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November 19
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ometimes I don’t know how we can bear to have dogs around us,” Coralie said. She scratched the cocker spaniel on the head and grinned when the dog began thumping her little stump of a tail. Some soldiers had found Maddy and Toby wandering outside the base. They had clearly once been sheltered pets, likely left behind when their humans fled. The base adopted the dogs as unlikely mascots, and now Maddy was days away from having puppies.
“It’s not like the aliens really are all that dog-like. We just call them Dogs,” replied Lewis.
Coralie rolled her eyes. “I think we can all admit that names carry a certain amount of importance.”
“Not that much importance. I can call the aliens toilet paper, but I’ll still use it when I need to wipe my ass,” Lewis said.
Jen regarded their empty trays as she pushed her food around with her fork, making a small haystack with her green beans. Without thinking before she spoke, she said, “Well, the Dogs do have some canine qualities about them. Their round eyes. Their placid natures when treated well. Their social hierarchy. They give birth in litters.”
Coralie and Lewis looked at her and Lewis tried to smile, but the conversation died. After waiting a bit, Jen decided to call it a night. She had been working many long days and often found it hard simply walking up a hallway without feeling exhausted. Best to have an early night.
Making her way towards her barracks, she stared ahead so that she would not glance at the speckled floor tiles or the cinderblock walls. Lately, anything with asymmetric patterns or textures caused her to semi-hallucinate. She would look at the sponge-like holes on the cinderblocks and her brain would matrix Stan or Amy’s face. It was hard to tune it out because it happened on a strictly subconscious level. She saw their faces in everything—toast, cooked oatmeal, tree bark.
Back in her barracks, Jen grabbed the pail that held her shampoo and soap and took a shower in the women’s communal bathroom. She combed her wet hair without looking in the mirror so she wouldn’t have to see the bags under her eyes or the worry lines on her forehead. She changed into sweat pants and a t-shirt that had become far too loose over the last six weeks and flopped onto her bed, desperate for sleep but unable to relax. She looked up at a picture of Stan and Amy, perched on a shelf above her cot, then took it down and put it in her footlocker. Since she saw them constantly anyway, the picture seemed superfluous.
November 26
Jen was deep in her examination when Lewis finally got her attention. The whoosh of air in her pressurized suit made it difficult to hear but she should have been keeping an eye on the EKG. When she saw Lewis on the other side of the glass, waving his arms, jumping up and down to get her attention, she looked over at the EKG. It was flat and she had no idea how long it had been that way. She looked at the dark-skinned Dog on the table and noticed that his eyes were closed.
She dropped the scalpel on the equipment tray and pushed the gurney into a small, enclosed chamber within the operating room. She secured the Dog inside the chamber, a make-shift cryogenic freezer, closed the door quickly and turned the valve that released liquid nitrogen.
She staggered to the exit and punched in her five-digit code to open the door. She waited for the red light to change to green. After 10 seconds, she realized she must have punched in the wrong code. She’d been doing that a lot lately, confusing her locker combination for door codes. She re-entered a series of numbers and that time the green light flickered and the door slid open, closing behind her. She exhaled deeply and looked over at Lewis. The look on his face told her how fine she had cut it. He helped her take off her helmet.
“Damn, Jen. You really need to start paying more attention,” he said.
“I know, I know. How long had he been flat lining before I saw you?”
“Close to a minute.”
Jen’s hand flew up and covered her mouth. How could she have been so inside her own mind, so completely cut off from the reality of what she was doing? She listened as Lewis used the intercom to call the clean-up crew to let them know they would soon have another frozen Dog to take to the deep freeze. Jen could not stand to be there a moment longer and turned to leave without even saying goodbye.
But before she made it to the door, Lewis spoke again. “So, does it look like the sugar is working?”
“Yeah, it does. The kidney was pink, not bright red.”
“Well, that’s something, right?” he asked.
“Only if someone can figure out how we’re going to make billions of aliens eat pounds of sugar before we kill them.” Lewis shrugged, and then settled in front of his computer monitor, making notes so he could issue a report on the day’s work.
