Bones Omnibus (59 page)

It was over these broken overpasses that Bones now wandered as he made his way out of East L.A. The stench of death rose from below Bones’s feet, and though it was easy for the shepherd to differentiate between those who had died a few days before and those who were in the process of dying just now, he still couldn’t get to them. He whined a little, looked around for a human handler he might alert to the situation, but then moved on.

“Hey!! Heeeey! Is someone up there?”

Bones stopped short and looked around in the dark, but saw no movement. He nosed around a little and then discovered a crack out of which he could inhale the scent of a still living, breathing man.

“Hey!! Who’s that? Who’s there?” came a voice from about fifteen feet below. “Hello?!?”

Bones whined a little and heard a sigh in response.

“Oh, Jesus, a fucking dog? My legs are crushed, I’m starvin’ like Marvin, and you’re a fucking dog?”

Bones sniffed through the crack, smelling bread and other baked goods, an incongruous scent certainly, but it seemed to be in abundance. The smell overlapped with oil and gasoline, but there was enough of the bread-scent to tell Bones there was at least some kind of food supply below, which kept his attention.

“Come on, boy. Go get help or something. Do you have a master? Are you search and rescue?”

Bones ignored the man’s voice as he circled around, trying to determine if there was some way to he could get down to the food source. The collapsed overpass appeared as solid as a tomb, and Bones whined a little in frustration.

But then Bones heard something echoing up from below. At first it sounded like somebody was spilling ball bearings out onto the concrete and they were rolling closer to the injured man. As the sound neared, a new smell appeared attendant with it, but with all the oil, food, shit, and corpses below and the dust from the collapsed buildings and the on-and-off fires in the nearby hills clogging the air above, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world for Bones to fix in on the new scent and identify it. Whatever it might be, the scent was nothing if not powerful.

“What is that?” asked the man below, more to himself than the dog he’d identified up on the surface.

The sound grew louder and louder as its source drew near. The man below didn’t speak, but Bones could hear him shifting around, trying to get into a better position to see what was going on.

That’s when Bones finally recognized the scent: rats.

Lots of them.

“Oh, my God!” shouted the man as the herd of rodents finally reached him. He sounded as incredulous as he was scared. “What the fuck?!”

Then he started screaming.

Bones took a couple of steps back as the man’s terrified high-pitched squeals were soon joined by the sound of others beneath the broken overpass, indicating the fellow in the bread truck was hardly the only to have survived so long. One sounded like a small child, another like an elderly man. As the smell of the rats became omnipresent, the screams rose to a crescendo, only to then go silent one by one. Bones could smell the blood of the man directly below him as it was drawn out through multiple wounds, the rats chewing into him from dozens of different spots. His screaming was cut off and his breathing got ragged, but then both were strangled.

Bones woofed a couple of times in the direction of the rats but then began moving away. As he looked down the overpass to the south where the sound had originated, the shepherd noticed movement in the dark, as if the night sky itself had touched down and was rippling over the roadway like a black tide. It didn’t take long for Bones to realize it was more rats.

Bones woofed an alert to any humans in the area, but the rats kept coming.

Normally, rats only moved as one when fleeing. Sailors reported watching herds of rats sweeping up from the bowels of a ship when it was sinking, having had no idea such a pulsing mass of creatures had been living among them during the voyage. This colony, however, was traveling in that way in pursuit of something, which was wholly unusual. These animals were like army ants in their single-minded mission. A mission that, at present, appeared to involve a German shepherd staring at them from only about a hundred yards away.

Bones woofed a third time and then pranced around as if to assert his unquestionable dominance on the food chain. The rats didn’t seem to notice, as they were moving without fear. The closer they got, the more Bones could pick up on the oily odor that emanated from their skin, which was much more pungent than the rats he’d encountered even earlier that day. He could also tell that they had picked up another scent: blood.

Blood was in the rats’ fur, in their claws, and dripping from their teeth. And it wasn’t just human blood, either, but all types of animals. It was such an eclectic mix that it was as if they had stopped off at the Griffith Park Zoo before descending on the 101 Freeway.

