Pavlov's Dogs (10 page)

“Better put that down, Buck,” a voice said from behind. Jorge came out of a stairwell. “I told you idiots the rescue squad was
lobos
or something.” He cleared his throat and pointed at the Dog. “I didn’t think that would be so literal, but... what the hell, right?”

The Dog grunted and licked its lips.

It turned to go.

“Come on,” Jorge said. Then he yelled up the stairs, “
Vamanos
, we don’t have all day!”

A line of people came down from the upper floor and followed Buck and Shayna, who were following the Dog. Outside, a tangle of dead limbs and torsos littered the street, and the survivors took care stepping over them. The Dog
woofed
once as a yellow school bus pulled into the intersection. Plate steel covered the windows, with crosses cut into them.

“Get to the bus!” Jorge yelled. He and the six other survivors jogged forward, but Jorge stopped as he got to the Dog. “Sorry about that. Buck’s trigger-happy. It’s why we love him.”

The Dog growled, and Jorge took a step back.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

He got on the bus and his legs went a little weak when the air conditioning hit him. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I could definitely... Marie?”

His ex-wife sat in one of the seats with another man. Jorge took him in, looking him over, eyes narrowing. Dark striped shirt, blue jeans, forearms and biceps powerful enough to crack nuts in between.

“Jorge?” Marie said. “
Ay, dios mio
, you’re alive!”

“Yeah,” Jorge said. “And who is this?”

The man’s face hardened. “I am Paulo.”

Jorge laughed once, an ugly sound. “Well, good luck with this one.
¿Y los niños?
”

Marie’s face fell, and Jorge felt his guts turn to water.

“
N’ombre
,” he said. “Tell me they’re okay.”

“
No se,”
Marie said.
“No se.
Estan con mi mama en Mexico, pero no se nada de ellos.”

Paulo reached around Marie and rubbed her shoulders. He looked up at Jorge with clear eyes. “We tried calling. The kids have been with their grandmother for six weeks now, even before all this.”

Jorge met the man’s gaze and knew there was something he wasn’t being told. “Shit,” he said, turning away. As he did, a large man with a shaved head stepped onto the bus. He glistened as if he were covered in sweat, but the smell coming off his sheen was bitter and tangy.

“I’m McLoughlin,” he said. “I realize my team must come as a shock, but everyone can relax. We’re taking you someplace safe.”

DR. DONOVAN STOOD in front of a six-foot sculpture of a Dog, looking at it in the sharp fluorescent light of Crispin’s Command Center. The statue was crafted in painstaking, loving detail, from the yellowish-black talons on the misshapen feet to the tufts of hair on the ends of the Dog’s ears.

Donovan tilted his head. “So, this is... decoration?”

Crispin, who was sitting at a very large touchscreen above a bank of controls, took off his headphones and turned to the neurotechnician. “I’m sorry, what?”

Pointing at the model of the Dog, Donovan said, “What is this?”

“Oh!” Crispin smiled. His mood had much improved since the skewed vote, and it had only elevated with each positive report from McLoughlin’s team. “There is a rectangle on the base of the statue. Step on it, please.”

Turning away and rolling his eyes, Donovan did as the project director bid. A seam of light brightened down the center of the Dog, splitting it from crown to crotch. The two halves of the sculpture rotated outward, revealing a network of fiber optics and realistic viscera. The skeletal structure was exposed on the right, the musculature on the left, with all the organs suspended in between.

“That’s... different.” Donovan’s eyes widened and took in everything. The fiber optics ran throughout the systems of the Dog, a fine line of pulsing light. “These are, what? The pathways monitored?”

Crispin grunted at the touchscreen. The monitor was tiled with little picture-in-picture video feeds of each Dog’s vision. “Close, Dr. Donovan. Those are the neural pathways the Pavlovian Chip
controls
. I’ll show you.”

The doctor pinched his forefinger and thumb together on the touchscreen, then expanded them, zooming in on Samson’s feed. The display was moving steadily and smoothly in hi-def, sweeping from side to side as the Dog searched the alleyway. The size of the monitor, combined with how close Donovan stood, induced a bit of vertigo. He put out a hand to steady himself.

“It takes a bit of getting used to,” Crispin said. “The neural interface captures the image coming into Samson’s eyes, even before it gets to his optic nerve. In fact...” He paused, raising one eyebrow at Donovan. “We can even intercept it. Would you like to see?”

Donovan nodded.

“Good. Let us see what our erstwhile Beta Samson is up to.”

They watched as the view closed in on a stout wooden door with a lancet window of meshed security glass. Samson edged toward the door, bit by bit. Dr. Crispin’s finger hovered over a button.

Samson moved, about to look in through the window, and then Crispin’s finger came down. The image on the monitor erupted in a flash of light, and Crispin and Donovan jumped as the tinny sound of an explosion rocked the headphones. Vital signs spiked at the bottom of the display.

“Ah, damn it,” Crispin whispered, taking his finger off the controls. He watched the screen in horror, grimacing and typing as Samson’s pulse and respiration leapt.

Donovan stood back, knowing better than to ask questions as the project director typed in a string of commands. The motion on the screen stopped, and Crispin blew out a breath. He scratched at his chin for a second, then began typing again, fingers flying over the modified keyboard.

Onscreen, a black-furred arm came up and one talon pointed at the shotgun that had produced the burst of light. Crispin typed again, and the display swung from side-to-side. He pulled a microphone out of the console and spoke into it.

“Samson, this is Crispin. Stand down. I am returning control.” He sat back and slapped at a glowing square button on the console. Looking up, he caught the sharp concentration on Donovan’s face.