Once his back was to her, Jen exited the observation room and went into the locker room. Laila, a member of the research team, was there to help her remove her bulky space suit. Jen hated wearing it and questioned its necessity. To be sure, if she did not get the Dogs into the cryogenic chamber in time, she would die immediately were she not wearing the suit. The suit, with its own oxygen supply, would protect her from the gases the Dogs emitted upon death, giving her a chance to get away and warn others.
But that didn’t eliminate the fact that if she didn’t freeze a dead Dog in time, warning or no warning, the gas would eventually kill everyone on the base. Still, it made everyone feel better to do the research when wearing the protective space suits, identical to those worn by CDC workers dealing with deadly viruses. The more buffers they had between themselves and the reality of their work in the operating rooms, the easier the tasks seemed to be.
Laila busied herself putting the suit away, giving Jen time to shower and dress, but once Jen was back in her civilian clothes, Laila could not help herself. “I heard what happened out there. That’s what? The third time this week you zoned out?”
“Yeah, it is. I need to pay more attention.”
Laila sighed. “It’s not that easy, though. Is it?”
“I don’t have time for this, Laila,” Jen said.
“What do you mean?” Laila’s forehead was creased into a look of curiosity that was so feigned that Jen laughed.
“Laila, you had less than a month left when the invasion started. Yet you re-enlisted in the Army in order to fight the Dogs, and two years later here you stand, criticizing what we do!”
“Come on, Jen! Haven’t you ever thought that there could be a better way?”
Jen cut her off. There was no way she would have this conversation again. “If there’s a better way to do this, I would love to know!” Laila said nothing. “Thought so! Until you have some alternative, maybe you should give the indignation a rest!”
“How about we suspend research until we can track down some knock-out agents,” Laila murmured. Jen heard her as if she had shouted it but wouldn’t dignify it with an answer. No one had any idea how to find medical supplies. Did a real supply chain even exist anymore? Laila understood those facts as well as anyone else. She glared at the woman and stomped out of the locker room before she found herself spitting in Laila’s face.
On the way back to her barracks, she passed the entrance into the rec room they had all christened the Decompression Chamber. As she walked by, she heard a voice call out, “Hey Jen! Maddy had her puppies! Come have a look.” Jen turned around and walked back to the Chamber where a crowd had gathered around a large cardboard carton. Inside was Maddy, with five newborn pups on the teat and Maddy, far from being an uptight new mom, seemed to be reveling in the attention.
When Jen picked up one of the tiny, meeping puppies, she held it close to her chest so it could feel her heartbeat. She cupped her hands around it and once it felt secure, it stopped making noises. When it started suckling air, she returned it to Maddy and scratched behind the dog’s ears. Though the pups raised everyone’s spirits, the conversation inevitably turned back to real life. “I wonder what will happen to them if we don’t turn this around?” someone said, a soldier Jen did not know by name.
“Yeah, it’s hard to think that in a month Maddy may not have anyone to look after her,” said yet another soldier. Though that was her cue to leave—because really, she could not take anymore of the endless speculations—Jen knew no one should worry about Maddy, Toby or the puppies. The aliens liked dogs a lot. Maddy would be in no worse hands with the aliens, just different ones.
November 27
Jen slept fitfully for about five hours and awoke to a loudspeaker announcement, piped into her room at an unbearably high volume: “Gen. Pearson wants all research personnel in the medical wing meeting room at 0800 hours!” She groaned at the thought of dealing with the old gasbag. He traveled back and forth between the research facility and an Army base in San Antonio, and his visits inspired in her only irritation and dread. She often wondered how such a moron had made it to General, but then she remembered that most of the armed forces were dead in America. Hell, most of the armed forces were dead throughout the world. Pearson had probably been a staff sergeant when the invasion began.
Jen knew that many were not suited for the jobs they were doing. The entire world seemed to have become one scattered, ad hoc committee trying to save humanity. She realized that as much as she thought Gen. Pearson was an idiot, there were those who questioned her own credentials. He was probably as lost as she was at times and covered up his fear with bluster. Still, looking at the situation philosophically only helped so much. Jen hated the man, and she suspected the feeling was mutual.
