Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  “She’s awake,” someone said.

  “Goddamn it, sedate her again! She’s next in line for the OR!”

  Someone dressed like a duck—that couldn’t be right—tried to stab her. Cami heard weird, strangled noises coming from someone. She realized it was herself just before she slid away again into sleep.

  When she woke again, she recognized that she lay on a gurney in a hospital hallway. The attack by Mr. Anselm’s dog came flooding back, but not anything after that. A nurse whom Cami didn’t know, a middle-aged woman dressed in scrubs printed with ducks, hurried by.

  “Wait…wait…” Her voice came out faint and scratchy but the woman heard it and stopped. Deep circles ringed her eyes. “What…happened… me?”

  “You’ve been operated on, honey. Compound tibial/fibular fracture. You should be in Recovery but there’s no more room.”

  “Wait…”

  “I can’t stop to talk, honey. All I know is that you were attacked by a dog and some sheriff’s deputies interrupted the attack and brought you in.”

  “Mr.…Anselm?” But the nurse was already gone.

  A man lay on another gurney beside her, his shoulder thick with dressings, blond stubble on his face. He watched her from merry hazel eyes. “Hey, little thing, it ain’t as bad as all that.”

  “I…” She felt tears start.

  “Aw, don’t cry, pretty girl like you, after the dog missed your face it’d be a shame to ruin all that make-up.”

  That made Cami smile; she never wore make-up. How could this man look so happy? “You…dog…”

  “Not me, no dog bite here, I got shot,” he said cheerfully. “Meanest dog owner in Tyler didn’t want to give up his little ol’ vicious pets. I’m an animal control officer. Billy Davis.”

  “Cami. Johnson…nurse.”

  “A nurse, huh? Well, then, that dog oughta missed you altogether, we need you too much…oh, shit, Cami, don’t cry. What can I get you to make you feel better?”

  He looked as if he shouldn’t move himself, let alone get her anything. But maybe, since he was an animal control officer, he knew people. She managed to get out, “Belle…”

  “You want a bell? What for? You gonna ring in the new year? Missed it by a month and a half, sweetheart.”

  “My dog…”

  “Belle’s your dog? That who bit you?”

  Exhausted from talking, she tried to shake her head, which made it ache so violently that she cried out and everything went black. The next thing she knew the duck-scrubbed nurse was bending over her but scolding Billy Davis. “Mr. Davis, I told you twice not to get up! Miss Johnson, you should know better than to try to move. Now lie still, both of you!”

  “Wicked Witch of the West,” Billy said when she’d left, “’cept this is East Tyler. Listen, Nurse Cami, I’ll find out about your Belle.”

  And he did. Everybody that went past, Billy harassed by name. “Hey, Rod, you bring in another load? Can you find out from Jess about a dog named Belle from the Magnolia Apartments? Sure appreciate any information… Hey, Burt…naw, I’m fine, takes more ’n a Russian semi to keep me down but I tell you, Jess and me got egg on our faces the way that FBI girl saved our bacon…Listen, there’s a dog named Belle—”

  Cami slept. When she woke, she felt marginally better. Billy Davis was being wheeled away by a tired-looking orderly who nonetheless was shaking his head and smiling. Billy saw that her eyes were open and said, “Your dog Belle’s an old collie, right? She’s safe at the tent that FEMA put up ’cross from the Cedar Springs Motel, for dog overflow. Bye, Nurse Cami, I’m gonna see you again, you can bet on it!”

  Belle was safe. What a nice guy to find that out for her! When Cami had finished nursing school in West Virginia, become bored with her hometown, and taken the job at Tyler Community Hospital, her mother had warned her that even though Tyler, too, was a small town it was pretty near to Washington. Cami should watch out for those oversexed city boys with their smooth talk. But here was Billy Davis, as nice and real as possible, finding out about her dog just so Cami wouldn’t worry. A thorough gentleman.

  She drifted off to sleep, smiling.

