“Just a second,” she said. She stopped the car, got out and walked around to the rear. The hatchback opened, she rummaged, and a moment later came around to the rear passenger door. She opened it.
“Come on!” she said, coaxing the terrified, car sick dog toward the door.
“Hey! You’re not going to throw her out here!” I said.
“Of course not,” said Gwen. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
I got out of the car too and saw that she had a large towel in her hands.
“Come here girl.”
The dog picked its way gingerly across the floor of the back of the car. When it was close enough, Gwen grabbed its collar. It only tried to get away for a moment. Gwen produced a wet wipe from somewhere and began cleaning the barf off the dog’s tiny chest. It struggled to break free the whole time. When she was done, she wrapped it in the towel, which seemed to calm it, and handed it to me.
“There,” she said. “Now we have a baby together, so don’t die. The kids would be devastated.”
I looked at the animal. It didn’t look terrified anymore so much as sad.
Gwen reached into the car and pulled out the thick rubber all-weather floor mat. She got a couple more wet wipes and a bottle of water from the hatch and quickly cleaned it.
“What?” she said. “I’m prepared.”
“I’ll say.”
I looked at the dog’s collar. It had an Allegheny County license tag as well as a name/phone number (Miss Mixter) and one of those “I’m Microchipped!” tags. If there was a humane society or something like it nearby, we could drop the dog there, and it would easily make its way back home.
I got back in the car, holding the bundled dog close to me, and fired up my phone. It turned out there was an animal shelter about twenty minutes up the road. I showed Gwen, who was putting her car back together.
It only sort of smelled like poop now.
And lemon wet wipes.
“Shouldn’t we hang onto her, for when Babd comes back?” she said.
“You want this dog in your car for the next hour?”
“Not really.”
“And Babd won’t have any problems finding us. At least, she doesn’t ever seem to.”
“I guess not,” said Gwen. “Okay. Shelter time.”
I called ahead, which was a good thing because they were about to close. The woman on the phone was super nice, especially when I told her that we’d found the dog by the highway (Not true!) and had seen it almost get hit twice (Not true! said the voice of Honest Abraham Lincoln in my head). But it had its tags, so she confirmed that they would contact the owners. She agreed to stay open until we got there.
On the way, the dog started to cough twice, but I kept her from barfing by rubbing her neck and telling her that she was a good girl.
The animal shelter was down a long rural road. I started to have a growing feeling of unease like I had when Brigit and I were walking around in Stoneface’s house. Something was coming for me, or maybe it wasn’t. The problems we’d left behind weren’t going to resolve themselves. Somehow these problems involving magic had a way of reaching out and touching someone and that someone was probably me.
Once again, I was six years old and walking up the stairs in the dark. I couldn’t look behind me because then I’d see it, and I couldn’t run because I knew if I did, it would be on my back in a second. The only thing to do was to walk slowly to the top of the stairs like nothing was stalking me. Each step got worse and worse like some kind of increasing resistance. If I could make the last step, it couldn’t get me.
Those were the rules when you were a kid, and you were scared of the thing behind you that you couldn’t see. You couldn’t let yourself panic, even though it got worse with every step. You knew that finally when you made it up, you’d break through like some kind of horrible surface tension.
I wanted to throw the dog out the window, steal a faster car and just floor it. Panic.
But then whatever was behind me that I couldn’t see and wouldn’t look at would get me. And Gwen.
And I knew it was all silly and just feelings, but the feelings can make you do stupid shit. So do the things. Keep driving, just like normal. Take the dog to the shelter. Don’t panic. Don’t let it eat you.
We were there. I took Miss Mixter inside where the woman was happy to have her.
“You really went out of your way,” she said to Gwen and me. “Not a lot of people would stop by the highway to pick up a stray.”
“Yeah, well,” I said.
“And then get off the highway to bring it to a shelter.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said.
“Can you hold out your phones?” she said.
Gwen did. I didn’t have my phone and didn’t really understand what she was doing, but as I had several of the Guards’ phones in my jacket pocket, I pulled one out.
The woman pulled out her own phone and dialed the number on the collar. After about ten seconds, during which she kept her eye on us, she hung up.
“Okay,” she said.
“What was that?” said Gwen.
“You’d be surprised how many people bring their own pets here and say they found a stray, just so someone like me doesn’t think they’re a piece of shit for doing it.”
Oh. Well, that certainly wasn’t us. We were entirely different pieces of shit.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’ns have a nice day,” she said.
We got back in the car. It was just Gwen and me, while less than an hour before there had been four of us. That was fine. The car was pretty small.
“Want me to drive?” I said.
“Nah, I’m good.”
“Okay.”
We hit the road again.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Gwen once we were back to highway speed.
“About?”
“Babd. And the dogs. I don’t like that she’s taking them away from their home, or whatever, and then just dumping them somewhere else. Or worse.”