Though they were only rats, Bones knew better than to stand and fight. He could’ve easily gone up against a dozen or so at once, but something about the new smell bothered him. It was a reflex like the kind an animal has to alcohol. Bones knew something wasn’t right about the rats and didn’t stick around to discover what it was.

Instead, Bones turned ran north on the crushed highway, leaving Echo Park behind and heading in the direction of Hollywood. As he ran, he could hear the rats behind him but soon heard the sound of other rats rising up from below, joining the chase.

Deciding on a detour, Bones made a lateral move and leaped over the broken median, crossed the southbound lane of the highway, and ran up a grassy embankment to what had once been Sunset Boulevard. The street was littered with abandoned and demolished cars, but Bones flew by the old CBS complex and through the rubble of collapsed buildings away from the highway. For cars, the avenue would be hopelessly impassable, as it wasn’t only the shattered buildings that blocked the road but also everything inside them that had been vomited out into accidental roadblocks. For a dog like Bones, however, this was easy enough to hurdle, and he simply jumped over this pile of cinder blocks and that busted billboard as he fled the rats.

The trouble for the shepherd was that scent worked both ways. His blood was pumping and the rats could smell it, which egged them on. Bones’s nose informed him in no uncertain terms that he would soon be overtaken. His tongue lolled out of his jaws and he was just beginning to feel winded when a new sound entered the fray, followed quickly by a man-made light source cutting through the night from the north.

In his peripheral vision, Bones could see a dozen or so motorcycles, followed by two garish yellow civilian Humvees, weaving their way down to Sunset on a side street. The Humvees bounced over the rubble on the streets like it was nothing.

“It’s a dog!” came a cry. “What the hell’s a dog doing setting this thing off?”

Bones stopped short when one of the motorcycles got close enough to almost run him over, and then he smelled cordite from a recently fired gun. With a
clank
, two turret guns, typical of a military Humvee but hopelessly incongruous on a consumer model, were readied and aimed at the oncoming rats.

“Light ’em up!”

With a tremendous burst of muzzle flash, hot lead screamed out of the twin guns and chewed through the incoming rats. The bullets moved so quickly and the targets were so near that it looked like a sci-fi movie laser beam was being used to sear through Bones’s attackers.

Bones turned and barked at the spectacle, though his voice was easily blocked out by the tremendous
THRRUUUUMMMM
of the mounted machine guns. Satisfied that he was no longer being pursued, Bones wheeled around to run off, only to have a harness thrown around his neck by one of the motorcyclists.

“Where do you think you’re going,
puto
?” the biker, a large Latino wearing a sweatshirt and ball cap, asked as he reeled the shepherd in.

Bones struggled against the leash every inch of the way to the motorcycle until the biker produced a cattle prod and jammed it against Bones’s shoulder. As 9,000 volts coursed through Bones’s body, the shepherd dropped to the deck, unconscious. As the hail of bullets continued shredding the air around him, the last thing Bones smelled was the oily-scented blood of a thousand dead rats.

Bones awoke a few hours later in great pain and found himself the subject of a surgical procedure. The tracking device that had been placed in his left leg was being removed by three people he could not see, and the pain had jarred him out of unconsciousness.

Naturally, he wheeled around and sunk his jaws into the would-be surgeon, the iron-flecked taste of the man’s blood quickly oozing across the shepherd’s tongue.

“Holy shit!! Zap him, man! Zap him! He’s awake!!!”

The cattle prod was quickly brought around and jammed into Bones’s side. Bones shuddered and sank back into unconsciousness after the second recharge.

When Bones woke up a second time, his muscles were sore to the bone, and his skin was burned wherever the cattle prod had touched. On top of that, his leg was in tremendous pain from the impromptu surgery, and despite the expert way that his fur had been shaved away before a careful incision had been made, no painkillers had been administered to ease his transition into consciousness.

So when Bones immediately stood up, the other four people in the room, folks who only showed up as smudges to Bones’s bleary eyes, all jumped as well.

“He’s awake!” said a twenty-something man in a gray suit, clearly terrified.

