Pavlov's Dogs (29 page)

“Trust me,” Mac said. “It sounds odd, but a hole saw just isn’t going to cut it. Even a big one. I heal too fast. We already talked about this.”

Ken nodded. “I know, I know. It’s just, I’m having a little trouble wrapping my head around the idea, now that I have a chainsaw in my hand. And, you know, we’re about to pop your head open like a tuna can.”

“It’s his skull,” Julius repeated.

“I would like to register with everybody present, I am... uncomfortable with this part,” Ken said. “Pastor, you still praying?”

The pastor, head down, nodded.

“Okay. No bets. If you have any, I don’t want to know.”

That said, Ken pulled his goggles down and yanked the starter rope on the yellow chainsaw. It roared to life on the second try, and he squeezed down on the throttle, making it scream. He inched the whirring teeth down to the Alpha Dog’s skull.

“Are you sure about the painkillers?” he said, pulling back.

“Just do it, will you?” Mac shouted. “Hurry up, before I sweat the ink away.”

Kelly scampered over and offered a leather belt for Mac to bite down on.

He said, “Fold it in half, please.”

She did, and he took it into his mouth with a grateful half-smile.

Holding his breath, Ken came down with the chainsaw, hitting the thick, black ink marker that circumscribed the Dog’s skull. He angled the blade, and the stench of burning skin filled the workshop. The teeth bit into bone, and the chainsaw tried to pull away.

“You’re lucky I’m a construction worker,” Ken said. “If I were a real brain surgeon, that probably would have broken my forearm.”

Mac bit down on the belt, and Ken thought he heard a growl over the whine of the chainsaw.

“Right. More cutting.”

True to his word, the bone in Mac’s skull had already formed small tendrils, repairing itself. The skin was healing even faster than that. Ken saw it and grimaced, trying to cut faster.

“Pull,” Ken said.

Kelly and Julius ran to the stepstool he was standing on and dragged it slowly around to Mac’s right side. Ken continued cutting and couldn’t help but think of winters during high school, when he’d tried his hand at ice sculpturing only to fail miserably.

Oh God, oh God.

Do
not
think of this as just another test.

He worked the chainsaw around, straining to see clearly through the pink mist that filled the air between him and Mac’s head. He thought that he probably should have worn a mask over his nose and mouth too.

“Pull.”

As they moved around to the front, Ken looked down and caught Mac’s eye, immediately wishing he had not. The Alpha Dog’s face was red and streaming with sweat and blood. The cords in his neck stood out, and his lips pulled back to show teeth embedded deep in the leather belt. But the eyes... even though the surgery was his own idea, Mac’s eyes held murder in them.

Ken ran the chainsaw across the Dog’s forehead, blocking his face out with the body of the saw. He blew out a breath.

“Pull.”

As they maneuvered him around to Mac’s left side, he continued the cut, and then rushed over to the beginning of it again, where the skin and bone had made significant progress.

“Okay. Let’s just lift the hood, see what you have under there.”

With an obscene cracking sound, the top of the skull came free to Ken’s unyielding pressure; Kelly leaned forward with a sharp blade and sliced through the meninges, the membranes insulating the fleshy convolutions of the brain.

“Julius, you got the Dremel tool ready?”

The old man ran over with a small hand-held blue instrument. He clicked the button on the side and it whirred to life. As planned, he ran it around the top and bottom of the cut, holding the bone back on its journey to self-repair.

Mac spit out the belt. “Okay. There are two chips we’re interested in. They’re very close together. The one on the right—”

“Your right?”

“The one on
my
right is the Pavlovian chip. The other one is kind of important. That one lets me change whenever I feel like it. So don’t touch it. Without that chip, I’ll be far less effective.”

“They’re connected,” Ken said, clearing his nose off to one side. The wet dust from Julius’s continuous bone grinding was starting to become an issue. “Is there a fan in here?”

The pastor stopped praying and came over with a square yard of sheet metal. He waved it back and forth. “How’s that?”

“Peachy,” Ken said. “Mac, they’re connected.”

“I heard you. I’m just... you’ll have to try to get one out without disturbing the other. Are you up to it?”

Ken made a face. “Kind of late to back out now, isn’t it?”

Wiping the sweat from his face, he leaned back and took a deep, cleansing breath. He gripped the needlenose pliers in his steady right hand and leaned back in, but then immediately leaned back out.

“Just do it,” Julius said. “Don’t worry about hurting him. The brain processes pain signals, but it won’t feel any.”

“Not comforting,” Ken said.

“Come on,” Mac said. “Do you want the girl to do it?”

“Say no,” Kelly said.

Ken leaned back in and rested the handle of the pliers on the ring of bone. He edged the tip under one corner of the Pavlovian chip. He pulled, ever so slightly, and the corner lifted off the surface, pulling a small bit of gold wire out of a fold of brain.

“Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” Mac said. “I felt something there.”

“Still not comforting.”

Ken pulled a touch more, freeing a larger web of gold wire from Mac’s brain. “These fingers go everywhere,” he said.

“Don’t worry about the stuff coming to the chip,” Mac replied. “Without it, they’re just stuff. The chip is what needs to come out.”

Blowing out a slow, shaky breath, Ken pulled more on the Pavlovian chip. It was almost all up, and he smiled. “Okay, I think this is... this is it!”

He pulled the last bit free, but it didn’t come on its own. A corner of the other chip came with it. “Holy shit!”

“What happened?” Mac barked.

The pastor stopped waving the sheet metal and put his hand out. “You can’t undo anything, son. Just pass it over and we’ll get rid of the damned thing.”

“Holy shit,” Ken said, dropping the Pavlovian chip in the pastor’s waiting hand.

