Bones Omnibus (67 page)

“Okay. We leave in ten. Be ready to hit the ground running.”

They left in eight.

Trent had been stationed in the lobby and alerted the group just as the sun set over the distant ocean. The entire group of survivors were up the broken escalators in a flash, led by Zamarin and Nashon. Paul hung back with Sharon and Bones, who acted as something of a seeing-eye dog even though he was too excited to do anything but gallop.

Following behind were the rest, a mob of people desperate not to be left behind but also terrified of being out in the open. Greta was the last one out onto the driveway, and as she looked back at the hotel, a gallows smile spread across her face as she nodded at Sebastian. “I feel I’m stepping out of my grave to run off to my funeral.”

“I know the feeling well, my dear, believe you me,” he replied, already sweating. “But whatever happens, you can count on me to be by your side.”

Up front, Sharon kept an eye on the skies. She didn’t see any birds, but she kept telling herself that the absence of anything flying overhead didn’t mean they weren’t there, waiting. She looked down at Bones, the only member of the party that didn’t seem to have a care in the world, and wished she shared his optimism.

Running through the night, Bones was thrilled to finally be out of the hotel, as the smells were really getting to his sinuses. The corpses, the fine concrete powder hanging in the air, the sweat of the living, the rotten food, the myriad odors of asbestos, plastic, and various chemical cleaners all mixed together in a toxic brew had done nothing but give the shepherd a severe headache. But now that he was outside, these horrible smells that the humans seemed only vaguely aware of now absent, he inhaled deeply and bounded along beside Paul.

“Slow down a little, Bones,” Paul said, angrily yanking back his leash.

“You still planning to shoot him at the end of the mission?” Sharon asked.

“He’s not coming on the boat, if that’s what you mean. Shooting him would be doing him a favor, given what we’d be leaving him with.”

Sharon scoffed but kept going. She planned to revisit the issue once they were at the boat. Maybe give the dog another couple of chances to save Paul’s life and he’d change his tune.

The group had raced away from the Beverly Hilton and onto Santa Monica Boulevard as if it was a sprint, but then Zamarin and Nashon had slowed the pace to something that could be maintained. The sun had almost completely disappeared over the horizon now, and everything was colored in shades of gray, purple, and black.

When they reached the toppled buildings of Century City only a few minutes later, it began to get treacherous, but Trent’s knowledge of the jumble of rubble helped immensely as he showed Zamarin a path he’d taken earlier. Bones’s keen senses helped with this as well, and soon the group had crossed over the worst of it with only a minimum of twisted ankles.

Once they were on the other side of the fallen buildings, Trent’s admonition proved true in that the road was in utter disrepair and there were more stumbles, but part of this was because the farther away from the Beverly Hilton they traveled, the less likely it would be to race back there in retreat should something happen. More and more, they were at the mercy of the city.

For Sharon, this was the part of the trek she was dreading. She watched as the familiar streets passed by: Avenue of the Stars, Century Park West, Beverly Glen. Sharon had driven this road home from work for years and had taken it back from the Beverly Hilton the night of the first big quake. These very roads, now long gone. She looked up ahead, and even though nothing was standing, she knew they were within a few hundred yards of her collapsed apartment building and Emily’s broken body somewhere within.

She forced herself not to cry and ran on.

Closer to the ground, Bones found it easy to navigate the rubble and therefore hadn’t suffered the mental fatigue of the others, either. Paul, who was beginning to tire, yanked back more and more on Bones’s makeshift tether.

“Come on, Bones,” Paul said. “Stay with me.”

But that’s when a different scent entered Bones’s nose. The buildings were farther away from the street on this part of Santa Monica, so he’d been light on smells for a while, fresh air cutting through the rotting trees and concrete, but now there was something new.

Bones slowed and sniffed the air, recognizing the oily odor of matted fur and blood that he’d first picked up on a couple of days ago now on the broken Hollywood Freeway. As Bones slowed, Paul knew immediately from the break in the shepherd’s stride what he’d picked up. He leaned down to the shepherd, feeling his snout, and could tell Bones had picked up a scent.

