The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (42 page)

WAR DOG

by Michael Barretta

The Dog was an Abomination. She was also his only companion.

HE SLOWED
for a feathered corpse in the middle of the road. Up above, the local troop of macaques shrieked at a flock of gene-crafted micro-raptors. He rounded the blind curve and jerked the steering wheel back to avoid a washout from last night’s thunderstorm. The truck bounced across broken asphalt, and the steering wheel twisted out of his hands. From the corner of his eye, he saw a man emerging from the woods. He jammed the brakes and his truck left the road, plowing to a stop into the soft red dirt undercut from the crumbling asphalt.

Not a man, but a shroom. The figure staggered, hands outstretched, and pressed its naked body against the side glass. He could see the delicate snowflake tracery of white rhizome fibers under its skin. The shroom’s eyes glinted clear and blue. Its slack mouth drooled. The creature broke away, leaving a moist trail across the car. Its eyes turned skyward and fixed on a power pole draped with broken electrical lines and wild jasmine. It stepped away towards the pole, cast a look over its shoulder at him, almost as if it was still a person, and climbed.

He took his phone from his pocket and dialed 911.

“Gulf Breeze 911, where is your emergency?”

“Yes, this is Major William Jackson, 3rd Florida Infantry, Retired. I need to report a shroom on Soundside Drive.”

“Okay,” said the operator. “Are you sure it’s a shroom?”

“Yes, it’s a shroom. I know what one looks like.”

“Of course, Major. Has it fruited yet?”

“No, not yet. It just started climbing.” The former human, infected with a weaponized version of
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
, clawed its way up the pole with fierce resolve.

“Can you show it to me?”

“Yes, hold on.” He tabbed on the camera feature of the phone and spun it to face the shroom.

“We have your location. Can you vacate the area?”

“I ran off the road. I thought I was avoiding a person, and my truck is stuck.”

“Do you have personal protective equipment?” Her voice took on a new urgency.

“Yes, I do. I think.” He opened up the glove compartment and took out a government-supplied filtered hood. Three of them crowded the glove box.

“Major, we have a hazmat team on the way. We would like you to stay in your car and put on your personal protective gear. I’ve sent out a cellular warning to all citizens in the area. We want you to stay connected and keep us informed of the shroom’s status.”

“I think I can get upwind.”

“Are you sure it’s the only one?”

“No.” It was a good question of the 911 operator to ask. There was rarely just one shroom. Infections typically occurred in clusters.

“Best if you stay in the car.”

“Okay, I can do that.” He leaned forward to get a better view. The shroom had climbed three quarters of the way up the pole. He propped his phone on the dashboard. “Can you still see it?”

“Yes, we can. We don’t want you to worry. The hazmat team will decontaminate your vehicle should the shroom fruit before we get there, but if you have any powered ventilation we would like you to turn it off. Would you like me to pray with you?”

“No, I’ve already prayed, but you could pray for me; I don’t mind listening,” he lied. He behaved with enough piety to not arouse suspicion and used his combat-wounded veteran status to excuse the acts of contempt that he could not hide.

He opened one of the filter hood packages and pulled the battery lanyard. The filter pack hummed. He put it over his head and cinched it down around his neck. The hood fogged around his mouth and nose with every exhalation, but it wasn’t too uncomfortable.

The shroom reached the top of the pole and checked its grip, tightening and loosening its limbs. A mockingbird, unaware of the danger, harried the creature. The shroom shuddered, going through the terminal phase of its design.

Then he remembered his only neighbor, the Dog.

The wind was blowing from the west. If the shroom fruited, its spores would drift over the Dog’s homestead. Even if they didn’t, the decontamination team would fog the area with caustic chemicals.

He decided.

He stepped out of his truck, abandoning its relative safety, and ran farther up the road. He took off his hood to breathe more easily and turned up the narrow dirt path that led to the Dog’s home. Branches whipped at his face, and twice he ducked under immense dewy spans of banana-spider webs. He broke out into a clearing and slowed to catch his breath. It had been a long time since he had run. The emergency hood hummed in his hand.

He had seen the Dog twice before, and they had acknowledged each other at a careful distance. As veterans, they shared the bond of war, but whereas he had emerged from conflict a respected soldier, she had come out as an illegal gene splice, a piece of dangerous biological equipment.

A neat, wood-shingled house sat in the clearing. The Dog stood up in the midst of her garden with a small hand shovel held like a weapon. Leaf mold flecked the velvet gray fur of her arms.

He felt her fear, surprise, and anger. Dogs were focused telepaths by design and imprinted on their handlers at an intense and intimate level, but an unbonded person in close proximity could still feel strong emotional bleed-over. He imagined the Dog deciding whether to kill him or not. In the CSA, the Christian States of America, she was an abomination and regarded as military property to be neutralized by an ordnance disposal team, but he had known about her presence for almost a year and had not reported her. He hoped that that would work in his favor. He could see her muscles tense as she decided the best course of action.

“Shroom,” he said. “You are in the dispersal range.”

he felt. The word filled his head and popped like a soap bubble. Her voice was soft and feminine and un-doglike. Her design was mostly human, so much so that she was inter-fertile with baseline humans, but that held little weight in the CSA. “Still, they’ll decontaminate the whole area. You know what that means.”

, he felt. Hard work had built her hidden homestead in the middle of a blight zone.

“The hazmat team will arrive in a few minutes. Once they secure the scene, they’ll disinfect with an aerial attack.”

She bolted for her house and retrieved a military pack designed for her body. Like a good soldier, she was ready to bug out at a moment’s notice. She surveyed all that she would lose, came to him, and hugged him. Her body, taut and muscular, smelled like warm sun. He could not remember the last time he’d been hugged.

