Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (33 page)

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Denny Edwin Tallchief, as was occasionally pointed out, hardly lived up to his last name. Never growing past a squat five-foot-five and shoveled food by an over-protective mother who used same to express love, Denny spent elementary school and junior high as a short, fat kid who no one would ever mistake for a class leader. As unexceptional in sports as he was in his school work, Denny learned to hate just about everything school-related, with the one big exception being the school’s library. His mother worked in downtown Bullhead City as a secretary for a construction company. With school out at three-thirty and Sheila Tallchief getting off at five on a good day, this left at least a half-hour drive before Denny would get picked up. Denny’s father, Gene, had never married Sheila, which was just as well, since he was in prison for armed robbery at the super-max facility at the Arizona State Prison in Florence, but this meant almost every dime of Sheila’s paycheck went to living expenses with nothing left over for after-school care.

But Denny’s principal, a kindly old man named Mr. Heiden, who had started his teaching career in Mohave County after returning from the Pacific theater in World War II, often did things to help his students and their families and was considered more akin to a pastor than a school administrator at times. He struck a deal with Sheila to let Denny camp out in the library after school if he helped the current librarian, a revolving parade of part-time substitute teachers, shelve returned books. Denny took to this task with relish and soon was entrusted with a key to not only the library but also the school building. So efficient was he that the temporary librarians found it easy to fudge their time cards, knowing Denny was more than happy to take on all the after-school responsibilities of keeping up the library, from writing up the overdue notices to mending broken spines with just the right amount of book tape.

Additionally, Mr. Heiden began letting Denny borrow books from his own voluminous library that he kept in the principal’s office. His shelves were filled, but Denny noticed early on that the vast majority of them were focused on World War II, particularly actions Mr. Heiden had been a part of: Kwajalein and Engebi in the Marshall Islands, Ormoc and Valencia in the Philippines, and then Okinawa, where Heiden had been wounded and shipped home.

Denny never forgot Heiden’s personal touch with his students, and after surviving his school years, he went to Arizona State University with the intention of going into teaching himself. He’d slimmed down in high school, was still no one’s idea of attractive but ended up dating a handful of girls who were as socially awkward and prone to spending Friday nights in the campus library as he was.

He fell in love for real one day with a woman named Jennifer Baker, who organized study groups in the library for the blind, herself legally blind, though she still had some limited sight in both eyes. Having been burned more than a few times before, Jennifer was dubious of Denny’s attentions at first but soon fell for the gentle young man whose most animated discussions came when describing, no,
monologuing
about what kinds of innovations he hoped to use in his future classrooms to keep even the most disaffected students engaged and interested.

They were married in a simple ceremony eight weeks after graduation. They moved to Flagstaff, as both had been offered jobs in the same school district (he at an elementary school, she as a roving administrator dealing with issues relating to the handicapped), and set up housekeeping in a tiny apartment that they decided to endure in order to save up for a down payment on a house. Three years later, one week after Denny’s twenty-fifth birthday, Jennifer announced that she was pregnant. Twelve days later, they watched on the news as the first information about the plague that struck Florida began making its way into the media.

Three days after that, Jennifer was dead.

Denny had heard some people on the internet refer to the disease as the “sepelio” virus and believed, like many, that it was a technical term or referred to a specific ailment that had been identified as the cause which meant a cure was forthcoming. In point of fact, a doctor in Cincinnati named Kuhn had dubbed it “sepelio,” the Latin for “to bury” and took the additional, colloquial meanings of “to overwhelm” or “to annihilate” in a series of initial findings he posted online eight hours before he died. As such research was in short supply and his outlined the progress of the disease (first came a fever, followed by intense difficulty breathing, as if the victim was having a heart attack that resulted in capillaries exploding in the lungs, which drowned the patient in their own blood), it was treated like gospel by the world media as they desperately sought an answer before it was too late, which is why his name stuck.

