No Dogs in Philly (2)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir. Chapter 2: Intervention

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It was a mistake, Ria thought, to go into the subway. She had taken the normal route, sliding through the oversized storm grate on Logan Boulevard, climbing down the iron spikes that some nameless do-gooder had hammered into the walls, dropping carefully onto the cinder-block island—now practically submerged from the pounding rain—and then feeling her way along the wall until she came to the hatch that led to the abandoned Logan Station. She had stepped carefully over the mounds of dozing elzi, careful not to even brush against the antennae poking from their eyes or ears or throats. Most people were afraid of the elzi, but to her they were a comfort. They were the canaries of the underground, their snores and growls and whimpers a sign that all was safe.

The dog had followed her, of course. She had thought the trip underground might shake it, but of course the dog wasn’t real and didn’t have to climb ladders or slide through grates or tippy-toe hop from cinder block to cinder block to find his way to the Low City. It was there, in the shadows, in the corner of her eye, prowling, watching her. It grew and shrank with the light. Black as a pit with golden eyes or suddenly gold with black eyes. It wasn’t a breed she had ever seen on any of the feeds but it looked maybe like the bastard freak of a wolf nailed down by a lion. Lately it had been growing larger, huge sometimes, like a parade balloon swelling to fill the streets and the terror would overtake her, a suffocating sense of impending and she would run, tear down the street, shoving the sneering crowds out of the way and confirming to all the world that she was indeed a crazy woman unfit to handle herself.

I hate you, she thought at the dog. It stared at her from the shadows. You ruined my life.

It had appeared five years ago—was it really so long?—on her thirteenth birthday. Or was it fourteenth? Was it her birthday? She couldn’t recall. A birthday was no different than any other day back then unless it fell on a Friday and the free lunch program had cheesecake. She loved cheesecake. It had come in the same little plastic cups that all the other desserts had come in and she had licked it clean every Friday. Mom had called her fat, but that wasn’t true, she was skinny as a stick, which was what Derrick used to say, laughing at her, but it didn’t stop him from kissing her under the bleachers. Was that when the dog had first appeared? Under the bleachers with Derrick Wilson, between his sloppy tongue kisses and him grabbing her boob so hard it hurt? She had slapped him for that and then she’d let him do it again.

She wasn’t crazy though; she knew that. The dog was there, even if no one else could see it. Sometimes it left—but never because of the pills they gave her or the words they said, condescending—but it always came back. At first it was tiny, not a puppy, not cute or juvenile, just smaller, a little wiener-dog version of itself. At first she thought it was because of the acid or the pink powder that Bobby had given her that she later discovered was lolacaine, a sex drug, and he was trying to get her to put out. The dog had glittered like flames in her dissolving consciousness and she thought maybe he had seen it, for just a flicker, but maybe he’d only seen the look in her eye. Either way he zipped up his shitty thrift-store jeans and slunk away.

It wasn’t the drugs though because she didn’t know a drug on the planet that made a tiny golden dog appear and follow you around for your entire life.

It was warm underground, and dry, but she had been soaked in the rain and she shivered. Up ahead was a flickering and she followed it to a group of four huddling around a trash fire. She approached the group cautiously, holding up her hands and walking slowly so they didn’t mistake her for a hungry elzi. She saw them tense and then relax. Close to the fire she saw their faces, two weathered men, a girl, and one that was a toss-up. They were older than her, except for the girl, who seemed very young to be homeless. She must’ve ditched foster or a bad situation at home. Ria felt a surge of sympathy.

She took a seat on an old tire close to the fire but slightly apart from the rest. The others said nothing. They stared at the flames. Wordlessly, one of the older men withdrew a flask, took a long swig, and then passed it to his left. It went around and Ria drank gratefully; it was harsh in a good way, and she felt herself warming. She took off her jacket and lay it on a pile of bricks and subway tiles close to the flames.

“Bad nigh’,” the other man said. He could’ve been thirty or sixty. His face was shriveled and most of his teeth were gone. She guessed he’d been using a bit. His words had a chewy, gummy-like feel as though he couldn’t quite remember how to form them.

“Lossa rain,” he continued. No one could argue with this. Ria stared at the curving wall beyond the fire, enjoying the dancing shadows. It was quiet here; she liked it. She wondered how many other small groups like this were scattered throughout the station. There was a slight tremor, a few stones rolled; some dust fell from the ceiling. A train, probably, from another line, or one of the big dumb waiters bringing food to the distribution points. Could she get to there from here? There must be a way. Her stomach growled. The thought of all that food—still in its neat, pristine packaging—made her mouth water.

The dog was back. It stepped out of the shadows on the wall, stood in midair and stared down the subway tunnel. Ria thought this might mean something, but she had resolved to ignore the dog. She could have lived with the dog, ignored it completely, if it hadn’t started killing people. That had caused her some problems, all her problems, really. The man at Lourdes, what was his name? Dr. Stermdrick? Stern Dick? Why not? He had said that she had started the fire, that she couldn’t remember it, that she was blaming her imaginary dog, but that wasn’t true! Sure, she had been drinking, but they seemed to think that meant she was drunk. She could pound a liter of vodka and walk a line and thread a needle and she remembered exactly what had happened.

The man had come at her, was going to kill her, cut her up for parts. He was a harvester, a desperado selling whatever implants, blood, bones, organs, brains, he could steal or scavenge. He had his meaty hands locked on her throat, thrashing her, slamming her head into the side of his van, stars exploding in her face. She’d struggled and flailed her legs but he sat his fat hairy ass on her body and pinned her to the floor. She was ninety pounds with a meal in her and he was a fat gorilla man that felt like a bus crushing her sternum. In the end he had broken two of her ribs and torn something in her gut that made blood show up every day of the month, and that was what forced her into the hospital in the first place.

