His grand appearance in the lobby that evening hadn’t helped though, he thought as he carefully pulled on his pants and drew on the shirt. If the scratches started leaking, he doubted anyone would notice the stains through the dark fabrics he was wearing. Tentatively, he walked around the king-sized bed, taking a couple of exaggerated steps, to test how it all felt. There was just a little irritation, nothing to worry about.
Going into the den area of the suite, he sat on the couch and looked at his laptop. He’d immediately copied the files onto a pair of disks, even the innocuous ones. Dodd didn’t want to take any chances with them. They were his only proof right now, and he’d have to go with that if he couldn’t find anything more concrete before he got ready to break the story. And that was another problem, he realized.
One of the first things he’d have to do when he got ready to make his move would be to resign from the Inquirer. Technically speaking, this was their baby. He was just an employee. This story, these pictures, this whole deal was theirs. He was just a lowly grunt and the articles and whatever came from them was just work for hire. He’d have to time it well, quit his post, wait at least a few days, and then put the whole thing up for auction. Maybe they’d buy their own pictures back. If they bid high enough.
Sitting there, he thought of how close he had come to activating the phone modem and faxing the files straight to the home office. Dodd had even gotten to the point of bringing up the fax program before he’d come to his senses. He ran his injured fingers through his wiry hair, thinking of the big payoff that was going to be his.
With any luck at all, soon he’d have a decent retirement account sitting in the bank, a good money market fund earning a comfortable living, a townhouse (maybe two) with an ocean view. Dodd thought of Seattle; he thought of his time there with Anne, his wife who’d left him. Hell. Maybe he could get whoever bought the pictures to throw Anne in on the deal, too. Despite everything, he still loved her. Who knew? Maybe she’d come back to him when she heard about all of this. Anything was possible, now.
Dodd sat, drying in the cool air, and he waited for room service to bring the steak and lobster dinner he’d ordered.
And a bottle of wine.
Chapter Fourteen
Denny Eagleburger got out of his truck and walked around to the rear. The back was a cage, thick wire mesh holding a very big dog. He could hear the Doberman’s dull nails clicking and clacking on the steel floorboard every time it took a step. “Howdy, Number One Dog,” he said.
The dog huffed and lunged playfully at the cage door. Number One Dog was his favorite of the bunch. This one, despite the paperwork that claimed that Berg Security owned him, was really Eagleburger’s animal. He was, in actuality, what was referred to in the old days as a one-man dog. They were attached, these two. Eagleburger unlocked the pen and opened the door.
He said nothing, for they needed few words to understand one another. Eagleburger just opened the door and glanced at the ground, and the 170-pound Doberman poured out, a black, glistening arrow of oilstain fur covering a frame of pure, sculpted musclemass. As it hit the ground, it turned its pointed head on a thick neck and nuzzled the man’s fingers with its moist nose. If he’d still had a tail, it would have been carried at half-mast, to tell everyone who was the master: Denny Eagleburger. Denny was leader of the pack, and Number One Dog was his first lieutenant. But, since his tail was nothing more than a surgically altered stump, he made do with dipping his head and nuzzling the master’s hand. There were other ways to be understood.
“Sit,” Eagleburger hissed. And the dog’s haunches went down like a hundred-pound bag of stone. Number One Dog didn’t make a sound as the man produced a leash and latched it to the dog’s collar. There was just a solid, metallic click in the night. “Good,” the man said. Dog’s big tongue snaked out, but met nothing, and quickly vanished.
Eagleburger looked around, surveying the area. He had parked the truck near the substation. Tatum had given him the report, showing that the guy from the government wildlife agency had parked here. And the reporter who had been giving the company such a hard time had parked nearby also, apparently following the other man—Riggs his name was—into the forest. Both men had been driven back to their vehicles, the reporter first, and then Riggs. And this was the weird part, Tatum had told him: Dodd, the reporter, had come back with Colonel Grisham, whose ranch abutted the town, while the other guy had been driven back by that big chick who worked for Vance Holcomb. “It’s all very strange,” Tatum had said. He knew, from Tatum’s big mouth, that the studio was worried that they might face some kind of united legal front from the folk they were struggling with. This development did not look good to their suspicious eyes.
Well, Denny Eagleburger didn’t make the decisions as to what was strange and what was not. He just read the report, which had been written by his boss, and he was out here to do what Tatum had told him to do. “Look around there. Snoop. See what you can find. If Riggs thinks that snake is there, maybe you can find it. Take one of the dogs with you. Find the damned thing.” So here he was, with Number One Dog.
The security guard jerked lightly on the dog’s chain and began to walk toward the woods. Out here at the edge of Phase Three, there were only a few streetlights, and they were set back nearer the houses. Here, it was dark, and they had only the stars and the moon to light the way. There was a half moon, though, so the forest was not quite so obscured as one would have imagined. And under a clear sky, the moonlight was enough to reveal quite a lot of detail. Eagleburger could make out the waxy leaves of Spanish bayonet, could see clumps of oleander with bundles of flowers blooming in the night. And the tops of the pines made soft forms against the blue-black sky. The security guard liked it out here at night. The air was comfortably warm, the humidity low, and the wind was blowing softly and carrying the sound of a billion insects and ten thousand smells all blended into a great, moist scent that he’d come to identify with home. Everything seemed to be in it: the mud and the sand, the pines and oaks, the Spanish moss hanging in great masses, cattails growing in wet places. He wondered, sometimes, if the bugs, the untold tons of insects that flew and crawled and hid everywhere one looked were also a part of that heavy, earthy scent.
