Pavlov's Dogs (9 page)

Donovan turned to see the podium already set up and wired for sound. When had that happened? Surely, he hadn’t been that captivated by the Dogs. Had he?

Crispin tapped the microphone twice, as was his custom. The maintenance tech standing by was ready this time, and he fiddled with a slider on his mixing panel. He looked up with a grin for the gathered island personnel. There was a smattering of applause.

“Thank you,” Crispin said. “I know you’re all eager to learn something about the situation, so I’ll get right to it. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we have received a distress signal.”

Immediately, the room was electrified. Donovan sat up in his chair, his early-warning synapses firing.

What does he mean, “we”?

Crispin put his hands up to fend off a sudden barrage of questions. “Now, now. Hold on. I have brought a sound bite for you all to hear.”

He gestured to the sound guy, who nodded and then pressed a button on a little laptop he had set up. The crackling sound of airwaves came over the speakers.

“
Mayday, mayday—please. We have been stranded here for exactly thirty and a half days. That’s... 732 hours of trying to survive.”

“Jesus,” Holly breathed.

“
Please, we are running out of food and water, and we have very little for protection. There are women, children. Please—”

Crispin motioned for the sound guy to stop the recording, and the room fell into silence.

“Fifty thousand minutes,” Holly whispered. “Jesus.”

Donovan noted that the distress signal had not divulged the survivors’ exact location.
Smart
, he thought. Better to make contact first and build some form of trust or rapport.

“The communications men put the signal strength within reach of a search and rescue team,” Crispin said.

Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Sounds fishy.”

“The government has collapsed, people. There is no aid coming to these civilians. No comfort, no succor. The only hope they have of escaping their situation is the Dogs.”

At this, the pack of men stood straighter, coming to attention. Alpha McLoughlin barked out, “Dog Pack, all present and accounted for. Ready for duty, Project Director, sir!”

Dr. Crispin smiled, beaming at his genetically-enhanced warriors. “Bravo, men!” Looking back at the assembled throng, he waved. “You see? The Dogs are ready.”

“Just a minute,” Donovan found himself saying. “Just one
minute
, Doctor. There are some unanswered questions on the table, and I think they should be addressed before we send the Dogs off on some mercy mission.”

“Mercy mission,” Crispin repeated. “I like the sound of that.”

Frowning, Donovan waved that away. “I’m talking about the dead, Dr. Crispin. The
zombies
.” He paused, looking to see whether the extra emphasis on the word had affected the project director at all. To his dismay, it had not. “The reports that we’ve received all agree; if one of us is bitten by one of them, an irreversible process begins, and then we die. We become... one of
them
.”

Donovan had almost shouted the last word, silencing all other voices in the dining room. He lifted his head and looked around, then pointed at the Dogs, who still stood at attention.

“What happens, Doctor, if one of them bites one of our Dogs? Do we know? Hell no, we don’t know.”

Murmured assent blew through the room.

Donovan continued.

“Dr. Crispin, your humanitarian impulses do you credit. But, sir, we don’t even have a specimen of the walking dead to examine. There is no way to know how the finely-tuned systems of the Dogs will react to whatever it is that turns perfectly normal people into ravening maniacs.”

“He is correct,” Ronald said. His medical team was nodding in unison. “We should wait until we have data.”

Dr. Crispin’s face changed, the smile crumpling to something unpleasant. “More data, Mr. Michaels? And where, pray tell, will we get this data if we don’t send somebody to the mainland?”

Donovan panicked at the thoughtful look that passed over the medical team leader’s face.

“Dr. Crispin—”

“No, Donovan—enough. It is my intention to send the Dogs on a combination rescue mission and specimen-collection run. As before, I feel that I’m too close for an objective view, so I ask you again, good people of the island. What should we do? All in favor of sending the Dogs, say aye.”

