An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

Standish rinsed out the pot and put it in the dish drainer. She remembered what Peter had said about the dead zone his tests had created and the company’s insistence on pursuing the degassing compound. “No, they probably don’t.”

  Olive laid her head down on the table. “Miss Kate, I wish my mom were here.”

  Standish hesitated a second and then squeezed the girl’s shoulder. “Me too, Olive.”

  PETER SAT on the cold floor of his cell. Posie Eames had brought him a late lunch of pasta and vegetables, and now the scent of stale garlic lay over the cramped space. On the other side of the wire mesh, another cell sat empty. The sheriff’s department didn’t usually arrest more than one person except when Songheuser’s paychecks came on a Friday.

  The freight elevator grunted and whirred, and Peter came to his feet. It was probably just Posie coming back for his empty tray, but he wanted to meet her with dignity. He wiped his hands on his pants. He could hear hushed voices, but the speakers weren’t in eyeshot yet.

  “Peter Bajowski.”

  He took a step forward, surprised to hear an unfamiliar woman’s voice. It took him a minute to recognize Victoria Wallace.

  “COO Wallace. Nice of you to stop by.”

  “I wanted to lay eyes on the man who thought he could bring Songheuser to its knees.”

  “It’s not me. I don’t have any problems with Songheuser, and even if I did, I could never hurt anybody. Especially not innocent millworkers.”

  “Pretty words, Bajowski, but I know better.” She pulled out a pair of I+ glasses and slipped them on. “Video 321, projection.”

  A light flashed on the glasses’ temple, and an image appeared on the wall beside Peter. He recognized the paneling before he recognized the back of his head. It was footage from Mark Allen’s office, and he could hear his own voice, furious and desperate as he begged Mark to stop the chemical tests.

  “You look pretty angry with the company to me.” The image switched off, and Wallace moved closer to the door of his cell, close enough that he could smell her perfume, some sparkling floral stuff that seemed too pretty for a shark like her.

  “I hope you like Earth,” she said with a smile. “Because even if you get out of this cage, I’ll have your visa stripped before you can check your email.”

  Peter gripped the mesh of the door to steady himself. Anything he said would be a waste of breath.

  “Goodbye, Bajowski. I hope you feel like a hero.”

  Then she left him, alone and trembling. He squeezed his eyes shut and rested his forehead against the door. Even here in the basement, he could hear the rain coming down outside.

  HUGINN, Day 199

  I’ve been hiding in the pollinator shed. I don’t know what time it is, although there’s a little gray light coming in through the window, enough to see this page. I don’t want to write any more, but I have to. I’m coughing up blood now, and someone needs to know what happened.

  I wrote the last entry here after Doc Sounds and I came back from the Morris’s house. The town felt empty. No one was working out in the fields; no one answered our knocks on their doors. I took my diary and my Bible into this shed while Doc continued our search.

  When he threw open the door to the shed, I knew something else was wrong.

  “Craig’s gone.”

  He could barely say the words. His eyes wouldn’t focus on me and his legs wobbled underneath him. He looked sick, like he was about to pass out.

  It took me a minute to understand what he meant: that someone had taken Craig’s body from the root cellar where we’d stored it. I had to take Doc by the elbow and march him back to the kitchen and make him a cup of tea before I could get any sense out of him. He couldn’t find anyone. Craig’s dead body was missing. We were alone here.

  I couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. And the more he kept repeating it, the more I couldn’t stand it.

  Finally, I had to see for myself. I stumbled out of the kitchen and down the muddy track to our house. The rain soaked my skirts and through my bonnet. I fell once, twice. My legs could hardly hold me any longer. Matthias wouldn’t leave me. He would be at home, ready to take me wherever the others had gone.

  And sure enough, there was smoke coming out of our chimney.

  I fell through the door and Matthias was right there with his hand under my elbow. The cabin felt so warm. He set me beside the fire and put a blanket around my shoulders. There was a smell in the room that I couldn’t quite place, but it made my stomach buck and clench.

