Pavlov's Dogs (17 page)

Dr. Crispin’s eyes darted from the keyboard to Donovan’s reflection on the big screen. He began to type faster, adding a parallel command in the syntax string. It was a short command, and this would be the fourth time he’d sent it. Any Dog receiving this directive would have to obey promptly and decisively.

Except Kaiser.

Damn his eyes!

Crispin hit ENTER and waited. Sliding his gaze sideways, he caught a glimpse of Kaiser grimacing. The Dog fidgeted for a moment, flexing and rolling his shoulders. But then the moment passed.

Looking up at Donovan and seeing his attention riveted to the LCD, Crispin began to type again.

Onscreen, the Theta Dogs walked side-by-side down the street, headed back to the marina. Dunne licked at his shoulder wound, which wasn’t healing as it should. The edges of the bite were ragged and dark red. Faint lines radiated outward on the surface of his skin.

Infection.

Landis reached out, maybe to help, and Dunne snarled and snapped his teeth at him. The other Dog pulled his hand back, eyes wide but worried. Licking his wound again, Dunne kept his eyes on Landis.

Donovan blinked a few times. Watching the same thing from two different angles, as fascinating as it was unique, was giving him a headache. He put out a hand, wishing there was a way to jack directly into the Dogs’ sensory input. To live what they were living. To fit them on like a glove.

He noted that Crispin was still typing.

“What are you doing?”

Fingers clattering on the keyboard, Crispin looked up. “What? I’m doing what you told me.”

“Why don’t you just show me how to do it then? You’re taking too long.”

Crispin’s teeth showed for a moment. “Look, you must realize that something like this, terminating one of my creations remotely... I didn’t make it
easy
to do. This is not a command I had planned to use willy-nilly.” He typed faster, re-keying the directive to Theta Kaiser, along with Dunne’s final command. “As a matter of fact, if you’ve been paying attention at all, you would know that quite a number of things need to happen before the final command. If every protective function in the Pavlovian Chip isn’t shut down, the command could trigger an—”

“Director,” Donovan said.

“Yes, yes—there!”

Crispin hit the ENTER key, and the three of them turned to the monitor. Dunne’s half of the screen flashed bright white and then went dark. Through Landis’s point of view, Donovan watched as Dunne took a stutter step. His eyes rolled back and his head shook once, violently. Blood poured from the Dog’s ears and nose, and he fell over, stone dead. He didn’t even twitch.

Crispin had not stopped typing. He had reworded the command to Kaiser, putting it in terms so strong, if the Dog did not comply, surely he would sustain some sort of damage. Had to. Crispin also added a rider, activating the loyalty protocol. For the other Dogs, this step was unnecessary, but for Kaiser, Crispin could only hope.

Again, he hit ENTER.

Donovan hooted. “Good job, Doctor! I know this seems an odd time to say it, but I really admire the system you’ve pioneered here. It’s not often that I come across something so revolutionary. Now, if you would be so kind—”

He stopped, feeling hot breath on the back of his neck. Donovan turned, finding himself face to snarling face with Theta Kaiser. The Dog loomed over him, fangs bared, growling deep in his chest as drool oozed from the sides of his mouth. Kaiser sucked huge breaths of air, his chest and diaphragm working like a bellows.

“Kaiser?” Donovan asked in a small voice. “I thought we were together on this.” He took a step back and cried out as the Dog tensed.

Kaiser lunged.

But to the
left
.

Crispin’s eyes widened in the split-second he realized that Kaiser had defeated the command. Then the Dog was on him, his sharp, sharp teeth buried in Crispin’s throat.

Kaiser shook his head, worrying at the director, and when he stepped back, he pulled out two inches of red and black gristle in his mouth. His eyes danced with bizarre mirth.

Doctor Crispin’s throat made a sucking sound as he watched his own blood jetting away from him, and the thought went out of his eyes. He fell over the console, fingers scrabbling at the ragged, gory hole in his neck as he coughed and sneezed out gouts of blood.

Crispin’s chair tipped over, and he hit the floor. His legs kicked and he rolled onto his belly, pushing himself up. The jet from his throat pumped one last time, and then the strength went out of his arms. He fell down, smacking his face into the cold concrete. Finally, still.

Kaiser turned to Donovan, who had backed up all the way to the large screen. The Dog grinned as he chewed on the chunk of muscle and windpipe he had torn from the project director’s throat.

“Good... good boy,” Donovan said.

He fell to his knees and gripped his stomach and mouth. He couldn’t stop it; the vomit came up and sprayed through his fingers and out his nostrils, his breakfast and bile hitting the floor, mixing with Crispin’s swiftly-cooling blood.

KEN AND HIS SMALL GROUP were frantically clearing bodies out of the short hallway to the stairwell. The gunfire had attracted even more undead attention, and he wanted the bodies out of sight before the rest of the zombies arrived. And there were plenty of cadavers to go around.

He had already decided that the ones in the stairwell would have to stay put. He and his team certainly had the manpower to move them all; they could have easily dumped them out a window at the back of the building. But right then, Ken knew that nobody had the heart for it.

And while he didn’t know the inner workings of the zombie mind, he knew they always investigated fresh corpses. Always. So the lobby had to be cleared if they wanted any kind of lasting peace. While everyone else was happy to wait for the Dogs to return, Ken had a bad feeling about them.

A piercing whistle stopped work; the roof sentry had seen something. Ken left the work detail and ran to the front of the building and looked out. Zombies on the lawn, what else? He looked up at the sentry and put his arms out.
What?

“Dogs!” Kelly yelled. “A whole group of them!”

Ken hooded his eyes with his hand. He spotted them, far away on the rise. He saw their bus and their tow truck.

