The Last Dog on Earth (7 page)

“That's right. It's your choice. I'm giving you the opportunity to join us again.”

Westerly opened his mouth. Then he closed it. His throat was dry. Never in his wildest daydreams would he have imagined
this:
that Harold would call to invite him back to work. It could only mean one thing. Harold was in some kind of trouble. He'd actually
swallowed his pride and stooped to call Westerly—the guy who couldn't get along with anyone, the “mad scientist of the mountains.” (Harold had once called him that in an e-mail a few years back.) The situation was
that
bad.

“The disease is spreading,” Harold added, as if answering an unspoken question. “I've had to order the equipment to run fullscale tests for the presence of prions. All the evidence so far seems to indicate that it's a strain we've never seen before. It's stronger and faster. The incubation period is much shorter. Three weeks from infection until death. The evidence also seems to indicate that it can be transmitted through dog bites….”

As Harold continued, Westerly found he could no longer listen. He could only stare at Jasmine. She'd stumbled on the stairs just now.

Stumbling was one of the first symptoms of a prion disease.

Westerly would have thought nothing of the stumble if Harold hadn't called. None of this had crossed his mind in three days—not since he'd looked around for the paper. Not once. This was a gift Westerly had and one that served him well in his work: If certain thoughts interfered with his ability to focus, he simply stowed them somewhere, in some hidden part of his brain, and forgot about them until the appropriate time. Some people called it compartmentalizing. Others—his ex-wife, for instance—said that
compartmentalizing
was just a fancy way of dressing up the truth, which was that Westerly was self-absorbed and rude and thoughtless….

“… Are you still there?”

Westerly nodded. “Yes. Yes, I'm sorry.”

“So what's your answer?” Harold asked.

“You'll have to excuse me, Harold,” Westerly mumbled, wrenching his attention away from Jasmine. “I didn't hear the question.”
It was just a stumble
, he told himself.
Don't read into it.

“For God's sake!” Harold snapped. “Can't you listen to me for five minutes? Do you still hate me that much?”

Hate you?

Well,
hate
was a strong word … although, yes, Westerly disliked him. But that hardly mattered. This was a crisis. Yet Harold had to turn it into something personal. He had to bring up all the old issues again—issues of not getting along with people, issues that had nothing to do with the matter at hand. In short, Harold had to place himself and his problems over the seriousness of this disease.

It was politics. Stupid politics.

Westerly's lips pressed into a tight line. So. Nothing had changed at all in seven years. Not one thing. And in that instant, all the sour memories of the university came flooding back, washing away any temptation he might have had to take Harold up on his offer. There was no way he would go back there. He'd help Harold as much as he could from home, but that was it. End of story. Besides, if the disease was spreading, then a trip to Portland would endanger Jasmine's life. And that was a risk he refused to take.

“I need an answer, Craig,” Harold said.

“I'll tell you what you need to know over the phone,” Westerly said. “From day one, my theory has always been that to cure prion disease, you need to synthesize an antidote from an immune animal. Get your hands on an immune dog, and I'll talk you through the process—”

“That's part of the problem,” Harold interrupted. “We can't find an immune dog. All the dogs at the university are already sick.” His voice rose. “This is an emergency!”

“You can't be serious,” Westerly said.

“Dead serious,” Harold said.

Westerly couldn't answer. He couldn't even breathe. The cabin spun around him like water circling a drain, faster and faster.

It's happening
, he thought.
It's really happening, just the way I said it would.

He'd been right all along. But that didn't make him feel any better.

“I hope you know that I'm telling you all this in the strictest of confidence,” Harold added. “We haven't made this information public because we don't want to start a panic. I'm telling you now because I want you to understand how bad the situation is. So you have a choice to make. Either you start behaving like a responsible scientist, or you keep hiding out there in the woods.”

Click.

“Harold?” Westerly croaked. “Harold?”

But the line was dead.

The she-pup had never known contentment until the day she was let out of the shelter. She'd known happiness at different points in her young life: in the forest, before the sickness had wiped out her pack … but this was different. To feel the sun on her coat, to have a full belly, to breathe the scent of the evergreens, to be free—that was what it meant to be alive.