Jen deliberately dawdled so that she would be the last person arriving. Though she was the ostensible leader of the base’s research team, the less time she had to spend in there, waiting for the meeting to begin, the better. She would rather put a bullet in her brain than speak needlessly of the project in pre-meeting chitchat. In many ways, Jen was at a disadvantage. Unlike most of the people on the base, she had never served in the military. She had been recruited after Nebraska fell, sought after as one of the top endocrinologists left alive in the USA, the last shot they had at unlocking the metabolic mysteries of the Dogs. In the real world, she would have walked out on most of the meetings Gen. Pearson called, but she wasn’t in the real world anymore and it grated her nerves.
Her ploy worked and she arrived just as Gen. Pearson did. But before she even had a chance to sit down, Pearson began peppering her with questions. “So what were the results of the sugar tests?”
She sighed and sank down into a chair. “It’s too soon to tell definitively,” she began, only to be interrupted.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Gen. Pearson wasted more time than any other human being she had ever met. Had he just let her speak, he would have gotten what he needed to know in half the time. “It means that the organ that we believe is analogous to the human kidney was pinkish instead of bright red, indicating what I think is decreased function.”
“What do you mean, analogous?”
Jen had no idea if the General asked the question because he did not understand the meaning of analogous or if it was because he didn’t understand how little they really knew about the Dogs. “I say analogous because even though their lungs, digestive and circulatory systems are quite similar to ours, the functions of the rest of their organs are not clear to us. The organ we call the kidney only got that name because it filters waste. Just because it filters waste does not make it exactly like our kidneys. They have several organs that all seem to do the same job and some we have not been able to figure out the purpose behind. And given that human kidneys do not release toxic gases when humans die, it becomes even harder to say that we really are dealing with the kidney. It’s just our best bet.”
Gen. Pearson’s face gave no sign he understood what Jen said. “Why does the color of the kidney matter?” he asked, and out of the corner of her eye, out of sight of Gen. Pearson, Jen saw Lewis mimic banging his head on the conference table. Lewis typed up huge debriefs of each day’s activities, on Gen. Pearson’s request, and it was clear the man never read a single one of the memos.
Jen sighed. “As I have explained before, the toxic gas the aliens pass at death emanates from what we think are their kidneys. Evidently, sugar was not a part of the Dogs’ diet before they came here and their bodies cannot handle it. When we introduce large amounts of sugar into the Dogs’ diets, they develop a condition similar to diabetes, and the more sugar they eat, the more they destroy their kidneys. If we can find a way to create complete kidney failure in the aliens, we hope we can prevent the gases they emit when they die.” By now two other male techs had joined Lewis and she wondered how Gen. Pearson did not notice them. The three men looked like they were banging their heads at a heavy metal concert.
“And you say it’s working?”
“Well, it seems like it is, but we don’t know for sure yet. We’ve had to be very careful about the amount of sugar that we feed them because we don’t know how much they can take before they die. It’s a delicate balance. If one of them dies outside the operating room, we can’t freeze them in time and the gases could kill us all. We have determined that like humans, too much sugar has a deleterious effect on their kidneys, but it’s hard to say for certain that we have proven anything.”
“Tell me again why it is we can’t use something more lethal? Doesn’t it take a long ass time for the sugar to work?”
Jen resisted the urge to wave her hand in front of his face and yell, “Hello? Anybody home?” She swallowed and said, “We don’t even have access to anesthesia drugs to knock the Dogs out before we cut them up. There are other ways to kill the kidneys, but I have no idea how to get my hands on much more than liquid nitrogen, oxygen tanks and sugar because this place was well-stocked with them when I got here. Plus, if a drug acts too quickly, it can kill quickly, and we all know what happens if one of them dies and we can’t contain it.”
Gen. Pearson seemed to consider this for a moment then said, “Well, you’re just going to have to pump more sugar into them and find a way to contain it if they die. You got to speed this up. Austin fell yesterday and Houston will be gone in a week. The Dogs don’t even seem to need the Alphas anymore because they are breeding like rabbits and spreading like the plague. People are so afraid that when the Dogs show up, they leave, though I have no idea where they’re going. Mexico is under siege and we have lost all contact with South America. Last we heard the Dogs had made it from Chile to Guatemala. We estimate we’ve got less than three weeks.”