  “My sweet love,” he whispered. “You are the thinnest of all of us. I promised God I would take care of you as my own flesh, that I would protect you and keep you well. How I have failed you. I brought you to this place and now you are dying.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, or maybe just tried to say. My run had taken all the strength out of me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten.

  He knelt before me with a steaming bowl. “Please drink,” he said. “It’s just broth, you can drink it.”

  The broth was a clear, light beige. A scrap of bay leaf floated on the surface. It could have been tea. It could have been anything.

  “It’s leather bird,” he said. “Vonda found a way to cook it safely.”

  “Vonda?” My head spun. Was that what we’d found on her stove? Leather bird soup?

  He pushed the spoon close to my face. It smelled wonderful.

  I remembered the way the leather birds’ bellies opened up into that sharp-edged slit, the yellow lining of their orifice as unwholesome as death. I turned my face away.

  “Please,” he begged. “It sounds bad, but it’s the only way we’re going to make it through this winter. I can’t live if you die, Hepzibah. I’m not me without you.”

  The smell made me cry out. Nothing had smelled this good, not since the last of the lentils ran out or the final bit of oatmeal vanished. Even the dogs we’d butchered hadn’t smelled this delicious.

  He leaned in, his eyes huge and terrified. “Please eat it. Don’t think about it, just eat it.”

  And then I knew. I knew it wasn’t leather bird.

  I got up. My mind had gone completely clear and hollow; I could see the words of scripture as if they were printed in front of my eyes and repeated themselves over and over in the bowl of my mind: “Him that dieth of Jeroboam in the city shall the dogs eat.”

  “Eat it!” he screamed.

  I pushed him as hard as I could and launched myself out the door. Just a moment ago, I could barely walk, but now I was running. I had to run someplace, anyplace away from Matthias and Orrin and Vonda and the things they had done. Leather birds swooped over my head and tree scooters chirped at me, and as I ran I swore I could understand their voices, that I knew what the creatures of this place wanted, and it was for us to go, to leave them to their place and let them live as they had always lived. I tripped over a fallen horsetail limb and hit the ground hard. Something crushed under my hand and I smelled the sour stink of red death puffballs.

  I crawled a few feet farther, choking on the cloud of spores, and then my strength gave out and I collapsed on the damp ground.

  I woke in darkness, coughing. My arms ached and my ribs hurt where I’d fallen on them. I was going to die if I lay here. I had to find shelter and something to eat.

  I remembered my pollinators. There was a little sugar left in the bottom of their food stores; I’d hidden it from everyone to give my bees a chance at survival. Now I needed it. The others would try to force me to join them in their sin, but I would not. I would go to the pollinator shed and come up with a plan.

  I sat up and realized where I was: the cemetery. I’d tripped on the cross we’d planted on Cheyenne Ferguson’s grave and collapsed in the soft dirt.

  But the whole cemetery was soft dirt. Every smooth-packed grave had been churned up and left untamped, the crosses flung willy-nilly. Someone had dug up the graveyard, like the dogs of Jeroboam, looking for the dead.

  My lungs burned as I force
d myself to my feet. My soul reviled this place, these people, the ones who had been my friends. I wanted to run into the forest, toward Space City, but I remembered Matthias’s journey and made myself turn back toward town. There was still hope in the pollinator shed.

  But as I walked, the sounds of the night changed. I heard voices off in the distance. I heard crashing and crunching in the brush. And then I heard the sound of a dog crying in pain.

  The crashing grew louder and a pack of dogs streaked past me, dogs of all sizes, brown dogs and white dogs and black dogs and dogs of disparate parts and breeds. I had never seen so many dogs, and they were all chasing one brilliantly white creature.

  “Soolie!” I shouted, and the dogs stopped to stare at me. We hadn’t brought this many dogs to Canaan Lake. There was something strange and terrible about them, as if they were only the shells of dogs and what hid inside them was something monstrous.

  Their growls filled my ears as I moved toward my dog.

