Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (25 page)

Bones turned and looked out towards the northwest, over towards the Pacific Palisades and Malibu beyond, and saw a thick black cloud of smoke rapidly making its way across the blue sky. It was as if a great conflagration had just been ignited and was consuming everything in its path. But then the cloud’s tail broke free from the earth. It became a wandering black splotch on the horizon following the coast down towards Santa Monica.

Only, the wind was blowing northeast.

Bones started barking but wasn’t sure why. He was definitely barking at the cloud, particularly now as it seemed to be changing direction again and moving less towards Santa Monica and more in the direction of Beverly Hills. Then, something even stranger happened as the sky darkened behind the hotel as well, casting the floor in shadow.

Bones began barking in earnest.

“Bones! Keep quiet!” Nashon cried, hurrying over to the dog, a shushing finger to his lips. “We’re getting out of here.”

But the shepherd couldn’t stop. Something was clearly terrifying it. As if catching a scent on the wind, Bones bolted around and headed out of the room, across the hall and towards the east-facing side of the structure. He began barking even louder just as the shadow over the sun began getting more and more complete, dimming the light in the already dark hotel.

Paul and Sharon hurried out of the “room” they had been in and watched Bones, the dog’s panic quickening their pulses.

“Shit, what does he know that we don’t?” Zamarin asked.

Paul, a little scared to do so, strode quickly over to Bones’s side and looked out into the sky towards where the shepherd was directing his alarm. Upon seeing what the dog was up in arms about, Paul immediately knew the casualty rate of the coming encounter would be large.

In the eastern sky, blocking out the sun, was a collective mass of literally hundreds of thousands of birds, possibly millions, flying in from the ruins of downtown. Paul was amazed by the sight. He’d never seen so many birds outside of a documentary.

“Sir? We’ve got birds incoming.”

Paul turned and saw Levy pointing out towards the west.

“What do you mean? They’re over here.”

But then Paul saw through the building that an equal number of birds were coming in from the ocean side of the city. They seemed intent to marry up with the complementary fleet from the east at the Beverly Hilton’s brunch buffet consisting today of Israeli commandos, one young woman and a German shepherd. Paul turned and looked around, finally recognizing that the phosphorus and nitrogen smell, coupled with what he’d wrongly written off as some kind of chemical powder from the building’s fire extinguishers, was actually bird guano.

He’d never been to Los Angeles before but understood that it, like many a metropolis, was overrun with pigeons and seagulls. It had never occurred to him that birds would have interest in devouring anything as large as a rat, much less meat off a human corpse.

“Back to the stairwell—n
ow,
” he ordered.

Paul didn’t have to convince anyone. The other commandos saw the approaching flocks and recognized malevolence in their movements. What they didn’t realize was just how quickly they were approaching.

Sharon surprised herself by being the last to move as the previous week had found her exercising reflexes and response times she didn’t know she had. She’d been in bed in her Wilshire Corridor apartment when Alpha hit and was up like a shot. Her girlfriend had not been as fast, figuring the quake to be as mild as any they’d ever felt. Within seconds, she had been crushed under the full weight of their collapsing ceiling. From her vantage point in the living room, Sharon had just glimpsed this but had had a clear view of the panic on Emily’s face when she realized too late the mortal danger. Sharon had successfully avoided calling that image to mind for eight days now as she’d fought to survive, first to get food and water, then when having to fight off would-be rapists at Memorial Stadium on the USC campus where a number of survivors had initially gathered but then when hunted down by the Mayer men who seized her about half an hour after she had found a working satellite phone and had called the Stephane offices in New York.

But she found something hypnotic about these birds. If she’d had the wherewithal to write it down, she’d admit that it looked like something out of a 3-D movie winding its way towards her from the screen. She actually loved birds. A couple of weekends before the quake had spent a morning with Emily photographing them at a bird sanctuary in Griffith Park. As she’d never seen birds exhibit anything remotely like this behavior before, naturally she was enraptured.

“Come on!” shouted Paul, this time snapping Sharon out of it and making her run.