The two, man and dog, moved away from the truck that had brought them. For a moment they followed the road, and then they veered off, taking an almost invisible trail that led over to the asphalt path the bikers and joggers preferred. This path scribed a huge rectangle around the entire town. It hugged the backyards of the four principal planned neighborhoods, and it angled off into the woodlands that surrounded the place. And it crossed the streams that led down into swamps that then emptied out into the Kissimmee River away off in the trackless places into which Salutations was eventually going to spread. Or so the company was fond of saying. A part of Eagleburger hoped it didn’t happen quite that way. He found himself hoping some of that roadless wild could be saved.
Number One Dog huffed, not quite a bark. They held up, stopping short. The Doberman was looking ahead, staring toward the trail, which lay just beyond a narrow strip of knee high wiregrass. Denny reached down and patted the big dog’s muscular neck, but he said nothing, whispered no words of encouragement. None was needed. This animal had learned to know what Denny was thinking just by the way the man stood, or moved, or breathed.
Number One Dog huffed again, and the hint of a growl was there. Scratch that exhalation with the right scent, and a deep roar might emerge. One could feel it just waiting to burst forth.
Denny nudged the dog with his right knee, barely a touch on the canine’s heavy ribs, and both moved forward. The pair, part of a larger pack, was roaming their territory. Nothing could stop them from it. God save whatever threat tried to prevent them from claiming their space. Dog moved stiffly, powerfully on, his Leader backing him up.
Something was shadowing them. Something was moving toward the asphalt trail, but coming in from the forest side, testing the edges of where th
e town had come out to meet the trees.
The Scarlet had not been able to take the man that day. He had wanted to. He had even smelled blood, tasting it on the wind. The blood had not smelled, had not tasted so different from that of a deer, or of one of the savage little pigs that rooted about in the recesses of the high grounds around the swamps. He had wondered how the flesh would taste, how it would feel to take the man and eat him. In all likelihood, the meal would be a good one, he surmised. It would be filling and would sustain him as well as any.
But he had been prevented from discovering if he were right. At the last moment other men had appeared. The Scarlet had felt foolish when that had happened. Perhaps Mother and Father were wrong in some ways, but they were right in others. He had forgotten himself, so absorbed had he been in breaking such a primal rule. Even a pig could be dangerous. Even a pig could tear with tusks and several could form a defensive circle when they were hard pressed. Perhaps men could do the same. The Scarlet had peeled away from the chase, moving in a burst of speed that he knew was faster than that of anything that ran in the forest, and it had left the men to do whatever it was that they did. For a while, it had let the ways of men remain a complete mystery to it.
But only for a while.
Under cover of night, the Scarlet had returned to the verge of the forest, where the trees met the places where men pushed up their stony burrows and their ludicrous paths. Spying on them, the Scarlet supposed that men hunted as the Flock hunted, and so made their ranges in such a way that made it easy to run down the deer and the snakes and the other animals on which it was good to feed. Coming close to where men lived in the past, he had seen deer lying dead and broken upon the earth, left there to ripen by the men who had killed them. The Flock had consumed some of this carrion, and had seen that the deer had been shattered within, as by a great killing head strike. The Scarlet had thereafter imagined how a man might do such a thing, with its tiny head that seemed ill equipped for such a use. Still, the world was strange. Perhaps men could do this thing alone. Who was to say?
In a clump of young pines, he came up and stopped, peering out at the two, the man and the dog. The Scarlet enjoyed dogs. He liked the flavor. Despite what Egg Father had taught him, he had discovered that the dogs who lived side by side with Man were easy to kill. For weeks he had been coming to this place, where the men teemed, and had lain back, out of sight of their poor eyes, and had watched how the dogs lived and where they denned. These dogs were stupid creatures. Even a turtle was wiser in the ways of survival than the dogs who lived with Man. The Flock had been deprived of an easy prey by their refusal to come to where men lived and eat the dogs who stayed in such great numbers. There was food waiting to be taken.
The Scarlet hunkered down, making his moves in complete silence. And he watched the man and the dog come closer. When they came within two steps, he would burst out of the cover and run them down. He looked at them, gauged their mass. He was easily twice as heavy as the two of them combined. The dog’s tiny mouth, full of teeth though it was, could not harm the Scarlet. He laughed to think of those fangs trying to tear at his tough skin, trying to bite back as his own great maw closed down on the dog. His feet braced beneath his bulk, his legs tensed, ready to sprint, prepared to sprint.