  » 23

  Even in the middle of a natural disaster, Jess realized, you cannot kill somebody without repercussions. Not if you’re deputized, and the federal government is trying to do everything right to make up for what it hasn't done right in the past, and the national media is slavering for news. And if you're the idiot who deputized the shooter, you're involved, too.

  Not that he wasn’t grateful. Without Tessa’s interference, Billy would be dead, and it’s possible Jess would have had to shoot Victor Balonov. Jess had never killed a man before. Something made him suspect that Tessa had. So Jess was grateful, and was slightly humiliated, and was kept hanging around critical-incident headquarters until sundown when what he wanted was to be back out on the street picking up dogs.

  “You need to stick around, Jess, until Mr. Lurie says you can go,” the sheriff told him.

  “Don, they need me out there. You know that. What’s Lurie got to do with this? It’s local law enforcement—your jurisdiction, not FEMA’s.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but Washington doesn’t know that, and Lurie’s in charge of everything by direct order of the White House.”

  Jess saw the conflict on Don DiBella’s honest, exhausted face; DiBella had voted for this administration. Jess had not. But Don was a good man trying to make the best of a bad situation. Jess said, “I want to go by the hospital to check on Billy.”

  “Billy’s fine. Burt just called in—Billy was badgering him about some girl’s dog. A girl on the bed next to him.” Don smiled, apparently despite himself. “Same old Billy. Anyway, I have your statement, it sure sounds like a justifiable shooting to me, so just stay around here until they’re done with the lady FBI agent, in case Lurie’s guys have more questions.” Don glanced around, leaned forward, and whispered, “Between you and me, I think it’s a goddamn turf war. FEMA doesn’t want the Fibbies here.”

  “She’s an ex-agent,” Jess felt compelled to say, although he couldn’t have given a reason for saying it.

  “Whatever. Just stick around.”

  Jess left the Cedar Springs Motel room that served as temporary law-enforcement headquarters, blinking in the afternoon sunlight. The motel, he decided, was one ring of a three-ring circus, the ring where exhausted humans capered and jumped through hoops. Ring number 2, across the street in an empty field, belonged to the dogs; huge Army-issue tents were being set up to house all the caged animals taken from Tyler. In Ring number 3 the microbes performed, or maybe didn’t. The CDC, the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, and FEMA’s National Disaster Medical System each had huge trailers flanked by more tents for their respective personnel.

  The entire circus was in turn ringed by the media, gawkers, and protestors, kept at bay by troops from the Maryland Guard. Reporters that had ventured into Tyler were now stuck here, although hastily printed “authorization passes” had been issued to crisis personnel. Occasionally someone from the motel would venture into the slavering audience of media and throw them tidbits of news, shouting to be heard over the hundreds of snarling, barking, and snapping dogs in the tents. And somewhere in the woods and fields all around Tyler were more troops, ready to shoot any escaping dogs, with or without owners. Already they’d captured two teenage girls and a middle-aged man, each trying to get out of Tyler with a pet dog.

  Whatever Jess had envisioned when he’d suggested a quarantine, it hadn’t been this.

  He caught sight of Dr. Latkin crossing the parking lot toward the CDC mobile lab and strode toward him. “Dr. Latkin! Joe!”

  Latkin turned, looking as harried and tired as everyone else. “Oh, hi, Jess. Great job you’re doing bringing in the dogs.” It was said mechanically; for all Latkin actually knew, Jess could have taken to setting every animal free.

  “Thanks. Look, I know you’re busy but
I just want to know how the pathogen search is coming.”

  Latkin smiled wryly. “You know, I think you’re one of the few people genuinely interested? Scott Lurie wants a scapegoat, a resolution, and a gold star, not medical information.” All at once something new seemed to occur to him. His pale eyes sharpened, like water crystallizing into ice. “Come in here for a minute. I want to show you something.”

  Jess followed Latkin into the mobile lab, the first time he’d been inside. Somehow it looked even bigger within. The back third was sealed off. A door said:

  INFECTIOUS AREA

  NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY

  TO OPEN THIS DOOR

  PLACE I.D. CARD ON SENSOR

  The first two-thirds of the lab was jammed with more counters, equipment, and people than Jess could have imagined would fit. Latkin led him to a woman in her forties, wearing a white lab coat and frowning at computer displays.

