Dogs Gotta Eat

by Dan Scamell

Parts.

They think they’re saving us, I guess. That’s what they were programmed for. Medical Hounds. Nurses. Some of the kooks say a Hound’s in the city now, but I haven’t seen it. They’re always running from their own shadows. Kooks, I mean. Who could blame them? When I chase the wild dogs away from the body in the street—facedown, spinal column, brain, and a liver or kidney excised with mechanical precision—it becomes more difficult to call them alarmists.

Unperturbed, the mutts return to their dinner, gnawing at the fresh meal on the cracked pavement. There’s a pang in me, something old that tells me it’s wrong to let the dogs lap the blood and chew the splintered and splayed ribs of the dead man, but really, what difference does it make? Dogs gotta eat.

The misty drizzle soaks me as I walk down the street, wondering how 14-year-old me would have reacted to the scene. In a movie or comic, it would have been cool. In reality, it would have fucked me up good. So, 31-year-old me is glad not to be 14-year-old me, though he wouldn’t mind going back to that world.

Integrate. Meld. Heal.

From the alleyway between the abandoned café and the nearly-abandoned hotel, there’s a rustling, scraping sound. I should get off the street. The kooks never really mess with me—and if one did, I’d easily outclass the poor mutated things—but there’s other shit to be wary of. Malfunctioning security drones, rabid ferrets—recently wolves have moved into this part of the city. I should search out a new place to snag grain and beans.

If I were smart, I’d carry a sidearm—I’d hunt. But I’m not smart. I’m a bleeding heart who’d rather eat decades-old dry lentils and moldy grain gruel than butcher a cat or a possum or a deer. Funny, since 14-year-old me shot a yearling with dad’s bow and felt so fucking proud eating that juvenile, tender meat. Today, with so many things dying or already dead, I don’t have the stomach for it. I guess 14-year-old me might do well nowadays after all. Dogs gotta eat. But I’m not a dog.

I duck through the alley toward the depot. The sound I heard was just some rats. I think they were rats anyway. They could have been frogs. It’s hard to tell sometimes now. Even if I still had a taste for meat, I couldn’t eat those things. Though killing them might have been merciful.

Assemble. Heal. Parts.

The depot’s storage room is cavernous, and the metal shelving keeps most of the dry goods safe and edible. There are maybe 100 people, kooks mostly, still living in this district. For some reason, I haven’t gone totally nuts or gotten the rubber-bones yet. Anyone could have their pick of all this crap, but they leave it to me. They think I’m dangerous, I guess. They don’t know I’m a spineless pacifist. Lucky me.

There’s a bellowing metal crash and the east wall of the storage bay ripples hollowly. I turn and see another impact from outside bend the steel studs inward, snapping a few before the corrugated metal panels start popping their rivets and clanging to the concrete floor. Cold air billows into the room and I smell the tang of stale blood and blackened oil.

It crawls crablike into the room then stands at its full, towering height—an insane composition of machine parts from cranes, factory-robots and drones. Its bulbous, black steel trunk is twenty feet across, dotted with LEDs and half-broken tablet screens and metal grating through which its interior is dimly visible. As it lifts six of what could be called “arms,” it activates a set of floodlights at its peak and bathes the storeroom in cadaverous fluorescence.

Fully illuminated, I see the source of the bloody perfume. Within the louvered grating lining its sides writhes a hideous amalgamation of meat, bone and viscera. Deeper inside the thing, better protected, is a glass barrel filled with a mixture of pale pink mush peppered with large white centipedes my mind eventually discerns as columns of vertebrae.

“Join,” says a poorly synthesized voice from a blown-out loudspeaker at the horrifically evolved Medical Hound’s shoulder. “Be saved. Become We. Be healed. Help us. Parts.”

Well, shit. I guess the wet-brains were right. There really is a Nurse here. I turn, dropping my armful of dried beans and taking a step toward the exit before it descends on me with shocking speed. One of its claw-like appendages grasps me about the midsection, firmly, but not causing pain. It can risk damaging what it needs from me—components to keep the organic monstrosity inside it alive.

“Parts.”

More arms grab me, holding my shoulders and ankles. I feel my coat and shirt sliced from my back, then the cold blade snicks up my body from asscrack to crown. It slices me three more times, cutting deeper with each pass. Smaller claws grip my spine and tug. My limbs dance involuntarily as my brainstem is wrenched about.

“Parts. Heal. We.”

It happens so fast it’s like a dream. I feel myself pulled from myself. In the second before my optic nerves sever, I see my back, splayed and bloodied, then there’s silence and darkness. Icy, claustrophobic terror. Then We are aware.

From the malfunctioning Medical Hound’s visual interface, We see the dry goods storage. Our claws harvest Parts from the Former. We hope the Former’s old Parts will help us. We feel assured they will.

A comfort that had evaded the Former for decades now fills Us. We ask this new neural component from the Former if there are others to save—to Heal—nearby. It assures Us there are, and We set out again in search of others to integrate into the We.