Seize the Night

massive oaks.
    When I described my encounter with the gang that had almost caught me in the bungalow, Bobby said, “Thirty? Man, they're busy breeders.”
    I told him about their use of the flashlight and the manhole hook.
    “Next,” he said, “they'll be driving cars, trying to date our women.”
    He finished his beer and handed the empty bottle to me, which I planted upside down in the ice chest.
    From somewhere along the street came a soft, rhythmic creaking.
    It was probably just one of the shop signs swinging on its mountings, disturbed by the breeze.
    “So Jimmy could be anywhere in Wyvern,” Bobby said. “What about Orson?”
    “The last I heard him barking, I think it was coming from here in Dead Town somewhere.”
    “Here on Commissary Way or over in the houses?”
    “I don't know. Just this direction.”
    “Lot of houses over there.”
    Bobby looked toward the residential streets on the far side of the park.
    “Three thousand.”
    “Say like four minutes a house … Take us nine or ten days, searching around the clock, to go through all of em. And you don't do day work.”
    “Orson's probably not in any of the houses.”
    “But we have to start somewhere. So where?”
    I didn't have an answer.
    Besides, I didn't trust myself to speak without my voice cracking.
    “You think Orson is with Jimmy? We find one, we find both?”
    I shrugged.
    “Maybe this is one time we should tell Ramirez what we know,” Bobby suggested.
    Manuel Ramirez was the current chief of police in Moonlight Bay.
    He had once been a good man, but like all the cops in town, he had been co-opted by higher authorities.
    “Maybe,” Bobby said, “in this case, Manuel's interests are the same as ours. He's got the manpower for a search.”
    “He's not just corrupted by the feds,” I said. “He's becoming.”
    Becoming . That's the word some of the genetically afflicted use to describe the physical, mental, and emotional changes that are taking place in them—but only once those changes have passed the subtle stage and reached a crisis.
    Bobby was surprised. “He tell you he's becoming?”
    “He says he isn't. But there's something wrong with him. I don't trust Manuel.”
    “Hell, I don't entirely trust me,” Bobby said, which put into words our greatest fear that we might not merely become infected with the retrovirus but that we might start becoming something less than human without being aware of the changes taking place.
    I sucked down the last of the Heineken, jammed the empty bottle into the ice chest.
    “We gotta find Orson,” I said.
    “We will.”
    “Crucial, bro.”
    “We will.”
    Orson is no ordinary dog. My mother brought him home from the Wyvern lab when he was a puppy. Until recently, I didn't realize where fur face had come from or how special he was, because my mom didn't tell me and because Orson was good at keeping his secrets. The intelligence-enhancement experiments were conducted on monkeys and on hard case lifers transferred from military prisons, but also on dogs, cats, and other animals. I've never given Orson an IQ test, pencils aren't designed for paws, and because he lacks the complex larynx of a human being, he isn't capable of speech.
    He understands everything, however, and in his own way he makes himself understood. He is smarter than the monkeys.
    I suspect he possesses human-level intelligence. At least.
    Earlier, I suggested that the monkeys hate us because we gave them the ability to dream but not the means to fulfill their dreams, leaving them lost outside the natural order. But if this explains their hostility and thirst for violence, why should Orson, who is also outside the natural order, be so affectionate and good-hearted?
    He is trapped in a body that serves his enhanced intelligence less well than the monkeys' bodies serve them. He has no hands, as they have, and his vision is comparatively weak, as is that of any domesticated breed of canine.
    The monkeys have the communal comfort of the troop, but Orson endures in a terrible solitude. Though more dogs as smart as Orson might have been created, I've yet to encounter another. Sasha, Bobby, and I love him, but we are too little comfort, because we can never truly share his point of view, his experience. Because he is, at least for now, a singularity Orson lives with a profound loneliness that I can perceive but never fully comprehend, loneliness that is with him even when he is among his friends.
    Maybe his basic doggie