Dogs (6 page)

Ed and Cora Dormund had had a bad night. Ed remembered the fight only vaguely. He guessed he'd drunk too much but jeez, what was wrong with that? The way Cora carried on, you'd think he was an alkie or something. And Cora could pack away the Buds, too, no matter what she pretended. What had happened last night—whatever—wasn't all his fault, not by a fucking long shot.

Ed staggered from bedroom to bathroom. It was too early to be up, but the pressure of his bladder woke him. He scowled at the bathroom window: barely dawn.

In the living room Cora snored heavily on the sofa, surrounded by beer cans, a shattered glass vase, and the torn remains of the roses that she'd squandered eighteen dollars on they didn't have. Now the fight came back to Ed. She'd thrown the vase at him, the bitch, just because he thought they should economize now that he was laid off. It was all her fault. She'd practically forced him to hit her.

Outside, the dogs barked. Ed lurched to the kitchen. Cora hadn't even let the dogs in last night, he couldn't count on her for anything. He closed the door between kitchen and living room so that Jake or Petey or Rex wouldn't step on shards of glass.

Opening the kitchen door to the outside, he suddenly paused with his hand halfway to the latch of the old screen, which he hadn't gotten around to replacing last fall with the storm door. Something was wrong.

The three Samoyeds—
"Stupid to keep sled dogs in Maryland!" 
Cora's voice nagged in his head—stood bunched by the door, waiting for him to let them in from the fenced backyard. Nothing unusual in that. But a low noise came from the dogs, rumbles in the back of their throats, that sent cold sliding down Ed's spine. Rex and Petey stared directly at him, tails high and bristling, ears forward. Jake, usually the leader and Ed's favorite, stayed further behind. His lips pulled back and forty-two long, sharp teeth gleamed in the light from the kitchen.

“Hey, guys,” Ed tried to say, but the words came out a croak. All at once a picture flashed into his mind from some movie, primitive men crouched close around a fire while in the darkness beyond, creatures moved with firelit eyes and drooling jaws. But these were Ed's pets, his protectors!

“Hey, guys—”

All at once Jake snarled and sprang over Petey. Ed slammed the door. He heard Jake hit the screen and heard the wire mesh, soft as cloth from so many summers, rip away from the wood frame. All three dogs howled and snapped. Ed locked the door and leaned against it, panting as if he'd run a mile. His stomach lurched.

What the fuck had just happened?

Next door, Del Lassiter was wakened by the Dormund dogs barking. 5:46 by the bedside clock. Those awful animals! Still, they usually weren't outside this early.

Silently Dol slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Brenda. Once he was awake, he could never get back to sleep. Something to do with getting older, he supposed. At twenty-two he had been able to sleep through a fire alarm; sixty-seven was a different matter.

Del padded to the kitchen, where Folly slept on her little bed. The Chihuahua liked to be near the heat register. Folly woke, too, and gave him a friendly bark and tail wag, all two pounds of her.

Putting on water for coffee, Del could still hear the Dormund dogs snarling and barking. He tried to catch sight of them through the window, but apparently they were in back. The barks sounded…enraged, somehow. What could have upset them like that? Well, whatever it was, Del would have to talk to Ed about it. Brenda needed her sleep; the chemo was hard on her. Yes, he'd call Ed later, at a decent hour, even though everything in Del recoiled from the idea. He hated confrontation of any kind.

Folly yawned, stretched, and wandered to her water bowl.

Two blocks away, Ellie Caine stirred in her warm bed. One of the Greyhounds in the kitchen, it sounded like Song, whimpered. Probably had a bad dream. Ellie shuddered to think what Song might be dreaming.

She'd rescued the four Greyhounds from a race track, where conditions were horrifying. Dogs were trained to run by starving them and then forcing them to chase a piece of meat on a mechanical arm that moved faster and faster. Sometimes, even though it was supposed to be illegal, the meat was replaced by a live rabbit with its legs broken to make it scream. If a Greyhound couldn't run fast enough, or after its racing days were over, the poor dog was killed.

Ellie wished she could rescue more Greyhounds, but even four were a tight fit for her small house and yard. She was passionately determined to make up to Song, Music, Butterfly, and Chimes everything terrible that had been done to them. She rushed home from work at noon to spend her lunch hour with them; she took them every day to the dog park; she stayed home with them every night. They were her friends, her companions, and so much more reliable and loving than people ever were.

Song still whimpered, and Ellie decided to give him five more minutes. Then if all wasn't quiet in the kitchen, she'd leave her cozy bed and go to the greyhounds.

Just five more minutes.

Steve Harper sat on a sofa at the Webster Funeral Home. He couldn't have described the sofa, or the room, or the funeral home. Nothing registered, nothing except the mental picture of Davey, in that spun-out moment when
the brown mastiff raised its head and looked straight at Steve, a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth—

“Mr. Harper?” someone said.

Hanging from its mouth onto Davey's body…

“Mr. Harper!”

Slowly the funeral director came into focus. The man, the room, the purpose for this terrible visit. And then one thing more.

“As I was saying, Mr. Harper, FEMA's temporary regulations make it impossible for us to go forward with little David's viewing, service, or burial just now. But we can still choose the casket and make—”

The thing sat on the fireplace mantel. A statue, china or glass…

“—all the other arrangements for the eventual—”

A statue of a dog.

The brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey's body...

Steve jumped from the sofa, seized the obscene decoration, and smashed it as hard as he could to the floor.

Cami Johnson dropped the IV bag on her way to her patient's curtained corner of the ER, caught it just before it hit the floor, and banged her head on a metal linen shelf while straightening up. The fall wouldn't have hurt the sealed plastic bag, but the bump hurt Cami. She blinked back tears even as she looked around to see if Rosita Perez had noticed.

