The Hunted

by A. J. Scudiere

  They'd been storing the bodies in the garage. No one wanted them in the house, but they’d had to be kept where the other dogs wouldn't get to them, which meant keeping them under heavy locks.

  Now, Cage realized that, while he didn't have quite her level of determination, he found it was a bit infectious.

  His father moved as though ignoring every feeling he had, though Cage understood where his sister was coming from. Their mother was not going to die in vain.

  In fact, she already hadn't. She had given them the one thing they really needed. The thing the whole family had been working toward for two weeks, and had been unable to accomplish. Kaya had handed to them, not one, but two of the dogs.

  The two part was important. He knew if they only had one, if it had any unusual features, they might assume that feature was true for all the dogs. Having two gave them an exponential increase in information. “Come on, Dad.”

  He headed out to the garage, not looking back, only listening for his father's footsteps following along. His father was on leave from his job and Cage wasn't sure Nate would ever go back. He didn't know what his father would do without his mother. But right now, what they were going to do was check out these dogs.

  It took fifteen minutes to unlock the multiple padlocks, get a good grip on the heavy tubs, and haul both of them in.

  While they had been out, Joule had set up the dining room like a well-stocked laboratory. She laid out boxes of latex gloves. Cage knew they’d been stored in his mother’s office. She kept them in several sizes, because they weren't like other families and they occasionally ran physics or chemistry experiments when they could. When the twins had found a dead animal, or a baby lost from its family, their mother had encouraged them to pick it up. But always with gloves.

  Under the window, Joule had opened a TV tray, covered it with a white trash bag, and set up the microscope their mother had bought them. She and Nate had always said they didn’t understand much biology or chemistry, but they’d encouraged the kids to try everything. So when she’d found the laboratory-grade microscope in the thrift shop, she’d not only bought it for them, but immediately invested in glass slides and coverslips.

  His eyes drifted to the center of the room. Joule had extended the table with the leaf and wrapped they whole thing in plastic. She had trays out. They would no longer be baking cookies on these; Joule was ready to possibly dissect organs. Three steak knives sat at the ready.

  But Cage looked at her and at the knives. “We have dissection kits. Remember?”

  Quickly, she’d nodded and run upstairs as he and his father pulled in the second of the heavy tubs. Putting in the ice had been a good move. The dogs didn't smell any worse now than they had when they'd been alive.

  Joule came back, not only with two leather dissection kits that they had purchased for high school, but also the scale from her parents bathroom. She set it on the floor and motioned to Nate to not lift the lid yet.

  “Weigh the whole thing,” she said as Cage and Nate caught on quickly.

  Holding the tub onto the scale, he watched as she tilted her head around to read and then record the weight. “Now take out the dog.”

  Following her instructions, they hoisted the carcass onto the table. The body almost didn’t look real, it was so stiff. But Joule wasn't looking. She again looked down at the scale, calculated the difference, and said, “Approximately eighty-two pounds. Next.”

  The second dog, though visually a little smaller, and in a tub that seemed to have more ice in it, had still outweighed the first. It clocked in at eighty-five pounds. Joule had it all written down in a lab notebook she must have pulled from her room.

  The two dogs were laid out on the table, side by side, snouts aimed away, legs pointing to the left, as the three of them stood there and looked. Nate took the spot in the middle, and Joule looked ready to record with her notebook and pen in hand.

  “Alright.” Cage breathed in heavily. They could do this. “Visual assessment first. What do we see?”

  They did their initial walk around, the three of them counting toes, bending legs to see if they moved like regular dog legs, and tipping the heads. They measured the circumference of the tails and the waists. Joule recorded length of each dog from the tip of his nose to the base of his tail.

  They measured around one head, then the other dog’s, and recorded everything. Cage walked to the front of the table, and did something that felt very scary despite the fact that he knew the dogs were dead. He lifted one eyelid and shone his small flashlight at it.

  For a fraction of a second, he expected it to jump up and growl, snarl, and bite. But it did no such thing.

  “These eyes are light brown,” he said. “And when I shine the light, they reflect back a little bit. I think that's normal for dogs. I mean, sometimes you can see their eyes in the dark. Right?”

  Joule nodded. Nate shrugged, but his father finally held a hand out, asking for the flashlight. Moving to the second dog, Cage watched as he repeated the test. That made Cage notably happier.

  His father had merely been going through the motions, doing what he was told to set up the funeral and letting the kids take lead. This was the first time that he had made a move on his own in days. Cage wanted to tell his father he'd be okay. But he didn't know if that was true.

  The best he could do was show his father that he would be okay.

  So he reached out to the dog’s jaw and pried it open. Pulling back the lips, he scanned the space. “The gums are almost black,” he told his father and sister. “The teeth are yellow… hey, look at this.” He pointed into the mouth.

  Joule came around his side, and looked and frowned. Nate joined them as they all stared into the mouth. Holding the jaw open so his father could shine the flashlight on it. They peered in and tried to count.

  “Those are molars…”

  Joule made notes as Cage counted the long and multi-ridged teeth that lined the back of the dog’s mouth. The front incisors didn't appear quite as tiny as those on a regular dog.

