Chapter 8 - A Tail for the Cages
*****
Max stirred awake. His head was throbbing, as if arising out of a long sleep. How long had he been asleep? It could've been days. The last thing he remembered was being dumped into the back of a van and a cloth doused in chloroform being pressed to his face.
He was lying on a thin scratchy mattress. As his mind adjusted to his surroundings, he could hear barking around him interspersed with random words. His brain was still fuzzy so he couldn't fixate on any conversation. He stood up on all fours, steadily getting to his feet.
Looking around, Max's heart sank. He was in a cage with metal bars around him, and the barking became clear: there were rows of cages filled with dogs lining the dim room. They were all types of breeds, some lying down looking sad, others excitedly barking to one another. The strange part about the noise was that some of the barks made sense to Max, as if he were understanding part of what the dogs were barking. It was a lot to process just having woken from his slumber so Max droned out the background noise.
"Hey, hey, you," Max heard someone call to him in the cage next to him.
Max turned to see a blonde male Labrador looking at him through the bars. He was confused. Was the dog speaking to him?
"Did you speak?" Max heard himself say in human speech.
The Lab tilted his head in confusion, not understanding Max.
"Ugh, I'm going crazy," Max lowered his head in disappointment.
The Lab started barking again and Max could hear words in the dog's broken speech, "concentrate -- think -- like -- dog."
"Oh my God, I can understand some of what you're saying," Max said.
"You -- speaking -- human," the Lab barked.
It became apparent on Max. He had been talking to the dog using human speech but the dog had been trying to get him to bark. His mind had changed again. He was adjusting to dog cognition. That's why he could understand some of the barking echoing throughout the room.
Max closed his eyes, concentrated and tapped into his dog instincts. He needed to be able to convey a message using his newfound dog language. He tapped into the switch in his mind that controlled his linguistic ability and changed it to that of a dog. Before he knew it, he felt a growl bubble up in his throat and he started barking, "can you understand me?"
The Lab wagged its tail and barked back in reply, "Yes, well done. You're speaking dog now."
"Wow, I can hear you clearly now," Max barked back in reply, for the first time hearing the other dog converse clearly. It was strange. He knew they were both barking, but the language reached his brain as if it were in clear human speech. His dog transformation had given him the ability of bilingualism -- both human and dog. The excitement passed. He needed to figure out where he was and what was going on.
"What's your name? Where am I? What's going on," Max barked, trying to understand the weight of the situation.
"Calm down, you've probably been through a lot. I'm Hugh, what's your name?" the Lab barked.
"Max."
"Nice to meet you, Max. You've been asleep for three days since they brought you here," Hugh barked. "I'm guessing you know Xander, or else you wouldn't be here in his secret hideout."
"Xander..." Max tilted his head in thought. "The head of the cartel, how do you know him?"
"We all do," Hugh pointed his muzzle toward the other dogs. "This is what he does. If you cross him, or if he thinks you need to be taken out for knowing too much about his drug operation, he uses his genetically enhanced guard dogs to bite one of his victims, they become a dog, and that person 'disappears.'"
"That's why people have been going missing, dead ends at every turn," Max gazed into the distance, the case he and Carey had been struggling with investigating made sense now. "But why not just kill off people? Why turn people into dogs?"
"Murder is messy. No body, no crime. He doesn't get charged this way, and he gets away with it. Who would believe animal transformations? He then takes the people-turned-dogs and sells them off on the black market, makes sure they are sent far away, and they never get back to their families or friends. Any info they know about the cartel is kept in track that way."
"So all these dogs... were people?"
"Yup," Hugh barked sadly. "I was the accountant for the cartel. Moved money around, hid the assets, laundered the money, but Xander got wind that I wanted out, so now here I am. I have too much information so he needs to get rid of me. I've been a dog about a month. I expect he'll soon send me somewhere far. Same with the others here, we all know something. What about you?"
"I'm a detective, or at least I was. My partner and I were investigating the cartel, but one of his dogs got me," Max lowered his head.
"Sorry to hear that, man, it looks like you won't be too far behind me either, unfortunately," Hugh nodded to Max.
Max had forgotten about his own transformation. He had been too absorbed with his surroundings to check in on himself. Gazing down at his body, he saw fur had made its way up to the base of his neck. He was completely dog from his shoulders down. There was a dog bowl of water in the corner. He trotted over, looked down and saw his changed face in the reflection of the water: his nose had transformed into the short black snout of a dog muzzle, his teeth were pushed outwards to follow the shape of the muzzle, and his tongue lolled out. He whined, seeing his humanity fade ever more.
