Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (15 page)

“You could jump the fences at Uncle Norman’s house like they were nothing,” he said quietly. “But you think you have to keep looking out for me.”

Bones just stared at Ryan, panting quietly.

“If you want to stay, that’s fine,” Ryan continued. “I’ll see you at home when I get back from school. But if you don’t…”

Ryan reached into his backpack and retrieved a battered strip of cloth, Bones’s Pittsburgh Bureau of Police collar with his name on it. He reached around Bones’s neck and put the collar back on, snapping the little plastic clasp in place.

“This is so nobody thinks you’re a stray and everybody’ll know your name.”

Ryan petted the area between Bones’s ears, his wounds now as healed as they were going to be, but then he hugged the German shepherd close to him. Bones didn’t like this and tried to squirm away, but Ryan held him tight for only a moment longer before letting him go. Ryan started to tear up.

“Well, I love you, Bones.”

Ryan got back to his feet, looked at Bones one more time and then turned and walked across the practice field. As he went, his footfalls gently creasing the closely cropped grass, he fought the urge to cry. His eyes became glassy with tears and his nose began to run, but he wiped off both with his sleeve. Only when he reached the other side of the field did he allow himself to look back, half-expecting Bones to be three steps behind him, having not understood what Ryan had told him.

But Bones was long gone.

•  •  •

Bones had stayed within the trees as he walked, following the creek as far as he could, but about a mile down it stopped at an underground drainage pipe, and that was the end of that. He’d ostensibly been following the scent of a raccoon, but wasn’t hungry and wouldn’t have done much more than tease the thing if he’d caught up to it. Climbing up the sides of the creek bed, he saw that the trees had momentarily fallen away as the pipe ran under a rural, four-lane highway that cut through the woods. On the opposite side from where he was standing, Bones could see that not only did the trees start up again, but there were also no signs of houses or businesses or people for a ways, just the endless thicket of a state forest.

Bones waited until a lumbering tractor-trailer, the only vehicle on the road, passed by, then took a tentative step onto the road. After another second, he galloped across, disappearing into the trees on the other side. As he ran, the exhaust and oil smells of the highway faded away and were replaced by the sweet scent of mountain laurel and rhododendron. It wasn’t long before he found another creek to follow that was weaving through the chestnut trees. He played with a frog, urinated against a picnic table, barked at a chipmunk. Took a nap in the afternoon, raided a trailside garbage can for dinner, and then slept under the stars.

When he woke up the next morning, he found another creek.

Lupus in fabula

T
here is a joke in high-end real estate that compares selling a space in Manhattan to Los Angeles. A New York realtor will show a loft to a perspective client, pointing out the view, explaining the history of the neighborhood, who may live in the building, what’s close by, but will ultimately always close with, “It’s the total New York experience.”

In Los Angeles, it’s all trees, hills, canyons, high fences, and privacy, where the potential buyer is finally told, “You won’t even know you’re in LA.”

Los Angeles is a city of isolation. In New York, the subways, the buses, and the sidewalks force a sort of egalitarian integration among the classes. In Los Angeles, cars are king because of how far everything is from each other, making it easy for people to stay within their self-selected residential pocket. You’re East Side, West Side, Valley, the Hills, Culver, downtown, LBC, the Marina, wherever.

During the Rodney King riots, LAPD officers in riot gear enforced these divisions by forming a shoulder-to-shoulder human barricade on Wilshire Boulevard to prevent looters from crossing north into Beverly Hills. This at a time when law enforcement was letting other parts of the city burn. Families will live in an area they can afford but then rent a cheap apartment elsewhere to establish residency in the school district they want to send their kids to. Micro-cities within Los Angeles like West Hollywood have seceded to make certain that their tax dollars only go to their own services and not to pay off the city’s burgeoning debt, making for wealthy, crimeless duchies throughout the disparate megalopolis that only consider themselves Los Angelenos when the Lakers are in the playoffs.

Then along came a great equalizer.

