Bad dog, p.22
Bad Dog, page 22
“What’s happening with the security guards?” he asked.
“Nothing to report,” Smith said. He was watching a pair of the security guards moving with commendable caution over the grounds outside the sanitarium property. They showed up on the security cameras Smith had long ago positioned throughout the facility.
“No sign of intruders,” Smith added needlessly. “It’s just Koln’s men out there.”
Mark nodded.
“Is it getting worse?” Sarah asked.
“No better, no worse. It’s just sitting there.”
Smith couldn’t pull his eyes way from the display. He felt as if some invisible presence waited out there, about to tear into the security guards. He had to remind himself that they were talking about dogs. There was nothing supernatural about these animals. They were flesh and blood, and they had body heat. They would show up on the night-vision goggles of the guards and on Smith’s night-vision video cameras. There would be no surprise attack at Folcroft.
Mark slowed his pacing.
“Is something happening?” Smith asked.
“It’s retreating.”
“You don’t sound certain.”
“I am sure. It’s moving away. The danger is getting less.”
“Do you have a direction, Mark?”
“Sorry. All I can feel is it going away. Not where it’s going.”
“Is Folcroft safe?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know because I don’t know if the danger was to the sanitarium in the first place. I don’t know what it was.” He added gloomily, “I don’t even know that was real.”
The Foreman found his car. He wasn’t sure how, but he was back in the town of Rye at the twenty-four hour grocery store. He fell into his car, and attempted to dial out. The phone wouldn’t dial. Rather, his fingers wouldn’t work the buttons.
As he drove out of Rye he struggled to keep his eyes focused on the road. He was still disoriented. He found himself going too fast or too slow. Wouldn’t that be a laugh, after all he had done, to be arrested for speeding in the little burg of Rye, New York?
The mental noise dissipated with every mile he put between himself and Rye, and finally he felt stable enough to dial the phone. He rang Trevor Sharp.
“Now what?” Sharp snapped.
“I have the target for you, Trevor.”
“It is about time. What and where?”
“Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.”
“Fine. I know where Rye is. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“They’ll be waiting for you,” the Foreman said.
The Foreman didn’t really think Trevor Sharp would be able to neutralize the danger in Folcroft. Whatever the place was, its defenses had to be substantial. Sending in Sharp was simply a method of evaluating the enemy. Sharp would probably be destroyed. The dogs would be lost. But this was no longer about Lou MacMayor or his dogs. This was all about the Foreman’s survival.
“Was it the dogs?” Smith said.
“I don’t believe it was,” Mark replied.
“Why not?”
“Don’t know.” Mark’s vision seemed shrouded. He had trouble thinking. Why was Smith intent on labeling whatever it was that had come to Folcroft?
“The dogs are the logical explanation, and I don’t trust the idea of some new and supernatural or technologically advanced foe tracking us down in the midst of this crisis.”
“Whatever the enemy was, it was invisible on the security system,” Sarah pointed out.
“It could have been the dogs closing in, then sensing a dangerous level of security. That would have scared them off,” Smith said. “The scenario fits the pattern, time and again, the dogs bypassed guarded facilities to hit facilities where the human security was insufficient.”
“Yes,” Mark said. He couldn’t think of a good argument, but somehow he thought the reasoning was wrong. But even his own senses insisted that the danger was decreasing. It was almost gone. It was slipping away like a song he was forgetting.
Mark Howard needed sleep. He hunched in the corner of the couch, lulled by the tapping of Smith’s keys. Sarah was at Mark’s desk, with nothing better to do than keep an eye on the video monitors.
He stirred awake again and again, listening for a break in the cadence of Smith’s typing or a hint of alarm from Sarah. There was nothing.
No more danger.
He was safe.
Chapter 30
Sarah sighed and gave Smith a wave, then pointed at the screen. Smith checked it out. The security patrol was taking liberties with its assigned route again. When the guards wandered far enough off the Folcroft grounds, the video monitoring was incomplete. The guards didn’t know that, and Smith wasn’t going to let them know that he was watching almost every move they made.
Smith turned up the audio feed from the patrol radios.
“Gary’s spotted another wolverine,” said one of the men in the field. It was their running joke. Apparently, the man named Gary had once shot at a wolverine breaking into a remote Upstate New York chemical storage yard, only to find he had blasted the head clean off an invading opossum. Smith didn’t see the humor in it. It was well known that there were no active wild wolverines in New York State.
It was a long night already, but at least the end was in sight Remo and Chiun would be back on the ground in the United States soon. They were headed directly to Albany, then to the home of Lou MacMayor. They would cut the head off the snake. They would learn what they could first about the dog teams.
They must be able to find and stop the dog teams. Under MacMayor’s control, they were deadly, but without his control, the handlers would probably keep the dog packs operational, to their own ends.
The killing and mayhem could get much worse before it got better.
Would MacMayor be able to provide the intelligence needed to find the dog packs? Smith didn’t think so.
MacMayor probably had an underling running tire dog show, and whoever it was had done a first-rate job of choreographed mass executions.