A brief chorus of ayes came from scattered mouths around the room, but it was far less than half. Donovan sat back into his chair, blowing out a shaky breath. He had been worried there for a second, but it appeared as if common sense would prevail.

“Excellent,” Dr. Crispin said. “The ayes have it. Thank you.”

The rest of the room erupted in disbelief.

Crispin gestured imperiously to Alpha McLoughlin, who huffed out a short command: “March.”

The Dogs moved as one, forming up behind Dr. Crispin and following him out of the dining room like an honor guard.

“Well, he finally got his way,” Lucy said. She turned back to her plate of rice. “Crispy has flipped his lid.”

A SMALL YACHT pulled into the deserted wharf, its presence announced by the thumping of the twin engines. Everything else in the night was quiet, save for the gentle rhythmic slapping of waves against the piers.

Then came the moaning.

From boathouses and offices they came, dead men and women dressed in rental company uniforms and grease-stained overalls, a few enterprising individuals who had tried but failed to get to their boats when the disaster first hit. One of the dead dragged behind him a small suitcase, strapped to his wrist.

As the yacht pulled up to one of the finger piers, the horde shambled faster in anticipation of a mouthful of flesh. Something to cool the furnaces in their guts. Clumsily but relentlessly, they moved forward, closing on the quiet yacht.

It bumped against the wooden pier as the waves pushed it around, and the noise drew more and more of them from inside the fenced-off shipyard.

Then a new sound split the night. At first, it was indistinguishable from the purr of the engines, but it rose steadily from a growl to a howl, ringing out into the dark.

The zombies, excited, hurried toward the boat.

A dark, furry shape shot up from the deck, landing heavily on all fours on the pier. The large, thickly muscled beast bared its wicked teeth, and, unwilling to wait for the rest of the pack, charged.

The creature hit the crowd of zombies at full speed, scattering them like ninepins into the water. Those that kept their feet reached for the Dog, only to draw back stumps of bone and flesh.

Clawing, slashing, the Dog rose up, scooping reams of bowels from bodies, letting thick blood from still veins spill, liberating heads from shoulders.

A short minute later, viscera, dismembered trunks, and rent limbs floated in the water, and the pier was clear of the undead, if a little slippery from the offal.

“Good job, Kaiser,” McLoughlin said from the boat. “Come on, Dogs. Clear the rest of the boatyard. Keep your heads on. If you need to change, make it count. Because after you change back, you’ll be stuck until we return to the therapy rooms.”

The seven other Dogs put out a gangplank and crossed it, following in the wake of the hulking Kaiser.

’

The next morning, Thetas Hayte and Rose stood behind the gate, each holding a black bullpup submachine gun at the ready and sneering at the straggling dead in the street beyond. The sound of a heavy engine behind them signaled the beginning of the day’s festivities.

Hayte turned and looked at the massive wrecker that Jaden’s man had found. Last night, Dunne and Kristos had gone through the Change and had followed Kaiser out onto the street to clean out loads of walking corpses. The three of them were now sleeping it off in the hold of the yacht.

“Are we ready?” Rose asked, pointing at the driver, one of Jaden’s men. Four of the security guards had come along to lend support. The man nodded and gave a thumbs-up, then wiped his forehead.

Rose grinned and stepped back, mouthing the same question to the driver in the school bus they had dragged in off the street. Holly Randall had raised hell about losing one of her welders for the job of fortifying the bus, but Dr. Crispin got his way.

The bus driver gave him an A-OK, and Rose whistled once, a high, piercing sound. An office door opened under a jet-ski rental banner, and Alpha McLoughlin strode out, with Theta Landis and one of his Sigmas in tow.

“When we get out there, Parker, you stick with Landis. Understood?” McLoughlin looked down at the Sigma.

Parker, a lithe man, redheaded and pale, nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

McLoughlin clapped his hands together and looked over at Hayte and Rose. “Where’s Samson?”

“Up here.”

