Dogs

Tessa Sanderson Mahjoub

  Did that say what she wanted, which was, essentially, “Tell me what you and Salah emailed about last year?” God, she hoped so. What if the correspondents weren’t even Tunisian? After all, one of the addresses was in the uk and the other could be anywhere. Well, then they’d email back “Huh?” and she’d take it from there.

  As she sent both emails, Minette whined to go out. The Cape Cod had no fence, although Tessa was planning to install an electric one eventually. She threw on a coat, fastened Minette’s leash to her collar, and left the house through the front door.

  Mrs. Kalik, her new neighbor, was hauling her garbage out to the curb. She took one look at Minette and shrieked.

  “Don’t let your dog out!”

  “No, it’s fine, Mrs. Kalik, she’s harmless and she—”

  “Get her away from me!”

  Nobody but a true phobic reacted that way to a toy poodle. Tessa picked up Minette, who squirmed to get down and piddle.

  Mrs. Kalik glared at her. “Don’t you know? If your dog is okay, don’t let it go outside and catch the plague!”

  The what? The woman must be a hallucinatory schizo. Or maybe a religious nut. Tessa tried to remember if there were any canine plagues in Revelations. She took Minette around the back of the house to piddle, while Mrs. Kalik slammed her garbage on the curb and sprinted inside as if pursued by a bear.

  Apparently even Norman Rockwell small towns had their paranoid crazies.

  » 9

  A mile and a half from Tessa’s Cape Cod, Allen Levy looked up from his and Jimmy’s snow fort as his mother’s blue Chevy screeched to a stop at the edge of the road.

  “Wow,” Jimmy said, “your mother’s a fast driver.”

  But she wasn’t, usually. Allen and Jimmy watched as Mrs. Levy leapt out of the car, waved her arms at the edge of the empty field, and screamed, “Boys! Get in the car now!”

  “Why?” shouted Jimmy, who was always in trouble for not doing what adults told him to.

  “Because I said so!”

  Allen could have told Jimmy that’s what his mother would say. He looked reluctantly at the snow fort, which had taken an hour to build because there wasn’t actually much snow on the ground and they’d had to haul it over from the woods and from ditches that didn’t get much sun. But there was no arguing with Allen’s mother. “Come on, Jimmy.”

  “What if I don’t want to?” Jimmy said, but not very loud, and he followed Allen to the car.

  His mother hurried them into the back seat, climbed in, and turned to look at them without even starting the engine. “Listen, boys, because this is very important. Something happened. There’s some kind of…of disease spreading among dogs that makes them attack viciously. Two children have already been killed. I’m going to take you both home and—Jimmy, are your parents home, for once?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Then you’re coming to our house,” Allen’s mother said. Allen wasn’t allowed to play at Jimmy’s house ever since she’d discovered that Jimmy’s father owned a gun. The Levys didn’t approve of guns. She continued, “And both you boys are staying inside until this thing is under control. Do you hear me, Allen?”

  “Yes. But—what about Susie? Where is she? Does she have the disease?”

  His mother started the car. “Susie’s locked in the basement. She’s got food and water and I’m sure…I’m sure she’ll be fine. But you can’t go down there until I or your father say so. Allen, do you hear me?”

  “Yes. But, Mom, what if she does have the disease? How do dogs get it?”

  “Nobody knows. I guess from other dogs.”

  “Susie was outside all day yesterday, and when she does that she could play with lots of other dogs!”

  “I know. The sheriff’s department is saying to keep all dogs locked up and away from people until they know what to do, and to keep all people safe inside. Do you hear me, Allen?”

  “Yes,” Allen said. Jimmy put his hands over his ears, shook his head violently, and grinned.

  The Levy house was only a little way down the country road. As soon as they were inside, Allen could hear Susie. The cocker spaniel was at the top of the cellar stairs, scratching at the door and whining.

  Allen said, “She never got put in the cellar before, Mom. She doesn’t understand.”

  “Neither do the rest of us,” Mrs. Levy said grimly. “Boys, go upstairs and play.”

  “At my house we just have cats,” Jimmy said.

