Bones Omnibus (72 page)

Basically, the question on everyone’s mind was why were just Homo sapiens being shown the door despite being the most evolved, most capable, most prevalent species on the planet? The fact that this was specious reasoning at best, as humans were none of these things, occurred to few, and humanity slowly died off before accomplishing all of those many things it occasionally announced it was hoping to achieve.

Except
.

Except for Frank Flores, a Pensacola man who was the first to be identified by the Centers for Disease Control as an actual survivor and who had been quarantined in Toronto, where it was soon discovered that he wasn’t even a carrier, had never even fought off an infection, as he was immune. The plague looked at him, didn’t recognize the man as a target, and passed him by.

Cases like this began appearing in various places of the world in a wide variety of concentrations. A handful in Africa, a great number in Korea, an even larger number in Norway, some in Russia, virtually none in South America, same with Australia, and then several scattered across the United States, though the majority were concentrated in the American Southwest.

Frank Flores, who had lost his wife and five children in front of him, learned that he had lost all of his friends and many relatives except a handful on his mother’s side out in Oregon, and thought that, as they would be next, why should he hang around?

As people in the Toronto facility began dying, Frank approached a sympathetic Army Ranger who allowed him access to his sidearm, and Frank Flores put a bullet through his soft palate.

Frank Flores would have been wise to stick around and investigate those maternal relatives, as he would’ve learned that though the plague came to Oregon and slashed its way through many, it also spared an aunt, two cousins, a niece, and a favorite nephew. He would hardly have been alone. Death would continue to follow them in the coming months and years, but this was the scourge of privation and other disease. They, too, were immune from this plague.

I
t had been a while since Bones had smelled a fresh corpse.

He had spent about two-thirds of a year mostly alone in the devastated city of Los Angeles, the victim of a double earthquake dubbed “Alpha” and “Omega” by the nation’s papers (though when it was believed to be a single quake, Alpha had been tagged with the less Biblical “The Big Sleep,” as so many had been killed while in bed and, after all, it was L.A.). After his involvement in the “mutation incident” in Pennsylvania, Bones had been free to run about the Ohiopyle woods for much of the winter, only to be hunted down by the Pittsburgh police, who recognized what an asset he would be in the City of Angels due to his abilities as a cadaver dog. While assisting a team in Echo Park, Omega had struck, and Bones found himself helping a small group of survivors make it across the city as flocks of rabid rats and birds tried to devour them, driven mad after ingesting chemical residues from the flashing of more recently constructed buildings.

The lone survivor, a middle-aged woman named Sharon, had used Bones to help her locate her dead partner in their collapsed apartment building and, after burying her, she (somewhat accidentally) took her own life, leaving Bones to fend for himself in the broken city. Bones had returned often to the woman’s body as time went on, though he spent most of his days in search of food. The mania that had driven the rats and birds of Los Angeles to madness had also swiftly killed them off, but the U.S. government didn’t take chances and regularly dusted the L.A. basin with poisonous pellets to eradicate any that were left behind. Bones had learned to avoid eating any bird or rat that carried the scent of poison in its belly after a particularly harrowing night of shitting and vomiting endured by the shepherd, who almost died from a toxic pelican he’d caught in Marina del Rey.

Bones had seen plenty of living people over the course of his time in Los Angeles, but he’d assiduously avoided them. Scientists, military and governmental officials, and eventually federally funded teams of archaeologists entered the quake zone, always heavily fortified against the possibility of contamination, as literally millions of bodies continued to decompose. It had become an issue of national debate: What was to be done with Los Angeles and its dead? No one seemed to know, and before a definitive decision was to be made at the Congressional level, the rest of the country joined the dead of L.A.

Bones, though a creature of habit, still did not notice the absence of planes flying overhead nor the sudden drop-off in vehicles entering the area when it happened two months previously, but as he now left the city, he found bodies that obviously hadn’t been part of the earthquake dead. Rather, these people were in an almost uniform state of decomposition and had been feeding the bands of coyotes, ravens, and rats (normal ones) that had rapidly multiplied in the hills around the city at unprecedented rates after the quakes. Bones sniffed around these fresher corpses for a moment but quickly moved on to their packs of belongings, which seemed to indicate a misguided hope of hiding out from the plague in the quake zone.

Though he found no food on the persons of the dead, the shepherd got lucky at a nearby camp site, where he discovered bags and bags of non-perishable food stuffs that were still in edible shape. Using his claws, the shepherd tore apart a few of the bags, gorged himself on beef jerky and Twinkies, and then kept moving, leaving the eight-week-old corpses to continue their slow return to the earth.

