Bones Omnibus (48 page)

“Bones!!”

Bones turned just in time to see the gray cat, who had recovered from its toss across the room, leaping onto the coffee table to attack him again. Bones barked loudly and angrily at the cat, who jumped at him fearlessly. Bones reared up on his haunches and batted the cat to the ground with his forepaw, which he then used to hold it flat to the carpet. Bones’s jaws shot forward, and he quickly dispatched the animal, making for four kills in less than sixty seconds.

Though the tiger-stripe half-cat continued to mewl angrily and wave its forepaws in front of the family’s big flat-screen TV and surrounding entertainment center, which took up almost all the space against the living room wall, the house had suddenly gone quiet. Ryan, who was heaving mightily, stared down at Bones, still sniffling.

“Where were you?” he whimpered, accusatorily.

Bones was panting now and looked at Ryan but then turned, walked around the sofa, and went to Jesse, who he sniffed all over. The smells were quickly changing. There was the familiar scent of Jesse himself, the food he’d only just put in his mouth that now sat in his now partially exposed stomach, the rank odor of blood, but then, around his wounds, Bones could smell the saliva of the female flesh-eater…but also something else. He pushed his nose close into the open wounds as the juices of the two people began to mingle. Though Jesse smelled of death, the scent was beginning to change into the more acrid odor of a flesh-eater before Bones’s nose.

“He’s going to turn into one of them, isn’t he?” Ryan asked quietly, indicating the dead family of flesh-eaters nearby. “It’s what the driver was telling Mr. Arthur. He said it was some kind of virus that spread from one infected person to the next. If one of them killed us, we’d be like one of them, too, and keep spreading it until everybody got it.”

Bones sniffed around Jesse’s neck as the strange new smell made its way from the wound up through his body and all the way to his brain. Bones recognized the smell as the same bilious stench that had emerged from the leaking sores of the fusing flesh-eaters on the highway.

Suddenly, Jesse began to stir; just a movement in his feet that could’ve been misinterpreted as the result of a death rattle in any other circumstance. Bones jumped backwards and began barking at the corpse. As Jesse continued to wake, Bones cautiously moved forward, still barking, with the goal of tearing the teen boy’s throat out.

“Bones –
no!
” ordered Ryan.

Bones turned and looked at Ryan with confusion, wondering why he was being called off, but Ryan gave him a hard stare before uttering a second, sharp, “
No!
”

Bones held his ground but did as he was told. Ryan gave him one more harsh look before heading into the kitchen. The shepherd stared at Jesse’s body as it started to re-animate and began barking at it again. Ryan came back in, this time carrying his gun, and aimed it at Jesse’s head.

“Get back, Bones,” Ryan said, waving Bones away with the barrel of the gun.

Bones stepped backed a few paces as Ryan tried to stop trembling, the barrel of the gun moving around violently as his body was wracked with tears.

“I’m sorry, Jesse,” he whispered, almost sobbing.

The first bullet drove past Jesse’s head, directly into the floor, where it made a dark, smoky hole in the carpet. Ryan yanked back the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge, then inserted and chambered a second bullet. This time, Ryan said nothing but held his breath and aimed.

“
Gggnnnhhh
…,” Jesse began under his breath, though his eyes were still closed, as if dreaming. “
Gggnnnhhh…
”

Jesse’s brains exploded all over the carpet behind his head as the bullet entered his skull, instantly causing such a buildup of pressure that the ballooning matter’s only recourse was to get blown out the back following in the wake of the exiting .22 projectile. Jesse’s body became instantly still. Bones stared at it for a moment, anticipating a cautious approach, when he was startled by a second shot that was aimed elsewhere in the living room.

Bones looked over and saw that the “half-cat” was now a smoldering, bloody streak on the carpet as well. Bones barked at it a couple of times for good measure but then turned back to Ryan, whose tears had finally stopped. He ejected the spent cartridge, chambered another round, and lowered the weapon.

“Let’s go, Bones.”

B
ut they didn’t leave — not yet anyway.

As they were heading through the kitchen, Ryan cast a look back at Jesse’s body, a look that then traveled over to the dead father-end of this new, strange multi-flesh-eater organism. Despite being impaled through the brain, he continued to fight on, a fact that was weighing heavily on Ryan.