  He stood on shaking legs, his hide streaked in gore and his shape pitifully thin. His eyes were dull as he looked at me, and I knelt beside him to stroke his neck. I could not keep looking in those eyes. They were full of pain and suffering that would not be there if I had not given into my own weakness and fear and simply killed him.

  Then he collapsed. The dogs fell in on his body and I broke into a run. For a moment, I thought they would drag me down and rip me apart as they were ripping apart my Soolie, but they let me go. I ran out of the forest and into the pollinator shed and I latched the door behind me and hid under a shelf.

  I could hear screams outside. I dared not move all night.

  Dear Lord, I described Soolie’s eyes, but I didn’t tell you about the other dogs. Their eyes were human, Lord. And one pair was Matthias’s hazel.

  Our mental landscape is tilled by words and all our ideas are grown from their seeds. Words are the shape of our world.

  — from THE COLLECTED WISDOM OF MW WILLIAMS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  STANDISH SLOWED her UTV to a crawl as it entered the makeshift track Sheriff Vargas’s team had cut into the forest. She glanced overhead. There were probably two or three hours of daylight left. She hoped that was enough to find the bolt gun.

  The sound of her tires changed from the crunching of underbrush to the crackle of gravel. She’d reached the secret road, the road that somehow connected everything: Duncan, his murder, Peter’s trouble. Whatever was going on in Canaan Lake, this road lay at the root of it.

  Vargas’s team had cleared the trees and the driving was easy. When the road came to its end she sat in the rig a minute, her mind spinning. Sectors 13 and 14 had belonged to the Believers until their big sale to Songheuser, which had gone through just before she arrived in Canaan Lake. But the road and the clearing, the paperwork for the communications equipment, all of that was months older.

  Which meant Songheuser had been out here illegally. Whatever they’d been doing, they’d wanted it done where no one would see them and where no one could connect them to the damage. Then they’d covered it up.

  She opened the door and got out. The air smelled clean here, the bitter smell of horsetail fronds and ferns refreshing after a day of smoke and soot. Hattie jumped down beside her. The dog looked nervous, as if recalling her previous encounter with the native fauna. Standish shouldered the pack with the air horn and the pepper spray. She hadn’t been able to find a metal detector, but at least she had something to protect herself with.

  Standish gave her gear one last check. Everything seemed accounted for. She made sure her hand unit was tightly buckled onto her arm where she could reach it, and she tapped the screen. The signal was strangely strong here, but Dewey still hadn’t responded to any of her messages or calls. She set the unit to vibrate. She had no idea if loud sounds would frighten away the leather birds or call them to her, and she wasn’t about to take any risks.

  Looking around the clearing, she saw the trampled gap in the brush — a clear signpost pointing to the spot where they’d found Duncan’s body and where the volunteer search team had concentrated their efforts. She’d start to the north of that, at the farthest end of the clearing. Her boots shushed through the pseudo-club moss.

  The ferns and Christ’s fingers were so thick here she had to search around for a stick and smash them out of her way, beating a path into the woods. Something rattled in the bracken to her right, and she caught a glimpse of a lavender-hued trudgee disappearing into the base of a horsetail tree.

  Rain began pattering on the branches overhead, but very little moisture penetrated the thick canopy. This must have been what the forest had been like when Hepzibah and her fellow Believers had arrived at Canaan Lake. No roads, no clearings, no houses: just horsetails and undergrowth.

  Standish paused, remembering the diary with a pang. The settlers hadn’t realized how close they’d been to the dry season, had they? Poor Hepzibah, hiding in her pollinator shed, utterly hopeless in the cold and rain, hallucinating that the people she knew were turning into wild dogs. If she had only lasted a few weeks longer, perhaps she would have found a way to make it. She was the exact opposite of Standish, one dreading the rain and one dreading the dry.

  Standish stooped to pet Hattie. “It won’t be so bad with you around,” she said, and Hattie lolled her tongue as if she appreciated the sentiment.