“They’re coming
back!”
Kelly cried.

Ken grimaced. The work detail started hooting and clapping, and it just made him feel worse. His next move wouldn’t be popular, but he was the leader and it had to be done.

“Okay, everyone, let’s get back to work! We get this place back to how it was before more zombies get through. If the Dogs are really coming, we’ll let ’em in. But until they’re here knocking on our door, let’s keep working.”

The assorted men and women of the work group shrank a little, as if Ken’s words had let all their air out. And he supposed it had. But he would be damned if he let their hopes get up only to be dashed
again
by the Dogs.

He led by example, attacking the job in front of them with renewed vigor. Maybe the Dogs were coming to take them back to the island. Maybe they weren’t. He still couldn’t believe the way Dunne and Landis had just walked off. He slammed a corpse off to one side.

And before we go anywhere, I’m going to figure out how the zombies made it up to the roof. That was no accident. Someone had to have let ’em up. And when I find out
who...

Rifle fire started behind him. Single pops from multiple gunmen.

Ken knew time was getting short. If his people weren’t behind the barricades before the front of the building was overrun, that would be it for them. And all their hardship, all their heartache, would be for nothing.

’

At the crest of the hill, the Dog convoy had stopped. McLoughlin could see through his binoculars that the survivor cell almost had their barricades back into place.

“They’re set up pretty well.”

“They are,” Samson said from the wrecker. “The pair of shooters on the front steps are doing a good job.”

McLoughlin nodded. The men with rifles were taking single shots, not rushing, showing remarkable poise for civilians.

To have survived all this so far, they’d have to.

They were slowing the tide of oncoming dead, but that’s all they were doing. Still, North Regional was a defensible position. Especially after reinforcements.

So, the sixty-four thousand dollar question was: Why had Crispin ordered the Dogs back to base?

“Incoming,” Rose said at McLoughlin’s side. “Thetas Dunne and Landis.”

Absently, the Alpha nodded, still peering through the binoculars and counting heads at the building. There were more than just a few survivors. They had done well, even after the Dogs left. The work crew was moving quickly, the gunmen were doing their jobs admirably, and the lookout on the roof had spotted the Dogs.

So, why?

He dropped the binocs and waved Dunne and Landis on. Maybe they would have some kind of intel on the order to pull out. It looked to McLoughlin that Dunne was acting strangely. He was also wounded. Their orders had been to hold off on the Change unless absolutely necessary, because once they had done it, that would be it until they could hit the recovery ward. But now that reinforcements had arrived, Dunne should have changed to accelerate the healing process. So why hadn’t he?

As if prompted by the Alpha’s frustration, Dunne stopped walking. His head shook once, and he fell over, leaking blood from his face. It ran in thick rivers back down the hill. Landis dropped to his knees in front of Dunne and yelled for help. His own head came back as he roared, and the Change was on him.

Alpha McLoughlin jumped off the bus and sprinted over to the Theta Dog. Hayte, Kristos, and Rose were right behind him. The drivers, too scared to be anywhere the Dogs weren’t, fired up the vehicles and drove after them.

“What happened?” McLoughlin roared, grabbing Landis’s shoulder. “That was... that was the terminate order.”

Landis pointed his clawed hand at Dunne’s wound. He growled something, and McLoughlin barely understood him: “Bitten,” he’d said.

“Was this why we were called back?”

Landis pointed at the North Regional building. “Dead.”

More gunshots rang out from the building, and the faint sounds of screams floated uphill. McLoughlin grimaced. Whatever commands Dunne and Landis had received, the director must have also shut out their auditory centers and had told them the survivor cell was dead and gone, a lost cause.

But why, goddamnit?

Samson whistled from the back of the wrecker. “Boss, I know we’ve got our orders, but if Command issued them under the pretense that those people are dead...”

His words hung in the air for a moment. The rest of the Dogs shuffled their feet and looked at their Alpha.

He looked down at Dunne’s body.

Samson was right. None of this made any sense, not one bit of it. From rescue to retreat in less time than it had taken to plan it.

On the other hand, when has the Master ever done anything for no reason? There has to be a reason. Always has been, always will be. It’s the paradigm we live by.

“Load up the body,” he said. As Hayte and Rose moved to do this, McLoughlin climbed back atop the bus. He looked through the binoculars.

No surprise, the survivors were doing well. Better than that. Armed members of the barricade crew had joined the gunmen on the steps, and instead of just slowing the horde, they had thinned the zombies to a point where they were no longer an immediate threat. Retreat into the building would be a leisurely thing, and an evacuation would be safe, as safe as the last one. Maybe more so, considering that the survivors who had stayed behind were mostly armed men, ready to be reunited with their families on the island.

We should go get them. We should take the rest of those zombies out, pick up the survivors, and all head back to base.

He hung his head and lowered the binocs.

This is who we are
, he thought.
My words
.

Alpha McLoughlin slapped the binoculars in his hand. He could feel his pack staring at him, waiting for him to make a decision. And whatever he decided, they would follow. If he said then that they were to storm the gates of Hell, they would go howling.

They were loyal. And he would be loyal, too.

“We are not a group of individuals,” he said. The Theta Dogs all looked up at him as he stood on the bus, their quiet conversations done and forgotten.

“We are not freelance contractors. We are not civilians. We are a pack. We are the Dogs of War. And we do as we are told. Back to the marina.”

’

Ken, on the roof with Kelly, put down his own binoculars and spit over the side into the street. Everyone watched as the Dogs’ small convoy pulled away. The fact that Ken had been
right
not to wait for the Dogs gave him no comfort. But at least he had kept his people’s hopes from getting too high. Maybe. There was little enough solace in that.