Though she thought the better of what she was about to say, Jen said it anyway, unable to abide the notion that the General would relay to others that sugar was their salvation. “General, while the preliminary surgeries are promising, the fact is that we don’t know if the sugar is going to work. We also need to bear in mind that the real world applications here are limited. We will have a lot of trouble finding a way to get the Dogs to consume enough sugar to kill their kidneys.”
“Hell, woman! We’ll just dump it on them if we have too! We’ll dump sugar then bomb them.” Before Jen could explain that the Dogs were not roaches and sugar was not a huge can of Raid, the General stood up and announced, “We have a couple more dozen prisoners of war. Make good use of them.” Then he sauntered out the door.
Fall in South Texas was not consistently cool, but it was consistently bleak. The Rio Grande Valley’s terrain ranged from being hilly to completely flat, and the base was situated in one of the flattest parts of the region. Though the leaves clung to the Live Oaks until late fall and early winter, there was little else to break the horizon's expanse. Once the grass died, it was as if one was peering out onto a beige and brown horizon, meeting in the distance with gray clouds.
Jen had been at the South Texas military research facility for less than four months. It had become an Army base when the Dogs invaded, taken over and staffed by what was left of the Army, along with as many civilians as would volunteer. She had arrived in late July, when the situation was dire but there was still some hope it could be managed. Jen now felt like she was just working frantically so that when the end came, she could die knowing that she had not just marked time until human beings were extinct, that she had not been one of the cowards who cut and ran into hiding.
The facility had been used for medical research before the invasion, a hush-hush locale few knew the purpose behind. When the aliens arrived and the Army seized the facility, the government started experiments to see if there was a way to ensure the integrity of livestock if the aliens tried to tamper with human food sources. That was early during the invasion, before they knew food would become the least of their concerns.
When she arrived, she was tasked with finding a way to defeat the aliens’ best natural defense—the deadly gas they emitted when they died, a gas that did not affect the Dogs themselves. The gas was molecularly similar to cyanide gas, and just as potent.
It was hard at first, living over 500 miles away from her husband and daughter who remained in Dallas, but at the time, the government insisted that despite the horrible failures to contain the Dogs in Nebraska, Kansas was secure. Then Kansas fell, and by the time it was clear that the Dogs would overwhelm Oklahoma, it was too late for Jen to get Stan and Amy out of North Texas. All summer long and into the early fall, the Alpha Dogs bombed North American cities left and right, killing millions of humans by engaging in strategic friendly fire, using the gases the Dogs emitted upon death to kill human beings.
Then the bomb campaigns suddenly stopped in most of North America and Europe. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, wondering when the other shoe would drop, and it occasionally did, with friendly-fire attacks reported in Mexico, Florida and Southern Europe. But in all the other attacks, the Alphas avoided their own, killing the humans directly. Jen reckoned the Alphas realized that during winter months, the Dogs might not be able to reproduce fast enough to make up their numbers when the Alphas deliberately killed them. This was just a guess; it often seemed there was no rhyme or reason to what the Alphas did.
“It’s not like the aliens killed them,” Laila dared say one day in late October. She, Lewis and Jen were all sitting in the mess hall, feeling disquiet because the last television station with a signal they could receive was no longer on the air. Was it because the station had been destroyed? Was the station and technology intact but no humans left to run it? Among all the tightly wound people working to save their race, television had been a great buffer. Without it, they all found themselves involved in tense, unsettling conversations, forced to dwell on their circumstances. Worse, without television, it was impossible to know what was going on in the rest of the world. They had no faith that the Army would tell them the truth.
Jen was still recovering from the horror of losing her family, and those raw emotions were coupled with the horror that much more could be lost. She wanted to slap Laila. Did Laila have no one she loved? Had she not lost anyone or anything that lessened her for its absence? “How do you figure that?” she murmured, trying to keep a hold on herself.
