by Mark Wheaton
• • •
When the first gunshots echoed through the Building 10 lobby, no one moved. But when Ken emptied the magazine into Detective Garza’s head at point-blank range, everyone scattered.
“Somebody’s shooting!” they called out as they ran into the courtyard.
Everyone, that is, except Becca and Bones.
“Come on, boy!” Becca cried.
The German shepherd didn’t need an invitation. Together, they hurried to the stairs leading to the subbasement and descended. What they found was easily Becca’s worst nightmare.
“Trey! Ken!” she screamed, clambering down the stairs and over to them.
Detective Garza’s head had been functionally obliterated, a mass of blood and ruined bones, so Becca had no idea who that corpse belonged to. But as she pushed it aside, she saw that Trey’s eyed were fixed and beginning to dilate as they stared at the ceiling.
“No!” she wailed, the tears coming quickly.
She turned to Ken and, upon seeing the gun, wondered if he had been the one to shoot both of the others. She couldn’t imagine Trey had shot him, but until this day, there were a lot of things she couldn’t have imagined either of her brothers capable of doing.
She went over to Ken and found him unconscious, though still breathing, labored and shallow. She looked around the locker room, unsure what to do, until she saw Bones at the service hatch. He was already pawing it open, the hatch having swung shut after its last use.
“Is that where he went?” she asked breathlessly.
Bones glanced back at her for only a second before continuing to work on the door.
Becca picked up the gun next to Ken, but it felt light. She knew there weren’t any bullets in it. She moved over to Trey, the gun that had taken his life sitting close by. It was heavier. She pocketed it and then moved with the shepherd to the service hatch.
“Okay,” she whispered.
Swinging the hatch open, the unlikely duo exited the locker room and slipped into darkness.
XV
Becca had never been under the city before, but she understood that there was an endless labyrinth just below the streets. Trey had talked about the ways the various buildings of Neville Houses were connected by service tunnels and that some of these had access points elsewhere in the city, but she didn’t always believe everything Trey said.
Trey.
She couldn’t make the connection between the body she’d just seen in the subbasement and her brother. He couldn’t be gone. Not him. She hadn’t wanted to leave Ken behind, but part of her wondered if that was her brother anymore. She’d heard him on the roof. Something was inside him. Something, she feared, that couldn’t be extricated until the dog lost its power over him.
That meant killing the beast. And that meant following it all the way to hell if necessary.
She wasn’t sure what made her feel better, the gun in her hand or the German shepherd at her side. She didn’t know why Bones was going after the mastiff. She knew there was nothing “personal” between the two dogs…or was there?
She eyed the dog. Bones’s nose was pressed to the concrete floor of the dark tunnel. Becca had feared that it would be completely dark, but there were dull emergency lights glowing every thirty yards or so. They didn’t do much, but they cut down Becca’s terror.
Though she hadn’t seen the mastiff since they’d entered the tunnels, she was confident that Bones was taking her in the right direction. He didn’t stop moving, but kept right on going as if the trail was lit in neon. When they came to side tunnels or other passageways, the shepherd might lift his head to sniff the air a little, but then he’d go left or right or straight ahead without doubling back. He knew exactly where the other dog had gone.
At one point, the environment changed. The tunnel, already cold, grew colder. The tunnel narrowed and the walls and floor became slick, as if Becca had somehow entered the throat of a living creature.
But as Bones pressed on, so did she.
She wondered how long they’d been underground, but the darkness played tricks on her perception. It might’ve been an hour, but if it turned out to be fifteen minutes, Becca would’ve believed it. She had long given up trying to determine which direction they were going, much less how long it would take to reach their destination.
Then it changed. The tunnel widened again and the air remained dank, but the walls no longer perspired, and she tasted fresh air. Up ahead, she could just make out a light source coming in from above. A ladder came into view, little more than iron rungs bolted into the wall, but Bones stopped in front of it and looked up.
“He climbed the ladder?” Becca asked in surprise, trying to imagine such a large animal ascending the steps with ease.
But then, as if making a point, the German shepherd placed its forepaws on one of the lowest rungs, sank back on its haunches, and then leaped forward, half-jumping, half-climbing to the surface.
As soon as the dog disappeared, Becca climbed up after it. When she reached the surface, she was surprised to find herself in the woods. The sun was just beginning to rise in the east. She realized she must have been underground a lot longer than she’d initially suspected.
Turning back, she saw the lights of Manhattan behind her. She walked towards the edge of the trees and saw that she had walked all the way from Harlem to Randall’s Island, having taken a service tunnel under the East River.
She turned back to see where Bones had gone, but he was out of sight.
“Bones?!” she cried, instinctively feeling for the gun in her pocket.
She hurried through the trees until she found herself in a large park. There were two soccer fields and a baseball diamond, all with bleachers. She’d been here, she realized, but only a couple of times with Ken. There’d been a neighborhood get-together and then a birthday party for a classmate once. She scanned the area, but saw no sign of the German shepherd.
