Bones Omnibus (71 page)

But when they reached the end of San Vicente Boulevard where they’d so recently buried the Israeli commando team leader, Bones found Sharon in such a state of distress that he didn’t know what to do. He tried to nuzzle her hand, but she pushed him away. He stayed close to her as she began to dig a new hole, but every time he stepped into the hole himself, he got shooed away.

“C’mon, Bones,” came Sharon’s quiet voice, the most she seemed able to manage.

Finally, Bones lay down on the ground, put his snout on his forepaws, and simply watched as Sharon dug Emily’s grave. She had a pick and shovel this time, so it went much faster than when burying Captain Harazi.

When the hole was finally almost too deep for Sharon to climb out of, she finally stopped digging and moved the blue blanket next to the mouth. She lowered herself back into the grave and then brought Emily’s body down with her. But she knew how much Emily weighed, how she felt in her arms. This wasn’t Emily. The person was long, long gone, and Sharon momentarily wondered why she had gone to so much trouble for something that wasn’t much more than a token reminder.

She laid Emily at the bottom of the grave, considered staying down there with her for a few more minutes, but then climbed out and began covering the body.

Sharon had plans for what she was going to do next. She and Bones would follow the broken 405 Freeway to the Valley, where the soldiers had told her, if she ever changed her mind, a sprawling command post had been set up. There she’d contact her parents, fight tooth and nail to keep the shepherd with her, and then head east, maybe to New York, maybe to the Carolinas, which she had decided sounded nice.

But as she stood her looking at Emily’s grave, the tears came all over again, and she realized that she couldn’t leave her lover all alone here. Just because her body was buried didn’t mean that it wasn’t just another faceless victim of the quake.

There’d been a part of her that had considered this and had kept a rope with the materials. She looked to a nearby tree and eyed what she thought might be the strongest branch.

Bones watched as Sharon retrieved the rope and tied a makeshift noose at the end, little more than a loop set with a strong knot. She climbed the tree easily enough, secured the free end around the branch, and placed the noose around her neck.

Time froze for a moment as she felt the rough twine around her neck. She remembered the last time she was at death’s door out on the boat when the birds attacked for the last time, and she wondered why she couldn’t be as Zen about this moment as she had been at that one.

That’s when she realized that this was unnatural. This wasn’t what humans did. She’d survived all that she’d survived for what, to kill herself? Hey, last one to die in L.A., don’t forget to turn off the lights!

She looked down at Emily’s grave and forced herself to remember who she was without her. She was an individual and would continue to be even now. She would endure.

Bones had watched Sharon climb into the tree and was now watching as she scooted back as if to come down. She was working apart the knot when she slipped off the branch and fell.

“Oh, God!” she cried as she fell, managing to grab the noose with one hand and the rope with the other. When the rope went taut, she had just managed to arrest enough of the force that it didn’t snap her neck. Instead, she found herself hanging in midair, desperately trying to pull herself back up to the branch. “Bones!”

Sensing Sharon’s distress, Bones hurried over to the tree but found himself a good three feet or so below the dangling woman.

“Please, Bones,” Sharon whispered, barely able to breathe. “Help me, find help. Jesus, c’mon…”

Misunderstanding, Bones leaped up and grabbed Sharon’s foot, giving her a tug. Sharon yanked her foot away but the force caused her to swing away, making it harder and harder to keep from strangling.

“No, Bones!! No! No more!”

This Bones understood. He stayed on the ground, looking up at Sharon as she steadied herself, coming to a rest after a few seconds. She took a deep breath and worked to undo the knot, trying hard this time to keep her cool and proceed methodically.

As she did so, she looked down and saw the shepherd watching her, eyes full of curiosity. He didn’t seem to understand what was going on but knew she was in trouble and was standing by to help in any circumstance.

“Don’t worry, Bones,” she said. “I’ll be down in a second. I got myself into this. I can get myself out.”

It took two and a half hours for Sharon to die.

