Free Dogs by Nancy Kress

could remember. It was very important to her. Allen crept quietly from the family room to the basement door.
    He couldn’t hear Susie through the door. All night he’d heard her, whimpering and barking because she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, at the foot of Allen’s bed. Instead she was locked in the basement, where it was dark and cold. She might even have eaten all her food by now. Allen’s mother said she’d given Susie a lot of food, but his mother didn’t always tell him the truth. Just last week she said Allen couldn’t go over to his friend Jimmy’s to play because Jimmy’s mother had the flu, but the truth was that Jimmy’s mother was drunk again. Jimmy had told him later.
    â€œSusie,” Allen whispered through the door. Nothing. He tried again, louder, hoping the noise from Star Wars covered him. “Susie!” Still nothing.
    What if she really was sick from this dog disease? Then they should take her to the doctor, get her the right medicine. Not just leave her lying alone down there on the cement floor! What if she was dying, all alone?
    Tears filled Allen’s eyes. He tried the doorknob, but the cellar door was locked. Quickly, before he could think about it, he opened the front door and slipped outside.
    It was cold out but not too bad, and anyway he didn’t care. The sun was warm. Allen rounded the house, ducked behind the bushes, and put his face smack up against a basement window.
    Susie lay on an old blanket his father must have put there, and for a heart-freezing moment Allen thought she was dead. But then she heard him, jumped to her feet, and gazed upward at the small window, her short tail wagging joyously. Through the glass, Allen heard her give her happy bark.
    But her water dish was empty. That wasn't right! Dogs had to have water, everybody knew that. And Allen’s father wasn’t due home until after dark. Allen put his hand on the window glass, hesitated, and then pushed. The window, too, was locked.
    Again he thought he might cry. Breaking a window was a sin, for sure. But so was punishing a dog that hadn’t done anything wrong, that might even die if she didn’t get water. Which sin was bigger?
    Well, duh .
    He went back inside, then returned. It took only one swing with his baseball bat to break a different window, one in the laundry part of the cellar, which was separate from the part Susie was in. Allen held his breath but his mother didn’t come. Even from outside he could hear Star Wars playing loudly. With the blanket he’d brought from the house wrapped around his arm, he pushed all the rest of the broken glass away from the window, then dropped the blanket over the pieces of glass on top of the dryer. That’s the way they did it on Law & Order . Allen slid onto the dryer and jumped onto the floor.
    Susie was thrilled to see him! He hugged her, filled her water dish, and gave her the Cheerios he’d saved in his pocket from breakfast. Then he left the cocker spaniel in her part of the basement, carefully closed the door to the laundry-room part, and wriggled back up through the window.
    A half-hour later his mother came downstairs. “How you doing, sweetie? Is Star Wars over?”
    â€œOh, I turned it off,” Allen said. “It was boring.”

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    In the early winter dusk Jess pulled the truck into the parking lot of the Cedar Springs Motel. The motel had no cedars and no springs. What it did have was the CDC. The motel was located just outside town on what passed for a highway, which made it easy to reach from D.C.—or, at least, as easy as anything else in Tyler. The motel’s wide parking lot overflowed with vehicles. The largest was the mobile lab, which had extended itself with an accordion-like structure to twice its traveling length. It looked intimidating, like some giant metallic worm.
    In a field across the road, kept there by two scowling cops, were