Bones Omnibus (90 page)

The creature had only gotten halfway when the ranger tumbled through the trapdoor, screaming all the way. He landed directly on top of the sasquatch, pulling the beast off the ladder. Together, the two fell backward through space. Seeing that they were heading directly for her, Jess quickly rolled aside as the sasquatch landed beside her, its head striking the front bumper of the Jeep with such force that its neck snapped. The ranger hit the ground next to Alex’s body, but as the sasquatch had broken his fall, the portly fellow only snapped his ankles upon landing.

“Aw, Christ!” he spat. “Oh, Jesus Jesus Jesus, this
hurts
!”

A female sasquatch, though Jess didn’t think it was the one she’d seen earlier, crossed the clearing to stand over the fallen ranger.

“No, I’ll be all right!” the man said, quickly changing his tune. “Look!”

The ranger fought his way to his feet, grabbing the ladder to hold himself up. But as he stood there, grimacing in tremendous pain, there was a second, sickening snap. As he sank to the ground this time, a sharp shaft of bone extended from his ankle.

That’s when Jess noticed that there was a
baby
hanging onto the back of the female sasquatch. Only, it wasn’t hairy like its mother. In fact, it more resembled a large human baby, maybe an eight-month-old, but one that had already grown to a disproportionately large size, maybe two and half a feet tall. It stared back at Jess, smiled, and then waved.

“What in God’s name is
that
?” Christy whispered, aghast.

“I have no idea,” replied Jess. “And I don’t want to know.”

“Please, let me be!” Tom begged, tears and perspiration streaming down his face. “Just leave me here! I won’t say anything to anybody! Just let me live to see the end. What if I’m one of the blessed?! One of the survivors? I can
help
you!”

But the female sasquatch was unmoved. With a roar, she kicked the man down, stomped on his neck, and twisted her foot, snapping his neck. With this accomplished, she let out a war whoop of triumph. The other sasquatches joined in, as if momentarily forgetting their other captives. Jess turned to try to crawl away, but suddenly felt the ice cold foot of the female sasquatch on her neck as well.

She looked up and saw its black eyes staring down at her, not in anger, but in challenge. Did Jess wish to fight her for the privilege of escape?

Jess did not. She sank back onto the ground, and the sasquatch stepped away. As she did, Jess caught sight of something falling off the ladder in her peripheral vision. When she looked, she saw that it was Bones, who had somehow crept a little ways down from the tower and had launched himself at the nearest sasquatch.

“Oh, boy,” Jess muttered, doubtful at the dog’s prospects.

But the sasquatch whose shoulders Bones landed on was taken completely by surprise. It raised its arms in anger, swatting at the dog and roaring its disapproval. This second action was its downfall, as Bones sank his teeth into the creature’s lower jaw, yanking it until it was dislocated from the sasquatch’s skull, hanging limply on one side. As the monster groped at it with its fingers, Bones bit four of the digits off its hand and, with a quick second chomp, bit into the brute’s throat.

The man-beast’s eyes went wide as blood spurted out of the wound, splashing on the ground, the tower ladder, and the pile of corpses, which the sasquatch would obviously soon join. The strength of the fountain of blood ebbed quickly with the dying of the creature’s heart, and it keeled over, spread-eagled on the ground.

By the time this happened, Bones was already on his way to the next sasquatch. This one the dog attacked awkwardly, trying to climb up to its neck by leaping straight up its body. The sasquatch managed to get in a glancing blow, which tipped the shepherd off balance. But it wasn’t a total loss, as Bones managed to sink his teeth deep into the monster’s abdomen. The sasquatch twisted and stomped, but the dog hung on, even with all four feet swinging in the air. Rather than shake the canine’s teeth free, the monster only succeeded in forcing Bones to tighten his grip.

Unfortunately for the creature, the shepherd’s razor-sharp fangs soon cut deep enough into flesh to pull away everything they had stabbed into. Bones tumbled away from the sasquatch, yanking fur, skin, muscle, and pieces of the creature’s large intestine with him.

Worse, the dog hit the ground running.

A second later, and the newly disemboweled sasquatch joined the other dead on the forest floor.

“You just found that dog while walking around?” Christy asked Jess, incredulous, as they watched Bones tear the genitals off another sasquatch.

