The Last Dog on Earth (4 page)

The prisoner was ready for execution.

Dr. Craig Westerly liked to think of his laboratory rats as prisoners. Somehow that made it easier for him to put them out of their misery—as if they'd been jailed for committing some terrible crime. He didn't give them names, either. This particular rat was simply known as F-6. He was fat and gray and very, very sick.

F
stood for
flu.
Six was the number of rats Westerly had used so far in this latest experiment. He was trying to invent a flu vaccine that could be inhaled, like asthma medicine. He wanted to replace flu shots. Nobody liked flu shots. They were painful. They made your arm sore and swollen. Some people even had bad reactions to them and got
sick.
An inhaled flu vaccine would do away with all the pain and swelling and bad reactions.

So much of medicine was really barbaric, when you thought about it. So many of the treatments were practically worse than the diseases they were supposed to cure. In Westerly's opinion, it was because the medical community didn't really care about their patients. They were simply interested in money and fame.

That's why I left it all
, Westerly reminded himself.
So I could get out here and work on real science, with no politics to mess it up.

He told himself that a lot.

Unfortunately, Westerly wasn't having much luck with his
research. He couldn't figure out the right dosage. His rats just kept getting the flu every time they inhaled the vaccine.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Guess we'll have to wait and see how F-7 does. Eh, Jasmine?”

Jasmine, his big, lazy golden retriever, sat by his feet on the home laboratory floor, watching as he dumped a pellet of ether into F-6's specially sealed glass tank. Jasmine was seven years old— almost as old in dog years as Westerly was in human years.

The ether quickly put F-6 to sleep. Westerly sighed.

Better luck tomorrow.

He and Jasmine headed out to the back porch.

There was a tree at the edge of Westerly's property that reminded him of a tree he used to climb as a boy. It was an evergreen, tall and cone shaped. The branches were as solid and evenly spaced as the rungs of a ladder. At sunset, if the weather was nice, Westerly would sit on the back porch and watch the tree change colors. Jasmine usually lay beside him. He liked to imagine that she enjoyed watching the tree as much as he did. Truth be told, she mostly slept.

Westerly had fallen in love with the tree the very first moment he laid eyes on it. It was one of the two reasons he'd bought this property. The other reason was that he wanted to be as far away from other people as possible. People were trouble, by and large. His nearest neighbors—an old recluse named Mrs. Hoover and her dog, Daisy—were two miles away, and that was close enough.

On days like today, when the afternoons stretched on and on, the tree would slowly change from green to gold, then to a fiery orange. A few minutes later the branches at the top would come to life with a color that verged on purple—but only for a brief
moment. Then the sun would sink behind the mountains on the other side of the valley, and the tree would turn into a skeleton: forbidding and gray. It would stay that way until the next morning.

Climbing the tree had been on Westerly's mind quite a bit recently. During the summer he sometimes felt like a boy again, just watching it. When he was younger, all those years ago, he would have climbed it without a thought. The other kids played baseball or tag, but somehow Westerly always ended up at the top of the old evergreen in the park by his house. There he would dream about traveling in the planes that flew overhead or building a big dome over the entire park to protect it from the rain.

“What do you say, Jazz?” Westerly asked. “Do you think I can climb this one?”

Jasmine was half asleep at his feet. She looked like a fuzzy yellow pillow. She opened her droopy eyes, then sniffed and closed them again.

Westerly smiled. “What's that supposed to mean?”

He loved asking Jasmine questions because he could interpret her answers any way he saw fit. Given her slouchy, uninterested mood, she could be saying, “Come on. Sure, you can climb that tree. You're only fifty years old. That's nothing
.
” Or maybe she was daring him to do it. “Don't waste my time
talking
about climbing the tree. Wake me up when you're at the top.” Or maybe she was telling him to give it up. “Are you out of your mind? You can't climb that tree. You're practically a senior citizen.”

