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Reverend Rick

"It is not true speech," the clergyman said, as he stood before a Human Right panel. "With consistent reward, these 'talking dogs' can be taught an impressive vocabulary of human terms, but no evidence has been found that they fully comprehend syntax, at least as humans understand it. MRI scans on their brains find them to be actually far less developed than basic working breeds. Unlike the panda collies or the gorilla rottweilers, their problem-solving capability and their ability to organize meaning is, if anything, atavistic. They were bred out of feral lineages."

One of the panelists, an aging gentleman, leaned forward, and after clearing his throat, he said, "Reverend Ferrare, would you disagree with the view that--with these apparent 'talking animals' among us--it would be easier for a criminal to start passing off some half-human, deformed freak as one of them?"

"No, sir," Reverend Rick Ferrare said, a sweat forming on his brow as he spoke. "No serious organization would take such a risk. I've read the documented evidence of small organizations undertaking such endeavors, but a lack of funding--and the loss of key figures to a mixture of assassination, defamation as homosexuals, and criminal prosecution--has rendered poor and infertile results. Such wanton debasement of the human race remains a niche fantasy of fools who are bent on racial suicide. Learned men shun such behavior, and the people who pursue it are wasteful and stupid."

"And in the event that some mutant characteristic were to appear among the animals, enabling human speech?" the panelist continued, drumming his fingers.

Rick ground his jaw, and he looked very frustrated suddenly. "This conversation is getting to be far-fetched," he growled. "The non-talking working breeds have much greater cognitive development than these speech-mimicking mongrels; some countries don't even consider them and the working animals to be the same species, as if you were comparing an opossum with a chipmunk. Whenever crosses are even suspected, they are banned from being sold as working dogs."

"What use are they, then?" asked Mr. DeHume impatiently.

"They have been indispensible in children's hospitals," said Ferrare. "St. Ronald Reagan's Children's Hospital in Madison, Republic of Wisconsin was on its way to collapse. The animals provided a necessary distraction, and the children rallied to make a game out seeing how many words they could get their animals to repeat. A particularly violent blind child--who had previously been rebellious and ungovernable--spent weeks at this and was later found to be quite submissive, which made caring for the crippled child much easier. A single panda collie, which served the entire ward, could do what had previously required the undivided attention of an entire team of nurses."

"An entertaining animal," Mr. D'Hume scoffed, drawing laughter from other panelists.

"Without it, a funding shortfall would have required the closure of the facility," said Rick. Children who were like he had once been, weak and unable to live a normal life, would have been sent home to their families, who would have been--although glad to care for their children--unable to provide the services that a fully equipped children's hospital could. Although Rick's secret studies into the depth and breadth of history made him question the beatification of President Ronald Reagan as a saint, the hospital was a needed source of relief for stressed and overburdened families not only in the Republic of Wisconsin but for nuclear-blighted regions as far away as Calgary.

Mr. D'Hume scowled across his steepled fingers. Mr. D'Hume had also familiarized himself with history, and he knew where a dependence upon frivolity led. It led to morality itself being overturned. It led to the submission of humanity to decadence and sin. It led to homosexuality being accepted, and it led to freethinkers conspiring to take away the moral sanity that men like himself considered to be paramount for the survival of the race. Before his eyes, the noble efforts of his distant ancestors were beginning to fray, and once it was allowed to begin in force, the world would turn into a freak-show. He knew it would.

However, D'Hume's fellow panelists eventually sided--by a slim margin--with the reverend. Although they were certain still in their cause, they had become complacent in it. The war, against making a disgrace and freak-show of Mankind, had been won. The purity of all of the races of Mankind would remain intact, holy and perfect in the eyes of God as they were originally created. The alterations that had been made to the animals only made it further certain that dogs were the helpless tools, put there for the benefit of Mankind.

The resolve of the Human Right stood firm, and as the dignified winter of the modern age continued unabated, children held hands and sang in the streets, their bare feet sloshing in the poisoned mud. However, there was truly no more winter...merely storms and darkness.

Dr. Matlock

Dr. Matlock was a good doctor, and he abided by the law. He used only natural compounds in his medicines, never that illicit synthetic stuff. Matlock had spent his life fighting against those poisons, his crowning achievement being his aid in busting up a ring that trafficked abraxane for the treatment of tumors. The very documents that had been used to bring back the poison were destroyed by burning, and prayers were said, in churches across the region, that the knowledge of them could be forever forgotten.

As all textbooks said, natural was best. He ought to know, having written many of them. Getting ahead, in the field of medicine, required one to uphold the dignity and tradition of an ancient profession. Singing constantly the refrain that old knowledge was good because it was old propelled one to the heights of respectability. Because this was what Dr. Matlock had always done, he was widely held to be a wise and enlightened man.

The incomprehensibility of the laws made a law-abiding man rather archaic, though. There were some otherwise intelligent men who had attempted to apply the law to its full measure, but they had never learned how to survive. They had never learned how to use the law to protect themselves, thinking that it was an abstract sort of thing that ought to be served unto itself.

