Dog Warrior

by Wen Spencer

To David G. Kosak,

little brother of my heart

CHAPTER ONE

Ludlow Service Area, Massachusetts Turnpike,

Massachusetts

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Atticus smelled the blood first.

He'd parked the Jaguar under the floodlights, and he had just paused, door open, his cup of hot cocoa on the roof, in order to pull off his leather jacket before climbing back into the still-warm car. A blue Honda sedan came cautiously into the rest stop from the dark highway. The bitter cold wind blasted over the Honda and brought him the reek of slaughter .

He tracked the car's movements without looking directly at it. It paused at the decision point of turning into the parking lot or going on to the gas pumps, the right turn signal flashing a yellow warning. There were four people in the car, three men and a woman. The woman was leaning over the front seat, pointing toward the retro-styled McDonald's with the large yellow arches. Atticus turned his back to the Honda as the driver scanned the parking lot.

On the other side of the Jaguar, Ru picked up on his unease. "The Honda?" Ru pretended to ignore the sedan, seemingly focused on the coffee cup in his hands, tracking the car only with his dark eyes.

"Yes." Focusing on his sense of smell, Atticus grew aware of the Jaguar's hot engine, oil spilled on the asphalt nearby, food cooking in the McDonald's, the taint of the ocean a hundred miles away, and massive amounts of old blood. "They've got something dead in the trunk."

"Ah." Ru sipped his steaming coffee. "Things like that are always a bitch to explain."

"Do you see anything weird about it, Ru?"

The car cooperated and turned into the parking lot. The driver carefully used proper signals and slowly pulled into a nice dark corner of the parking lot, tucked behind an RV.

" Nada." Ru shrugged one lean shoulder, his black bangs falling into his eyes. "Maybe I need a closer look." Ru finished his coffee and walked to a trash can across the parking lot.

Atticus leaned into his car to place his hot cocoa into the front cup holder.

The woman all but bolted from the Honda, hunched over, clutching at her stomach, her face set in pain. She concentrated on walking, eyes focused on the ground. The men followed, intent on the woman, worried. All four were in their early twenties, wearing black running suits with jackets zipped over pistols in shoulder holsters. They smelled faintly of gunpowder, smoke, scorched hair, burned flesh, and blood.

The men had ignored Atticus, half-hidden in the Jaguar, but glared at Ru as he casually stuffed his empty cup into the trash can. Ru read the bulges under the jackets and the tense body language and didn't play any mind games with them. He studiously ignored them, walking back to the Jaguar, pulling on his leather gloves.

"A seriously scary foursome." Ru unzipped his jacket slightly, giving him access to his own gun, as the four vanished into the McDonald's. "I say we see what they've got in their trunk." He made a show of sniffing. "I'm sure I can smell blood now."

Atticus scoffed at the claim, while he considered the car parked upwind. More than the blood, there was a weird niggling feeling that something was drastically wrong with the car. It seemed to exude terror. How could a car feel afraid?

Ru rapped on the roof, his lock picks in hand. "They're not going to be in there very long!" he sang.

Atticus glanced toward the McDonald's. "Let's do it."

He shut the Jaguar's door and walked after Ru, keeping watch on the building.

Ru had the trunk open before Atticus even reached the car, murmuring. "Bingo: one body." Ru stripped off his right glove and reached bare fingertips to the body's neck. "Question is, is he really dead or just—Oh, fuck."

Atticus looked then. The trunk light shone on a young Native American face, battered and bloody, vaguely familiar.

I know this person,Atticus thought with a lurch.

"Atty," Ru whispered. "This is you."

"What? Well, there's a resemblance—"

"Atty, I've seen you dead enough times to recognize your body. This is you. Look, there's blood mice."

This was directed at small forms darting for new cover as Ru shifted the body slightly.

They're just normal black mice,Atticus thought at first. He'd long resigned himself to being a freak of nature; the one-in-a-trillion result of the genetics game played with billions of combinations over millions of years. Like the Elephant Man, he'd been oddly malformed, only his monstrosity remained hidden down on the cellular level.

Then he realized that he could feelthe mice—little motes of terror moving through his awareness.

They're why the car feels afraid.He looked again at the dead body with the familiar face. His face—just at an angle he wasn't used to viewing. He's like me?Atticus laid his hand on the boy's cheek. The flesh was cold to touch, but it was his skin, his cells, his DNA. It felt like half his body was dead and being examined by a part still alive. He jerked his hand back.

"We've got to get him out," Ru was saying. "And into the Jaguar."

He's not" like" me, he is me!Numb, Atticus slowly shook his head. "We call nine-one-one."

"Atty, if we call nine-one-one, they'll take him to the morgue and do an autopsy."

Atticus shuddered at the idea of being not completely dead, but entirely helpless. "We don't know if he'll come back to life."

Ru shook his head. "If he's like you, it's going to take him hours to heal up from this kind of damage. But if he can recover, and we let the coroners take him . . ."

"Oh, fuck." That didn't bear even thinking through. "Okay. Get the Jag."

Atticus would guess the boy to be twenty at most, but Atticus had aged strangely, still looking to be in his teens when he was nearly thirty. Even now Atticus could pass for mid-twenty. Hair as crow black as his own, but long enough for a braid down past the shoulder blades. Boots with a crease mark from shifting motorcycle gears across the top of the left foot. Blue jeans incrusted with road dirt and dead blood. A black T-shirt with small bullet holes punched into the chest. Powder burns indicated the boy had been shot at close range. His arms were handcuffed behind his back, where the bullets had shredded part of the design on the leather jacket. Only the words "Dog Warrior" remained.

Who the hell is this? Why did they kill him?

The damage had been done by more than just bullets. Road dirt, abrasions, paint, and shattered bones indicated that the boy had been hit by a car first. Judging by the angle of entry for the bullets, he'd been lying prone when shot. Oddly, his killers had bound his feet and handcuffed him after he'd died. They'd done a thorough job murdering the boy, but if he was like Atticus, it wouldn't be enough to keep him dead.

Pulling on his leather gloves, Atticus took the handcuffs and jacket off the boy, leaving them as evidence on the bloody carpet. Ru pulled the Jaguar in beside the Honda and popped the trunk but left the motor running.

"Good compromise," Ru said of the jacket and handcuffs. "I need to move the bags. Here." He held out a small cage. "Don't forget the mice."