The Service Dog

“Officer number 46: Guardian class, field ops.” Gabe took pride in hearing his rank and title. He had just graduated from the enforcer academy and now he could finally do something with his life. In the briefings after this ceremony, each of the graduating enforcers would be given their field assignment, either common patrol, or individual assignments like Gabe was hoping for. 

He was taken to the backroom after all 100 enforcers had been listed and acknowledged. Gabe was one of 14 who were not given a straight patrol assignment. The chief of Prague’s force greeted and welcomed Gabe to take a seat before him. “You really didn’t show much promise with a partner assignment, Gabe. I’m sure you’re well aware of that after these two years.” Gabe knew this and yet felt a little shameful as he readjusted in his seat. “But you showed plenty of promise on carrying out orders and skill in the field, so you were a tricky assignment.” He waved for someone outside the room to enter, confusing Gabe. He had figured there wouldn’t have been anyone else involved in his orders, that he’d be given the role of remote drone operator or motorcyclist instead. 

Hearing the door close brought him back to the room. Gabe turned around in his seat to see a young woman in a uniform he had never seen before. She was quite beautiful, with her black hair in a short bob cut. However, It took him only a second more to register the real subject of the entrance: A tall and slender Doberman Pinscher. It’s smoothly cropped black fur gleamed with the fluorescent light in the room, and as soon as Gabe had registered that the dog was present, he jumped nearly out of his seat, leaning against the chief’s desk, who was now laughing at this. “Come now Gabriel, you’re not scared of a simple dog are you?”

Gabe inhaled quickly and in his situation, he forced his composure to return. He shook his head, “It just took me by surprise is all.” He swallowed quietly before continuing. “Will… he be involved in my assignment?”

The girl spoke up from behind the leashed dog. “You’re being assigned to the city’s Canine Unit. You won’t have a human partner, but K-2 here will be acting as a partner of sorts.”

Gabe could only nod when he was ordered to follow the girl, who’s name was Lucielle, a lovely name Gabe thought. He  followed her to the back room to be debriefed. He got suited up in his specially made enforcer garb, donning the all black wardrobe and putting on the shiny black helmet. He was able to manage holding K-2 on his leash. “Here. Stop.” Ordering him from place to place. “Punch. Crunch.” Ordering a pounce on a target. Luckily for Gabe, the dog was only here right now because he was able to pass all these barriers in his own academy, which Gabe could see in himself. In a sudden moment while K-2 was looking up at him, Gabe went to pet him on the head. 

K-2 sat up abruptly and sharply barked at Gabe’s outstretched hand, shattering all composure Gabe had been building up. Lucy then got right away to quieting K-2, rubbing the side of his head and stroking his back. “Why will he let you pet him?” Gabe muttered in the born again silence. 

“I’m sorry, it completely slipped my mind.” Lucielle shook her head and palmed her forehead. “Kato doesn’t like gloves. He refuses to be pet by them.” She squatted down to meet the dog, and pointed his head towards her own, playfully scowling. “You’re so difficult sometimes, aren’t you.” The dog simply panted in response, his tongue drooping to its side. Gabe hadn’t ever seen or heard pet talk before, it was weird to him. 

“I thought you said his name was K-2?”

Her face returned to a smile a bit as she looked up at Gabe. “That’s his official designation, yes. I call him Kato sometimes, he seems to like it more.” She gave him another rub behind the ears before they resumed the training regimen. 

Soon, the sun started to set through the enforcer office’s short slatted windows. Many tricks and commands had been learned, and would be practiced in the coming days, but to end their current session, Lucielle offered up an idea that Gabe had been dreading. “Why don’t you take out Kato for supper?” When Gabe looked at her with a blank expression, she clarified what she could with a slight frown. “Sorry, K-2 I mean.”

“Oh, no, I knew that, I just don’t know if I really want him dirtying up the new squad car.” It was a sorry excuse, but maybe it’d get him out of this for today. 

“Won’t he just get to that eventually though?” Her giggling was as radiant as her appearance, even with her canine-training uniform. 

Gabe didn’t really have an excuse to put it off further, so he sucked up his pride. Lucy walked him and K-2 over to Gabe’s new designated squad car. After Gabe led K-2 up the passenger seat and opened his own driver’s side, Lucy unpacked something from the canine supply bag thrown in the back seat. “Here, this is a dinner for him.” She pointed at the dog curled up in the passenger’s seat. “It’s all super-foods and other things specifically designed around his diet.”