“Well, the government rounded up all the Dogs in Oklahoma, didn’t they? Had we not put all the Dogs in internment camps, the Alphas would not have killed them all in one fell swoop when they carpet bombed Oklahoma. The government put all the Dogs in one easily targeted area. If they hadn’t done that, there would have been no cloud of toxic gas.” The gas had traveled south very quickly, a deadly wind creating ghost towns in its path.
Lewis, Jen’s main ally and right hand man on the project, could not control himself. “Laila, what the hell are you talking about? It’s easier to say that had the aliens not invaded Earth, there would have been no need to mount a defense against them. The Army had no way of knowing that the Alphas were so low that they would kill millions of their own people in order to kill millions of ours.”
“But doesn’t it bother you just a little bit?” Laila asked, unable to let it go, changing the subject so she could get to her real bone of contention. “Doesn’t it make you just a little uneasy, what we are doing? I mean, aside from the length of their skulls and the number of breasts, the Dogs don’t even really look that different from us. Whenever I deal with them, I feel like I am torturing a human being and I don’t know how I or anyone else can do it.”
“It has to be done, though,” Jen said flatly.
“Would Amy think this has to be done?” With that, Laila went too far.
“You are such a bitch, Laila. How dare you say something like that to her?” Lewis asked, amazed and disgusted.
“Well, it’s true, though. Isn’t it? Jen herself told us how Amy was into animal rights. Amy didn’t eat meat and wouldn’t even use products tested on animals.”
Lewis began to speak again but Jen cut him off. “My daughter’s beliefs when alive are none of your business. Her name should never come off your tongue.”
Laila replied, “So I take it Amy wouldn’t approve?”
“Laila, my entire family is dead. It’s hard for me to be sure about anything more than that. They are dead because a race from another planet decided to come to Earth because they overpopulated their own planet and refuse to stop over-breeding, even in their own interests. We are in a fight for our survival as a race. They may look similar to us but they aren’t human. I feel uneasy about nothing. Nothing at all.”
Laila raised an eyebrow. “Wow, Jen. I wonder if you doth protest too much. I look at the Dogs we . . . we vivisect and it’s hard for me. What on earth do you think our own space program was about? Potential colonization of other planets, poking around the cosmos to see if there was any place that could sustain human life. How is that much different than what the Alphas did? Besides, the Dogs didn’t ask to come here. They were forcibly colonized.”
“So they say,” Lewis cut in, but Jen understood what Laila was getting at. The aliens were easily divisible into Dogs and Alpha Dogs. The Alpha Dogs came to Earth at periodic intervals to drop off more Dogs and blow the hell out of any places where the Dogs were experiencing resistance. The Dogs, passive and in many cases very kind entities, simply did as their natures insisted. The women had a couple of litters of babies each year and those litters came of age quickly and repeated the process. In some places they quickly outnumbered human beings even without the bombing strikes reducing the human population.
“I can’t take anymore of this shit,” Jen said. “You don’t agree with this, go work somewhere else on the base, Laila. That you work with me at all shows your own hypocrisy, if you really are so concerned about the Dogs!” She stood up and walked away from the table, not even taking her tray back to the kitchen.
Still, it was hard to argue with the fact that the Dogs had not asked for any of it. But human beings had not asked for any of it, either. We were here first, Jen thought.
December 2
Given how little time they had left, Jen tasked Lewis and Sam to find a way to encourage more sugar ingestion in the aliens. The aliens were docile and likely to consume as much sugar-laden water as they were asked, yet it seemed impossible to make them ingest enough to potentially kill their kidneys in the course of several days. In the back of her head, she more or less knew what needed to be done. She just couldn’t bring herself to order it. It spoke volumes that when push came to shove, she shoved but considered all the alternatives before she did so.
She wondered if there was some way to put birth control in the water sources to sterilize the Dogs, but while there were certain similarities between Dog and human physiology, she did not have the time it would take to understand the female Dogs’ hormonal workings. Also, that approach would stop the breeding but it would not stop the gases the Dogs emitted when they died. Humans would still be in constant peril even if every female Dog on the planet were chemically spayed.
