Pavlov's Dogs Read online

  Ken fought the urge to spit.

  Looting, pillaging, and rioting were all foreign to him. He saw it on television often enough, but had never understood it. How could people, normal everyday people, act so wrong? Never mind the law, what about what was right? He shook his head, glad he wasn’t one of them. The mindless herd.

  As the Blazer came around the bend, he saw the source of the smoke. Flames billowed from the hospital at either end, unchecked and uncontrolled. Through the smoke, it was impossible to see anything else at the foundation of the building, but Ken had a sick feeling in his gut that it might be similar to the scene back on the highway.

  “Jesus,” Jorge said. “What do you think, the oxygen lines?”

  “Probably,” Ken said. He tore his eyes from the merrily burning hospital and looked ahead. “What the hell happened here? We couldn’t have been in traffic for more than an hour.”

  On the opposite side of the highway, a mob of people had converged on a small contingent of policemen and EMTs at the scene of a wreck. No one in the mob was moving with that awkward gait Ken had seen back at the bus wreck. This wasn’t a crazed attack.

  It was the beginning of a riot.

  A quick flash of red in front of him made Ken step on the brakes. A fire engine roared up the ramp onto the highway, lights on but no siren.

  “Firefighters do not wear white,” one of the women in the passenger seat said.

  Ken had to agree. It was also a completely foreign idea to him that someone would hijack a fire truck, but someone obviously had thought it was the right thing to do.

  How badly have things broken down here?

  Ken began to sweat. It was like a cold, clammy hand on the nape of his neck, and it made him feel unclean. His plan to make it into the city had been a poor choice. But at least they were still on the highway. If they stayed on it, it would take them through the city and out the other side. Besides, turning around wasn’t really an option.

  His eyes flicked to the mirror again. “You still got your iron?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jorge said. “It’s digging a very nice hole for itself in my paunch.” In the mirror, Ken saw him look down at his figure. “Maybe I should cut back on the beer.”

  Ken nodded. That reassured him more than a little. Jorge might not be so much on range safety, but he hit what he shot at. Though just to be on the safe side...

  He tapped the woman sitting next to him on the shoulder. “Do me a favor, will you? Reach down under your seat and hand me the case from under there.”

  He hated the idea of driving armed but it was the smart thing to do. If people were out and about and commandeering rescue vehicles, they wouldn’t think twice about stealing Big Bertha right out from under him.

  The woman plucked out the gun case and handed it over. Ken opened it up, and, driving with his knee, he loaded the gun.

  The women in the front seat cast him a few furtive glances.

  “Protection,” he said with a nervous laugh. Then he dumped the rest of the bullets into his shirt pocket.

  One of the women smiled; the other just looked away.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “You wouldn’t strap up if you had a gun?”

  “Hey, it’s the Army,” Jorge said, and Ken’s head whipped up to look.

  Surely enough, two Humvees and a large covered flatbed truck sat off the side of the road. As Ken passed, he saw the man in the lead Hummer talking on a field radio. The soldier looked worried, and the gunners on the Humvee-mounted .50 cals looked alert.

  “That doesn’t bode well either, compadre,” he said, meeting Jorge’s eyes in the rearview. A blur of movement in the side of the glass caught his attention, and he turned the mirror so he could see into the trailer.

  A red splash of blood arced away from the man with the bad B.O., and the man clutched at his neck. A second later, a scarecrow in a silk blouse was on him, tearing at his face with her teeth.

  “Holy shit,” Ken said.

  It was the girl with the bite.

  Jorge saw it too and shouted blasphemies in Spanish.

  The girl had become a monster, completely numb to the blows raining down on her head from the other people in the trailer. She clawed back and forth between them, grabbing skin and pulling until it tore, lashing out with her teeth. She caught one man’s nose and sheared it clean off. He fell back, holding the hole in his face, tumbling off the end of the trailer and taking another man with him. The old couple’s kin.

  In the Beetle, Jorge swerved and managed to miss them both as they tumbled along the road.