It was in increments, one arm weakening and then the next, the strangling being so slow that, if asked, Sharon would have likely reported that she was feeling sleepy, when in reality the oxygen was being gently choked off from her brain. With the fingers of one hand keeping the rope from touching skin, Sharon felt safe, not realizing that the noose was pressing her own hand into her windpipe with enough force that it would soon kill her.

During the entire struggle, Bones had not left Sharon’s side. She found herself staring into his eyes more and more as she fought against the rope.

“Shepherd,” she had said, thinking about for how many people this dog had been the last living thing they’d ever seen. In her already deoxygenated state, she wondered about this as the true origin of the breed.
Shepherd.
She recalled the twenty-third Psalm, “the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”

But then she spoke the next lines aloud, her voice a whisper. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.”

She looked down at Bones, her shepherd, and smiled to herself. Emily would’ve laughed at the idea of a lost cadaver dog standing in for God. She’d heard the Psalm read at many a Jewish funeral and wondered if there’d ever be one for her and if it would be read then.

She looked down at Emily’s grave, her vision losing most of its color, and was happy that she would soon be reunited with her lover in death. She wanted to bargain with God to allow her to be cut down from the tree so that she could crawl over to the grave and bury herself in the same ground, but then she died.

Bones stayed with Sharon’s body as it swung in the wind for the rest of the day and on into the night.

When morning came, Bones looked up at Sharon’s blackened hands and legs where her blood had pooled and up to her completely ashen face, her pale pink tongue barely peeking out through slightly pursed lips. Bones took a sniff, smelled nothing but shit and death, and moved away. The person he had been so loyal to was now absent, which vacated Bones’s feelings of responsibility.

Bones went for a long walk, ranging over miles and miles of ground. He reached a grocery store at one point and ate his fill from the racks, tearing into bags of everything from chips to bread to rice, but then kept moving.

He reached the collapsed 405 Freeway and saw soldiers in Humvees scouting around as a group of civilians workers took readings off some sort of various instruments. Bones flinched as if readying his legs to hurry over and greet the troopers, but something kept him back.

Turning around, Bones trotted back into West L.A. He thought he had sniffed something worth eating a few blocks before and backtracked to pounce on it before it got away from him.

By the afternoon, Bones was back at the ocean, the thousands of dead bird corpses having rotted away. He ran the length of the beach, barking at the brown pelicans that had come up from San Diego and even catching one that flew too low to the ground, quickly tearing out its throat and devouring the bird’s organs and muscles in seconds. When he discovered fish inside the pelican’s throat pouch, he ate those, too.

He took a nap under the remains of the Santa Monica Pier at nightfall and then decided to go on a night hunt once darkness fell. The beach was as quiet and dark as it hadn’t been for a hundred years, the glow of the moon and stars being the only illumination, the waves lapping on the shore the only sound.

Bones padded along at the surf’s edge for a moment, hopping out of the water as the night tide rolled in but then playfully jumping back in. He swam out a little ways, felt a fish investigate his foot, and promptly dove his snout into the saltwater to grab it in his jaws.

After devouring the fish, Bones trotted a few hundred yards further down the beach, but after a moment, broke into a run. He ran and ran and ran, the scent of saltwater still in his nose and the feeling of the unbroken sand sinking lightly under his paws.

By morning, he’d gone a mile. By noon the next day, he had gone six. He found an overturned boat in the early afternoon and took a nap underneath it. When he woke up, he started running back in the direction he’d just come, sometimes in the water, sometimes on the sand.

He didn’t see a human being the entire time, and he was happy.

Lupus non mordet lupum

B
ones woke up from a nap and felt a chill down his back that reverberated all the way to his marrow. It built into a dull, throbbing sensation that continued to crescendo throughout his body for a full thirty seconds and then just as suddenly disappeared.