McLoughlin looked up and saw Samson already lounging atop the school bus, the trunk of his dark blue coveralls pulled down and tied around his waist. His dark skin shined with sweat in the warmth of the morning sun.

“Good,” McLoughlin said. “We hit the ground running. The security team will drive and ride shotgun for each other. Samson, you and I will split off, looking for the survivors. Landis, you and Parker keep together, do the same. We have three directions to go. Remember,” he said, tapping the side of his nostril.

Landis said, “Follow your nose—it always knows!”

He and Parker climbed atop the wrecker, and McLoughlin joined Samson on the school bus. Hayte and Rose pulled the gates open, and the wrecker rolled through.

After the bus was clear, the Thetas closed the gates and resumed their watch.

Rose already looked bored. “You think they’ll find anybody?”

Hayte shrugged. “Only the Great Spirit knows.”

The wrecker slowed, easing into the first entanglement of cars. Its engine revved up as the great, dirty machine pushed the vehicles apart.

“All right!” McLoughlin shouted. “Dogs deploy!”

The four men unzipped their coveralls and stepped out of them. Before the dark-blue garments had hit the ground, the Change had started. All four of them hunched over, dropping to their hands and knees as bone and sinew rearranged itself with popping, gristly sounds. Human cries and grunts dropped down to guttural depths, and then there were four Dogs on the vehicles, howling.

The Alpha leapt away to the north, his golden coat rippling as he ran. Dark-furred Samson followed suit, running south. Parker and Landis, in gold and patchwork brown-and-grey coats respectively, loped off to the west.

“I don’t care how often I see that,” the driver of the wrecker said, “I will never get used to it.”

’

“Did you see that? What the hell
was
that?”

The man at the door peeked out through the narrow glass slit, eyes wide. He wore a tattered red shirt over dark-blue jeans, and a green trucker’s hat on his head. The back of his leather belt read BUCK in large letters, which was appropriate for the large man. He clutched a double-barreled shotgun that had seen better days.

“What did it look like?” a woman behind him asked.

“It looked like the devil.”

The woman, who wore black motorcycle leathers, rolled her eyes. “Come
on
, Buck. Be serious.”

“Screw you, Shayna. I saw what I saw. It was a... a... a
beast
. Fur, black as night. It ran by on all fours, big as a bear, maybe.”

Shayna put her fists on her hips. “Oh, really.”

Buck turned back to the door. “Not as wide. Thick through the shoulders, slimmer at the hips. Moving fast, too.”

She walked forward, her square-toed boots clicking on the concrete floor. “You sure you haven’t had a nip or two this morning? Let me see.” She brushed Buck aside, and he let her.

“I saw what I saw.”

Shayna put her face up to the safety glass, looking around. “Well, I don’t doubt you saw something. If it was moving fast, maybe it was the rescue squad. But a beast-man?” She shook her head. “That doesn’t sound—
oh, God!
”

A yellow eye in a black, furry face appeared in the window, and Shayna saw a mouth full of sharp teeth before she fell back.

“The Devil!” Buck shouted, lowering his shotgun and firing both barrels. The blast sheared away the window and a significant bit of wood around it. The face disappeared, and Buck hooted.

“I got it!” He put a hand out to help Shayna up. “And, no, I haven’t had anything to drink this morning, thank you very much. Ran out two days ago.”

Shayna’s sharp reply was cut off as a thick arm, corded with muscle and covered in black fur, jammed through the broken window and slapped at the door handle.

“Oh, shit,” Buck said, dropping Shayna and fumbling his shotgun open. “Shit, shit, shit.” His hands shook as he dug shells out of his shirt pockets. He dropped four of them trying to reload his shotgun.

The claws hit the handle just right and the door popped open. The daylight from outside was eclipsed by the hulking, wolfish form. It looked up at Buck and snarled, pointing one black talon at the shotgun. Slowly, it shook its doggie head, flinging blood from its muzzle.