The Dogs of God

by Chris Kennedy

  Tom looks like he’s never seen a CD before, but then drops into his beat-up chair, and pulls up to one of his computers to start typing. He keeps looking at the man with the bloody leg. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he says. There are bright red patches on his chubby cheeks. He gets those when he’s nervous about something, or playing Call of Duty. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  She jerks her head to beckon me closer. “Press the towel here.”

  I do as she says. I’m not bothered by blood, but I wouldn’t have said ‘no’ even if I was. She goes to stand beside Tom once I’ve taken over from her. “Hurry,” she whispers, as if to herself.

  “Alex? Can you hear me? Keep talking.”

  I’m a bit annoyed by Nick at this point. Whatever’s happening here is far more important than painting a picture for him and the doctor. In fact, I’m no longer sure I want talk about what’s going on here. It sure feels like something that isn’t his business.

  I can feel my heart pound in my chest, but that seems to be happening elsewhere. I can tell something’s gone wrong. I’m pretty sure I just got jabbed with another needle. Someone is definitely shouting now. I can’t tell if it’s someone upstairs, in the pit, or if it’s in Williams’ makeshift clinic twenty years from now. I feel dizzy again, but probably not as dizzy as the man in the chair, who seems to be on the verge of passing out.

  “I hear you,” I say to Nick, but speaking takes effort. “They’re on the computer. It’s not the Web. Just a DOS screen. Linux. Whatever. I feel sick.”

  “Did you see the screen?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m a geologist.”

  “Just read it! Find her name!”

  It’s not Nick shouting at me now. It’s Williams. Why is he shouting? Something is going wrong with me, and he’s worried about what’s on that screen?

  The woman is still looking over Tom’s shoulder, her face tense as she taps her hands on the back of his chair, as if that would speed up whatever he was doing. What had brought her to this cave where people like Tom spent their days scouring the most remote corners of the internet? How had these two found each other? And why does Williams care?

  I feel pain in my chest now, and then, weirdly, someone pulling my hair. The sensors. Someone is disconnecting me from their apparatuses. I’m guessing something’s gone very wrong but, even more weirdly, I don’t care. Maybe I’m dying. Sure sounds like Williams thinks so. I’m floating somewhere amongst my own memories, and I can no longer tell what’s real and what I’m just remembering.

  Is this even a memory? I look at my hands and adjust the towel on the man’s leg. I touch my face, which feels familiar. I blink slowly, three times. That isn’t a memory. I blinked because I wanted to blink, in this moment. Here. In Tom’s den.

  The realization that I’m so deeply sunk into my own memories, stuck in ancient synapses or engrams or whatever is storing our lives inside our heads, is making me even more woozy. I’ve become my memories. I’m back where I was. My consciousness, twenty years older, is inside my young body.

  I straighten up. The man’s leg has pretty much stopped bleeding now. I need to do things. Move. Leave this place. Maybe invest in Tesla or SpaceX or something. Place bets on the next presidential election or football game.

  “Nairi,” I say out loud. Not in my memories. Not to Williams. I say it to her, here in this room. I don’t remember what her last name used to be. And she doesn’t know what it will be, years from now.

  She frowns, freezing for a moment, before turning to me. “How do you know my name?”

  “You need to leave here. Something…something terrible is going to happen.”

  Her eyes narrow. “I kinda know that.” She turns to Tom. “Who is this? Whom have you told?”

  He looks at me, confused. “I told nothing. You think I’m crazy?”

  She shakes her head, not to confirm his sanity, but like someone who needs to focus on priorities right now. “They must be tracking us. No way could they know we’re in town.”

  “So you thought you’d come here anyway?” Tom screeches. I’d never heard him screech before.

  “Do your damn job. What are we paying you for?”

  “It’s almost done,” Tom says, trying to talk normal. There is sweat on his face. Except for those red patches, it makes him seem even paler than usual. “Almost there.”

