Bones Omnibus (70 page)

“Sharon, jump!” cried Paul.

Without thinking, Sharon did just this, abandoning ship without a second thought. She hit the water and turned to get her bearings, only to have the boat, which was still turning, smash her in the face.She was knocked unconscious and immediately began sinking beneath the waves into the depths of the dark, cold ocean.

Sharon woke up with the midday sun bathing her in warmth. Her clothes were almost dry, but her hair was still damp. She was lying on a beach, her face cupped in a shallow divot of sand. After a moment, she pulled her legs up, brought herself up on all fours, and then threw up. She had so little in her stomach that it was nothing but acid and bile and tore at her throat as it came up.

She leaned back on her feet for a moment and then sat up, staring out towards a row of ruined beachfront houses. As she looked up towards Ocean Avenue, her low angle afforded her a view straight to the bluffs of Temescal and Rustic Canyon but prevented her from seeing any of the ruined houses on the cliff side or the hotels and apartment buildings down below.

The coastline as it was and now would probably be again.

Sharon slowly got to her feet, took a step, and kicked something. She looked down and saw that it was a dead seagull, its stomach ruptured and its feathers waterlogged. Glancing around, she saw that the entire beach was covered in dead birds, literally thousands of them washed up on the shore. She looked back down at the one at her feet and saw that there was a pair of dark red streaks burnished into its beak just below the nostrils.

She stood there idly for a moment, but then realized that one of the corpses on the beach about fifty yards to her right was human.

“Oh, God, no….”

She walked over to it but found that her legs were borderline unresponsive. They were stiff as if they were asleep, and the lactic acid churned inside as she walked. When she finally reached Paul’s body, she could tell that he was long gone. She leaned down next to him and saw that he was already being feasted upon by an army of sand flies and rove beetles. She looked at his bandaged face, bloated from being in the water but could also see that he had burns on his arms and torso, implying there had been some kind of fire on the boat.

She couldn’t remember a thing. She had hit the water and then…nothing.

As she regarded Paul, a sand crab emerged out from under the bandage wrapped around his empty eye sockets and she almost vomited. She had a vague notion that she wanted to bury him but didn’t think she had the strength to pull him all the way up the beach and onto dry land where there’d be soil instead of sand.

But then she decided that that was exactly what she was going to do. What else? This man risked his life for her without a thought. She could at least do for him what she couldn’t do for…

Her train of thought froze as she looked up to a bicycle path running parallel to the ocean up by PCH and saw a certain German shepherd sitting there watching her, its tongue out and panting in the heat, giving it, like all shepherds, the appearance of a grin.

“Bones.”

She marched across the sand directly to the dog and immediately dropped to her knees and put her arms around him when she reached the path. The dog whined a little and tried to break free, but Sharon held him tight. His fur was still damp, and she knew that he must have dragged her to shore.

“You saved my life. Thank you.”

Bones finally broke away from the human’s embrace and looked up at her for a moment. She stared back into Bones’s deep black eyes and smiled.

“We’re going to be good friends, you and me.”

As she thought it would, the burial of Paul, whose last name she didn’t know, took hours. His kit and uniform had been too heavy, so she’d eventually stripped him almost naked on the beach and tossed his clothes and weapons aside. In doing so, she kept thinking she’d find that one identifying card or letter or picture, but Paul was a professional and must have judiciously left all such things behind. Angry at having their meal taken away, the sand flies bit at Sharon’s arms and legs, but she eventually was able to drag him as far as the bicycle path.

She saw the ruins of a bicycle rental store nearby with rows of perfectly intact bikes and carts and buggies alongside the shattered building. It turned out that the bicycles were all chained together, but with a little doing she was able to wrench one of the trailers meant to carry children off the rear of one of the bikes and roll it back to Paul’s corpse. It wasn’t much easier to go up the hill with Paul on the trailer as opposed to simply dragging him, but she knew she wouldn’t have been able to get him even halfway up the steep incline without the wheels.