The boy had rescued her.

She'd been too dazed to show him gratitude at first. She simply slept as he whisked her off to her new home. But now, at the moment of arrival, she knew she had come to a place where things made sense. Here, she had a companion.

The boy kept close to her side. He protected her. There was a connection between them.

The memory of the wild—of Mother and White Paws and the slow death of her pack … all of it began to fade. She was part of a new pack now. A pack of two. The boy had restored order. He had given her safety. He had given her a name.

She was no longer a starving puppy in the forest, fighting for survival.

She was Jack.

Logan's first order of business was to train Jack to pee and poop outside.

He already had a specific place in mind: the little grassy area in the backyard, right under Robert's hammock. Jack seemed to want to go there, too. She kept tugging on her leather leash, trying to drag Logan toward that exact spot.

So far, so good.

From what Logan could tell, training a dog to pee and poop someplace—or to do anything, really—wasn't all that hard. You just had to be patient. You had to do the same thing again and again, in the exact same place. You had to approach it from a scientific point of view. No cute talk or games or face licking or any of that. Nope. Strictly science.

Over the past three days (the time it had taken for the shelter to make sure Jack wasn't sick), Logan had buried himself in a bunch of books on dog training. He was going to become an expert. Of course, part of the reason he read so much was to keep Robert off his back. Robert had thrown a major fit about Jack, even worse than Logan had expected.
“What do you mean, you didn't go to the breeder? I had a deposit there! I don't want the money back! I want a purebred! How could you let Logan sucker you into this!”
… blah, blah, blah.

After the freak-out, though, Robert had kept to himself.
Especially when he saw Logan reading. Maybe he really
did
think Logan was trying to shape up.

More likely, though, he was just saving up for another explosion. Whatever.

As it turned out, Logan could have read a lot less because most of the training books said pretty much the same thing. He kind of felt ripped off. The books all had lame titles—
I Just Bought a Puppy! So What Do I Do Now?—
and all the covers featured glossy photos of big-haired women with fake-looking dogs. The books were written in stupid, flowery language, too, like romance novels or something.
“Dear dog owner, The most important gift you can give your new mate is your heart….”
Blecch. Logan heard Ms. Dougherty's voice in his head whenever he cracked one open. And they could all be summed up in six words:

1. Reward good behavior.
   

2. Ignore bad behavior.
   

That was it.

Interestingly,
punishing
a dog for bad behavior was the wrong way to go. Punishment only made a dog sullen or withdrawn—or in the worst cases, violent. (Sort of like people, if you really thought about it. Robert could learn a thing or two from these books.)

Sure, there were a couple of tricks. One was to get the dog to associate good behavior with a treat, like a doggy biscuit or a piece of bacon. That way the dog would
want
to be good. And if you threw in a pleasing noise of some sort—like a bell or a click or a whistle—then that was even better because dogs responded well to “sonic cues.” Along
those lines, it was best to use simple, one or two-word commands.

“Sit.”“Down.”“Heel.”“Play dead.”

There was really nothing more to it than that. Say the command; give a treat; ring a bell; bingo. Pretty soon the dog would do whatever you wanted. You wouldn't even have to use the treats for very long because soon hearing the “sonic cue” after the command would be rewarding enough. According to the books, anyway.

Logan made sure all the bases were covered. For treats, he'd swiped the bacon bits from Mom's spice cabinet. For the noise part, he'd built a special device: the Logan Moore Sonic Cue Gun, or LMSCG. He'd taken the bicycle bell from Mom's old three-speed and fastened it on top of a water gun, then rigged the trigger with a bit of fishing wire so that when he pulled it, the wire yanked on the bell's ringer. All he had to do was aim the thing at Jack. Point, squeeze,
brrring!
It was pretty loud, too.

“All right, Jack,” Logan said. “Time to do your business.”

Jack stopped tugging at her leash. She sniffed the lawn.

