Bones Omnibus (73 page)

In the L.A. quake zone, whenever a live meal went scarce, Bones simply turned to foraging for food amongst the vast stores of packaged goods in shattered grocery and convenience stores, people’s homes and offices, and everywhere in between. He was able to find food in a buried car, in piles of trash, in semi-collapsed buildings, and even left behind on the side of the road by wasteful soldiers and scientists who came into the city. He did not go hungry.

All this had changed once he left the city. In the vast nothing between Los Angeles and the eastern horizon, Bones encountered fewer and fewer human outposts. There would be gas stations and the occasional neighborhood with its attendant services, but as he neared the Mojave Desert, these dwindled in number or had already been ransacked. Again, he was discovering more and more human corpses, all of which had been dead for about eight weeks and long picked over by other scavengers, which meant that even if he’d been willing to sample human meat, there was none to find. Instead, Bones found himself heading out into the desert at night to find his food, feasting on wood and kangaroo rats, the occasional rattlesnake or jackrabbit, a bighorn sheep that Bones had tracked for hours, and even an unlucky badger who had emerged from his hideout directly in front of the hungry shepherd and didn’t even have time to react before Bones had viciously snapped its neck.

But other than these few forays into the wilderness, Bones stayed on the main roads, keeping near the scent of humans. The stench of the dead hung heavy, but every so often, Bones caught a whiff of the living that had ridden the wind out to the desert. Also, the roads were simply easier to travel on, and Bones had a place to go. Every test of his muscles seemed to increase the strain he felt deep within his body, giving his travels a sense of urgency.

Typically, the shepherd chose to move at night and into the morning, rested during mid-day in whatever shade he could find, and then continued on in the late afternoon or evening, generally seeking out sources of water that he would drink heavily from before seeking out his first and often only meal of the cycle before continuing on.

A few days after his wife’s death, Denny began a series of forays around Flagstaff and soon found that he wasn’t as alone as he thought. A small group of survivors, fourteen in all, he would soon learn, had gathered downtown in first the hospital and then the Flagstaff Sheraton on West Route 66 in the historic downtown district, where they had hung sheets off balcony guard rails with writing on them to alert others to their presence.

But on that first day out, Denny had driven around Flagstaff for much of the morning and seen no one. He surprised himself by having little trouble adjusting to the depopulated city, breaking a window to slip into a neighbor’s house to retrieve the truck keys of the young man he knew had lived there, as he had one of the newer and best-suited for Denny’s purposes vehicles on the block. While he was in the house, he went on to help himself to the fellow’s stores of bottled water, food, and even the cash he’d had in his wallet, sixty dollars, before realizing that he probably would have nowhere to spend it.

He took the truck to get gas and found an ancient service station with non-automated mechanical pumps that had apparently been left open and accessible to anyone by the charitable station owner. He collected and filled up every one of the red plastic gas cans the owner had put out for sale likely only days before, and then drove the fuel back to his apartment. He stole a second truck that afternoon and was driving around in search of a second gas station to drain when he saw the sheets hanging out of the Sheraton. He went to investigate and was shocked when he saw two people standing on the roof, smoking cigarettes.

Believing he might be met with suspicion, he did nothing to quiet his approach, parked outside the chain-link fence that had been erected around the hotel grounds, and walked up the long driveway to the entrance. He was halfway there when he realized that maybe he should have brought a weapon in case the “welcome” messages on the sheets were a ruse. When he entered the lobby, he found two women, a mousy-brown-haired twenty-something with what appeared to be a shy demeanor and then an older, black-haired femme with sinewy (gym-hardened?) features and a pinched smile. They gave him a casual nod when he entered, as if this was the third or fourth time they’d seen him that week. What he noticed immediately about both women was that, like him, they had the features and skin tone of American Indians, specifically Apaches.

“Are you alone?” a tall, thin man in his mid-forties who soon would introduce himself as Lester Ingram asked, coming in from the manager’s office.

