Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (38 page)

It was while he was eating this that he caught the scent of a feral cat outside and decided to make a run at it. He slipped out the door he’d come in through and spotted the cat feasting on a dead mouse in the garage. The cat didn’t seem to notice the shepherd in the slightest, so it was easy for him to slip over to only a few feet away and then spring at the animal, slaughtering it before its heart rate had time to quicken. On top of that, the mouse had been freshly killed, so he ate that, too.

It was while he was chewing the mouse that something inside him seemed to rupture, sending Bones’s entire body into spasm, and he loosed his bowels. All of a sudden, Bones found himself sitting in a puddle of his own blood and shit as his vision began to cloud. He tried to stand up but felt too weak and toppled to his side. As he panted for breath, he found himself urinating down his leg.

That’s when the pain came, a tremendous throbbing sensation in his bowels that quickly traveled up his entire body causing him to quake and whine. After another moment passed, he drifted into unconsciousness swathed in as much agony as he had ever felt.

•  •  •

Back at the Sheraton, Denny found himself ostracized by the other survivors so he figured he’d make himself useful and push it out of his head. He went to help in the makeshift infirmary that had been set up in the hotel’s kitchen and learned that two others from the Jicarilla massacre had died in the night and a third was just barely hanging on. Though they had plenty of medical supplies, an early priority for Lester, they still didn’t have access to fresh blood, which was a real problem given how much the victims had lost. No matter how skillfully their wounds had been washed, disinfected, stitched and dressed, their bodies could not make up the difference with blood.

But even if they had been able to conduct transfusions, they also had no way of typing blood, so it would be a crap shoot unless someone just happened to know they were O-negative, but no one was.

“I’m sorry,” Denny found himself saying time and time again to folks as he tried to bring them something to alleviate their pain, even if it was only the itching from their stitches.

Additionally, the lack of refrigeration meant that several drugs they’d found in this hospital or that were now useless and, to no one’s surprise, the morphine and codeine supplies around Flagstaff had almost been exhausted by those in the medical profession who attempted to ease the suffering of the quickly dying, which in many cases meant euthanizing their patients and then themselves.

Something would have to be done.

“You’re the guy who brought in the dog, right?” one of the wounded Jicarilla men asked. “I’m not blaming you, as I would’ve probably done the same. But if you had seen what we had out there, you would never want to see another dog for the rest of your life. It was like sharks. All teeth and instinct.”

Denny nodded and offered the man a glass of three-hundred-dollar Scotch, which he readily accepted.

•  •  •

When night fell, Bones awoke knowing he was in really bad shape. He was cold all over and could sense that his bowels had let go at least one more time that day while he was out. He struggled to stand up, and when he finally got on all fours, he discovered that he wasn’t alone.

Just outside the garage on the driveway, he could see the six dogs watching him. He got their scent and knew immediately that they were of the same pack he’d run into the night before.

Bones also knew that they could smell his weakness and lowered his head, baring his teeth. He struggled to make a deep, guttural growl to suggest that even if they came at him in this weakened state, he wasn’t about to make it easy on them.

But the dogs didn’t attack.

Perplexed by this, Bones stepped forward challengingly, suggesting—basically—that he would come to them if they didn’t have the balls to attack him, a move that from the various smells sluicing through the air was painfully obvious false bravado to all concerned. But the shepherd didn’t know any other way and started limping through the garage to confront the waiting animals.

When he got to the edge of the garage though, new smells suddenly filled his nose and he didn’t even have to look up to know that others of the pack were directly overhead on the roof, ready to pounce down on him like wolves. The problem was that Bones’s own stench was some great that it had temporarily diminished his abilities to scent out the others.

Bones growled but then saw the Rhodesian ridgeback appear alongside the house. It was clear that the other dogs were following their pack alpha’s lead by not attacking. Bones bared his teeth ready to battle the animal to the death…

…until a
new
smell filled his nose.