Upon activation, he heard the aether engine ignite. The dogs ears perked up and he was alert. Gabe didn’t know whether to reassure the dog or let it be, so he chose the latter. As the car pulled out of its garage, he waved goodbye to Lucy. It was now just him and the dog. He drove around the block for a bit at first, and soon after the dog had grown accustomed to the moving vehicle, resting his head back on his paws. As K-2 breathed, Gabe noticed that the air in the compartment had become humid and dense. How could one creature create this much moisture. In response, Gabe lowered the windows and veered the car a bit. K-2 had jumped up out of his seat to peer out of the tinted slit pumping fresh air. Gabe rolled his eyes and lowered the window the rest of the way, luckily it was moderate temperature today even with his all black uniform. 

Gabe drove them to a local drive-in joint; he had a hankering for a juicy burger… or two. When his order was delivered to him, he lowered the visor and face-piece of his enforcer helmet, freeing both his eyes and his mouth for the occasion. Each bite was better than the last, and he soon realized that he hadn’t eaten anything since his breakfast before the ceremony, meaning K-2 probably hadn’t either. He popped open the air tight seal on K-2’s food dish and set it in front of the dog. The dog made no sound, and after only a minute Gabe looked over to see half the food left and the dog’s nose wrinkled, hovering over the remaining food but leaning away from it. He looked simply disgusted. “Come on, K-2. I thought you always eat this stuff.” In a moment of weakness, Gabe leaned over into the dog’s seat to get a whiff of his partner’s food, and needless to say Gabe understood the dog’s expression. Once Gabe had retreated to his own food, K-2 looked over as if saying, You think I want to eat this stuff?

For the first time all day, Gabe actually laughed. “Here, for your troubles.” He tore off a quarter of his second burger, intending to throw it into the dog’s dish. Instead it ended up in K-2’s mouth. 

The first few days together went on like this. It wasn’t until the third night that the dog and his new partner advanced past their field training. The first mission was a stakeout at a nearby motel. There had been a few tips as to an illegal smuggler taking refuge for the past few nights, so Gabe and K-2 were dispatched there for the night to note any suspicious activity. Gabe was betting the charade would end up being nothing, so he brought along two pillows just in case the squad car had to become a makeshift bed. 

The sun set in a purple haze over the vastness of the Prague sky, and both K-2 and Gabe showed their own signs of being tired. Although his expectations were still low, Gabe wanted to make sure that his first dispatch went as well as possible. “K-2: Alert.” It was a command for overnight missions like this one; K-2 was able to sleep, but he was to hover just slightly below his active alertness.

The night dragged on for hours. Gabe had exhausted his entire supply of comic books and newspapers, and had resorted to cleaning his aether blaster. The blasters themselves didn’t dirty ever, it was mainly the aether canisters that gathered residue on the releasing end.

Suddenly, a light flashed across his eye, only a faint glare, but it still caught his attention. Gabe hadn’t seen the motel’s doors open at all since he had parked, so he figured it was just the owner. His thinking changed when he saw the man holding a toolbox beneath his leather jacket. Gabe was tired and he honestly would’ve let it slide had it not been for the man running away from all the cars in the lot, towards the small forest leading to town. 

Ugh, for Pete's sake. Of course. “K-2 --” But the dog was already up. Had Gabe actually said his thinking out loud? 

Unfortunately for the pair, they’d have to take a lengthy jog down the slope to follow their target. The two of them had to be stealthy. They no longer had a visual on their target, so Gabe needed to utilize his stealth ops training from the academy, following the known trail slowly while watching both behind and in front. The trees creaked, keeping both Gabe and his canine partner alert as they traversed the woods. Soon, lights and sounds of the nearby highway began to leak through the foliage, and the two became ever more careful knowing they would likely meet their target in the coming moments. 

And there he was. Gabe brought K-2 close to the treeline and peered through the underbrush. His target was now in front of him, walking hurriedly in the direction of the highway. If he waited much longer, Gabe wouldn’t get his chance to catch the man. Slowly and silently, he rose and gently led K-2 forward as quietly as possible. There was a command for this type of behavior that had inexplicably escaped Gabe’s memory, but K-2 seemed to be going along with it anyways. Gabe looked down at the dog; his eyes were trained on the figure before them, his ears were up and back showing his alertness, and his tail was poised in the same fashion. A few more steps and…

“Hands where I can see them!” The man dropped the toolbox he had been holding. In the same instant, he reached into his coat and pivoted to face Gabe with a gun of his own, an old-fashioned gun. But Gabe’s attention was on what fell out of the vessel the man had taken great care to hide earlier. Rolling out of the toolbox was a metal cylinder the approximate size of the toolbox itself. It was glowing light blue with the aether inside of it, easily past the point of commercial capacity, and this man wouldn’t have been secretive with it if he were certified. “What the hell?”

