Cadaver Dog (2 page)

“No! No! No! No!” she yelled. Angie had an idea of what was hiding in the funeral home, and the idea made her arms break out in gooseflesh. As her Labrador barked, the ravens cawed their displeasure and took flight, melting into the velvet sky.

From her side view, she saw movement and knew it was the officer stationed at the funeral home. He had heard them and come around the side. For a second, she criticized herself for not thinking to call in her new location to Jasper, who could have warned the officer that they were coming. She justified her lack of procedure because she was
chasing her dog
.

“Police! Freeze!” the officer shouted in that authoritative tone that makes most people react like they’ve touched a live wire on an electric fence. Angie didn’t stop, though. To begin with, she wasn’t that kind of person. Also, live wire or not, her baby was running to his death.

“Waylon, stop!” she shouted at the dog, trying to imitate the authority of the officer yelling at her. But Waylon was already inside the building structure. He was acting like a terrier in front of a rat or a hound behind a raccoon. Instinct had kicked in. All Angie could do was try to keep up and hope she was wrong.

She found the white Labrador on the other side of the door, waiting for her. Waylon had stopped.
Will wonders never cease,
she thought, then took him by his collar and started to drag her dog out of the funeral home.

Something moved in the corner.

Angie didn’t have her flashlight in hand anymore, so she could not see what it was, though she knew without a doubt.

Waylon barked at the shadow as she pulled him back.

This is it
, she thought.
This is how I die
.

Two pale arms reached out of the darkness and grabbed Angie. She spun around as she half-shoved, half-threw Waylon out the back door. If this was her moment of death, she would not share it with Waylon. Thick arms closed around her like the reanimated tentacles of some dead octopus. Then she felt the inevitable bite, the teeth sinking into her shoulder blade. It was every bit as painful as she’d been told. Like being stung by a hundred bees.

“Goddamnit!” She wiggled her shoulders, but the zombie didn’t let go. The thing was strong, like wrestling with a statue. She tried kicking it off with her boot. Made contact with a cold leg that neither recoiled nor reacted in any way. The zombie, which was short and maybe only five feet tall, began pulling itself up her back, climbing her like a telephone pole. Angie realized the monster was maneuvering itself closer to her exposed neck.

A white blur of fur raced past Angie, and she knew Waylon had entered the fray. Without so much as a low growl, Waylon had latched onto some part of the zombie and began to shake his head violently. Angie used the distraction as an opportunity to reach down to her knife, pull it out, and stab the corpse walker in the side. She felt blood and bile spilling on her like the detritus of uncorked plumbing. The creature screamed and backed away.

“Stay down!” the officer yelled as his silhouette appeared in the door frame. Angie yelled “Waylon, down!” and tucked her head to her sternum. She heard the loud blast. Saw the room light up from the muzzle flash, then felt the zombie let go and fall over.

Angie rolled over and pulled Waylon in her arms. She hugged and kissed him and said, “You wonderful, stupid dog.” He looked at her with his big happy eyes and smiled. When she let go of him, he began to strut around her and the officer, his tail high.

“Are you okay?” the officer asked. “Were you bit?”

“Yeah. In the back.”

She pulled down the blood-soaked tank strap and showed him the shoulder blade. He winced as he called it in. “I’ve seen maulings that don’t look that bad. Good thing your dog was here. He gave me just enough time to get here.”

Angie was sitting at incident command while an EMT applied antibiotic cream to her bite wound and wrapped a bandage around her shoulder when Jasper walked up. Swollen gray umbrellas hung upside-down under his eyes. Most of the sky had lightened up between the mountain peaks, and the sun was beginning its long hard glare. All but two of the patrol cars had cleared out.

“Maybe I should have sent in the robot,” Jasper said.

“There was no way to know for sure it was a zombie. Waylon is just a human remains dog. All he is looking for is a body.”

“Exactly, and if a robot gets bitten, I can replace its parts. You get bitten, and now I have to send you to the hospital to get looked at. I have to fill out about twenty forms because of you. I will have to answer to the county, and I may have to answer to the media. All ‘cause a volunteer got bit. God knows what would’ve happened if the damn thing’d been five inches taller and bit you in the jugular.

Jasper sat there a minute letting his words hang over her in uncomfortable silence.

“What do you want me to do?” Angie said. “I can’t stop zombies. Maybe if the police were part of the solution instead of punting to Animal Control, something could be done about it.”

“Hey, do you think I like funneling 15% of my budget to Animal Control? Why am I arguing with you? You’re a volunteer search worker, you’re not paid. I just won’t call you anymore. I’ll call somebody else.”

“Like who?”

“Like Joel.”

“Joel is allergic to half the shit out here. Besides, you want to keep me in your good graces. You like me.”

The lieutenant glared at her. “Once you get cleaned up here, my officers and this EMT are going to escort you to the hospital. You
will
go to the hospital, Angie. Either in your truck or in a patrol car. I don’t want to have to explain why we aren’t following procedures.”

After a moment, Angie asked, “Did you recover the bug?”

He nodded. She shuddered.

Sitting in the hospital for an hour gave Angie plenty of time to dwell on her mistake. Like the plastic molded chair she sat in, her memories were unfortunate, and she wished she could replace them. Maybe she could have kept Waylon closer. She should have worked him on lead. If he had been on lead, he would not have chased the zombie into the funeral home, and she would be at home asleep instead of sitting in the uncomfortable, cushionless chair. Even accepting that he was off lead, which was normal when working in thickets, if she had stopped Waylon at the door of the old brick building and let the officer handle the situation, she wouldn’t have gotten bitten, and she wouldn’t have to wait in the cold waiting room with the same Sisyphean news being reported over and over while her shoulder burned like electric ice.