She stepped back.

“Be safe,” he said.

She ran towards the edge of the woods, and, just before reaching it, dropped to all fours and moved with the grace and power of a cheetah, her spine curling and springing open, covering ground in twelve-foot leaps. She vanished into the brush.

He returned to his truck, winded from the exertion and wet with sweat. He put his hood back on. Military vehicles circled the shroom’s pole. Amber strobes flashed, and men in hazmat suits set up decontamination gear. He looked up in time to see the shroom convulse. Ropey pink antlers burst out of its skull. The shroom swung its head, rattling the antlers and releasing a pink mist of spores that caught the wind and drifted. The shroom shuddered again, and more thick antlers erupted from its back, growing and branching with astonishing fungal speed. The yellow-suited hazmat team finished their setup, and a jet of flame erupted from the fire gun’s nozzle to engulf the shroom. The antlers crisped, turned black, and broke away.

“Did you call this in?” asked the supervising officer.

“Yeah.”

“Good job. Is your hood cinched down tight?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Okay, as soon as we clean up the scene we are decontaminating the area. You know what that means.”

“I do.”

The shroom fell from the pole, hitting the ground with a wet, hissing splat. Broken pieces rolled away, and the team hosed it down with more fire until the thing turned into a pile of ash. They worked the surrounding area with chemicals. Leaves dissolved and dripped under the chemical attack.

“Fruiting bodies visible upon arrival,” said the supervising officer into his radio. “High concentration of spore release. Wind speed is light and variable. I’m recommending immediate chemical decontamination.”

“Roger that,” squawked the radio. “Chopper is on the way.”

“This is going to be inconvenient,” said the major to himself.

In the hospital isolation ward, he breathed the acrid chemical mist to purge his lungs of any shroom spores that might have infiltrated his lungs. Ventilation fans whirred for a few minutes. He dried himself as best as he could with the paper towels. The sealed door opened.

“Major,” said a nurse. She handed him a paper hospital smock and watched as he dressed. “Would you follow me?”

He followed her, and she drew back a curtain.

“In here, please,” she said.

He sat at the edge of the examining table. The curtain was pulled aside, and the Sisters of Eternal Grace stepped in to pray over him. One of the crones put her bony, knuckled hand on his forehead and tapped him. They rattled their donation can in front of him when they finished. He looked down at the hospital smock.

“I don’t have any pockets.”

The lead sister frowned at him and rattled the can again.

“I don’t . . .”

Her face twisted into an uncharitable grimace of disgust.

The doctor entered. “Get out, hags.”

The sisters scowled in unison but turned on their heels and left in a whirl of gray skirts and sensible shoes.

“You know they are going to bill you for that prayer. The VA will cover their costs, but you should be nice to them; they’re connected like the mob,” said the doctor. “Are you feeling okay? You look like shit.”

He coughed. “I’m okay. Does that stuff work?”

“The shower washes off any spores on your skin, but the mist? No, it just scorches your lungs. The spores are encysted. The prayer is the best treatment.”

“Great.”

“I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his lab coat pocket and took out a bottle of pills, migraine medicine.

“Where did you get them?”

“There are ways, and then there are ways. People need things, and I can get them. How do you think I can help so many?”

“I can’t pay for them.”

“I still owe you.”

“That debt was paid a long time ago.”

“That debt can never be paid, but let me try. You need to be careful.”

“About what?”

“The sampler found chimera hair and skin cells on your clothes.”

“I was wearing old clothes from the war.”

“Yeah, you can try that excuse, but the sampler is more sophisticated than that. It’s the best piece of equipment we have in this hospital, and it is hotwired to the DOFF. They’ll be watching you. You know how they love rooting out heretics and atheists.”

“Yes, and Zionists and Papists and Colored.” Every society needed an underclass to absorb injustice and excess force.

“Do you need a ride home?”

“No, I’ll walk. I need the exercise.”

“You also need some clothes. It’s a long walk.”

“We’ve walked farther on less.”

“Yes, we have. You’re good to go. I’ll have the nurse bring you some clothes. The reverend-director of the hospital will want to stop by and pad your bill with another prayer or two.”

“Prayer is the best medicine.”

“I thought that was laughter.”

“Not anymore.”

Raindrops pummeled the road. He walked into a nightmare landscape of dripping, gray-green slime that coagulated in puddles and ran across the road in sticky, mucosal sheets. The aerial decontamination spray had turned the surrounding woods into a melted, Dalí-esque landscape. The larger trees resembled wilted saguaro, bent and sagging in graceful, bone-less curves. Whip-thin branches of heartwood dripped to the ground. The delicate gray bones of small creatures caught in the dissolving spray littered the sticky ground. His truck remained in the washout. With a jack and boards pulled from the bed of the truck, he managed to extricate it from the ditch and drive home.

Inside his home, he wedged a two-by-four into the cleats to bar the door shut. He showered off the slime of the melted forest. As he dressed, the wind shifted with frontal passage, and the house rocked in another direction. The temperature dropped as the cold front engulfed the house. Bizarre weather typified the new normal. He started a fire in the stone fireplace and hung a battered teakettle over it. Thunder boomed. Hailstones pummeled the roof. The ghosts of his family, trapped and framed above the fireplace, regarded him from a world before the I-War and the Second Civil War.

Another roll of thunder shook the house, and he popped two of the doctor’s pain pills to break up the loci of pain that accreted around the piece of Yankee shrapnel lodged in his head. After a few moments, the white-hot dots of agony abated. He closed his eyes and listened to the crackle of the wood fire and the hiss of boiling water from his kettle.

Someone knocked on the front door. He roused to awareness and fetched his shotgun. He chambered a shell and peered through the glass peephole.