  “I don’t know if these are normal.” More comfortable now, he ran his latex covered finger over the teeth. “Let’s check the other dog.”

  Cage stepped over and pulled that jaw open, too, and then leaned back to let both his father and sister check out what they were seeing.

  “It looks pretty much the same as the other,” his father commented with the tone he used when he was examining something. At least he wasn’t using the flat, unaffected sound of the past three days, Cage thought.

  But he turned to Joule, waving the flashlight as a cue. “Do you want to grab one of those veterinary texts, see if we can match it?”

  She was moving before he finished the sentence, flipping pages and holding up a diagram.

  “Look,” she said. Cage read where she’d held the page up to him, then turned to show it to their father. Normal dogs had incisors, canines, and premolars—much like humans. Though the individual teeth were shaped very differently, he could see they were in roughly the same layout.

  The premolars in the book were sharp and pointy, but not like the canines. They were short, and wouldn’t do much damage in a bite. Once they figured out which teeth were molars and which were premolars, they frowned. “I only counted two on each side.” Joule said.

  “Those are premolars.” Cage countered.

  “No, look.” She held up the book, where the description of a premolar tooth was clear. “They don’t have enough cusps to be premolars. These are canines.”

  That gave the dogs three canines in each of the four quadrants.

  The canines were the sharp teeth made for tearing into meat, and these dogs had an abundance of them. The Mazurs stepped back and looked at each other, confused.

  Cage looked first to Joule and then turned to his father. But Nate only shrugged; this wasn’t his forte.

  Cage checked out the dog quickly, thinking what he now needed to do. They needed to check the internal organs. They needed to take
samples and look at them under the microscope later. Suddenly, this project had gotten huge.

  But right now, he and Joule were comparing the teeth they saw to the teeth in the textbook. Looking at his dad, he explained. “We learned something very important in biology class,” he said. “Teeth are conservative.”

  His father shrugged. “I guess I always thought they were liberal?”

  “Ha ha, funny,” Joule dead-panned. And, for the first time, despite the conversation and the dead dogs lying on the table, the tone of the room felt a little closer to normal.

  But Cage was about to change that.

  “No, Dad,” he said. “It means, teeth don't change. All dogs have the same teeth, and that's how you know that they're the same species. Any time the teeth change, you can declare it a speciation event.”

  He and Joule looked at each other then up at their dad.

  “These extra canines are consistent between both the dogs. They're not just a mutation. This is a whole new species.”

  27

  Joule stood at the table with her hands on her hips as she surveyed their work.

  The dogs, laid out and clearly autopsied, barely resembled dogs anymore. They had been cut into and their organs removed, weighed on the kitchen scale, and checked against the veterinary texts.

  It had taken them three days to get to this point. Each night, they would pack the dogs back up into the hard plastic bins, stuffing the extra area with ice. They put ice packs on top of the bodies when they weren't working on a particular dog and packed them as best they could at all times, in hopes of slowing the decay process.

  Joule looked at her father and brother now. “I’m starting to smell them. I think this is the last day.” She looked back and forth and when neither of them spoke, she pushed a little harder. “What else do we need before we dispose of them?”

  Cage, mimicking her stance, also surveyed the table. “What we need is to figure out how to kill them.”

  At the head of the table, Nate nodded.

  None of them had left the house for several days. If they had been eating at a regular pace, they would have run out of food yesterday, but instead, today was the day.

  “We need to get to the grocery store before dark tonight,” Joule said, feeling like she was the only one who had her head on her shoulders. Her father was despondent, though understandably so. Her brother was neck deep in the dogs, learning everything he could and not paying attention to much else. Also, understandably so.

  But Joule was the one making sure they were fed, and that they showered regularly.

  “Here's what we know,” Nate told the room at large, almost shocking her. He’d spoken so infrequently this last week. “Their physiology is slightly different from normal dogs, at least according to the text and the two specimens we have. However, compared to our other books, their physiology is generally mammalian and, within that grouping, generally canine.”

  Cage recited what they’d learned. “Kingdom, Animalia. Phylum, Chordata. Class, Mammalia. Order, Carnivora. Family, Canidae. Genus ... and here’s where we can’t classify anymore ...”

  “They have to be Canis like dogs, wolves, and coyotes.” Joule was reading the text in her hands as she talked. “They aren’t Lycalopex or Vulpes, because those are foxes. But the individual species doesn’t match anything here ...”

  “That means we should be able to kill them in generally canine ways,” Cage added.

  Joule nodded, following along. Though the family had not stayed awake in the hallway with flashlights, reading—as she had suggested they do—she had.

  Each night, she would sneak out of her room. She had a halogen flashlight that she dialed way down and she would read her mother's notes and textbooks. For several hours, in the otherwise dark space, she would take her own notes from her mother’s, mark significant passages, or check what her mother had flagged. No one questioned her. No one asked when she said, “But this book says dogs do X,” or “But wolves do Y.”

  Now, she looked back and forth between the two men. “My books should be here today. I ordered two more texts. One on animal behavior and another on general mammalian behavior and learning.”

