Wild Dog City (Darkeye Volume 1) (35 page)

"Tonight?"

"Yes," said Biscuit. "If you meet me at the
south end of Wide Street after the moon has set, I'll guide you
there. We shouldn't find any trouble at that time."

Mhumhi thought it over carefully. The offer
seemed valid- there did not seem to be any obvious suspicious
signs- but he was still uneasy.

"Fine," he said. "But I'll be bringing my
sister."

Biscuit hesitated for only a fraction of a
second. "Good. I want to meet her again anyway."

No, thought Mhumhi, amused in spite of
himself, you might not.

The Caged
Skull

"I still don't think we need him," Kutta
growled.

She had said this a few times before, that
night, but now she seemed to feel the need to say it particularly
loudly, as Biscuit was slinking along ahead of her, rump tucked
low. Mhumhi did not bother to contradict her. Rather, he walked
beside her with his tail waving and his tongue hanging out.

He had got Kutta to agree to go with him with
little difficulty, especially after she had learned that they would
be traveling with the domestic; he suspected she'd been looking
forward to an opportunity to vent some of her frustration. She had
even suggested to Mhumhi that they go without any intention of
moving the puppies at all and instead shove Biscuit into one of his
master's snares. Mhumhi had not been entirely sure whether this was
in jest or not.

Biscuit had responded to her aggression by
reverting to the state in which they'd first seen him- the
overly-humbled, pathetic creature that had been cowed by a golden
jackal. Mhumhi had been thinking that it had all just been an act,
but now he wondered if it was just a state that came naturally to
him.

Regardless of it all he had to admit that
Biscuit had been a great help to them. Maha and Tareq had reacted
to the cardboard box with delight and had devoured its contents
with gusto. The contents within appeared to be little crunchy bars
formed with something sticky and sweet. Maha had offered one to
Mhumhi, but it had just gotten stuck in his teeth.

Biscuit suddenly stopped short, and Mhumhi
and Kutta froze. There was a streetlamp nearby and Mhumhi just
caught a glimpse of a dark-furred tail as he heard the retreating
sound of pattering paws.

"It's a Darwin's fox," muttered Kutta. "D'you
think he saw us?"

"He saw me," said Biscuit. "But I think it's
all right. If he dares to try and fetch anyone, we'll be well away
by the time he gets back."

"They could track us," Mhumhi pointed
out.

"Then don't pee on anything," said Biscuit.
Kutta gave him a yellow-eyed stare for this and he resumed tucking
his tail and slinking.

"You're going to scare him off," Mhumhi
murmured to her. "I think we should look at the place, at
least."

"I won't tell you what I'm thinking," Kutta
replied, not bothering to keep her voice down.

They went on, slipping through the shadows
and skirting streetlamps. Biscuit was leading them somewhat out of
Oldtown, though by the opposite way that Mhumhi and Kutta had gone
to encounter the wolves in the giant store. Mhumhi thought they
might be getting close to Zoo Park, in his hazy mental map. He was
glad his back leg had been feeling better, and Kutta seemed to be
keeping up all right despite her cough. The journey was dredging up
unpleasant memories of the night after Sacha had died.

The area they were traveling through was full
of squat, featureless brick buildings, sort of like the school.
Occasionally there were also shiner, more modern-looking buildings
that put Mhumhi in mind of the dispensary. Biscuit had led them to
leap over several short chain-link fences to enter the area, and
now Mhumhi saw that there were numerous little kiosks with wooden
partitions like the one he and Kutta had seen near the parking
garage.

"Do you know what this place is called?" he
asked Biscuit, trotting a little to catch up with him.

"They call the main street Silent Street,"
said Biscuit. "The buildings here are shut very tight and no one
can get in them, so few dogs come here. Lamya told me it was
'high-security.'"

"Did she," said Kutta, in a clipped way.
Mhumhi wagged his tail a tad nervously.

They came to another fence, this one very
tall with barbed wire at the top. Biscuit sniffed along the length
of it until they came to the gate, then rose and pushed it open
with his weight. There was a cut padlock dangling from the clasp;
Mhumhi glanced at it uncomprehendingly.