He went to the kitchen cabinets and looked around for something, didn’t find it, and went to the garage. As he did, Bones stayed in the kitchen, taking a couple of sniffs down the basement stairs, having to step over the pile of chairs and other debris that someone (a neighbor? another family member?) had stacked in front of the door to keep the man, woman, and presumably the cats at bay to give them enough time to escape. When Ryan came back in from the garage and saw what Bones was doing, he snapped angrily at the dog.

“Get away from there, Bones.”

Bones did as he was told, following Ryan into the living room, where the boy stood over Jesse’s corpse. In his hands, he held two things – a long cardboard tube filled with fireplace matches and a blue-and-white squeeze bottle of starter fluid for the barbecue. Setting down the matches, Ryan popped the nozzle up on the starter fluid and began spraying it onto Jesse’s body but also around the room in general, getting some on his shoes and pants leg. Slowly but surely, he was able to empty the entire bottle, which he tossed on the sofa. He then picked up the day’s newspaper and shredded it into a number of long strips, which he then twisted together and jammed into Jesse’s pockets, the crooks of his arms, his shoes, and even his mouth and the hole in his forehead.

Once there were seven or eight of these wicks placed around the body, Ryan struck the first of three matches, lighting all of them until they began burning down towards the lighter fluid–soaked corpse.

Inhaling the scent of burning newspaper mixed with the harsh odor of the liquid accelerant, Bones got agitated and started whining. Ryan, watching the flames until they were well on their way to the body, finally turned when the first fire touched the starter fluid, immediately engulfing Jesse’s left foot in fire.

“Come on, Bones,” Ryan whispered under his breath, picking his rifle off the sofa and heading back towards the kitchen.

They exited out to the closed garage, and Bones took a couple of sniffs of the air. Nothing seemed to alarm him, so Ryan went ahead and opened the garage door. The fresh air began to quickly scrub away the scent of the house’s many perfumes, the corpses, the burning Jesse, and everything else that had been filling Bones’s nose, allowing his most powerful of senses to slowly recharge.

Ryan stared at the pavement below his feet as he walked, carrying the rifle in such a way that the steel barrel bounced off the concrete a couple of times, scraping the finish. He obviously didn’t care; damaging the gun he had just been forced to use against another boy who’d been saving his life all day was having a soothing effect on his wounded conscience.

Bones trotted along next to him, inhaling the scents of the area dogs that had been marking their territory here for years but were now distinctly absent. A couple of times, the shepherd spotted a squirrel or a bird that momentarily distracted him, breaking the silence with a chirp or chatter, but the vague scent of humans and flesh-eaters alike continued to permeate the air, suggesting a horrific catastrophe that the boy and dog had missed by several hours. Bones was far from relaxed.

“Where are we even going?” asked Ryan dejectedly. “They’re going to be pretty much anywhere, and we’ve got to sleep sometime.”

Bones kept walking, panting lightly as he went, but he wasn’t tired. Well past the point of exhaustion, he probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep if he tried.

“Mom’s dead, Jilly’s dead,” Ryan said. “I’ll bet Grammy’s dead, too. Uncle Norman is probably dead. Aunt Ronelle. Albert. Maggie. Miss Glover is probably dead.”

Ryan scoffed at this, not altogether unhappy that his teacher might not have survived the apocalypse, but then his scowl returned.

“Mr. Harris is probably dead,” he continued, wallowing in his despair. “Ms. Heartfield. Mr. Birdwell. Miss Hogan. Pastor Coleman. Dr. Rayburn. Dr. Holly. I guess I won’t be getting braces now.”

The rifle bounced off the concrete again. Bones hopped a step to avoid it coming down on him.

“All the kids on my street. All the kids on my bus. All the kids in my class,” Ryan said as he kept walking, not noticing that Bones had stopped
dead
in his tracks. “All the kids at daycare, all the kids at the allergist’s office…”

Ryan finally looked over and saw that his four-legged companion was no longer at his side. “Bones?”

He turned around and saw Bones standing stock-still, staring straight ahead. With great trepidation, Ryan turned to look where Bones’s eyes were fixed, and soon understood why.

