Wild Dog City (Darkeye Volume 1) (5 page)

Sacha hopped from the counter down to the
scratched old table, onto a chair, and down to the floor.

"I feel better keeping an eye on her," she
told Mhumhi. "She's been wandering off lately, and she hasn't been
giving Keb much meat, either. Doesn't it make you wonder?"

"Wonder what?" said Mhumhi, turning so that
his front paws dangled off the edge of the couch.

"If she's met somebody," said Sacha. "If
she's thinking of splitting off."

Mhumhi was shocked. "Sacha!"

"Well, I don't know what else would make her
act this way," Sacha grumbled, furrowing her brow. Mhumhi looked at
her a moment, then stepped down off the couch to nose at her
shoulder.

"Kutta just likes to run around. Don't worry
about her, she's not going to leave anytime soon."

"It would be
good
if she did," said
Sacha, turning her nose up and away. "For her. To be with her own
kind, I suppose."

Mhumhi licked her tiny ears, saying nothing.
Now he was beginning to feel rather guilty.

"Mhumhi," called Bii, over by the door.
"Let's go now. We don't want to have to wait in line too long."

Mhumhi looked over at Bii, who he was feeling
somewhat less kindly towards today. He'd been woken up to the loud
crunching sound of the fox sitting up next to him devouring a large
cockroach. When pressed, he had admitted he'd pawed it out from the
underside of the toilet hole.

Still, a dog had to eat, after all. Mhumhi
tried to let go of his negative feelings as he trotted beside the
fox down the street, where the morning crowd was amassing. He
spotted his fennec neighbor sitting in his storm drain, yawning.
Mhumhi gave his tail a friendly wave and the fox blinked at him a
moment before vanishing back into the darkness.

Even though it was still early morning it was
shimmering hot in the streets, the last of the previous day's rain
vanishing into a haze above the hot asphalt. The dogs around Mhumhi
were all trotting with ears back and tongues hanging out, a crowd
of lean legs and small white teeth. There were a few growls as more
and more dogs fed into the crowd, but it was too hot to really
fight.

Mhumhi still stood out as the largest animal,
though as they got towards the edge of Oldtown there were more and
more larger ones. A family of rotund raccoon dogs trundled up to
join the fray, and a pair of thin black-backed jackals were
squabbling outside their door while a third panted on the sidewalk.
Mhumhi smelled the sickly-sweet musk long before a maned wolf,
leggy and ruffled-looking, stepped warily over several smaller dogs
and into the crowd. She was taller than Mhumhi, but she cringed
nervously away at the sight of him. He kept his white-flagged tail
waving high.

Oldtown's crowded apartments and townhouses
soon gave way to larger buildings, squat and flat like the one that
had housed the subway station. Some of the dogs spilled through a
gap in a chain-link fence surrounding a playground, startling a
family of Rüppell's foxes that had taken refuge underneath the
roundabout into furious, sleepy yapping. Mhumhi could see movement
within the darkened and shuttered windows of the school beside
it.

There were old cars here, too, scattered and
parked permanently in different areas along the roadside. Some of
them had their windows broken in and served as makeshift dens for
the smaller and less lucky dogs, but mostly they served as vantage
points, especially as the crowd continued to swell. Mhumhi broke
away from Bii for a moment to bound on top of a sedan, paws
thumping dully on the metal, adding dusty pawprints to the dozens
that were already there.

Beyond he could see the line where Oldtown
ended and the rest of the city began. Far off there were
skyscrapers, some square, some spiraling. The rest of the city fell
into a kind of dip and formed a vast basin of buildings and metal
winking and shimmering in the sunlight. There seemed to be no end
to it at all. Mhumhi looked out to his left, where far in the
distance he could see a large flat patch of yellow and brown: that
was Big Park.

"Come on," Bii called, putting his paws on
the car's fender, and Mhumhi leapt down.

Their final destination was along the street
they called Wide Street, for it was exceptionally wide compared to
the single and two-lane streets that wound through Oldtown. Across
the massive intersection a single traffic light lay on the ground
like a dead thing, glass lights long shattered. The rest still hung
on their tall wire, flicking through colors for the carless
streets. A narrow lane of gleaming solar panels stretched high
above them; Mhumhi caught a glimpse of a lone fox running across
it.

