J.B. reached in his pocket. “Very clever animal, if you’re right, Trader. Didn’t just recover from a brain shot with a .38, but it also made itself a brand-new collar.” He produced the original strip of silvered metal and let it dangle from his fingers.
Jak sheathed his knife again. “Ryan said was ex-dog.”
Doc glanced at Mildred, who grinned. They chorused, perfectly together, “It has ceased to be,” and broke into laughter.
“What’s funny?” Abe asked, joining them. Seeing the dog, be added, “Why did you shoot a dead dog, Ryan?”
“It’s identical,” Krysty said quietly. “Same three white stars. Same white paw. Same collar.”
Ryan stooped and removed the metal strip, angling it to the sun so he could read it.
“Says 279792493.”
“Same number, exactly as this one,” the Armorer said, checking each digit. “This one ends in the letter A . That one got the same letter?”
“No. This is a B , instead. Precisely the same coded sequence, but just a letter different.”
They all stood in silence, looking at the corpse, already attracting the first of a swarm of blowflies.
“This passes belief,” Doc said. “They must surely be from the same litter. Brothers, perhaps?”
Ryan looked at his son. “Did you notice anything else unusual about that first dog? Anything about it we could check with this one?”
Dean considered the question. “Gee, Dad, that’s I nearly pissed in my pants when I saw it coming for me, you know. The way it was snarling and baring its teeth at” His eyes widened. “Oh, yeah, the teeth.”
“What about the teeth?” J.B. probed.
“Well, I noticed that instead of the usual big curved tooth on each side, here” he pointed to his own mouth, at the front, “it had like double teeth.”
“The canines?” Mildred asked. “Really big and hooked over. Two? You mean two on each side at the top?”
“Yeah. Certain. I remember noticing it. When I was living with my mother, Rona, we were on the run a lot, skipping from villes at night, you know. Often had the baron’s dogs set on us. I saw more hounds’ teeth than I had hot soup.”
Trader was already down on hands and knees, reaching for the blood-flecked muzzle, forcing open the jaws with an effort. “Strong bastard, it was,” he said. “There.” He finally managed to get them apart.
Everyone leaned forward, seeing that the dead animal had double canine teeth on both sides of its upper jaw.
RYAN HELD THE TWO COLLARS, laid flat across the palm of his hand, staring at them. “Doesn’t make sense. Not to be that alike.”
“Identical twins are not that unusual among human bipeds, are they, Dr. Wyeth?”
“I don’t know the stats on that. Not my field. Twins must be odds of around a hundred to one. Identical siblings can only come along about one time in fifty sets of twins. That’s all I know about babies. What I know about animal genetics can be written large on the head of a damned pin.”
“But that engraved code.” J.B. took the pair of metal tags from Ryan. “Absolutely identical apart from that last letter. Like some kind of experiment. Mebbe the woods are alive with twenty more, all with the same numbers and different letters. Or a hundred more.”
Trader had been picking small pebbles from the deep tread on his combat boots, flicking them into the lake, where the corpse of the second animal was floating gently by them, about twenty yards out in the water.
“I reckon we should move from here,” he said.
“Why?”
“Spooked, Ryan, that’s why. When you meet something out of the ordinary, then it’s time to hit the trail again. That was always my rule with the war wags.”
“Like when?”
“Onyx woman in Houston. Giant rats in Allegheny. The purple creeper in Tuscaloosa. And the gold eagles up over the border snows in Canada. How about”
Ryan held up a hand. “All right, Trader. You made your point. You say we should go back and make a jump again up on Cadillac Mountain?”
“No. Just move on. Away from the lake.”
“I agree.” J.B. looked around the circle. “Trader could be right. Something strange in those dogs. I can feel it. Guess we all can.”