"It's this building," said Biscuit, and
walked along the brick wall until they came to a little patch of
dirt. Here he spent a good long while sniffing about until he
suddenly began digging. Mhumhi and Kutta watched him blankly.

"Is he planning on digging his way inside?"
Kutta asked.

Biscuit stuck his nose in the dirt and came
out with something small in his teeth. He dropped it on the ground
in front of himself- it was a small white card.

"This is important," he said. "This is how
you get in. I'll show you."

He picked the card up again and led them back
through the gate around to the front of the building, where there
was a solid-looking door. Next to the door was nailed a featureless
gray pad, and underneath that, a smaller blue pad with a white
squiggle on it. Biscuit reared up next to the grey pad with the
card in his mouth. Something beeped, and a light flashed. He
glanced back at Mhumhi and Kutta significantly- they were both
still entirely bewildered- and pushed on the blue pad with both
paws.

Much to their surprise, the door swung open
seamlessly.

Biscuit dropped the card to speak again.

"This unlocks the door, and then you must
push a button," he said. "I think you understand how hard it would
be for an ordinary wild dog to figure it out, and if you take the
key, they still wouldn't be able to do it."

"'An ordinary wild dog,'" Kutta muttered.

Mhumhi asked, "What if we don't have the
key?"

"Then you can't get in," said Biscuit. "Don't
lose it. The humans that were with my companions had a difficult
time finding it to begin with."

"Then how did you come across it?" asked
Kutta.

"When the wild dogs took them, one of the
humans dropped it," he told her. "They did not give it a second
glance. After they were all gone, I came and got it and buried it
here for safekeeping."

"Lucky for you."

"Lucky for us," Mhumhi said, nudging her with
his shoulder.

The heavy metal door began to slowly swing
closed, and Biscuit jumped to his feet.

"Come on," he said, snatching up the white
card in his jaws again, and they followed him inside.

The door swung shut behind them, cutting off
what little light there was from the streetlamps. Mhumhi blinked
for a moment in the darkness. The only light came from faint
stripes on the ground up ahead.

They heard the clatter of Biscuit dropping
the card to talk again.

"There's a light switch somewhere around
here, but I can't remember where it is. Step carefully- it's
cluttered."

Mhumhi realized he was right when he
immediately ran into something hard. It felt and smelled like a
large, heavy cardboard box. There seemed to be stacks of them all
around the room, creating a sort of maze; when Mhumhi tried to
navigate it, the faint stripes of light completely disappeared.

The three of them bumped around for a minute.
The place smelled strongly of paper, Mhumhi thought, and there was
a kind of strange moistness in the air. He could hear water
trickling somewhere nearby.

"I found the light," Biscuit called, and
Mhumhi squeezed his eyes shut just in time before the place lit up
in a dazzle of white.

"Mhumhi!" called Kutta, and he squinted in
the brightness to see her teetering on top of a short stack of
boxes. "There you are, I completely lost you."

She jumped down. One of the boxes followed
her with a sloppy-sounding thud. Papers slid out of it in great
piles.

"Be careful!" Biscuit snapped. "Those papers
are very important to the humans-"

"I'll piss on them if you talk to me like
that again," said Kutta, and he pressed his jaws shut. Mhumhi took
the opportunity to nose at the papers, but he saw no pictures on
any of them. Just more of the blurry black squiggles that Maha had
said could talk to her.

"Come on, Mhumhi," Kutta called, leaping
lightly over another box and spoiling the effect when she had to
cough. "This way."

He followed her, scrambling and scratching
over the boxes. Biscuit was walking through a doorway ahead of them
that led into a long hallway with doors on either side. Down this
way, the ever-present trickling seemed to get even louder. Mhumhi
rotated his ears, trying to pinpoint it. It was coming from
somewhere ahead and to their left.

As they left the room with boxes behind them
it got dimmer again. They were passing windows with blinds over
them, lit up by an outside security light; the source of the
stripes of light on the floor. Mhumhi could see flickering shadows
cast on the hallway wall, waving patterns. The air felt wet and
heavy.

Biscuit led them around the corner and
stopped. When Mhumhi followed him, he saw why: the room ahead of
them was partially flooded, water just starting to slop over the
doorstop. From the paneled ceiling above he could hear a faint
trickling sound, and in several places there were dark spots that
dripped.