The German shepherd, a proud, strong animal, knew what the extended spasm meant, however, and got to his feet. The pain was visited in order to send him on a journey, but it would be a long one, so he immediately set out for the east.

He was soon to die, and he would die where he was born.

T
he world had ended.

Well, it had ended for the humans, at least. An angry group of mercenaries of the Mayer Corporation, disgruntled with the way they had been treated in the wake of the Los Angeles earthquake disaster that had killed millions and thrown the economy of the United States into chaos, had broken into the Anniston Army Depot in Bynum, Alabama. They were in the process of raiding the armory with the vague hope of committing a string of bank robberies with their haul when something unexpected occurred. Though Anniston was one of seven depots in the U.S. that stored chemical weapons, the mercenaries couldn’t have known that the CDC was additionally using the facility to house surviving biological fragments of a large mutated sea anemone that had killed tens of thousands in Pennsylvania a few years before. So when they ran into sentries tasked with guarding said fragments with their lives, they figured they could get by with the kind of threats and bluster they’d made copious use of thus far.

Instead, the sentries immediately drew down per standing orders, a massive gun fight erupted, there was an explosion, followed by another within minutes, and a toxic cloud was released. The minutiae of wind direction, weather conditions, barometric pressure, and the proximity to water sources would be studied closely over the next few days by desperate scientists looking for a way to stop this new airborne killer, a further mutation of the Arctic-originating anemone that was now aspirating into people’s lungs at a tremendous pace, where it simply killed them rather than turning them into flesh-hungry monsters, as had happened previously. Unfortunately, these scientists were fated to fail.

Within minutes, everyone on the entire base had been killed; within hours, most everyone in the surrounding counties of St. Clair, Etowah, and Talladega had joined them; and within days, the entire southeastern United States had been similarly decimated. When winds carried the plague out to Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica, delivering a devastating toll to their nations, the world powers and their respective citizenry realized that this was it, and anarchy began to break out the world over.

A violent coup erupted in Pyongyang, rioters took to the streets of Moscow, London burned, and Paris was swept by mass suicides that soon became contagious across Europe. In many places, the larger cities rapidly depopulated as residents led themselves to believe that they stood a better chance of surviving away from others. Johannesburg lost a third of its number in two days. Rangoon was a ghost town in three. In Stockholm, the people took to the sea and spread out to the many islands of the Swedish archipelago, but were no safer there in the enclaves of their Norse ancestors. In Canada, many headed to the northern territories. In Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, a number of Indians whose families had spent generations transitioning to urban life left their homes and vanished back into the Amazon.

Some went underground. In Rome, the catacombs and sewers beneath the city were opened, and thousands took their possessions and hid there. In Hue, the vast dormant tunnel systems utilizing during countless colonial wars were filled with a terrified but strident group of locals who eventually sealed themselves in, leading to armed confrontations with those who tried to get in later. In Athens, many fled to the old crumbling temples of the past, begging long-dismissed gods and goddesses to save them. Deities whose names hadn’t been called out with any real meaning for centuries were suddenly being voiced in earnest from Norway to Cape Town, Kyoto to the Rocky Mountains.

And then, little by little, these voices went silent.

As the inevitable set in, people found it hard to comprehend. How could something like this have existed on the Earth for centuries beneath the ice that, once dredged up so easily, could turn around and kill every member of only one species in particular? Why were there to be hundreds of millions lying dead, stinking under the noonday sun, an entire race erased, but a carefree flock of starlings was allowed to whiz past unmolested? Pet owners stared helplessly from their death beds as the family dog, cat, hamster, and goldfish looked on in perfect health while their meal ticket expired. Those who took to the sea, which were many, thinking it would save them (rightfully so, it turned out, at least in the extreme short term) watched as the entire ocean-borne ecosystem continued to flourish unabated in the waters around them. Many had prepared themselves to stumble across massive fish-kills, gulls pecking the corpses of bloated sperm whales and other scenes of horror but were to be disappointed, as it was business as usual in the animal kingdom.