Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (36 page)

“Dog attack,” Riley said quickly. “They were camping outside the city. Said there was something like two hundred dogs.”

“Two
hundred?
” Denny exclaimed.

Riley nodded. “Yeah, and they keep saying ‘They weren’t wolves, they weren’t coyotes,’ they were just fucking dogs. People’s pets gone ape shit.”

Riley hurried on as Denny looked over at Carrie who appeared similarly incredulous.

“Jesus. Let’s see if we can help.”

•  •  •

On the afternoon that the wounded arrived at the Flagstaff Sheraton, Bones was still a few miles away from the city, taking a nap on a dog bed inside the office of an Arizona Highway Patrol station. Bones didn’t know why, but there was something nice, cozy, and familiar about the place. Recognizable smells like gun oil, coffee, cigarettes, and boot polish had soaked the fiberboard ceilings with their unique brew over the course of several years, and for Bones it was like coming home.

He’d found the dog bed in one of the offices and curled onto it for a nap that lasted hours, and when he woke up, it was dark outside. He searched the station for food, only to find that even the vending machines had been previously ransacked, and went about on his way.

He hadn’t gotten a mile before the smell of slaughter entered his nose. At first, he thought it was close, but then after raising his nose for a fresh sniff, the shepherd realized it wasn’t that it was nearby but instead was a substantial kill site with more than one victim. Bones kept walking, but strayed off the highway and kept his nose in the air. The odor of death grew heavier in the air, but then he smelled something else as well, an animal other than human. Cautiously, Bones crept ahead through the dark until he reached the first human corpse.

The body had been torn to pieces, a leg here, an arm there, the head ignored but the torso shredded and the entrails stretched in multiple directions. Judging from the smell, Bones could tell that it had actually been the work of several dogs and that this was hardly the only carcass.

As he nosed around, he discovered at least seventy corpses on the ground next to a collection of tents, extinguished cooking fires, and a few vehicles. There were also guns among the dead and a smell of cordite hung in the air, suggesting that at least a couple of the humans got off shots at the dogs before being killed, though Bones found no dog carcasses.

The shepherd was about ready to head away when he heard a growl coming from out of the darkness. He peered into the black and saw a single animal trotting towards him through the abattoir-like surroundings

Bones woofed a warning of his own but was unwilling to bark. He wasn’t alarmed and didn’t want to suggest as such. The dog came into view and Bones saw that it was a female, a bitch Rhodesian ridgeback. As he stared at her, trying to collect her scent, he realized that due to the sheer amount of blood in the area, his senses had been dulled and that there were a number of other dogs around as well, likely watching the encounter.

The ridgeback stopped and stared at Bones for a moment as the large shepherd lowered his head, ready for a fight. At the same time, Bones heard the other dogs circling around him, getting into position on either side. Though the ridgeback was in front of him, Bones knew the first attack would come from either his right or left to distract him and that the ridgeback would probably wait and go in for the kill when the shepherd was distracted.

But Bones wasn’t going to wait.

As his two would-be flankers got into position, Bones suddenly bared his teeth and moved as if to charge the ridgeback. Instinctively, the bitch took a step back, only to have Bones change his course and lunge at the animal to his left, a wolf hybrid—seventy-percent wolf, thirty-percent Siberian husky. The dog was taken completely by surprise. Bones tore out its throat in a single, vicious move. Beside the wolf hybrid was an Australian shepherd who immediately turned, wanting no part of Bones, but the shepherd launched himself at this animal, too, and ripped out its throat as well.

Now the ridgeback’s entire pack began moving backward as if realizing their quarry wasn’t quite the lackluster specimen they initially thought. They regarded Bones as a group of well-armed hunters might a wounded, yet capable grizzly bear despite their superior numbers.

