Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  The chain-link fence had a latch that opened it into the shed.

  Ebenfield turned back toward her, the line of light from the opening cutting like a knife across his rotting face. A knife would have been more merciful, Tessa thought. But Ebenfield’s voice was triumphant.

  “Behold my servants. Not the first ones, but my servants nonetheless.”

  “They’re dogs.” It sounded stupid, but how did you talk to the certifiably, dangerously mad? She had to keep him talking, had to hope that something he said could somehow be used to her advantage. “Where did the dogs come from, Richard?”

  “They are mine. Of my making, under my control.”

  “They’re infected with canine plague, aren’t they.” It wasn’t a question. “Where did the infection come from?”

  “Provided for the restoration of the true men.” He moved away from the opening—and toward her. The awful smell of him, strong even over the dog turds and pissed-soaked straw, intensified.

  “Provided through you,” Tessa said. “You were infected in Africa, weren’t you? When you were bitten by wild dogs in that jungle village. Monks cared for you afterward. Les Frères de l’Espoir céleste.”

  She’d hoped to stop him cold with this but he only nodded, as if of course she would already have that information. He stopped at her feet and gazed dreamily down at her.

  Tessa said desperately, “You recovered from the dog bites, the monks said. Then what? How did you infect these dogs here? You didn't bring them with you from Africa.”

  “Don’t you know, my Tessa?”

  “No. I don’t know. Tell me.” She was babbling, anything to keep him motionless. “You were sick from the wild dog bites, the monks nursed you—”

  “I was sick before the wild dog bites. The brothers only made me sicker. But the dogs cured me, which is how I knew they were on my side. Beasts are never fooled, my Tessa. They can always recognize the natural rulers of the Earth.”

  Sick before the wild dog bites. He had had one type of illness, maybe a virulent flu, and the dog-bite pathogen had mixed with it and…Her mind was skittering around. Ebenfield raised the hem of his jacket and unbuckled his belt. Aisha. With Aisha he had tried to—

  “But wait, Richard, how did you…I want to hear everything, I want to know, don’t stop talking now, tell me how you did it. How?”

  He pulled off his belt and dropped it into the straw. “I’ll show you.”

  She stopped breathing, but he came no closer. Instead he turned and left the shed. Again she strained at her bonds; again they refused to budge. Beyond the fence the dogs howled, jumping hysterically at the chain links, their teeth white in their black mouths. Two minutes later Ebenfield returned, carrying something under his jacket. He closed the shed door and smiled at her.

  “You see, my Tessa, the power was always there for the true aristocrats. All we had to do was see clearly the terrible injustice that has deceived the world. That injustice is this: The wrong men rule. Soft, rich men who don’t deserve their riches. Men like Salah and his friends. What did Salah ever do to have all that money, all those friends, women like you? He inherited it, is all. A perpetuation of a corrupt system. But when true men genuinely recognize their own power, nothing can stop them from claiming what is rightfully ours. Because we are not soft, not corrupted by pampered ease. We are willing to do anything to reclaim our rightful control. Anything.”

  From under his jacket he drew out a puppy.

  Eight weeks old, Tessa guessed numbly; ten at the most. A small wiggling ball of black fur. The dogs behind her went crazy, leaping and snarling. Probably one of them was the puppy’s mother. Ebenfield smiled at her again, raised the puppy to his mouth, and bit it hard.

  The animal yelped. Ebenfield tossed it into a corner, where it cowered and cried. Blood and dog hair smeared Ebenfield’s lips.

  “You see, my Tessa, how I make the beasts of the Earth mine, to do my bidding and to correct the errors of the Old Order.”

  She fought to keep her voice steady, to inject into it cold contempt. “But you aren’t correcting those errors alone, are you, Ebenfield? Someone else is using you. To bring the dog plague to the United States, to commit an act of terrorism here where they couldn’t go but you can. They’re using you, don’t you understand that—”

  She couldn’t deflect him. It was as if he didn’t even hear her. The dreamy expression had returned to his face. He unzipped and pulled down his pants and briefs, exposing his penis, engorged purplish-red. Below it, his spindly legs puckered into goose pimples from the cold.