  A woman in a T-shirt stepped up to defend herself, but the creature hooked two fingers inside the lady’s cheek and tore her face wide open. The injured woman toppled over the side of the trailer, which jumped as the wheels rolled over her body. This time Jorge couldn’t swerve because of oncoming traffic—a truck barreling out of the city with a deranged man hanging onto its rear bumper; the man’s legs had been sanded down by the road.

  With a feral look in her eyes, the she-monster swung to look into the Blazer, then swung the opposite way to glare at Jorge.

  “I wonder if she wants her car back,” Jorge said. “Well you can’t have it!” Quieter, he said, “The yellow’s kind of grown on me.”

  The woman snarled, as if she could hear his taunts. Then, like a stuntwoman, she got a running start and leapt off the back of the trailer.

  Ken heard Jorge drop the phone, then heard his friend cry out in the background as the woman smashed into the windshield of her own car. The glass spiderwebbed and crumpled beneath her, and her elbow poked through.

  She thrust her arm into the hole and swiped at Jorge, who glimpsed her face through the cracks and the splat of blood and snagged hair.

  In the rearview, Ken watched helplessly as his friend swerved to throw the monster off. He heard a honking horn and looked forward into an oncoming motorcycle.

  “Hold on!”

  Ken jerked his wheel as the motorcyclist laid his bike down and slid, sparks flying, right under Ken’s left tire; the combination of the motorcycle impacting and rolling under the Blazer, the twist of the steering wheel, and the shifting weight of the tool trailer was all too much for Big Bertha.

  Ken jerked the wheel back, but he felt the vehicle tipping anyway, driven by velocity and mass. There was nothing else he could do.

  The Blazer turned on its side, still hurtling down the highway at fifty miles per hour. It turned as it slid, and as it went perpendicular to the road, the whole thing began to turn, slowly at first, then with more speed as momentum took over.

  Finally it stopped.

  Ken, laying on his face and jammed up against the steering wheel, had one last vision before he blacked out.

  Feet.

  Feet and legs, shuffling toward the Blazer.

  ONE MONTH LATER

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE we’re having rice again,” Donovan said, staring down at his plate. “One month without a supply run, and we’re living like poor Chinese farmers in the Han Dynasty.”

  Holly Randall laughed, earning a black look from the neurotechnician.

  “Oh, lighten up,” she said. “At least we’re eating. At least we have electric lighting and armed guards.” She looked at her forkful of rice. “Only a little while now before our crops pay off. Imagine the poor bastards out there in the real world. You know, we used to play a game, my friends and I, back in school.” She stopped, looking over at Donovan.

  He had put some soy sauce on his rice and was mixing it up. “Oh, go on. I’m enraptured with your story already.”

  Ignoring the tone of his voice, she continued. “This game, it was fostered by our instructors. The goal was to create the most realistic projection of a complete societal breakdown. The particulars of the precipitating event were left up to us. Any wild story we chose was acceptable, as long as the end result was the same.”

  She paused to wash down her rice with a swig of horchata. She looked at th
e cup. “Amazing. I’m eating rice and drinking rice milk. Anyway...” She turned to Donovan. “My scenario of choice was a Martian invasion. Wells is my favorite, you know.”

  “Mmm,” Donovan said.

  “We factored in weather and other conditions, but none of that had much of an impact. Especially not for this area, where the power grid is fed by a nuclear reactor. You know what the biggest contributor to loss of power and services was?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Leaks. That’s it. Just stupid, simple leaks. With no one to replenish the water levels in the pressurized steam system... you know, the thing that turns the big power turbines? Eventually the water will run itself out. Then with no heat transfer media in the tubes, they break and let the primary coolant of the reactor leak out. Bada bing, bada boom, you have a meltdown in the course of days, if not hours.”

  Donovan continued to stare at his plate.

  “Knock it off,” Holly said, finally letting her irritation show. “The algae machine should be up and running in no time now. We’ll have our Soylent Green by the end of the week.”