Westerly smiled. He liked these imaginary conversations. He truly enjoyed Jasmine's company.

He couldn't say that about anyone else.

* * *

The sun was well below the mountains when Westerly heard a soft chime from his computer. Somebody was sending him an e-mail. He sighed and opened the rickety porch door for Jasmine.

“Come on, Jazz,” he murmured. “Come on, girl. Time to go in.”

Jasmine yawned and stretched, then shambled inside and flopped down on the rug next to the desk. Westerly followed her in. The laboratory was dark except for the ghostly blue glow of the computer screen. He sank into his chair and peered at the e-mail in box. The subject line was printed in all capital letters.

It had been sent by Harold Marks.

Westerly felt like deleting the message without reading it.

Every now and then he heard from Dr. Harold Marks of Portland University. Westerly had worked at Portland University, too, once upon a time. That was how he thought of his career there: “once upon a time”—as if it had happened to somebody else, in a story.

Westerly was quite a bit older than Harold. In fact, Westerly had been Harold's teacher. But from the moment they first met, Harold had treated him with little respect. As a student, he'd immediately started calling Westerly by his first name.
Craig.
Not
Dr. Westerly.
Still, that had never stopped him from taking Dr
.
Westerly's work and passing it off as his own.

Seven years ago, Harold had been named chief of research at the Center for Infectious Diseases. Westerly couldn't believe it when it happened. The man didn't have an original thought in his head. He wasn't even a good researcher. Westerly didn't want the job for himself; he had no interest in being anyone's boss … but he certainly
didn't want Harold to be
his
boss. So he protested. But Harold got the job, anyway. And the very first thing he did was fire Westerly.

“I'm sorry,” Harold had told him. “You just don't know how to get along with people.”

And then Westerly had gone home and told his wife, and a few weeks later she had kicked him out, too. Not as bluntly as Harold— no, instead she'd said in her soft voice, “Maybe you ought to try to talk to Harold about getting your job back.” And when he'd argued with her, explaining that there was no way he'd ever go back to Portland, she'd said, “Craig, you're not being reasonable. Can't you just try, for once, to get along with him?” And then later she'd said, “You're not being fair to your family. We can't live like this, Craig!”

So he'd left. Just said “so long” to everything—wife, kid, house, job, life—and come up here.

Maybe Harold was right about me
, Westerly thought.
Maybe I don't know how to get along with people.
But getting along with people had nothing to do with science. It could even get in the way of science. How could you concentrate on your research if you were constantly worrying about what other people thought?

Harold's problem was that he cared too much about what other people thought. Of course, the only reason he cared was because he wanted power. As far as Westerly had ever been able to tell, nobody
respected
Harold. But they did fear him—feared his power. Everybody at the university was scared of him. If he couldn't control you, he got rid of you.

Like he got rid of me.

Whatever. That was all in the past. Westerly wasn't bitter anymore. Life was good here in the Cascade Mountains. He'd built his own laboratory so he could work on any kind of research he
wanted. Nobody could betray him or kick him out of their lives— not Harold Marks, not his ex-wife, no one. He was all alone. He could play with Jasmine whenever he felt like it, and wear his pajamas all day long (he was wearing a pair of flannel pj's right now, in fact), and tie his gray hair back in a ponytail—and never, ever,
ever
have to worry about getting along with other people.

He clicked open the e-mail.

We're looking for your research paper on prion diseases. we've been notified that there's been a small outbreak of an unidentified illness among dogs in Redmont, a town in the southern part of the state. it seems to mimic symptoms of both mad cow disease and rabies, very much the way you described in your paper. do you have a copy on file? we can't find it here. if you have it, send it.

Westerly stopped breathing.

In an instant he forgot his annoyance at being disturbed or even being asked to do Harold a favor.

Prion diseases.

Westerly hadn't thought about prion diseases in a long, long time. But if Harold was correct in his suspicions, then a “small outbreak” would be nothing of the sort. It might appear to be small at first, but it wouldn't take long for a few cases to develop into something far more dangerous. Something along the lines of a full-scale epidemic.