It had been a while since he’d taken in such an odor, but he knew exactly what it was. The ridgeback whined a little and slunk closer to Bones, whose own instincts in the matter began to take over. He was sick, he was dying, but he was still the male of the species, and when the ridgeback wandered into the garage on the far side of an old ‘76 Mercedes and “presented,” Bones complied with the unspoken request to the best of his abilities.

“I
t’s a necessity. We have guns, they don’t have the element of surprise anymore if they’re even out there, and we’ll be in vehicles. We need supplies and we know where they are. This will be fine.”

Everyone listened as Ches Marzan, a survivor from Cottonwood who had come in with two others a month after Denny, addressed Lester and a number of the others in the ballroom that night. The lights dimmed as one of the generators outside the fire exit sputtered as if to emphasize the seriousness of Marzan’s words, but then glowed back to life when Lester appeared to be in agreement.

“All right,” Lester said. “But in two groups: one for the medical supplies and a second for the guns. You guys leave first thing in the morning.”

It had never been a question in Denny’s mind that he’d be in one of the next day’s requisition parties. He’d always been a part of them, he knew the streets as he’d been a resident,
and
he had seniority, so it came as a surprise when he went out to the loading docks the next morning and found Ches shaking his head when Denny went to climb into the back of the truck he was fueling up.

“We’ve got enough people, man, but thanks,” Ches said.

Denny stared at Ches incredulously. “Are you kidding? Who knows where all the good pawn shops are? Me. Who knows where the sporting goods stores are? Me.”

“And me, because you showed them to me. But that’s precisely why we need to be showing other people the routes, too. We’ve got new folks and there’s no telling what happens next, you know? We’ve got to get everybody up to speed.”

It was a good enough manufactured reason to show Ches wasn’t going out of his way to show up Denny, the former school teacher thought, but he saw the looks on the faces of the men already loaded into Ches’s truck and could see the truth. Each held a rifle and regarded Denny the way his classmates once did in elementary school. He was the one going unpicked for this assignment, his position on the delicate pecking order sliding downhill due to his inability to kill a defenseless animal that morning. He supposed none of these men would’ve thought twice about it and this made them better suited, but he disagreed.

He turned and walked over to the group seeking medical supplies, this one led by Anna Blackledge.

“Do I have to beg?” he asked her.

She shook her head and nodded to the back of the SUV. He clambered in, and the two small convoys left the hotel grounds.

•  •  •

When Bones woke up for the second time that day, he was still feeling weak but was better able to stand this time. When he looked around, he saw that the Rhodesian ridgeback and the rest of her pack were gone but had left behind half of a deer carcass that Bones could tell had only been killed a few hours before. He sniffed the dead animal, realized he had no appetite, and left the garage without taking a bite.

There was only a slight chill in the morning air, but Bones felt it all through his body. His fur was getting stiff and the skin beneath it loose, as he had lost some weight over the course of his journey. But he still knew which direction he had to go and began moving that way, wandering towards the rising sun.

His gait had accumulated a serious limp, his right rear leg quivering every time his right rear foot touched the ground. He hopped along for a few steps, found that even worse, and continued limping.

When he heard trucks, he didn’t care so much and made to slink down an alley to avoid detection. But as he did so, Bones caught the scent of the dog pack. He moved down a side street, around the back of a small strip mall and spotted a couple of the dogs—two Belgian shepherds—in a resting position just alongside a small staircase leading to the second floor of a one-time Mexican restaurant. About two hundred yards away were the trucks Bones had heard, now parking in front of a large building.

Though Bones could only see the two shepherds, he could smell a great number of the others. They were in the area and were watching and waiting, none moving. The strange thing was that he could tell it wasn’t the whole pack as he caught no scent of the ridgeback.

