Dogs (12 page)

Whatever Jess had envisioned when he'd suggested a quarantine, it hadn't been this.

He caught sight of Dr. Latkin crossing the parking lot toward the CDC mobile lab and strode toward him. “Dr. Latkin! Joe!”

Latkin turned, looking as harried and tired as everyone else. “Oh, hi, Jess. Great job you're doing bringing in the dogs.” It was said mechanically; for all Latkin actually knew, Jess could have taken to setting every animal free.

“Thanks. Look, I know you're busy but I just want to know how the pathogen search is coming.”

Latkin smiled wryly. “You know, I think you're one of the few people genuinely interested? Scott Lurie wants a scapegoat, a resolution, and a gold star, not medical information.” All at once something new seemed to occur to him. His pale eyes sharpened, like water crystallizing into ice. “Come in here for a minute. I want to show you something.”

Jess followed Latkin into the mobile lab, the first time he'd been inside. Somehow it looked even bigger within. The back third was sealed off. A door said:

INFECTIOUS AREA

NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY

TO OPEN THIS DOOR

PLACE I.D. CARD ON SENSOR

The first two-thirds of the lab was jammed with more counters, equipment, and people than Jess could have imagined would fit. Latkin led him to a woman in her forties, wearing a white lab coat and frowning at computer displays.

“Jess, this is Dr. Deborah Preston, our principal investigator, from Special Pathogens. Deb, Jess Langstrom, Tyler Animal Control.”

“Hello,” she said wearily. “So you're the one bringing us all these specimens. Did you haul in the boxer on Prozac?”

“The what?”

“Some hysterical woman wouldn't let her boxer come in because she was afraid we wouldn't give him his regular doses of Prozac and the dog was seriously depressed without it. I heard the animal people had to have
her
sedated.”

“Sounds apocryphal,” Latkin said.

Not to Jess. People got very strange about their dogs. If Jess hadn't been so depressed himself, he'd have told them about Victor Balonov's demon-possessed Rottweilers. Instead he said awkwardly, “Are you… you scientists finding the cause of this thing?”

“Could be. Take a look,” Deborah said, getting up from her stool and motioning at the screen. Jess moved into position and stared at what looked to him like a lot of blue peppercorns wriggling frantically in orange sauce.

“That's false color, of course,” Deborah continued. “The thing is, this is an unknown pathogen but not a very complicated one. It's relatively large as these things go, which is a good thing or we'd still be looking for it. Well, I shouldn't say it's totally unknown, it seems to be related to a class of canine viruses found mostly in Africa, although it's not identical to them. Mutated, most likely. It can cross the blood-brain barrier—like rabies, you know. It lodges in the amygdala, a part of the brain that contributes to aggression. There it just disrupts neural firing until
kaboom!
A regular electrical storm and a fried dog brain.”

Jess fumbled for the right questions. “Can people get it?”

“Unknown. We have amygdalae, too, although the odds are they're not receptive to this particular microbe, at least not in this particular form. Some hot agents learn to jump species—avian flu, for instance—but it takes time. That's the good news.”

“What's the bad news?”

Deborah looked at Latkin, and suddenly Jess had the feeling that this good at this political stuff.

Latkin said, “The bad news is that this isn't something for which we can whip up either a cure or a vaccine in twenty-four hours. It's too new. The only way we might speed up the process is to find a dog with a natural immunity. Build on its immune-system defenses. That's why if you find such an animal, one infected but not aggressive, we need to know
immediately
. If you can let the other animal control officers know that, it would help a lot. I'm putting out the word on this but everyone is so exhausted and stuff doesn't always get read, and FEMA is trying to control information flow completely. Official channels, protocols, blah blah blah. They're making this a political situation first and a medical one only as an afterthought.”

“I see,” Jess said. “Got it.”

“Thanks,” Deborah Preston said, and went back to her wiggling blue peppercorns. But Jess wasn't done.

“How did the germ get here from Africa?”

Latkin steered him gently by the elbow, toward the door. “We don't know for sure that it was Africa. And it could have gotten here any number of ways. The most likely is a traveling pet who picked it up, but Scott Lurie tells me they've checked passports and no dog from Tyler has traveled out of this country in the last six months. We don't yet know the incubation period, but it's probably not that long.”

“So how else could—”

“We just don't know,” Latkin said grimly. “Thanks again, Jess.”

He was dismissed. Jess walked back to the motel. Maybe the officials were all done with Tessa, which meant both of them could finally leave. This encampment gave him the creeps.

It had finally dawned on him, far later than it should have, that those wiggling blue microbes had to have come from some dog's brain. Probably more than one dog's brain, because wasn't that what science did? It duplicated experiments, to be sure the answers were right. Had they dissected brains from dogs that had already been shot, like the pit bull that attacked young A.J. Wright on his own sink or that dachshund, Schopenhauer? Or did they need freshly killed dogs?

Were those peppercorn-shaped viruses from his little cousin's collie?

Or from the sweet, overly pampered Schnapps and Applejack, which Jess had personally assured their owner would be returned to her unharmed?

Or from the toy poodle Tessa had belatedly confessed to owning, which might easily have been picked up by some other team while Tessa was away from home, explaining over and over how she'd saved Billy's life?

The sun was still warm. But Jess turned up his collar as he walked back to the motel to await whatever grimness came next.

