Bones Omnibus (61 page)

“Hey Chris. Some woman’s asking for you down in 310.”

“Young one or that old broad?”

“Older broad.”

Chris sighed but then nodded towards Bones. “Beggars can’t be choosers, right? You don’t mind bunking down a flight, do you?”

Chris led Bones down to the empty office where he’d woken up that morning and found that Arthur, Sharon, and Gary had each eked out a corner of the room, where they’d set up the cots the Mayer men had issued to them. The group seemed surprised by Chris’s appearance, having been ready to turn in for the night. All of them, that is, except for Barbara, who looked up at Chris expectantly when he opened the door and poked his head in.

“You wanted to see me?” he asked nonchalantly.

“Can we talk a minute? It’s about my husband and this ‘bounty’ that he may or may not be trying to raise.”

Chris nodded but walked Bones across the room first and re-chained him to the radiator.

“Oh, come
on
,” cried Gary. “You can’t leave him in here with us all night. I have allergies.”

“Company wants us to make sure everybody’s protected,” Chris reported sternly. “Somebody unauthorized gets within a hundred feet of you people, and you’d better believe that dog’s going to let everyone in the building know.”

With that, Chris escorted Barbara out and closed the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, Gary leapt to his feet.

“Shouldn’t we have tried to stop her?” he asked, sounding pissed. “This is textbook Stockholm Syndrome, and he’s taking advantage. He’s abusing his power.”

“And what have you been doing all afternoon with me?” Sharon dryly retorted. “‘Hey, we’re stuck in here, shouldn’t we try and make the best of it? C’mon, baby.’ I mean, I’d call it flirting, but I’ve never seen it so one-sided.”

Arthur chuckled at Gary’s reddening face.

“Oh, fuck you,” Gary snapped. “Like you weren’t doing the same thing. I saw you two huddling over there in your corner.”

Arthur and Sharon looked at Gary with incredulity.

“Keep me out of this,” Arthur chortled, laying back down on his cot. “If you had been listening carefully, you’d know that Miss Wiseman and I were actually playing a rather strident game of chess.”

“Without a board or pieces?” Gary scoffed. When Sharon just rolled her eyes at him, the young man realized that was exactly what they meant. He scoffed a second time and flopped down on his cot.

Bones, for his part, had fallen asleep five seconds after Chris had left the room.

The reason the Deco Building hadn’t even partially collapsed during either quake was actually both complicated and secret, at least outside of a handful of people in the Los Angeles City Planning and Transportation Services Departments. When the Metro Station at Hollywood and Vine was being built, the tremors from the digging equipment had produced massive cracks in the building’s foundation that had gone completely unnoticed by its owners, a consortium of cardiologists who lived in Agoura Hills and owned a number of east side apartment buildings as well as a handful around Hollywood. After it was quietly brought to their attention, the city planners debated doing nothing about it at all but feared that if the building subsequently fell in a quake, the inevitable liability lawsuits might spur the cardiologists to hire powerful enough lawyers to get to the bottom of it, and once they did, the city would be sued.

After two closed-door consulting meetings with the city’s legal team, it was decided that the amount the city would likely be made to pay out in damages would just surpass the dollar figure of repairs, as long as the repairs were done in secret. If the cardiologists and subsequently the media were alerted to this accident, it would likely create a frenzy in the press as reporters, concerned citizens, and just about anybody else looking for handout began sniffing around for cracks in other buildings that might have been created by the never-ending Metro dig. This might lead to court actions, which could lead to the most feared word of all: injunction.

So the necessary repairs were clandestinely made to the Deco Building, and the planners were assured that even the strongest earthquake on record wouldn’t be able to bring it down. As it turned out, that boast was not only correct but also surpassed all expectations. Unfortunately, none of the planners or the contractors who mounted this quiet achievement would ever know of their success as, to a man, they were all dead.

The fact remained, however, that Metro tunnels were running under the building. And in a city that stank of nothing but dust, oil, rotting food, and rotting corpses, the attendant smells of the living: freshly cooked food, fecal matter, sweat, etc., stood out like a beacon in the night.