The horde of dogs hit Wide Street and fanned
out, filling it with their grumbles and yaps. On the other side of
the road there was a massive building, its tall walls a clean and
gleaming mismatch to the dirty, tired buildings of Oldtown. It had
a base of blue and white, and above that rose black metal struts
and tall windows of blackened glass. Narrow concrete booths
protruded every few feet along the outer wall.

The dogs organized themselves into rough
queues behind each of these booths. Many were growling now, as
impatience mounted; puppies yapped and whined next to their
parents. The tall maned wolf cringed more than ever as her much
shorter neighbors jostled her on both sides.

Mhumhi, panting from the heat of the sun and
the streets and the commingled dogs, helped guide Bii to a spot in
one of the queues. He was relieved to see that it wasn't terribly
far back from the booth.

A sharp scent pricked at him, and he turned
to see a three large dogs sitting together atop a parked car,
surveying the crowd. Painted dogs, police dogs. Mhumhi, standing
out in the crowd of little dogs and foxes, tried to make himself
look small and solid-colored. Liduma, the head police dog for
Oldtown, sometimes liked to give him a hard time.

Abruptly a loud tone rang out, and from
beyond the gleaming black glass, something hissed and ground to a
start. Several dogs responded to it with eager whines and howls,
and the line began to move.

Mhumhi had been to this meat dispensary a
thousand times, though he had never really understood it. Somewhere
behind that brick and featureless glass lay a vast store of meat.
No dog had yet been able to penetrate one of the dispensaries, but
they had little need to. The meat was delivered to them regularly,
once a day, one portion per dog.

As each dog took its turn and stood inside
the booth, the slider clicked and hissed out of the rubber lips in
the wall, bearing a package wrapped in opaque white plastic. The
air was soon filled with the sound of hissing and the smell of
bloodless meat as each dog carried its package away in its jaws to
devour in a more secluded area.

A fight broke out on one of the nearby
scales- a coyote had snatched the meat from a little corsac fox,
which was squealing furiously. Immediately one of the painted dogs
bounded down from the car. At the sight of it the coyote dropped
the meat and darted away. The painted dog wheeled around,
scattering the crowd, and hopped back up onto the car.

Mhumhi was caught up staring, but Bii nipped
his heel- it was his turn. Hastily he loped over into the booth,
claws clicking. The bottom of the booth was a metal scale that
depressed underneath him as he stepped onto it. He ducked down and
pressed his nose against a black button set in the wall.

A metal slider hissed and emerged smoothly
from the wall, bearing a painted dog-sized hank of meat in a
plastic wrapper. Mhumhi tugged it loose from its hook and stood to
one side as Bii hopped up on the scale and reared to brush his nose
against the button. The slider retracted back into the wall and
returned a moment later with a much smaller package.

"Let's get out of the crowd," he called to
Mhumhi as he leapt up to snatch it.

They squeezed back through the crowd, earning
hungry looks- the rest of the dogs in line had yet to eat, and more
were still squeezing onto Wide Street. Bii flicked his tail and led
Mhumhi underneath a ramp held up with round concrete columns. There
were a smattering of other dogs lurking there already, and they
were greeted with growls, but Mhumhi's appearance was enough to
keep them unmolested.

Mhumhi found an empty spot in the shadows and
tore through the plastic on his package. As always, the malleable
stuff got stuck to his teeth and on the roof of his mouth. He
curled his lips and scraped the roof of his mouth with his
tongue.

Bii was having an easier time of it with his
needle-sharp teeth. He sliced a neat line through his wrapper and
tugged it fully back, exposing the pale, bloodless meat. Mhumhi
started salivating at the sight, which didn't help him much in
trying to get a grip on the slippery plastic.

"I can help you," Bii offered, watching him
struggle, but Mhumhi warned him with a soft growl. He hooked his
teeth onto one corner and stepped on the package to squeeze the
squashy stuff out of the hole he'd made. He gobbled it as Bii
watched.

"Don't you ever get tired of eating the same
thing every day?"

Mhumhi swallowed his mouthful and licked his
chops. "There's nothing else to eat."

