The pilot landed as close to the front entrance of the park as he dared, adjacent to the space cleared for the convention party. “Wait for the blades to stop,” he demanded.
Sam opened her door. “Can’t. No time.” She jumped out. Tom was half a step behind her.
They cleared the helicopter and ran between the faux Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. They made it to the park entrance on a sprint.
Twenty-five armed Guards blocked the entrance in the type of formation Sam had seen only in pictures of riots—shoulder to shoulder, their heavy batons held out horizontally in front of their chests. The dogs were still several blocks away, but Sam could see them coming. She couldn’t identify the dogs from this distance, but several struck her as familiar.
Sam raced up to the line of Guards. “You can’t hurt them! The dogs are safe! We have proof!”
“It was a vaccine!” Tom shouted. “The dogs aren’t contagious. We need them alive,” he yelled at anyone who would look at him. The stone-faced Guards would not respond.
“Please, listen to us!” Sam cried out. In her frustration she tried to jerk the baton out of the hands of one of the soldiers, but he was impossible to move.
Tom reached for her. “Don’t, Sam. They’ll hurt you.”
Sam shook him off. “Let me go!”
McGreary’s Jeep screeched to a halt in front of the line of Guards and he jumped out. “Step away, miss!” he shouted at Sam. “This is now a restricted area.”
Tom ran up to McGreary. “Look, I’m the deputy mayor, Tom Walden. I don’t know what’s going on here, but these dogs are safe and we need them. Alive. Please.”
“You have proof of that, Mr. Walden?”
“We’re getting it. We are talking to the CDC right now.”
“That doesn’t help me, sir. The governor believes that if those dogs cross into the park, they will have access to the entire city.”
“Bullshit! That’s not why you’re here,” Tom said. “The governor screwed this up from the start, trying to protect his convention party, and now he can’t back down without admitting it. That’s what this is about—what it always was about!”
McGreary turned to his troops. “Stand ready! You have my orders, soldiers. I don’t care what else you have heard today. I expect you to follow my orders. Do you understand?”
The soldiers, long drilled in command and combat, responded in unison: “Yessir!” Whatever feelings they had about their orders, these men and women did not show it.
Sam scanned the street; the dogs were just two blocks away. The leader ran with a familiar graceful strength. It was Nick! Scrabble, Blinker, and Monster ran behind him, along with all the shelter regulars and a mass of other dogs. The large pack dodged cars and pedestrians and leaped over obstacles, as if something in the park called to the dogs. They showed no signs of slowing.
Sam refused to stand around arguing with people who wouldn’t listen. That was how she had spent her whole life, always out of place and too often ashamed even to be a member of this species. She knew that she had only one real choice.
Sam ran toward the pack.
She was still a block away from the dogs when Nick, relying on some impossible reserve of energy, charged ahead of the others. He bounded up to Sam, plunked his big paws on her shoulders, and licked her face. Despite everything that had happened, Sam felt a moment of elation. She hugged him tight and noticed with great relief that his eyes were bright and his breath smelled clean.
Scrabble, Blinker, and Monster ran up next. Then all the shelter dogs, the ones Sam had lived with and cared for, surrounded her. They had only a few moments of joyous reunion before the remainder of the dogs overtook them. Sam tried to stop them from pushing forward, but realized almost immediately that it was a lost cause.
Sam’s twin demons of numbness and panic battled for control in her head. Then she heard her mother’s voice cut through, as firm and as clear as if she’d been standing next to Sam. “Trust yourself,” her mother said.
Perhaps she couldn’t save these animals, but Sam vowed that she would never be the face of their Devil. The only thing she knew with certainty was that she had to get there with them.
Sam turned and, with Nick on one side and Scrabble and Blinker on the other, ran for the line of soldiers.
Of the thousands of images recorded that day, this one—of Sam running side by side with Nick, Scrabble, and Blinker toward the boundary of Guards, the rest of pack fanned out behind her—was the one that appeared on the cover of every New York and national newspaper and magazine. Sam often looked at that photograph in the years afterward and prayed that she had proven worthy of her running companions on that day.