  “That’s only halfway funny,” Donovan said. “Do most people in the compound know what goes into the fertilizer for this rice?”

  Holly crossed her forearms on the table and leaned over them. “Intellectually, yes. But we ignore that. I mean, you know what’s in fertilizer that gets trucked out from farms, but that doesn’t stop you from enjoying a hearty salad, does it?”

  Donovan raised an eyebrow. “I suppose you have a point. But using the, the processed ejecta from the—”

  “Attention on the island,” Crispin’s voice blared over the PA system. “Attention. There has been a new development on the mainland. All personnel not on watch are to report to the dining room in fifteen... no, ten minutes. Five—be there in five minutes!”

  Donovan put down his fork. “Well, he sounds happy.”

  “I wonder what it is,” Holly said.

  IT Lucy, the surly one, put down her tray at a table next to theirs. “Something on the radio,” she said. “I was back and forth between his office and the communications room all last week, wiring his stereo and the Furunos and the satellite phone into his computer, and showing him how to record everything.” She waved a fork in the air quickly, generating a breeze that stirred her fine brown hair. “He’s been glued to it ever since.”

  “That’s interesting,” Donovan said.

  Lucy shrugged. “Whatever. All the traffic about the hungry dead, I don’t see how he can sleep at night listening to that shit. It’s gruesome.”

  The doors to the dining room opened, and the Dogs came in, all eleven of them, with McLoughlin at their head. Kaiser and Samson flanked him, and the other eight Dogs followed behind. They had shaved their heads, and wherever exposed skin showed, there were swathes of pink skin, evidence of more bestial sparring matches.

  Donovan, seeing the Dogs together like that, felt a chill run up his spine. In the past four weeks, he had come to marvel at the extensive work done by his predecessor, and of course at the marvelous specimens endowed with that work; the brain-computer interface tapped into just about every major area of the brain. One day the Dogs would be jovial, joking, and laughing human beings, and the next they’d be monsters lunging and tearing at each other in the cage.

  Now when he saw them, he knew the action potential lurking within, and it thrilled him. He had come to watch them running drills on each other in human form, and even those moments of unarmed combat had set the neurotechnician’s imagination aflame.

  “Earth to Donovan,” Holly said. “Do you have any theories about the hungry dead?”

  “No. Barring some sort of supernatural involvement, there’s nothing that springs to mind. Who knows what it is? Biological warfare or contaminated space probes from Venus. Does it really matter? The dead walk, and they eat.” He pushed his plate away. “Now I’m not even hungry. I never should have let you talk me into watching the video broadcasts.”

  “I can’t believe the man on watch let you in,” Lucas Jaden said, coming up behind Donovan. “I docked Winchester’s pay, but somehow I doubt that’s going to make much of a difference anymore.”

  “Come on, Luke,” Holly said, “Don’t tell me you’re out of hope, too.”

  He flashed a grin at her. “I’m a realist, Miss Randall. If you show me a glass, I see it as neither half-empty nor half-full. I see enough water to drown a man, if I can find a way to put it in his lungs.”

  Lucy stabbed her plate of rice. “You win for creepy sentence of the day.” She looked over at Donovan, her tired eyes ringed with dark circles. “I’ve even been talking to Fatty Ron, learning about how meat breaks down.” She jabbed her fork at Jaden. “You still win.”

  Dr. Crispin entered the dining room, his face full of manic energy that seemed to drift up into his unruly standing hair. He gave the impression of someone who just stuck a finger into an electrical socket and was eager to do it again.

  Donovan turned to see the podium already set up and wired for sound. When had that happened? Surely, he hadn’t been that captivated by the Dogs. Had he?

  Crispin tapped the microphone twice, as was his custom. The maintenance tech standing by was ready this time, and he fiddled with a slider on his mixing panel. He looked up with a grin for the gathered island personnel. There was a smattering of applause.

