Dogs by Nancy Kress Page B

hadn’t explained the whole situation to Mr. Anselm—well, to be fair, she hadn’t known the whole situation. She still didn’t! But if he tried to go outside, walk to the store or anything… Cami knocked on the door.
    No answer. Had he already gone out? Oh, God, if he had just his cane and Captain…the police were rounding up dogs. They might even be euthanizing them. But it would be worse if Mr. Anselm had gone out with just his cane. He did that sometimes. Then he’d have nothing to warn him of any strays.
    Cami knocked louder. “Mr. Anselm! Are you there?”
    Still no sound from within. They must have both gone out. Maybe there was some clue as to where they’d gone, an empty milk carton in the sink or something. If she knew, she could try to find him before she reported in to work. Cami tried the doorknob; it turned under her hand. She opened the door and went in.
    Captain waited at his usual place just inside the door, his seeing-eye harness buckled on. Briefly he looked past Cami as a door opened somewhere in the corridor behind her and someone shouted. Cami herself barely had time to glimpse Mr. Anselm’s body, the throat torn out, before the German shepherd sprang onto her and she went down.

» 18
    Tessa stood brushing her teeth in the living room, grimacing around the toothbrush at the stupidity on the TV. Jess Langstrom wasn’t going to pick her up until 7:00 A.M. and it was only 6:00, but she couldn’t sleep. Last night it had taken the local cops two solid hours to clear her credentials, and by that time an exhausted Langstrom had gone home to sleep, which apparently he hadn’t been doing too much of. The delay in a critical situation was enough to make Tessa drastically lower her opinion of locals—not that the FBI hadn’t done the same thing too many times, God knows. In fact, the only people acting decisively seemed to be FEMA, who were erring in the other direction, for once. That idiot Scott Lurie had actually called Tyler “a possible act of terrorism.” Terrorism! Give me a break. There was no evidence of that, none whatsoever, and of the newscasts Tessa had scanned so far, only Janet Belville of CNN seemed to acknowledge and recognize that fact.
    FEMA, of course, was simply exploiting this mutated virus, or whatever it was, to counterbalance their dismal performance in last year’s California earthquake. But Tessa had been watching TV for an hour and had heard no contradictions from the FBI. CIA, Homeland Security, or the White House. Bernini and Maddox must be tearing their eyes out at being muffled like this.
    The problem with working counter-terrorism, Tessa had long since learned, was the tendency to see anything that happened in terrorist terms. An Amtrak train hits a cow and derails—was it a “deliberate disruption of transport”? Was that top adviser’s suicide actually an assassination? She knew of CT agents who suspected that levees breached by a hurricane were the work of al-Qaeda.
    â€œWhat do you think, Minette?” Tessa asked the toy poodle, who stared at her disdainfully and walked to the front door to be let out. Tessa scooped her up and carried her, protesting, to the back door. They slipped outside, where Minette piddled and shit before immediately being carried back in.
    Tessa had no fear of Minette’s being infected. Since coming to Tyler three weeks ago, Minette had had zero interaction with any other dogs, not even so much as a friendly butt sniff. Unless this thing were airborne, of course, in which case the entire country was in deep trouble indeed. But nothing Tessa had seen, read, or pried out of Jess Langstrom indicated that.
    She still had nearly an hour until he showed up. Tessa meditated briefly and unsatisfactorily, then checked her email. Still no reply from Salah’s second, unknown correspondent. Maybe she could have his or her original email translated from Arabic.