The man of the cloth held it up to his face. “Such a small thing for so much trouble.” He leaned over it. “Well, it’s just best that it’s—”

Crack!

The Pavlovian chip exploded, and the pastor reeled back, a hole in his hand and a hole in the side of his face. He fell, his one good eye rolling in its socket.

“I think... I think...”

“Holy shit!” Ken yelled again.

“I think I’m hurt,” the pastor said, then fell over.

“Close my fucking head!”

Dropping the needlenose pliers, Ken and Julius pushed the flap of skull and scalp back into place.

“The keeper,” Julius said.

Ken blinked and turned, grabbing at a corkscrew on a wire hanger. He turned the tool into the top of the flap of scalp, then suspended it from the ceiling.

“Try not to move for a while,” Julius said on the way past. He knelt down by the pastor. “When your skull is more or less together, we’ll take the keeper out.”

“I know that,” Mac said. “Why are you still talking to me? Help that man!”

Julius stood up, pulling the handkerchief from his back pocket. “Ain’t no helping him now.”

DONOVAN HIT THE ENTER key with a triumphant “Hah!” and bounced in his seat as the McLoughlin window on the big touchscreen went completely, irrevocably black. He sat back in the Command chair, fingers laced behind his head, a smug look of bliss on his face. His Cupid’s bow mouth was pursed as if he were about to receive a kiss.

“I did it. I found it.” He leaned forward, slapping his hands on the open manual. “I found it right
here!”
He giggled, feeling high on his own accomplishments. And why shouldn’t he? Wasn’t he the one who followed the clues? Going from ink smudge to chocolate stain, tracing Dr. Crispin’s progress through the manuals until he came to the one labeled MISC. PROTOCOLS IV. Who knew the Dog termination code would be in such an innocuous volume? Nobody could have.

But he’d found it.

Donovan stood, stretching his shoulders and back. He felt much better, even with the increasing stiffness from hours spent hunched over the piles and piles of technical manuals in Command. The stiffness was okay now because he had done it.

And he had done it without the help of that Summer Chan, insufferable as she was. Others might see her as aloof, but Donovan knew the truth about her. She didn’t think anybody was good enough to fill Dr. Crispin’s shoes. Every time he’d fumbled a line of Command syntax, or had to look again at a reference volume, he had felt the sting of her disdain. Quite acutely.

He shook his head. No, instead of letting that woman bring him down in his moment of conquest, he would use this opportunity to let people know how good he was. But who? Not Holly. Though he enjoyed the company of the engineer when she wasn’t incessantly talking, she wasn’t the right kind of audience for this particular piece of good news.

Striding over to the wide and multi-buttoned phone on the Command console, Donovan picked up the handset and tapped the 0 key.

“Get me Kaiser’s cell,” he told the comms officer.

A moment later, the sulkily defiant voice of the prisoner Dog came over the line, a bit crackly from a poor connection in the Kennel’s speakerphone system. “
What the hell do you want now?
”

“I have good news, Kaiser.”

“
Yeah?”

Donovan felt as if he were smiling so hard, his cheekbones would surely burst under the pressure. “The Alpha is dead. I enacted the final solution on his Pavlovian chip.”

For a moment, the line was silent, and Donovan was almost certain the connection had been severed. The smile on his face slipped a notch when he realized the mistake he’d made.

Kaiser already believed the Alpha to be dead.

“
You know what this means?”
Kaiser finally replied, a grin evident in his voice.
“It means there needs to be a new Alpha.”

“I’m not sure what you—”

“
We need to hold a tournament. I’ve been robbed of my opportunity to take out the old Alpha. So, if I have to beat in the brains of every other Dog to take the top spot, so be it.”

Donovan stared at the handset, unsure of what to say. Removing people from his path, from his ascendancy to his rightful place as ruler, that was one thing. A tournament, which almost surely meant gladiatorial-style combat, was something else entirely. It would be vastly entertaining.

“
You there, Doc?”

The project director hung up the phone.

’

An hour later, Donovan sat in Crispin’s old office, chewing on his knuckles and staring at the silver sword. He’d gone in there to listen to some music, perhaps unwind a little bit while he thought about Kaiser’s idea, but when he went to open the audio folder, the first thing that caught his eye made him catch his breath.

Radio Call, 1730.

It was date-stamped the day before. He clicked on it and was shocked to hear McLoughlin’s voice, then even more surprised to hear Jaden respond.

As soon as he recovered from his initial reaction, Donovan grabbed a pad of paper and restarted the file. He scribbled madly as he listened.

He then sat for forty-five minutes, biting his fist and trying to decide what to do. Even though the Alpha was taken care of, his fellow refugees might decide to try this ludicrous plan without him. Or maybe even
because
of him, because of his death.

Donovan stood and tucked the pad of paper into the breast pocket of his long lab coat. He couldn’t think here, in Crispin’s office. He did better in Command.

On the way, Lucas Jaden came alongside him and fell in step. “Dr. Donovan, sir.”

The project director struggled to keep his face neutral.

“Sir, can we talk?”

“Yes, of course,” Donovan said, keeping his face forward but casting furtive glances at the security man, moving only his eyes.

Jaden stopped walking. “Somewhere private.”

Donovan paused, wondering what Jaden had to say.

“It’s a matter of island security,” Jaden said, and Donovan nodded.

Maybe he’s going to turn on McLoughlin’s group after all?

Or maybe it’s something about the dead?

“Sir, perhaps we could go to Command? It’s very private.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good,” Jaden said, walking toward the secure building. “Walk with me, sir. The breach in security runs high, higher than you would believe.”