Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (43 page)

“All right,” he said, tossing the meat away and helping Bones up into the truck.

E
ven with Bones in the car, Denny drove along slowly. He had the windows down, and Bones kept his snout to the wind as they went. They had only gone sixty miles by midday but Denny had enough fuel to take them all the way to Florida if need be, though he didn’t imagine that would be the case. No, something told him that the dog’s destination was closer than that, or he wouldn’t have been walking it. He got the idea that the shepherd knew exactly how bad his condition was and that he chose his time to leave the Flagstaff pack carefully, not too late, not too soon.

But then they reached the exit that would send them to the town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Bones began whining, which soon turned to barking. Denny didn’t know if it was a smell or a sight that had alerted Bones to their position on the map, but the dog couldn’t have made it clearer that this was where they going.

Las Cruces, “the City of Crosses,” was about the size of Flagstaff and located in the southern part of the state, surrounded by mountains. None of the buildings were very tall, a common sight in New Mexico, as there were ordinances about blocking views of the horizon. Church steeples were high, apartment buildings were not. As Denny rolled into it, he found it eerily silent and filled with the stench of death.

Having no idea where they were going, Denny drove around a little, circling the downtown mall area off Main Street until Bones indicated this direction or that. It was mid-afternoon by the time Bones had finally decided on a neighborhood, and after trolling up this street or that, Denny finally decided that the easiest thing to do would be to let Bones out on foot. He’d follow in the truck.

This easily proved to be the better plan. Though the dog was hobbled by illness, Bones’s nose seemed to instantly grab onto a scent and he made a beeline down the sidewalk, crossed two lawns, and took a side street down to a row of modest, single-story houses at the very edge of the neighborhood where the back fences abutted the arroyo. One of the houses didn’t have a back fence, its backyard invitingly open to all comers. It was to this lot that Bones ran.

Denny parked the truck in the driveway alongside an old Chevy Blazer and climbed out as Bones scratched on the front door. Self-consciously, Denny glanced around but saw no sign of people and was about to try to force the door when he discovered that it was unlocked. He swung the door wide. The shepherd immediately ran inside.

Denny had feared that they would be greeted with the scent of a rotted corpse, but this wasn’t the case. A heavy, musty smell permeated the air, but even the always attendant stench of spoiled food was absent from this place, as if it had been cleaned out after being abandoned.

As he walked through the small den, kitchen, and dining room at the front of the house, Denny realized that the house likely belonged to an older man, a belief confirmed when he went into a home office of sorts and saw the kind of jumbled, paper-strewn mess that no woman he ever knew would tolerate. On the wall were plaques celebrating the law enforcement career of a man named “Lionel Oudin,” and there were several photos of him in uniform.

And then there was a photo of Oudin in uniform alongside Bones.

“Oh, my God,” Denny whispered.

But he didn’t know what he was most reacting to, the fact that he was being given a window into this dog’s past or that Bones was able to navigate himself back from wherever he came from all the way to his master’s house.

Denny looked over a few more of the awards and photographs, Oudin clearly having had a particularly distinguished career, but then exited to find the shepherd.

He didn’t have to go far. There were only two more rooms in the house: a dusty, unused guest room with a four-poster bed in it surrounded by dust-covered boxes and then the master bedroom, which looked more like a hospital room. A large semi-electric hospital bed with heavy bed rails and an overbed table was set up in the middle surrounded by medical equipment that suggested someone quite infirm lived here.

The only thing was, the bed was empty and there was no sign of its one-time occupant.

Bones was going over the room with his nose, as if he’d picked up on the slightest of smells but couldn’t for the life of him find where it emanated from. He moved from the bed to the dresser to the closet where an old man’s clothes hung, the floor littered with boxes and shoes.

On a chest of drawers, Denny saw photos of Lionel with a young woman, probably a daughter, and then a few more of the woman alone through the years. A very young Lionel stared out of a wedding photo with a young lady who favored the daughter in the other pictures, further confirming Denny’s belief regarding their relationship though the wife appeared in only a few other photos in the room, all from younger days.

