Bones Omnibus (58 page)

At one point, Bones took a couple of sniffs of the material, gave a chunk of it a healthy lick-and-chomp but found that it just gummed up his jaws. He tried to spit it out, but it instantly clung to his teeth, and with each breath the tiny fibers were pulled back towards his windpipe.

With a yelp, Bones took a couple of steps back and did what came naturally: he vomited.

A healthy torrent of the contents of the shepherd’s stomach hosed most of the insulation out of his mouth and onto the floor of the room. Sniffing over what he’d just puked out, Bones resisted the urge to lap it back up and moved into the next room to hunt for the dead body he’d initially scented out in the house.

There had been almost constant aftershocks since the initial quake, but as almost all of them were relatively minor, it quelled the fears of both survivors and government officials alike. Seismologists, however, were becoming increasingly alarmed by the erratic nature of these additional quakes and, too late, it turned out, began to suggest that they weren’t aftershocks at all but a precursor to a second major event. Generally speaking, an earthquake
was
the event, a buildup of pressure between plates that was alleviated when the tension reached its peak and an earthquake resulted, and after which the plates were allowed to settle. In this case, however, scientists were beginning to believe that a second earthquake was pending.

A so-called double earthquake wasn’t uncommon. One had happened in New Brunswick in 1982 when a magnitude-5.7 earthquake struck on Saturday, January 9th, to be followed by a second quake on Monday, January 11th, that measured 5.1. As the Los Angeles earthquake had measured 10.2, the idea that the first quake could have merely been a preamble wasn’t even discussed. A double quake indicated that the job was only half done the first time, and as a 10.2 was the strongest recorded earthquake in modern U.S. history, it was inconceivable that something twice that size could even occur.

This opinion was revised when powerful aftershocks started hitting every hour on the hour five days after the event. It was revised even further when the aftershocks began hitting in the upper 4s and even the lower 5s on the Richter scale, making them substantial seismic events in their own right. The opinion was completely thrown out the window and the very field of seismology was altered forever by what came next.

A
bout an hour after her shift was up, Elizabeth found and fucked Wieneke in what was once the visiting team’s dugout at Dodger Stadium. The locale was hardly romantic, but as the stadium parking lot had stayed at least somewhat intact, it had become base camp for the search-and-rescue units assigned to the eastern recovery zones and was handy. They had looked for somewhere better than the dugout, but there was no privacy in the camp itself, and beyond the guarded perimeter it had been whispered that gangs of looters operated with impunity by night.

So they ended up slipping into the off-limits stadium, off-limits because half the building had collapsed in Sunday’s quake, including the entire home side of the park. The upper decks had come down on the mezzanine, which had collapsed on the field level, and all of it together spilled out onto the field. Half the bleacher seats in the outfield had collapsed as well, and if seen from above, the park would seem to be like a great, haunted maw with an intact upper jaw whose lower one was little more than a pile of twisted metal and shattered concrete.

The dust of the crushed cinder blocks still hung heavy in the air, and as Elizabeth gasped for breath in time with Wieneke’s thrusts, she wondered if she was unwittingly making herself a candidate for the same kind of health problems faced by World Trade Center first-responders, who spent a few weeks inhaling all the pulverized asbestos and a few years on were suffering from cancers of many stripes.

As Wieneke dug his teeth into her neck just a little too much, Elizabeth pushed this thought aside and gently suggested to the paramedic that he should find a more constructive way to get out his aggression.

It was at this very moment that the second quake, soon to be dubbed “Omega” (renaming the initial quake “Alpha,” half-assed, media-friendly allusions to the Book of Revelations), arrived, though it came slowly at first. She flinched and knew immediately the bad joke Wieneke would make, as she had learned to her distress over the last hour that he was the king of such things.

“Yeah, you felt it, too, huh?” he smirked without a hint of irony.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes but then closed them. Aftershock or no, she was determined to focus on the sensations in her pelvis and not the idiot that was causing them, as she just wanted an orgasm. Because of this, she didn’t see the gigantic concrete block fall off the roof of the dugout and crack him on the head. The blow sent him reeling backwards as the block continued to roll until it came down on his foot, breaking several bones, though he was already well on his way to unconsciousness.

