Night Howl (30 page)

“We were up and down this place,” Horowitz said. “We went in all those buildings—or what’s left of them.”

“You went through them from top to bottom?”

“We didn’t go up no decaying stairways. In most cases, there’s nothin’ to go up to. Anyway, a dog wouldn’t do that.”

“Maybe a dog wouldn’t, but he would,” Qwen said.

“Huh?”

“Better hand me out the tranquilizer gun,” Qwen said.

“Tranquilizer?” Horowitz smirked. “We aim to kill that bastard.”

“Not before he talks,” Qwen said.

“Talks. What the hell is he talking about?”

Michaels didn’t answer. He handed the rifle out to Qwen and got out of the vehicle.

“We’ll walk from here on,” Michaels said, but when he turned around Qwen was already trotting down the street. “I mean run.” He started after him.

“What the fuck?” Horowitz shook his head and picked up his radio mike to call in and report his location. After that, he got out of his car and followed the two men into what he had come to call the land of the dead. He saw the dog was moving quickly and barking madly. Qwen was into a run and Michaels was doing his best to keep up, but he was falling behind. Horowitz started to run himself, his heart beating with excitement.

Did that hound dog from the boondocks really know what it was doing?

Who the hell were these guys?

E
VEN BEFORE HE
heard the dog barking, he knew they were coming. Before, when he had picked up the sounds of the city policemen below and sensed their presence in the building, he had prepared himself for the inevitable battle; but he had done so with a sense of optimism. It was true that they had come in a pack, and a pack was the worst thing to fear. Animals that gathered together to hunt down and share the prey were unusual in his experience, even his race experience. If anything, it was his genetic lineage that traced itself back to such creatures. It was his ancestors who had been gregarious, who had seen the advantage in moving together in numbers. But for him, now, there was something mystical and horrifying in such an occurrence.

When he had moved through the forest and heard sounds around him, he had looked into the darker areas and imagined such herds of marauding creatures. To come upon them was to come upon Death itself, for any animal alone had no chance of escaping them or defeating them. Nothing was truer than the knowledge that the strong survived and the weak perished; and he knew without ever having personally experienced it that even an animal half his size was stronger when it was in a pack.

But he had been so successful in eluding and defeating men, even those in the uniforms, that he viewed them now almost the way he would have viewed a colony of rabbits. They were animals; even when they were in large numbers, they were no match for him. Now he was suffering from the belief that man was that way, too. When he had heard them below, he hadn’t felt that all-encompassing, deadly fear that could move with electrifying intensity throughout his entire body and could leave him disheartened and weak.

Suddenly it was different, though, because he sensed something familiar in these oncoming pursuers. They had been behind him before. This knowledge came from an instinctive awareness, honed through centuries of species development. It was a marvel of nature, the result of thousands of years of adaptation, the evolution of those wild elements within him that were now given at birth. It was why baby birds flew, why newborn horses stood almost instantly after birth, and why squirrels knew to hoard. Scientists had come to describe it as the sixth sense; they struggled to dissect it, to understand it. Maybe it was electrical; maybe it came like radio and television waves, or maybe it was extrasensory perception. Whatever it was, it was there.

He raised his snoot in the air and sniffed, as though to confirm it. What could have followed him so far and located him so quickly? Whatever it was, he hadn’t yet defeated it. All he had done was postpone the face-off. He growled in anticipation and stood up. The sound of the dog barking outside grew louder and closer. He stepped out to the middle of the room and tuned in his hearing to any activity below.

Qwen paused as he approached the gaping hole in the side of the building. Maggie had stopped before it, not crossing through to enter the partially wrecked
structure. The moments of silence between her barks had grown shorter and shorter until she delivered almost one continuous yap, high-pitched and excited. It excited Qwen; he knew what that meant. She would do it only a few feet from a fox or a coon. A well-trained hound dog didn’t go farther without command at this point. Maggie had done her job well—she had brought her master to the kill.