When it arrived, it was hardly a surprise. The City of Los Angeles regularly posts bus shelter ads and billboards begging its citizenry to prepare for emergencies by creating “earthquake kits” just in case. These were recommended to contain important documents and cash, with water and non-perishable food not far away. Even more so, in the eight months leading up to the quake, water mains routinely broke around the city. Cautionary stories floated around the internet that this was the result of a trembling along the famed San Andreas Fault where the Pacific Plate rammed up against the North American Plate, resulting in unending tension. About a hundred magnitude-1 and—2 earthquakes began rattling California throughout the winter and into the new year.

But even then, Los Angelenos were dismissive along local lines.

“It’ll probably hit out in Pasadena,” someone would say. “We won’t feel it in Los Feliz.”

“Luckily, we’re right on the water, like
right
on the water. It’ll suck for everybody crammed in downtown, but we’ll be okay.”

“Good thing we’re in the city proper, because it’s not the quake but the fires that will break out in the hills when all the gas lines snap that is really going to do the most damage.”

“It’ll be the worst for the poor. Those buildings they live in haven’t even been retrofitted. They’re going to flatten, and you know there’s like twenty people living in each one. Jesus.”

“Man, the beaches. When aid rolls in, they’re the furthest out. They’ll be cut off.”

In the end, everyone turned out to be right.

T
here had been a point in the winter when the hikers quit coming, which forced Bones to switch from his diet of trashcan leftovers to a steady stream of wild life. He’d assiduously avoided what some of the animals of the Ohiopyle woods did when the snows came: an ever-closer march towards highway rest stops or winter cabins to continue scavenging off man’s leftovers. Instead, Bones pushed even deeper into the forest, happy to be shy of people for awhile. Mice were easy enough to catch, but not filling. Rabbits became a staple. He’d killed a turkey once, but when the feathers poked at his gums and took root between his teeth, he had decided to stick to mammals in the future. Having become a keen hunter relatively quickly during his time in the woods, Bones even found himself going after the odd lynx or bobcat from time to time.

Long thought extinct in the area, a pack of timber wolves was active in the woods as well, but Bones knew to avoid them. If a confrontation became unavoidable, he could probably use his superior size and strength to fight off two or three of them, but the four or five of a hunting party would easily overwhelm him.

Thus far, there had really only been one incident, and it was easily resolved. Bones had been snoozing under a rocky outcropping during a light snowfall. He hadn’t eaten for a day or so and was starting to get hungry when a year-old buck walked by, all alone. Its horns more resembled thin sticks than a rack of antlers, which seemed to indicate that it had only lost its fawn spots a few months before. Still, it stood three and a half feet at the shoulder which gave it more than enough meat to satisfy a ravenous German shepherd.

Bones waited until the deer crept past his impromptu blind, the snow playing havoc with the deer’s sense of smell, which typically would be effective against predators that close. The young buck moved with caution, as if realizing that another large animal had been in the area not so long ago. Still, it seemed to be banking on the fact that whatever-it-was had since moved on.

Wishful thinking.

Bones crouched low, his eyes focused on the buck’s ears, eyes, and tail to see if anything was setting off its internal alarm bells, but everything proceeded as normal. The buck’s reactions indicated little trepidation.

Once it had moved a few feet downwind from the outcropping and was investigating a small patch of grass in a neighboring clearing, Bones made his move. Moving swiftly and low to the ground, the one-time police dog launched himself off the rocks and directly onto the buck’s back. At the last moment, the larger animal seemed to realize what was happening and whirled around to bolt, but not in time. Bones wasn’t as fast as he’d been as a younger dog, but he made up for it with the viciousness of his attack. Knowing that the buck would fight back for only as long as it thought it had a chance at survival, the shepherd knew to come on strong and in a dominating manner. An older buck, arrogant in its size and standing in the woods, would fight back even with catastrophic wounds bleeding it out onto the forest floor. A younger one feeling mortal fear for the first time would sooner submit.

In this case “sooner” equaled less than a minute.