Paul hesitated, feeling cold and alone and isolated in his new blindness, practically naked out on this desolated rubble-strewn street in the middle of nowhere. Icy shivers ran down his spine as he realized just how disastrous this plan might turn out to be.

“Here they come!”

T
he Mayer men had been dead-on.

It was the Nivec that the rats had been chewing on which contained a chemical compound called methylstinine that caused a rabies-like reaction in rodents when they ingested it. But Paul’s idea that the birds brought it into their systems by eating the rats was completely false. Instead, when the buildings and houses fell and exposed the Nivec to the air, it released massive quantities of the already broken-down synthetic alkaloid that the birds then aspirated into their lungs, causing the same sort of mutation.

While the humans and every other animal in Los Angeles were breathing it in as well and often in just as heavy concentrations, the behavioral changes were expressed quickly in the lesser mammals and in birds. The rats got sick, Bones did not. The birds got sick, but the humans did not.

Yet
.

Scientists were just beginning to understand the carcinogenic properties of Nivec, and the effect of methylstinine on the survivors of Alpha and Omega would have provided conclusive proof that even limited exposure caused incredibly aggressive cancers such as had never been seen before.

“Would have provided” because there was a separate, albeit tangentially related event on the horizon that was to have an entirely different effect on humanity in general. No amount of medical science could have prepared mankind for this, so something as comparatively simplistic as cancer would have seemed downright quaint in comparison.

If, of course, anyone had been around to make the comparison.

“Where do we go?!”

This scream came from the Australian Kathryn, who seemed determined with her high-pitched squeal to drive the rats directly to them.

“Do you see anything?” Paul asked Nashon, who was moving alongside the team leader. “Do we even know if they’re in front of us or behind us? Could we be walking straight towards them?”

“There’s no telling,” Nashon replied. “Bones seems to be indicating they’re behind us, but it’s gotten dark pretty fast. We can’t see anything, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.”

“How far to the coast?” Paul asked.

Nashon turned to Sharon, who shook her head.

“Nowhere close. We’re just at the 405 Freeway. On the other side of that is Santa Monica, and then we’ll still have about fifty or sixty blocks to go.”

“Where are the bastards?” Zamarin asked, looking around. “Shouldn’t we see them by now?”

That’s when Paul reached down and touched Bones’s head. The dog’s snout was investigating a manhole cover. With a heavy heart, Paul raised a hand and stopped the group’s progress.

“We won’t see them if they’re still using the sewer,” Paul said to Zamarin. “I think they’re under us.”

“Oh, God,” Sharon said. “Can’t we get to some kind of high ground?”

“Not any the rats can’t climb,” Paul replied.

“Then what’s the plan?”

“We fight. Try to make a big show and buy ourselves some time. At least if we stop now, we get to pick the battleground. Might mean all the difference.”

Sharon looked at Zamarin, who looked unconvinced. To his credit, the sergeant raised his submachine gun and waved to the group.

“Everybody behind us. Looks like we’ve got company, but we think it just might be a couple of them.”

Everyone knew this was a lie but did as the sergeant asked. The 405 passed over Santa Monica Boulevard, but the bridge had collapsed onto the street during the first quake. The group began taking positions on the rubble to, at the very least, be up off the ground, however futile it felt.

“Keep going,” Zamarin said. “Try to get to the highest points.”

Bones trailed Paul up onto the broken bridge, but then stiffened. The shepherd jutted his nose into the shattered concrete and then immediately started barking. That’s when Paul came to a realization and turned to Sharon.

“If the sewer ran under Santa Monica Boulevard…”

“…then the weight of the bridge collapse might have smashed through the road and broken into the main,” Sharon concluded. “They were waiting for us.”

Sharon turned to the bridge, her eyes training around from human to human. She was just about to shout a warning when the black silhouettes of the rats began erupting out of the holes and fissures of the broken bridge like a burst pipe.

Within seconds, the humans were outnumbered 67,000 to 1.

Nashon and Zamarin’s barrels were almost to overheating as they blazed away at the rats, firing at anything that moved. The sonic disrupter had been used right away and had, in fact, driven away a few thousand rats, including several with ruptured eardrums. Some of the survivors had looked ready to celebrate, but every injured rat was replaced by a hundred more. It was soon looking like a no-win scenario.