But in truth, no one had actually named the disease. It wasn’t even a virus.

After Jennifer died, Denny waited in his apartment with his wife’s body in anticipation of the moment that he, himself, would pass. After twelve hours, he fell asleep and then at twenty-four, he began to wonder what was going on. He let another half-day pass by and finally ventured out to commiserate with other survivors only to find that his entire neighborhood was dead. His internet was still up and he checked on the plague’s progress, seeing that it had continued on into California and that most people in North America had died. The “most” came because there were those exceptions like the oft-mentioned, quickly legendary Frank Flores who many believed was still alive in Toronto.

On the third day, when Denny realized that he had survived something that had taken the lives of just about the rest of the world, he broke down and cried tears of self-pity.

T
he ease with which Bones took to living off the land as a hunter and scavenger would not have surprised various handlers of his through the years. They had detected something that seemed to suggest the shepherd was never fully domesticated in the first place. There was always a certain quickness to violence, a deep sense of territoriality, and a keen hunter’s instinct that seemed out of place with the dog’s ferocious loyalty to his handlers even when it didn’t feel earned; something that made more than one trainer wonder if the loyalty part was artificial in any way.

One such trainer of his in the Pittsburgh Police Department worked with Bones for a single day before the shepherd had apparently decided that he would defend this man with his life, something the man hadn’t observed in an enforcement dog before. Wondering if there was some sort of vestigial closeness the shepherd felt to male handlers based on his loyalty relationship with his original partner, a Doña Ana County Sheriff named Lionel Oudin, the trainer teamed Bones with a veteran female handler to see what would happen. The woman reported the same experience as the male trainer, finding Bones remarkably quick to accept and defend his trainer.

No one seemed quite sure what to make of this until a visiting ATF agent observing at Pittsburgh’s K-9 training facility remarked that he’d worked with a dog like that before.

“It’s a rarity in an animal,” the agent explained. “The dog I worked with like that had an equally unusual response in a pack situation with other dogs. It couldn’t identify and bond with a canine alpha or pack leader, so it never settled into the traces. But with humans, it was just like your dog here.”

When it was asked if that meant Bones would lack the qualities of great enforcement animal, the ATF agent replied that it “actually quite the opposite” and that Bones would make an excellent addition to the force, as he would take commands readily and execute them without fail.

“Don’t think of him like a partner in the traditional sense,” the ATF officer said. “Imagine yourself as king or shogun, and he’s your faithful knight or samurai. You want something done? You won’t get questions. There’ll be no debate. Some dogs, even the best trained in the world, hesitate when their instinct tells them something’s dangerous and they, and possibly their partner, can lose a step. That will never be the case with this animal. He won’t question the notion that your commands are gospel and won’t think he might know better. He will simply execute.”

But Bones was no longer the same dog he was back in Pittsburgh. He’d now gone through two long periods away from having a human alpha where he’d been forced to fend for himself, hunting, gathering, and killing when necessary to stay alive. He proved an adept-enough hunter on his own, though going it alone against large game, particularly ones that ran in herds, was never simple. In his encounters with timber wolves in Pennsylvania and then packs of coyotes in Los Angeles where he might have become a member of that grouping, or, potentially, that pack’s new alpha despite a difference in species, he never did. His instincts kept him solitary so he remained on his own.

In the L.A. quake zone, whenever a live meal went scarce, Bones simply turned to foraging for food amongst the vast stores of packaged goods in shattered grocery and convenience stores, people’s homes and offices and everywhere in between. He was able to find food in a buried car, in piles of trash, in semi-collapsed buildings, and even left behind on the side of the road by wasteful soldiers and scientists who came into the city. He did not go hungry.