“Yeah,” Jess whispered. “Glad he didn’t eat
me
.”

Bones had just sunk his teeth into the tender inner thigh meat of another sasquatch when an elderly woman flanked by two other sasquatches stepped into the clearing. She was tiny, barely four feet tall, had almost no hair, was so tanned her skin was the color of dried blood, and wore buckskin clothes.

“
Enough
!” she roared in a voice surprisingly threatening for someone with such a meek appearance.

The sasquatches all turned to her, save the one whose eyes Bones was currently tearing from its skull. The old woman nodded to someone behind her, who stepped forward. It was a young boy not more than nine or ten, wearing similar clothes. The child raised a wooden bow and strung an arrow. The boy stared straight at Bones and loosed the arrow. It made a whistling sound as it flew from the edge of the woods into the soft meat of Bones’s haunch. The dog was thrown off the dying sasquatch’s head, propelled a good ten feet by the arrow’s impact.

“Oh, no!” Jess cried.

She tried to get to her feet, but the female sasquatch shoved her back down. She struggled, but soon found her face being ground into the dirt. When she couldn’t breathe anymore, she stopped fighting. The sasquatch took her foot away. Jess glowered at her, tears of shame and helplessness glassing her eyes.

“Let me go!” Christy yelled. “What’re you doing?!”

One of the sasquatches had lifted Christy off the ground and thrown her over its shoulder. It moved amongst the trees lining the clearing as others gathered the dead. The old woman and the young boy moved to Bones’s side. The shepherd was trying to stand, but blood sluiced down his leg and through his toes, pooling on the ground beneath him. The arrow was in deep.

The old woman kneeled beside the shepherd even as the dog grew woozy from blood loss. Her hands shot out, grabbing Bones around the neck. He pawed at her but didn’t even have the strength to push her away.

“I am sorry,
erhar
,” she said, then nodded to the young archer.

The boy leaned down, put a cloth around the arrow at the point where it entered Bones’s leg, and pulled it out. The arrow was a bolt with a small pointed tip as opposed to one with razor-sharp notches meant to ravage flesh when pulled out. When he took the cloth away, more blood poured out, and Bones’s lethargic yet bloody maw opened and closed listlessly. A second later, and he slipped into unconsciousness.

Jess felt a pain in her heart unlike when Patrick, Ruthie, or Dan were killed. They died panicked and afraid, as she had been. The shepherd had died defending his new friend, risking his life over and over until he was shot down.

“I’m sorry, boy,” Jess whispered as another sasquatch lifted her onto its shoulder.

As she was carried into the woods, Jess stared back at the only member of the party left behind, the German shepherd, until she couldn’t see him anymore or even lie to herself and imagine that he was staring back.

B
y the time the sun came up, the walk had become excruciating. Jess had passed out at some point in the night, but wasn’t sure when. It couldn’t have been for very long, however, as when she woke up, it was still dark. The ibuprofen had worn off, and now every step the sasquatch took sent a ripple of pain through Jess’s body.

But as much as she wanted to cry out, the young lawyer refused to give the clan of sasquatches and humans the satisfaction. Besides, she figured the gruff beast that had her over its shoulder wasn’t being punitive as it roughly stomped through the woods, causing Jess to bounce against its (she couldn’t tell the gender from this angle) hairy back or slam into a passing branch. A protest would likely fall on deaf ears.

Jess counted at least a dozen sasquatches, with twice that number of humans. The sasquatches dwarfed the people, some barely coming up to the monsters’ waists. As their clothing looked like a Hollywood director’s idea of American Indian apparel, she was predisposed to believe that was what they were. But that wasn’t the case. Rather, they looked like Caucasians to her eyes, albeit ones who had grown up outdoors, earning deep tans that leathered the skin of even the youngest members of their party. Instead of feeling like a frontierswoman taken hostage by those whose land her family had encroached on, Jess imagined she was being hauled off by some cult of sun worshippers out in Central California.

Albeit ones that had established some sort of alliance with sasquatches.

At one point, the sasquatch carrying Jess stopped to urinate. When it did, the creature carrying Christy
and
the corpse of Alex, one body over the left shoulder, one over the right, moved past.