  Allen knew about Jimmy’s mom’s cats. They were nasty and mean,living outside on scraps and mice, scratching if you tried to pet them, dirty all the time. Dogs were better, and Susie was the best dog ever. What if she really was sick? Wouldn’t she be afraid and upset and lonely, all by herself in the cellar?

  “Cats are better,” Jimmy said. “C’mon, let’s play Nintendo.”

  INTERIM

  The man in the Dodge Caravan lit a cigarette and rolled down the mini-van’s window. Night air rushed in. Above, the stars glittered, pinpricks of cold light, barely visible above the bright floodlights of the hospital parking lot.

  Another ambulance raced past him on the approach to the Emergency Room, followed by a car driven wildly by a distraught woman.

  A few minutes later, another racing car.

  Then another ambulance.

  The man finished his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. He rolled up the window, started the engine, and he left the parking lot, then the town.

  He smiled. His work was done here. And it was good.

  FRIDAY

  » 10

  Early Friday morning a huge van followed by three cars arrived in Tyler from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, rolling into town like a miniature, very antiseptic rock tour.

  “Musta driven all night,” Billy said to Jess as they stumbled into the town hall for the emergency meeting called by the mayor. “Pretty damn quick.”

  Billy was right, Jess thought—and why was the response that fast? The CDC didn’t investigate infections unless invited by local governments. Somebody must know somebody, and one of the somebodies was in a tearing hurry.

  Jess wished he felt that energetic. He and Billy had gotten maybe three hours sleep each. The frantic dog bite reports had poured in all day yesterday, then fallen off by evening as the word spread and people isolated their dogs in basements, garages, and laundry rooms. Throughout the deserted streets of Tyler echoed a background howl and barking. School had been canceled for the day, and many businesses had not opened. Tyler was a ghost town populated only by trapped dogs.

  But not all pets had been inside when their owners heard about what whole neighborhoods were now calling “the dog plague.” A few dogs roamed the street, and Billy and Jess had spent the night following up on reports of vicious strays, reports of attacks, and at least one more death. There had even been a dog killed by an infected dog; a Malamute had killed a Jack Russell Terrier, sixty pounds lighter, that had been valiantly trying to defend its yard. Animal control officers had been recruited from nearby towns. All sheriff’s deputies were on the streets.

  And so far nobody had any answers. Maybe this meeting would provide some.

  The Tyler Town Hall was an historic brick building housing the town court, tax office, county clerk, and various miscellaneous municipal offices, none of them large. The building’s utilitarian interior didn’t match its lovely neo-Georgian exterior. Mayor Hafner held his meeting in the empty court, a bleak space with Congoleum floors, folding chairs, and a raised dais for the twice-weekly court sessions, most of which featured traffic tickets. Anything serious was handled at the county seat.

  Except that this was serious.

  “I’d like to welcome our guests from the CDC,” said Lou Hafner, who owned Hafner Lumber. A big, rumpled, genial man, he and Jess occasionally went fishing together. Jess liked him but didn’t have a high opinion of his intelligence or administrative skills. Those weren’t what got you elected small
-town mayor.

  “Let me take a minute to introduce everybody,” Hafner continued. “Dr. Joseph Latkin from the CDC, an epimed…epidemiologist and his, uh, team. Jess Langstrom and Billy Davis, our animal control off—”

  “We’re not really here,” Billy said, “just stopping by on our way to another call.”

  “Well, uh—” the mayor began, but the CDC doctor cut in.

  “I’d like at least one of the animal control officers to stay. They’re the ones with the most direct information on the dogs’ behavior, and we’ll need to ask them questions.”

  Jess said to Billy, “You go on. I’ll stay.” Billy nodded, clearly glad to escape. Meetings weren’t Billy’s thing. Jess just hoped Billy didn’t screw anything up out there alone.

  The mayor said, “Dr. Olatic from the hospital, Dr. Ramsay from Public Health, our county vet Dr. Carl Venters, and Sheriff Don DiBella. Now I’ll, uh, turn it over to Dr. Latkin.”