As soon as she felt his body go limp, Elizabeth opened her eyes and saw not only that her partner was now heavily bleeding from a gash in his skull, but also that their surroundings were beginning to shake in earnest.

“Oh, shit!!” she cried and leaped forward off the dugout bench. She bolted for the guardrail and swung under it up onto the field, hoping that she’d be safer out in the open.

It was then that she looked up and saw the second half of the stadium beginning to come down. Large chunks of concrete crushed the media booths and bounced down through the seats like boulders aimed directly at her. With nothing in their way, they simply accelerated with every bounce and didn’t stop when they reached the field, tearing up the turf as they kept going.

Elizabeth had a feeling of helplessness in the face of the hailstorm of mortar. She didn’t want to believe, but she couldn’t escape the idea that all of these events were literally bigger than she was and that it would be seconds before she was pulverized and, perhaps, forgotten against the backdrop of the larger tragedy.

But as she turned and ran, leaving behind Wieneke without a second thought, she allowed herself the fantasy that maybe she and Bones had bonded enough over the past few days that he wouldn’t allow himself to be used by another handler until he had located her broken body in the rubble, maybe even still barely alive. The longer the quake went on, however, the less likely this seemed, and in her distraction she tumbled forward and skinned her knees.

She looked back at and saw through the gray darkness that at least forty Honda-sized chunks of concrete were hurtling themselves at her and creating new, albeit smaller boulders as they came.

The reality of her situation was overwhelming. It would all be over soon.

Bones and the other search-and-rescue dogs knew about the second quake a good thirty seconds before their human counterparts did. They had been kenneled outdoors in a fenced-in pen complete with hard plastic doghouses and a small area over grass where they could do their business. They were fed in it and had some room for exercise, but only as much as a 10-foot by 10-foot space would allow.

When they felt the coming quake, they whined like they did for every aftershock, which signaled the nearby National Guardsmen, who had by now realized what the in-unison protest represented.

“Aftershock coming!” they called out, and a few people responded by passing the announcement along.

But when the quake erupted in earnest, the already cracked parking lot ruptured and bowed, knocking everyone off their feet and collapsing many of the temporary structures that had been set up to house the unit’s command and communications personnel. Seconds later, the remnants of Dodger Stadium began to come down, and both soldiers and civilian workers alike panicked and ran for open ground.

The dogs were among them. The pen gates weren’t very high to begin with, but Bones and the others sprang lithely over them, and they raced out to flat ground, yapping and yipping like dogs playing in the rain.

For reasons unknown, the fuel dump where supplies were kept to gas up the Humvees each day was probably the least secure area of the temporary base, set up more for ease of access than to guard against future earthquake damage. That is not to say that even if precautions had been taken they would’ve included the possibility of a second magnitude 10-plus quake anyway, so perhaps the breaking open of so many barrels and the saturation of the area with fuel was an inevitability.

The dogs paid little attention to the humans, happy finally for a little freedom. They raced out towards the woods of Elysian Park and over a small hill that took them directly into the backyard of the Los Angeles Police Department Training Academy. Interestingly, the very place they were traversing was the “secret” burial location of the LAPD K-9 officers that had died in the line of duty. As the cemeteries where human officers were buried weren’t about to let animals be interred there, enforcement dogs or not, the K-9 unit had a long tradition of taking their fallen comrades to a spot in the hills behind the training academy and burying them there in a reverential service marked with tradition. No one outside the unit actually knew the precise location of the spot, and as so many members of the current and previous LAPD K-9 units had been killed in the first quake, the chance that the spot would be lost to history was good.

Leaving the woods behind, Bones led the other dogs over the hill and into the devastated training facility. They raced past the outdoor shooting range, the Daryl Gates Cafeteria, and the three-tiered and tree-shaded waterfall and reflecting pool that stood as a memorial to fallen human officers. As they passed the pool, a couple of dogs stopped for a drink, but then the group carried on out into the parking lot and down towards the shattered 101 Freeway, which served as an ad hoc border between East L.A. and the rest of the city.