The dogs were now a few hundred feet away from the Guards. Sam was nearly keeping pace with them despite her fatigue. All those years of running had conditioned her. But there was something else too. Sam felt part of a larger entity—powerful, feral, primitive, graceful, and purposeful. She had returned to an earlier form of her being and had never felt so utterly whole.
The first dogs, the fastest, charged forward to the line of Guards. Sam had no idea what would happen once the dogs met the batons, but she prepared herself to see the worst of humanity, knowing how horrible the worst could be. The nearly infinite number of images from an insane history of human-animal conflict sped through her mind: clubbed baby seals lying on bloodstained ice; lowland gorillas with their heads and hands removed; chimpanzees strapped to surgical tables; bulldozers full of dead pigs, sheep, and cows; dog carcasses lining the street following a rabies cull; caged dogs with their vocal cords sliced through.
The dogs met the Guards twenty feet in front of her.
“No!” she yelled. Please, she begged silently. Give us sanctuary.
McGreary called out three words. Sam’s heart was pounding so hard in her ears that she wasn’t sure she had heard them correctly. It sounded like—
“At ease, soldiers!”
The soldiers lowered their batons to their sides as one.
Most of the dogs stopped at the line. They sniffed soldiers, pawed the ground, and lifted their heads for soft scratches, playful pats, and utterances of affection that some of the dogs had not felt or heard in a few days and others in an entire lifetime.
Tom was so relieved that he nearly collapsed. Sam caught his arm before he hit the ground. That somehow turned into a hug and Sam didn’t mind it at all.
The mayor arrived in a black SUV with blue bubble lights flashing. A few men in white lab coats jumped out with her. She ran to Tom, Sam, and McGreary, who stood in the center of two dozen excited dogs. “We have CDC confirmation,” the mayor said breathlessly. “These dogs are no threat.”
The mayor turned to McGreary. “I know for a fact what your orders were, Lieutenant. And this,” she said, pointing to the scene of Guards and dogs playing together in small groups, “was not it. You have an explanation?”
McGreary smiled warmly for the first time since his assignment had begun. “Sometimes you’ve got to interpret and improvise,” he said. “As someone very smart once told me, this is New York. We don’t kill puppies in New York.”
Nick and most of the shelter dogs surrounded Sam. Despite her human form, she was still their alpha. She had fulfilled her duty to keep the pack safe.
But, perhaps, only for today. She still had no long-term solutions and was no further along in her quest for a permanent sanctuary. Old voices tried to fill her head… voices of judgment, shame, and admonishment… familiar snickering. The countdown clock still loomed, accusing her of failure.
“Sanctuary.”
She repeated the word. Now that her anger no longer gorged on her present, the word felt different in her mouth. She looked at her dogs… and really took them in this time. They were so happy to be near her. That counted for something. Perhaps she didn’t need to find an abandoned farm in upstate New York to create her sanctuary. What if sanctuary was not about a specific place, guarded by a large lock from the outside world, but a feeling… a space that she had the power to create simply by choosing to be present for them? By caring? If that was so, then she could carry her sanctuary with her wherever she and the dogs ended up. The only thing really required of her was that she continue to love them.
And Sam could not deny that she did love them. She loved them so much that the thought of losing any one of them now for want of will was unacceptable. Their connection was so powerful that it sustained her just as much as she sustained them.
The recognition hit her as Nick and the others sniffed her shoes and jeans. These creatures offered her sanctuary in return. They always had. Sam saw the symmetry and felt its innocent beauty in a way that had been absent from her life since the days of her childhood animal tea parties. An injured dog, an angry daughter, a sick child, an abused teen, a grieving widower, a recovering drug addict, and a priest looking for understanding—they were all just seeking meaningful connections. They were all seeking sanctuary. In this most fundamental respect, no being was superior to another.
They were no less than equals.