The humans were all at different distances from the stairwell door when the birds coming in from the east slammed into the building first. It was a tremendous sound as several of the flock collided with the building itself both above and below the open-air eighth and ninth floors. Still, thousands drove in through the windows at the commandos, and within seconds, two of the commandos had been pounded so ferociously that they fell off the edge of the building. Another two had been similarly driven to the ground, their eyes bloodily torn out.

“Shoot ’em!” screamed Paul, who turned and blasted into the birds with his machine gun.

This proved disastrous for the team leader. The flock was moving way too quickly and as soon as he fired, he found himself pelted with just as many severed beaks and claws from the ones he’d killed as from the living. Gallons of bird blood splattered against his face as a gull reached his head, dug its claws into his temples, and tore out his eyeballs.

Nashon didn’t even bother firing. He hit the deck immediately and landed nose-down in a dead rat’s stomach. He retched, but kept his head down so that the worst he got from the birds racing by overhead was hair torn out of his scalp and his clothes shredded.

Sharon actually managed to get behind a large chunk of rubble and survived without a scratch, save a gash she gave herself as she scraped her leg when she’d ducked down. A number of birds smacked into her temporary barrier, but those flying by overhead didn’t even see her.

“Help me! God, help!”

She looked over and saw the commando named Levy as he appeared to be physically
carried
over the edge of the building. It was an unbelievable sight, a man lifted aloft by birds. Even though he was flailing mightily against his attackers, Sharon felt the commando looked downright angelic as if he was being held aloft by some unseen Heavenly protector.

But the moment passed and, like Icarus, Levy became all too aware of his limitations and that knowledge seemed to break the illusion and cause his body to fall. As with her girlfriend, Sharon managed to make eye contact with the man as he began his descent. He looked terrified but did not scream the entire way down to the concrete below.

It suddenly occurred to Sharon that that explained the bodies down in the driveway.

Well aware of what was coming, Bones had simply lain down on the ground behind a crushed piece of flooring and watched the birds pass over with amusement. At first, he made a couple of snaps at them, even pulling a mourning dove out of midair, which he promptly killed. But the action brought the attention of some of the other birds, who came and tore into his fur as they flew by. Realizing it wasn’t worth it, Bones knelt back down and sat out the action.

It took the entire ocean-borne flock less than fifteen seconds to make their aerial maneuver through the hotel and come out on the other side where they faced off against the flock from downtown.

“What the
fuck
was that?” screamed Zamarin.

Sharon looked over at the older commando and saw that though he had managed to secret himself behind a broken concrete slab, his left eye had been torn from its socket and was now hanging down his cheek.

“I don’t know,” she said, clambering to her feet.

She looked around and saw that two commandos were dead on the floor, three were missing and, she presumed, had gone over the ledge of the building. Paul, who was being attended by Nashon, had been at the very least blinded by the birds. She moved over next to him and saw that he was sitting upright in a massive pool of blood surrounded by empty cartridges and shredded birds.

“Who’s alive?” Paul croaked, his commanding voice intact but sounding punch-drunk from blood loss.

“I am,” reported Zamarin. “Ms. Wiseman, the dog, and then Corporal Sahar.”

“No one else?” Paul said, though he didn’t sound that surprised.

“No, sir.”

“And what are the birds doing?” Paul asked.

Sharon looked out towards the sky and saw that the two flocks had merged, but rather than turn and blast directly back into the hotel to finish the job as she expected, they appeared to be killing one another. The corpses of literally hundreds of birds were cascading down to the rubble-strewn wasteland of Beverly Hills in a torrent.

“They’re fighting…or something,” Sharon said. “There are birds dropping out of the sky. They’re killing each other. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I think they’re infected with whatever got into the rats,” Paul suggested. “Either that or God’s decided to take pity on us for a moment. Either way, let’s not spit in His face by wasting it.”