What she did see was a single open gate at the edge of the park. She made a beeline for it, hoping that the animals simply hadn’t hopped the nearest fence and gone off in a different direction.
Once she was on the other side of the fence, she found a long, curving road and began to follow it along the shoulder. The longer she went without seeing Bones, the worse she felt. She’d undertaken this mission, and now she had failed in it.
She kept going until she reached the far side of the little island, finding herself between two bridges that crossed the East River, emptying out into Queens. One was the continuation of I-278 to Queens, the other a much smaller bridge used by trains.
As she eyed the train bridge, she saw, silhouetted against the purpling sky, the shape of the mastiff as it made its way to the center of the bridge.
Her reaction was immediate and instinctual. She took off running. She moved as fast as her legs would carry her, almost tripping over her own feet as she flew down the rock-strewn shoreline towards the train bridge. She still saw no sign of Bones, but didn’t care.
She had the gun.
She had the target.
This was going to end right now.
When she got to the bridge, there was no easy access at the waterline, so she had to go inland a few dozen yards to clamber up onto the train tracks and hurry onto the bridge that way. She could still see the dog. It had stopped walking and was now sitting dead center, staring down into the water. It looked like it was waiting for something or, stranger, about to jump.
She kept running, fumbling for the gun. She took out of her pocket and felt the safety, which was on. She knew a lot about guns for someone who had never fired one. She knew when a safety was off, when a gun was loaded, and when a bullet was in the chamber.
A second later, and all three of these things were true about the pistol in her hand. The mastiff still hadn’t acknowledged her by the time she was only ten feet away. She stopped, held the gun in both of her hands, and aimed it at the dog.
“Hey, motherfucker!” she yelled, spitting her rage at this
horrible beast.
As the mastiff turned to her, she realized that she wasn’t looking at the black dog at all, but Bones, the German shepherd sitting there as calm as could be, staring out over the water.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
She felt the mastiff’s hot breath on the back of her legs a second later. She didn’t know how it had gotten behind her, but there it was, its teeth inches away.
“Bones?” she said, as calm as she could muster.
The German shepherd slowly got to its feet and turned towards Becca. The way its jaw hung down, its tongue lolling out between its bottom teeth, Becca thought the dog looked downright rabid.
“Come on, Bones,” she said, tears welling up into her eyes. “Not you, too.”
The shepherd moved up close and, when it was only a few feet from Becca, it began barking, its teeth bared. The little girl started to tremble as the shepherd stamped its front feet and lowered its head, clearly getting ready to pounce. Becca raised the gun and pointed it at the dog.
“Please don’t make me do this, Bones,” Becca begged. “I don’t want to shoot you! Come on, boy. Don’t come any closer!”
But the angry shepherd inched ahead, causing Becca to back up, her body pressing up against the mastiff. As she felt its weight on her skin, something changed in her mind, a synapse fired, a connection made where one hadn’t been before. She’d seen Bones try to fight the dog before and it hadn’t worked. The shepherd hadn’t been able to get so much as a tooth into the other animal’s thick hide.
She turned and faced the mastiff, looking into its soulless eyes. It stared back at her as dully as the night sky, without concern. She pointed the gun directly between the mastiff’s eyes only to feel a slight shift in her vision. Everything looked the same, but it was that same warped perspective, the same feeling that what was in front of her was an optical illusion.
Even more indicative was the subtle shift in the direction from which Bones’s barking came. He should be behind her, shouldn’t he? Then why did it sound like the barks were coming from something mere inches from her gun?
She turned back around and the optical illusion seemed to fall away. She was now facing Bones, but the sound of his barking was still coming from directly in front of her.
She turned and looked over the side of the bridge to where she thought the mastiff had been looking. Directly under her, she saw something black deep within the water. At first, it appeared to be moving, but then she realized it was an optical illusion. She moved her head one way or another, and the shape disappeared. Then she’d find it again, a large patch of darkness like a shadow at the bottom of the river.
“What is that?”
She turned from the angry shepherd to the impassive mastiff, but then back to the water. Everything about this was wrong. She ran through her options, finding little to recommend. But then a new one appeared. As Bones continued to inch forward, she tumbled over this new idea in her mind and finally made a decision.
“I’m sorry, boy,” she said to the shepherd.
And jumped.
• • •
Though the bridge was hardly the highest in New York, when Becca hit the surface of the water, it still felt like she’d been in a car crash. Her head shot back, all the air was forced from her lungs, and her legs felt as if they’d been torn off her body. The fact that the water was frigid was something she only noticed after a few seconds had passed and she’d clawed her way back up to the surface.
She had only been up for a moment before she came face-to-face with Bones, hurtling downward from the bridge, his snarling jaws aimed directly for her throat.
She took a deep breath and forced herself back under the dark waves.
Come on, Bones, she thought.
She swam towards the dark shadow on the riverbed below. Even as she got closer, she still couldn’t tell what it was. There was a part of the river bottom that she could just make out, rocks and ridges, mostly, and then a part she couldn’t: a gaping maw with ill-defined edges, albeit vaguely in the shape of a circle.