“Yes, sir,” Denny said, noticing a pistol tucked in Ingram’s belt that couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d been twirling it in his hand.

Lester nodded as if mentally checking a box and nodded to the women, introducing the younger as Carrie Millsap and the older as Anna Blackledge before getting Denny to tell an abbreviated version of his story, the four of them standing in the lobby as if they had just met at some seminar and were looking for a new topic to pass the time. Like Denny, they appeared to be shell-shocked but finding ways to adjust to the new reality. Also, everyone seemed to have made the same assumptions that most everyone in the government was probably dead, that no help was coming, and that any other survivors there might be were in about the same boat as they were, surrounded by strangers and figuring they might be the only people alive.

After Denny told his story, he learned that Lester had been a real estate appraiser in his former life, was divorced, no kids. Carrie had been a housewife with a three-year-old son and a husband who had been her high school sweetheart. Anna had, at one point, been a city planner with four children, all of whom she had buried forty-eight hours before alongside her husband, an auto mechanic who owned his own shop. She described the business and insisted Denny must’ve at least seen it if he wasn’t a patron.

“Huge place, big sign that read Big Mike’s, over on Humphreys,” she explained. “Started on one lot but then just bought out the three adjacent and kept right on expanding. American cars, Japanese, even had an old Romanian fellow who could fix European cars, Andreas.”

Denny went along with her illusion and agreed that he’d seen it a number of times.“On Humphreys, right?” he said, earning a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile from Carrie.

“He was a good man, a good father, and our kids were the best,” Anna explained passionately, though Denny thought it sounded rehearsed to maximize sympathy. “I barely got to say goodbye.”

Denny looked over at Carrie and could tell her mind had traveled to her own losses, but he didn’t say anything.

“The good news is, if we’re alive, then there are others alive,” Lester summed up. “Others are probably gathering in their respective cities, and we’ll hear about it. Right now, I figure it’s our job to get everyone in the Flagstaff area together. We have to be smart about boiling water and using the generators only for essentials. For now, we also have plenty of food, and if we’re smart, we should be okay in that department. What I would ask, if you want to put in with us, is that you bring any supplies you’ve stockpiled to be shared.”

Denny nodded but said nothing about the gasoline he’d taken back to his apartment. A part of him, the part that had preferred the school library to the classroom as a youngster, wanted to keep something in reserve just in case things got bad and he came to the conclusion that he’d have a better shot back on his own.

I
n Las Vegas, two hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, two men and one woman, who had discovered each other alive the day after everyone else in the city died, were racing through the fourteenth floor of the west tower of the Venetian Hotel and Casino.

“Shit, where are they coming from?!”

“I don’t know! I thought they were all upstairs. We have to get to one of the other rooms!”

The noise echoing in from the stairwells grew louder and louder as a strong feeling of dread set in, accelerating their heart rates even more than the running. As a dull throb began pulsing behind the eyes of the woman, Judy, she realized that so soon after narrowly evading death she was now going to die, horribly, and there would be no escape this time.

Unlike their counterparts in Flagstaff, the trio of Las Vegas survivors had reacted to their survival of the plague by indulging in the kind of Bacchanal the city was known for, though it would still be considered extreme in anyone’s book. The men, Greg Stokes and Damon Mebane, friends since their kindergarten days in San Jose, had been in Vegas together with four others (all dead) when the plague came, and got caught in the gluts at the airport and car renters and were unable to get home. Greg was in finance and advised several wealthy clients, while Damon was always bouncing from this start-up to that, given that he knew a variety of software suites but didn’t have the business savvy to self-promote himself into any kind of career permanence. Greg was the good-looking one and Damon the one who looked like he spent most of his day hunched over a computer lit by fluorescents.