It took her a good couple of hours to find the right place to bury him, finally deciding on a spot at the end of what had once been San Vicente Boulevard, overlooking the ocean. She had nothing to dig with until she found a bent “No Parking” sign and used it to at least start a hole. Once it was about a foot deep and roughly the size of a man’s body, she found herself using her hands more than the sign.

It was late afternoon before the grave was as complete as it was going to be, Sharon’s hands raw and bloody from clawing the earth out of the ground. About two feet short of the requisite six, Sharon had continued digging more out of a sense of fear than duty. She had no idea what she’d do once Paul was buried.

Throughout all of this, Bones kept her company but aided neither in the transport or burial of Captain Paul Harazi, born in Ashgelon, died at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind an ex-wife and three children. But Sharon couldn’t have made the trek without the shepherd. After she’d noticed that no birds were coming to kill her, she kept an eye on the sky regardless, but none came. She didn’t know if the rats would come with nightfall, but something told her all of this was over.

When night did come, she realized that neither she nor Bones had eaten yet, so they tromped up San Vicente in search of food. When they reached their first convenience store, she was afraid that there’d be nothing left, as it was sure to have been ransacked by previous scavenging survivors, but then she found that virtually nothing had been touched. Bones had quickly discovered the dead clerk in the stockroom, likely having been refilling the trays of Marlboro and Camel Lights as the quake hit, but there were corners of the store that looked pristinely unaffected.

Avoiding all refrigerated goods, Sharon filled bags with bread, Spam, chocolate, trail mix, water, breakfast cereal, and anything else she thought they could use, loaded it onto the Day-Glo red and yellow trailer, and moved on.

They bunked in for the night in a park across the highway from the vast Los Angeles National Cemetery, where thousands of the war dead from the Pacific Campaign of World War II had been buried, and waited for the rats. They never came. By midnight, Sharon had even managed to fall asleep, her head resting against Bones’s stomach as a pillow.

When morning came, Sharon felt a real sense of exhilaration. She had survived the quakes, she had survived the rats, she had survived the birds, and she had survived the ocean. There was nothing she could not surmount.

Ever since she had buried Paul, she knew what direction she intended to go with Bones. It only took half a day to travel from the cemetery back to the Wilshire corridor, where the pair turned south and moved down what had once been Westwood Boulevard. Throughout the previous day and now this morning, there hadn’t been so much as a flyover, and Sharon began having visions of the earthquake “spreading,” devastating the entire country until the only living things were herself and her dog. She found this a ridiculous thought but enjoyed it nevertheless.

But then they reached her old apartment complex, the ironically named Shamrock Village. It was a mountain of broken concrete and splintered drywall, with broken pipes and pieces of furniture jutting up at odd angles from within the rubble. Her apartment had been in the northeast corner on the third floor, but as the building had been so hopelessly crushed, she thought Emily could be anywhere in there.

“Bones? Ready to go to work?”

Both the birds and the rats had begun dying off the morning that Sharon, Paul, Bones, and Sergeant Zamarin were on the water. By noon, they were all gone and began to rot along with the rest of the Los Angeles dead in the hot sun.

The U.S. government did not know what to do about Los Angeles, an understatement of ridiculous proportions, but the American people didn’t have anywhere near the sentimental attachment to the place as they had to post-Katrina New Orleans (coupled with the fact that there were only a tiny handful of survivors ringing the bell of “rebuild it!”). The same magazines, i.e.,
National Geographic
,
Time
, that had listed all the reasons to rebuild New Orleans now ran similar cover stories explaining why it was pointless to rebuild L.A. Scientists and the military had moved in to explore the area and remove any last survivors, as well as to investigate the reports of massive tribes of killer rats and birds, but came away with very little in either department.

Everything in the Los Angeles basin was dead, it was determined. Any survivors living in the broken city had likely been so traumatized by the events that they were hiding out and refusing extraction and probably wouldn’t survive more than a few months.

