Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (21 page)

Disinterested, Bones turned away and saw Sharon returning from the latrine.

“That was a most disgusting experience,” Sharon said.

“Yeah, well, everybody else still alive in L.A. is pulling water from whatever they can find, not realizing most of it is run through with human piss and fecal matter. We’ve got about a day and a half before cholera wipes out anybody left alive out here.”

“Why don’t you rescue them, too?” Sharon asked. “Or is this simply a mercenary operation?”

“Oh, absolutely a simple mercenary op,” Chris replied. “We have enough manpower to rescue and defend the elite and that’s it. The rest is the government’s responsibility. Bet you’re glad to be important, huh?”

Sharon didn’t say it, but she had to admit that she was.

C
hris brought Gary and Sharon back to the room on the third floor of the Deco building where the pair quickly brought the other two (the older man, Arthur Nguyen, and the panicky older woman, Barbara Kuhn) up to speed.

“What’s the name of your company?” Arthur asked.

Chris hemmed and hawed but then replied: “I guess you could say we work for an umbrella corporation called Mayer, but we’re mostly freelancers getting paid by a middleman Mayer hired.”

“Is this like a Blackwater thing?” Gary asked.

“A lot of us are ex-military, ex-special forces, but we get hired on a mission-by-mission basis. Blackwater couldn’t afford us full-time even if they wanted to.”

Chris waited around for a moment, didn’t answer any more questions and then took Bones out with him.

“You stay in there too long and you’ll walk out a bitch, am I right?” Chris asked Bones who just seemed happy to not be cooped up.

Chris brought Bones back out into the courtyard to walk the perimeter, which consisted more of the handler stopping to shoot the shit with a number of his comrades as they went. The big topic of discussion was the rat encounter from the previous night. Everyone had a “the rats are going nuts” story to tell from the last couple of days. One saw hundreds of the creatures devouring the still living residents of a well-built nursing home. Another mentioned a “shower of rats” endured by a fellow when the ceiling above his head collapsed. Four or five dozen rats tumbled through along with piles of skeletons covered with tiny rat bites. No one ventured a guess as to whether the victims had been dead or alive during these encounters.

Throughout the stories, there was another constant. Though the rats were primarily focused on devouring people they had also been seen gnawing on the walls of buildings. From what Chris and a couple of the others could recall from their limited knowledge of rodents, rats gnawed on walls not out of hunger but out of a desire to sharpen and whittle down their teeth or enlarge a living space. But as Bones had observed, the rodents had a taste for the material found between the interior and exterior walls of newer buildings.

“What’s worse is then you see it in their shit,” one of the guys, a fellow named Rodney, exclaimed. “They can’t digest it, but they can’t get enough of it. What is that stuff?”

“It slows fires,” an older guy named Eswin explained. “It’s this high-tech fibrous material that’s got a really, really high flashpoint. Think it’s called Nivec. So if there’s a building fire, it takes longer for it move from room to room, as it really has to cook the walls to finish the job. It won’t completely contain a fire but just slows it down for awhile, like wet wood.”

“How come the rats like it so much?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe it tastes like rice pudding.”

Chris snickered. “We’re going to see a lot of shit worth writing home about before we pull out, I’ll bet. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Everybody nodded in agreement at Chris’s statement, not realizing they’d all be dead by morning and wouldn’t be writing home about anything any time soon.

•  •  •

Bones found patrolling with the Mayer-hired mercenaries boring.

He missed being out on in the broken city doing his job. Though he was classified as a work dog by law enforcement, his training made it so that the retrieval of bodies registered in his mind as instinct. Rather than being a hunter-gatherer like his ancestors or the timber wolves, Bones’s brain told him his job on the day was to look for the dead. Being tied down to Chris in and around the Deco building almost felt like punishment in contrast, particularly with the heavy chain the men insisted on keeping around his neck. In the evening, Chris went on break and took Bones up on the roof to finally deliver on the big meal he had been promising the dog since sunrise. It was mostly canned beans and tins of meat, but Chris had liberated all his two hands could carry from the mess hall, so it was in abundance.

“Mr. Loeb’s lawyers are getting antsy about the money,” Chris told Bones with a laugh. “Apparently, the quake really fucked the market, and when you add up the son’s insurance policies, stock portfolio, and pieces of his would-be eventual inheritance pie, Daddy’s suddenly realizing his boy’s worth more dead than alive. Neither side wants to say it, but they’re both dancing around the same thing. ‘Cut him loose.’ Hell, they’d probably pay us a little something just to do that and look the other way.”

Chris and Bones had come across Chris’s boss at one point, a rugged-looking, deeply-tanned Britisher named Gerson. Gerson looked permanently annoyed as he tried to lock down bounty payments so that at least a few of his “charges” could be sent east in a pre-dawn helicopter evac the next morning to free up more of his men to go after further contracts. It sounded like Mayer had been the only game in town for a couple of days, but that was changing. Time and time again, Gerson was tasked with convincing the hopeful wealthy that his team was the best. By contracting them they were most likely to get their loved ones out of the quake zone.

“You have to understand what it looks like on the ground here,” Gerson would say. “The first quake was bad enough, but then the second one hit. Even the military pulled out. You can deal with the cowboy organizations, sure, but we’ve been handling private search-rescue-secure operations dating back to Hurricane Andrew. This is what we do. We’re the best.”

More often than not, this would do the trick, and the Englishman would close the deal. He’d give a thumb’s up to whoever was closest while waiting for a satellite-delivered image of the to-be-claimed package or information on the person’s possible whereabouts.

“Oh, shit,” said Chris after seeing the accompanying address on one of the pictures. “We went by there when we pulled that Kleiner fellow. Everything within ten blocks was rubble.”

Gerson shrugged. “Next best thing to a reunion is closure. Find me a body. I’ll see what I can negotiate.”

At some point during the day, Chris had decided to give Bones a name and started calling him “Butch.” He talked to his newfound companion about the last three days, how he’d been helicoptered in from offshore to a relatively untouched air strip in Long Beach that had been deemed unsafe for some reason by the military. He lived in Tucson but split his time between Arizona and California working as a trainer for the Navy, having been a SEAL himself. He’d established his digs on the fourth floor of the Deco building and had his kit all laid out, one that contained a full two weeks’ worth of supplies and at the end of the day he took Bones up there to settle in for the night. It was pretty spare with a cot, some clothes, a lantern and a bag, but perched in the window on a bi-pod was what Chris referred to as the most important part of his kit, an SR-98 Accuracy International sniper rifle complete with flash and noise suppressor, folding stock, and five-round magazine.

“There are looters for sure, but they know to leave us the hell alone,” Chris said, nodding out the window to the dark, rubble-strewn streets of Los Angeles, where distant sounds indicated that they weren’t quite the only people left alive in the city. “But still, gotta be ready in case the skinnies get brave, you know?”

Bones didn’t seem to care all that much, so Chris fed him another candy bar which the shepherd happily devoured. They hadn’t been down five minutes before one of the other guards knocked on the doorframe.

“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. 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 started chuckling as Gary’s face got red.

“Oh, fuck you,” Gary snapped. “Like you weren’t doing the same thing. I’ve seen you two huddled together all day, thick as thieves.”

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. When 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. Once they did, the city would be sued into oblivion.

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 surpass the dollar figure of repairs, just as long as they 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 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 could even lead to court actions resulting in 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. More recently, they had 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.