“Everybody get to the other side of the bridge!” Paul yelled, grabbing Sharon’s arm to hold onto. “They’ll hold them off long enough for us to get…”

But Paul’s words were cut off by the screaming of one of the hotel workers, who was suddenly being swarmed by rats coming from behind them.

“They’re all around us!” yelled Sebastian, hurrying over to help the worker and his companions as more and more of the rats scurried over to their position.

Sharon did a 360 and saw rats coming at them literally from all sides but up. There were rats flooding up from beneath them, rats coming from both ends of the broken bridge, and then rats flooding up from sewer grates and breaks in the road on the east and west sides of Santa Monica Boulevard. It was as if the humans were at the bottom of a bathroom sink and the rats were being poured in over the lip from each side and were accelerating down to them just as fast as water.

“What’re we going to do?” Sharon asked, terrified.

“Plan B,” Paul said, then turned to Zamarin. “Plan B!!”

Zamarin nodded. Sharon looked at Paul with surprise.

“Plan B?”

“Plan B,” Paul replied as Zamarin, still blasting away at the sea of rats, ran over and grabbed a pack from Paul and set it on the ground. Sharon finally got a look at what Paul had ordered Nashon to retrieve from the kitchen as Zamarin extracted five plastic-wrapped six-packs of Sterno and quickly tore them open.

Sharon started at them in surprise. “Explosives?” she asked.

“Not on their own, no,” Zamarin replied. “But with a little help…”

The sergeant next plucked a pack of thin, flashlight-sized propane tanks out of the bag, the kind utilized by the Beverly Hilton on the crepe station grills during Sunday brunch, and set them next to the Sterno cans. He immediately opened the first can and smeared the denatured alcohol jelly on the outside of the propane tube and nodded at Sharon.

“Last ditch. This can go all ways of wrong, including killing us.”

As soon as he had one done, he nodded at Nashon. “You ready?”

Nashon nodded, and Zamarin threw the makeshift firebomb in front of them. “Don’t fucking miss!!!”

As the tiny tank arced over the rat-swarm, Nashon fired a burst into it. As a bullet caught the tank, the little bomb exploded, creating a small fireball with a six-foot radius, igniting a handful of rats.

“That’s not going to do much,” Trenchard, who had stumbled over to the commandos, announced derisively.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Zamarin replied.

What Trenchard hadn’t noticed was that when the tube exploded, tiny burning droplets of the sticky Sterno had landed on literally dozens upon dozens of rats. Rats that were now erupting in flames and setting other rats on fire as they tried to get away. These rats then set other rats on fire, which then set other rats on fire, who then set still
other
rats on fire. It was a chain reaction of burning fur and flesh racing through a living sea of black.

“Oh, my God!” Kathryn screamed. “You’re cooking them.”

“Here comes another!” shouted Zamarin, smearing Sterno on a propane tube. He tossed it in a different direction and, after Nashon blasted that one, too, another couple hundred rats burst into flame and began evangelically passing it on.

By now, Sharon, Lisa, and Trent were helping Zamarin smear the Sterno on the propane tubes as the other survivors hurried over to see if they could assist. Two of the Malaysian television crewmen, with much better aim than Zamarin, began throwing the completed bombs out in front of Nashon, who gladly blasted them to pieces.

“Uh, oh,” said Nashon, noticing something.

The flaming rats, in their confusion, were running every which way, and that meant some were coming straight at the humans.

“Look out!” Nashon yelled, nodding at the incoming rats.

But that’s when Bones, who had been dancing around near Paul enjoying the spectacle, moved in. Though naturally averse to fire, the shepherd went after the rats with zeal, snatching up the burning creatures in his mouth, snapping their necks and flinging them aside. He stomped on a couple with his claws, bit the heads off others, and in general tore through them as you might think a playful, fun-seeking, middle-aged dog would do. Soon the rats, even in their addled states, began choosing any direction to run but at the humans.

“Do we have enough to try and break through?” Paul asked Zamarin.

“Got seven left,” the sergeant said after doing a quick count. “We should be able to get to the other side of the bridge and maybe put a nice wall of flame between us and them.”