Finally Angie lumbered up to the attendant’s station and complained that she had a dog waiting for her in the car on one of the hottest days of the year and was still waiting to be seen for a simple bite wound. This wasn’t a complete lie. Waylon was in the car, but the “car” was a pickup and Waylon was in his pen in the truck bed. He had plenty of shade, water, and even a fan blowing on him, so he was probably more comfortable than most people in the waiting room, but the attendant didn’t need to know that.

The woman at the attendant’s station rolled her eyes and said, “All the doctors are busy and visitors will be seen in the order that they arrive. Please have a seat.”

Angie looked around and noticed that most of the people in the small wait area were either staring at her or pretending not to. Something more than her outburst drew their attention. They were staring because she looked like she had just walked off the set of a horror movie. Her back still had mud on it, she wore a bandage over her shoulder, a few cuts crisscrossed her arms and face, and she looked like she hadn’t bathed in days.

“Are you okay?” an old woman in pajamas asked. “You look like you been ridden hard and put away wet.”

It didn’t help that the old woman was breathing with the help of an oxygen tank and had a giant reddened bandage hiding half her face.
I look ridden hard?
Angie sat back down, tried to pretend she didn’t exist, and pulled a few twigs out of her hair that she hadn’t seen.

A few minutes later, she was finally ushered in to see a doctor, who spent five minutes telling her about the importance of keeping the wound clean while he examined it.

“Do you feel any pain in your lower arm? Sometimes people react bad to the venom.”

“No,” she responded.

“Well, this isn’t the worst case I’ve seen today,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“I haven’t slept in a day, and I’ve been out running around all night. I could pass out right here.”

“Well, you’re not going to like this, but you’ve been bitten by a dead body, and clearly the skin has been broken. So the main concern is transfusion of Hepatitis C, but also AIDS. So I can’t just give you a simple antibiotic and a Benadryl. If antibiotics were soldiers, I’d be sending in not the platoon, but the entire army. And not just the army, but the navy, the marines, the air force—Everyone! That doesn’t come cheap. Tell you what, I am going to do something a little different. Earlier today I had a little girl in here who’d been attacked by one of those damned things. Her face, her arms—it was like a bear had mauled her.”

He pulled a few small packages out of his pocket. “I have some free samples. It is very strong stuff. Nothing generic. Consider it a thank you for doing what you do. These pills should take care of you, but if you develop any signs of infection—fever, itchy, reddened skin—you come back to me and I’ll fix you up. In the meantime, I want you to schedule an appointment to have some blood drawn so we can test you for Hepatitis C and AIDS. Do not worry. Rarely do these diseases transmit, but as a hospital, we have to cover our butts.”

Angie smiled grimly at the mention of AIDS. It was a well-documented health risk of tracking the damned, but she had known the risks.

She shook Dr. Rivera’s gloved hand. The man was maybe five feet tall, but he had an infectious smile and a desire to please reminiscent of her retrievers. Angie thanked him and tried to explain that she ended up hunting a zombie by accident, but that didn’t stop his campaign of profuse thanks.

Angie walked out of the doctor’s office with the free pills. She shivered in the hallway and wondered how hospitals always seemed to somehow import their air directly from the North Pole. On her way out, Angie happened to pass a room where a little girl, no older than eight, was getting stitches. The little girl’s face had been cleaned up, but she would have a toothy scar for the rest of her life.

Angie’s plan was to go home, feed the dogs, take the pills, and crash on the sofa because she didn’t have enough energy to make it to the bed. Then she looked down at her cellphone. She had a voicemail from Dr. Saracen. For a moment Angie debated ignoring the call, but that made her feel guilty, so she listened to the message, knowing it would only keep her further from sleep.

“Ms. Graves, this is Dr. Saracen. I am examining the amazing specimen that was brought in earlier from your search, and I need to talk to you about something fascinating. Could you come see me at your earliest convenience? Thank you.”

Angie put the phone in one of the pickup’s cup holders and started the engine.

Animal Control sat on the outskirts of town where the tall pines started to encroach on the roads. Angie pulled into the parking lot and parked on the newly paved blacktop. Old Animal Control vehicles that once upon a time were white but now had the red of Colorado clay permanently stained into the paint waited in line to one side of the lot for drivers who would never come. Toyotas, BMWs, and Chevys relaxed on the side closer to the Animal Control building.

Half of the building was an amalgamation of decades-old concrete and steel pens for cats, dogs, goats, horses, and whatever other animals were reported in the county lines. The smell of bleach wafted from the kennels. Stray animals were still kept at the facility, even if control of that kind of animal was only a secondary function of the department now. Out of this old edifice grew a newer, shinier building like new shoots of mirrored glass foliage rising out of the pruned stumps of an old art deco oak. Angie felt her cool visage mocking her from the reflective glass. It knew where Angie was going and how much she reviled that place.

The Invasive Entomology Studies Lab was the very last room at the end of a long hallway. To get there, Angie first had to pass a line of front offices, locker rooms, equipment storage rooms, and conference rooms to the back of the Animal Control building.
Why is it
that you always have to travel farthest to the places you don’t want to go?

She also had to pass the robotics support room where the robots were stored and maintained. Angie could not resist stopping and stealing a look through the windows. There weren’t any complete robots in the many bays, but a few legs were neatly stacked up against the wall. Each one ended in a padded hoof and was big enough to support a small horse.

The Invasive Entomology Studies Lab was next to the loading/unloading docks. Angie did not have an access card, so she knocked on the lab window. A few seconds later, Dr. Saracen appeared and pressed the button to open the outer door for her. He was in his early fifties, with the gruff peppered beard and demeanor of a grandfatherly Airedale terrier. The rubber lining squeaked as the door opened.