Then there was the dog, two eyes in the shadows, growing, filling the van. The harvester letting go, red error messages flashing across his mechanical eyes, the gooey sweat on his fat neck and the hole opening in his armored chest, like a fist-sized cigarette burn, and his scream. He was too big, she couldn’t get him off, and the hole widened and widened and burned away his mass, his chest, his face, his arms dropping off like sausages, and then her squirming out from under his melted belly and running into the night. It was the dog, she knew it was the dog, not her—how was she going to start a fire like that? How could she even get free? They didn’t care; they didn’t listen.

It was impossible to feel grateful to the dog, even though it had saved her life. It was too much, too horrible, the man burning alive on top of her, even if he did deserve it. She didn’t feel safer after, merely hunted. She had killed; she was insane, dangerous. What would happen the next time she felt threatened? Was the dog going to vaporize anyone that came at her? Could it tell the difference between unease and terror? A good pain and a bad pain? A real threat from some dumb punk trying to snatch her purse? How much did the dog understand her?—because she didn’t understand the dog at all.

 There was another tremor, greater, and then noises, hundreds of bodies scrambling to their feet, cans and garbage kicked around, and then a mass of people. All around them the elzi were rising from their stupor and shuffling or scrambling or sprinting if they hadn’t decayed too far. A herd leapt into the pit of the subway track and began racing south. Another group scrabbled for the sewer entrance.

Her companions thrust themselves up to their feet and looked wildly around for the danger. Ria stayed seated and stared at the dog. The dog stared down the subway tunnel.

“What do we do?” the young girl asked.

“Run,” the man with the flask said, but it was a question more than an answer.

“No,” Ria said, “We can’t, not yet.”

She felt that same cold sweat like when she couldn’t find booze, and a queasiness in her stomach. All the hairs across her back stood on end, but she knew they couldn’t run. There were too many elzi, clogging the exits with their mass, dumb beasts getting stuck and crammed in the narrow exits. If they tried to follow, one of them would touch an implant and then the elzi would rip them all apart.

“Shit,” the man with the flask said. “Shit, shit, shit…”

“What about the tunnel?” the androgynous one said. “We could run down that way. Follow the elzi.”

This seemed like the only answer, but as Ria thought it the dog looked at her and she knew it was wrong.

“No, we can’t.”

“Screw this.”

The androgynous one ran to the platform edge and hopped down. After a second’s hesitation the man with the flask followed far less gracefully, and then the other man. Ria stayed where she was and the young girl’s head jerked between her and the others now running down the tunnel. The androgynous one disappeared into the black beyond the firelight and then the young girl sprang after them screaming:

“Wait, wait for me, don’t leave me!”

They disappeared.

Ria sat there, staring at the black mouth of the tunnel where they had gone. Her heart pounded a thousand beats a minute. She felt the sweat wetting her clothes again. The scrabbling of the elzi began to fade. It was quiet, so quiet she could hear the drip drop of water falling from the ceiling. She was alone, except for the dog. It walked toward her slowly, coming as close as it ever had, touching her, and then not stopping, entering her body. It was a strange feeling, like heat and cold at the same time and a thousand needle pricks on every inch of skin. She looked at her hand and saw that it both was and wasn’t, understood that only her eyes could see the hand before her, that the light no longer obeyed the rules of a dumb universe, but a new set of rules, rules of a magical ghost dog that said, “Back, away, this person is not yours to touch. She is hidden.”

There was a sound, a slithering nail on a vinyl record, a sound that crawled inside her ears and wriggled down her spine and made her want to jam knitting needles in her eyes and scream. In the flickering light of the trash fire the creature looked like a train-sized centipede, countless legs jutting out at strange angles, scratching along any surface they could grasp to push the body forward. At the front was a mass of flesh—bodies, at least a dozen torsos, crammed together, and they were alive. They moved together, swaying like seaweed, eyes all closed, and as they passed she saw their mouths all twitching together as they whimpered—a dozen men, women, and children all whimpering together in tenors and basses and sopranos.

The creature stopped and then reared its head, its mass of human bodies, twenty spindly metal legs clawing into the floor and walls and ceiling to force the head up to the fire to bring the dozens of bodies within five feet of her, and in unison their eyes opened and they stared at her, right at her, and she sat, frozen in terror and horror. The whimpering stopped. They reached, arms grasping as far as they could out from the fused lump of flesh they shared, licking their lips. And then they spoke: “Come…come…come…come…” a whisper, all of them over and over in her ears and in her brain: “Come…come…come…come…”

The words trickled through her nerves, nudging her, moving her, she felt herself stand. The arms were welcoming; it was her family, they wanted her, they loved her. She felt it, the warm beam of love from her family drawing her in. She would reach out, touch them, join them.

A jagged pain cut through her, a dagger of ice cutting through the warmth. It was that damn dog! It had taken everything else from her and now it was taking this too! She took another step, and another dagger of ice and then another and two more in her eyes and she saw herself suddenly inches from the grasping hands, the fingertips worn to yellow bone from scratching, the eyes white and dead, the lips cracked and torn and bloody, and she screamed. The hands drew back and the eyes rolled wildly and the mouths shot open and screamed back at her. Then the creature reared up and crashed back onto the tracks, shaking the ground and showering dust and bricks and tile from the ceiling. The legs twitched frantically and it tore down the tunnel, segment after segment of twisted metal, and was gone.