Judy Albert lived in Las Vegas, was originally from Florida, and worked at a gift shop. She didn’t have the kind of looks that drew glances from even the drunkest of her shop’s patrons, but after she ran into Greg and Damon, she found herself being competed for by two men ten years her junior, and a tension emerged almost immediately, a tension made worse when Judy selected Greg to sleep with a few nights later. Any hurt feelings that erupted were just as quickly erased, as the primary activities of the trio involved getting drunk, getting high, and treating the Las Vegas strip as their personal playground.

That was, of course, until the dogs showed up.

Damon had spotted a group of them wandering the Strip one day when he went to retrieve more water bottles from downstairs at the Venetian where they’d been staying. They’d seen plenty of birds around, including the various exotics that had escaped the enclosure behind the Flamingo; had visited the Mirage, where they saw that the lion keepers had had the decency to euthanize the famed white lions there when it looked like no one would feed them anymore; and even gone to check out the aquarium at Mandalay Bay to see if the keepers there had done similarly (they had not).

“If they didn’t, I’ll bet it’s a feeding frenzy, sharks against all the other fish and then shark versus shark,” Greg said, soon to be disappointed when they arrived and found that the lack of electricity meant the water temperature had dropped severely, killing all inside.

But now, here were dogs.

Damon thought at first they were coyotes or even wolves as they were so large, but then realized they were domesticated pets of a variety of breeds probably from the vast suburbs that had sprung up around the city in recent years.

“Hey, pooch, you hungry?” he called out, though the dogs hardly looked starved.

But rather than regard him with any kind of friendly recognition, dog to human, the animals immediately halted, their ears standing straight up in alarm. This reaction was puzzling to Damon, as if they’d never seen a person before, but he pressed on.

“Hey, we’ve got food,” Damon continued. “It’s okay. We’re not gonna eat you.”

He bent down on one knee in a sort of supplication, extending his hands to call over the dogs, and they sprang away as if he was a predator. That is, except for one of them, a light brown Rhodesian ridgeback that kept its gaze glued on Damon. It didn’t growl, it didn’t bare its teeth; it simply regarded Damon appraisingly for a moment and then trotted away.

The next time Damon saw this dog, it would be trying to kill him.

In the days following the first encounter, more dogs started coming around the Venetian and, Damon having related his experience to the others, the three agreed that they were just taking Damon up on his offer and were scavenging around for handouts. From their windows, they’d see them scurrying around on the sidewalks below. When they’d go down to the casino floor to retrieve supplies or wander to another hotel, they might catch the sight of a tail, encounter a pile of shit in a corner (or, far more common, the stench of urine sprayed on a slot machine or gaming table), or spy a couple racing across the street as the sun went down. They tried to make friends and left food out for them, but it was never touched. With so much else going on, however, Judy, Greg, and Damon paid the dogs little mind.

It was only one afternoon when they’d come in out of the pool, the only of the Venetian’s amenities that they made even passing attempts at keeping up, and were about to make the long slog up the stairs to the penthouse when they discovered that though they might have been paying little attention to the dogs, the animals were paying plenty to them. Every encounter having been a test, every venture into the casino a scoping of geography as sure as when wolves became aware of a herd of deer in a certain patch of forest and were moving in to pick the area clean.

The dogs were hunting them.

Judy saw them first: a pair of dogs approaching from the cashiers’ cage but without the skulking deference they typically showed the humans when they’d been stumbled upon.

“Oh, shit,” Judy exclaimed, at first more amused than scared. “Dogs.”

As soon as she pointed, she caught a flash of movement behind them and then saw a dog standing on a table watching them from a little ways away. She glanced back and saw that a couple more animals were trotting around behind them, closing a circle.

“Guys…?”

Greg turned and was just becoming aware of the warning in Judy’s voice when he saw one of the dogs approaching from the cage spring at Judy. Without thinking, he lunged forward and pushed Judy towards the open stairwell door, only to catch the brunt of the dog’s attack as it sank its jaws into his arm.

“Fuck!!” Greg shouted, trying to bat the thing away. “Damon, give me a hand!”

Damon was already moving to do just that when he saw that the dogs that had moved behind them were readying their attack. “Judy!! Run!!”