“Don’t worry,” said the younger of the two women in the room, who appeared dressed in business casual. “He’s chained.”

“My neighbor had a Siberian husky when I was growing up,” said the older woman, who wore sort of green pajamas. “That thing bit right through its chain. They bought another one, and it bit through that, too.”

“Yeah, well, this a German shepherd,” said the fourth man, an older fellow in a sweat suit.

“I knew a guy who had the rear tire of his Volkswagen chomped into by a German shepherd,” said the older woman. “He had no idea that it had happened, so he drove away and pulled onto the 134. His tire blew and he had to pull over, but got plowed into by an eighteen-wheeler. His widow sued the owner of the shepherd and won.”

Bones had been looking from person to person and hadn’t noticed the chain they’d been referring to until he took a step and felt himself jerked backwards. He tugged at it, found it sold enough, and decided to voice his disdain for it with a huge torrent of barks that echoed all around the room and scared the hell out of the four humans.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted gray suit. “He’s pissed!”

Bones tugged at the chain a second time and discovered that it was wound around an unused, many-times-painted-over radiator under the one window in the room. Angry, Bones grabbed the chain in his jaws and tried to chew through it.

“See?” said the older woman. “He’s going to bite right through it!”

But Bones took a couple more snaps at the chain, didn’t like how it felt against his teeth, and promptly lay back down on the floor, to the surprise of his fellow prisoners. He had given them something of a sniff-over, detected nothing but the scent of abject terror in their sweat, and decided he couldn’t be bothered with anything else. Moments later, he went back to sleep.

It appeared that Bones and his fellow captives were being held in a small office in what must have been one of the last still standing buildings in all of Los Angeles, a multi-story Deco design that was likely apartments at one time, now converted into office space. Though one wall was marred by a gigantic crack and the glass of the window had shattered (though it was mostly still held in place by wire “quake-proof” mesh), those were the only signs of the recent seismic event.

Though the group had talked earlier in the day, they now fell mostly silent in hopes of not riling up the snoozing German shepherd. They stayed that way for an hour until someone finally opened the door.

“Bathroom break,” came a guttural voice that, unsurprisingly, belonged to a bulldozer-sized, biker-looking type with an intimidating shaved head and mustache combo and least three visible Iron Crosses tattooed on his neck and shoulders. “Anybody?”

“Me!” said the gray-suited man.

The biker grunted at the man.

“Me, too,” said the younger woman. “Is there a ladies room?”

In response, the shave-headed man shrugged but then turned to make sure that the group could see the gun in his belt to know that questions weren’t welcome. He waited for any other takers, but when there were none, he looked over at Bones, who was waking up.

“Bet you need a walk, huh, boy?” the biker said. He nodded towards the gray-suited fellow. “Unchain him. Bring him with.”

“You’re kidding….”

The pistol was out of Chris’ waistband and aimed at the younger man’s face so fast that everyone in the room save the tattooed man gasped.

“Turns out I’m not,” grunted the gunman. “You gonna get him or what?”

A couple of minutes later, the group was walking through the crumbling building. The biker had said his name was “Chris,” so the young woman introduced herself as Sharon Wiseman and the gray-suited man as Gary Loeb. As they walked, the trio passed first a ladies room, then a men’s room, and Gary got a little nervous.

“I thought you were taking us to the bathroom,” Gary said, trying to sound tough.

“The building’s intact, but the plumbing ain’t,” explained Chris. “You piss in there, it goes all over my friends downstairs. You might not have a problem with that, but they would. There’s a latrine outside.”

Once they’d gone down the three flights of stairs to street level, Gary’s initial fears fell away as he became preoccupied with the building around him.

“So why this one?” Gary was asking to no one in particular. “I mean, it looks like what, 1920s? We’re in Hollywood, right? It’s not like this area wasn’t affected, but was this one just built a little stronger? Retrofitted after the Northridge quake slightly better than it should’ve been?”

Sharon rolled her eyes and Chris caught it, grinning back despite the fact that he’d threatened to murder her as recently as the night before.