Sarah Slate didn’t seem to know that the Masters were back home in New York. Just as well. She would want them brought back to Folcroft to defend it against the dogs.
Should they ever come.
The one named Gary Tomoe thought he saw a flicker of heat through the thermal goggles, but it could have been anything. Squirrel. Rabbit. Wolverine. He was never gonna live down that wolverine.
Too small to be a dog. They had the glasses set high, just so they could watch for dogs. The setting made the whole woods look on fire.
He took the opportunity to take a leak, and halfway through it he imagined he heard something moving in the trees. It sounded small again.
He could swear it sounded bigger that a possum, and it did seem close. Still, he couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from. He strained his ears as he finished his bathroom break, then pulled the thermal goggles back in place.
At once, the blackness was alive with hot creatures, and they were moving around him, so close he could probably reach out and touch one. He knew what they were. He could quite clearly make out their shapes. Canine bodies. Sure enough, they had the same collars that all the eyewitnesses reported from all the murder scenes.
Gary Tomoe pulled out his radio and it vanished from his hand. His hand was mauled. He felt the torn flesh.
His partner was only twenty paces away, waiting for Gary to report on his latest wolverine sighting. Gary tried to shout to the man, but his throat was clamped shut. A big dog had buried its fangs in his neck. It pierced his flesh even as it crushed his windpipe.
Tomoe need to produce a sound of some kind. He snatched out the knife on his belt and sank it into the dog’s chest, scraping over the bones, then he forced it through the rib cage. It was a perfect strike. The dog expired and became a deadweight on top of Tomoe. The grip on his throat relaxed. Gary tried to shout, but he felt air bubbles forming up on his neck. He knew his shouting days were over.
When Harold Smith saw something warm on the screen where Gary the wolverine chaser was known to have gone, he thought nothing of it. He was simultaneously watching the other patrol, which seemed to have stopped to examine something of interest. But then the patrol moved on.
Over by the wolverine chaser, Smith saw the shape of the guard, also on the ground. There was another shape, on top of the guard. Neither of the shapes seemed to be moving.
Smith colored. Was the guard doing what it looked like he was doing? Did he have a young woman meeting him in the woods? That would explain his absence.
But there were still more shapes, many of them, coming together. Even the blur of the thermal images couldn’t hide the fact that they were four-legged animals.
“It’s them,” Sarah Slate said just as Smith was about to.
“Alert Koln,” Smith said.
Mark Howard was on his feet as if he had never been asleep. He grabbed a lower drawer of his desk, extracted his CIA handgun and met Smith at the door. Smith was holding his own handgun from earlier days. They closed the door behind them, leaving Sarah Slate alone.
It was as they had planned. Sarah was unskilled with firearms. Mark Howard had CIA weapons training.
Still, Sarah Slate could not believe that she was left alone in this ancient, intimidating sanctuary to simply watch it all happen.
Chapter 31
Koln’s job was to keep the dogs from getting in.
Smith and Howard were there to protect the patients, just in case the dogs did get inside anyway.
Sarah’s job was to keep an eye on things.
The animals were gathering in the blackness where the patrol had been. The man who chased wolverines was clearly dead. What of his partner? The man couldn’t be seen. The thermal images were blurry and disorienting. The video camera showed her nothing but blackness.
The animals had all gathered in a bright swarm of green waiting for something to happen. Then one of the beasts bolted across the patches of light on the hospital grounds.
The animal had a purpose. Sarah understood the method when she saw it was at a high-voltage shed, which brought power lines into Folcroft. The animal left behind a small package and bolted away. The electrical junction box disintegrated. Folcroft’s power supply turned off.
Harold Smith heard the blast and checked a nearby window. He could see the damage and had to admire the strategy. The detonation destroyed the electrical power coming into the buildings, as well as the junction boxes that distributed all electricity throughout the facility. So much for the emergency generators. Although the generators were churning to life, their power had nowhere to go.
Self-charging batteries in the emergency lighting system popped on. They would have enough charge to get the hospital through to morning, but it was limited. Only the surgery center had its own source of full-power battery backup.
And, of course, CURE would be unaffected. The battery systems for the computers and other CURE operations were designed to give them full power for weeks.
Another thought occurred to Smith—there was a service door at the electrical junction shed. The dogs were even smarter than he had given them credit for. They had not only turned off the power, they had also opened a locked entrance to Folcroft.
The black shapes were already slinking across the grounds to the smoldering corner of the building.
Smith went to meet them.
He reached the animals too late. Pairs of the powerful-looking animals were loping off in all directions.
Smith felt his hopes sink. Those pairs would be assigned to opening fire doors all around the building. There was no way they were keeping the whole pack out now, unless Koln could stop them.
Where was Captain Koln?
Smith marched boldly into their presence. When he saw the first four-legged shape approach him, Smith began firing.
The dogs were caught off guard and three of the beasts tumbled to the ground after three bullets had been fired. The others pushed and shoved back outside—and in all directions inside. They went up three hallways.
Smith triggered his weapon into the knot of animals at the broken door, until his weapon was empty and there were no animals left alive. Smith reloaded and went in search of strays.