Standing at an intersection directly in front of them were a dozen flesh-eaters, but not massing in some mob or on the move. Instead, they were simply lined up shoulder to shoulder, similar to the family of flesh-eaters back in the house – fused at the shoulders, hips, hands, legs, thighs, calves, and even feet – but
unlike
the family, they weren’t trying to pull each other in different directions. No, what had been disorganized about earlier incarnations of this fused undead monstrosity seemed to have been worked out in this version, the difference between a helpless newborn baby and a three year-old toddler, able to communicate, move, eat, and in general function as an individual entity.

The creature stared at Ryan, but with eighteen eyes instead of twenty-four, as three of the twelve bodies were
without heads
, though were still fused at the arms and legs. This meant nine mouths revealed their rows of teeth, many broken from hours gnashing through muscle into bone instead of a dozen. Eighteen ears heard it when Ryan gasped at the sight, and nine noses inhaled his scent of fear as twelve chests rose and fell in the exact same rhythm, the bodies breathing completely in unison.

Ryan knew when it stepped forward, it would do that as one, too. Probably when it ran as well. But this wasn’t foremost in his mind. Even though the father flesh-eater was part of a longer chain and had been up on its feet after receiving a poker to the head, Ryan figured that that was the anomaly. He still fervently believed the one thing for certain about the flesh-eaters that had murdered his entire family was that a head shot equated death. Bullet to the head,
bang
– you’re dead, like he’d had to do with Jesse. But now that comforting fail-safe was gone. The flesh-eaters had not only found a way around even this, but they seemed stronger for its execution. The living nightmare was only getting worse.

That’s when the mouths of the nine bodies with heads opened wide and roared at Ryan and Bones.

“
RAAAAAAHHHHH
!!!!”

The noise was tremendous, like a phalanx of Ottoman Janissaries preparing to charge across an ancient battlefield with the sole intention of massacring their enemy to a man. Deep and guttural, the sound chilled Ryan to the bone, his eyes going wide with fear. Bones barked back and viciously bared his teeth as the free arms of the line of flesh-eaters began to gesticulate wildly, also in unison, readying their attack. The bodies hunched down, like a row of sprinters on their starting blocks, all eyes on Ryan and Bones.

“Shit-shit-shit-
shit
,” inhaled Ryan as he quickly raised his rifle.

Before he could aim, the creature launched itself forward, its legs moving together like some kind of great, side-turned centipede. Startled, Ryan pulled the trigger, and his first shot went completely wide, the bullet whizzing skyward well over the head of the left-most flesh-eater on line. He went to reload, but unlike the other flesh-eaters, this monstrosity had the ability to use its multiple legs to really
run
and was quickly cutting the distance between itself and its would-be meal.

“
Bones…?!
” Ryan cried urgently, as if seeking permission to flee. He didn’t have to wait long for Bones’s reply.

Without so much as a woof, Bones suddenly broke to the left and Ryan followed, the creature changing its course to pursue them both. Ryan saw a narrow path between the back fences of two houses.

“Through there!” he yelled to the dog. “Over there!”

With Bones at his heels as they entered the alley, Ryan looked back, hoping to see that the flesh-eaters wouldn’t be able to follow. But then he watched as the undulating creature rolled the segmented bodies that made up its form together into a more aquiline, insect-like version of itself and used its limbs to not just run across the alley floor but also to accelerate by galloping its hands across the fences on either side, pushing itself ever faster. Like a tunneling mole, the creature didn’t seem particularly bound to directions up or down and was much quicker when pushing itself off against three surfaces than just one.

Though he was just behind Ryan, Bones hadn’t been running at full speed, just fast enough to keep up with the boy or maybe a little faster to speed up his pace. But as the dog glanced back, his nose filled with the peculiarly dank smell of this new creature, a scent that differentiated itself from simply that of a cadaver but was an entirely new animal with its own, now-living smells.

Ryan looked back again as well, seeing that the creature was gaining on them. He turned and saw that the end of the alley was still about two house-lengths ahead. So panicked was Ryan, that he didn’t see the couple of upside-down paint cans directly ahead in his path.

“
Oof!
” cried Ryan as his right foot kicked into the cans, sending him sprawling forward and landing with a
splat
against the grass. Behind him, the creature immediately arched itself up, its various arms and legs allowing it to straddle both fences and rise above the prone boy like a cobra readying to strike.