The Mastiff with the Brass Warning

I climbed down from the truck, legs unsteady, and brought Evans’s battered medical case to my workbench. I shoved aside greasy tools and old spark plugs, making a clear patch of wood for him to work on.

Evans unpacked a small field microscope that ran on batteries, along with a glass slide. From his bag he took the vial of blood he’d drawn from the mastiff. He placed a bead of it on the glass, bent to the eyepiece, and worked the focus with fingers that wouldn’t quite hold still.

The barn had gone quiet. Only the dog’s deep, measured breathing carried across it from the truck bed.

A minute dragged by. Then another. Evans stayed hunched over the instrument, scarcely moving.

At last he pulled back. “Good God.” He removed his glasses and rubbed both hands over his face, like he needed to wake himself up.

“What are you seeing?” I asked, leaning over the bench. “Something wrong with his blood?”

“It isn’t ordinary blood, Elias.” Evans looked at me, eyes stretched wide with wonder and dread. “There are artificial structures in the plasma. I can’t identify the material. They form a kind of mesh, and they’re attaching to damaged cells, repairing them. Doing it mechanically.”

He glanced down at the slide again, as if hoping it might offer a less frightening answer. “And his red cells carry oxygen at several times the normal capacity for a dog. Three or four times, perhaps.”

I tried to make those words fit the animal watching us from the truck. “You mean somebody engineered him?”

Evans’s jaw tightened. “That’s what the evidence says. He’s an engineered asset, with healing that runs far faster than it should. His bones are denser than normal, too. That barcode and all those scars suggest they opened him up and changed his body.”

My stomach turned as the pieces came together. The place across the creek wasn’t some harmless agricultural storehouse. Mark had kept this animal behind its walls, and now Asset 04 had escaped.

We hadn’t just taken a dog away from a cruel neighbor. We’d walked off with something built through years of secret work, and the people who wanted it back were already hunting us.

“We need law enforcement,” I said. My hand went to my pocket for my phone. “The sheriff. Miller. State police. We need people here, and we need protection.”

I brought up the keypad and hit the emergency number. The screen showed nothing useful. At the top, where my signal should have been, a red warning said I had no service.

“Damn it.” I walked toward the barn’s side entrance and lifted the phone, testing the air as if a better patch of reception might be waiting near the wall. “I normally get a couple bars out here.”

“Elias,” Evans said, his voice gone taut. “Can you check the internet?”

I opened the browser and tried to load a page. It failed before anything appeared. No connection at all.

Evans lowered himself onto a stool. “They’ve blocked us. Those SUVs at the clinic weren’t only there for the dog. They must have equipment to jam local communications. No calls, no internet. We’re on our own.”

Fear crept up on me, cold and persistent. I was holed up in my own barn with a stolen engineered animal, while armed people searched the countryside. And Mark Vance, my neighbor, had been part of the whole thing.

Mark’s name landed hard. He’d known what was coming. He’d told me I’d doomed us. And he’d kept the mastiff inside a compound less than a mile from my property.

If we waited, the searchers would keep spreading out. They’d find the tracker I’d thrown into the woods, work out that it had been dumped, then start looking at the nearby homes and barns. My doors wouldn’t keep them away for long.

“I have to go back,” I said. I crossed to the steel cabinet at the far end of the barn, took a set of keys from my pocket, and unlocked it. Inside was my pump shotgun and a box of shells.

“Go back where?” Evans got to his feet. “Have you lost your mind? They’re all over this area!”

“I know these woods better than they do.” I slid the red shells into the magazine one by one. “They’ll be looking around the clinic and for the tracker. Mark knows what this dog is and why they kept him. He may know how they’re moving, too. If I’m going to get us out of this, he’s the one person who can explain what we’re up against.”

“Mark nearly shot you to take the dog back,” Evans said. “Why would he help you now?”

I loaded the last shell and worked the pump. The hard clack echoed off the barn walls. “He’s scared of them. I’m betting he wants to make it through this as much as we do.”

The mastiff watched me from the truck bed. Asset 04 showed no alarm at the sight of the shotgun, only that steady, unreadable attention.

“Keep this place locked,” I told Evans. “Don’t open up for anybody but me. If I haven’t returned in an hour, take my truck and get out of the county. Go through the back wall if that’s what it takes.”

I slipped through the side door and secured it behind me. Outside, the trees crowded the land in dark, familiar rows. I held the shotgun close and started toward Mark’s property, determined to confront him before the retrieval team searching the area closed in on us.