The charge nurse noticed everything. “You've been on duty how long, Camilla? Sixteen hours? Go home.”

"It's all right, ma'am, I'm fine, I just slipped, I think there's a bit of water on the floor…”

“Then wipe it up, hang the bag, and go home. You look like shit.”

Probably true, Cami thought wearily. Sixteen hours, and the dog bites had just kept pouring in. They wouldn't
stop.
The hospital had every available doctor, resident, and intern seeing patients, and still stretchers were stacked in the hall, people sat bleeding in the er waiting room, and ORs had been commandeered from Maternity, so that women were delivering babies in their rooms. Nobody, the older nurses told her, had ever seen anything like it. And so many of the patients were children! Children and dogs, a boy and his dog, how much is that doggie in the window…Cami's tired mind had been going around and around with that silly tune for the last hour.

Rosita was right; Cami needed to go home for a little while. And even if Rosita hadn't been right, nobody argued with Rosita.

She was surprised to find a police officer in the underground staff parking area. “Can I see some I.D., ma'am?”

Cami showed him her driver's license and hospital pass. He inspected them, unsmiling, and then said, “All right. Drive straight out with your windows rolled up. Don't roll them down to talk to any reporters, or anyone else, who may be outside the hospital. Drive straight home. Do you have a dog at home, ma'am?”

Cami hesitated. If she said yes, would he give orders to take Belle away?

All the while she'd been working on the terrible dog bites flooding the ER, Cami had had Belle in the back of her mind. Cami had had one course in public health during nursing school. If there was an animal-borne plague, an important step was to eliminate the animal hosts. That's what WHO had tried (and failed) to do world-wide with malaria in the 1970s: eliminate the host mosquitoes. Eliminating mice had helped to bring hantavirus under some control in the Southwest. And, of course, all those poor monkeys in Reston, Virginia in 1983, carriers of Ebola from the Philippines—every single monkey had been killed. Wasn't that eventually what might happen here?

But Belle was different. She was so old, and so gentle. With her arthritis, even walking was a chore. If she were infected—and Cami
had
let her off the leash in the dog park last weekend, with tons of other dogs—Belle could hardly even
hobble
over to someone to attack. By the time Belle got there, the “victim” would have been able to escape to the next county.

Anyway, Belle would never attack Cami.

There were no reporters outside the hospital, after all. Cami drove slowly home, so tired that it was a chore to keep her arms raised to the steering wheel. The streets were weirdly deserted, even for February. But she saw a lot of police cars.

At her apartment complex, she pulled into the long garage built beneath her building. Each renter was allotted one garage slot and one outside parking place, and all the indoor slots were filled. In the SUV next to her Ford, a German shepherd barked ferociously, lunging at the window and snapping as if he could tear through the glass and get at her. He couldn't, of course, but—this garage was supposed to be communal! How dare the dog's owner put everyone else at risk…but, of course, what else could they do with the dog if there were children in their unit?

Cami flung open her car, hurried across the garage, and closed the stairwell door on the frantic barking.

At 2-B she paused and knocked. “Mr. Anselm? Are you okay? It's Cami Johnson.”

Slow footsteps punctuated by the tapping of a cane. The door opened on Mr. Anselm and his seeing-eye dog, Captain. “Cami? How nice of you to stop by. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No, I can't stay,” Cami said, so exhausted that the words had trouble rising past her lips. “I just wanted to make sure that you heard about the dogs and don't go out. Did you hear, Mr. Anselm?”

His wrinkled old forehead wrinkled even more above the filmy, unfocused blue eyes. “Heard what, my dear?”

“Some kind of plague is affecting dogs, Mr. Anselm. Nobody knows what it is. Captain hasn't snapped at you or anything, has he?”

“Captain? No, of course not. He's too well-trained for anything like that, isn't he, ol' boy?”

Cami nodded, even though he couldn't see her. Seeing-eye dogs were superbly trained. And Mr. Anselm hardly ever left the house anyway. She wanted to say more, but she was just too tired. She managed, “Take care, Mr. Anselm,” staggered to her own door, and let herself in.

For just a second, as she pushed open the door, Cami felt a frisson of fear:
What if Belle
…But the collie met her at the door, tail wagging, gentle old eyes shining with pleasure that Cami was home.

In a blur of exhaustion Cami put down food and water for the dog, took off her scrubs, and fell into bed in her underwear. She hadn't taken Belle out…how
could
she take her out, anyway? Let Belle pee, and even shit, in a corner of the kitchen, as she'd had to do once or twice before when Cami had worked a double shift. Cami could clean it up later. Right now sleep, sleep,
sleep
…

But just before she crashed, she pulled herself up off the duvet and closed the bedroom door, leaving Belle on the other side. Just in case.

Tessa, who'd spent all of Thursday and much of Friday morning unpacking boxes in her new kitchen and bedroom, looked around her living room, which still seemed to be full of boxes. How did she own this much stuff? She'd given away, it seemed to her, entire roomfuls of stuff before she left D.C., calling the Goodwill and Salvation Army to haul away truckloads of chairs and books and frying pans and throw pillows. Yet here was all this stuff.

It wasn't the most restful site for meditation, but Tessa nonetheless unfolded her mat. She hadn't meditated this morning; it would make a nice break now. She opened the window to the bracing cold air, faced the brass statue, and sat on her heels, hands on knees, spine straight and relaxed. Breathe…

The doorbell rang. Minette started her insane barking, and Tessa picked her up as she opened the door. Minette was always thrilled to see anyone. A visit from the FedEx man could send her into orgasm.

“Hi, I'm Pioneer Cable,” said an impossibly young workman. “You had a one P.M. call for a new cable hook-up, but I got started early today so if it's okay with you…”