Bones didn’t stop there. He wheeled around and went for a Rottweiler that had been circling around on his right despite the dog outweighing him by a good forty pounds with layers of fat and muscle around its neck, both things making it far more difficult for the shepherd to use his typical attack throat-gouging attack. Instead, Bones leapt up and used his claws to jab at his opponent’s eyes until he had managed to gouge out the left one. After this, he proceeded to tear off the Rottweiler’s left ear.

Panicking, the dog moved backward, but Bones merely launched forward like a wrestler and grabbed the Rottweiler’s front left leg in his jaws. He plunged in his teeth and quickly tore it off, yanking the bone from its socket and then tearing the epidermal layer away before tossing the whole thing aside. As the Rottweiler limped away, mewing and crying like a wet cat, Bones turned back to the ridgeback and was ready to kill it, too.

However, the ridgeback had a different idea and was already backing up, bobbing her head up and down and woofing a little in supplication. The dog then moved over to one of the human corpses that hadn’t been completely devoured yet, tore off a chunk of meat from a ragged, bloody thigh, and dropped it a few feet in front of Bones.

The shepherd eyed the ridgeback but didn’t move towards the meat. After another long moment, the ridgeback simply turned around and walked away in the direction she’d come from. Within seconds, Bones’s nose told him that the many other dogs of the pack that had been just out of sight were now gone as well.

Bones waited a moment longer but then approached the chunk of human thigh, sniffed it over and proceeded to gulp it down in four quick bites.

A
t the same time in Flagstaff as night continued to shroud the hotel, Denny, acting on behalf of Lester, who was helping the wounded, finally got the whole story out of a couple of the attack survivors.

“We’re from the Jicarilla Reservation out near Moenkopi,” one of the middle-aged survivors, Norman Devers, told him. “When the plague hit, we fully expected to die as so many in the towns had but then a good fifteen, twenty percent of us survived. We buried our dead and, like your group it seems, began collecting supplies. We had no intention of leaving reservation land but after we had to go further and further to locate fuel for our generators, we voted, and it was decided to strike out for Flagstaff. We hoped that if we weren’t the only ones, we would find more of our people here.”

Our people
. Denny nodded when the fellow said this but was still amazed by what it implied. He kept waiting for the one white person, the one Mexican or Latino, the one black person to show up, only for it to always be the same: Indians.

More specifically? Apache Indians. More specific than that? Apache Indians of the Ypandes tribe.

There had been many discussions of this abnormality, and it was pretty quickly decided that just like certain races showed a more marked susceptibility to certain diseases, blacks to sickle-cell anemia, Jews to Tay-Sachs, etc., the Ypandes-Apache Indians appeared to have a sort of genetic resistance to the plague, at least so far. Denny knew the other survivors had all sorts of theories about this, many of them relating to their own spiritual beliefs and thoughts that God might have spared them for some greater purpose, but Denny had another theory, one he kept to himself as the most recent arrival continued his tale.

“We saw the dogs here and there as we traveled but never that many of them. We imagined they were content to pick through our trash, but we didn’t have enough food to try and feed any of them, even if we thought one or two looked like they would make good watch dogs.”

“Were they ever aggressive?” Denny asked.

“Not really. At least not that we talked about or was discussed, I guess. When we got onto the road, crows and vultures were following us, too. Thought of them the same as the dogs. Just scavengers.”

“Then what happened yesterday?”

Norman took a deep breath and then described something that sounded incredible even to the young schoolteacher, who was accustomed to the fanciful stories of elementary school kids. The day had apparently started like any other. They’d camped the night before just outside of town and when dawn came, they sent a group on foot into Flagstaff, a dozen all told, to scout for any potential dangers.

“We ran into a problem with a couple of aggressive hoarders outside Cameron who fired a couple of shots in the air to show us how tough they were,” Norman said. “It was a silly reaction. We wanted to say, ‘Hey, bet we know something you don’t know’ and then show that we were Ypandes, too, but everybody’s got to make their own way through this, you know? So, the scouting party came back and said that you guys had these sheets out the windows here and didn’t seem to be looking for trouble.”

