Dogs by Nancy Kress Page A

“You’ve been on duty how long, Camilla? Sixteen hours? Go home.”
    "It's all right, ma'am, I'm fine, I just slipped, I think there's a bit of water on the floor…”
    â€œThen wipe it up, hang the bag, and go home. You look like shit.”
    Probably true, Cami thought wearily. Sixteen hours, and the dog bites had just kept pouring in. They wouldn’t stop. The hospital had every available doctor, resident, and intern seeing patients, and still stretchers were stacked in the hall, people sat bleeding in the er waiting room, and ORs had been commandeered from Maternity, so that women were delivering babies in their rooms. Nobody, the older nurses told her, had ever seen anything like it. And so many of the patients were children! Children and dogs, a boy and his dog, how much is that doggie in the window…Cami’s tired mind had been going around and around with that silly tune for the last hour.
    Rosita was right; Cami needed to go home for a little while. And even if Rosita hadn’t been right, nobody argued with Rosita.
    She was surprised to find a police officer in the underground staff parking area. “Can I see some I.D., ma’am?”
    Cami showed him her driver’s license and hospital pass. He inspected them, unsmiling, and then said, “All right. Drive straight out with your windows rolled up. Don’t roll them down to talk to any reporters, or anyone else, who may be outside the hospital. Drive straight home. Do you have a dog at home, ma’am?”
    Cami hesitated. If she said yes, would he give orders to take Belle away?
    All the while she’d been working on the terrible dog bites flooding the ER, Cami had had Belle in the back of her mind. Cami had had one course in public health during nursing school. If there was an animal-borne plague, an important step was to eliminate the animal hosts. That’s what WHO had tried (and failed) to do world-wide with malaria in the 1970s: eliminate the host mosquitoes. Eliminating mice had helped to bring hantavirus under some control in the Southwest. And, of course, all those poor monkeys in Reston, Virginia in 1983, carriers of Ebola from the Philippines—every single monkey had been killed. Wasn’t that eventually what might happen here?
    But Belle was different. She was so old, and so gentle. With her arthritis, even walking was a chore. If she were infected—and Cami had let her off the leash in the dog park last weekend, with tons of other dogs—Belle could hardly even hobble over to someone to attack. By the time Belle got there, the “victim” would have been able to escape to the next county.
    Anyway, Belle would never attack Cami.
    There were no reporters outside the hospital, after all. Cami drove slowly home, so tired that it was a chore to keep her arms raised to the steering wheel. The streets were weirdly deserted, even for February. But she saw a lot of police cars.
    At her apartment complex, she pulled into the long garage built beneath her building. Each renter was allotted one garage slot and one outside parking place, and all the indoor slots were filled. In the SUV next to her Ford, a German shepherd barked ferociously, lunging at the window and snapping as if he could tear through the glass and get at her. He couldn’t, of course, but—this garage was supposed to be communal! How dare the dog’s owner put everyone else at risk…but, of course, what else could they do with the dog if there were children in their unit?
    Cami flung open her car, hurried across the garage, and closed the stairwell door on the frantic barking.
    At 2-B she paused and knocked. “Mr. Anselm? Are you okay? It’s Cami Johnson.”
    Slow footsteps punctuated by the tapping of a cane. The door opened on Mr. Anselm and his seeing-eye dog, Captain. “Cami? How nice of you to stop by. Would you like a cup of tea?”
    â€œNo, I can’t stay,” Cami said, so