The rats, including the main army that Bones had encountered, had already begun to utilize the underground routes to travel across the city en masse and had recently picked up on the smells from the Deco Building and were endeavoring to determine their source.

At one point, the rats had been a group numbering in the dozens, but that had swiftly become tens of thousands within the first forty-eight hours after Alpha. By the time Saturday night arrived, a mere few hours before the one-week anniversary of the first quake, the number of rats assembled into a single pack was numbering right around six million, a sea that stretched almost a mile. If it had been seen from the air, the rat army would appear like a great black snake winding through the city, searching for a substantial food source to feed its Herculean number. But the rats stayed underground and out of sight, since when they did surface, they became easy prey to the various predatory birds now encircling the city.

It wasn’t as if any of these stragglers fed to the birds were mourned, however. The rats were in a state most similar to rabid. They had a poison running through their system, but in the way rabies manifested itself with insatiable thirst, this poison from the Nivec did the same with hunger. The rats would never be able to eat enough, and this would eventually kill them. But while they were alive, it meant that no living thing in the Los Angeles basin was safe.

Just past midnight, Bones awoke to screams and gunfire.

He got to his feet just as Gary, Sharon, and Arthur all did the same, staring bleary-eyed at one another as what began as sporadic incidents of shooting quickly became a fusillade of bullets echoing up from below as if a war was being fought two levels down in the building.

“Shit, shit,
shit!
” cried Gary, freaking out. He leaped up and started pounding on the door. “Hey! Let us out!! What’s going on?!”

Arthur raised a hand. “Did you ever think it might be better to stay be locked in here in a situation like this? Maybe even keeping quiet?”

Gary turned and was about to unleash an expletive-filled rant at Arthur, but then realized what he was saying might be true and stepped away from the door. As he did, the massive Humvee-mounted cannons in the courtyard began firing over the other gunfire, and the trio of humans raced to the window, only to be surprised at what they saw.

“Why are they firing
into
the building?!” Gary asked, his eyes going wide.

It was a bizarre sight to see so much firepower blazing away into the very structure they were being housed in, but they could also see a great number of men running away from the Deco building, obviously terrified. For a moment, the group thought that looters might have taken over the guns and there was a battle going on between the mercenaries and locals. But soon they could see that those mounting the Humvee cannons were the same as had been standing guard earlier.

Bone heard it first, a single sound rising so high in its intensity that it even dulled out the gunfire. It was a low rumble that echoed as it traveled up the walls, sounding not unlike the coming of yet a third earthquake. Arthur heard it next, then Sharon, and finally Gary, all three of whom initially believed it to be an aftershock, though a couple of seconds later they began to realize it was something else entirely.

“It’s everywhere!” Gary said, stepping away from the window.

The rumbling came up from the stairwells, down from the ceiling, over from within the walls, and beneath them in the floors. The room began to vibrate. In a panic, Bones barked and tugged at his chain so hard that it finally unraveled off the radiator and clinked around the room.

“Quiet!” Arthur yelled at the dog, but to no avail.

The noise of the rats got louder and louder, sometimes a rattling, sometimes a scratching, sometimes a pounding. Sharon thought it was as if she had suddenly found herself inside an echo chamber surrounded on all sides by an enthusiastic phalanx of snare drummers who couldn’t decide a rhythm, so they had simply agreed to play louder and louder.

Just as the noise reached its apex, Gary disappeared.

More accurately, the floor beneath his feet disappeared, crumbling away and carrying the man and about four dozen rats down into the office full of unused furniture below. Gary screamed the whole way down until he landed amidst a cluster of wooden chairs with a sickening crack, the bones of both his legs splintering as he landed, one of which produced a spur that shot out through his flesh.

“FUCK!!” he cried, tears instantly welling in his eyes.

Sharon and Arthur gazed in horror at the sprawled-out young man and saw that though he was already partially covered in rats that had come down in the fall with him, even more were now racing across the floor towards his prone body. He screamed in horror as they dug their teeth into his skin, but when one ran straight to his face and sunk its incisors into his left eyeball, causing a geyser of blood to shoot a good two feet up into the air, Gary’s screams became even more high-pitched.