“You okay, Bones?” Denny asked the shepherd as the dog snuffled around in the closet with greater and greater intensity.

Denny walked over and looked at the dog as he made his search, until he finally figured out what the shepherd wanted. In the back of the closet hanging from a hook was an old leash that appeared to have been used in an official capacity, as it had the logo of the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department on it. Denny took it down and placed it on the carpet in front of Bones.

“Is that what you wanted?”

Bones replied by sniffing all around the thing, circling it over and over. Denny waited a couple of minutes but then walked away and left Bones alone with it.

A few minutes later, as Denny sat in the living room wondering what to do next, Bones wandered in and moved directly to the sliding glass door that opened out to the patio and scratched at it for a moment. Denny rose and slid it open, allowing the shepherd to scamper out and nose around the yard. Though he knew there was no fence and Bones could just walk away, he didn’t look on the dog as “his” in any way and didn’t think he’d ever feel that way about any animal again.

In fact, Bones going right to the leash surprised him. He thought of it as a symbol of subjugation. Why would a dog like Bones want to be subjugated? Then he realized that he was thinking of it as a human might, which had little or nothing to do with how the dog saw it. For Bones, the leash was not a symbol of subjugation so much as an indicator of his close relationship to this man who obviously meant the world to the dog. Denny wondered where the man’s body was as it seemed clear that he was sick well before the plague came.

He sat back down in the recliner in the old man’s living room and, having now been awake for more than twenty-four hours, promptly fell asleep.

•  •  •

Denny woke up about ten hours later in the pitch dark. The first thing he did was grab for his gun and found it just where he’d left it. He hadn’t seen any dog packs roving Las Cruces on the drive in, but that didn’t mean they weren’t watching him.

That’s when he remembered Bones.

He went quickly to the patio door and slid it open, terrified that he might find the butchered carcass of the shepherd lying there, savaged by those very unseen dog packs while attempting to get back in. But, there was no sign of the animal.

“Bones?” Denny asked, in case he had just walked out a little ways into the field beyond. When there was no response, he tried again. “Bones?!”

Still nothing.

Denny went to the kitchen to see if there was any non-perishable food worth eating that might save him a trip to his truck and found only powders, vitamins, and prescriptions, Lionel clearly having been on a mostly liquid diet. Glancing through the prescriptions, he saw several related to the side effects of chemotherapy and realized that Lionel had been dying of cancer.

When the sun finally rose, Denny walked out in the backyard with his rifle and looked around for Bones some more. He called the shepherd’s name repeatedly, but there was no answer. Nothing moved but the birds.

Undeterred, Denny got behind the wheel of the truck, drove around to a dirt road that ran behind the row of houses and continued searching for the dog, slowing to call out his name while being careful not to drive anywhere too dangerous for fear of breaking an axle. While he figured he could easily trade in the truck for Lionel’s Blazer, there was a lot of ground to cover between the scrub behind the houses and Lionel’s back patio. If there were any dogs around, Denny would be greatly exposed to predation. This was the new mindset, Denny realized.

At midday, Denny began running out of fuel, decided that would be the moment he’d give up the search and, half an hour later, stopped the truck to gas up from one of the many cans in the back.

“BONES!” he cried one last time.

But the dog was long gone, having disappeared into the wilderness of his youth behind the home that had been the first and only place Lionel had ever owned, rented out during a couple of years while in Pittsburgh, and then returned to for his retirement, “to be close to his daughter,” he told friends.

After a long moment, Denny nodded to himself, tossed the empty gas can in the back of the truck, climbed behind the wheel, and began following the setting sun back to the west. He glanced into the rearview mirror but continued to see no sign of the German shepherd, though by now he didn’t expect to.