By chance, the wind suddenly changed direction, corkscrewing down like a dust devil and swirling around a copse of oaks, blowing through a patch of young slash pine and oleander on the north side of the trail. On that wind, Number One Dog smelled something that was completely unfamiliar to it. Something hot, something whose blood flowed even warmer than Dog’s own. Something whose scent was sharp, edged, like that of a hunter.
Number One Dog stopped short, like a rolling sphere of granite that had suddenly lost momentum. He held up and every alarm in his mind sent out warnings. The Doberman went into a mode of perceiving the world that was reserved for preparation, for protection. The pack, two though it might currently be, must be defended. The hair all along his back bristled, displaying a creature more massive than he truly was. His legs splayed out, slightly, bracing for a number of options: defense, attack, and flight. He looked forward, toward the source of this strange scent.
Out of his huge throat issued a low growl. Challenge or warning. The noise was flat, but could be altered to be either. For now, though, there was more of warning in it than challenge. He acknowledged the movement of his master as the man reached forward and released the chain that tethered them together. Permission to attack or defend was what the action told him.
And though he felt that his pack leader wished it, he waited for the command. The man’s hand came up, found the place where the leash met with the collar, and there was a tiny click as the dog was released. “Get ’im,” said the man. “Go, boy,” he was beginning to say, but the Doberman was already gone.
Dog exploded away from where he had been. His thick, dull claws gripped the asphalt trail for just a split second, and then he was dashing across it and into the brush. His eyesight was good, even in this dim moonlight. The earth was revealed to him in contrasting shades, perceived in far greater detail than was allowed by the poor eyesight of humans. He could see the trees and branches and obstacles. He could see forms and the layered nature of the forest. He could see from where the strange scent emanated.
Plunging into the underbrush, he barreled through it, vanishing between the drooping leaves and limbs, clattering across dried sticks and the other detritus of the forest floor. Ahead, there was the mass of vegetation: bear grass and oleander. Something was hiding back there. Something was waiting.
The dog roared a challenge; to spook whatever waited, threatening the pack. He roared, expecting anything there to be spooked by the loud explosion from his throat, fleeing in fear so that the Doberman could run it down and tear it. This is what it supposed must now happen. This is what it knew must occur.
One of the last things the dog would have expected was to be suddenly kicked.
The Scarlet had not thought that dog or man could have detected where he was lying in wait. Of course, hunting Man was a new experience, and there was much to learn. But being detected had not been part of the possibilities for which he was prepared.
He was still waiting to attack when the dog was coming through the underbrush. Confusion reigned in him when the big mammal crashed through to where the Scarlet was waiting. And for just an instant, the two were face to face.
But, the Flock had not survived evolution’s test by allowing confusion to dim their kind into inaction. The instant passed, and the Scarlet reacted.
He stood.
The dog saw the thing, his own mind full of the need to protect the urge to kill. He, too, hesitated. This was something new. This was something different and completely unexpected.
While he paused, even for that bare moment, the other creature rose up. The great head went from the ground, where it had been almost resting against the forest loam. And up, and up. Until the head—roughly the size of a man’s torso—was raised ten feet up, eyes staring down from the lower limbs of the live oak behind it. There was a hissing sound as the mouth opened wide. The dog could see a stiff tongue jutting out of the razored mouth like a thick, pointed stick. His eyes were locked on that tongue, on that mouth that presented infinite possibilities of death.
And so the dog did not see and was not prepared to be kicked.
The animal’s huge, clawed foot lashed out. Fortunately for the Doberman, the claws were not hinged out, since the blow had been from the ground up, rather than a downward, slashing strike. Instead of opening his body like an overfilled water balloon, the foot instead struck him like an unimaginably powerful fist. So, rather than falling to the ground as dripping meat, he was kicked like a two hundred-pound football and sent tumbling, airborne.
Denny Eagleburger had had no time to react. He watched his Number One Dog crash through the brush on the far side of the trail. His hand was fumbling for the big, metal flashlight on his right hip, the one that
served both as illumination and as a blunt weapon, if the need was there. The guard was still poking at the on switch when he heard something—a hissing, like a quickly leaking tire—and suddenly.
He was struck in the chest. His dog, his Doberman, his one-man canine hit him like a sack of bricks.
The air whooshed out of Eagleburger’s lungs at the impact. Despite the impossibility of it all, he immediately realized what was happening. Someone has dropped kicked his one hundred and seventy pound Doberman pinscher. Just like that. Man and dog tumbled to the ground in a heap, human limbs tangled with hound legs.
As the man caught his breath, sucking in air, he struggled away from the limp form of his animal. Thinking more of trying to see what had attacked the dog than of going for the pistol on his hip, he finally succeeded in firing the light that was still gripped in his right fist. A tight beam of yellow light arced out from his hand, and he shined it at the clump of oleander and bear grass where the action had taken place.
Except for the branches and limbs moving slightly, either from wind or the passing of something more solid, there was nothing. He aimed the beam further into the forest, toward the north where that entire wilderness lay. For just an instant, and he wasn’t sure it wasn’t just the sparkling of the stars he was seeing from the impact, he caught a brief glance of something red, something scarlet vanishing into the trees.
The Flock Page 9
