Short Story: Those Left Behind
Sci-fi: Alpha says it's time to take the dog for a walk.
You smell him before you hear him. A rank odor pricking at your nose; it’s all you can do not to gag. A cloud of stale sweat, antiseptic intended to keep him Pure in your presence, and the vanity of leather-scented deodorant–so easy to rub onto his hairless, simian form, yet still improperly applied.
You had been watching the light filter in through the blinds. Motes of dust hang in the still air. Only your breath moves. No one is in this room but you. You and the pain that radiates from your hip, a grasping numbness that explodes into a race of fiery lines along every nerve at the slightest movement.
About time for the farm, you think. No one has use for a bedridden dog.
The makings of a smile contort your jowls. Your lips pull back, exposing snaggletoothed canines each as long as a man’s finger. The teeth of a beast. Is it any wonder why you’re left alone?
His stink gets stronger. Keys jingle as he flings open the door.
“Let’s see how much human ya got in ya underneath that shag.” He stands there, stocky and barrel-chested, on the other side of the room. Yet you still feel his spittle, viscous and warm against the trembling sensitivities of your whiskers, as he barks, “today’s the day to walk, ya fuckin’ mutt!”
Walk? You feel the vibrations deep in your belly threatening to run away into a howl of laughter. The only thing keeping it down is the flare of pain radiating from your hip.
If I could walk, I’d run. One last time. Far away from here, little, fat man.
But you keep your voice to yourself. For now. No one among the Pure would ever be willing to spend time among a dog like you unless they were the lowest of the low, driven here by necessity.
“Did ya hear me, mutt?” He slams the door closed behind him. “Or are those furry towers on your head just for fuckin’ show?”
“What a pretty picture your scent makes.” You roll a yellowed, canine eye towards him.
His true smell dances in a bright splattering of misery: the cloying loneliness of freeze-dried gruel pours forth like a fog machine from where traces are stuck in his molars; twisting red lines of cheap, beer-scented sadness leak from his pores; an iridescent shimmer of ammonia reek comes from dried jism on his left sock.
“How’s it feel to be the slightly more tolerated thing in this room?” Your voice is husky. Your words are unclear, mangled as they are by the length of your snout, the way the splicing gave you a dog’s tongue but a man’s compulsion to speak.
You close your eyes and breathe deep as you hunt for smells of anger and wounded pride. It’s not hard to spot. This little man, so desperate to make himself seem strong in the moment, is already deflated. At least the bitterness of his anger covers up the rest of his stink.
“I think,” his words come staggered worse than yours with half the excuse you have, “they done spliced ya wrong. Ended up with the brain of a dog too? Speakin’ to your walker like this? Just ya wait, pup. We’ve got ways to train–”
“I can’t walk,” you say. Your voice is a low growl at the base of your throat, its timbre honed over millennia of evolution to instill panic in prey. His Adam’s apple bobs. He coughs, stamps his work boots, and takes a step closer.
“Listen, mutt.” His hand travels to a rod hanging from his belt. “When I say you’re goin’ to walk today, you’re goin’ to fuckin’ walk. Broken hip or pain be damned. Word straight from the Alpha”–a bad joke from the early days that got stuck in the grooves of everyone’s collective gray matter–“that we need your nose.
“Trust me, I’d rather let ya rot. But Alpha says there’s a colony of splicin’ freaks left for ya to root out. Free range. So ya best fuckin’ believe I’m gonna get ya rootin’.
“‘Sides.” He hocks up phlegm and lets it sail onto the corner of your bed. “Your room’s a fuckin’ mess.”
Sensory chaos.
The hours blur in a cacophony of pain. Him throwing you off the bed you remember. Even as pain lanced across each fiber of your being, threatening to burn you to ashes in pure suffering, you still managed to bare your teeth and lunge at him on all fours.
“Like the fuckin’ animal ya really are!”
Then came the rod. A bolt of pure shock flowed from it into your exposed flank, burning away the matted fur.
After that, just impressions. A dapple of light sending your pupils wide. A kick. Forced to your feet, your dysplastic hip buckling from your weight following so many weeks bedridden. Your eyes rolling back. Tightness. Something hard wrapped around your legs, your torso.
A million pins stabbing through your flesh.
And all the while, his reek–malice, aggression, desperation–filling your nostrils and choking your brain further and further until …
Your first sense to return is touch.
Wrapped across the bare skin of your thighs and lower back, your fur sheared, is something cold and hard. It digs into you, like the time you found a tick in the folds of your armpit after the last hunt. But a million times more pronounced, biting every inch of your exposed flesh.
You instinctively jerk, bringing back additional layers of consciousness. A collar fastens your neck to the wall behind you. Your hands are manacled. The dog walker’s stench is there, but more flavors swirl in his personal cloud: a not unpleasant sweetness of self-congratulations nearly fully overpowered by a flop-sweat reek of approval-seeking cowardice.
“You have him standing,” a new voice says. “Could you remind me, walker, what I had requested?”
“I believe,” he stammers.
“I-I-I,” the second voice cuts in, her tone pitched in mockery. “Out with it, walker.”
