Bones Omnibus (57 page)

“Bones!” Elizabeth reprimanded. “What’s wrong with you?”

This only seemed to make Bones’s growl deepen as he stared at the hole Elizabeth was digging in the roof.

Elizabeth looked at the dog with incredulity for a moment longer, but then reached down and found a large flat chunk of ceiling panel under the last couple of tiles. Realizing the person must be trapped underneath it, she squared up her feet and bent down to grip the edge of the wood.

As her gloved hands coiled around the edge of the plank, she suddenly felt something reaching out and grabbing onto her fingers.

“Shit!!”

She dropped the plank but quickly regained her composure. Fearing she might have injured the very person she was trying to save, she grabbed the panel again and this time was able to force it up. As soon as it was even part of the way up, she could see the face of a middle-aged Hispanic man.

It took a second to realize she was only seeing half of it.

The other half, the bottom half, had been completely eaten away by rats, of which there were at least half a dozen running around underneath the plank.

“Oh, no!!”

It was a silly thing to yell, but it was how she felt. The rats had scattered when she’d raised the board, but were now back looking at her as if waiting for the human to recognize that the man was dead and should be left for them to deal with.

That’s when Bones moved in. With a growl, the shepherd launched himself at the rats, grabbing one in his teeth and shaking it so hard that it was quickly torn in half, the rodent’s blood drooling down Bones’s lower jaw as he dropped it and went for a second rat. This one he bit in half immediately gulping down the head.

“Bones! Stop it!” cried Elizabeth, but to no avail.

Bones stepped down into the hole in the roof, careful with his footfalls, and tore apart a third rat. As he did, Elizabeth looked at the men’s corpse and realized there were at least two more bodies lying next to it, that of a woman and, Elizabeth realized with growing dread, that of a small child.

When the search-and-rescue team arrived, they comforted Elizabeth as best as they could. She expected derision or, at least, a couple of sidelong glances, but things had been going so drearily that even the idea that there might have been someone still alive had recharged a couple of spirits. The rush of adrenaline, the launch into action — it had been good for morale, no matter the outcome. But this did little to alleviate Elizabeth’s melancholy.

“It’s all right,” said one of the paramedics, a Las Vegas–based RN named Chris Wieneke. “You’re not the only one out here needing a win.”

“I know, but it’s the rats, too. It was…shocking.”

“Yeah, we’re hearing they’re everywhere,” Wieneke said, nodding. “It’s like they saw an opening and decided the city was theirs for the taking.”

“They can have it,” replied Elizabeth, miserable.

Elizabeth and Bones spent the rest of the day doing more of the same, though Elizabeth worked harder to distance herself from what she was seeing. She accepted the fact that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending, no camera-ready rescue from deep within some crushed house revealing thankful survivors. And as the day went on, experience proved this out time and time again as she and Bones located another thirty to forty victims buried in the rubble, her spray can eventually running out of paint. To take her mind off it, she let her thoughts wander as she walked. She’d only been to Los Angeles once before, to give a training seminar to West Hollywood sheriffs and had only seen the city from the airport to WeHo and back again. She hadn’t even stayed the night.

Still, she knew enough to know just how devastating the earthquake had been. The views had changed as completely as the skyline. Where once on the hills around Echo Park she figured she would have been looking down onto apartment buildings or telephone poles or houses or churches, with all the flattened buildings she could now easily make out the contours of the land that formed the L.A. basin and could even see as far as the ocean. She tried to imagine who the last person to see the Pacific from her unelevated vantage point might have been and decided whoever it was had probably been dead a century. She’d seen a number of collapsed Victorian houses in Angelino Heights at the end of the first day and had asked a local law enforcement officer about them. When she’d heard that it was only the second neighborhood ever built in the city and dated back to the late 1800s, she wasn’t surprised. There was no telling how many minor quakes these houses had weathered through the years, but with a seismic event on the level of the Big Sleep, these old buildings had crumpled under as if they’d been made of toothpicks and held together with Elmer’s glue.