  “They’re coming,” I say. I don’t know who. I don’t know why. But I know. My memories are no longer in order, and my mind is skipping around like a kangaroo in my head, but whatever happened twenty years ago, whatever I did here, it was about to happen.

  Williams can’t help me. I no longer hear Nick talking to me. I feel nothing but the stale, warm air in this room. Did I die? Is that possible? I know I need to leave here. Now. Maybe it’ll put things right somehow. Or maybe leaving is what fucked everything up.

  Nairi looks at me pretty much like most people have been looking at me for years. Curious, a little freaked out, scared maybe. She reaches into her jacket, and I about fall over when she pulls out a gun. Her companion lurches out of his chair, and I see that he has one, too. She moves past him to the door, listening for sounds on the other side.

  After a moment she nods to him.

  Tom turns to them. “What are you—”

  She pulls the door open and leaps into the hall. I cover my ears when the shooting starts out there, but just for a moment. It seems silly to cover my ears. It’s just too loud here now. Whatever is happening out there doesn’t take long, and they come back in, slamming the door. There is a big latch on it, and she shoves it home.

  “Too many of them.” She walks over to Tom and opens the CD drawer, which seems to take an age to open. Someone is talking in the hall. Maybe figuring out some way to not get shot before they can shoot us. Whatever they’re saying, it’s not in English. I’m frozen in place.

  She puts the CD on the floor and smashes it with her gun. Pieces fly everywhere, and she scoops up what she can before scattering the rest with her boot. She flings the shards into the dim corners of the lab to scatter among the cables and monitors and routers.

  “The hatch,” I say to Tom, jabbing at him with my fingers.

  “Yes,” he says. He finally seems to get motivated and starts pushing buttons and typing things into his machines. “Go. I just need to…I have to ditch some stuff.”

  “No time!” Nairi yells. “Let’s go. This place is compromised.”

  “I can do this,” he stammers. “I have a program that’ll wipe the lot. Go.”

  “This way,” I say to her, and for some blessed reason my feet are actually able to move. “Behind there.”

  I think I razzed Tom a dozen times about his cloak-and-dagger secret door in the darkest corner of the lab. It used to be a doorway, from this room to the furnace, and from there to what was a coal chute about a million years ago. It’s a window now, little more than a hatch. Tom told me that hacker work was dangerous work, and I called him a geek. That was then.

  Nairi doesn’t ask. She helps me open the cluttered shelf that’s really a door, and we duck into the furnace room. Behind us someone is bashing at the lab’s door. I guess Tom had made that hard to break down while he was building his nest.

  “Through there,” I say, pointing at the hatch. It was near the ceiling, but someone had placed a crate conveniently nearby. “Tom! Come on!” I turn to let Nairi’s friend climb the crate, but he shakes his head. “I’ll be a minute,” he says and takes off his backpack.

  Nairi starts to say something, but then doesn’t. She hops up onto the crate and unlatches the window. I’m right behind her, freshly invigorated by the sound of more not-English shouting behind us.

  It seems to take a lifetime to scramble through. I get caught on something on the frame and scrape my arm open. I won’t feel that for hours yet. We squirm into the foundation shrubbery, wet with autumn rain, and she doesn’t stop. I crawl after her on all f
ours until we reach the corner of the building. It’s cold and muddy, but I don’t really feel any of that.

  “That way,” I say, fumbling for a set of keys in my pocket. “My car is the red one by the mailboxes.”

  She grabs my hand with the keys in it. “You stay,” she says.

  I look into her smudged face, thinking I’ll always remember her. Guess I was wrong about that. But at the time it made sense. I wanted to tell her that she would become Nairi Peri, the scandalously fabulous wife of an haute couture designer whose fashion line was sought after by royalty and celebrity and the ultra-rich throughout the world. She’d not believe me, of course. How would this bedraggled young woman go from a university hacker lair to the salons of the powerful elite, we’d both wonder.

  She takes my keys and replaces it with her gun. “Do not let them catch you. Do what you have to. You did not see me.”