There is only one scent for this voice: an overbearing pine that masks anything else. She knows what she’s doing in the presence of a dog. You crack your eyes open. The walker stands off to the side, shifting. He lifts his gaze, sees your eyes open, and a spasm of hatred darkens his face.
“Ma’am–”
“Alpha.” She doesn’t bother looking at him. Her eyes are locked on you, drinking in every detail. “Are you awake, dog?”
You give a nod. Your body aches something terrible–deep ripples of pain from where you can only presume the walker had vented his rage–but it is bearable. The pain from your hip is gone, and with that absence a forgotten clarity dawns in your mind.
“Standing, Alpha.”
The faintest smile creases her otherwise porcelain smooth face. “Has your walker told you what your mission is?”
He begins to mumble. She snaps her hand up and he falls silent. You can smell the iron tang of his blood as he chews his lip.
“Look who’s the dog after all.” You can’t help saying the words, just as you can’t help but let your tongue loll out of your snout to pant in enjoyment at his anger. You can practically taste his impotent rage, his stench is so strong.
His face flushes a deep burgundy. “You’re next, ya fuckin’ pup. Ain’t none of us Pures safe until all ya spliced scum is fuckin’ dealt with!”
“And after me, you,” you growl. “Don’t think I can’t smell myself on you, even with your perfume. Isn’t that right, Alpha?”
She looks between the two of you, her expression doll-like calm. She retains that calmness as she gets up in your face in two succinct steps. Her expression doesn’t waver as she jams a shock stick into your side and holds it there for two, three, four, five seconds. An eternity of agony. You smell burning flesh before she pulls it away from you. You can’t help but yelp.
“I asked you a simple question,” is all she says as she takes a step back. “Has he explained why he’s walking you?”
You try to answer, but all that comes out of your mouth are canine yelps. You shake your head instead.
It’s subtle, but you notice it. A sidelong glance she casts towards your walker. With any luck, he’ll be in the Center next. As long as there are more Splicers hiding out, the Pure will always have a need for dogs to run down their scent. And this fuck may have just pissed off the Alpha enough to get himself on a shortlist for some genomic reshuffling.
You would know intimately how that process works, after all.
“There’s a colony of Splicers we’ve found tracks of out in the mountains,” the Alpha says, her words crisp. “Cougar-kind. We’re having trouble finding them, so we need your nose. Your walker here was intended to debrief you and guide you into what you’re wearing now.
“It’s an exosuit. It redistributes your weight to help with your dysplasia. It also releases local anesthetic; should eradicate your nerve pain, but it does have the danger of not allowing you to feel if you damage yourself.
“There, all caught up. Not difficult.” She turns her head now and, for the first time since you’ve regained consciousness, looks fully at the walker. Her expression is impossible to read, her scent still masked, but her gaze does not waver. She does not blink.
After too many heartbeats of staring, she turns on her heels and leaves. You and the walker stand in silence as her staccato footfalls echo down the hallway into silence.
“Well.” You pull your lips back in a snarl. “Just you and me now, friend. Let’s go for a walk.”
To run. To feel the wind rush against your whiskers, to smell the shifting rainbow mosaic of scents as you barrel through a forest, to hear the chatter of animals and the burble of a brook: this is how you were meant to live.
Free.
At least, free but for the walker behind you. His pathetic human form could never keep up with you on a track, let alone through the wilds of this alpine forest. He skirts through the air behind you on a personal quadcopter three feet off the ground. In his hands are the controls of an electric leash. The collar bites around your neck, threatening to send a shock into your brainstem if you turn.
A final lights out.
Unnecessary, you think as you leap over a small boulder and continue to run. Your legs, free of all feeling, untiringly bound away from him. Dogs aren’t crafty enough to ambush their walkers.
Your lips pull back as you run, revealing a jagged smile. You found it. An orange trace of scent that pulls you further up into the mountains. It is a scent of raw meat and ammonia urine and upturned soil. It is a scent of cougar-kind. You breathe deep and savor it–the scents of your final walk.
Dogs are too reliable to turn on their masters. And even if they could, they’re too slow. Too land-bound.
But cougars. The wisps of scent thicken into clouds, turning this whole section of the forest an orange invisible to your walker.
Cougars are ambush predators.
Author’s note: If you liked this story, you may enjoy the following tales:
Microfiction: The Lord of Change
“Why you in muck, little one?” The behemoth rose from the marsh, head of a toad, as large as two mens’ chests; its words came odd, as if each was spoken by a different voice within it. “Not many now come.”
Flash Fiction: Invasive Species
“Why’d you wake me, Uncle? I was having the most delightful Banquet dream.” She batted her eyes open, the forest gloomy against the remembered brilliance behind her eyelids.
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A lot to like about this - how the situation is never really explained but unfolds naturally, the focus on scent which is unusual but makes perfect sense for this character, and a nice payoff at the end.
Ah, another 2nd-person story! It does sort of cut off before the climax; would've been nice to see more of this plan in action--or to not realize the plan until it's too late for the filthy handler. Muhaha!