“Oh, God,” Sharon said.

As she spoke, rats began emerging from the edges of the broken floor and were now looking up at her, Bones and Arthur.

“This isn’t going to be pleasant,” said Arthur, as if describing an unappetizing piece of salmon.

The rats spilled out from the broken floor, but as they launched themselves at the humans, Bones playfully leaped towards them. He kicked a few over, nipped at this one or that, but when one of the rats had the bad manners to bite the shepherd on the foot, Bones snatched the squealing rodent up into his jaws and bit it in two. The other rats didn’t seem to notice and continued moving at Sharon and Arthur, but Bones decided to involve himself.

Without a thought, the large German shepherd jumped into the fray and began tearing the rats apart, but with an almost genteel touch. Bones would lean down like a mother cat, gently pick up the rat in his mouth, but then bite its head off. At the same time, he would use the great claws on his forepaws to tear open the soft flesh of other rats’ underbellies, killing them just as easily.

Within fifteen seconds, Bones had killed at least fifteen rats, and the driven little bastards were beginning to get the message and were stopping short at the edge of the hole in the floor.

“They’re not just going to stop,” Arthur said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Sharon was about to respond when the wall behind them broke apart, pouring literally hundreds more rats into the room, some immediately sliding to the hole in the floor as if it were a drain and being dropped onto their comrades devouring Gary below. As Sharon screamed, the rats massed together and then turned towards the other occupants of the room.

But just as Sharon prepared herself for a most horrific death, a noise like nothing she’d ever heard tore the room.

Well, to say she “heard” it is a misnomer. More like her ears momentarily sealed themselves up to allow a dull, hollow throb to pound incessantly within her skull, so much so that she felt as if she’d been deafened by a blow to both temples. She and Arthur both dropped to their knees and saw that Bones seemed to be affected by it even worse than they had been, since he shook his head violently and then battered it against the nearby sofa as if trying to shake something free.

What Sharon saw next shocked her. The rats fled as if the building was on fire. They escaped into the wall and into the hole in the floor where Gary had fallen, and a few even exited through a small space in a corner of the ceiling that Sharon hadn’t noticed before. They vanished so quickly that Sharon had to remind herself that they’d been real in the first place and not just a terrifying figment of her imagination.

As she contemplated this, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

Turning to look, she saw a man in full body armor and military-style urban night camos looking down at her. he uniform had no insignia or distinguishing markings to it, but she still recognized the pattern as that utilized by Israeli special forces. She had done her two years of service in the IDF and had hardly been part of any elite unit, but she’d seen the digital blue and gray she was looking at now once when a special forces team had temporarily bivouacked at her base in Mishmar Ha Negev. The special forces team hadn’t fraternized with the regular IDF soldiers as much as some of the female soldiers had wanted them to, but that only added to their mystique.

“Sharon Wiseman? We’re here to rescue you.”

Finer words, she had never heard.

The special forces troopers, led by a tall, olive-complected lieutenant named Paul (“Just Paul”), would not listen to Sharon when she demanded that both Arthur and Bones be extracted with her.

“Our mission is to retrieve you and you alone,” Paul said. “We don’t have the resources for an additional player, much less a dog.”

“Then I’m staying here,” Sharon replied.

“Then we’ll remove you by force.”

“Do you know who my father is?” Sharon shot back. “And who my grandfather was and what he meant to the nation?”

Paul was about to rip right into her but then held his tongue. He could hear the Mayer soldiers regrouping downstairs, and the last thing he wanted to do was be discovered.

“Just the man,” Paul said.

Sharon looked at Bones but then reluctantly nodded, despite the dog having saved her life. “All right.”

Sharon and Arthur were brought over to the window, where they saw how the special forces team had breached the room, coming across Vine on a wire connected to the last standing corner of the shattered hotel across the way where Bones had earlier seen the hawk. The team hooked a harness around Arthur and sent him across. Once he was safely away, Paul harnessed Sharon into a similar apparatus.