  “Don’t you understand? They used you! You were convenient, an American who could go anywhere in the U.S. without suspicion, a vector no different from the mosquitoes that carry malaria or dengue fever—”

  He smiled at her and knelt in the straw. His voice held caresses. “Yes, it must happen here, in the sight of my servants. Salah was first, but only as the precursor to me. Ah, my Tessa, I have waited so long—but the true men always triumph in the end.”

  Gently—the gentleness was an obscenity in itself—Ebenfield reached for the button on her jeans.

  The moment he leaned over her, Tessa arched her entire body and thrust her knees upward. The blow caught him in the balls and sent him, shrieking, backwards against the wooden wall. The dogs went crazy, barking hysterically, snapping their sharp teeth.

  Frantically Tessa tried to spin herself in the straw to aim a kick at him from her bound feet, but he wasn’t disabled long enough. Gasping in pain, his rotting face contorted, he nonetheless scrambled over to her and punched her hard in the face.

  “You’ve ruined it! You’ve ruined everything! You bitch, you whore! You’re supposed to be mine, not his! Everything is supposed to be mine now!” He made as if to punch her again but instead collapsed against the far wall and began to cry.

  Tessa tasted blood. Her ears rang. But her jaw wasn’t broken; the deep straw had absorbed some of the impact.

  Ebenfield sobbed for what seemed like a long time. Cold seeped into Tessa’s bones. She couldn’t reach him and she didn’t want to provoke another blow. This time he might kill her.

  But when he finally got to his feet, she saw with amazement that his erection had actually returned. Again he knelt, this time beside her where she couldn’t reach him, and yanked her jeans and underwear to her ankles. Hope surged through her. If he meant to spread her legs to rape her, he’d have to cut the rope around her ankles and if her legs were free to really kick…he was weak, and she was trained to fight.

  However, he didn’t cut the rope. Instead he lay on top of her. She felt his hard penis thrust between her bare legs—and felt, too, its quick deflation into soft, limp jelly.

  “He…couldn’t,” Aisha had said.

  Ebenfield rubbed himself against her, trying to regain his erection. It didn’t happen. Tessa braced herself for the blow, but he didn’t hit her again.

  In a voice full of more quiet anguish, of genuine despair, than she had imagined him capable of, Ebenfield uttered a single word. Then he rose and dressed quickly, not looking at her. He put out the lantern. For a moment his hand strayed near the latch on the fence, and Tessa closed her eyes. No. But of course he wouldn’t let the dogs in from into the shed while he himself was in it. He would go outside, spring the latch with some remote mechanism…

  He left the shed, but the fence stayed closed. Tessa couldn’t hear where he went. All she could hear as she lay naked from waist to ankles in the reeking cold were the dogs and, even louder than the dogs in her head, that one word Ebenfield had whispered. Not with hatred this time, nor even with bitter envy, but with agonized longing for what he could never be, never have.

  Salah.

  » 55

  Frantically Tessa chafed against her ropes until her wrists bled. When Ebenfield returned, once his momentary anguish had passed, he would almost certainly kill her. He’d failed to rape her, failed to make Salah’s woman his own, and his humiliation would turn to rage.
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br />   She couldn’t get free of her bonds. She did manage to get to her feet and hobble to the shed door, but Ebenfield had locked it from the outside. If she could find a nail or rough edge of wood, rub the ropes against it to weaken them…but that didn’t work, either, because she didn’t have enough time. The light from the dog enclosure faded into red sunset.

  In the corner the bitten puppy whimpered.

  Tessa, naked from waist to ankles, started to shiver. God, it was cold! Frostbite, hypothermia…Her teeth chattered.

  All at once, the dogs raced away from the shed opening.

  Tessa went completely still, straining to hear whatever had alerted the dogs. After a moment she caught it: voices! Maddox must have traced her!

  She almost called out, but long training restrained her. And a moment later, the voices became clearer as they neared the shed. They were speaking Arabic.

