Pavlov's Dogs (27 page)

The twinge emitted by the Pavlovian chip felt eerily like Crispin’s punitive hand.

“Stop it,” Donovan said. He had managed a whisper. Certainly not loud enough to be heard over the loudmouth idiot and the shrieking caged bird.

Kaiser just kept bashing the man’s skull, and twitching each time like a broken record, bashing until there was practically no hard structure left beneath the cancer man’s scalp.

“Stop it!” Donovan yelled. “Stop!”

Jorge kept yelling himself hoarse, and Donovan just couldn’t take it anymore. He stalked right up to the immigrant’s cell, pulled the gun he had taken from Crispin’s office, and from the force and pressure and absentmindedness of shouting “Shut the fuck up!” he accidentally tightened his finger on the trigger.

The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space.

Everyone fell silent, except for the girl, who whimpered quietly on her bed.

Donovan, shaking with adrenaline, noticed the gaping wound on the side of Jorge’s head. Slowly, dazed, Jorge reached up and felt his face. He pulled his hand away and looked at his fingers, which were smudged black from the powder burn the bullet had left along his cheek.

He didn’t seem to feel or notice the bite it had taken out of the back of his ear.

The smell of cordite was thick and oppressive in Donovan’s nose. “Shut up,” he said, swinging the gun over to point at the girl. “Just... stop.”

He spotted Kaiser from the corner of his eye and whirled around. The Dog was now moving down the kennel to the girl’s cell. He stopped and grinned in at her, and she started wailing again at the sight of his manic bloody face.

“Kaiser,” Donovan said, “that’s...”

He couldn’t finish the thought. He had to close his mouth and swallow, or else vomit up the rest of the words. The taste of acid burning the back of his throat reminded him too much of the taste of Dr. Crispin’s death.

Kaiser wasn’t listening anyway.

The Theta growled at the girl, and she screamed.

“Kaiser, stop!”

The Dog slammed against the bars and roared—and then stumbled back as yet another gunshot rang out in Kennel 2.

“I said stop!” Donovan shouted, gun still smoking in his hand.

Kaiser hunched over and grabbed at his thigh where the bullet had gone in. He was panting and sweating, and some of the sweat ran pink with the cancer man’s blood.

Donovan could see the bullet hole in the Dog’s flesh, and realized his mistake a second too late—Kaiser wouldn’t be able to heal rapidly in the absence of the hormone overflow.

But then the wound started to spit out the bullet.

Kaiser picked out the slug and let it drop to the concrete. The wound seemed to stop healing after that, but it wasn’t bleeding as badly as it should have been, and Donovan now had no doubt that it would heal faster than any normal man’s wound, even without hormone therapy.

Something had changed.

Theta Kaiser looked up at Donovan, grinning, grimacing, sweating from the pain. He climbed to his feet and, towering over Donovan, took a step toward him.

“Don’t,” Donovan said, sticking the gun in the Dog’s face. “One little wave into the camera,” he said. “Remember that.”

Kaiser wiped the blood off his chin. Still grinning, he said, “Yep, just like him.” Then he turned around and started hobbling back toward his cage in Kennel 1.

’

Donovan stood at the door to Command, staring down into a little cooler full of ice. Crispin’s eyeball stared back up at him from a plastic bag.

He hated touching it. Hated it even more that the eye seemed to always be watching him.

Donovan fished out the bag and opened it. He used the plastic like a glove as he held Crispin’s eye up to the retinal scan. The door to Command clicked open.

Donovan took the cooler inside.

Summer Chan immediately jumped up from a stack of instruction manuals she had been leafing through at her desk. She took the cooler from Donovan and immediately moved to put the eye in the little personal refrigerator.

Donovan stepped up to the manual that Chan had left open on her blotter. Using a cutaway of a Dog’s skull, the left page illustrated how one branch of the Pavlovian implant monitored brain-activity patterns in the left-prefrontal cortex, specifically the parts related to aggressive cognitions and effects.