Yeah. Much worse.
“That’s crossed my mind,” I said.
We couldn’t really control what Babd did or how she did it, but at least she seemed open to reason. If we had a few rational requests, she might follow them.
“How about a few rules,” I said.
“Ah. Your rules.”
“What do you mean?”
“The way that you try to control things around you by making rules for yourself.”
“I do no such thing.”
“Suit yourself.”
“What does ‘suit yourself’ mean? It doesn’t even make sense here.”
“Are we talking about dogs and rules or what?”
We were. I thought.
“Okay,” I said. “We use the campground rule. Leave it better than the way you found it. We can ask her to pick animals that don’t have owners or are hungry or whatever. And we make sure to feed them and leave them better off.”
“Sensible,” said Gwen. “That’s a good rule.”
“And no more fighting for the dogs,” I said. “It’s too… prone to bad outcomes.”
But it had been helpful. Very helpful. There were several times over the previous week where having Babd around had the made the difference between me being alive or not alive.
“You’re not going to stop her from fighting,” said Gwen.
“I know,” I said. “I know. She seems to like it.”
“Maybe no suicide missions?”
Certainly no suicide missions. I wasn’t going to allow that, but how could I stop her? She really thought of the bodies she used very differently than I did. Maybe I could wrangle a promise out of her. She seemed to be the kind of thing that understand honor. That might work.
“You know,” said Gwen, “code is just a bunch of rules.”
I looked out the window.
“And so is magic,” she said.
The trees whizzing by were fantastically intere
sting.
“You can’t keep the wrong things from happening, no matter how many rules you make,” she said. “Life is chaos, Lincoln. It doesn’t look like it to most people, but it really is. And it’s okay because people are–I don’t know–we’re like chaos-filtering machines. We swim in it all day, and it goes into our mouths and comes out of our gills, and we’ve filtered it and made it nicer.”
“So are we machines or fish?” I said.
“Shut up. My point is that you think you can control things by crafting your rules carefully enough, and so do the Praecants, and so does everyone else, I guess. But you can’t. No one can. Babd is going to do what she is going to do. Good things and bad things are going to happen, and not because of anything you did or didn’t do, but because that’s just how it is.”
I could think of a million counter-examples and reasons why she was wrong, but I didn’t feel like arguing about it.
And it wasn’t true. You could control it. If you kept your head and didn’t panic and got a good enough read on what was coming down the line. Like Babd had said, everything was probabilities, and if you were clever enough, you could force your will on things and make some probabilities bigger and some smaller.
“Lincoln?”
“What?”
“I think it’s really sweet that you want to do right by these dogs.”
Great.
“It’s because you’re a good person,” she said.
That was strange to hear. I didn’t feel like a good person. At all.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just–I’m not sure how I feel about it. I know that I was ready to break that guy’s head open with your bat because he killed the body Babd was using. I almost did it. That’s not okay. This is about the dogs, yeah, but it’s about me too.”
“I know,” she said.
I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers into my forehead. God, I was tired. I needed real rest, not whatever magically induced weirdness I’d been under with the Guard.
Maybe I couldn’t control what happened, but I could at least influence it. By doing things like getting enough sleep. And building magically powered artificially intelligent guns.
“If you want to sleep, I’m fine,” said Gwen.
“No,” I said, although I did really want to sleep. Sometimes when you go to sleep, you wake up in a different universe. I was okay with a universe where Gwen and I were getting out of Dodge, just us, together.
My mind wandered.
I followed it as it played over the last week and everything that had happened. I’d thought life was all going down one way, but it had really been something else. I hadn’t been helping Dan to recover something that had been stolen from him. I’d been brought along as muscle and an ace in the hole on a murder/robbery. I hadn’t intervened to save Dan and Brigit from an unprovoked attack by a crazy person. I’d been summoned to the site of a fight between one of the leading members of the Congress of the Pittsburgh Neutral Territory and two people who attacked her when the battle was turning against them.
I hadn’t defended myself against an out-of-control aggressor in the park. I’d been set up and used as ground troops so Dan could assassinate the person who had been trying to take him down.
How? How had I been so stupid?
I got that after the thing with the Zoro, Dan, Brigit and Gwen were pretty much the only friends I had, and had almost certainly had undue influence over me. But wow. It was kind of obvious now in retrospect. It wasn’t like Dan was a great liar. He just blustered his way through. Hell, he barely had time to lie. He was always so busy doing something.
How had this happened to me?
I don’t know. It felt like there was something I was missing. Something I should be able to see.
But whatever else had gone before, I was going to try to have clarity moving forward.
I was determined to try to prevent further casualties on the canine front, and Gwen had already made it clear that she wouldn’t be endangering herself again. Those were good things. People close to you not getting hurt was a good thing.
“Back in the park,” I said.
Gwen didn’t respond.
“Back in the park, what happened there... I’m glad you’re not doing anything like that again.”