She pushed herself deeper and deeper, feeling the burn in her lungs not unlike what she’d so recently encountered in the smoke-filled stairwell. She glanced back and saw the German shepherd still coming towards her, a trail of air bubbles floating away from his clenched jaws.
Even in the lowlight, she saw the fire in his eyes. She was his target. He wouldn’t stop until he’d killed her.
Keep coming, boy. Keep coming.
She was within a few dozen yards of the black pit when she began to feel lightheaded, her arms and legs going to jelly as her strength began to ebb. She tried to see into it, but saw only darkness. Nothing lay beyond its mouth but black.
But still she pressed on. She forced her fingers to claw forward, raking the water aside as she went deeper. Her vision began to blur as well. She knew it wouldn’t be long now.
She turned and saw Bones approaching, but similarly running out of steam. He stretched his neck as if trying to take a bite out of her leg. She kicked a little harder and moved ahead, but that was the last of her energy. She was almost to the shadow when she felt herself going limp. Her momentum slowed as her body gave up. It was a welcome feeling, a weightlessness that swept all cares away.
She curled around and tried to see Bones one last time, but her eyes failed her.
That was okay, she thought.
Then nothing.
• • •
“Kid! Kid! Wake up! Come on!”
There was a distant light, there was blue, there was a sick feeling, and then Becca threw up. Her eyes opened as water belched out of her lungs. She tried to hold herself up with one arm, but the strength wasn’t there and she collapsed back down, only to vomit again.
“Oh, my God!” cried a panicked woman’s voice. “Oh, my God!”
Becca felt a hand go under her back and lift her into a seated position. Her eyes finally began to focus, and she saw a woman in running clothes staring back at her.
“Oh, my God,” the woman repeated a third time, Becca having the presence of mind to think it a bit much. “Are you okay?”
Becca tried not to scowl. She thought this a ridiculous question.
“I saw you go into the water. Do you fall off the bridge?”
“Bridge?” Becca asked.
The woman pointed. “The Hell Gate. The train bridge.”
Becca stared at it for a moment before everything came back to her at once. “A dog! Did you see a dog?”
“Yeah! It jumped in after you. Tried to save you. I saw it when I dove in to fish you out. It was swimming for you. But then I lost track of it. Was that your dog?”
“Yeah,” Becca said.
“I’m really sorry,” the woman said. “He was a really brave dog.”
Becca nodded before looking back up to the bridge.
“You didn’t see a second dog, did you?”
Epilogue
Bones was found a week later in Queens. He’d been skulking around behind a row of restaurants on Roosevelt, eating rats and garbage, when one of the local business owners finally had enough and called animal control.
It took a couple days, but a sharp-eyed veterinarian’s assistant who volunteered at the local shelter had heard from a friend about a police dog who’d been stitched up after a dog fight a couple of weeks before in the exact same area where this animal had been. She made a couple of calls and the presumed-dead shepherd was brought back to Manhattan. Once his identity was confirmed, he was put on the next plane back to Pittsburgh.
“Jesus Christ, Bones!” Sergeant Youman said upon picking up his partner at the airport. “You look like shit. That’s the last time I entrust you to the NYPD. Hope you slept on the flight. Got a guy downtown who claims he buried a couple of bums in Point Park. Pretty sure that’ll kill most of the morning.”
Bones just stared up at the sergeant until the officer sighed, jammed a fist into his pocket, and brought out a half-eaten bag of pretzels.
Bones licked his lips. Billy tossed him a couple. Bones swallowed these without chewing, so Billy poured the rest of the bag into his hand.
“Here.”
The shepherd scarfed them up then followed his handler out of the airport to where Billy had parked his truck at the curb.
“I dare airport security to give a ticket to a K9 officer. Seriously, you’ll bite their balls off if I ask you to, right?”
Bones glanced up at him expectantly.
“Ah. You’d do it for more pretzels. Well, let me see if I’ve got any in the glovebox.”
A minute later, they were on the Penn Lincoln Parkway, making good time back to the city.
• • •
“What happened to the dog?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t see it?”
“No. It was on the bridge when I jumped off. It was gone when I came back.”
Ken sighed. “And you didn’t see it in the water?”
“Not at all.”
Ken nodded from his bed only a few hundred yards from the exact spot Becca had been pulled out of the river by one of the nurses at the hospital for the criminally insane that was currently housing the young man. It had taken two weeks of petitioning by social services to get Becca in to see him. It wasn’t until the threat of certain deviations from policy in Detective Leonhardt’s handling of her and her family coming to light were made that the police relented and allowed this one visitor.
“They said that you’re probably never getting out,” Becca said quietly.
“Do you know how many died because of me? Worse, you know that I killed two police detectives, right? They’ve got me dead to rights on both of those. Oh, yeah. That maintenance guy, too. Used the same thing on him as I did the detective.”
“Stop it!” Becca protested.
Ken shrugged. “What? Should I feel sorry for myself? I’ll have plenty of time for that when they put me in Riker’s or wherever they stuff folks like me. Right now, my entire focus is on finding you the right home.”