  I only stare and nod. What had been on that disk? How many more secret labs were being used by people like her, a network of spies, industrial or otherwise, carrying secrets worth killing for? Worth being chased down by foreigners. And clearly she was good at her job. In a few years she’d find a way into those salons and the confidences of presidents and ministers in the guise of an international jetsetter. Hiding her mission in plain sight.

  “CIA?” I say, feeling a bit silly.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I say, but I’m starting to feel dizzy again. Nothing I had except for my keys would help her escape this place. I can hear sirens in the distance. “I did not see you.”

  She peers around me, probably nervous about her companion, who had not appeared. Or Tom, for that matter. What was his part in all of this? How long has he worked for them, relaying secrets and messages, while the rest of us assumed him to be goofing off with Zelda? She nods to me and scrambles to her feet. I watch her disappear in the dark. I look back at the open window. For a second I’d forgotten what I was doing out here.

  I think those sirens might offer safety, so I get up and run toward that side of the building, away from the parking lot. Someone is running toward me. He has a gun!

  I remember the gun in my own hand, but I’m not sure how it got there. I have no idea how to use it, but I’ve seen it on TV. I aim and fire, and it almost kicks out of my hand. The man dives to the side and disappears. I’m pretty sure I didn’t hit him.

  Then it feels like someone’s slammed into me from the back. A massive whoosh of air is bending the greenery and flinging things around, but I don’t recall having heard the explosion. Maybe the sound was too loud for my ears. Later I was told the furnace had blown. So I must have heard that.

  I’m on the ground now, but I see the man running away, toward the parking lot. Someone’s waiting for him at the open door of a blue minivan. Not exactly the spy-mobile of pulp fiction, but probably efficient. The waiting man looks up, and I can see his face in the bleary light of the streetlamps. He’s young, maybe thirty-plus, and familiar.

  “Williams,” I whisper. I try to shout it, but he doesn’t hear me. I almost expect the other man to be Nick, but he’s not. He looks middle-eastern, Turkish maybe. I’m not good with that.

  I scramble to my feet and start walking toward them. Staggering, really, and waving the gun in the air. I’m very tired. And things are really blurry now. Had there been a girl? I can see the flashing lights of emergency vehicles bounce off the trees along the service road. The man climbs into the van, and then another car starts up. They speed away to the west entrance of the lot; the van takes the road through the greens.

  There’s some thought in my head that I have to get back somewhere. The lab! Tom’s lab? No. Cheesy lab with blanket warmers and cheap carpeting. But the doctors were silent now. Gone now. I feel severed. And distant. Twenty years distant.

  I wipe the rain from my face with my arm. Blood on that. Why am I bleeding? Things are disappearing into a weird fog, soon to be labelled as dissociative amnesia. I try to grasp at the pieces, like you try to hold onto a dream that’s slipping away the moment you wake up. Maybe some of the memory-dope is still affecting my brain, although I’m sure that I’ve left my dead body somewhere in the future. I don’t want to forget this. I am not a murderer. I did not blow up the lab in a psychotic rage over having lost a video game against Tom.

  Or did I? Is this the real life, or is this just fantasy? I want to sleep.

  Someone is walking toward me, shouting at me to drop the gun. I’m happy to do that. I try to tell them that the agents from who-knows-where have escaped in a blue van, but no one’s listening. I tell them that I’ve come back from the future to find the truth, but even in my confusion, I shut up when I see the cops’ faces. I turn to look for my car, which seems important, but it’s gone. I think I went to sleep after that.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry; should we pick this up again next time?” she says, sounding more annoyed than apologetic.

  “Huh?”

  “You just totally zoned out, Alex.” My legal counsel shakes her head and pulls some notebooks from her lawyerly briefcase that so perfectly matches her lawyerly shoes. More than just lawyerly, they look like Peri, or at least Peri knockoffs. “I don’t think you heard a word of what I’ve been saying.”

