Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (20 page)

The trouble for the shepherd was that scent worked both ways. His blood was pumping and the rats could smell it, which egged them on. Bones’s nose informed him in no uncertain terms that he would soon be overtaken. His tongue lolled out of his jaws and he was just beginning to feel winded when a new sound entered the fray, followed quickly by a man-made light source cutting through the night from the north.

,In his peripheral vision, Bones could see a dozen or so motorcycles, followed by two garish yellow civilian Humvees, weaving their way down to Sunset on a side street. The Humvees bounced over the rubble on the streets like it was nothing.

“It’s a dog!” came a cry. “What the hell’s a dog doing setting this thing off?”

Bones stopped short when one of the motorcycles got close enough to almost run him over and then he smelled cordite from a recently fired gun. With a clank, two turret guns, typical of a military Humvee but hopelessly incongruous on a consumer model, were readied and aimed at the oncoming rats.

“Light ’em up!”

With a tremendous burst of muzzle flash, hot lead screamed out of the twin guns and chewed through the incoming rats. The bullets moved so quickly and the targets were so near that it looked like a sci-fi movie laser beam was being used to sear through Bones’s attackers.

Bones turned and barked at the spectacle, though his voice was easily blocked out by the tremendous thrum of the mounted machine guns. Satisfied that he was no longer being pursued, Bones wheeled around to run off, only to have a harness thrown around his neck by one of the motorcyclists.

“Where do you think you’re going,
puto
?” the biker, a large Latino wearing a sweatshirt and ball cap, asked as he reeled the shepherd in.

Bones struggled against the leash every inch of the way to the motorcycle until the biker produced a cattle prod and jammed it against Bones’s shoulder. As 9,000 volts coursed through Bones’s body, the shepherd dropped to the deck, unconscious. As the hail of bullets continued shredding the air around him, the last thing Bones smelled was the oily-scented blood of a thousand dead rats.

•  •  •

Bones awoke a few hours later in great pain and found himself the subject of a surgical procedure. The tracking device that had been placed in his left leg was being removed by three people he could not see. The pain had jarred him out of unconsciousness.

Naturally, he wheeled around and sunk his jaws into the would-be surgeon, the iron-flecked taste of the man’s blood quickly oozing across the shepherd’s tongue.

“Zap him, man! Zap him! He’s awake!!!”

The cattle prod was quickly brought around and jammed into Bones’s side. Bones shuddered and sank back into unconsciousness after the second recharge.

•  •  •

When Bones woke up a second time, his muscles were sore to the bone, and his skin was burned wherever the cattle prod had touched. On top of that, his leg was in tremendous pain from the impromptu surgery, and despite the expert way that his fur had been shaved away before a careful incision had been made, no painkillers had been administered to ease his transition into consciousness.

So when Bones immediately stood up, the other four people in the room, folks who only showed up as smudges to Bones’s bleary eyes, all jumped as well.

“He’s awake!” said a twenty-something man in a gray suit, clearly terrified.

“Don’t worry,” said the younger of the two women in the room who appeared dressed in business casual. “He’s chained.”

“My neighbor had a Siberian husky when I was growing up,” said the older woman, who wore sort of green pajamas. “That thing bit right through its chain. They bought another one. It bit through that, too.”

“Yeah, well, this a German shepherd,” said the fourth man, an older fellow in a sweat suit.

“I knew a guy who had the rear tire of his Volkswagen chomped into by a German shepherd,” said the older woman. “He had no idea that it had happened, so he drove away and pulled onto the 134. His tire blew and he had to pull over, but got plowed into by an eighteen-wheeler. His widow sued the owner of the shepherd and won.”

“Should’ve sued the company that had contracted the eighteen-wheeler,” the twenty-something said. “Would’ve gotten more money.”

Bones had been looking from person to person and hadn’t noticed the chain they’d been referring to until he took a step and felt himself jerked backwards. He tugged at it, found it sold enough, and decided to voice his disdain for it with a huge torrent of barks that echoed all around the room and scared the hell out of the four humans.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted gray suit. “He’s pissed!”