It was while she was thinking about all of this that Bones barked to get her attention. And then barked again. And again. And again.

Unlike with a corpse, Bones was genuinely excited and pranced around on top of a house that seemed only half-collapsed. The garage was still standing, at least partly.

“What did you find, boy?” Elizabeth asked as she wandered over.

Almost immediately, she was rewarded with a beeping sound that came from the other side of the garage door.

“Hello?” she said, not expecting a response. But then the beeping returned with two quick beeps in a row. “Okay, hold on! We’re coming in!”

The familiar rush of adrenaline pumping through her, Elizabeth grabbed her radio and called in a report, but this time she tried not to get anyone’s hopes up and muted her enthusiasm. After putting her radio away, she started in on the aluminum garage door, which had been bent all to hell when it was compacted down onto the cement driveway by a collapsing roof.

“
Gnh!!”
she cried, trying to bend it back but finding it immovable. “Shit!”

That’s when she heard Bones barking from the rear of the garage. She got to her feet and went around the building, seeing that the back door was on the left half of the garage, which hadn’t seen as much damage as the right and therefore was mostly intact. Despite the fact that the doorframe was slightly crumpled, Elizabeth thought she might be able to break the door apart and create a hole.

Using her boot, she kicked at the door with her heel and managed to crack it across the middle. Two more kicks, and it caved in. She immediately reached in and pulled out the broken pieces of door, tossing them into the yard. Getting down on her stomach, she looked inside the garage and knew this wasn’t going to be easy. The garage must’ve been a mess already and then the quake just threw everything into the blender, as even with her flashlight, she could barely see in due to the piles of trash. It looked like a landfill in there. It was obvious she wouldn’t be able to stand up inside, much less move, but she figured if she had a pathfinder that didn’t have to solely rely on his eyes, it might be easier.

“Bones,” she said, turning to the shepherd. “Get in there!”

Bones didn’t have to be asked twice. He’d been standing nearby watching as Elizabeth worked on the door and was obviously very happy to finally be allowed to explore the hole. He slithered under the top half of the door. For a second or two, just the last half of his tail was visible, but then it also disappeared.

“Okay, wait for me!”

Elizabeth got down on her hands and knees and crawled after Bones, pulling herself into the garage. She was fairly thin, but her height made such close quarters awkward. But as soon as she was a few feet inside, she discovered that there was more space than she’d initially led herself to believe.

“Bones?” she asked, shining the flashlight ahead. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see the sun creeping in through a few breaks in the roof and from under the broken garage door, which increased her visibility.

She heard something moving up ahead of her next to what she thought was a station wagon. She reached out to find something to steady herself on and realized she’d grabbed the heel of a man’s shoe, the man’s foot still in it.

“Jesus!!”

Beep…beep…beep…

“Sir? I’m right behind you. Are you okay? Can you speak?”

Beep…beep…

With all the debris, it took another couple of minutes for Elizabeth to get closer to the man’s face to check his vitals. When she finally did, she saw Bones’s snout illuminated in the dim light of a cell phone as the dog’s tongue lapped gently against the face of an elderly man, the fellow’s fingers wrapped tightly around the phone.

It took about ten minutes for the search-and-rescue team to pull the old man out of the garage, and by then the news cameras were there broadcasting images.

“After five days and little to rejoice about in the devastated city of Los Angeles, a ray of hope for those hanging on to the belief that loved ones may still be alive in the rubble has been uncovered,” announced a female reporter up from Melbourne into her rolling camera. “A man whose identity has still not been released has been discovered in a demolished house where he was trapped in his own garage since the earthquake of last Sunday…”

Elizabeth found this idea so strange. This isolated little spot miles and miles from what anyone would consider civilization was at this moment being seen by millions, and soon would be seen by tens and maybe even hundreds of millions of people by the end of the day. The man’s name, Victor Romo, was known, but it had been decided that it shouldn’t go out until at least a cursory attempt to notify relatives was made. Elizabeth’s name, however, was getting a ton of play. She was interviewed by one camera crew after another and did her best to explain point-by-point what had happened, knowing that a “Hero Dog” story would go over even better than a hero-person one. Even though she was a civilian, her team encouraged her to do as much press as she felt able to do, not only to help the morale of her fellow workers but also to spur on the much-needed donations the various service organizations were already starting to solicit.