  “Thank you,” Crispin said. “I know you’re all eager to learn something about the situation, so I’ll get right to it. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we have received a distress signal.”

  Immediately, the room was electrified. Donovan sat up in his chair, his early-warning synapses firing.

  What does he mean, “we”?

  Crispin put his hands up to fend off a sudden barrage of questions. “Now, now. Hold on. I have brought a sound bite for you all to hear.”

  He gestured to the sound guy, who nodded and then pressed a button on a little laptop he had set up. The crackling sound of airwaves came over the speakers.

  “Mayday, mayday—please. We have been stranded here for exactly thirty and a half days. That’s... 732 hours of trying to survive.”

  “Jesus,” Holly breathed.

  “Please, we are running out of food and water, and we have very little for protection. There are women, children. Please—”

  Crispin motioned for the sound guy to stop the recording, and the room fell into silence.

  “Fifty thousand minutes,” Holly whispered. “Jesus.”

  Donovan noted that the distress signal had not divulged the survivors’ exact location. Smart, he thought. Better to make contact first and build some form of trust or rapport.

  “The communications men put the signal strength within reach of a search and rescue team,” Crispin said.

  Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Sounds fishy.”

  “The government has collapsed, people. There is no aid coming to these civilians. No comfort, no succor. The only hope they have of escaping their situation is the Dogs.”

  At this, the pack of men stood straighter, coming to attention. Alpha McLoughlin barked out, “Dog Pack, all present and accounted for. Ready for duty, Project Director, sir!”

  Dr. Crispin smiled, beaming at his genetically-enhanced warriors. “Bravo, men!” Looking back at the assembled throng, he waved. “You see? The Dogs are ready.”

  “Just a minute,” Donovan found himself saying. “Just one minute, Doctor. There are some unanswered questions on the table, and I think they should be addressed before we send the Dogs off on some mercy mission.”

  “Mercy mission,” Crispin repeated. “I like the sound of that.”

  Frowning, Donovan waved that away. “I’m talking about the dead, Dr. Crispin. The zombies.” He paused, looking to see whether the extra emphasis on the word had affected the project director at all. To his dismay, it had not. “The reports that we’ve received all agree; if one of us is bitten by one of them, an irreversible process begins, and then we die. We become... one o
f them.”

  Donovan had almost shouted the last word, silencing all other voices in the dining room. He lifted his head and looked around, then pointed at the Dogs, who still stood at attention.

  “What happens, Doctor, if one of them bites one of our Dogs? Do we know? Hell no, we don’t know.”

  Murmured assent blew through the room.

  Donovan continued.

  “Dr. Crispin, your humanitarian impulses do you credit. But, sir, we don’t even have a specimen of the walking dead to examine. There is no way to know how the finely-tuned systems of the Dogs will react to whatever it is that turns perfectly normal people into ravening maniacs.”

  “He is correct,” Ronald said. His medical team was nodding in unison. “We should wait until we have data.”

  Dr. Crispin’s face changed, the smile crumpling to something unpleasant. “More data, Mr. Michaels? And where, pray tell, will we get this data if we don’t send somebody to the mainland?”

  Donovan panicked at the thoughtful look that passed over the medical team leader’s face.

  “Dr. Crispin—”

  “No, Donovan—enough. It is my intention to send the Dogs on a combination rescue mission and specimen-collection run. As before, I feel that I’m too close for an objective view, so I ask you again, good people of the island. What should we do? All in favor of sending the Dogs, say aye.”

  A brief chorus of ayes came from scattered mouths around the room, but it was far less than half. Donovan sat back into his chair, blowing out a shaky breath. He had been worried there for a second, but it appeared as if common sense would prevail.

  “Excellent,” Dr. Crispin said. “The ayes have it. Thank you.”

  The rest of the room erupted in disbelief.

  Crispin gestured imperiously to Alpha McLoughlin, who huffed out a short command: “March.”

  The Dogs moved as one, forming up behind Dr. Crispin and following him out of the dining room like an honor guard.