Despite their roving, the dogs were easily rounded up the next morning by the search-and-rescue team. Miraculously, including Wieneke, there had only been four deaths in the base camp, though there were a couple dozen minor injuries reported. The National Guard would later be commended for their selection of Dodger Stadium as a staging ground, but as soon as they had re-established communications with the superiors at the Burbank Airport, they learned that they were one of the only groups so unaffected. All across the broken city, other search-and-rescue teams hadn’t been as lucky and were reporting casualty rates of seventy to eighty percent. At the Burbank Airport itself, the rate was around fifty percent, with a majority of their vehicles rendered inoperable by Omega.

“The long and short of it is that our situation has become untenable, and we’re being forced to pull back to Edwards,” the high command repeated over the radio to each of the search-and-rescue team commanders in the field. “As that means we will no longer be able to provide support to your team, you are to be extracted as well.”

A couple of the team leaders protested, but their hearts clearly weren’t in it. The surviving members of the teams were demoralized and were ready to leave. The fear was that the ground had just become so unstable that no one could predict what might happen next.

No one was more surprised by the events of the day than Elizabeth. To her surprise, she had survived Omega with barely a scratch, having made it to the rubble of the already-collapsed home side of the stadium and finding there a narrow path between what had been the Dodger bullpen and the field seats behind the foul pole. As the ground continued to shake, she slipped between spears of broken railing, fearing they could impale her at any moment, but then reached the parking lot beyond and managed to escape.

The only problem was that she had left her pants back at the dugout and was completely naked from the waist down, being forced to pick her way across the broken-up pavement of the circular parking lot to get back to base camp in her bare feet. In the darkness with aftershocks hitting every ten to fifteen minutes, it took her an hour and a half to make the journey, tripping and scraping her knees as she went, which was why she practically burst into tears upon finally seeing the generator-fueled lights over the camp. With everyone else distracted by the hubbub of repairing the camp, she was able to make it to her temporary shelter, grab new pants, shoes, socks, and underwear, and reclaim at least some of her dignity before going to the head of the paramedics.

“Wieneke was in there,” she said, pointing to the devastated stadium.

The paramedic didn’t have to ask why she knew this, but Elizabeth burst into tears anyway. She was given a sedative and led back in her shelter to ride out the night. The next morning, the news of their extraction was music to her ears, as all she wanted to do was get out of California and go back home.

She went to check in with the soldiers who had rounded up all the escaped dogs, placing them carefully in their travel crates for transport, and that’s when she noticed the one absence.

“Wait, where’s Bones?”

The night before, Bones just hadn’t stopped running. When the voices of the soldiers started calling out for the other enforcement dogs, the others had all stopped and eventually trotted back towards the stadium. Bones, however, ignored the cries, as he was busy exploring a cracked culvert that ran alongside the highway. Though the quake had hit at five in the morning, the 101 had still been busy with cars and trucks utilizing the stretch of road as one of the many NAFTA highways that connected Mexico with all the major cities of the California coast and beyond up to Canada. When Alpha hit, most of the drivers didn’t even feel it at first, the swaying light poles alongside the highway being their first indication. But then the long network of bridges and overpasses that ran from south of downtown all the way to the Valley began to domino downward, as their earthquake-reinforced columns were only tested effective up to an 8.5 quake.

Due to all the new technological advances made in strengthening a vehicle’s “roll cage,” many people actually survived the initial collapse. Their vehicles may have hurtled downward, and oftentimes engine blocks were forced backward, resulting in crushed legs and spines, but the roll bars kept people’s upper torsos intact. Instead of being killed instantly, several hundred drivers and their passengers found themselves in the unenviable position of being slowly bled to death in excruciating pain, whereas in a bygone era they would’ve been put out of their misery immediately. Some had even survived all the way until Omega.