Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  Once they were far enough from the tent, he let go of the girl, who immediately fell to the ground and curled back into her protective ball. Well, that would be as safe as anything, and they were far enough away now. He glanced over at Keith as they ran, and so saw the moment that Keith, still crouched low and running a good zig-zag pattern, pressed the detonator clutched in his right hand.

  Tent A, with all its child-killing infected dogs, exploded into sound and fury. A moment later it began to rain down debris and metal bars and the pulpy bodies of incinerated dogs.

  Jess, halfway across the field, was knocked to the ground by the blast shock. He fell heavily and felt something tear, but not before he saw Tent A blow up. A sound like a lightening crack shattered the air, followed seconds later by its echo: Bbboooooooommmmm. What was left of the tent’s canvas walls began to burn.

  The human sounds, shrieking and yelling, rose to a crescendo and then fell in a long, keening wail.

  Jess covered his head, waiting for the second tent, the one with people in it, to also explode. It didn’t. A horrible smell filled the air. Dog flesh, roasted in the blast. He gagged and tried to sit up, feeling his chest pull in sharp pain. He’d cracked a rib.

  Nonetheless, he crept forward on his knees, toward a body ten feet away on the ground. He pulled off the ski mask and saw it was a middle-aged woman with bright red lipstick, as if she’d freshened up for this. She was dead.

  Sirens sounded, coming closer, a whole other cacophony. Police, fire, maybe more Guards.

  Too late for that. The field was emptying rapidly. People and dogs vanished into the woods, down the road, into the night. Some figures carried dog cages. Another dog jumped over Jess and kept running. Jess moved forward, to another body. This one was a Guardsman, not yet dead.

  “Medic! Medic!” Jess screamed. He went on screaming it until there was no one moving but the newly arrived EMTs and one of them rushed over to the Guardsman. In the harsh glare of the floodlights and the flames at Tent A, the medics’ faces were dead white.

  Jess rose to his knees. Definitely a cracked rib. Holding his chest together, he staggered to his feet and gazed in despair over the terrible scene, how could this have happened, if the—

  He saw Billy.

  Carefully, as if any movement might startle that inert form lying on his back, eyes open to the sky, Jess walked toward Billy. He sank to his knees, put out one hand, withdrew it. Billy was dead. He’d been shot through the heart.

  “Don’t nap too long, Billy.”

  “Catch you later, dude.”

  Jess crouched by the body. He didn’t shout or cry or even touch Billy. He just sat, while around him the medics and firefighters and cops and fresh Guards filled the field with as much noise as the departed terrorists and their departed dogs.

  But not all departed. Jess felt something hurl against him. He looked down and there was Minette. Maybe because she recognized his smell, maybe because he was the only live human at her level on the ground. She huddled against him, shaking violently, ears so far back that they rested on her quivering little body. She was terrified by the noise and the fire and the guns, and as soon as Jess tried to pick her up, her terror made her growl and then bite him with her small, sharp, harmless teeth.

  » 70

  Tessa drove Ebenfield’s car very slowly over the dark mountain roads. A part of her mind was genuinely surprised to see that her hands shook on the wheel. She hadn’t eaten in—how long? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think of anything but Ebenfield’s screams as the dogs tore him apart, of the Doberman rushing straight at her as she yanked the car door, of the eerie leaping and twisting of the other huge dog as it snapped and fought with empty air, of the dog she had crushed against the shed…

  Damn it, her hands shouldn’t shake like this! She was—had been—an FBI agent.

  The two puppies whimpered in the back seat. Tessa’s feet, in socks sodden from her dash across the snow to Ebenfield’s car, felt like ice. She turned up the heat as high as it would go and directed it downward. As the car warmed, the puppies fell asleep.

  She had no idea where she was, or even if she was still in West Virginia, although she guessed the answer was yes. The dashboard display included a digital compass. Tessa headed west, searching for a highway. She turned on the radio, flipping through staticky country-and-western stations—she must really be far from civilization—until she came to the news, also staticky.

  “—terrorist act that—crackle crackle—Tyler, Maryland. Initial reports—crackle—Guardsmen dead and—crackle—explosion that—”

  Tessa reached the top of a hill and the broadcast abruptly cleared. She listened to all of it, parked by the side of the dark road under the high cold stars. The freed dogs, the Guard opening fire, the explosion, the stupid senseless slaughter Ebenfield had caused among innocent people. “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?"

  And…Minette?

  Dr. Latkin?

  Jess?

  After another half hour, she came to a cluster of houses with a grocery store, a gas station, and a roadside diner/bar, McGarrity’s. When she stopped the car, the puppies woke and barked feebly. Tessa shuddered, berated herself, and got out.

  A big, middle-aged man in parka and a hat with ear flaps climbed out of a pick-up beside her. “Looks like you hit a deer.”

  “Yes.” The car grille was smeared with blood and pulpy flesh, made even more hellish by the red neon glow from the bar.

  The man peered at her. “You okay, miss?”

  “I’m…I’m fine.”

  “Don’t look fine. You need a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t got on shoes, you know.”

  “I know,” Tessa said, managed a smile, and went inside.