Denny nodded. The sheets now had writing on them, a massive painted message in English and Athabascan (Apache) that both said the same thing: “You are welcome,” though the Apache phrase suggested something greater. Not just “you’re welcome here” but carried the implication that if you did come in, you would also be protected, almost like the Pashtun notion of nanawatai.

“We were happy to know there were more survivors but also glad that we might have access to water and more permanent shelter after being on the road for a time,” Norman said, slowing his narrative as if trying to make sure he had the details right. “When the attack came, we were packing up our supplies and loading the trucks. We weren’t in any real hurry as, after all, we thought we had reached our destination. Then somebody shouted. I don’t know who. I was with my sister. We were packing her son in the truck we’d been using. I thought it was a fight or somebody hurt themselves on their truck or maybe spotted somebody else on the road. But then we saw the dogs. They were coming fast. I didn’t think. I shoved my sister inside the truck next to her boy and slammed the door.

“Anyway, the dogs were hunting us like any kind of pack predator moving on a herd. They had us circled and were just picking us off, a few dogs coming in at a time in small groups all coordinated against one person at a time. They were organized, as if they were lions more than dogs. It was like something on the Discovery Channel, but instead of going after the young or old or weak or sick, there didn’t seem to be a plan. We had a few guns, but it took a minute or two for people to react. We still thought we were looking at dogs. One of the biggest guys in our group was laughing his ass off as one of the dogs bit his arm because it was this little bitty thing. He didn’t see that there were three others behind him.”

Norman shook his head, frustrated in hindsight.

“We kept thinking we could scare them off. People were honking horns, waving towels and T-shirts, firing guns into the air like they were sheep, but it did nothing. The dogs kept coming, more and more and more of them. Every time we thought we’d seen all of them, another dozen or so would show up to block our escape. I’ve only ever seen crows do that. A group of crows will harass and herd a hawk away from their nests that way, driving the bird of prey to a stand of trees where four more crows are waiting to join the chase just to make the hawk wonder if there are crows at every turn. The dogs were doing it like this.

“I’d say it took us a whole five minutes to wake up to the situation, but twenty people were already dead. By the time we started fighting them with guns, we’d already lost the fight and the dogs were on the run, having done the damage they’d set out to do. We knew they’d be back so we took off, even though we didn’t have enough room in the trucks for the dead.”

Norman looked down for a moment and exhaled a long troubled breath before he finished up. “When I got back to my own truck, once it was obvious things had gotten completely out of hand, I saw that the front windshield had been completely smashed in and knew I wouldn’t be seeing my sister or nephew again. You know what kind of glass they use in a truck windshield? Big heavy shit, shatter-proof. It’s supposed to withstand just about anything. Tell me you think a dog, a fuckin’
dog
, is supposed to get through that.”

Norman finished his story and looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Denny didn’t have any words, so he simply reached out and put his hand on Norman’s hands. “I’m really sorry.”

The man started shaking and Denny realized that he was crying.

•  •  •

Back at the city limits, Bones finished his meal and turned towards the city of Flagstaff still a few hours before the dawn. He had picked up the dog pack’s scent and knew they were heading north, though the smell of exhaust told him that the most recent human travelers on the road had gone south. Bones turned to follow the humans’ trail, which was made easier by the fact that the drivers had been going fast, just choking out the fumes, which lingered heavy in the air.

But as soon as Bones entered the city, the stench was almost entirely muffled by the overwhelming stench of corpses still left unburied in a place whose population had, at one time, been over 60,000. The worst was likely over, the organs having long since decomposed with the muscles coming next and then the hair and skin beginning their long decline into dust. The stink had infected the walls and carpets and ceilings of where the person died, and without so much as an open window, the odor took weeks to slowly air out. For the average human nose, this smell wouldn’t be much more than that of passing a garbage dump with its mountains of decaying food, plant waste and other organic material. But the shepherd’s nose picked up everything else as well, the uncovered waste and rotting sewage that lay just under the smell of tens of thousands of unburied carcasses.