Bones Omnibus (68 page)

“All right, then. Let’s light them up.”

Zamarin signaled the survivors, and everyone gathered round to make a break for the other side of the bridge.

“Now!!”

Everyone began to run towards the west side of the bridge as the two Malaysian TV crewmen picked up the last Sterno-smeared propane tubes and threw them into the sea of rats. Nashon blasted into them with his machine gun, the subsequent explosions creating a path as if he was parting a Red Sea of rodentia.

“It’s not pretty, but we’ve got a hole,” Zamarin shouted.

“Let’s go!” Paul roared, rising to his feet as Sharon and Bones led him forward.

As a rolling mass of tens of thousands of burning rats ran in circles around their feet, some getting kicked out of the way and others outright crushed underfoot, the Beverly Hilton survivors followed Paul and Zamarin across the bridge, over the smashed chunks of guardrail in the direction of the west side of Santa Monica Boulevard. One by one, they made it and ran as quickly as they could away from the seemingly endless fountain of rats.

Nashon pulled up the rear, switching out the magazines of his gun in a fluid motion as he continued to blast at the closest rats. With the scent of burning fur and flesh heavy in the air, most of the rodents had actually seemed to forget about the humans and were primarily focused on escaping the flames. Worse, there were still others that Nashon noticed, to his revulsion, were using the opportunity to feast on members of their own species. Rats convulsing as they died a terrible death in the flames hardly noticed their brother and sister rats nibbling away at their legs or even face as it was too late to fight back.

“Disgusting,” Nashon said, not for the first time that day.

But then Nashon turned to follow after the rest of the group and found a small group of curious rats moving into position behind him at the edge of the bridge.

“Oh, shit,” he said, pulling the trigger on his machine gun.

The rats splattered all over the concrete as Nashon leapt over the broken guardrail that demarcated the median of the highway bridge. He’d only gone a few feet before something made him trip, the “something” being three rats that had emerged from a crack in the bridge.

“Gnh,” he exhaled as he smacked into the concrete, just able to catch himself with his hands before a sure-broken nose would’ve made his face explode with blood. He clambered back up, but not fast enough, as a large group of rats emerged from under the bridge and swarmed up his legs. “Sergeant!!”

Zamarin looked back in time to see all the blood drain from Nashon’s face, cast white against the gray of the concrete before disappearing completely under about three dozen rats. The sergeant immediately wheeled back as Nashon started screaming, the rats dragging him back under the highway through a crack. The survivors could hear Nashon’s bones beginning to break as he went.

With a heavy heart, Zamarin raised his machine gun and fired a single burst into the swirling mass of rats, and Nashon’s screams abruptly halted. The rats quickly dragged the corpse under and disappeared.

Zamarin shook his head as he turned back to Paul and Sharon. “All right!! Double-time it!”

The propane tube bombs had done enough to clear a path and buy the group a few seconds, but now the humans were once again on the run. Though the fires had certainly slowed them down, the rats began to regroup. The humans were only about a thirty yards away from the bridge when the rats regrouped and began the chase all over again.

Sharon looked back and saw that the entire boulevard appeared to move as the rats extended back like an endless tide, a creeping darkness that extended from one side of the boulevard to the other that was now washing towards them.

“There are just so many of them,” she cried out to Lisa. “We kill a couple thousand and there’s ten thousand more!”

Lisa said nothing, but Sharon could see the terror in her eyes as they ran.

Bones ran alongside Paul, his nose filled more and more with the smell of the ocean only a few miles ahead. The taste of the dead rats in his mouth strangely lingered, an oily aftertaste sliding down the back of his throat like a stream of thin caramel. But Bones kept running, licking his lips for more of the oil as he went.

Then a rat jumped on the shepherd’s back and he wheeled around, sending Paul tumbling as Bones’s jaws sank into the rat, bit it in half, and dropped the two pieces to the concrete.

Sharon and Trent hurried to help Paul get back to his feet as Bones killed a second and third rat, some now emerging from the collapsed buildings on either side of the road.

“They’re catching up,” Sharon whispered to Paul. “Got a Plan C?”

Paul shook his head. “Just keep running.”