  A large dim room, tables covered in red oilcloth, pool table, bar. George Jones played, too loud. She ordered chicken wings and a Scotch, then padded in Ruzbihan’s son’s socks, cold and sodden again from the parking lot, to the phone in the corner. The big man watched her all the way, his face creased with concern.

  She called Maddox’s cell. He picked up immediately.

  “This is Tessa,” she said, and paused. Where to even start?

  Maddox drew a sharp breath. “Where are you?”

  “Somewhere in West Virginia, I think. Ebenfield’s dead. He did start the plague and he nabbed me…I can’t give it all to you here now on the phone. Bring me in, John. I’m at a bar called McGarrity’s someplace on Route 50.”

  “I’ll have a helicopter there inside an hour.”

  “Put a lawyer on the helicopter.”

  “Not necessary. Just stay put, Tessa.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I heard on the radio…Tyler…”

  “Yes. Just stay put.”

  She padded back to the bar, leaving wet footprints on the grimy floor. By now most of McGarrity’s was watching her. Tessa leaned across the bar to speak to the woman behind it. “I have two puppies in the car. They’re in a box. Is it all right if I bring the box in here while I eat, so that the little dogs don’t freeze?”

  “Sure, honey,” the woman said. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” Tessa said. “Just fine.”

  Maddox looked as tired as she felt. He met the helicopter as it landed in an empty field located somewhere, Tessa guessed, near Tyler but not too near. Had he driven up from Washington or had he already been in Tyler? Maddox was alone, no driver, although two other cars were part of the entourage, one of which immediately drove off with the box of puppies. Tessa knew she’d never see the dogs again. She and Maddox sat in the front seat of his car. He kept the heat running.

  “Are you all right, Tessa? Do you need a doctor?”

  “I need a lawyer.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m going to record what’s said here, all right?”

  “Here? Now?”

  “Yes. With your agreement, of course.”

  Because she wasn’t an agent, just a civilian.
“Tell me first why I don’t need a lawyer. Off the record, John.”

  He hesitated and then, in the half-light from the dashboard, made his characteristic movement of eyes and mouth, that Maddox-grimace she knew so well from years of working together. She saw the moment he decided to trust her, as she was trusting him.

  “You know what happened tonight in Tyler?”

  “Yes. Or at least, what the radio reported.”

  “Probably accurate, although not the whole story.”

  “It never is.”

  Maddox turned in his seat to look her full in the face. She could see how carefully he was considering his words, and that he wanted her to see that carefulness. “You don’t need a lawyer because you’re going to come out the hero of this thing. Not publicly, of course. But the administration is going to need an intelligence hero, just like they’re going to need an intelligence scapegoat, along with a public scapegoat. The whole thing’s been mismanaged from beginning to end. The president is on the war path and Hugh Martin will be able to restrain him only so far.”

  Tessa nodded. The chief-of-staff’s restraining of the president was an old story inside the Beltway.

  “Scott Lurie will be fired,” Maddox said, “and Bernini will resign.”

  "Bernini? The Assistant Director?”

  Maddox nodded. “And you’re going to be the unsung hero of the dog plague problem. Completely unsung, except at the top echelons, especially if you’re right about Ebenfield. Now tell me where we can find his body. The CDC is going to need it.” He reached for the recorder.

  Tessa put a hand on his arm. “Just one more minute, John. And one more question.” She gathered herself, knowing how critical her question was, how outrageous. But she had worked counter-terrorism for a long time. She knew the kind of people recruited as informers—and what often happened to them later, when they went off the rails and out on their own. The whole thing’s been mismanaged from beginning to end, Maddox had said. How long a beginning?

  She said, “Were we running Ebenfield originally? Not the Bureau, of course, but our friends across the river at Langley?”

  Maddox looked at her. He made no answer—which was her answer.

  Jesus Christ.

  He said, “I’m going to start to record now.”

  She nodded, still stunned, but managed to say, “And I want to know what happened in Tyler.”

  “We have a lot to tell each other,” Maddox said. He turned on the recorder.

  INTERIM

  The president, so angry he could not sit still, raged at his chief of staff. “Goddamn it, Hugh, what a massive screw-up! How many dead?”

  “Seven, sir. Three National Guard and four civilians. Plus five wounded.” The number was right in front of them, displayed on CNN in a huge headline behind a somber anchorman. Nothing else had played on all major networks all evening. Now it was nearly midnight and the full staff still worked the Oval Office.

  “Son of a bitch! Of all the mismanaged—I want Scott Lurie fired. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Burial with full honors for the Guards—how many of the funerals should I attend?”

  “All three, Mr. President.”

  The president scraped his hands across his face, pulling at the tired flesh. “And the civilians? Personal phone calls?”

  “No. Everyone on that field in Tyler was engaging in an act of domestic terrorism, sir.” Was it possible that the president didn’t understand that this was the end of his presidency, there would be no second term, and that his legacy would be the “Tyler Massacre”? Was that—in the face of the screaming on TV, in the papers, and from the Hill—even possible?

  Yes. It was possible.

  “What are we doing with all the damn dogs?”