It was still barely alive when Bones tore open its soft belly and began stripping out the hot organs on which he feasted first. That’s when the shepherd’s well-tuned ears picked up a new presence in the area. Like the deer, Bones’s nose had been adversely affected by the weather, but his sense of hearing was as good as ever, and even in the soft snow he heard the footfalls of several hunters.

Bones turned around, instinctively blocking his kill with a tough defensive stance, and saw that the hunters were wolves, six in all, that seemed to have been tracking the buck when Bones interrupted and brought it down on his own.

Bones growled, the blood on his maw sluicing onto the snow as he bared his teeth. He’d had his first taste of blood for the day, was hungry for more, and wasn’t interested in being interrupted.

The wolves, which could have easily torn him apart as a group, stood their ground but refrained from coming closer. This infuriated Bones. He growled louder and then began to bark, loud, threatening noises filled with violence directed mainly at the closest two wolves. One of the others in back began to whine. Bones turned his savage barking on that one in particular as if indicating they would be the first to die.

After a couple of seconds passed with no movement, Bones simply turned and went back to eating, showing the wolves his tail. His back was still rigid as if ready to fight, but he allowed it to gradually relax. When Bones then heard the wolves resuming their approach, he tensed and stopped chewing, but the footfalls weren’t stealthy this time. In fact, they were as tentative as the buck’s.

In response, Bones whipped his head around and barked sharply at the three approaching wolves, startling each and making them recoil in their tracks. But just as quickly as he had turned, Bones angled his head back to the food and continued eating/ignoring them.

After another moment had passed, a single timber wolf stepped up beside Bones, sniffed the buck and inched its nose closer and closer to the food. Bones turned and growled at the wolf, but this only made it hesitate. It moved a little closer to the fallen deer, saw that Bones wasn’t going to kill it for doing so, and then opened its jaws to sink its teeth into the newly dead flesh.

As the other wolves slowly gathered around the kill, Bones kept his peace, and soon the buck was torn to pieces. Each wolf took a chunk for itself, but also kept some back to deliver to the rest of the pack, doubtless nearby.

Bones ate his fill, gorging on the choicest pieces of meat without a care for the rest of the wolves. When one moved too close to a piece Bones wanted, the shepherd didn’t make a sound but simply reached over and tore it away from the other animal. The wolf responded with a growl of its own, but Bones didn’t engage, and soon the wolf had wisely moved on to a different piece.

A few minutes later, Bones was finished. Continuing to regard the wolves as if they were little more than crows begging at the trough, he spryly hopped away from the kill as the wolves watched and then disappeared into the woods without looking back. Once he was out of sight, he lifted his leg and peed on a tree. Then he moved on.

•  •  •

“It says we’re right on top of him, but I don’t see shit.”

It was three months after the incident with the timber wolves when Bones had detected the first humans of the season. He’d been asleep, but their harsh scent filled his nose when they were still half a mile away. There were a number of them and they made a lot of noise as they walked making it easy for Bones to get moving and keep a few hundred yards ahead.

After only ten minutes of the humans staying tight on his trail, Bones realized he was being pursued.

“Bones! Here, boy! Bones!!” cried a voice.

Bones started in the direction of the sound, some deeply embedded bit of training unexpectedly rising to the surface. This quickly faded and he bounded away, heading higher into the hills around Sugarloaf Mountain.

As he went, he continued to hear the men behind him. Though he was upwind, the men were dauntless in their ability to track him, never missing a turn, as if they had his scent and good. Bones wasn’t tired, however, and just kept running. He was enjoying the pursuit, his mouth open as he galloped away as if playing a game. He never imagined he’d be caught.

Bones heard the sound of the helicopter only seconds before it crested a nearby hilltop, a man hanging out of it, holding a pair of binoculars. The wash of the rotors kicked dust and needles off the aspens, creating clouds of debris that affected the shepherd’s sense of smell. Momentarily unable to tell which direction the men were coming from, Bones made like an arrow for a small crevasse only a few hundred yards away.