W
ith the birds momentarily preoccupied with tearing each other apart, the survivors of their initial assault helped each other to the stairwell and shut the door. Once there and safe, Sharon pulled bandages from Paul’s woefully under-stocked first aid kit and wrapped them around his head, covering his empty, bleeding eye sockets as well as the numerous cuts on his face and scalp. Nashon started to do the same for Sergeant Zamarin, but there was a question as to what could be done with the still attached eyeball hanging from the end of the optic nerve.

“You can have that reattached,” Sharon said, though she was loath to actually look at it. “It’s not that uncommon a procedure. Just try and pack it back into the socket in some way. Then we’ll pad it with bandages.”

“You have any idea how quickly it’ll get infected?” the sergeant asked. “Minutes, not hours. And that close to my brain? Thank you, no.”

Zamarin pulled a knife out of his belt, snipped through the optic nerve and caught his severed eyeball in his hand.

“Oh, I can’t believe you just did that,” Sharon said, turning her head. Nashon looked as if he might throw up.

A bit delirious himself from blood loss, Zamarin clearly enjoyed the attention.

“If this is to truly be one of my last days on earth, there’s something I’ve always been curious about,” Zamarin began, a whimsical tone in his voice as if reciting a children’s rhyme. “What does it look like, the inside of a dog?”

With that, the commando fed his severed eyeball to Bones who swallowed it in one gulp. “Oh, dear God,” Sharon said, her mouth agape.

“Did he just feed his eyeball to Bones?” Paul asked, surprisingly matter-of-fact.

“He did.”

“You are one sick bastard, sergeant,” Paul said, shaking his head. “You take the prize.”

Zamarin shrugged, but then looked down the dark stairwell. “Be that as it may, I’d imagine the plan couldn’t go much more topsy-turvy. We can’t stay here. God only knows what’s waiting for us below. And if we step back out onto one of these floors chances are the birds will come right back to play another Hitchcock number on us.”

“Well, it just doesn’t make sense,” Paul said. “We got intel as recently as yesterday that there were survivors in this building. There were heat scans, they were moving and alive. Where could they be?”

That’s when a thought occurred to Sharon and she looked down the stairs. “The conference was being held in the subbasement ballrooms, which are right off the kitchen. If they stayed intact, wouldn’t that be the place to go?”

Paul nodded. “Only one way to find out.”

•  •  •

With Zamarin taking point and Nashon leading Paul, the group slowly made their way down the stairwell back to the first floor. Bones took his lead from the surviving commandos, staying close and not straying ahead. This allowed Sharon to keep a hand on the shepherd as they walked, the darkness giving her a sort of vertigo on the way down she hadn’t experienced on the way up. Even with the dog, she found herself stumbling every few steps when she missed the handrail.

“
Shit!
” she cried, tripping but then catching herself on the wall.

“You all right?” asked Paul.

“Fine, fine,” Sharon scoffed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You’re dehydrated, you’re overloaded with adrenaline which has contracted your blood vessels and exploded your heart rate. You’re probably in shock, at least mentally,” Paul explained. “What’s worse, you keep demanding your body move forward. This is it reacting.”

Sharon exhaled sharply, knowing Paul was right but not willing to concede that she might not be fit for this kind of duty. “I’m fine.”

“We all need rest,” Paul said. “I’m near a full system collapse.”

“Then why don’t we abort the mission?” Sharon asked. “Turn ourselves over to the U.S. military, get extracted?”

“I don’t know if you heard, but the American military has suspended all operations inside the Los Angeles basin,” Paul stated, groaning as Nashon slipped a little and bumped the team leader against the railing, confirming to Sharon that he was more hurt than he had wanted to let on. “They’re not coming in here, no matter what. We’re on our own. We have a boat in Venice that’s fueled and ready to go. That’s our extraction.”

“You really think we can get out all the way out there?” Zamarin asked. “Rats by night, now birds by day. Los Angeles is getting pretty feral. Never seen such aggressive birds.”

“Those birds weren’t being aggressive,” Sharon said. “That was some kind of defensive behavior, as if protecting a nest. Only—no nest. It’s what the Mayer guys said about the rats. The rats are poisoned with something that affected their sympathetic nervous system and now it’s been passed on to the birds.”