Flawed Dogs (13 page)

Three minutes, twenty-eight seconds after midnight, actually . . .

The gate guard for University Research Labs looked up from what he was reading and peered through the window of his little booth to see thousands of white rats running toward him.

This normally would have been enough to wrest his attention from a comic book, but it was the two hundred dogs behind them that brought him to his feet spewing forth a half-chewed Butterfinger from his mouth.

He jumped outside his booth into the drizzle to better see what appeared to be a biblical plague descending on his little spot on the planet. Like a swarm of ants, the rats and dogs funneled down from the dark lab buildings, from which now blared forth an emergency siren announcing the obvious.

It was a breakout.

The guard squinted and refused to believe what he thought he saw at the front of the phalanx of hopping, running, stumbling animals: Two beagles ran side by side, strapped across their backs a sort of missile launcher made of a half-curved aluminum rain gutter. Within this lay the now three-legged Sam, aimed and ready to launch like a furry bullet in a hot dog bun. Stretched onto the dachshund’s nose was a human’s latex glove, its index finger filled with several ounces of Elmer’s glue hardened rock solid. The guard believed it was aimed directly at his nose.

This image alone was enough for the guard to abandon all romantic notions of a Custer-like last stand, and he threw himself backward toward the chain-link gate behind him, scrambling upward and away from what he believed to be certain death.

At precisely nine feet from the guard booth, the two beagles threw out their front paws and came to an abrupt stop, sending Sam shooting out the half-pipe and up. He sailed straight and true through the night air, feet back, tail straight, hitting the electric gate’s recessed green Open button with the index finger of the glove on his nose. He clung to the electric junction box with his three feet like a huge squirrel while the massive gate began to roll aside, opening a space to escape for the approaching horde of animals.

“FORWARD! GO! C’MON! FASTER!”
yelled Sam to the rats and dogs, now streaming through the ever-enlarging space and toward the street—and freedom—below the facility. Sam looked back to the lab buildings and saw that people began to emerge on the heels of the last dogs.
“GO GO GO DON’T LOOK BEHIND!”

Another beagle struggled in the back, hampered by bandages that circled his middle covering the burns given him to test a new antiseptic ointment. The men behind were almost on him. The dog yelled at Sam:
“Go on without me! (puff puff puff) I’m not gonna make it!”

“Yes, you are! Don’t stop!”
said Sam. He pressed the red Close button on the gate with his latex nose finger The gate began rolling shut again, all the animals safely through . . . except for the struggling beagle, closing fast, the lab people reaching out for him only two yards behind.

With a metallic bang, the gate slammed shut, the beagle having slid through with only a few hairs at the end of his tail getting severed by the metal portal. Unable to stop in time, the men piled into the chain link in a tangle of limbs and squashed bodies.

Sam had freed the others but remained inside the perimeter. He leapt to the roof of the guardhouse, inches from the fingers of several lab workers. Even now, with only three legs, his former gymnastic instincts returned to carry him as he leapt from the roof to the light pole to the gate, up the chain link and through the razor wire coiled across its top, several of the sharp daggers tearing the flesh across his back as he went.

Sam dropped to the wet pavement with a howl of pain, spraining his remaining rear leg. Shaking off the latex glove from his nose, he looked to the other side of the street, where the last of the beagles were scrambling to the uncertain destiny of a life far away from people. Then he looked back to the workers in the white coats still piled in a tangle on the other side of the gate, breathing hard, staring at him from three feet away. Sam’s sprained leg was near useless, and he couldn’t run at all now. They had only to open the gate to reach him and return him to the horrors he’d just left.

A woman he recognized . . . the only human in that place who had ever looked at him with something besides cold disinterest . . . the one who had risked a rare, gentle stroke of her fingers across his shaking head at his darkest moments of pain and fear . . . she stood at the gate’s switch box, hand poised over the green Open button.

“Push it! Push it, Simmons!” screamed one of the men. “Push it or you’re fired!”

Sam looked at the woman, who smiled back with a look something between pain and relief and shame. She dropped her hand to her side.

“SIMMONS!” the man yelled, not believing what he was watching.

Sam turned and hobbled down the highway into the darkness, knowing that the gate would open soon regardless. Cars roared past him, their lights stabbing through the mist like searchlights, confusing him. The sirens at the lab grew distant, but he didn’t dare stop, now nearly dragging the rear of his long torso along the slippery pavement. He saw the lights of a service station across the highway, and the prospect of a hiding place lured him to cross the expanse of road.

He had nearly crossed the final lane when the pickup truck swerved and braked after its lights found the small dog directly in front of it. The tire hit Sam on his upper hip, sending him spinning onto the shoulder of the road.

Sam lay there, spent and breathing hard. Pain racked his tiny body, moving in torturous waves that ebbed and flowed from sources too numerous to count. He lay on his back and stared up at the sky, cold, cruel and black. He licked the air for rain, desperate to slake a parched and raw throat. His mind whirled from exhaustion and pain, and his thoughts became muddy, confused.

The sky suddenly grew lighter, and the falling mist sparkled like tiny diamonds. Sam opened his eyes wider. Suddenly he was doused in the brilliance of a blinding white light that seemed to descend on his broken body.

Despite the mental fog, his mind traveled back to what Cassius had said that terrible night over three years ago: that for the lost and unwanted dogs of the world, a guardian angel comes calling at their final moments.

This, the dazzling brilliance suddenly flooding his senses and surrounding his world . . . this surely must be
that.

He could feel his brutalized body lifting . . . floating up from the freezing road.

Sam closed his eyes and waited.

The tall young man stood in the rain staring down at the small panting dog lying on the wet road. He ran his flashlight across the tiny body and was surprised to see the foot missing. For a moment he thought it might have been the result of the impact, but he quickly saw that the stump was long healed. Sam’s short breaths told the man that a broken rib lay below his shaking chest. He saw the shallow rips that covered the dog’s flesh and wondered how they had happened.