Tracksuit left the room, leaving Wawa alone to keep an eye on these predators. Minutes later he returned, holding Cyrus on a leash. Wawa was so overjoyed that she began to jump up and down, unafraid to bark at her friend. She stopped when she sensed the men walking past her. Each took a turn petting her. The man with the porkpie hat was last. With a meaty hand, he lifted his sunglasses to reveal two enormous eyes, one of which had a brown iris. The other was shaded over with a milky cataract. He smiled, exposing teeth that were the same off-white color as the diseased eyeball. He patted her scalp and left the room.
The men took seats in the front row of the arena. By then, Tracksuit had positioned Cyrus in one corner. Another dog owner — a fat man with a pit-stained T-shirt — brought his own warrior into the ring, a gray mutt. Both masters carefully washed the dogs using a bucket and a sponge placed in the middle of the floor. Cyrus’s tongue bobbed up and down while Tracksuit wiped his fur with a waffled towel.
The referee inspected the animals. He was a squat little thing with a goatee and a buzzed haircut. He resembled a dog himself. Cyrus sniffed him. I can inspect you, too, he seemed to be saying. The arena grew quiet, prompting Wawa to stop barking. Several people whispered into the ear of the man with the porkpie hat. He nodded, the fluorescent lights reflecting off his sunglasses.
And then it began. The two dogs charged each other, colliding in the center of the ring, snapping, growling, twisting about until they no longer resembled living things but malfunctioning machines leaking fluid. Cyrus attacked deliberately, while the other dog seemed unable to help himself. He clawed at Cyrus, spraying foamy saliva with each bark.
It wasn’t long before the gray dog made a mistake and allowed Cyrus to corner him. The older dog pinned him and bit his leg, tearing open the skin. After that, the gray dog was on the defensive. His wounded leg left bloody footprints, and a cut slashed across his face from his snout to his right eye. Through the cigarettes and spilled beer, Wawa picked up the bitter scent of it. Cyrus was exhausted but had the upper hand. He took swipes at his opponent, provoking helpless squeals from the gray dog. Cyrus did not need to kill this mutt, but he would if he had to.
Before he could finish the job, Cyrus froze, his ears pinned to his skull. While the crowd exhorted him, Cyrus barked at them, telling them to shut up and listen. Wawa heard it, too: something was approaching the building. Tires crunching the dirt. Footsteps and whispers. The smell of rubber and gasoline. Wawa let out a warning bark of her own. A malevolent presence surrounded the house.
A man rushed into the arena. He clapped three times. The sound cut through the din of the spectators. Everyone rose from their seats and headed toward the rear exit in a thunderous stampede of shoes and sneakers. Tracksuit pushed his way through the crowd. Wawa barked, pleading for him to let her loose so she could run with the others, with Cyrus. He told her to shut up, a phrase she knew very well. As he untied the leash, the front door of the building burst open. The evacuation became more frantic. Everyone was shouting. Men in matching blue suits and hats entered through the front door, all pointing metal objects and barking like dogs themselves.
Tracksuit pulled Wawa into the meeting room and slammed the door. Thinking she needed to protect her master, Wawa growled at the door as the men tried to batter it down. With another tug of the leash, Tracksuit directed her to a window. Opening it, he ordered her to jump out. When she hesitated, he cursed, picked her up, and shoved her through. The wooden frame clipped one of her vertebrae. She managed to land on her feet. Tracksuit squeezed out and landed behind her.
Seconds later, they were running, the trail and the trees jostling with each breathless step. Tracksuit stumbled a few times. The noises and the scents of the building receded. Though she was more tired than she had ever been, Wawa kept up with the dirt-caked pant legs of her master as they trudged deeper into the woods.
They made it to the trail, which eventually returned them to the hard, flat surface. The sun was rising. The building where Wawa had seen the strange red shapes seemed to be sleeping, the glow now dull. The van was where they had left it. Tracksuit knocked on the window. His friend was napping in the driver’s seat. It took another knock to wake him up. The men spoke briefly. Then Tracksuit took Wawa around the truck and opened the sliding door. Cyrus was inside, sitting in his cage calmly like a sphinx. The other dogs were gone, lost in the confusion.
Tracksuit did not need to tell Wawa to get in. She went straight for Cyrus, sniffing him, licking his face and the base of ears through the metal bars. Cyrus reciprocated by snapping playfully at her. Through sheer will, he had defied the men who had descended from the night sky. He had survived the battle and found his way through the forest to where the sun rose peacefully. It was then that Wawa felt the primal urge of her species: to be a part of his pack, to be one of his people. To hunt with him, to taste blood and share it. To roam the forests, meadows, and mountains, claiming territory for her clan. To huddle together under the night sky in defiance of the cold, without cages to separate them. She would still die for her master, but she belonged out in the wild, without a rope tied to her neck, without canned food served in a child’s bowl. It was Cyrus who made her realize that she had been in a cell, and that the love and protection that Tracksuit bestowed upon her was somehow an illusion. She did not understand it yet, and the thought often fell out of her primitive brain whenever she felt the need to bark, eat, or piss. But the seed took root, and it sustained her through the worst times of her life. Even before the ants began their experiment, Cyrus showed her that there was such a thing as freedom.
On the way home, Wawa pledged her life to Cyrus. She would die for him if she had to. And she would kill.
“LUFF-TENANT,” SOMEONE SAID. Wawa knew right away that it was Archer, a raccoon who had followed Culdesac’s soldiers around for days before the colonel finally relented and allowed him to join the Red Sphinx. Archer insisted on using the weird British pronunciation of Wawa’s rank. When asked why he spoke the way he did, he claimed that he hid in the basement of the main branch of the New York Public Library after Manhattan was evacuated. He spent months learning the classics, watching documentary filmstrips, learning things that the ants could not program into his brain. Wawa had once seen him pick a bullet out of his thigh with his claws, wipe his hands on his tail, and keep fighting. He had earned the right to be a little snooty. Even though he still ate trash on occasion — a trusty survival skill, she had to admit.