So, given what needed to happen to quickly force the Dogs into complete renal failure, she should not have been surprised when she walked to the guardhouse and saw the solution Lewis and Sam had reached. Laila and two others were standing outside the cells. Laila had tears in her eyes.
“This isn’t right,” said Coralie. Coralie was a woman whose desire to destroy the aliens ran deep, and she seemingly held none of Laila's moral ambiguity about their situation. Coralie's horror cut Jen to the quick. Jen swallowed hard and looked into one of the cells. Then she looked away.
“She’s right, Jen. It isn’t right. This research is pointless. We’re torturing them for no good reason!” Laila called as Jen walked away.
Jen’s stomach felt queasy and she did not look back or answer. She began to shake and made it back to her barracks before she truly broke down. Jen thought about her daughter Amy, dead less than four months. She spent so much time trying not to think of her daughter that it seemed at times she was all Jen had in her head. She had heard reports of how the Metroplex became ghost towns after Operation Oklahoma Border Seal failed. She hoped that the Dogs who buried Stan and Amy were as solemn and earnest as the Dogs she was forced to kill daily in her research.
She remembered when Amy first started questioning the things in her life she considered unhealthy. With the purity of heart and the surety of knowledge seemingly available only to 15-year-old girls, Amy had announced that she could not make herself eat meat anymore. “It’s just too horrible,” she said, shuddering. Jen had always done her best not to just indulge her daughter, but also to encourage her to explore her world and make moral decisions based on what she discovered. When Amy and her friends found out about animal testing, she had run through the house screaming about how everything she put on her body was linked to death. “Moooommmm! Even my shampoo was tested on animals!”
In a way, Jen and the others now were living the other side of the coin Amy’s beliefs occupied. Her daughter had expressed her humanity by reducing the amount of suffering in which she participated. In order to ensure other humans avoided suffering and lived, Jen had no choice but to embrace the worst humanity could do in the name of self-defense. She thought back to what Laila had asked, if she thought Amy would approve of what she was doing. She thought Amy would understand, but she wasn’t sure. If we pull this off, will this make it into the history books? Will what we have done be seen as justifiable in the minds of those who get to live?
Jen could not calm down. She wanted a few hours of sleep before she would begin another grueling day’s work, but that was not to be. She rose and walked up the hallway to the Decompression Chamber and looked in on Maddy. Several soldiers, men not much older than Amy was when she died, were cuddling the puppies, who made little squeaking sounds when moved too suddenly for their liking. She peered into the box where Maddy lay and rubbed her tummy. The dog looked up at her with adoration, the way she looked at all humans.
December 3
The dissections yielded almost universal results—six aliens showed that enough sugar ingestion caused the Dogs’ kidneys to turn white, which Jen took as a sign that they were overtaxed and failing. It seemed possible now that sugar over-consumption would indeed ruin the organ in a very short period of time. She was surprised the results came so quickly but the Dogs had faster metabolisms than humans. It would take a human months, if not years, to so damage their kidneys. She had the results from five vivisections and she very nearly did not vivisect the last Dog because the results seemed conclusive. But the last Dog for the day was female, and since the previous five had been male, it seemed better to check and see that the effects were universal regardless of sex.
When Lewis rolled the Dog into the operating room and strapped her down, the first thing Laila saw was that the female alien had engorged nipples. Gingerly, she reached over and squeezed one of the six breasts that ran in threes down the alien’s chest and stomach and expressed milk. They captured a mother! The idiots captured a mother!
Without thinking, she looked into the alien’s round, canine eyes. Though many people liked to dismiss the Dogs as stupid, Jen knew that while their intelligence was different than that of humans, they were not as simple as real dogs. A dog strapped on a similar gurney would have no idea what was to come, though it might be scared or feel threatened. The female Dog before her knew exactly what was about to happen and she did not struggle or cry out. She just sighed, resigned to the horrible pain she knew was going to endure, and looked openly at her tormentor without rancor or hate.