“Hold on!” Michaels yelled. He was a good twenty-five yards behind. The short, quick run had brought home his weight problem, his age, and his fatigue. He had to slow down to a quick walk. Even that seemed too strenuous. How embarrassing it would be for him to keel over in the South Bronx, he thought. Jenny didn’t know he was down here doing this. If he didn’t die from it, she’d kill him. He cursed under his breath as the younger city patrolman caught up with him and passed him.

“What the hell does this mean?” Horowitz asked when he reached Qwen.

“He’s definitely in there,” Qwen said, his gaze set firmly on the opening in the wall.

“I’d better go back and radio the station, first. Everybody’s at least a half dozen or so blocks to the south and west of this. We checked this place out.”

“If he wanted to do it, he could hide right below your feet and watch you walk by,” Qwen said. Horowitz swallowed hard and turned to Michaels as he approached. “What kind of dog is this? A circus dog?”

“He’s part human,” Qwen said without cracking a smile. “We’ve got to approach this the same way we’d approach it if a man we was huntin’ was in there.”

“Part human?” The patrolman looked at Michaels, but the upstate police chief didn’t change expression. Horowitz began to feel as though he had been dropped onto the set of
The Twilight Zone.
He looked back longingly at his patrol car, hoping for the sudden
appearance of another black and white. Then he looked at the excited hound dog. “I’d better go back and radio the captain,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Qwen said. “You’re not going to do me any good in there, anyway.”

Horowitz didn’t reply. He turned around and quickly shot off toward the patrol car. Qwen took a few steps toward the opening and Maggie put her front legs up on the crumbled stone. Her barking, now directed into the building, echoed, reverberating throughout the structure and upward. Then she stepped through the opening, with Qwen only a few feet behind. Harry Michaels drew his revolver and followed.

The dog continued its barking, but she paused intermittently to sniff the crumbled floor. Qwen and Michaels looked around the room expectantly, neither saying a word until Maggie went farther into the building.

“Go slow,” Harry Michaels said. “She came at me from outta nowhere.”

“Keep yourself a few feet behind. Leave a good space between us,” Qwen said and started after Maggie.

They stepped over broken Sheetrock walls and loose boards, slowing down before every pile of rubble behind which a dog could hide, but when Qwen saw Maggie at the bottom of the stairway, he sped up. She went up a few steps and stopped, not barking as much now as she was sniffing. Climbing the stairs seemed curious to her. Qwen thought it was almost as though his dog doubted her own findings. It made him suspect, and he paused to turn about very slowly. Michaels did the same, lowering his upper body into a kind of crouch, as if he expected the dog to come leaping out at him at any moment. He brought back the hammer on his pistol. Qwen heard it and suddenly
realized it might not be so smart to have a nervous man with a loaded gun, primed and ready, walking behind him. He never liked it when he went hunting with someone, and he certainly didn’t like it now.

“Look,” Qwen said, “it’s what I thought. He went above them, crawling over places they never imagined a dog would go. They missed him because they didn’t think of him as anything more. I want you to stay here at the bottom of the stairs in case he gets by me.”

“You wanna go up there yourself?”

“It’s the best way to approach this.”

“Maybe we oughta wait for reinforcements. It shouldn’t be long.”

“Naw, they’ll all be trigger-happy. You know how they feel. It’s not something they deal with every day.”

“Who does? Christ, I don’t know,” Michaels said, looking up to the first landing. “Those steps might give way under your feet after a while.”

“Then it’s best only one of us attempt it. From the way this place looks, chunks of it chopped out here and there, this is probably the only way down. If he gets by me, you’ll have to shoot him.”

“You don’t hafta worry about that. Be careful,” he added as Qwen started up. “You’re not walking through some forest in the Catskills, now.”

Qwen nodded. That was so, but in a strange way, he felt at home. A hunt was a hunt, and although there weren’t trees and grass and rocks about, there was still something wild about this place. True, they were in a part of the city and there were thousands and thousands of people around them, but to Qwen this was just another kind of jungle.

The dog’s paw prints were now visible in the dust on the steps. He knelt down to study them. For him they were like fingerprints, and they served as final confirmation.