•  •  •

“I used to have eighty guns all told, three gun lockers around my place,” Ches was telling the man in the passenger seat, an older fellow who went by Pepe, as his last name was Pepoy. “I got with this girl who had a young son, and I really had to keep the guns locked up tight around him. But you know every time I opened one of those lockers, he’d just stare in there like I had all the treasure in the world behind that door. So I took him out shooting while his mom was at work. Would you believe it, he was a natural. Guns got demystified for him real quick, he saw that they weren’t like on TV or video games; they were just tools. Anyway, I had just gotten him NRA-certified, which is when we were going to tell his mom and we came home and found her
in flagrante
with one of my long-barrel revolvers…”

“Oh, bullshit,” Pepe said, his first words in twenty minutes.

“I shit you not,” Ches said, holding up his hand as if swearing on the Bible. “She had a condom on it so it looked like it was in one of those World War II movies where that’s how the soldiers keep their muzzles dry. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that lube was just about the worst thing possible to get rubbed into a gun. Anyway, she freaked out, demanded to know where we’d been. When I told her, the argument became all about me—you cretin, you dipshit, you asshole—and what I’d been doing behind her back. She split that very night and I never saw either of them again, but part of me feels like I did my good deed teaching that kid about guns. One more person out there who knows his way around firearms. Oh, well, shit—he’s probably dead now, but whatever.”

Ches finished his story right as they parked. He swung open the door of the truck and hopped out, glancing up and down the street before nodding at the others.

“Think we’re good to go.”

His requisition party was ten men strong, all armed, but Ches was still cautious. He’d been in the Navy at one point and felt that put him in a natural leadership position. Some of the survivors at the Flagstaff Sheraton knew how to fire this piece or that, but he knew how to fire
all
the guns they’d come across, which gave him a leg up, especially now that it looked like firepower might count for something. No more being led by a school teacher or a real estate appraiser, whatever-the-fuck that was. For Ches, it was time to treat an apocalypse like an apocalypse.

“What’re we looking for in here?” one of the party asked.

“Easy, light rifles for the women and some of the men,” Ches said, pausing for the laugh. “And then whatever you feel comfortable with for yourself. Now, I don’t want to see a bunch of compound bows and big game guns that require fancy ammunition we’re never gonna see again. Be smart. Load up on cartridges like it’s the last time you’re ever going to see any and then let’s move out quick as we came.”

Everyone nodded and moved into the store where an entire rack of shotguns and rifles waited at back of the shop.

“Oh, yes,” Ches added. “Look for hunting and scaling knives. Probably could use a couple of those, too. Maybe even some fishing line if they’ve got it. Think like a soldier ’cause that’s what you are.”

•  •  •

Across town at a medical supply warehouse they’d found in the phone book, Denny walked along with Anna as their group, also about ten persons, gathered up everything in sight. Occasionally, someone would wheel an oxygen tank or portable defibrillator over to Anna who would have to judge if it was worthy to bring back (“no” to the tank, “yes” to the defibrillator given that it’s battery could be recharged by the generators), but there were few things they couldn’t imagine needing.

“I have to admit, I’m a little jealous of you and Carrie,” Anna said, her back turned to Denny as she swept boxes of medical tape off a shelf and into a basket. “Yeah, I’m probably too old to have any more kids, but I think I’d really enjoy the regular sex part, the excitement of the time. It’s not like I don’t get propositioned, but you guys seem to have a nice thing going on. Am I right?”

Denny shrugged. This wasn’t a subject he would like to discuss with anybody, but Anna Blackledge least of all, knowing how she talked.

“It’s hard enough being alone,” she mused. “But physically alone is a different story, especially when you’re surrounded by other people who feel the same but for some reason just can’t make that connection.” Anna looked like she was getting ready to cry. “What I’m trying to say is that you have an open invitation. If it makes more comfortable to bring Carrie in on it, I don’t have a problem with that either.”

Denny fought hard not to laugh at the absurdity of what he was hearing but accidentally let out a snort, which Anna couldn’t have missed in any circumstance. She reddened, turned, and walked down the aisle until she was out of sight and left Denny feeling truly uncharitable.