Bones tugged at the chain a second time and discovered that it was wound around an unused, many-times-painted-over radiator under the one window in the room. Angry, Bones grabbed the chain in his jaws and tried to chew through it.

“See?” said the older woman. “He’s going to bite right through it!”

But Bones took a couple more snaps at the chain, didn’t like how it felt against his teeth, and promptly lay back down on the floor to the surprise of his fellow prisoners. He had given them something of a sniff-over, detected nothing but the scent of abject terror in their sweat, and decided he couldn’t be bothered with anything else. Moments later, he went back to sleep.

It appeared that Bones and his fellow captives were being held in a small office in what must have been one of the last still standing buildings in all of Los Angeles, a multi-story Deco design that was likely apartments at one time, now converted into office space. Though one wall was marred by a gigantic crack and the glass of the window had shattered (though it was mostly still held in place by wire “quake-proof” mesh), those were the only signs of the recent seismic event.

Though the group had talked earlier in the day, they now fell mostly silent in hopes of not riling up the snoozing German shepherd. They stayed that way for an hour until someone finally opened the door.

“Bathroom break,” came a guttural voice that, unsurprisingly, belonged to a bulldozer-sized, biker-looking type with an intimidating shaved head and mustache combo and least three visible Iron Crosses tattooed on his neck and shoulders. “Anybody?”

“Me!” said the gray-suited man.

The biker grunted at the man.

“Me, too,” said the younger woman. “Is there a ladies room?”

In response, the shave-headed man shrugged but then turned to make sure that the group could see the gun in his belt to know that questions weren’t welcome. He waited for any other takers, but when there were none, he looked over at Bones who was waking up.

“Bet you need a walk, huh, boy?” the biker said. He nodded towards the gray-suited fellow. “Unchain him. Bring him with.”

“You’re kidding…”

The pistol was out of Chris’s waistband and aimed at the younger man’s face so fast that everyone in the room save the tattooed man gasped.

“Turns out I’m not,” grunted the gunman. “You gonna get him or what?”

•  •  •

A couple of minutes later, the group was walking through the crumbling building. The biker had said his name was “Chris,” so the young woman introduced herself as Sharon Wiseman and the gray-suited man as Gary Loeb. As they walked, the trio passed first a ladies room, then a men’s room, and Gary got a little nervous.

“I thought you were taking us to the bathroom,” Gary said, trying to sound tough.

“The building’s intact, but the plumbing ain’t,” explained Chris. “You piss in there, it goes all over my friends downstairs. You might not have a problem with that, but they would. There’s a latrine outside.”

Once they’d gone down the three flights of stairs to street level, Gary’s initial fears fell away as he became preoccupied with the building around him.

“So why this one?” Gary was asking to no one in particular. “I mean, it looks like what, 1920s? We’re in Hollywood, right? It’s not like this area wasn’t affected, but was this one just built a little stronger? Retrofitted after the Northridge quake slightly better than it should’ve been?”

Sharon rolled her eyes and Chris caught it, grinning back despite the fact that he’d threatened to murder her as recently as the night before.

Once they were outside the building, Gary’s point was driven home. Every other building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine had collapsed or at least lost a major part of its super structure: the new hotel, the new condominiums, the old theaters (the Montalban and the Pantages), the Metro station, the old office building in the northeast corner. and almost every other piece of architecture in sight, right up to the once space age-looking Capitol Records Tower up Vine that had pancaked down on itself.

For anyone who might have seen the area in years past, it was now unrecognizable as even being in the same city. In fact, it more resembled post-war Dresden or Nagasaki, a forest of multi-story corners or facades of buildings with no floors in between, the contents of each poured onto the sidewalks, which were now covered in everything from broken glass and office furniture to file folders and ducting.

“We dug a latrine behind the parking lot,” Chris said, nodding to a spot behind the Deco building. “Unisex.”

Sharon nodded, but like Gary she was taking in the sight of the numerous armed men who came into view, patrolling around the building and the adjacent streets. Some were using piles of rubble to elevate their vantage points, while others had created blinds in the other buildings despite many looking as if they might come down on themselves at any moment. Abandoned vehicles had been rolled from nearby streets to create defensible barriers at the end of each block. These in particular disallowed any kind of transport from getting close to the men’s base of operations.