  Tessa dropped back onto the filthy straw and forced her icy body to shimmy from side to side. To the left, to the right, left, right… Straw drifted over her face, her belly, her exposed public hair. As quickly and silently as she could, she burrowed deep into the straw. A dog turd fell onto her face. She heard another rat somewhere, scurrying away from her.

  The back of her head scraped concrete just as the shed door opened.

  Tessa lay covered by straw. Completely covered? She couldn’t tell and couldn’t check. All she could do was concentrate on not making the straw quiver by trying fiercely to control her shivering. That, and hope that the fading light made visibility difficult.

  The men spoke Arabic and she understood none of it. But she heard their voices muffle as once again the door closed. After a moment, the voices again grew louder and so did the barking and howling. The men had come around to the side of the shed that abutted the dog pen. And now one voice spoke English. Ebenfield, yelling in hysteria.

  “No you can’t—no! Abd-Al Adil promised—he told me—no you don’t understand no—”

  Something hit the ground hard. The dogs’ howling rose to a frenzy. Then the screaming began.

  Tessa squeezed her eyes shut. The agonized screams seemed to go on forever, although it was probably just a few minutes. The tearing of flesh lasted much longer. Over those terrible sounds, Tessa just distinguished another voice she recognized, also speaking English.

  “Come on, then. The bloody Yanks’ll be here soon.”

  Manchester or Liverpool.

  “The true men,” Ebenfield had said to Tessa. The ones who could claim, rule, protect what was rightfully theirs. The masters.

  Ruzbihan bin Fahoud bin Ahmed bin Aziz al-Ashan had protected his renegade son.

  Tessa, lying buried and half naked in the straw, heard the car drive up to the shed, then a last volley of gunfire, and then the car roaring away. The gunfire bewildered her—what had they shot at? Not the dogs; she could still hear them outside, tearing at Ebenfield’s body. Ripping, slavering, sucking: noises that Tessa knew she would hear in her head for the rest of her life.

  Again she hauled herself out of the straw and onto her feet. Her jeans puddled above the ropes binding her ankles. She found a protruding bent nail and rubbed her wrist cord over it, again and again. It took a long time to weaken the rope, and it was full dark before it gave way. Cold seeped into her very bones.

  With numb fingers Tessa fumbled for and lit the lantern, untied the cord around her ankles, and pulled up her jeans. That didn’t warm her much. She did jumping jacks until she could feel circulation return to her limbs. Then she laid one hand on the shed door, hoping the blue-eyed Brit had left it unlocked.

  He had, but as soon as she cracked the door, she heard panting in the dark and slammed it again. The dogs were loose.

  That last volley of gunfire—Ruzbihan’s men had, from the safety of their car, shot off the lock on the dog pen. Why? Perhaps to let the in dogs scatter, making it harder for anyone to notice this place from the air, although the thick pine cover already contributed to that. Or perhaps just from malice.

  Tessa put her ear to the door. Quiet breathing. They were waiting for her to come out.

  A violent shiver rattled her teeth. She couldn’t stay in here; she’d freeze. The temperature must be in the twenties. Already her toes, despite the jumping jacks, felt like ice cubes. They might even have frostbite.

  She walked to the open wall, where Ebenfield had removed a five-foot section to expose the dog fence, and slipped her hand between the fence and the outside wall of the shed to see how high the fence rose. Only a few inches higher. And the roof of the crude wooden shed rose maybe another foot and half above that.

  One dog came back into the enclosure. The other two had disappeared. This one stood beside the mangled thing that had been Ebenfield, a darker shape in the dark yard, and Tessa could feel it staring at her.

  She grasped the sawn edge of the wooden wall just inside the fence and pulled inward. The wall didn’t budge but the dog hurtled itself, snarling, at the fence. Tessa stumbled backward, shuddering. The fence held—she could see that it was strong and new—but her reaction was involuntary. That dark shape leaping at her out of the night: every primitive circuit in her hindbrain fired. Danger danger run run...

  She couldn’t run. Again she tried to pull boards above the fence free from the shed wall. The wall had been weakened when Ebenfield cut his removable panel; this time a board tore loose.

