Chapter 172 Ten Years On The Clock

/Kara’s Third Person POV/

The hay barn was lit by an orange bulb and freezing at half past five in the morning. The sliding door stuck halfway along its rail, as always, while Dean hung a lantern on the nail above Hank’s bale for extra light and knelt in the straw beside the heater running at full throttle to keep Hank warm.

He’d come off the wall at four with them zipped into his jacket pockets, two to a side, and at five he’d been at Kara’s door in the new house holding all four of them out to her, his hands shaking, which was something Kara had never once seen on Dean Hart.

"Healing, brain, body, and ten years of life," he’d told her, looking down at them in his palms as though they might not be there anymore. "From Nikki... h-he gave them to me. For Hank... His words."

Kara had looked at them once, and had gone back into her room for her boots without another word.

Hank lay where he had lain for a month, on the horse blanket folded four times, under the second one, with his grey chin on the straw.

He opened his good eye at the light, saw it was them, and thumped his tail twice against the blanket.

Hank hadn’t heard them come in. He hadn’t heard anything at all in three years.

"Which first, Doctor Woodbrew?" Dean laid the injectors out on the blanket in a row and kept one hand on the old dog’s ribs, and for once there was no smile anywhere in it when he called her that.

"The ten years." Kara touched each injector in turn without picking any of them up. "So his body doesn’t give up on him when the others go in... Then the body, then the brain. The healing goes last."

"Why last?"

"It doesn’t heal anything by itself. It speeds up what his body would do anyway." Kara looked down at the bare knob of the old dog’s left hip under the blanket. "So we give him a better body to work with first."

Dean looked at her across the dog for a long second, then picked up the first injector.

Nikki had told Dean that the three of them would be the worst five minutes of the dog’s life.

And Kara had experienced it herself.

With a deep breath, she drew the left foreleg back until the point of the elbow touched the chest wall, and where it touched was the heart, give or take a rib, which every first-year vet student learned on a plastic dog in a classroom.

Dean set the injector there, and at a quarter to six he thumbed the cap away and pressed.

-Click-!

Dean leaned his weight across the dog’s chest, braced for it, while Kara got both hands on the hips.

The scream they’d braced for never came.

Hank let out one long breath through his nose, his good eye closed, and went still under their hands. Then he went stiller than that.

Kara pulled the stethoscope off Dean’s neck and had it in her ears before he could ask what she was doing, and she counted.

His heart was at ninety a minute when she started, old and tired but steady, then it went sixty, then thirty.

His breaths went from one every few seconds to one every ten, then one in twenty, and then she couldn’t find them at all.

"Kara..." Dean’s voice cracked down the middle. "Kara, is he-"

"Fourteen." Kara didn’t lift her head off the dog. "He’s at fourteen a minute. He’s still there."

She had read it in a textbook once, in the Chapter people usually didn’t bother with.

A black bear in its den took its heart down to eight beats a minute and a breath every forty-five seconds, and walked out in the spring.

She held on to that with everything she had while the number under her stethoscope kept on falling, twelve, ten, eight.

At four minutes, she pulled a strand of straw out of the bale and held it under his nose, and she watched it for a long time before it moved, once.

Dean buried both hands in the dog’s fur, his face pressed into his neck, and stopped talking to him.

At five minutes on her watch, the heart under her stethoscope stumbled, caught, and finally climbed: ten, fourteen, twenty, forty.

His ribs came up under her hand with a breath, then another, deeper, and the straw at his nose blew flat.

Then Hank opened his good eye and looked at her.

Dean made a sound into the dog’s neck that Kara would never repeat to anybody.

Kara herself sat back on her heels in the straw, and for the first time that morning her hands shook.

"It wasn’t killing him... of course it wasn’t..." She pulled the stethoscope out of her ears. "It slowed him right down to put the ten years in."

Dean laughed, his face still pushed into the dog’s neck.

They had an hour before the next one, and Kara spent it all with her palm on the dog’s chest, counting a heart that held at a steady eighty and never dropped again.

The Physiological Enhancer went in at the same spot at a quarter to seven.

Kara knew what was coming better than he did. She’d done her own two on a stranger’s bed in Marlow, with a handkerchief between her teeth and her hand locked around Mr. Norton’s forearm, and she knew exactly how long five minutes lasted from the inside of one.

-Click-!

For about two seconds the old dog did nothing at all.

Then Hank screamed, and kept screaming.

It came out of him high and raw, a sound Kara had never heard a dog make in all four years of vet school.