I can’t do this, Jen panicked. Laila’s right. This is pointless! She could not conceive of a method by which the meager US Armed Forces could make aliens eat or drink sugar, then kill them. I can’t think this way. I am a scientist. It is not my place to find a way to make my research work. I have no way of knowing if the Army can find a way to force the Dogs to eat sugar. This invasion killed my family—almost all families—and I am the last hope for my race. Besides, she is probably in kidney failure. She’s going to die anyway.
She tried not to listen to the voice telling her to euthanize the alien without cutting her open, to make her death fast and painless. But she still picked up the scalpel and cut open the alien. “I’m sorry. I know you’re someone’s mother,” she murmured, the first time she had ever spoken to one. “I was someone’s mother once, too.” The Dog began to flat line almost as soon as she was opened up, so Jen wheeled her into the cryogenic chamber, froze her and then made notes of her findings. Her kidney had been white.
She spent the rest of the day with Lewis. They needed to find way to let one of the aliens die without freezing it to see if sugar over-consumption really did prevent the fatal gas. They decided one of cryogenic chambers was the best place to try. The rooms they used to operate had ventilation but the cryogenic chambers were sealed. If the sugar did not work, then hopefully the cryogenic chamber would prevent the spread of gas until it broke down into safer component elements. It wasn’t the greatest solution, but the only one they had. The next morning she would vivisect one more sugar-filled alien, make sure the kidney was white, and then let it enter the metabolic death process inside the cryogenic chamber.
December 4
Word reached them that Laredo had fallen. The Alphas had appeared from the sky and had blown up the side of town where the last of the human resistance remained. The base was less than 300 miles due southeast from Laredo and with each passing minute, their day of reckoning was closer at hand.
She walked the long corridor that led from the barracks to the medical wing, doing her best to keep her mind clear, doing her best not to look at the patterns on the floor and the wall because she was now seeing too many faces—Amy, Stan, all the Dogs she had cut up. She tried to remember if she had showered or eaten the day before, but she had a hard time remembering. She was contemplating going into the mess hall to see if there was any breakfast left when she heard someone shouting her name. “Hey, Jen!” It was Lewis, racing up the hallway. “I was at the freezer. It lost power last night and the generator just now kicked in! No one called us in the night to let us know. The soldiers just dealt with it themselves!”
Jen stopped dead in her tracks. “What? You can’t be serious!”
“As the heart attack I’m about to have,” Lewis said, panting.
“Did they defrost?”
“Yes, every one of them!”
Jen’s eye’s widened. The research team had tested several other methods of suppressing the gas emissions. If the Dogs without sugar-weakened kidneys defrosted, it could mean big trouble.
“Yeah, they all defrosted. And it looks like we can forget about sugar. Even the ones outside the sugar trials failed to release anything toxic.”
“What are you saying?” Jen asked. She was so tired she was not sure she understood Lewis properly.
“Just what I said, Jen. Every single dead Dog in that deep freeze defrosted and not one of them released toxic gas. One of the soldiers who didn’t know what he was doing opened the door after the power loss and not a damn thing happened. There’s no mistake. With that open door and the heat on, they’re all close to room temperature and here we all stand, not dead from kidney gas.”
“How can that be?” Jen asked.
“You tell me,” Lewis said, his eyes hopeful, wild and exhausted all at the same time.
Jen began to think out loud. “What do all of those Dogs have in common?” she asked.
Lewis answered her. “Well, they were all artificially put into a sort of metabolic hibernation when we froze them at death. Other than that, I can’t think of anything. They were captured in different regions, they were different sexes and ages, we used different means to try to kill their kidneys . . .”
Jen thought about it for a moment, pacing in a circle in front of Lewis. Her mind kept focusing on the word hibernation though she didn’t fully know why. Then she staggered slightly and leaned against the wall next to Lewis. She was so tired.
People in the Decompression Chamber overheard part of the conversation and a crowd was gathering. She could hear them murmuring about Dogs, gases, Laredo. Her mind raced. Laredo was gone, the Alphas had killed all the people and the Dogs were spreading due east. The Alphas had killed all the people . . . Laredo . . . Hibernation . . . It came to her like a bolt from the blue. “Oh my god! It makes sense!” Jen shouted.