Even more horrifying were those who considered themselves to be above even the law, preaching that it ought to be changed. These were the worst, as far as Dr. Matlock could tell. Calling for change upset people, and it made one unpopular. Dr. Matlock had dealt with more than one such rabble-rouser by pointing out to him and his colleagues that all that the offender was truly doing was breaking the law, and how, asked Dr. Matlock, was he better than any other law-breaker, who cost lives by acting selfishly? These men who called for change made pretensions of altruism and yet committed the same crimes as the most selfish of fiends, so they ought, in Dr. Matlock's mind, be treated as fiends.

Of course, Dr. Matlock had secretly run empirical tests on the illicit compounds he preached against only a few times. His attempts at using those faulty, old empirical methods were always failures. Their results were more often wrong than not, and what if he were to publish such results? He would be an object of hilarity, and he would be lucky not to land himself in prison. Experience and professional intuition were the keys to success, and Dr. Matlock shared this wisdom widely.

At the height of his profession, though, Dr. Matlock had started feeling familiar symptoms bubbling up inside of him. He had seen it before in a man the same age as himself. It was a stomach tumor, and it was one that he knew would eventually bring an untimely end to his life.

"It is not fair," Dr. Matlock had raged. "I have a future!" He wasn't like that poor bastard he had once attempted to treat with a tonic. He recalled how that middle-aged man's eyes had lit up with hope as the quinine had temporarily soothed his belly. This had been touted by Dr. Matlock as one of his great successes, as a medical professional. "Cured!" Dr. Matlock had said. As far as the general public could tell, Dr. Matlock's patient had gone home cured and healthy, and Dr. Matlock had smiled as he had proved, to the faithful public, that following the most natural way was truly the best way.

Dr. Matlock had suppressed the memory of seeing his patient crunched over and screaming in agony as the cancer had taken its toll. Dr. Matlock had suppressed the memory of shooting up the man with his hand-distilled morphine--which had come from poppies grown in Dr. Matlock's own garden--and still heard screaming. Dr. Matlock had suppressed the memory of the screaming only really stopping when his patient had been driven into a coma by the drug, followed by dehydration and death.

All of it had been flooding back to Dr. Matlock, though, and he knew the truth.

Therefore, it was with a sense of shame that Dr. Matlock stumbled into the nightclub on 37th St., deep in his own hour of desperation. He wore a disguise, having made many enemies in this part of town, and fortunately, he had been watching this trade long enough that he had a fair idea of what kind of vermin were willing to extend their services to the dying.

He entered an empty establishment at 7 p.m., just as the other early arrivals were starting to show up at the door. As the music became louder, the fog machines came on, which softened the noise slightly. The music itself was just a smokescreen to cover up conversations, which not all patrons wanted to share too widely, and the uses of the fog was easy enough to guess as patrons stumbled into fog-banks and stumbled out either partially dressed or with pupils blown up to the size of black basketballs. This was a place where secrets of all kinds bred. This was a place where all manner of unnatural and freakish thing happened. It was a place feared and hated by respectable society.

"Hey, old man!" a patron said, leaping onto the barstool next to Dr. Matlock, who about jumped out of his skin before he could take in what had settled down next to him. The young man was wearing a navy cap over slicked, dyed-black hair and had over his shoulders a denim jacket. His trousers were brown and worn. His shoes were black patent leathers, and his shirt was really a white undershirt that sported various stains from it was hard to say where.

"Who are you?" said Dr. Matlock slowly.

The stranger shrugged. "I'm just running from life, like you." He reached out his hand and cried to the bartender, "Jimmy! Hey! Heyyyyy! Get me the stuff with all the hops!"

A very bald bartender, with a metallic crown over a bicuspid, came and wiped off a glass with a mostly clean, white cloth, smiling. "I am guessing you want the Blue Gravy, like last time, Paul?"

"Was that it?" cried Paul. "Yeah, that was the one I liked, I think."

From there, as Paul nursed on his beer, he tried to make vapid enough conversation with Dr. Matlock. Since Dr. Matlock was trying to keep a low profile, he kept his own answers generic, trying to say as little as possible. He bought one drink, just for appearances, and after nursing on it slowly throughout the first three hours of the night, bought a tonic and vodka and wandered off to the darker areas of the club, spending the following two hours looking for the kind of person he suspected would be able to help him while being bumped and jostled by individuals who had flooded out from the crowded dance floor.

It didn't take long to sight a promising fellow, who wore a burgundy suit. The man had the upright posture of a man who was out on business, not pursuing his own pleasure or out to do something desperate. This was a man who knew what he was doing, and ahat was the dead giveaway: true businessmen, Matlock understood, never looked furtive or suspicious, since that didn't sell product. The really successful ones were upright and spoke with confidence. Because Matlock was replete with financial resources, he was willing to pay whatever price was necessary for getting the real thing, real treatments, real tests, real abraxane if there was any still available anywhere. After only a few minutes, he managed to catch the man's attention. "Good evening," he said.