Prions were tiny, tiny strands of protein. Generally they were harmless, but every now and then a prion would become misshapen, malformed. The term in the scientific community was
misfolded.
Westerly had always likened these misfolded prions to bad seeds.
Once they found their way inside an animal and planted themselves there, the entire animal turned rotten. Prion diseases weren't like other diseases, which were caused by bacteria or viruses—like the flu, for instance. Misfolded prions couldn't be stopped. Worst of all, misfolded prions were found in food—meat, milk, cheese—almost every kind of food that came from animals.

The good news (if any news could really be considered “good”) was that prion diseases weren't directly contagious from one species to another. Mad cow disease, for instance, almost certainly could only be caught by healthy cows from affected ones. But even so,
that
particular epidemic caused near panic in England when scientists discovered that humans could contract a related disease by eating the meat of affected cows. Before mad cow disease was brought under control, people were concerned that the entire population of cows in England would have to be destroyed.

Back at the university, Westerly had tried to prove to Harold how dangerous prion diseases could be. He'd even written a paper on the subject—the very same paper Harold now wanted, in fact. But Harold had never been enthusiastic about it. No prion disease had ever occurred on a large scale in the United States. Humans mostly got it from eating spoiled beef in underdeveloped countries. There was a tribe in New Guinea that had gotten a prion disease called kuru from cannibalism. “There just aren't that many cannibals here in America,” Harold used to joke.

Westerly had never found that joke funny.

Then Harold would get serious. “It's not where the grant money is, Craig,” he'd say. “Prion diseases are not going to put this university on the map.”

“Unless one hits here and we're not prepared for it,” Westerly
would reply. And Harold would wave his hand and call Westerly Old Gloom-and-Doom.

“I warned him, Jasmine,” Westerly said. “Didn't I?”

Jasmine was asleep. Lucky for her.

Westerly leaned back in the chair. He knew he shouldn't panic. After all, Harold was a lousy scientist; he could have misread the data—but if dogs had already died, then the odds were extremely high that they'd caught the disease from infected dog food.

Westerly's eyes flashed to the lab counter on the other side of the room. He drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the shadowy array of test tubes, osmotic filters, microscopes, and centrifuges. He could test Jasmine's food right now. The equipment was ready. He was one of the few scientists in the country who had such equipment, in fact. Testing for prion diseases was difficult— and given how rare they were, it was hardly worth the effort. Or so most people believed … unless there was an outbreak.

But was there?

Yet even as the question squirmed in Westerly's brain, he knew he wouldn't test Jasmine's food. Not tonight. He was too afraid of what he might find. Because if the food
was
infected, he might as well start digging her grave. There was no cure for prion diseases, at least none that had been proven to work. Westerly had a couple of theories on how a cure might be created, of course—but that was all they were: theories. They wouldn't suddenly provide a magic pill that could save a dog's life.

Besides, nobody had ever listened much to his theories, anyway.

Many months had passed since Mother's death. In that time, the sickness had spread. The rest of the pack were gone. Only White Paws and the she-pup remained, left to fend for themselves. They were young, not even a year old. But they were healthy. They were strong. White Paws assumed the role of leader. It was the law of the forest: Those who are strong take charge; those who are weak submit to them or perish.

Yet the she-pup refused to submit to any creature, even her brother.

One night, she took off into the darkness. White Paws tracked her scent over hills and through thick brush, under fallen trees and across puddles….

As he approached the highway, White Paws could smell the horrible odor of the cars, their choking black smog. He could see the fearsome glare of their headlights through the trees. The cars were close—very close. One came to a stop, its roar fading to a low, steady growl. There were other noises, too: strange bumping sounds, the voices of men.

White Paws slithered behind a rock. He could see his sister. He watched as a man scooped her into his arms, then as the car swallowed them both and roared back into the night.