“He’s here,” Qwen said. “For sure.” He stood up and followed Maggie to the first landing. The rats, feasting on the corpse of the junkie, scattered as quickly as they had when Phantom had appeared. “Shit!” Qwen shouted.

Harry rushed up the stairs. “Looks like an O.D.,” he said. He indicated the syringe. “This place must be a shooting gallery.”

“In more than one way, maybe,” Qwen said. He studied the steps before him. They didn’t look as secure as the first set.

“Go slow,” Michaels warned. Qwen continued. Harry watched him until he reached the corner of the landing above. Maggie had paused by it as if she wanted assurance before going farther up. Qwen raised the rifle and started around. The step second from the top gave way and his foot went through. Michaels started up after him.

“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right.” He got his balance again and whipped around the corner. There was nothing above him but another set of steps, this one missing the second, fourth, and seventh. “All clear,” he called behind him and continued on.

He read the other dog’s bark; it was clear to him what this other animal was doing. For the first time since he had heard the barking of dogs sent to pursue him, he felt a sense of betrayal. It was funny that it hadn’t occurred to him before, but his mental powers and his awareness about the world around him had grown considerably during the last twenty-four hours. It was as though he had lost track of who and what he really was. Accordingly, his view of things began to change.

Every time he closed his eyes and opened them, he focused in on parts of his surroundings he had neither seen nor considered before. Subtly, the borders of his
vision expanded, but even more importantly, the contents within multiplied. For all of his life, until very recently, nothing had interested him unless it had carried with it the promise of food and comfort. Of course, he had a puppy’s curiosity in small movements and in other animals, but like any other animal, he tended to see everything in an isolated sense. Most of the relationships between things were lost to him.

Now it was different—he not only saw things for what they were in themselves, but he also saw their significances. The barking dog was not just a barking dog following a rote command to pursue; it was intrinsically linked to the man who was its master. In his eyes now, this dog was no longer a dog. It had become part of the man.

It seemed to him that all the world was closing in—animals, men, and even the very surroundings. Now he understood why this place had depressed him. It was a place of death. Buildings died, as well as living things, and sometimes they took living things with them. Maybe that was why the man was on the stairway; maybe that was why this was the kingdom of rats and other vermin.

He was sorry now that he had entered it, and as he looked about the room and realized the height he was at, he concluded that he had made a very big mistake, a mistake similar to taking the wrong turn in one of the test mazes back at the laboratory. In a real sense he had trapped himself. He had made it easy for the man’s dog and for the man. Such mistakes were tragic, and he knew that there was no room for tragic mistakes in the world of kill-or-be-killed.

He sensed that the man and the dog were only a flight or two below him now. All he had left to choose was where to do battle. This room was too small and too confining. It was better to go to the stairway,
where he would have the advantages of height and surprise. He trotted out of the room, staying closely to the wall again, and made his way over the partially demolished hall floor.

Maggie went wild. Qwen was amazed at the intensity of her reaction. She started up the steps of the landing and then came back down. Each time she did this, she inched up a little farther. It was as though she were pressing against an invisible wall, pushing it back slowly. Qwen studied the top of the landing, looking for some sign of the animal. He felt certain that it loomed just around the next corner.

Although all the steps in this section of the stairway looked intact, he saw that the header holding the stairs to the landing floor had slipped a few inches. It was possible that his added weight would send the entire set of steps falling downward and him along with it. He placed his left foot gently on the first step and leaned against what was left of the corridor wall. There was nothing to grab onto if the floor should give way beneath him, he thought.

“Go ahead, Maggie, go ahead,” he said in his most encouraging tone of voice. His dog looked back at him and then climbed another step. Her bark was sharp but full, and in the narrow stairway corridors it was amplified tenfold.

Qwen took another step. He thought the stairway trembled beneath his feet, so he paused, hoping to be able to jump back down to the more secure flooring behind him if the section began to crumble. In the back of his mind was the thought that the whole thing could come down.