“
Christy
!” Jess hissed.

But Christy’s eyes, which were open, remained fixed on her brother’s corpse. In only a few hours, his face had become puffy and bruised, but Jess realized that was because of all the blood that had drained into his head in the absence of a pumping heart. He was virtually unrecognizable.

“Christy,” Jess repeated, knowing she taunted fate.

“He’s dead,” Christy whimpered. “He’s really dead.”

She couldn’t see Christy’s face, but her voice told her the whole story. She hadn’t slept, she’d been forced to stare at Alex’s body for hours and hours, and she’d about cracked.

“Christy, listen to me…” Jess blurted out, but the sasquatch carrying the other girl was already out of sight.

Jess sighed, having figured that once the adrenaline wore off, Christy would crash. She wondered if she’d be able to try to pull her out of it once they reached their destination.

Wherever that was.

At first light, she’d glimpsed Mount Whittlesey. From the fire tower, it had loomed large to the northeast. Here, it was only a few hundred yards away. But as the sasquatches climbed what appeared to be old game trails through the rocks, Jess noticed they’d stopped ascending at one point and were simply traversing the cliff side. When they came down the other side, she saw a vast forest stretching all the way to the horizon, likely the Allegany, which continued up into New York State. She wondered what kind of range the sasquatches must have, given they’d already traveled several miles.

Then, around midday, the group stopped. They didn’t seem alarmed, just at the end of their journey. The waiting continued until an odd noise, like the honking of the world’s largest goose, echoed out to them. One of the sasquatches raised its hands to its mouth and returned the call, but in a short series of squawks that almost sounded like Morse code. A single long honk in return, and the party kept moving.

Jess had glimpsed a large hill in the distance at some point while rocking back and forth over the sasquatch’s shoulder. She kept trying to catch a look at what lay ahead, generally through glimpses past the monster’s swaying arm. At first, the distant hill looked like any other ridge or promontory, but the closer they got, the more Jess could make out what appeared to be a loose grid of cave entrances. Only, as each was situated under rocky outcroppings or in crevices, strategically obscured by shadows, trees, or scrub, she realized they were manmade. Sure, to a casual observer on land or in the air, they could pass for natural formations. But when carried toward them by a notoriously secretive cryptozoological phenomenon most agreed was a myth, their true nature became obvious.

They were only a couple hundred feet from the base of the hill when the old woman, who rode on the shoulders of one of the sasquatches like a child, raised a hand to bring the caravan to a halt. As she did, several other humans and sasquatches emerged from the caves to see what the party had returned with.

A man in perhaps his late twenties and wearing not a stitch of clothing materialized from one cave, sprinted over to the old woman, and embraced her. At first, Jess thought he was her son or grandson. But then she kissed him back in a way that suggested a very different kind of relationship.

“Thank you, my love,” the old woman said, patting the young man on the cheek. She turned to the sasquatches carrying Jess and Christy and nodded. “Put them on the ground.”

The sasquatches did as requested, and Jess thudded to the hard-packed earth with a shriek of pain. She scrunched her face, trying not to betray just how badly she was hurt, fearing an end similar to the park ranger’s. Two buckskin leashes were thrown around the two women’s necks, and their hands were roughly brought behind their backs to be tied as well. Jess gasped as the rope was tightened at her wrists, aggravating the gash in her left shoulder.

The two were then shoved forward and forced onto their knees.

The old woman approached, giving each an appraising look. Jess thought the woman spent an inordinate amount of time eyeing her breasts and hips, barely looking her in the eye. It was as if she was a cow at the State Fair rather than a recent victim of a kidnapping. When the old woman finished giving Jess the once-over, she eyed both.

“Have either of you had children?” she asked.

“No,” said Christy.

“No,” replied Jess, wondering if she should’ve said the opposite.

“Don’t think, simply answer,” said the old woman sternly, reading Jess’s mind. “This will be easier on you if you comply.”

“If I don’t have children, does it make it easier to kill me?” Jess retorted.

“If you hadn’t noticed, it would be the easiest thing in the world to kill you,” the old woman replied matter-of-factly. “But if you answer my questions to the best of your ability, I can offer you so much more than you could ever imagine.”