation; none of ot might be true. Still...
She walked to the cabin door, slid back the bar, and cracked it an inch. If the dogs were now attacking things that didn't exist, perhaps they would ignore things that did exist. She stuck one hand through the crack.
The dogs raced around the side of the cabin, now growling and snarling audibly. Tessa slammed the door and slid the bar into place. Apparently if something solid moved into their awareness, the dogs reverted from their illusionary world to this one.
She was still trapped.
Jess called Billy to see how Cami was doing, but he got no answer on either Billy's cell or his home phone. Nor did anybody answer at the Animal Control Officeâhad Suzanne evacuated without telling him? Frustrated, Jess drove downtown.
Early as it was, a few cars crammed with luggage already moved toward the evacuation exit point. Maryland Guard trucks and police cars patrolled. Jess saw windows heavily curtained or already boarded up, as if expecting a hurricane. It gave Tyler an eerily deserted feel, as if everyone had already left, aided by a town-wide hushed silence.
Too much silence.
Jess stopped his truck, rolled down the window, and listened. No dogs.
All right, they were sleeping, hiding in the woods or in sheltering backyards, until dusk. But dogs, unlike cats, weren't really nocturnal. They usually hunted by day. And over three hundred dogs were unaccounted for and presumably out there somewhere. Their baying and barking and howling had been unsettling Tyler since the epidemic began. Why didn't he hear any of them now?
He hadn't come up with an answer when he pulled into Linda's Diner and stamped the slush off his feet. A dozen faces, mostly old men, watched him with careful blankness. Jess picked a table and watched Linda approach with the coffee pot and a scowl.
“I'm not going, Jess.”
“Not evacuating, you mean.”
“That's right. You gonna try to make me?”
So that was the lay of the land. They associated him with FEMA. He said, “Not my job, Linda.”
“You approve of telling everybody they got to get out?” She held the coffee pot out like a sword.