That was not strictly true- if a dog was
clever enough to bargain, he could gain access to fruit from the
Great Glass Garden that sat above the center of the city. But
Mhumhi rarely desired any of the stuff, and it was never quite so
filling as meat.

Mhumhi finished his portion and went on to
devour Bii's little packet as well. It felt like a negligible
addition to his stomach, and he found himself rather cross at the
prospect of having to give much of it up again.

He licked his chops again and sat down, fully
intending to digest a moment, but Bii was waving his tail.

"Let's go, Mhumhi. We'll want to hurry back.
Aren't you and Kutta going somewhere today?"

"What makes you think that?" Mhumhi said,
springing back to his feet, though his full belly protested. "Were
you-"

"Listening? Not intentionally." Bii laughed,
and rotated his overlarge ears forward. "I'm afraid you'll have to
go further than the next room for me not to hear you. I would have
warned you, but I didn't know the house would have secret
conferences."

Mhumhi wavered there nervously, one canine
exposed, until Bii added, "I don't plan to do anything about it. I
don't have any stake in what you and Kutta do, or in getting on
your bad side."

"What about Sacha's bad side?" asked Mhumhi,
relaxing a little.

"I think that's the only side she has," said
Bii, briefly drawing his lips back in a tiny, devilish grin.

Mhumhi wagged his tail, reassured, though the
thought tugged at him that what stakes Bii himself had were as
mysterious as the inside of the meat dispensary.

They made their way back through to the heart
of Oldtown. The streets were much quieter now, as the flood of dogs
leaving had turned into a slow trickle of dogs returning. Mhumhi
kept an eye on Bii, who was starting to limp worse, debating on
whether or not he should offer to carry him again.

Quite suddenly Bii stopped dead in his
tracks, and Mhumhi nearly tripped over him. The fox had led them on
a short cut through a dim back alley filled with blue dumpsters on
the way to Food Strip Street. Bii was fixated towards the sunny
intersection ahead of them.

"What's the matter? Is it your leg?"

Bii did not respond right away, just stood
there with his ears forward and the fur on his back rising.

"I don't know what it is," he said, "but it's
coming towards us."

Mhumhi was puzzled. "What, it's a dog, isn't
it? How big is it?"

"Very big," said Bii, quivering, and then he
turned and squeezed into the tiny gap between the nearest dumpster
and the brick wall.

"You should hide too," came his strained
voice. "It's coming faster. Hurry, Mhumhi!"

Mhumhi, bewildered, turned and sniffed
towards the street. All he could make out was dog… and meat… and a
faint scent of blood. He quivered slightly. Ordinarily he would
have thought nothing of the three together, but Bii's fear was
catching. He ran around to the front of the dumpster, thinking he'd
jump into it, but the heavy lid was shut tight. He dithered,
plainly visible in the middle of the alley, and briefly considered
abandoning Bii entirely for a sprint in the opposite direction.

He deliberated too long, and now
his
ears caught the sound of it, big and round as they were. He
understood why it had frightened Bii. It was a slow, shuffling,
scraping gait that sounded like no dog he'd ever heard. And it
definitely came from a very large animal. Larger than him.

Mhumhi, tail tucked as far up against his
belly as it would go, slunk to the other side of Bii's dumpster,
shaking, and pressed himself against the juncture between the metal
and brick. Maybe the thing would pass right by the alley, not go
in.

The shuffle-scrape continued, growing closer,
pausing… Mhumhi was drooling now, out of fright. It entered the
alley.

He heard its footsteps, and swallowed
convulsively, pressing himself as far back as he could into the
shadow. It had such a heavy tread, its paws must have been huge-
and that scraping sound, that must be something
dragging
-
Mhumhi was suddenly able to visualize it: a massive dog, badly
wounded, dragging its heavy back legs behind it as it staggered on
its front paws. Now that it was closer, it smelled like death.

He squeezed his eyes shut as he heard it
start to pass the dumpster. He hadn't any idea what state Bii was
in now, jammed into that little crevice. He did not know why he was
so frightened. A dog was only a dog, and it sounded injured at
that, so what did he have to fear? Why was his heart hammering so
rapidly?