All this had changed once he left the city. In the vast nothing between Los Angeles and the eastern horizon, Bones encountered fewer and fewer human outposts. There would be gas stations and the occasional neighborhood with its attendant services, but as he neared the Mojave Desert, these dwindled in number or had already been ransacked. Again, he was discovering more and more human corpses, all of which had been dead for about eight weeks and long picked over by other scavengers, which meant that even if he’d been willing to sample human meat, there was none to find. Instead, Bones found himself heading out into the desert at night to find his food, feasting on wood and kangaroo rats, the occasional rattlesnake or jackrabbit, a bighorn sheep that Bones had tracked for hours and even an unlucky badger who had emerged from his hide directly in front of the hungry shepherd and didn’t even have time to react before Bones had viciously snapped its neck.

But other than these few forays into the wilderness, Bones stayed on the main roads keeping near the scent of humans. The stench of the dead hung heavy. Every so often, Bones caught a whiff of the living that had ridden the wind out to the desert. Also, the roads were simply easier to travel on. Bones had a place to go. Every test of his muscles seemed to increase the strain he felt deep within his body giving his travels a sense of urgency.

Typically, the shepherd chose to move at night and into the morning, rested during mid-day in whatever shade he could find. He then continued on in the late afternoon or evening, generally seeking out sources of water that he would drink heavily from before seeking out his first and often only meal of the cycle before continuing on.

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A few days after his wife’s death, Denny began a series of forays around Flagstaff and soon found that he wasn’t as alone as he thought. A small group of survivors, fourteen in all he would soon learn, had gathered downtown in first the hospital and then the Flagstaff Sheraton on West Route 66 in the historic downtown district, where they had hung sheets off balcony guard rails with writing on them to alert others to their presence.

But on that first day out, Denny had driven around Flagstaff for much of the morning and seen no one. He surprised himself by having little trouble adjusting to the depopulated city. He broke a window to slip into a neighbor’s house to retrieve the truck keys of the young man he knew had lived there as he had one of the newer and best suited for Denny’s purposes vehicles on the block. While he was in the house, he went on to help himself to the fellow’s stores of bottled water, food, and even the cash he’d had in his wallet, sixty dollars, before realizing that he probably would have nowhere to spend it.

He took the truck to get gas. He found an ancient service station with non-automated mechanical pumps that had apparently been left open and accessible to anyone by the charitable station owner. He collected and filled up every one of the red plastic gas cans the owner had put out for sale likely only days before driving back to his apartment. He stole a second truck that afternoon and was driving around in search of a second gas station to drain when he saw the sheets hanging out of the Sheraton. He went to investigate and was shocked when he saw two people standing on the roof, smoking cigarettes.

Believing he might be met with suspicion, he did nothing to quiet his approach, parked outside the chain-link fence that had been erected around the hotel grounds, and walked up the long driveway to the entrance. He was halfway there when he realized that maybe he should have brought a weapon in case the “welcome” messages on the sheets were a ruse. When he entered the lobby, he found two women, a mousy-brown-haired twenty-something with what appeared to be a shy demeanor and then an older, black-haired femme with sinewy (gym-hardened?) features and a pinched smile. They gave him a casual nod when he entered, as if this was the third or fourth time they’d seen him that week. What he noticed immediately about both women was that, like him, they had the features and skin tone of American Indians, specifically Apaches.

“Are you alone?” a tall, thin man in his mid-forties who soon would introduce himself as Lester Ingram, asked coming in from the manager’s office.

“Yes, sir,” Denny said, noticing a pistol tucked in Ingram’s belt that couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d been twirling it in his hand.

Lester nodded as if mentally checking a box and nodded to the women, introducing the younger as Carrie Millsap and the older as Anna Blackledge before getting Denny to tell an abbreviated version of his story, the four of them standing in the lobby as if they had just met at some seminar and were looking for a new topic to pass the time. Like Denny, they appeared to be shell-shocked but finding ways to adjust to the new reality. Also, everyone seemed to have made the same assumptions that most everyone in the government was probably dead and no help was coming. If there were any other survivors, they were in about the same boat as they were, surrounded by strangers and figuring they might be the only people alive.