  “Good idea,” Cage said, though Joule only nodded.

  She wanted to say, “Yes, it is. It was mom’s.” But she held her tongue, not sure if that would help or hurt. She also hadn’t told them that she had answered the door for the delivery man yesterday. The package he’d placed in her hands held a book—one that her mother had ordered before she died. Animal Minds. Joule had begun reading it last night.

  “I'm going to clean up the dogs here.” She motioned to the table, to organs cut out and laid onto the cake pans. To the slides that they had made with tissue samples and blood smears and examined under the microscope. “You two should go to the grocery store. And then when you get home, we can all carry the dogs back into the garage or figure out what to do with them.”

  But Nate shook his head, startling her. His expression held determination she’d not seen in too long. Though she was grateful, she was also wary.

  “No.” He didn’t protest, he just stated it like lord of the manor. “We all clean up. And we all go to the store. We don't split up. Not again.”

  Though his voice was quiet, the force came through loud and clear.

  Joule was in no position to argue, and he was in no position for a fight. She wouldn't do that to her father. So she nodded her agreement. Besides, he may have just said the first parental thing he’d said in a week, but he did make sense.

  “Is there anything we need to keep?” She looped back to her original question. The last thing she wanted to do was clean up then later wish she had something to compare and have thrown it away.

  “The slides,” Cage replied and promptly ran off, presumably to get a box to keep them in.

  “Let's keep everything we can,” Nate said and Joule shook her head.

  Though she agreed in theory, it wouldn’t work in reality. “It's biological, dad. It's going to rot. I can already smell it starting to turn.”

  Her father nodded as he seemed to think about it. A minute later, he looked up with an idea in his eyes. “Let’s swing by the home store and buy ourselves a freezer.”

  Joule nodded, because who was she to argue? Of course, that's what they would do. It was the smart thing to do. Her father had always commented that the actual report was better than the summary. The pictures were better than the report. And setup itself was better than the pictures. So they would keep the dogs in a freezer for anything they needed to learn about them later.

  With a nod, she began shoving the organs—still in ziplock baggies—back inside the hollowed-out dogs. It was the best place to keep the organs. Right organs with right dog. She felt like the creepiest kind of Dr. Frankenstein, but it didn’t stop her. They had to learn as much as they could.

  When everything was back in place—generally speaking—Joule positioned the bags of ice on top of the animals. They would leave them on the table while they went out.

  “Groceries first? Dogs second?” she asked her dad, and he nodded.

  “We need vegetables,” Nate declared as Cage came down the stairs with a small, wooden box in his hand, presumably for the slides.

  It was Cage who joined the conversation he’d only heard the last line of. “What we need is a way to kill the dogs.”

  Joule looked up at Cage then over to her father, and said, “Actually, mom already found that.”

  28

  Cage stretched his back. It was sore from the heavy lifting they’d all been doing.

  They had not made it to get a freezer the afternoon before. When they’d left the grocery store, spring clouds had been rolling in and they voted that they had just enough time to get home and get the dogs packed up. That was a necessity.

  So yesterday, they’d packed the dogs on ice again. Today, they headed first to the store and picked out a freezer. Getting it delivered had cost another several hours, but it h
ad arrived in the afternoon. Luckily, getting it delivered also included getting it hauled into the garage. Directing someone to put it in place seemed as though it should be easy, except they'd had to clear a spot for it first. That had been Cage’s labor input.

  Then they'd gotten it plugged in and realized it would take a good twenty-four hours for it to come down to the right temperature. Cage sighed at yet another setback, but his father just looked at what was there.

  “I think both tubs will fit inside.” Nate stuck his head into the freezer of a size that suggested to Cage his father had bigger plans than just these two dogs.

  So he and his father had lifted each tub up and over the edge into the freezer.

  As he put the lid down, and felt it click shut, he had to admit, “It is a well-sealed, insulated system.”

  Even though the temperature wasn’t down yet, the carcasses would still fare better inside. The ice they were packed in would probably help drop the internal temperature faster. All the physics added up.

  Just inside the door, Joule turned back to them asking, “Who’s first in the shower?”

  Cage noticed that she was no longer asking her father if he needed to shower, but simply stating that the three of them would do it. She was only asking, what order did they want to go in? Somehow, he and Joule always managed to put their father in the middle, ensuring that things happened. They were doing the same thing with food, making sure he ate.

  This time, it was voted that Joule should get the first shower and as she left the room, Cage turned to his father and asked, “Was it all worth it?”

  It was the first time he'd really broached the topic of his mother.

  “Kaya?” Nate asked.

  Cage nodded, realizing only then that his question was horrifyingly unclear and he could be glad his father hadn’t answered about the freezer. But Nate didn’t really see the humor. Instead, he breathed in deep.

  “It was worth every second of this hell.” His father spoke the words with a conviction that Cage and Joule had not heard since their mother had died. Nate continued, “I got you guys out of the deal. And I guess I need to tell Joule, too, because I realized it doesn't seem like I know that right now. But I am living for you two. That’s why I’m going on.”