“As you probably have inferred, I can override one or all of the Dogs from here,” he said. “The idea was to slow them down or stop them if one of their targets was deemed fit for interrogation instead of termination. But I also installed this quick release...” He pointed at the square button, which was no longer glowing. “The QR returns control to the Dogs in case they need to react independently.”

Donovan indicated the keyboard, which had another full row above the function keys. “And this is the controller?”

Crispin nodded. “It is.” He stroked his fingers over the extra row of keys. “These are the shortcuts, if you will. Each one has a string of commands tied to it to save time and facilitate ease of coordination between the Dog packs, if needed.” He turned and pointed at the bookshelf that spanned from one wall to the next. It was crammed with two-inch binders and what looked like military manuals.

“You’ll find all of this in there,” he said. “I did the bulk of the programming myself, but every now and again, hah, I find the need to consult the Wall.”

Donovan walked to the expansive bookshelf and plucked a binder from it. It was densely packed with folded papers, with a four-page table of contents at the front. He picked a folded sheet at random and pulled it out, revealing a three-foot, one-line diagram of system interconnections inside a panel labeled TxRx-3.

“What’s TxRx-3?” he asked.

Absently, Crispin pointed at a spot on the far wall as he put the headphones back on. There, where he pointed, Donovan saw a small door built into the metal wall. The neurotech put the binder down and walked over, sure Crispin had made an error.

That access door can’t be more than four inches square. Surely...

He got close enough to read the letters etched into the metal surface.

“TxRx-3,” he said.

Twisting the little handle, he opened the access door and peered inside. Donovan sucked in a breath. There, in the space behind the door, was a circuit board ringed on all sides by filaments of wire. He closed the door and looked at the rest of the wall where he stood. From top to bottom, there were twenty such access doors, and another twenty next to those.

“Fascinating.”

Looking back at the thick binder, Donovan saw that the cover said TRANSMIT/RECEIVE. He put it back on the shelf. “Is this how you get the commands to the Dogs? And how you get their readings?”

Crispin nodded.

“But there are only fourteen Dogs. You have forty modules. What are these, built-in spares?”

“Not exactly,” Crispin said. “The... hold on. Yes!” He reached out and turned off the monitor. “Come with me, Dr. Donovan. We are going to have a celebratory drink.”

“Celebratory? In celebration of what?”

“The Dogs have found survivors and are on their way back!”

’

As the Dogs herded the two groups of civilians off the bus, Jorge split off and walked over to the big blond man who had called himself Mac. The big soldier had just turned off a radio of some sort.

“Hey. You the leader here?”

Mac turned to the smaller man, taking everything in quickly. “I am. You’re the one who calmed things down when Buck shot Samson.”

“Ah. Is he the, uh, what do we call you?”

Smiling, Mac put a large hand on Jorge’s shoulder. “We’re the Dogs. And that’s all you need to remember for now. There’ll be plenty of time on the island to play get-to-know-you.”

Mac began to turn away, but Jorge caught his hand. “That’s not why I came to talk to you. There are more of us out there.”

Mac raised his chin. “Tell me about it.”

The civilians milling around the bus stopped to listen.

“Okay,” Jorge said. “About a month ago, when all this started...”

’

The Blazer turned up on its side and rolled. In the VW behind Ken, Jorge slammed on his brakes. The other people in the convoy almost rear-ended him. A few other drivers did rear-end each other, and he heard the crunching of metal and the shattering of taillights.

Clawing at the door handle, Jorge undid his seat belt. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the crazy woman who had jumped into his windshield. She lay in the ditch, trying to get up, but the bones of her legs just kept buckling.

More walking corpses were coming up behind her.

Jorge jumped out and slammed the door behind him. Tearing his automatic from his waistband, he walked toward the zombies surrounding the Blazer, feeling his breath coming in great gulps. He tried to calm himself so he could shoot, but the twisted hulk of Ken’s Blazer kept him from peace.

“Ken!” he shouted.

He took his stance and started shooting at the undead. The first one turned toward him and it got two in the chest, then one in the face for its attention. Another turned, and Jorge put a round in its lungs. It fell backwards, but got right back up. Jorge took another step closer and aimed, placing a round neatly in the middle of its face. It went down and stayed there.

“Ken!”

He kept firing, choosing his shots carefully, but there were more zombies than he had rounds, and behind him, another mass of undead was stepping onto the blacktop. He would get surrounded if he didn’t
move
.

“Shit,” Jorge said. He turned back toward the VW, and his eyes bugged out.

A burst of fire from behind the short caravan obliterated the first row of zombies to reach the highway. Then suddenly a Humvee raced up beside the line of cars, and a stern-looking man in a helmet shouted for them to follow.

Jorge opened his mouth to shout for help—his best friend was trapped in the wreckage—but the soldiers saw his gun and tackled him to the ground.

They carried him to the covered flatbed truck, even as he kicked and tried to wrestle away from them.

“Ken!
Ken!”

“Jorge?!” his friend called back from inside the Blazer. “Jorge, I’m pinned!”

Then the military men threw Jorge into the truck and started moving again as the zombies closed in on Big Bertha.

’

“Then, like, five miles away, we had to stop again for a car crash, and the dead were everywhere,” Jorge said, finishing the story. “Only a couple of the soldiers got away, and of course, we used their gear to call you guys.”

“Where are the soldiers now?” Mac asked.

Jorge shrugged. “Don’t know. They heard you guys were coming, and they geared up and split. I think they went looking for my friend, Ken Bishop, the man in the Blazer.”

Mac grinned crookedly. “You must have been very persuasive to get them to leave shelter like that. Especially to find a man who’s in all likelihood dead.”

“Well, these were the two jarheads who tackled me. I figure, I was about to use that lady’s Bug to run the zombies away from the Blazer, then maybe, I don’t know, somehow pull my friend out. But instead, I ended up with the jarheads. They owed me.”