Hank’s whole body went rigid under the blanket at once, all four legs locking straight out, his lips peeling back off his teeth while his good eye rolled white and his claws tore the horse blanket open at the seams.

Dean threw himself across the dog’s chest and held on with everything he had.

Kara took the hips in both hands and held them down without squeezing.

After all, hands now were a great deal stronger than they used to be.

"I know, buddy, I know, I know..." Dean talked into the dog’s neck the whole time, knowing Hank couldn’t hear a word of it, and never once stopped.

Kara pressed her cheek against the dog’s ribs so he could feel her there if he couldn’t hear her, and watched the second hand go round on her watch.

That was the one that made you feel your heart was about to burst while you stayed awake for every second of it.

Kara felt his heart throb as if it wanted to burst under her cheek.

One minute went by, then two. At three, the scream broke down into a sound that was worse than the scream, a long hoarse whine with no breath left behind it, while Dean’s shoulders started shaking where he lay across the dog.

At five minutes on her watch, it stopped.

Hank went loose under them all at once, lying on the straw with his tongue out, panting fast and shallow, his sides heaving under Kara’s cheek.

Then, a few minutes later, while she was still listening to his heart, Hank lifted his head off the straw.

He held it up on his own, steady, ears forward, his good eye bright and fixed on Dean and his tail going against the blanket.

He looked better than Kara had seen him look in four days, and better than he had any right to look an hour after his heart had gone down to eight beats a minute.

-Bang-!

The wind caught the sliding door and slammed it against its stop, and Hank’s head turned toward it.

Dean went rigid with his arms around the dog.

"Hank?" Dean’s voice came out barely above a whisper.

The dog’s ear turned toward him, the deaf one.

"Hank." Dean tried again, louder, his voice cracking straight down the middle of the word.

And the old dog looked right at him and thumped his tail, while Dean pressed his forehead against the dog’s, laughing and crying at the same time.

Kara didn’t laugh along with him. She had gone cold down to her stomach, because she had seen this before.

On her first clinic rotation, back in September, an old Labrador who hadn’t eaten in a week sat up one morning bright-eyed, licked the tech’s hand, ate half a tin of food out of it and thumped his tail at everybody who walked past his kennel.

His owners cried with relief in the waiting room. He was dead in his kennel before midnight.

The vets had a name for it. The rally, the last burst a body found as it got ready to let go, and the dog in front of her looked exactly like that Labrador had.

He didn’t try to get up. He lay there with his head up and his eyes on Dean, alert, bright, nowhere near his feet, while Kara kept her hand flat on his chest without telling Dean any of it.

June came across the yard at seven in her green quilted coat with two mugs of coffee, having heard the screaming from her kitchen, and stood in the gap of the half-open door without coming in.

She put the mugs down on a bale, looked at her dog for a long time, and went back to the house without a single word, which was not like June at all.

Dean sat with Hank’s head in his lap and wiped his face with the back of his wrist.

"Nikki says once he can understand me, I’m going to regret it."

"You will." Kara drank June’s coffee without taking her eyes off the dog. "Tikki reads labels."

Dean laughed properly that time, and the old dog’s tail moved against the straw at the sound of it.

Kara didn’t take her hand off his chest.

The brain went in at the temple at a quarter to eight.

Dean parted the grey fur above the dog’s eye with two fingers, and his hand shook so hard he couldn’t keep the injector on the spot, so Kara put her hand over his and held it there until it clicked.

-Click-!

Kara knew that one from the inside too: five minutes of fire behind your eyes, your hands over your face, your teeth together, and nothing in the world to do but wait.

Hank didn’t scream for that one. He went stiff from nose to tail with his eyes screwed shut and a thin high sound coming out of his nose, while Dean talked to him for all five minutes, and this time Hank could hear him.

The healing went into the hip at a quarter to nine, against the bare knob of bone where the muscle had wasted off it.

And this time around, nothing happened at all, no scream, no stillness, nothing Kara could see or hear or feel under her palm.

She took the left leg behind the stifle and brought it back, slow, with her other hand flat over the joint, exactly as she had two days ago in this same barn.

And the hip grounded under her palm the same as it had then, a dry, gravelly catch at the end of the range.

Dean’s face fell, and he didn’t hide it.

"It’s accelerated, not instant." Kara laid the leg back down on the blanket. "It speeds up what his body does on its own, and his body just got a great deal better at doing things. Give it days... A week."

Then it was over, all four of them, five minutes of looking dead and ten of the worst pain of his life, spread across three hours, four hours since Dean had knocked on her door.