  “The caged infected ones all died in the explosion. The loose infected ones are, according to the CDC, slowly going inert and then dying. The ones set loose weren’t infected so we’re trying to round them up again and move them to a secure facility at Fort Detrick. Anything else would look like condoning terrorism.”

  “Yes. I see.”

  The president didn’t ask if the escaped dogs were actually being found in the round-up, and Hugh Martin didn’t volunteer the information that no, of course they weren’t. Animal handlers and law enforcement hadn’t even found them all the first time, when at least some dog owners had been more willing to cooperate.

  Martin said, “The good news is that all threat to the public seems to be over, which is what you’ll say in your broadcast tomorrow morning. Also that there is cautious optimism from the CDC about the dog-bite victims.”

  “There is?”

  “There’s always cautious optimism, sir.”

  “There’s always a good hard strike-back, too! I want everybody who organized that terrorist act to have the book thrown at them!”

  “As soon as we identify them, sir.”

  Irritably the president snapped off CNN. “And speaking of terrorism, what about that FBI agent? She came in, right? Can we charge her with anything?”

  “No, Mr. President. She led us to Ebenfield and the dogs that were the primary terrorist weapons. She’s a hero.”

  “Oh.” The president considered this. “Does she know anything about… you know.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I just don’t want any loose ends here snapping back to hit us in the ass.”

  “There won’t be.”

  “I want Lurie fired. And Bernini, too. He couldn’t even find one of his own agents, for God’s sake, let alone find Ebenfield!”

  “Bernini will resign.” Martin had already spoken to him. “Sir, the agent has no idea that originally we were running Ebenfield.”

  The president’s thoughts had moved on. “That Arab cell that turned Ebenfield—how do we know he didn’t tell them anything?”

  “He didn’t know anything, sir,” Martin said patiently. They’d been over this before. Nor did Martin remind the president that Tessa Sanderson’s late husband had also been an Arab. It would only confuse him. “Ultimately Ebenfield did what we wanted him to—he led us to Abd-Al Adil al-Ashan. Nobody could have predicted that on the way he would contract an infection from wild dogs.”

  “And then attack the United States with it. Damn, Hugh, I’ve got half a mind to hold Decker responsible, too.”

  James Decker was the head of the CIA, which had recruited Ebenfield in Africa. Martin said, “I wouldn’t advise that, sir. Decker’s a good man.”

  “If he was such a good man then we wouldn’t have had a biological terrorist attack in the United States! And from dogs! The best surveillance techniques in the world and we get zapped by a man who bites Lassie and Marmaduke!”

  Martin said nothing. In this mood, the president couldn’t be reasoned with. The best thing was to let the tantrum run its course.

  “Was it the plague that turned Ebenfield into such a raging megalomaniac? The virus in his brain?”

  “We don’t know that yet, sir.”

  “And what about Abd-Ali…Abdul…whatever the hell his name is, the one with the alias ‘Erekat.’ Where is he and what are we doing about him?”

  “He’ll be neutralized in Tunis. It’s being set up now.”

  “What about the father?”

  “He’s clean. The son apparently went off on his little jihad without paternal backing.”

  “All right.” Abruptly the president calmed down. He sat behind his desk, looking presidential, a thing he did very well.

  Too bad it was too late.

  SATURDAY

  » 71

  Ellie Caine sat on the edge of her bed. Ten in the morning, she hadn’t slept at all, and she couldn’t stop shaking. No matter what she did—another blanket, warm milk, wine—she couldn’t stop shaking.

  She had shot and killed a man.

  He had been going to shoot her, that man on his knees in the black ski mask. She was sure of that. He’d raised his gun and was bringing it up to point at her. So he
r shooting had been self-defense. But it had happened while she was committing a crime herself, so didn’t that make it some sort of felony? Could she go to prison?

  Who had he been?

  When the doorbell rang, Ellie screamed and jumped. But it wasn’t the police. Two Maryland Guards stood there with dog cages.

  “Ellie Caine?”

  “Yes….”

  “Are you harboring any of the four dogs licensed to you, ma’am? The Greyhounds?”

  “No.” None of them had come home, not her beloved Song nor Chimes nor Music. Other dogs had come home, but not hers.

  The soldier’s gaze pushed hers. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

  “I don’t have my dogs.”

  “We have an emergency warrant to search.”

  “Go ahead,” Ellie said, while a complicated wash of emotions went through her. Indignation. Grief. But, most of all, relief.

  They had come for the dogs, not for her.

  This time.

  » 72

  Steve Harper heard the knock on the door but didn’t move. The people outside, cops or Guard or FBI, weren’t looking for dogs; he didn’t have a dog. They were looking for him. The door wasn’t locked and if they had a warrant, they’d come in. If they didn’t, they’d go away. It didn’t really matter.

  He and Keith had blown up Tent A, but the world was still full of dogs. He could hear them barking somewhere out there, filling up newscasts on TV the endless subject of endless debates by talking heads. The world would always be full of dogs. Steve knew that now. And some people—enough people—would always value the lives of dogs over the lives of children.

  The brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s small body… No.

  Steve couldn’t think about that image anymore. Couldn’t struggle any more. He was so tired inside.

  Another knock on the door.