Allen was worried about Susie. He hadn't been able to manage a trip to the basement to check on her because his mother, after she finished crying on the phone in the morning, insisted on spending the rest of the day with Allen. "We'll have fun!' she'd cried, with two weird spots of red high on her cheeks. "We'll play Candy Land!"

Candy Land was way too babyish for Allen, but his mother didn't know how to play Nintendo and didn't want to learn. They settled on Parcheesi, which was really boring, and Allen was just about to invent a social studies project he had to do for school, when the doorbell rang.

“Finally!” his mother said, which was weird because she'd been telling him all day that nobody was allowed outside, so how come she was expecting company? “Come in,” she said to the two people standing there, and as soon as Allen saw how they were dressed, his stomach shot up into his chest and he thought he might be sick.

“The dog is in the basement,” his mother said. “Just follow me. Allen, stay here in the dining room, please. Do you hear me?”

As they clomped through the room in their thick pants and parkas and gloves, carrying helmets and a cage, the woman stopped and spoke to Allen. “Don't worry, kid, we'll bring your dog back after this is all over. Meanwhile he'll be safe with us.”

“It's a she.”

“She, then.” They clomped on. Allen hated both of them.

All three of them.

He waited until they reached the bottom of the cellar stairs and then crept down after them, trying not to throw up.

“I don't
understand
, she was right here, my husband put her down here! She wasn't acting aggressive, but he said just in case she—Allen, go back upstairs, do you hear me!”

Allen sat defiantly on a step halfway down. He made himself not look at the filing cabinet in the corner.

The man pound-person moved cautiously into the laundry room and then said, “Karen. Come look at this.” The woman followed, and then Allen's mother. Allen stayed where he was. If he strained his ears, he could hear them.

“Did Susie escape through the
window?”
his mother said.

“Yeah, right, and first she knocked out every bit of glass and put a blanket on the dryer. Ma'am, did you or your husband let this dog loose?”

“No! We called you, remember?”

Allen closed his eyes. His stomach hurt really bad now. The three adults moved back into the main part of the cellar. The man said roughly, “When did you let your dog out, son?”

“Yesterday,” Allen said. “She's gone.”

“Son of a bitch,” the man said, and Allen waited for his mother to tell him we don't use that language in this house. But she didn't. Instead she stared at Allen, and all at once he didn't want the pound-people to leave, because of what his mother would say then.

Which was nothing compared to what his father would do when he got home.

But Allen didn't really care, because Susie was safe, and that was all that mattered. And now that his parents thought she was gone, it would be easier for Allen to go down to the cellar to feed her, give her water, and make sure she had more of the pills Allen had in his jeans pocket from the little bottle in the medicine cabinet.

It was a good thing that Susie had Allen. He was the only one who cared.

They wouldn't let Tessa leave until after 6:00 P.M., when the February sun had just slipped below the horizon and the sky was still fiery red. Trying to be cooperative, she told her story to four different small groups of people, from four different agencies. The last group, who did not identify themselves, was not from FEMA, nor from law-enforcement; Tessa suspected they came from one of the intelligence agencies. She became sure when one of them said casually, “Wasn't your husband an Arab?” and Tessa finally lost her temper.

“Why aren't all you people off dealing with the dog crisis instead of with me? Never mind, I know the answer. You screwed up too much with past national crises and you don't want to screw up with this one. Well, guys, guess what? I don't represent a threat to you. I didn't screw up. I shot in defense of my partner, however temporary that partnership was. You're in the clear. And no, goddammit, for the sixth time, I don't need a lawyer! I
was
a lawyer, remember? I went to law school and then I became an FBI agent, and now I'm a temporary animal-control deputy.”

“Not anymore,” the man said, which didn't come as much of a surprise.

“I think Ms. Sanderson can go now,” said a woman who hadn't spoken before. Tessa had pegged her for government counsel the second she laid eyes on her. “She should perhaps have an escort off incident headquarters.”

“Jess Langstrom is out there, in case we need him,” someone else said. “He can take her home.”

“Yes,” Tessa agreed sarcastically, “that would look good to the media. Show of solidarity.”

There was a certain freedom of speech in no longer working for the government.

Jess was indeed waiting outside, looking impatient and weary and disturbed all at once, an interesting look to pull off. He said, “Tessa?”

“No charges, but they want me out of here. How's Billy?”

“Fine. I called the hospital. Victor Balonov didn't hit anything important.”

“No wonder the Soviet Union fell,” she said, and felt slightly warmed by Jess's reluctant laugh. “I guess you better follow orders and take me home. God, look at this spectacle here.”

“Just what
I
thought. But at least the scientists are doing useful work.” As he told her what Joe Latkin and Deborah Preston had said about the virus, Tessa got a sick feeling in her stomach.

“How are they choosing the dogs to kill for brain tissue?”

“I don't know. Please don't tell me you're among the more lunatic animal-rights activists.”

“No. Just a dog owner,” she said, and noted that he frowned. “Look, I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Minette. But anyway, now the powers-that-be have ended my deputyship.”

“Sort of figured they would. Can't have you shooting any more exemplary Maryland citizens.”

She laughed, although it didn't really make her feel any better. It was never easy to kill a man, not even when you'd had no choice. Tessa knew she was not unduly sensitive. But she also knew that Victor Balonov's dead face would turn up in her dreams for months. That was the price you paid.

They rode in silence through the streets, empty except for official vehicles. It looked as if every cop in the entire state had converged on Tyler. If they were all picking up dogs, there couldn't be any left. Her stomach tightened as they pulled into her driveway.