Kara wrote 8:50 on the back of her hand with a pen out of plain habit, then sat and watched the dog and waited for the rally to end, as the Labrador’s had.

Hank lay there breathing for a while, and then he got up.

He did it by himself, without Dean’s arm under his belly, standing on all four legs on top of the bale with the left hind set down carefully under him.

Then he shook himself from his nose to the end of his tail until the straw flew off him in a cloud.

And the moment he did, the cold in Kara’s stomach let go of her all at once.

His heart had held at a strong, steady eighty under her hand for three hours. A body getting ready to let go didn’t do that, and it didn’t stand up and shake the straw off itself either.

The grey was still there in his muzzle. But nothing else about him looked old anymore, except the care he took with that left hind foot.

Both his eyes were bright, and both of them were looking at Dean.

"Hey, old man..." Dean’s voice gave out halfway through it.

Hank’s tail went once, twice, then wouldn’t stop, and he stepped down off the bale onto the barn floor, careful on the left side and not caring about anything else.

Outside, the sun was up, low and white over the east wall, the first clear morning in days, with the shadow of the barn lying blue across the snow.

Hank went out through the gap in the door at a walk, then at a trot with a hitch in it, and stuck his whole face into the first drift he came to and sneezed.

Kara had seen him clear the paddock gate from a standing start once, when he was ten.

[Give it a week...] she thought. [No... In a few days he’d be doing it again]

And before she knew it, she was laughing out loud in the snow before she could stop herself.

Hank came back round at his hitching trot and went straight for Dean’s heels, nipping at the backs of his boots and running him round in a circle, the heeler in him coming back all at once.

Dean went down on his back in the snow laughing, with the dog standing on his chest licking his face.

While Kara laughed until her stomach hurt.

When she looked up, Dean watched her from the snow, then looked away at the dog.

She thought nothing of it at all.

"Go find Dad," Dean told the dog, still flat on his back.

Hank looked at the house, at the porch running round the bottom of it, where Walter stood at the top of the steps with his morning coffee, and went across the yard at that hitching trot.

Yesterday he couldn’t get up those steps. He went up all four of them now, one at a time, careful with the left hind on every one, and sat down on Walter’s boot.

Walter looked down at him for a long time.

Then he set his coffee on the porch rail, crouched, and put his hand on the dog’s head, staying down there a long while, and nobody in that yard ever mentioned it.

Kara stood in the snow with her hands in her pockets and wanted, more than she had wanted anything in a month, to find Nikki and thank him for it herself.

She didn’t know what it had cost.

She knew the eight injectors Mr. Norton had lined up on a coffee table in Marlow had come to two million Credits between them, and not one of those eight had put ten years on anybody.

Whatever the ten years had cost, it had cost Nikki a fortune, and he had spent it on an old dog who wasn’t even his.

She was happy. More than that, she was surprised. Both feelings sat warm and heavy in her chest at once as she watched Walter Hart crouch on his own porch with his hand on his dog.

She was surprised because the man who’d stood on that wall all week staring east at a church didn’t spend fortunes on old dogs, or she’d thought he didn’t.

"He never came in for breakfast." June was in the open door behind Walter with a dish towel in her hands when Kara asked. "His plate’s in the warming oven. Three helpings... That boy has never once missed a meal at my table."

"Haven’t seen him since dinner." Leo came down the porch steps past his father and the dog, staring at Hank with his mouth open.

"He was up on the wall with me till about two." Dean was sitting up in the snow now, brushing it off his shoulders. "Said he couldn’t sleep."

Nikki did not miss meals, ever.

The Enhancers had him eating four and five times what a person ate, he had put away three plates last night, and there was no Nikki, old or new, who walked away from June’s pancakes.

So Kara went to the Ascender.

It was parked at the end of the RV row, engine off, heater running, frost all over the outside of its glass.

Nora sat in the back at the little table, knees pulled up, the blanket off her bed around her shoulders.

The System’s tablet was propped up, showing her drone’s feed of the church, and the ThinkPad was on the table with three books open on it at once.

She’d been at it before dawn, by the look of her.

The pages went into her as easy as breathing now, one after another after another, and Kara was fairly sure her sister couldn’t stop turning them anymore even if she wanted to.

"I am occupied." Nora didn’t look up from the screen. "I am halfway through-"

"Where’s Nikki?"

"Hunting." Nora held up one finger to finish her page, then lowered it, having already finished it. "The System says so... I asked it at seven, when he did not come for pancakes, which I have entered into the record as unprecedented."

"He doesn’t need to hunt." Kara picked the tablet up off the window. "He has a magic shop... get your drone up."