Happy for a break from all the misery, Elizabeth settled into a routine of spelling her name, explaining who she was and what she did, and then writing out the URL of her dog training business so that each outlet could run it over her interview in case people wanted to learn more.

Only a few camera crews had arrived in time to actually watch Victor Romo get extracted from his house, but there were several in attendance when the search-and-rescue team brought out the dead body of the elderly man’s wife, who had been found crushed in a bedroom. At death’s door though he was, the old man had refused to be taken away until her body had been removed, and the press had dutifully turned off their cameras as his body quaked in anguish at the sight of her being hauled out on a stretcher.

As the reporters hung around, perhaps hoping more gold might be mined from this unexpected vein in Echo Park, Elizabeth found herself again with the paramedic, Wieneke. They were now tasked with loading the old man onto a Humvee that would drive him to an open enough area that had been determined safe enough to attempt a Medevac.

“Why don’t you just drive him out of here?” Elizabeth asked, a little puzzled. “Wouldn’t it take about the same amount of time?”

“It’s all about symbolism right now,” Wieneke answered. “Every morning, everybody sees those Medevac choppers out there on the runways, fueled up and waiting for a call that never comes. Seeing one of those birds lifting off, seeing it overhead, it will just do so much for morale. Everybody’s going to be talking about it. You know, ‘well, if they found somebody alive maybe we can, too.’”

Elizabeth smiled and nodded, and then let Wieneke patch up the cuts and scrapes she’d acquired getting to the old man. In the course of this, she found herself surreptitiously gathering intel on where his base station was.She thought it might be nice to get good and laid that night, since she’d seen him checking her out more than once that day.

Something to look forward to.

Soon, however, the paramedics, the reporters, and the search-and-rescue teams were all gone, and it was just her and Bones again. The team had fed the shepherd, and he had been resting comfortably under the one still standing tree on the block when Elizabeth walked over and slumped down next to him.

“We’re going to keep going, Bones,” she said, as if trying to convince herself more than the dog. “If some old guy can survive five days under all this, you’d better believe there’s somebody else out there.”

Bones spent the rest of the day mostly on his own, as Elizabeth was off in her own head. He went from house to house, often locating multiple corpses in each, some old, some young, men and women alike. The smells got more distinctive and easy to trace as the afternoon sun continue to cook the rotting human meat for yet another hour, until Elizabeth couldn’t take it anymore and wrapped a bandanna soaked with water around her mouth.

Of course, this didn’t bother Bones. He had a job to do. When he smelled something dead, he went to it and alerted his handler by moving in a circle, pawing at the area where the smell was emanating from and barking. Elizabeth had long run out of treats to reward Bones with, but she had realized early on that he was one of those rare service dogs who didn’t require one every time. His training was so ingrained that when surrounded by the smell of this many corpses, locating the dead superseded all other interests he might have pursued.

But every time Bones moved into a collapsed or semi-collapsed building, the same thing happened. He’d take a couple of steps in, his own scent would hit the air, and he’d suddenly hear the skittering of tiny feet.

The light galloping gait of a rat.

He’d seen more than a few rodents as they moved away from his approach, and he found even more of their fecal matter, sometimes all around the dead body it was eating but more often, particularly in the newer homes, around the walls. In these homes, the rats appeared not to be eating so much the people, but gnawing on the insulating layer between the drywall and the outer stucco, a tart-smelling, poly-fibrous material that had been laid between the interior rooms.

Everywhere they went, Bones would see the material, the exposed sheets being silver on both sides with a third sticky red-colored sheet in between, each time pockmarked by rat bites.