  She’s right. I haven’t a clue. “Of course I heard you.” Well, that was a lame response, and the look on her face assures me that she thought it was lame, too. Her minutes are billed in triple digits by the firm that’s been my family’s legal counsel for two generations.

  “I thought you’d be more interested.” She leans forward to push some papers across the table. No staples, but it’s a big stack. “You know I have no faith in this sort of thing, and it certainly didn’t work last time we tried something like this, but this is a new approach that’s showing some promise. This team has read about your case and is offering to treat you as part of their study. For free.”

  I tilt my head to read the title page. It’s a report by a Doctor Glenn T. Williams.

  “Really?” I say with a lopsided grin. “Williams?”

  She rolls her eyes. “It’s a common name.”

  “True, that.” I look at the abstract. “They’re mixing hypnosis with nootropics to treat dissociative amnesia? Trippy.”

  She raises a hand like a traffic cop. “It wouldn’t be admissible, of course. But maybe it’ll give us something to investigate. Enough reason to reopen your case. Find some reason for this.” She waves that hand to encompass the bleak cubicle of a room, with its single table and cafeteria chairs, tiny window, and an excessive amount of grey paint. The only thing missing is the two-way mirror and cameras, but I’m not criminal enough for that anymore, I guess.

  For someone who doesn’t believe in memory regression, she seems awfully enthusiastic about the whole thing. But then, she’s one of the few people who doesn’t think I’m insane or criminal. Maybe the only one, including me.

  I’ve had twenty-odd years of trying to figure out why I lit that furnace; actually not a bad feat, seeing how I got away with just a few scratches, while Tom’s entire lab got turned into a molten mess of metal and plastic and Tom-parts. The other body was never identified, but then people came and went a lot back then. Could have been anybody.

  I pull the paper, probably full of caveats, disclaimers, and contracts, over to my side of the table. “Let’s do this. Does it mean I get out of here for a field trip to the doctor’s office?”

  * * * * *

  Chris Reher Bio

  Lifer is a bit of a departure for Chris Reher, whose characters are normally immersed hip-deep in Space Opera. Mixing pulp spy lore with a medically-induced causal loop just seems too much fun to pass up, and so poor Alex gets to save the CIA’s biggest asset forever and ever.

  Visit http://www.chrisreher.com for information about other science fiction by Chris Reher, synopses, audio books, and links to your favorite book sellers.

  # # # # #

  Riders on the Storm by Chris A. Jackson />
  Hummingbird holorecorders hummed above the crowd, darting and diving to get the best angle, as the stratosail crews mounted the stage. The cheering throngs projected banners, holo-streamers, and images of their favorite stratosailors from their eyephones. The atmosphere was tense, festive, and slightly foreboding in this final moment, the last glimpse of their adoring fans before the great plunge.

  Wren Templeton paused at the top of the steps to display the corporate logos splashed across her skin-tight flight suit, payback for their millions of credits in sponsorship.

  “You’re such a suck-up,” Berk whispered as she smiled and waved to the recorders.

  “Careful,” she whispered back, flashing her pearly teeth in the face of the cameras without moving her lips a millimeter. “They read your lips.”

  “Great.” Berk wasn’t trying to hide his facial movements in the slightest. “Then they undoubtedly know we’re sleeping together.”

  “Stop it!” she snapped without breaking her smile. He always bantered like this just before a drop, and she’d grown to appreciate it, after a fashion, but at moments like this, it could cost them their contract. A stratosail team was only as good as their ratings. “You screw this up, and I’ll jettison your ass twenty klicks up!”

  “And lose my charming wit for the endless hours of racing through the stratosphere? You wouldn’t.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” She spared him a glance as she waved to the crowd. “But only because you’re the best damn stratosailor in the solar system.”

  “You only love me because I tolerate your atrocious taste in music.” He mimicked her smile and waved.

  “And I thought I only tolerated you because you loved my taste in music.” Wren was wound a little tighter than usual, but that was understandable. This wasn’t just another stratosail race; this was the race.