"Good morning!" the man he assumed was a peddler said. He was technically correct because the hour had presently turned midnight.

"Good morning," Matlock corrected himself. "I am sorry. I had not realized that we observed the wee hours as morning if we had not been to bed, but I'm up rather later than I have normally been accustomed.

"Lost somebody?" the man said sympathetically.

"Not far off," Matlock said carefully, not wanting to reveal too much at one time.

The man he had taken to be a peddler smiled knowingly. "It's rough trying to get real help, in this world," he said. "My mother went through that...it's just what it is."

Matlock's lip curled in disgust. "I don't know if what you are offering is real help, by my thinking," he snarled. "I am out of options, though...no," he stopped himself, having second thoughts suddenly. "No, peddler, I've sunk too low. I don't belong here. I am, indeed, truly sorry that I bothered you."

"But..." stuttered the man in the burgundy suit.

Suppressing tears, Dr. Matlock turned away from the conversation, and he fought his way through the crowd to get to the door, trying to get out the door before he could vomit. A bouncer stopped him, holding his bill up and shaking him while scolding, and Matlock quickly paid well over his tab and began to abscond, toddling down the causeway only a few steps back to the remote industrial lot where he had parked his vehicle before violently throwing up.

As he recovered himself, slowly straightening himself while the shameful tears, of a man dying with a distinct lack of grace, surged out along with his vomit, a ghostly hand snatched him into a back alley, and Dr. Matlock realized, with a little bit of a shock, that he was looking into the face of the same young man he had first seen upon entering the establishment, whom he had taken to be a youth out hoping to find a woman rather than anything more sinister.

"Look, bitch," said the man in the cap, "I can give you some cheap pain-killers tonight, but listen to me: that shit you've got is going to eat you alive without chemo, and even though the chemo would also eat you alive, it might not leave you quite as dead." He shoved a few tiny vials containing red crystals into Matlock's hand. "This should get you through the next three days."

"Chemo?" said Dr. Matlock weakly, as if he was not fully understanding. He understood perfectly well, but he wasn't quite believing he was hearing himself potentially resorting to chemotherapy. The stuff was an abomination. Like all man-made things, it caused more problems than it was touted to solve, he thought, and he hated himself for this self-debasing ploy to try to avoid the inevitable outcomes of his own sins.

"If you'll be here, in this exact same place, at this same time, there will be someone waiting for you here. We'll get you hooked up with a night doc, but you have to be willing. You have to be committed. You cannot pussy out, or you will fucking die."

Dr. Matlock's shoulders sagged in defeat, and he nodded slowly. His time was over. What was left of him truly did belong to these debased creatures of the night, and they would do with him what they pleased as he slowly became one of them, lowly and desperate like them, dying like them, sinners like them, unnatural like them, deformed, helpless, broken.

Bittersweet and Mrs. Angelson

"Now, this is the bottle that contains...the quinine tablet, isn't it?" said Mrs. Angelson.

Bittersweet--a retired bitch--whined and shifted on her forefeet as she realized that her mistress had misread the label.

"It must be," Mrs. Angelson said "It is the right shape and color. The pills are the right color...I don't think the oak root extract has that color, I mean."

Bittersweet yapped fearfully, her voice catching rebelliously in her throat as she tried to shout out a warning. Even with the profound dyslexia that had been bred and engineered into her lineage, she could see that the bottle had the wrong letters on it. Her mistress was in danger, and Bittersweet had to act or else her mistress could get hurt. She snatched the pills in her jaws and ran off to a corner.

"Hey, now!" Mrs. Angelson snapped. "Bad dog! Bittersweet, bring that back!" As Mrs. Angelson leaned over, though, she spied another pill bottle, and she realized--even as she scolded the retired bitch she had adopted--that her bottles had been put back in the wrong order. "Oh, dear...that was the anti-inflammatory you have over there...and THIS is the quinine." She plopped three of the quinine tablets into her tray for each of the remaining five days of the week, and she leaned back for a moment, her eyes closing as a wave of pain washed over her dying body.

Bittersweet came back, her tail wagging, and she set the pill bottle back into the black rectangular prism shaped bag. She reached up with a paw, scrunching it into a humanoid fist with an effort and a popping of her own aging joints, and pulled on the zipper to close it.

It really hadn't occurred to Bittersweet or to anybody else, really, that forty-three was longer than dogs were officially supposed to live. Nobody really kept clear records anymore, and dogs that remained for overly long were chalked up to being two or more distinct animals.

Bittersweet had once been a most prolific bitch. Having borne about five hundred purebreds into the world by delivering thirty-two litters of an average of about sixteen puppies each--the largest being twenty--over a course of fourteen fertile years, Bittersweet was, after bearing one small litter of five, considered to be long overdue to be retired into light domestic service, having been expected to die from overbreeding in her third or, at the very possible latest, sixth year.

Now, however, the only creature that Bittersweet cared for was poor, old Mrs. Angelson.