But it was quickly obvious that the couple dozen humans on two legs were no match for the million rats behind them on four. The rats, driven by their blood-need to sink their teeth into the flesh of the humans, pressed harder and harder, seemingly indefatigable. The humans, some of whom hadn’t had a decent meal or night’s sleep in days, were the opposite. Once the adrenaline had cycled through their bodies, it was as if they had nothing left in the tank and were willing themselves to fail as surely as Bones’s buck back in the Ohiopyle woods. The inevitable was the inevitable, so why fight it?

This was the case with Sebastian and Greta, who were in the rear and the closest to the rats. The rats reached Sebastian first and scurried up his legs as he was in mid-stride. Within seconds, a dozen rats were charging up the backs of his legs, up his back, and onto his shoulders as if the pets of an eccentric.

Sebastian’s steady stride came to an end as he tried to swat the rats away, resembling a man beset by bees. “Christ, he’s on my ear!” Sebastian grunted, a rodent turning an attached ear lobe into a detached one.

“Hang on,” Greta said as she reached over to bat it away. Unfortunately, the rat simply grabbed her hand in mid-flight, bit into it, and then ran up her arm directly to her face, where it bit her nose.

“
Aaaah!
” she screamed, trying to get it off.

Members of the Malaysian news team and a couple of the hotel workers slowed down to help the pair. But this all-too-human impulse proved to be a grave mistake as the rats simply swarmed them as well. A rat bit into Sebastian’s carotid artery, and he bled out within seconds. The moment a second rat bit into her, Greta gave up and slid to the ground as well, resigned to their killing of her, to which the rats happily obliged. Two of the hotel workers were next, the rats moving up their bodies like cartoon army ants, and then one of Lisa’s colleagues at the Asian medical consortium who, mistakenly, thought Sebastian could still be saved.

Though he hadn’t made the mistake of slowing down to aid his fellow man, Trenchard, the Australian finance minister, was next, as years of living high on the hog caught up to him as thirty rats leaped onto him.

“Kathy!!” he cried, reaching out to his mistress.

She looked back at him, shot him a sort of conflicted look, but then kept running without a word.

Sally and Shahin were way out in the lead, but even they seemed to know that the end was nearing. They looked back at the rats and then each other.

“I’m pretty sure I love you,” Shahin cried.

“Yeah, me, too,” Sally replied. “I never would have made it this far without you, and you know it.”

Shahin smiled and kept running. “Race you to the beach.”

“Last one in is a rotten egg.”

They kept going, but Sally could feel the burning sensation in her legs and side and knew that she wouldn’t be able to complete the race.

Sharon looked over at Lisa and saw that the rats were now running alongside them, swirling around like dirty water. She was barely able to watch where she was running, the constant fear of twisting her ankle and going down, smashing her face on the concrete, going through her head.

“This is it,” she said to Lisa for no reason in particular. Lisa nodded back just in time to see another of their number fly backwards, multiple rats on their back, and sprawl into the piranha-like miasma where they were quickly torn to pieces.

Of the runners, Bones was actually faring the best. Rather than simply trying to bat the rats away, every time one landed on him, he made sure to kill it and toss the corpse aside. Seeing this happen, a number of the rats seemed to stick with bringing down the humans first, which suggested that if the shepherd had so desired, he could have used this opportunity to flee. Perhaps he could have more of a fighting chance away from the group, as the rats didn’t look too ready to divide their number. But Bones was too loyal, simple, and endlessly rat-hungry to consider making a simple turn up a side street and disappear from view. Instead, almost blissfully unaware that each moment could be his last, he continued casting his lot in with the humans.

A new sound suddenly cut through the night, and it took the survivors a moment to realize it was coming from above them. Sharon was the first to look up as lights pierced through the night sky and rapidly approached their position.

“What is it, sergeant?” Paul asked. “Choppers?”

Zamarin looked up into the dark but couldn’t believe his eyes. “Looks like, sir. The cavalry has arrived.”

Two SH-60 Seahawk helicopters with U.S. Navy sigils lowered themselves over Santa Monica Boulevard, hovering as if seeking out a flat enough surface to land on, but then deciding to take action from the air as they realized how dire the situation on the ground was. They lowered themselves to about thirty feet off the ground, the wash from the rotors so tremendous that it knocked a few of the survivors off their feet, though it had the same effect on the rats.