“Have you found it yet?” Donovan asked, turning a page.

Chan shut the refrigerator and said, “Nothing’s caught my eye.”

Donovan cursed and threw the manual, then turned to the screens. Sitting on the cot in his cell, the Theta Dog was looking down on the head of the doctor who was currently patching up the gunshot wound in his leg.

At least Donovan had been able to control Kaiser with bullets and threats. But he knew that con would only work for so long.

“HOLY JESUS,” KEN SAID, taking a test step on his newly-wrapped ankle. “And right after he turned you guys around, he died?”

Mac nodded, now looking fully human, dressed in a pair of sweatpants he’d gone out and found on their way to the machine shop. “Crispin was killed,” he said, putting down a box of water jugs harder than he had to. “He was gutted by my new third-in-command.”

“A lot of that going around,” Kelly said, standing from wrapping Ken’s ankle and dusting her hands together. “I guess there isn’t going to be a better time to tell you, Ken.”

He turned to her. “I guess not. Thank you for not making me ask again.”

Catching Julius’s eye, Kelly tilted her head away. The old man put down his sack of canned food and herded the group of survivors away. “Right over here, folks. Let me show you to your new living quarters.”

The pastor huffed after the group, already speaking words of comfort to people afraid for their families on the island.

“North Regional was a great place,” Kelly said. “But if you knew the way in and out, and you weren’t afraid of dying, you could ruin everything. For everybody.” She looked up at Ken. “Did you know Jimmy had a girlfriend?”

He stood up straighter. He’d never considered the thought that his red-headed lieutenant would have somebody.

“Me, neither,” Kelly said. “She was a little brunette number. Apparently, when Jimmy went to the island with the Dogs without her, she had some kind of breakdown or something.” Kelly shook her head. “Before, when everybody was in line to get on the radio, she was convinced he was dead. So while all eyes were topside, she went downstairs and made her deal with the devil.”

“What a bitch,” Mac said.

“Did she ever talk to the pastor?” Ken asked.

Kelly wrinkled her nose. “The pastor is kind of an a-hole.”

“Been my experience.”

“Anyway. She didn’t take it so well that, one, we repelled the zombies and, two, Jimmy was actually still alive. So while you were off getting the bus, in a fit of guilt-induced depression, she lit herself on fire.”

“On fire,” Ken said.

“In the quarters. Yeah. Londy and Clint were on the way down from the roof when they smelled the smoke—”

“And they tried to put her out,” Ken said, sitting back down.

“—and they tried to put her out, yes. They didn’t make it. And they also had the other two nines.”

“That settles it,” Ken said. “Next time we raid a drugstore, I’m looking for anti-depressants.”

“She’s dead,” Kelly said.

“I meant for
me
.”

Mac snorted a laugh. Ken and Kelly both looked over at him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I meant to laugh.”

“Everybody’s settled in upstairs,” Julius said, wiping his hands on a rag. “How are we getting along down here?”

“We’re okay, I think,” Ken said. “This is quite a place you have here, Julius.”

The old man looked embarrassed. “Aw, shucks. This old place ain’t nothing.”

He turned, taking the shop in as if seeing it with new eyes. Thick wooden workbenches with nicked and scarred tops lined one side of the room; the wall above was painted a light blue and stenciled with red outlines where tools hung. A great many of them were still in place; only three or four red shapes stood out. Along the adjacent wall, opposite the great roll-up door, stood red and black toolboxes. Near the wall opposite the workbenches were a hydraulic press, a pipe bender, a drill press, and a hose press. On the wall itself were rows and rows of bins, full of parts.

“It’s very clean,” Mac said.

“Yeah, well. Two months ago, the bank was all set to foreclose on me, and I made the place up nice to attract buyers.”

“Did you find one?” Kelly asked.