Logan tried to yank her over to the hammock. She seemed to have changed her mind about wanting to go there. And for such a scrawny dog, she was actually pretty strong. Logan had to shove the LMSCG into his pocket and use both hands to pull her.

“Come on, Jack,” Logan grunted. “Come on. Right over here.”

She started tearing at the grass with her front paws.

Uh-oh.
The hammock was close to the kitchen window. Mom and Robert were in there right now. The screen was shut, but the window was open. If Robert saw Jack ripping up the lawn … well, Logan would just try to keep quiet. Anyway, he was supposed to ignore bad behavior. Digging a hole in the backyard certainly fell into that category.

Logan chewed his lip. He could hear Robert and Mom at the table.

“… can't believe we let him bring that mutt home,” Robert was muttering. He sounded disgusted. “This is
your
fault. This has disaster written all over it.”

“But I think it's good for Logan,” Mom said. “He feels that he made his own decision, you know? He's taking responsibility for it. It's not like we're forcing something on him again. I mean, you saw all those books he has on dog training. And besides, he does have a point about the money. You can still get a purebred Lab if you really want one—”

“This house isn't big enough for two dogs,” Robert snapped. “And you know it. And what if Jack has this disease everybody's talking about? What if she's sick?”

Mom sighed. “She's not sick, Robert. She was examined thoroughly. Look, just be patient, okay? Let's make the best of this.”

Logan stared down at Jack.

Come on, come on
, he urged silently.
Stop digging. Stop it….

Suddenly Jack lifted her head and lowered her rear end. She peed, staring into space. She wasn't right under the hammock, but she was close enough.

“Good girl!” Logan exclaimed.

He reached into his front pocket for a handful of bacon bits. As Jack gobbled them up, Logan pulled the LMSCG from his back pocket. He had to struggle to hold on to the leash at the same time. It was all a little awkward. But he managed to get off a ring before she'd finished the treats. Jack wagged her scraggly tail and raised her eyes, as if to say,
No more bacon bits?

Logan grinned. “Okay, Jack,” he said. “Next time I'll—”

“Logan! What are you doing out there?”

Robert's nose was mashed against the window screen.

“I …” Logan didn't know what to say.

“Did you just let the dog pee on my lawn?” Robert demanded.

(“
My
lawn.” Not “
our
lawn.” Not “
the
lawn.”
Robert's lawn.
) “Well, yeah,” Logan said. “I just figured it would be better if she peed out here than—”

“Take her on the
sidewalk
, Logan!” Robert shouted. “It's bad for the grass! Get her out of the backyard! Now!”

Jack's tail stopped wagging. She barked at the window.

Logan turned away and pulled at the leash. But Jack didn't seem to want to move.

“What's that bell you got there?” Robert asked.

“It's supposed to help with the training,” Logan said.

“Why do you need it? The Wallaces don't use a bell with Otis.”

“I was just following the advice of the books,” Logan said.

“What are you, an expert on dog training now?” Robert demanded.

Why are you still talking to me if you want me to get Jack out of the backyard?
Logan wondered. But instead of asking the question out loud, he bent down and picked Jack up, cradling her like a big baby, and carried her away from the window as fast as possible. In a situation like this, it was best just to get her out of Robert's sight.

Not that Logan was going to stop training her to pee under the hammock. He was just going to wait until Robert went back to the car dealership.

Weirdly enough, the hardest part of owning Jack turned out to be finding a toy that she liked.

You couldn't just
give
her a toy, Logan realized. If you tried, she
would sniff at it, then just stare at you as if to say,
Come on, man. This is a fuzzy bumblebee. Don't insult me. Give me the good stuff.

It was actually pretty funny. The day after she arrived, Logan took her to the pet store to load up on plastic bones and rawhide sticks and squeaky stuffed animals. She seemed pretty interested in the stuff while he was picking it out. Especially the bumblebee. She even barked at it. He spent nearly thirty bucks—just about every penny he had. But when he got home and dumped the loot in the middle of his room, she didn't even bother to
look
at it.