Biscuit gave a soft whine. "A pipe must have
burst! This was not here when I last came…"

"Not such a good hiding place anymore, then,"
said Kutta.

"A human's hands can easily fix this sort of
thing," said Biscuit, though he kept his tail tucked. He stepped
gingerly into the shallow water, which seemed to be no deeper than
a puddle.

"Why are you going down there?" Mhumhi asked,
eyeing the water doubtfully. It looked clean, but he was never in a
hurry to get his paws wet.

"There's another thing I wanted to show you,"
Biscuit said. "Another reason it would be good for the children to
stay here. It isn't far…"

Kutta exchanged a look with Mhumhi, but
Mhumhi went ahead and stepped into the water. It was surprisingly
cold.

They followed Biscuit through the room. It
was a sort of odd room, with a lot of low counters and sinks. There
were a great many wheeled chairs, several lying on their sides.
They smelled like rotten fabric from the water, and Mhumhi saw that
there was pale yellow moss growing on several of them, creeping
upwards.

There were a lot of things on the counters
that he could not identify- large plastic boxes, clear plastic
tubes, paper tacked to the walls. Biscuit went to flick the light
switch with his nose, but it appeared that the water had shorted
it, for they only heard a crackling sound somewhere above. They
were left in a peculiar wet gloom, the shuttered windows letting in
thin bands of light, and the water casting flickering shadows on
the walls.

There were several more doors leading out of
the flooded room, and Mhumhi stopped short at one of them.

"Look, Kutta," he said, and she turned her
head. The door opened to a room that held a rack of cages.

"Not that way," Biscuit said, coming back
towards them, but Mhumhi went forward curiously, sniffing. There
was water dripping in here, and drops were slithering down the
metal, which was beginning to rust in spots. But it was not
flooded- the floor had a drain in it.

Mhumhi stepped into one of the open cages,
sniffing- it was quite large. There was a vague scent about it, not
one he really recognized, more of a suggestion of history, of
something that had been forgotten.

"Look, Mhumhi," Kutta called, and he stepped
out of the cage and joined her in front of another. This one was
shut, and there was a little plastic dish tacked on the outside,
and a plate on the front that Mhumhi couldn't read.

Kutta was looking further in, where there was
a small pile of bones.

"Something died in here," she said.

"It must have been a long time ago," said
Mhumhi, peering at them- they were in the corner, and covered in
what seemed to be a thick layer of dust.

"Those have always been here," said Biscuit,
who had come up behind them. "At least, as far as I know. Must be
from before…" He trailed off, seeming reluctant to say more, but
Mhumhi thought he knew the event he was referring to.

"They must have come from a big dog," said
Kutta, eyeing a long pale femur.

Mhumhi reared up to get a better look and was
surprised to feel the metal front of the cage sliding under his
paws.

"It's not even secured," he said, getting
down, and used his nose to push it the rest of the way open.

"Be careful, Mhumhi," said Kutta, tail
raising as he entered to sniff the bones. He did feel a brief pang
of anxiety- what had led someone to die here, in an unlocked
cage?

But the bones were quiet, calm even, gently
nestled together, like their owner had been curled up. Mhumhi nosed
through the dust and sneezed.

"It wasn't a dog," he said, and picked up the
skull in his teeth to show them. It was domed, the muzzle flat.

"A hulker!" exclaimed Kutta. Biscuit said
nothing, though he glanced away.

Mhumhi put the skull down, grimacing a bit
from the dusty taste of it.

"If you're done," said Biscuit, "what I
wanted to show you is back this way."

Mhumhi and Kutta exchanged another look, for
the domestic's tone had been strange, but there were no obvious
conclusions they could draw from it. They followed him together
back out of the cage room, Kutta drawing her brushy tail along
Mhumhi's side to comfort him, or perhaps to comfort herself.

What Biscuit wanted to show them seemed to be
at the very back of the long room, on a wall upon which was
suspended a strange rack of hanging metal frames. Each frame was
cross-divided into a number of tiny sections, and there were masses
of wires running from it in every direction, some lying in the
water on the floor. Mhumhi gazed at it without comprehension.