He had been trained to fire on sight of a devastating weapon such as a potential bomb, but one look at the man stopped Gabe. The man’s gun, the revolver, was trained on the dog at Gabe’s side. He didn’t know why, but that held back his trigger. Why won’t I fire? He’s right there, I just need to shoot. He pushed with all the might his finger could muster, but the trigger did not waver. I’d lose him? He’d die? For nothing?

The gun went off. The forgotten scent of gunpowder surrounded them.

------

He was out at night, past curfew as kids typically did in the slums of Prague. The tedious laws were held in lower regard by the enforcers, and in a depraved area such as this, rarely did they care to waste their time on little scoundrels such as Gabriel. 

He was about to turn the final corner to his house, but he heard murmuring from the adjacent building, an unwelcome and sinister sound. Talk of resistance and resilience in the face of the empire. Gabriel had never heard these words before and was only curious as to what they meant, and his curiosity got the best of him. 

Shadow would be his cloak. He’d sneak under the window listening to the plans and the tales, words of a world different than his. But once he had placed himself, back against the wall as flat as the siding, the sound of talk faded, overtaken by another. A faint and low rumbling from the same source. 

Then it became all Gabriel could hear until the sound broke. It snapped at him and was on top of him, his nose and lip were in severe pain as he cupped his face. Someone, no something, big and muscular was standing on top of him, breathing in his newfound fear and exhaling exhaust. “Axl, what’d you find, boy?” Gabriel hadn’t noticed that all the talking from inside had stopped when the dog had jumped him. “Oh, an actual boy.” The stout man at the entrance seemed almost disappointed, like he was hoping for a bigger fish. His limbs were wrapped in tattoos. Another man, tall and lanky with a nose piercing with a blinding glare, soon joined his shorter accomplice as they both walked out to observe the child caught underneath the dog named Axl. “A little rat it seems? What was he doing outside the window?” After getting no reply, he restated the question correctly in his nasally tone. “Kid, what were you doing underneath the window?”

Gabriel’s only response was a sob. It was too much, the pain, the men, the dog. His home was merely a minute’s stroll away but he felt like he’d never make it back. 

After a painful silence, the stout man pulled on the faintly-growling dog’s leash. “Here Axl. I think you’ve taught the boy his lesson.” 

Gabriel finally got up, and at first didn’t know what to do. All eyes were on him, he looked down at his attire, internally screaming when all he saw was blood red. The tall lanky man took one more step towards the kid before him. “Scram.” And Gabriel did as he was told. 

------

As Gabe fell onto his back, he felt no impact as everything dissolved around him. All he saw and felt was a white light. He didn’t know why, but he was crawling towards it, clawing and kicking his way upwards. It was the only thing he could think to do. And yet the light began to fade; had he not been quick enough? As Gabe’s fingers started to lose feeling and the light gradually faded from his view, he succumbed to the void, cold and lost forever. It could’ve been an eternity before he felt anything else, but suddenly he felt something drag along his face. It felt as though his whole body was being dragged by the friction. It happened again, and a third time. Gabe was starting to get annoyed but then the light came from nowhere, rushing at him as something pounded at his chest; and his eyes opened once more. 

He sat up abruptly as a pair of paws pounced on his rib cage. A soreness now radiated across his entire front half, his blaster wound acting as the origin. It took a few blinks for his vision to deblur. There in front of him sat his canine partner, panting and wagging his tail. Gabe’s assailant was lying on the ground from where he had shot from. He assumed that [dog name] had taken him out after Gabe had fallen. “Good boy, Kato” was all he could think to whisper as he pressed the disinfectant canister against his bullet wound. Who uses metal bullets nowadays? There shouldn’t even be any in circulation. He winced at the immense sting, but let out a sigh as it subsided. Kato once more licked Gabe’s face and for once, Gabe chuckled at it, and the pain receded. As he leaned himself back onto his feet, he saw a couple more enforcers running towards him across the field.

Gabe went to sit on a nearby bench, awaiting the questioning as to what happened and how he had managed to get shot; something he wasn’t looking forward to. It was no stretch to say Gabe had faltered when confronted by the suspect. Gabe’s partner could tell he was nervous now and pawed at Gabe’s shoes. It seemed like a stretch, but he went to take his gloves off now, and rubbed behind Kato’s ears. Both of them were able to grin.