Julius turned back to them, a smile on his face and tears standing in his eyes. “Nope. And then I didn’t need one.”

Ken whistled. “Imagine what we could do to that bus if we had power here.”

Julius raised an eyebrow. “You want power? We can have power. The place next door has an emergency generator.”

Kelly perked up. “We could have light! And music.”

“That would be nice,” Ken agreed. “Some long-lost creature comforts to take everyone’s minds off the new regime on the island. What about the noise? Do you think we’ll attract too many visitors?”

Mac shook his head. “No. While you were being tended to, I was scouting around. The buildings on this whole block are all close together. We need to go anywhere, we can head away by rooftop. So maybe the more visitors at the front door, the better. Concentrate them here—”

“And you know where they all are,” Ken finished. “That’s not bad.” He leaned back onto a large covered object behind his stool. “So, if we have all of this at our disposal, what are we going to do?”

Julius stuffed the rag in his back pocket. “What do you mean?”

Ken ran his hands through his hair. “We can’t just sit all comfy and pretty here while shit’s going all crazy over there. We have families to put back together. Maybe the island is nice, even with a crazy dictator. But from what Mac has said, it’s not the place for us.”

He stood, testing his ankle again.

“So, the question remains. What are we going to do?”

Mac looked at Ken and raised his eyebrows. “How many men do you have who can shoot? Or, I guess, would be willing to?”

Jerking a thumb upwards, Ken said, “Every father up there will pull the trigger. That’s how they made it to North Regional.”

“Different,” Mac said. “That was all dead people they were shooting at. Now they’ll have live ones shooting back. And the Dogs.”

Ken thought about going toe-to-toe with one of the beasts. “Okay, so a full-frontal assault is out.”

“We need to get over there first,” Mac said. “The marina is our gateway. Unfortunately, they know this. The entire perimeter of the island is lined with sonar arrays. They have radar. They have cameras. The security chief is very thorough.”

“You know him pretty well?” Kelly asked.

Mac smiled. “Yeah. He was the first person I talked to that wasn’t a scientist after I became a Dog. If I could find a way to talk to him...”

“We have a radio,” Julius said. “Maybe if you called—”

“No. That’s no good. If I know Donovan, and I can say that I do now, he’s taken up residence in Dr. Crispin’s old offices. Before all this, Crispin had linked all the radio and comms to his computer, recorded twenty-four seven.”

Kelly slumped against the hydraulic press. “So if you make a call, even if you get to talk to...”

“Jaden,” Mac said.

“To Jaden, Donovan will know what’s coming.”

“And he’ll be ready, with or without Jaden. He’s already got the Sigma Dogs at his beck and call, and I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before the Theta Dogs come around.”

Mac stopped talking, taking in the lost looks on their faces. “Right. There are five ranks. I was the Alpha. Samson was my Beta. Kaiser was the new Epsilon. There were five other Thetas, but Dunne is dead. And there were six Sigmas, one for each Theta. Now there is one less.”

“The Dog at the bus?” Ken said.

“Yeah. So, here’s what I think. I can talk to Jaden. I
can
. I just have to word things so he’ll understand what I mean and Donovan won’t. And if we make it across the water, I can draw the Dogs away, I think.”

“I’m already brimming with confidence,” Julius said.

Mac waved his hand. “I know. These are just the quick and dirty details. The big thing will be getting a boat over there large enough so that all the survivors will fit. Not just your group; there was another group we picked up before we found you guys. And there’s island staff who might want to leave.

“The original quarantine area isn’t far from the pier. Then again, neither are the Dog barracks. And about half of the survivors were being moved from normal quarantine to someplace else, someplace underground. I bet it’s the Kennel, but we need intel.”

“How about a diversion?” Ken said. “There are enough of us that we could take two boats.”

Mac snapped his fingers. “That might be what we’re looking for. We take two boats out of the marina. We can run one right at the pier and trick the security team to concentrate on it.”