  Five minutes later she had a hole a foot-and-a-half high between the top of the fence and the roof. But if she put one frozen foot into the chain link to climb, the dog would surely bite it. As Tessa pondered this, the moon rose over the mountains to the east, filtering silver light through the pines. Somehow, it cheered her. Not just for the light, which would be useful, but because that lopsided white orb seemed a witness to her efforts. She’d always done good work under close observation.

  It took several vigorous, painful jumps on Ebenfield’s wall panel to break it. When it finally cracked, Tessa hurled the largest piece at the dog, which dodged it. She thrust the second piece, sharp side down, into the snow on the other side of the fence. It shielded her foot from the dog’s jaws when she stuck her toes through the fence and climbed it to the top.

  Immediately the dog snarled and leapt. But it couldn’t reach her, perched five feet above the ground. Tessa crouched, worked her body through the hole, and scrambled onto the roof of the shed, under the overhanging pine branches that hid the structure from any air surveillance.

  Here the cold really hit her. She hadn’t realized how much warmth the straw-filled cabin had actually held. But at least up here she didn’t have to smell the filthy straw.

  Ebenfield’s cabin was about thirty feet away, under another thick stand of trees. Pines weren’t ideal for climbing and Tessa’s arms were stiff with cold. Nonetheless, she managed. As she swung out over the roof onto the second tree, the dogs went crazy. There were two of them down there now. Keep moving, don’t look down… When she reached the roof of the cabin, her feet were so cold she nearly slipped off. There were no gutters to catch her. Spread-eagled on the steeply pitched roof, Tessa breathed deeply and forced herself to calm. “The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel..."

  Not tonight.

  Groping with extended arms over the eaves, Tessa found what seemed to be the cabin’s only window, set high in the south wall. She used a branch broken from the pine tree overhead to break the glass and sweep the opening clear of all shards. Almost there. Lying on her stomach, she eased herself down the wall until her feet found the sill, teetered briefly, and slid inside, falling heavily and gracelessly onto Ebenfield’s bed beneath the window. A few bits of glass pierced her clothing, but nothing serious.

  Even with the broken window, the inside of the crude cabin was blessedly warm, heated with a propane stove. Bed, table, one chair, some rough open shelves. Ruzbihan’s men had obviously been inside, and they had been thorough. No papers, no books, no cell phone, no medicines, no camera. No laptop, which Ebenfield must have charged a
nd used at various wireless locations around West Virginia, since the cabin was without electricity. Tessa didn’t even see any extra clothing. Just the crude furniture, a few basic tools, a fifty-pound bag of dry dog food, and, in the corner, a cardboard box with two more squealing black puppies.

  Outside, the dogs growled and scratched at the door.

  She nailed a blanket over the open window; at least it would stop the wind. The shelves held ten cans of beef stew, all the same brand, plastic jugs of water, and three packages of dried figs. Figs.

  Salah and she at a market stall in the souks of Tunis, eating fresh figs sold still attached to the branch, fresh dates from the harvest at Nefta, the juice running down her chin and the warm fruit tasting like heaven.

  “You bastard,” she said aloud to Ebenfield. His figs defiled her memory.

  She heated a can of stew and ate it, enduring the pain as feeling returned to her frozen toes. The puppies cried and she gave them some dog food mashed with stew gravy. Outside, one of the dogs howled at the moon. Another, maybe the puppies’ mother, scratched relentlessly at the door. The third puppy, the one Ebenfield had bitten, would undoubtedly freeze to death in the shed.

  Too exhausted to plan her next steps, Tessa wrapped herself in Ebenfield’s remaining blankets—she couldn’t bring herself to lie in his bed—and fell asleep on the floor beside the propane heater.

  INTERIM

  Chief of Medicine Bruce Olatic sat in the conference room at Tyler Community Hospital. The faces along the length of the table all wore the same expression: profound weariness. Olatic didn’t blame them. He himself had been on duty twenty straight hours.

  Luke Mendenhall said, “Tell me again—how many people left who were initially treated for dog bites but haven’t yet come in with post-bite syndrome?"