“Damn right,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You could have-” and then there was something wrong with my throat and chest. The words caught there, and I felt like I could force them out, but I didn’t know what would happen if I did.
I tried to think about something other than Babd’s body laying there, smoking, still moving, and Gwen’s beside it, even though that hadn’t even happened. The more I tried to push it away, the bigger it grew. There were other bodies too, of people I remembered. They weren’t burned, but they were just as dead.
Their names floated above their bodies in my mind, like a display in a nightmare video game that wouldn’t turn off. I tried not to read them.
“Hey,” said Gwen. “Hey.”
I felt stripped for an instant, like the mechanisms that guided my thoughts and behaviors had broken down, leaving me open to the depredations of a band of creatures who had taken up residence in the attic of my mind without my knowledge. They were coming for me, and I didn’t think I was capable of wrestling them into submission.
I pressed my eyes closed and tried to breathe deeply.
The pictures of the bodies and the smell of smoke were gone, replaced by the same sense of panic I’d felt about being pursued on the road, only this time I sensed it wasn’t coming from outside. I realized that I had no tools with which to fight it.
A hand touched mine.
“It’s okay,” said Gwen.
No, it’s not.
A part of me wanted to pull my hand away but didn’t have the will to actually make it happen.
“You’re going to be okay,” she said.
Sure I am. I’m always okay. But nothing seemed real to me. It was like I was now outside of all of the different universes, the ones with the happy Lincolns and the sad Lincolns and all the Lincolns in between. I couldn’t touch any of them. I had no relation to them.
But something was touching me.
I thought about her hand. I noticed it with intent.
From the point where her skin contacted mine, a feeling began to spread out. It moved up my arm, and the more I concentrated on it, the more the creatures faded, shrank back to their attic. The algorithms that normally ran things in my head began to reboot.
The panic subsided.
“You’re magic,” I said, barely a whisper as I didn’t trust my full voice.
“No,” she said. “I’m just a normal person, and so are you. And being with other people who care about you can help you deal with things.”
No, you’re magic.
“It means you’re a human being, Lincoln.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You giant dumbass.”
I started to laugh, and then my throat tightened up, and it turned into a single snorting, disgusting sob. Awesome.
“Tissues in the glovebox,” she said.
I reached in and grabbed a few. The amount of material that had instantly appeared in my sinuses was formidable.
She laughed.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s a lot of snot.”
I found that I was able to actually laugh too.
“I’m going to put on some shitty music,” she said, “and we can just ride. That going to work for you?”
I reached up and tapped the radio on.
“Yeah,” I said.
I wondered when we would see Babd again. I missed her already.
I didn’t recognize the song that was ending, but I’d know the opening bass riff of Nirvana’s Come As You Are even if I were in a coma. I started singing along, but maybe singing wasn’t really the word for it.
“You’re horrible,” said Gwen. “And old.”
“Liking Nirvana makes me old?” I said.
>
“Of course not,” she said. I was only five years older than her.
“Why don’t you pick something then?”
“No, nostalgia is good,” she said. And then she started singing along too. She was much better than me.
* * *
Gwen’s dad’s place was a couple of blocks away from the coast of Lake Erie. She’d never told me what went down between the two of them other than “My Dad’s a dick.”
She hadn’t talked to him in three years, but she still knew where the key was.
It wasn’t so much a lake house as it was a cottage/cabin kind of thing with a little kitchen, little living room, little bathroom. A tiny bedroom that basically had room for a bed and nothing else. Toward the lake side, you could walk out onto a small deck that really needed to be redone.
It was ratty, but it turned out that there was WiFi, so ratty was fine. We just needed somewhere out of town to hole up, do some research and figure out what to do next.
Gwen dropped a large duffel bag on the cheap recliner in the corner.
“I packed us some stuff,” she said.
“You were really optimistic about getting me out of there,” I said.
“Babd promised me we’d be able to do it.”
“She’s a good dog,” I said.
“She made the plan. She’s a good bad dog.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“It’s been a long day,” said Gwen. “I’m going to get cleaned up.” She grabbed a bundle from inside the duffel bag and headed into the bathroom. I heard what sounded like a shower kick on.
I collapsed onto a couch that, judging by its size and lack of comfort, was probably also a pull out bed. Gwen’s shoulder bag was on the floor, so I reached inside and found Fox. I didn’t think that anything horrible was going to come bursting through the door, but I felt better having him ready. I also had a thought.
The AI system I’d built to run him, to listen to requests and intelligently act on them–during testing I’d used language with it as a two-way interaction. It could talk back. But since I’d loaded it into the weapon, the communication had been a one-way street. It could pulse to let me know that it had successfully executed my command, but that was it.
I know that the system wasn’t self-aware in the science fiction sense, but it actually made me feel a little bad, like I’d put tape over a friend’s mouth.
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 19