“What makes sense?” Lewis asked. The murmurs around them grew louder.
“That’s why the Alphas stop killing Dogs in cold weather!” The murmuring stopped.
“I’m not following, Jen.”
Jen’s voice was so hurried she hoped she was making sense. “It’s the liquid nitrogen that is key. It’s the cold that stops the gas! Dogs that die in the fall and winter do so in a cold environment. The Alphas have destroyed the electric and gas infrastructures so aside from rudimentary heating, the Dogs live in the cold during the winter. Cold puts parts of their bodies into hibernation, like bears!” More and more people joined the crowd around them.
Jen went on, spewing out the thoughts as her mind produced them. “My best guess is that the cold stops the metabolic function of the kidneys when the Dogs die. If those processes are interrupted, they don’t start at all. When we freeze them, we put their organs into a state of hibernation like bears, but one they never come out of, even if they thaw out. The metabolic process just doesn’t restart. If alive, when the weather gets warmer, their kidneys start working again but if they die before they warm up, they don’t emit gases. That’s why the friendly-fire stops during the colder weather. Why would the Alphas bomb their own people when doing so would not result in the gas emissions? That’s why all the recent attacks have been on people and not Dogs!”
Lewis thought this over. “But what about the last attacks in South America. Those all had friendly fire, or so the Army said.”
“Well, South America is warm for the most part, but bear in mind, South America is having summer while we are having winter. Remember the equator?” she teased. She no longer felt a bit tired. “Lewis, do you know what this means? We can kill as many Dogs as we want as long as we do it when it’s cold. Let’s find out how cold they need to be before their kidneys stop making the gas!” A small cheer went up around them and side-by-side, Jen and Lewis ran the rest of the way to the medical wing.
Jen called an emergency meeting with the staff, telling them what they had found. Amazed, the team sprung into action. Laila and several other techs rigged a way to rapidly cool the operating rooms without flash freezing the Dogs. Jen was surprised to see that Laila was working so enthusiastically. Laila saw Jen looking at her and said, “Damn, Jen. This could actually do some good! This would be worth doing harm if it means we get to live. That sugar nonsense would never have worked. But this . . . This looks like it really might work!”
The rest of the day was spent cooling the remaining prisoners of war and then killing them, putting them in the cryogenic chambers and seeing if they emitted gases. Two experiments failed and the chambers had to remain sealed, but eventually they discovered that all of the Dogs exposed to temperatures 45°F for at least one hour did not emit gas when killed, regardless of age, body weight or sex. Elated, Jen got Gen. Pearson on the line, and announced the findings. She began to cry when she heard the hoots and shouts of joy on the other end when he revealed the news to the soldiers around him. San Antonio was less than two hours down the Interstate from the Dogs in Austin. This discovery did not come a moment too soon. A cold front had settled over most of Texas and if they acted fast, they could stop the Dog encroachment south.
It was not the cure they needed. It would not enable them to defeat the Dogs entirely. But it would buy them some time until Jen’s team, and hopefully any other teams that might still be out there, could find a way to defeat the Dogs in the summer as well. They could demolish the Dogs when it was cold, regroup, and then think of new tactics.
In the meantime, Gen. Pearson ordered bomb strikes as well as ground invasions with the few troops left in the United States to start immediately if the temperatures were right and had been right for at least 24 hours. No mercy, no prisoners. It would be genocide, but at least they would not be the ones dying en masse. Gen. Pearson also tasked his communications team to try to spread this news to anyone else left in the rest of the world and parts of the USA that had been silent for too long.
The medical team celebrated that night in the Decompression Chamber. There was no alcohol left on the base, but they were all so tired that they seemed drunk. Once the party was over, they left one by one and headed to barracks until only Jen remained. On her way out the door, she passed Maddy’s box and peered inside.
Maddy was on her side, her pups snuggled up close. When Maddy saw Jen, her eyes brightened and her tail began to thump. She leaned down, putting her head close to Maddy’s. “We were here first, Maddy. Weren’t we? We were here first.” |
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