“Worried about looters?” Gary joked as he nodded towards the road blocks.

“It’s for your protection, not ours, asshole,” Chris scoffed.

“From what?” Sharon asked.

Chris paused as if the answer was self-evident but then shrugged, turning to Sharon first. “Sharon Wiseman, some muckity-muck with a banking giant out of Baltimore, right? In charge of a large number of accounts, apparently a genius at picking stocks on the international marketplace.” As Sharon looked surprised, Chris turned to Gary. “And you, your father is the CEO of an aerospace giant in Colorado doing the real work while you blow all his money telling nineteen-year-old wannabe actresses you’re looking to finance movies.”

“How’d you know all that?” Sharon finally asked.

“You’re both on the list.”

“What list?”

“Bounty list,” Chris explained. “Everybody knows L.A.’s fucked.
Millions
are dead. Millions. It’s unprecedented. But as soon as it happened, a bunch of companies and a bunch of rich guys started putting bounties out for people. Most of them were for family, but some are for business people like Sharon whose companies can’t move forward without knowing the status of certain employees and starting a chain of succession in earnest. The U.S. government’s our biggest client but also the easiest as a lot of military guys now have to get those GPS tracking implants in their wrists like our friend here.”

Chris looked down at Bones, who had gone mostly unnoticed for a couple of moments. The shepherd hadn’t waited for the latrine to urinate having just whizzed on a nearby pile of broken cinder blocks.

“We even thought this guy was one of ’em,” Chris continued, nodding at the dog. “He had a tracking device, was on the move and there’s a $20,000 reward from the government per trooper, so we went for it, and it turned out to be some kind of enforcement dog. Hell, we’re still trying to figure out what kind of money we can get for him.”

“But you’re holding us against our will,” Sharon said, her agitation level rising. “How can that be legal?”

“Let me assure you, it’s for your own protection,” Chris countered. “I don’t know if you have a sense of just how feral it’s gotten out there. Lotta crazy gangbangers picking through the rubble, lotsa thieves who’ll knock over anybody who gets in their way. And those are just the humans. L.A.’s also got this big rat problem now, too, isn’t that right, boy?”

Chris looked down at Bones and rubbed the shepherd’s snout.

“So you’ve got me on a list and you’re probably talking to my dad,” Gary asked. “When do I get out of here?”

“Soon as he deposits a million dollars in our company’s account,” Chris replied. “He went into the press all earnest about finding you, but the more days go by, the more it looks like he figured a pussy like you wouldn’t be able to survive.”

Chris led the pair to the latrine, taking Bones’s chain from Gary. Parking himself on a nearby pile of broken bricks to wait, Chris stared out towards the south as Bones lay down.

“You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” Chris asked before reaching in his pocket and producing an energy bar. Bones angled his head up expectantly. “Oh, now I’ve got your attention, huh?”

Chris unwrapped the bar and took a small chunk for himself but then tossed the rest to Bones who wolfed it down in one gulp.

“Guess you were hungry,” Chris said.

Chris talked for a moment longer about how happy he was to have a dog around, but Bones wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was focused on a large flock of pigeons that seemed to be circling overhead as if guided by a dervish waving a sword. They’d duck low, roll, sweep back around, then race skyward again in an elaborate pattern, always perfectly in unison.

That’s when Bones spotted a red-tailed hawk sitting atop a nearby outcropping, a single surviving corner of an otherwise collapsed six-story building. The hawk was watching the pigeons as closely as Bones but seemed to be intimidated by their movements even though it was the predator. Though the pigeons would normally regard the raptor with fear, their swirling flock moved closer and closer to the hawk until it finally took flight. As it did, the pigeons swarmed towards it, engulfing the large bird in their midst and tearing it apart. Unseen by Chris or any of the other men, the hawk’s shredded corpse soon fell from the sky dropping soundlessly into the rubble of the Montalban Theater.