  “Jess, this is Dr. Deborah Preston, our principal investigator, from Special Pathogens. Deb, Jess Langstrom, Tyler Animal Control.”

  “Hello,” she said wearily. “So you’re the one bringing us all these specimens. Did you haul in the boxer on Prozac?”

  “The what?”

  “Some hysterical woman wouldn’t let her boxer come in because she was afraid we wouldn’t give him his regular doses of Prozac and the dog was seriously depressed without it. I heard the animal people had to have her sedated.”

  “Sounds apocryphal,” Latkin said.

  Not to Jess. People got very strange about their dogs. If Jess hadn’t been so depressed himself, he’d have told them about Victor Balonov’s demon-possessed Rottweilers. Instead he said awkwardly, “Are you… you scientists finding the cause of this thing?”

  “Could be. Take a look,” Deborah said, getting up from her stool and motioning at the screen. Jess moved into position and stared at what looked to him like a lot of blue peppercorns wriggling frantically in orange sauce.

  “That’s false color, of course,” Deborah continued. “The thing is, this is an unknown pathogen but not a very complicated one. It’s relatively large as these things go, which is a good thing or we’d still be looking for it. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s totally unknown, it seems to be related to a class of canine viruses found mostly in Africa, although it’s not identical to them. Mutated, most likely. It can cross the blood-brain barrier—like rabies, you know. It lodges in the amygdala, a part of the brain that contributes to aggression. There it just disrupts neural firing until kaboom! A regular electrical storm and a fried dog brain.”

  Jess fumbled for the right questions. “Can people get it?”

  “Unknown. We have amygdalae, too, although the odds are they’re not receptive to this particular microbe, at least not in this particular form. Some hot agents learn to jump species—avian flu, for instance—but it takes time. That’s the good news.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  Deborah looked at Latkin, and suddenly Jess had the feeling that this good at this political stuff.

  Latkin said, “The bad news is that this isn’t something for which we can whip up either a cure or a vaccine in twenty-four hours. It’s too new. The only way we might speed up the process is to find a dog with a natural immunity. Build on its immune-system defenses. That’s why if you find such an animal, one infected but not aggressive, we need to know immediately. If you can let the other animal control officers know that, it would help a lot. I’m putting out the word on this but everyone is so exhausted and stuff doesn’t always get read, and FEMA is trying to control information flow completely. Official channels, protocols, blah blah blah. They’re making this a political situation first and a medical one only as an afterthought.”

  “I see,” Jess said. “Got it.”

  “Thanks,” Deborah Preston said, and went back to her wiggling blue peppercorns. But Jess wasn’t done.

  “How did the germ get here from Africa?”

  Latkin steered him gently by the elbow, toward the door. “We don’t know for sure that it was Africa. And it could have gotten here any number of ways. The most likely is a traveling pet who picked it up, but Scott Lurie tells me they’ve checked passports and no dog from Tyler has traveled out of this country in the last six months. We don’t yet know the incubation period, but it’s probably not that long.”

  “So how else could—”

  “We just don’t know,” Latkin said grimly. “Thanks again, Jess.”

  He was dismissed. Jess walked back to the motel. Maybe the officials were all done with Tessa, which meant both of them could finally leave. This encampment gave him the creeps.

  It had finally dawned on him, far later than it should have, that those wiggling blue microbes had to have come from some dog’s brain. Probably more than one dog’s brain, because wasn’t that what science did? It duplicated experiments, to be sure the answers were right. Had they dissected brains from dogs that had already been shot, like the pit bull that attacked young A.J. Wright on his own sink or that dachshund, Schopenhauer? Or did they need freshly killed dogs?

  Were those peppercorn-shaped viruses from his little cousin’s collie?

  Or from the sweet, overly pampered Schnapps and Applejack, which Jess had personally assured their owner would be returned to her unharmed?

