Devoted(19)
The man stooped and examined Kipp’s collar and said, “No name. No phone number. Maybe you’ve been injected with a chip.”
Kipp didn’t have a chip, but the clasp of his collar contained a GPS and a small lithium battery to power it.
Dorothy hadn’t feared that he would run away. But she worried he might be dognapped.
After flipping a few hamburger patties, the man cut into pieces the burger and frankfurter that he set aside for Kipp, to help the meat cool faster.
A woman herded four children to a nearby picnic table. The two boys and two girls resembled her and the kind man. Their puppies.
On the table were potato salad and potato chips and pasta salad and other things that smelled wonderful.
The woman carried a platter of cooked patties and frankfurters to the table. The kids cheered and started building sandwiches.
This was a happy place.
The kind man put the paper plate on the ground, and the meat was cool enough, and Kipp ate it with pleasure.
He did not whine for more. That would have been ungrateful.
Besides, the children at the table were digging into the feast. All he had to do was hang around. More food would be forthcoming.
Indeed, he had to be careful not to accept too much and make himself sick. All of it was delicious.
The moment was lovely, with the food and all, with everyone in this family smelling right, smelling safe, no anger or envy or other more bitter scents arising from them.
Then the Hater arrived behind Kipp, who smelled him too late.
The Hater clipped a leash to Kipp’s collar and pulled it tight and said to the kind man, “Is this your dog?”
“I suspect he’s lost. We thought we’d take him home with us.”
“This is a dog-free campground,” the Hater declared. “He’s not allowed. I’m taking him with me.”
He was wearing khaki pants and a khaki shirt, like a uniform.
“When we leave day after tomorrow,” the kind man said, “we’d be happy to take him with us.”
“He won’t be here then,” the Hater said.
He jerked hard on the leash to make Kipp understand that he was in control, and he headed across the campground toward the office at the entrance.
Kipp went without a struggle. This was not a kind man. He might react to resistance with violence when they were out of sight.
The stink of hatred was more intense and more frightening than any other smell, except for certain scents that identified different kinds of insane people.
Sometimes a person smelled of hatred and insanity. This man reeked only of the former.
Depending on what all he hated and how intensely he hated it, this might be a difficult man from whom to escape.
Haters lived to hate, to exercise power over those they hated. They were obsessive about it. Focused. Relentless.
The campground office was in a small log cabin at the end of the entry lane from the highway.
Kipp did not want to go in there.
His collar was too tight for him to slip out of it.
He would not bite except in the most extreme circumstances. That was a protocol of the Mysterium. And it was only right.
Maybe there would be someone else in the office, someone who was not as wicked as this man.
They climbed the steps and went inside.
No one else was there. Only Kipp and the Hater.
17
The day synchronizes with Lee Shacket’s mood, the sun fading behind gray shrouds as smooth as casket satin, the overcast slowly descending like a heavy lid. The late afternoon darkles into a long and sullen twilight.
He leaves I-80 for a two-lane state route that rises and falls over nature’s wooded contours, cleaves flowering meadows, and for mile after mile offers isolated human habitats only here and there. Shadows gather among the trees in threatening convocations, and the late-summer wildflowers, once bright, seem now to smolder in the fields like fragments of some meteor superheated and shattered as it plummeted through Earth’s atmosphere.
Shacket’s unrelenting hunger is not merely for food, but as well for justice, for transformation from the victim he has always been, for an undefined but amazing transcendence that he feels will be his. Pressure is building in him like superheated steam in a boiler, psychological pressure but also what seems to be some kind of powerful escalation of his physical abilities. Hour by hour, he feels stronger; his eyesight grows sharper, his hearing keener.
What he feels has something to do with what happened at the Refine facility in Springville, Utah. Engaged in longevity research, seeking to greatly extend the human life span, the richly financed experiments were, at the insistence of Dorian Purcell, focused intensely on archaea, the third domain of animal life. The first domain is eukaryotes, which includes human beings and all other higher organisms. The second domain is bacteria. Microscopic archaea, which lack a nucleus, were long thought to be a kind of bacteria. But they have unique properties, not least of which is the ability to effectuate horizontal gene transfer. Parents pass their genes vertically to their offspring. Archaea pass genetic material horizontally, from one species to another. Their mysterious role in the development of life on Earth is only beginning to be understood, and perhaps it is madness to seek to harness them for the purpose of improving the human genome and extending the human life span.
On the other hand, although Shacket had first thought of the events at the Springville facility as catastrophic, he is beginning to wonder if the opposite is true. Although he has perhaps breathed in hundreds of billions—even trillions—of programmed archaea that are carrying longevity-fostering genes from many species, perhaps it is a mistake to regard the breach of the organism-isolation labs as an existential crisis. One of the scientists in a position of high authority—or Dorian himself—evidently thought it was exactly that and triggered the security program to lock down the complex and eventually burn it to the ground.