Eleven
“Okay, folks, if you can just wait a minute I’ll have all these bags out of here!”
The bus’s cargo bay door had swung open, filling the compartment with light. Yablonsky, the driver, immediately began grabbing bags and setting them onto the tarmac.
“Just have a look for your bag and take it,” he said, crouching down, grabbing at handles, dragging the bags out. “Oh, my back,” he said under his breath.
Then, “Holy mackerel, what’s this?”
A couple of the passengers grabbing their luggage leaned over to peer into the cargo bay.
“It’s a dog!” one yelled.
“It’s dead!” said another.
“Oh, no!” said Yablonsky, who pushed bags out of the way so he could crawl into the bay on his knees.
Chipper lay on his side, eyes closed, not moving.
“Hey, fella, come on now, you okay?” said the driver, reaching a hand out to tentatively touch the dog’s fur. He stroked his side a couple of times. “How’d you get in here? How’d you get in here, boy?”
“Is he dead?” a woman asked.
“I don’t know,” Yablonsky said, worriedly. He rested his hand on the dog’s side. Did the dog’s chest cavity move? He wasn’t sure. But one thing he was sure of: if this dog was breathing, he wasn’t breathing very hard. He crouched down, got his arms under Chipper, carefully moved him out of the cargo area and set him gently onto the pavement.
“Oh, no!” several passengers said in unison. One shouted, “Someone needs to do something! Call an ambulance!”
“An ambulance?” said another passenger. “For a dog?”
“The fire department,” said someone else, getting out a cellphone and starting to tap some buttons. “They help dogs and cats!”
“No time,” said the driver quietly to no one in particular. “I’ll have to do it myself.”
“Do what?” someone asked.
“Mouth-to-mouth,” Yablonsky said.
“What?” said several of his passengers.
What they did not know was that their bus driver loved dogs very much, had three at home, and he knew it was possible to save a dog the way you would a person who had stopped breathing. The first thing he did was open Chipper’s mouth and stick his fingers in to make sure nothing was blocking the animal’s windpipe. Finding nothing there, he lifted up the dog’s head, put one hand around his snout to keep his mouth mostly closed, then put his own mouth over the dog’s mouth and nose and blew as hard as he could.
“Ewww,” said a passenger.
But most of the passengers weren’t making a sound, except for one who was briefly on the phone to call for help, and no one was grabbing a bag and walking away. They were fascinated by what was happening before them.
Yablonsky blew hard into the dog’s snout, took his own mouth away to take in a deep breath of his own, then repeated the process.
Someone snapped a picture. “I’m posting this for sure!” a woman said.
The driver didn’t want his picture taken, but he was more concerned with saving the dog than telling the woman to stop it.
Breath after breath after breath.
“Come on,” he whispered pleadingly to the dog, while taking in another deep breath.
And then, suddenly, Chipper’s eyes opened. He gave his head a shake, forcing the driver to stop the life-saving exercise.
The dog’s chest could be seen going up and down.
“You did it! You saved him!” the passengers shouted.
“You need mouthwash!” another yelled.
Chipper took in several more breaths on his own and surveyed the scene in front of him. All these people standing around, looking at him, cheering and clapping. And there was this man in a uniform on the ground with him. Chipper remembered him from when he’d first hidden on the bus.
He saved my life.
Chipper observed several people on phones.
Oh, no, he thought. That’s not good.
If someone had called the police, they’d probably take him to a veterinary hospital.
Put him in a cage. Try to find his owner.
Chipper didn’t have an owner. Chipper had had a captor. He did not want to be returned to The Institute.
With great effort, Chipper got to his feet. He raised himself up on his front two paws, then pushed his back end up with his hind legs. He wobbled slightly.
“You take it easy there, fella,” said Yablonsky. “You were nearly a goner.”
Chipper struggled to access files, the GPS program in particular. Where were they? Where had the bus stopped? Was this Canfield?
“I’m gonna take you home,” said the driver. “Help you get your strength back, then find out who you belong to. Let me have a look at your collar there.”
Before Chipper could pull away, the man had grabbed hold of him by the band that went around his neck.
“What the—” He was struggling to get his fingers between the collar and the dog, but could not. “This collar, it sure is tight... no, wait a second. Is this thing... it’s like it’s stitched right to you.”
Chipper, still waiting for coordinates to load so he’d know where he was, pulled away from the man in one, sudden jerk.
He heard something. Off in the distance. His ears perked up.
A siren.
Someone was coming. Police, maybe the fire department.
Chipper spun around and ran, disappearing under the bus.
“Hey!” the driver shouted. “Come back here!”
The dog emerged out the other side. He figured the best thing was to run, for now. Find someplace to hide until he could recover, get his strength back.
No, wait.
There was something else Chipper had to do first.
He stopped abruptly, turned around, and ran back towards the bus. Shot under it and came out the other side, where the driver was still kneeling, shaking his head in disbelief at Chipper’s sudden disappearance.
The dog pounced on him, threw his paws onto the man’s shoulders, and gave his face a huge, long lick of gratitude.
And then Chipper hopped back down and disappeared, once again, beneath the bus.
Twelve
Daggert was in The Institute’s main control room, where three men and three women were seated at a bank of computers. All wore headsets. Some monitors displayed maps, others lines of data.
“Come on, people, I need something, anything!”
Everyone continued clicking and tapping.
“Why can we not get the tracker activated?” Daggert asked of everyone.
A man raised his hand. “Working on that, sir.”
“Watson?” Daggert said, moving to the man’s workstation.
“Wilkins,” he said. “Trying to reboot remotely is presenting some problems. For a while there, when I thought I was almost about to lock on, I lost the signal. It was almost like the animal had gone into a steel cage or something.”
“A steel cage?” Daggert said. “What do you mean, a steel cage? What kind of cage?”
“Not a cage, necessarily. But some kind of enclosure with metal walls that inhibited the signal. I totally lost him, and now I’m having to try again from scratch.”
“Well stop wasting time talking to me then, and do it!”
“Yes, sir, of course. I was only—”
From across the room, a woman removed her headset and shouted, “I’ve got something!”
All eyes turned on her.
“What is it?” Daggert demanded.
“Some emergency chatter,” she said. “Someone made a call to nine-one-one.”
Daggert knew The Institute’s sophisticated equipment could listen in on police, fire and ambulance transmissions. They could even intercept cell phone calls. They had instructed their surveillance program to listen for key words. Today, there was only one word they had their ears open for.