  Or from the toy poodle Tessa had belatedly confessed to owning, which might easily have been picked up by some other team while Tessa was away from home, explaining over and over how she’d saved Billy’s life?

  The sun was still warm. But Jess turned up his collar as he walked back to the motel to await whatever grimness came next.

  » 24

  Allen was worried about Susie. He hadn’t been able to manage a trip to the basement to check on her because his mother, after she finished crying on the phone in the morning, insisted on spending the rest of the day with Allen. "We'll have fun!' she'd cried, with two weird spots of red high on her cheeks. "We'll play Candy Land!"

  Candy Land was way too babyish for Allen, but his mother didn’t know how to play Nintendo and didn’t want to learn. They settled on Parcheesi, which was really boring, and Allen was just about to invent a social studies project he had to do for school, when the doorbell rang.

  “Finally!” his mother said, which was weird because she’d been telling him all day that nobody was allowed outside, so how come she was expecting company? “Come in,” she said to the two people standing there, and as soon as Allen saw how they were dressed, his stomach shot up into his chest and he thought he might be sick.

  “The dog is in the basement,” his mother said. “Just follow me. Allen, stay here in the dining room, please. Do you hear me?”

  As they clomped through the room in their thick pants and parkas and gloves, carrying helmets and a cage, the woman stopped and spoke to Allen. “Don’t worry, kid, we’ll bring your dog back after this is all over. Meanwhile he’ll be safe with us.”

  “It’s a she.”

  “She, then.” They clomped on. Allen hated both of them.

  All three of them.

  He waited until they reached the bottom of the cellar stairs and then crept down after them, trying not to throw up.

  “I don’t understand, she was right here, my husband put her down here! She wasn’t acting aggressive, but he said just in case she—Allen, go back upstairs, do you hear me!”

  Allen sat defiantly on a step halfway down. He made himself not look at the filing cabinet in the corner.

  The man pound-person moved cautiously into the laundry room and then said, “Karen. Come look at this.” The woman followed, and then Allen’s mother. Allen stayed where he was. If he strained his ears, he could hear them.

  “Did Susie escape through the window?” his mother said.

  “Yeah, right, and first she knocked out every bit of glass and put a blanket on the dryer. Ma’am, did you or your husband let this dog loose?”

  “No! We called you, remember?”

  Allen closed his eyes. Hi
s stomach hurt really bad now. The three adults moved back into the main part of the cellar. The man said roughly, “When did you let your dog out, son?”

  “Yesterday,” Allen said. “She’s gone.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the man said, and Allen waited for his mother to tell him we don’t use that language in this house. But she didn’t. Instead she stared at Allen, and all at once he didn’t want the pound-people to leave, because of what his mother would say then.

  Which was nothing compared to what his father would do when he got home.

  But Allen didn’t really care, because Susie was safe, and that was all that mattered. And now that his parents thought she was gone, it would be easier for Allen to go down to the cellar to feed her, give her water, and make sure she had more of the pills Allen had in his jeans pocket from the little bottle in the medicine cabinet.

  It was a good thing that Susie had Allen. He was the only one who cared.

  » 25

  They wouldn’t let Tessa leave until after 6:00 P.M., when the February sun had just slipped below the horizon and the sky was still fiery red. Trying to be cooperative, she told her story to four different small groups of people, from four different agencies. The last group, who did not identify themselves, was not from FEMA, nor from law-enforcement; Tessa suspected they came from one of the intelligence agencies. She became sure when one of them said casually, “Wasn’t your husband an Arab?” and Tessa finally lost her temper.

  “Why aren’t all you people off dealing with the dog crisis instead of with me? Never mind, I know the answer. You screwed up too much with past national crises and you don’t want to screw up with this one. Well, guys, guess what? I don’t represent a threat to you. I didn’t screw up. I shot in defense of my partner, however temporary that partnership was. You’re in the clear. And no, goddammit, for the sixth time, I don’t need a lawyer! I was a lawyer, remember? I went to law school and then I became an FBI agent, and now I’m a temporary animal-control deputy.”