The side doors of both choppers slid open, and a pair of National Guardsmen began firing at the rats with heavy door-mounted machine guns as the helicopters came around and began blasting at the same with nose-mounted Vulcan cannons.

The muzzle flash illuminated the street as if it was the middle of the day, but the sound was more deafening than the sonic disruptor the commandos had used. Sharon clapped her hands over her ears but kept running, slightly hunched over, as she stepped into the pool of white light created by the helicopter’s high beams.

The helicopters continued blasting away at the rats, the white hot bullets racing over the humans’ heads as they ran, chopping the rats to millions of little pieces. The rats continued to surge forward regardless, but the door and nose gunners had more than enough ammunition to answer them.

It took a steady stream of fire that didn’t cease for well over a minute to finally turn the tide, but not until more than a quarter-million rats had been torn to pieces.

As the helicopters landed, several guardsmen hurried off the helicopters to the survivors as Sergeant Zamarin pulled Paul to his feet. Bones seemed to have lost a step or two to the rats but was recovering. Sharon, her clothes torn and her body bleeding from two dozen cuts, got to her feet in a state of disbelief.

But then she looked down and saw that the rats had chewed through Lisa’s stomach and had dragged out her entrails as they fled. Sharon bent down and could tell from the blank-eyed look on her friend’s face that, perhaps thankfully, Lisa was already dead.

Along with Lisa, Sebastian, Greta, and the Australian finance minister, the two other members of Lisa’s medical consortium, Gregoire, three of the hotel workers, and Shahin were all dead. Sally had actually survived, but had her hands chewed down to the bone, as Shahin had been the one to fall behind first and she had been trying to save his life when the helicopters arrived. This left a dozen survivors, albeit severely traumatized ones.

The guardsmen approached Paul and Zamarin, looking over their weapons.

“Where did you get those?” a captain asked, “Feliz” on his uniform’s name stripe.

“Found them,” Zamarin replied without blinking.

“Where?” the captain continued, sounding as if he didn’t believe Zamarin.

“Back of a truck. Same place as we found these clothes. Looked like the owners had been killed by the birds. Mercenaries, I think. Mayer, maybe?”

The captain looked from Zamarin to the others in the group, waiting to have the man contradicted, but when no one did, he sighed.

“Well, this was just meant to be a flyover, not a rescue,” the captain said. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have room for all of you.”

“That’s a shame,” Paul said, piping up. “My friend and I will be the last ones on. If there’s no space for us, we’ll do what we can.”

Captain Feliz wasn’t expecting this response, but then nodded. “We can see about sending back a relief helicopter, but we were under strict orders not to land or engage anyone on the ground.”

“We’re glad you countermanded that order, captain,” Paul replied. “But even if you did come back, we’re not really planning on staying in the same place.”

“I understand,” Feliz said. “Good luck to you all the same.”

One by one, the survivors divided themselves amongst the helicopters and climbed on board. Once they were on board, one of the guardsmen looked expectantly at Sharon, but she shook her head.

“You won’t considering taking the dog, will you?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“Are you serious?” the guardsman asked.

“The number of times he’s saved my life, I can’t just leave him behind,” Sharon explained. “Thank you, though.”

Paul turned to Sharon like she was crazy. “You need to get on that helicopter.”

“I cast my lot with you guys. You’ve gotten me this far.”

“Yes, but that’s mainly because we know who your father and grandfather is and was.”

Sharon grinned and nodded, moving away from the helicopter.

“Lieutenant?” Captain Feliz said. “Relieve them of their weapons.”

The sergeant stepped forward, but then Sharon stood in the way. “You can’t leave us defenseless!”

“I absolutely cannot allow weapons like that to remain here in such a hostile environment,” Captain Feliz said. “If they should fall into the wrong hands, terrorists domestic or foreign, I would be in dereliction of my duty.”

No one missed the implication of Captain Feliz’s emphasis on the word “foreign” as he made it clear that he knew neither Paul nor Zamarin were locals. The lieutenant indicated for the pair to hand over their weapons, so they did so. The guns were then loaded onto the helicopters with the others.