  Joseph Latkin was slim, small, maybe forty-five, intense. Jess thought that he looked competent but accustomed to having his way, like a lot of doctors. He had odd eyes, very pale blue, almost white. It made his gaze disconcerting, as if he had no irises at all and his eyeballs were a solid reflective surface, giving you back nothing but yourself. Despite his small size, he commanded the room without even mounting the judge’s dais.

  “Please call me Joe. We’re here from the CDC to find out, first, if a pathogen is causing this canine behavior. There are other possibilities, such as an ingested environmental. The speed of onset in the dogs and the relatively confined geographical area suggest that could be the case, so we’ll start by examining the dogs’ stomachs.”

  Jess considered this. The dogs all ate something that turned them into killers? What could something like that possibly be?

  Latkin continued, “However, what you’ve told us so far is consistent with a certain class of brain pathogens that can turn animals very aggressive. We won’t know for sure until we dissect a few infected animals and examine their brains. To that end, some of us—” he nodded toward the twelve people seated to the left of the room “—will be working here in the portable lab, some with Dr. Venters, and two at the hospital and morgue, examining samples from victims. We’ll also have a constant, two-way flow of information and samples with Atlanta. I want to emphasize that if we determine that this animal behavior does have a disease-based cause, it will be absolutely necessary that we move fast to contain and neutralize the pathogen.”

  Jess voted silently for a brain disease. A pack of well-behaved family dogs, living peaceably for years side by side with their human pack, sleeping on kids’ beds, chasing balls and sticks, part of the annual Christmas picture. Then all of them, all at once, attack those same beloved owners. Something infecting their brains was the only thing that made sense to him. But, then, he wasn’t an epidemiologist.

  “Let me ask a question,” Dr. Latkin continued. “Why don’t I see anyone here from the Army Veterinary Corps in Frederick?”

  No one spoke. Jess could guess the answer: Nobody had thought of the Army Veterinary Corps, a tiny outfit based with the Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, twenty miles away. Certainly Jess, busy putting out fires for most of the last twenty-four hours, had not. The CDC was here probably because someone at the hospital had thought of them. Lou Hafner, small town mayor, didn’t think in terms of federal agencies.

  Dr. Latkin spoke over his shoulder to one of his people. “Julie, call USAMRIID and request the Veterinary Corps.” Julie rose and glided silently from the room.

  Latkin talked on, clarifying CDC procedures, stressing the need for information sharing. When he dismissed the meeting, Jess rose.

  “Wait a minute, doctor. What about quarantining Tyler?”

  Dead silence.

  Mayor Hafner said, “Jess, I think that’s a bit premature.” He looked panicky.

  The sheriff said, his eyes narrowed, “What do you mean, Jess, by ‘quarantine’?”

  Jess wasn’t used to addressing a crowd. But he was used to animals. “Dogs wander. If this thing is a disease, a parasite or a virus or something, it seems to transfer pretty easy from one animal to the next, judging by the quickness that the whole thing blew up and—”

  “How quick?” Dr. Latkin interrupted.

  “No dog bites at close of business Thursday, forty-six since then.”

  Dr. Latkin turned to Lou Hafner. “Forty-six? You didn’t tell me that was the incident curve!”

  “I didn’t know it,” Lou said. “But look here, Jess—”

  “Animals don’t respect town boundaries,” Jess said, “dogs no more than any others. You get infected dogs wandering over to Linville and Flatsburgh, you’ll never get this thing contained. You’ll get people leaving town, taking their dogs with them because Spot isn’t infected yet and they want to get him away before he is. But maybe Spot is already infected—Dr. Latkin here said they don’t have any idea yet how long the incubation period of this disease might be. I think we need to close off the town now.”

  “Jess, do you know what you’re saying?” the sheriff said.

  “I’m saying we have six people dead, four of them children.”

  Lou Hafner said, “But there’s been no new bites since last night! None at all this morning!”

  “It’s early yet, people are staying inside, and a lot of dogs are locked up. But Billy and I glimpsed at least one in the woods by Randolph Road, and we heard another someplace behind Wal-Mart. There are a lot of loose dogs out there.”