  Standish pushed on, jabbing at the ground with her stick. Duncan’s killer wouldn’t have taken the air bolt gun too far into the woods. No one would want to wade around in this mess for long for fear of getting lost. That was if the killer had left the bolt gun in this sector. They could have just as easily thrown it in the lake. Why was she wasting her time out here when the gun was probably sitting at the bottom of the lake, buried in weed?

  Hattie gave an inquisitive bark, and Standish turned her head.

  “What did you find, girl?” Standish ducked under a tall fern frond and stopped, surprised to see an open expanse about the size of her front room with a wireless transmitting tower sitting in the middle of it. It stood about thirty meters tall, its frame untouched by moss or lichen.

  She stepped forward, a Christ’s finger popping underfoot, and put out her hand to touch the tower. “Carbon fiber. And new.”

  She craned back her head, her eyes following the structure into the sky. Rain silted over her face without the thick canopy to block it, although the taller trees around the clearing’s perimeter nearly closed over the tower’s top.

  It wasn’t a complicated structure, and the individual pieces would have been fairly lightweight. Someone could have set up a small printer and made the pieces right here in the woods. It wouldn’t have taken any special tools, and the whole thing could have been done using only the equipment Songheuser already kept on hand.

  This was the reason Duncan had made notes about the conduit in Sector 13. If he could have brought in an underground line to connect this tower to the Canaan Lake transmission station, it would have simplified the entire network and more than doubled the service area. But according to Songheuser’s records, this tower didn’t exist.

  Like the road behind her, this had been a temporary installation that Songheuser had wanted to remain a secret.

  Standish took a second look at the tower. She understood why it was there — with the gas pockets in the trees, you couldn’t mount a transmitting platform on a horsetail, no matter how much cheaper it would be — but she didn’t understand how it had stayed a secret. Anyone flying over this sector or looking at a satellite photo would have seen it.

  “Oh, fuck me,” she whispered.

  Someone had seen it, of course. Someone who routinely checked Huginn’s satellite feeds to make certain the planet’s communications networks were in good working order. Someone who had records for every transmitting station in the world.

  Of course Dewey had known. That was why she was so suspicious of Songheuser. But something had made her keep quiet about it. Standish tried to imagine what they�
��d held over her friend. She wasn’t the kind of woman to sell out easily.

  Then it hit her: the boob job. Those C-cup tatas Dewey was so proud of after a lifetime of push-up bras and padding hadn’t come cheap. Standish had assumed Dewey’s government job and careful saving had provided the means to make up for starting hormones so late in her teens, but wasn’t Sheriff Vargas proof that the Huginn government wasn’t exactly rolling in cash? Songheuser had subsidized Dewey’s dream in exchange for her silence.

  She hoped it was worth the price. She still couldn’t see any reason to turn a communications tower into a secret.

  Behind Standish, Hattie growled, and the low rumble sent the hairs up on Standish’s neck.

  “What is it?” Standish brought up her stick like a baseball bat, turning in a half circle. She scanned the trees, looking for leather birds.

  Hattie gave an angry bark.

  The ferns rustled, and a brown dog appeared on the track Standish had just made. Its big head was low and wide, somehow snakelike on its long neck, and a string of slaver ran from its curled lip.

  “Fuck.”

  Standish took a step backward, but there was no place to go. The transmission tower cut her off.

  Another dog appeared in the corner of her eye, its shaggy gray shape low to the ground. They were stalking her just as they had stalked Rob McKidder down Main Street. She took an uneasy step up onto the bottom crossbar of the tower. Could they climb a metal ladder? God, she hoped not. Hattie couldn’t.

  Could she climb? Could she climb a slick ladder high enough to get out of the dogs’ reach, all the while carrying Hattie? The dog had to weigh forty kilos, if not more.

  “Come on, Hattie.” She dropped to the ground and reached for the dog’s collar. It was like tugging a tree out of the ground.

  Hattie growled again and the brown dog took a step forward. Now Standish could see it better. Its short coat was marred with scars and wounds, a circle of raw pink flesh standing out on one side of its chest, a raised purple scar on the other — the purple scar oddly like a cross.