There had been a push by the military to bomb Los Angeles or use it as a testing facility, but that was where public opinion had stepped in. So many had died there that leaving it intact was memorial enough for now. Also, scientists from around the world were extraordinarily curious to analyze what would happen next in the city as nature reclaimed the land. A real memorial was constructed outside the Presidio in Golden Gate Park a few hundred miles to the north in San Francisco, and when the president and state governor dedicated it, more than a million people were in attendance.

When asked why San Francisco took this tragedy so to heart, the answer was simple: “It could’ve been us.”

And that was the fear for much of the rest of the spring, into the summer, and then into the fall — that another massive earthquake would strike somewhere, causing a similar disaster. But the truth was, the double-quake of Alpha and Omega had actually brought to temporary rest the more major incidents of seismic activity around the Pacific Plate. A correction had been made, and now the planet could live on in the peace for the time being.

But for Los Angeles, this was cold comfort. Almost immediately following the earthquakes, the city had begun to decay. The few remaining buildings began to fall, the last trees died off, and when the spring rains came, new plant life began to push out through the acres of concrete to start the long process of wiping the place off the map forever.

It had taken a month, exactly thirty days, for Sharon to uncover Emily’s remains. Like one person working a quarry, Sharon had taken apart the broken site brick by brick over several days until it resembled an archaeological dig. After the first couple of days proved difficult to even begin, Sharon had gone on a hunt for a hardware store, and when she finally found one, had retrieved picks and shovels galore, knowing that many would break when working against concrete rather than dirt.

On the eighth day, she had seen a helicopter but had ignored it. When one returned and called to her through a bullhorn, she ignored that, too, but then one landed up on Wilshire, and a detachment of soldiers came to talk to her. She explained her situation, showed them her food and her dog, and asked them to leave her alone, as they were now standing in her home. The soldiers understood the desire not to leave someone behind and, to their credit, did not report the day’s incident.

There had been a couple of false positives during the dig where Sharon had uncovered a desiccated corpse, only to have it turn out not to be Emily, and she buried those, too. But on the thirtieth day, she had had a feeling that her hunt was over, given the number of personal items from her old apartment she was discovering, coupled with Bones’s insistence that a corpse lay under the next chunks of flooring.

And then there she was, identifiable only from her tattered hair and tattered pink pajamas. Sharon wept for almost an hour as she slowly pulled Emily’s remains from the shattered apartment and laid them out on a blue blanket that she had retrieved expressly for this purpose. She had made a meal for herself and Bones and then sat with the wrapped body for the rest of the day, praying to no one in particular but really trying to send her thoughts out to Emily in the great beyond. She had done what she’d set out to do, but it gave her no pleasure. Instead, it extinguished any figment of Sharon’s imagination that suggested Emily might have been injured but not killed, had survived, was in a hospital somewhere. Was already recovering. Was waiting for her. Missed her. Still loved her.

All of that went away with the discovery of the corpse lying a couple of feet from Sharon by the campfire.

Across the thirty days, the only animals that had bothered Sharon and Bones were coyotes, which Bones scared off, and a few rats that had begun to reemerge. Unlike the massive, rabid tribes, however, these rats scurried away when so much as a brick was tossed their way, and the shepherd made quick work of those that didn’t. Sharon worried, though, that having an unburied corpse with them overnight (she’d buried the other corpses nearby within hours of their discovery) would bring the animals out in force, but then she realized there was hardly anything on Emily’s bones worth feasting on.

The thirty-first day came, and Sharon loaded Emily’s body onto the trailer for the hike back to the ocean. She fed Bones, drank some rain water, and then started walking back to the spot where she buried Paul, where she had decided she would bury Emily as well.

Bones walked alongside her as they left Westwood, the shepherd picking up on Sharon’s somber mood. With a complete absence of other humans, Bones had taken to Sharon and accepted her as his new partner and handler of sorts. Her moods affected his mood just as much as her determination and drive had egged him on over the last month as they attempted to excavate the corpse.