  “You can’t cut off the whole town,” Hafner said angrily. “We have all the commuters leaving for work in D.C., people and goods coming and going…this isn’t bubonic plague, Jess! It’s just a bunch of bad-behaved dogs.”

  The CDC doctor stared incredulously at Hafner. Then he said, “Jess Langstrom may be right. This was a topic I was going to introduce after we had a bit more data, but that was before I heard how abruptly this pathogen—if it is a pathogen—emerged. That suggests very easy animal-to-animal transmission, possibly even the worst-case scenario, which is an airborne, species-threatening hot agent. Plus, the disease may even have an alternate host, just as avian flu uses both birds and swine. I think we do need to quarantine Tyler.”

  “And how the hell do you propose we do that, doctor?’ Lou Hafner demanded. All traces of his usual geniality had vanished. This was a weak man pushed into belligerence by fear. “Dogs don’t respect yellow police tape, you know. Maybe living in a big city like Atlanta, you don’t happen to realize how much woods and open land we got here. Tyler township is nearly thirty square miles. We can’t just put a huge barbed-wire fence around all of it!”

  “No,” Joe Latkin said, unaffected by the mayor’s sarcasm. “But FEMA can, or at least an approximation. I’m calling them now. Mayor, your office will need to draft a statement for the citizens of Tyler and another for the national press, because it won’t be long before they’re here. Outside the quarantine cordon, of course.”

  “Outside? No people can come in and out?”

  “Yes, people can move in, but no animals of any kind. And no one who enters should be allowed back out, except for necessary crisis-related movement. We can issue special passes for that. We need that containment until we determine that this pathogen, if it is a pathogen, is not capable of human-to-human transmission.”

  The mayor said, “Does that include commuters who live here?”

  “I’m afraid it does.”

  “But the dog bites have goddamned stopped! And you’re declaring martial law, that’s what you’re doing! I don’t think you have the authority to do that, doctor.”

  “I’m not declaring anything. I haven’t the authority. These are best-practices recommendations for you to act upon.”

  The sheriff and the mayor glanced at each other, and Jess saw them both relax. Until Dr. Latkin said quietly, “Until FEMA gets here. Then federal authority trumps yours. Mr. Langstrom, could I ask you
some questions, please?”

  Jess made his way through the angry buzz of Tyler’s officials toward Dr. Latkin. Jess had some questions himself. “Alternate host"—did that mean some other animal could have the plague, too, going berserk and attacking people? What animals: groundhogs, rabbits, raccoons? Raccoons carried rabies more often than dogs, even. And no quarantine from FEMA or anybody else was going to confine Tyler’s rabbits to Tyler. Not going to happen.

  A hard knot was forming in Jess’s stomach. Even if there was no secondary host, even if it was only dogs that got this thing, that meant any dog in Tyler could be infected. “Very easy animal-to-animal transmission,” the doctor had said. Latkin had also mentioned avian flu, and Jess knew what they were doing in Asia to try to control that. They were destroying all the chickens that carried it.

  All the dogs in Tyler.

  And, if it came to that, Jess knew who would have to carry out the order.

  » 11

  Ed and Cora Dormund had had a bad night. Ed remembered the fight only vaguely. He guessed he’d drunk too much but jeez, what was wrong with that? The way Cora carried on, you’d think he was an alkie or something. And Cora could pack away the Buds, too, no matter what she pretended. What had happened last night—whatever—wasn't all his fault, not by a fucking long shot.

  Ed staggered from bedroom to bathroom. It was too early to be up, but the pressure of his bladder woke him. He scowled at the bathroom window: barely dawn.

  In the living room Cora snored heavily on the sofa, surrounded by beer cans, a shattered glass vase, and the torn remains of the roses that she’d squandered eighteen dollars on they didn’t have. Now the fight came back to Ed. She’d thrown the vase at him, the bitch, just because he thought they should economize now that he was laid off. It was all her fault. She’d practically forced him to hit her.

  Outside, the dogs barked. Ed lurched to the kitchen. Cora hadn’t even let the dogs in last night, he couldn’t count on her for anything. He closed the door between kitchen and living room so that Jake or Petey or Rex wouldn’t step on shards of glass.