Free The Last Dog on Earth by Daniel Ehrenhaft Page B

remember? We share things.”
    “You might want to remind your son of that,” Robert snapped.
    Logan stared at them. He started to feel weirdly detached, as if he were watching the scene unfold on cheap, grainy videotape. This was possibly the dumbest argument in the history of planet Earth. But somehow it was so
serious.
Mom and Robert were glaring at each other. Any satisfaction that Logan felt over Mom's decision to side with him began to melt away like the butter that was sitting in the sun on the kitchen table. Why was Robert so mad, anyway? This was stupid even for
him.
    “Robert, listen,” Logan said. “I'm sorry about your racket. But look at it this way. Jack's an animal.
And
a puppy. So she does whatever she feels like. I mean, I get just as angry as you do when she messes with
my
stuff. But it isn't, like …
personal.
You know? If she sees something she wants to chew, she'll chew it. We just have to put things away. And we have to stop her if we catch her. We have to teach her that it's wrong.”
    “Makes sense to me,” Mom said pointedly.
    Logan offered Robert an apologetic smile. He was trying to call a truce, even though smiling for Robert's benefit always made him feel ill.
    Robert pushed himself away from the table. The chair screeched on the linoleum.
    “All I know is that if we'd gotten the dog I asked for, I'd still have a tennis racket,” he said. He dropped his plate into the sink, then strode out of the kitchen.
    Logan's jaw tightened. In the space of about three seconds, he'd gone from fantasizing about making peace to fantasizing about ramming that chewed-up tennis racket down Robert's throat so his stomach would explode and guts would fly everywhere.
    Logan stared down into Jack's bright, saucerlike brown eyes. How could anybody possibly blame her for chewing on something? She was
supposed
to chew on things. She was a dog. She did whatever felt natural. It was absurd. No, it was beyond absurd. It was incomprehensible. It was …
    Robert.
    Logan came to an important realization at that moment. A monumental realization.
Humongous.
It was the kind of realization that could change you forever; it could give you the power to quit everything and move to a mountaintop and become one of those Shaolin monks who are so wise and enlightened that they don't even have to
eat—
they only have to breathe air.
    After four years of struggling to understand the oaf who'd married his mom, Logan still hadn't gotten anywhere. But in less than a week he'd come to understand the newest member of his family better than he'd understood anyone else in his whole life.
    And …
    And there was something very depressing about that.

Letter to the editor published in
The Redmont Daily Standard, June 28
    TO THE EDITOR:
    While I understand that your newspaper must run advertisements, it was irresponsible of you to publish Rudy Stagg's “open letter.” He is clearly trying to frighten people into bringing their business to him. That's not what we need right now. People are scared enough already.
    We now estimate that half the dogs in our town are either sick or dead. What's more, the disease has spread to other towns. The CDC is calling it POS, or psychotic outburst syndrome, due to the fact that the dogs always attack someone or something before they die.
    The more the CDC knows about the disease, the sooner they'll be able to formulate a response. It's important to go through the proper channels. The CDC needs to track its spread. They need to know when people are bitten so that they can see if they develop the disease. As soon as any new information comes in, they'll let the public know. So here is
my
open letter to Redmont's dog owners: If you call Rudy Stagg or try to deal with a sick dog yourself, you are putting your own life and other people's lives in danger. It's as simple as that.
    JOHN VAN WYCK
    Redmont County Sheriff

C HAPTER
NINE
    Westerly wasn't quite sure what he was doing. As a scientist, he was used to