“Sarah?” he said into the phone walkie-talkie.
“They’re in every patient wing,” Sarah said despairingly. “They’re acting irrationally. I think whoever was controlling them isn’t controlling them anymore.”
Mark Howard wasn’t too concerned by the power outage. The emergency fights were more than enough to navigate inside the hospital.
But then he heard the opening of doors and the clatter of animal feet.
Mark Howard had never counted on facing a dog pack with his handgun. The CIA didn’t train him for that kind of thing. He didn’t even have enough rounds to respond.
All he could do was the best he could do. He strode into the front lobby and began blowing the mutts away.
They were just animals, and he felt bad to do it—but they were there to kill human beings. Folcroft human beings. Mark Howard’s human beings.
Several animals turned as one and charged into the gunfire. Mark blasted them, taking them down, until one lucky survivor reached him and leaped onto his chest.
Mark had failed to keep tabs on his bullets. They had to be almost used up. He waited until the dog was on top of him, bearing him to the ground, before he squeezed the trigger one last time.
The weapon fired.
The dog’s insides fountained above them as Mark Howard slammed to the linoleum floor.
“Mark!” Sarah shouted, then she grabbed her walkie-talkie.
“Mark! Mark Howard, you get to your feet this instant.”
Nothing moved for what seemed like a long time, then the big dog rolled like a log off of Mark Howard and he got to his feet, already reloading. He looked around, spotted the security camera and nodded to Sarah. When he finished loading, he radioed.
“Where are the dogs?”
“Mark,” Sarah said miserably, “they’re in every patient ward.”
In fact, Sarah felt numb staring at the screens. It was a horrible television show, staring at people she knew—being murdered before her eyes.
Then she saw the dogs get into the small wing for long-term residents. Sarah couldn’t look and she couldn’t look away.
One of the dogs was driven out of a room by an old man in boxer shorts. It was Larry the Lecher Leebok, armed with a cane. All he could do was infuriate the animal. It leaped at him, driving him back into the room.
The dog had a bloody snout when it emerged.
Then came old Mrs. Thorn-Mullet from the next room, hurrying to get to Leebok’s aid. They were sweet on each other. And it was Mrs. Thorn-Mullet who had come to Sarah offering the help of all the long-term residents. They wanted to help convince Mark Howard to pop the question to Sarah Slate. It was very sweet.
But now Sarah watched Mrs. Thorn-Mullet risk her life to help Larry Leebok.
The dogs came to get her.
It did occur to Sarah that she was no longer useful to Mark or Harold Smith. She couldn’t tell them where the dogs were if the dogs were everywhere.
So why was she just sitting here like a bump on a log?
There were dead people in the halls of Folcroft. Their throats ripped open. Their eyes wide in death.
Smith ignored the bodies and concentrated on the living animals. They were everywhere in this wing, and Smith began the grisly work of killing them all.
Mark Howard heard the gunshots one floor beneath him, then the tumult on the stairs. He knew what it would be. Smith was driving the animals up.
Mark would drive them right back down again.
He stepped over poor dead Mrs. Gippsland and dragged the stairs door open. The dogs coming up were in chaos. They never expected Mark.
He laid waste to them.
Sarah Slate could tell where the others were by their gunfire. She knew the third-floor wing had no one to protect it.
She went there, swinging the fire ax pulled from a wall box. The ax was heavier than she had imagined.
And the dogs were faster.
She cleaved one of the beasts through the head, but the second animal sidestepped the blow and leaped at her. Sarah brought the ax down on its back. The creature staggered away and collapsed.
She spotted a beast nudging its way into one of the hospital rooms, and she followed it. It was sniffing around a woman who was covered in plastic devices. She was chained to the bed by tubes and wires, and she didn’t seem strong enough to be afraid.
She was diseased. Of course she was diseased. The dog leaped onto the bed, and Sarah buried her ax head in its flank. It howled and crashed to the floor, then gnashed at Sarah’s legs.
She grabbed the ax and tore it out, dragging the snarling brute behind her, and swung him through the door. The ax head tore free of the wound.
Another dog watched its wounded comrade slide to a halt and decided to have his own go at Sarah. She put her weight behind the door and slammed it on the thing when its front half was inside the room. The door was a heavy piece of work.
The animal was creased up the middle, bones crackling.
Now Sarah heard gunshots coming close. The dogs were fleeing one way and another.
Soon enough, Folcroft was silent again, and at peace.
The flight from Scandinavia to New York was one of the longest Remo could remember since his career as a globe-trotting assassin had began. Chiun was locked in himself in a way that made Remo uneasy. He preferred the complaining Chiun who never shut up to the quiet, morose Chiun.
Remo was left alone with his own miserable thoughts. They were selfish, and that made him feel guilty, but he couldn’t shake them off. How would he go on without Chiun? How would he survive? How in the world would he keep the Sinanju machine running?
He didn’t want to feel this way. He should be talking to Chiun, learning how Chiun felt about this, planning what they would do to fight this disease—whatever disease it was. But how could he reach out to someone who wouldn’t respond to anything he said? Everything he said was disregarded.