T
he moment Denny had opened the back door, Bones got the scent he knew he would. It was faint, now months old, but it didn’t matter, as this was what the shepherd was trained for, his specialty. He headed out through the scrub and mesquite trees, and within the hour he’d made it into the Organ Mountains east of the city.

Bones had grown up walking the various trails of the Organ Mountain National Recreation Area and knew the slopes well, the smell of pine and mahogany filling his nose as he headed across the lower steppes and into the higher elevations. He could tell the trail he was following now would take him through the Needles Range and into the distant canyon, one that had a stream through it certain times of the year, which included now, due to the recent rains. Rain in the desert can make a nasty habit of erasing any sign of a tracker’s quarry, something many a lawman discovered in the Organ Mountains dating back to the time of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but this was precisely why Lionel had chosen the place to train the shepherd.

“Just keep walking,” Lionel had said to a group of trainers and their dogs brought to the mountains for training one day. “If a scent came from that direction a moment ago don’t decide the trail has gone cold just because your dog has lost the scent. He’s got 200 million scent receptors in that nose of his to all five million of yours, and that means it takes a lot more than just rain or cold or other animals to wipe your fugitive away. Humans are surprisingly foul creatures whose stink and oils can be more definitive and potent than a skunk; we’ve just grown accustomed to them. On top of that, you add deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, cologne, cigarettes, junk food, and everything else your target came in contact with in the last twenty-four hours. And you’re damn right there’s still a trail. For a human, the desert’s a hard place to find somebody. For a dog, it’s like looking for a needle on a white floor. It’s not obvious from every angle, but you can’t miss it if your eyes are open.”

Bones had been a puppy the first time he’d heard Lionel give a variation of this speech, but it meant as much to him as Sanskrit to a roof rat. What Bones took away from this was how the other humans regarded Lionel and how the dogs regarded their trainers. He knew where the target, a Doña Ana reserve deputy named McCaffrey, was hidden, a cave some six miles away where he’d been camping for three days without fire. Bones had been with Lionel and the reservist two months ago when they’d selected the spot and then spent the next six weeks intermittently walking different trails with the young man to drop latent scents. Then, Lionel had the fellow change everything else about his routine, which meant different shampoo, toothpaste, a scentless deodorant, and even a new diet.

It didn’t matter. The dogs located the man within five hours, deep within Fillmore Canyon.

Bones had been along for the ride, mostly, though Lionel was also using him and his scent as an ongoing distraction to the training dogs, two of which were female. Bones performed his role with flying colors, but it would be another eight months before he was involved in an exercise as a trainee.

Now the shepherd was heading back to that same canyon, the scent of his master faint but that of the only human who had been this way in months. The farther away from Las Cruces Bones walked, in fact, the fewer human smells he detected at all. Lionel’s neighborhood had been a veritable curtain of death, each house on the old man’s street containing at least one or two bodies alone. But now, out in the wilderness, as the trail got ever clearer, Bones knew his master wasn’t far away now.

•  •  •

Bones found Lionel an hour later next to a stream. He was in pajamas and a bathrobe, seated in a red and green beach chair with thick wool socks and hiking boots on his feet. By his side was four-footed quad cane that had been slightly overgrown with moss, the Organ Mountains famous for this type of fast-growing botanical life.

Lionel’s fingers, folded in his lap, had been chewed away, and his eyes had been pecked out by this creature or that, likely the work of birds and possibly a fox, but they had soon discovered that through his body ran a manmade poison meant to slow the progress of the disease that was killing him, which had the additional side effect of rendering his meat inedible to wildlife. The only thing the old man had brought with him other than the chair (no easy task) and the cane was a leash. Unlike the more martial leash Denny had retrieved for Bones in Lionel’s closet, this one was cloth, made for a puppy, and was clutched in his hands.

Bones padded silently around the old man’s chair, taking in his scent and nuzzling his hands. For about an hour, the shepherd sat alongside the dead man with his head resting on his knee, listening to the stream and the occasional bird call coming from overhead.