Denny Edwin Tallchief, as was occasionally pointed out, hardly lived up to his last name. Never growing past a squat five-foot-five and shoveled food by an over-protective mother who used same to express love, Denny spent elementary school and junior high as a short, fat kid who no one would ever mistake for a class leader. As unexceptional in sports as he was in his school work, Denny learned to hate just about everything school-related, with the one big exception being the school’s library. His mother worked in downtown Bullhead City as a secretary for a construction company, and with school out at three-thirty and Sheila Tallchief getting off at five on a good day, this left at least a half-hour drive before Denny would get picked up. Denny’s father, Gene, had never married Sheila, which was just as well, since he was in prison for armed robbery at the super-max facility at the Arizona State Prison in Florence, but this meant almost every dime of Sheila’s paycheck went to living expenses with nothing left over for after-school care.

But Denny’s principal, a kindly old man named Mr. Heiden, who had started his teaching career in Mohave County after returning from the Pacific theater in World War II, often did things to help his students and their families and was considered more akin to a pastor than a school administrator at times. He struck a deal with Sheila to let Denny camp out in the library after school if he helped the current librarian, a revolving parade of part-time substitute teachers, shelve returned books. Denny took to this task with relish and soon was entrusted with a key to not only the library but also the school building. So efficient was he that the temporary librarians found it easy to fudge their time cards, knowing Denny was more than happy to take on all the after-school responsibilities of keeping up the library, from writing up the overdue notices to mending broken spines with just the right amount of book tape.

Additionally, Mr. Heiden began letting Denny borrow books from his own voluminous library that he kept in the principal’s office. His shelves were filled, but Denny noticed early on that the vast majority of them were focused on World War II, particularly actions Mr. Heiden had been a part of: Kwajalein and Engebi in the Marshall Islands, Ormoc and Valencia in the Philippines, and then Okinawa, where Heiden had been wounded and shipped home.

Denny never forgot Heiden’s personal touch with his students, and after surviving his school years, he went to Arizona State University with the intention of going into teaching himself. He’d slimmed down in high school, was still no one’s idea of attractive but ended up dating a handful of girls who were as socially awkward and prone to spending Friday nights in the campus library as he was.

He fell in love for real one day with a woman named Jennifer Baker, who organized study groups in the library for the blind, herself legally blind, though she still had some limited sight in both eyes. Having been burned more than a few times before, Jennifer was dubious of Denny’s attentions at first but soon fell for the gentle young man whose most animated discussions came when describing, no,
monologuing
about what kinds of innovations he hoped to use in his future classrooms to keep even the most disaffected students engaged and interested.

They were married in a simple ceremony eight weeks after graduation. They moved to Flagstaff, as both had been offered jobs in the same school district (he at an elementary school, she as a roving administrator dealing with issues relating to the handicapped), and set up housekeeping in a tiny apartment that they decided to endure in order to save up for a down payment on a house. Three years later, one week after Denny’s twenty-fifth birthday, Jennifer announced that she was pregnant. Twelve days later, they watched on the news as the first information about the plague that struck Florida began making its way into the media, and three days after that, Jennifer was dead.

Denny had heard some people on the internet refer to the disease as the “sepelio” virus and believed, like many, that it was a technical term or referred to a specific ailment that had been identified as the cause, which meant a cure was forthcoming. In point of fact, a doctor in Cincinnati named Kuhn had dubbed it “sepelio,” the Latin for “to bury” and took the additional, colloquial meanings of “to overwhelm” or “to annihilate” in a series of initial findings he posted online eight hours before he died. As such research was in short supply and his outlined the progress of the disease (first came a fever, followed by intense difficulty breathing, as if the victim was having a heart attack that resulted in capillaries exploding in the lungs, which drowned the patient in their own blood), it was treated like gospel by the world media as they desperately sought an answer before it was too late, which is why his name stuck.

But in truth, no one had actually named the disease, and it wasn’t even a virus.

After Jennifer died, Denny waited in his apartment with his wife’s body in anticipation of the moment that he, himself, would pass. After twelve hours, he fell asleep, and then at twenty-four, he began to wonder what was going on. He let another half-day pass by and finally ventured out to commiserate with other survivors, only to find that his entire neighborhood was dead. His internet was still up and he checked on the plague’s progress, seeing that it had continued on into California and that most people in North America had died. The “most” came because there were those exceptions like the oft-mentioned, quickly legendary Frank Flores, who many believed was still alive in Toronto.

On the third day, when Denny realized that he had survived something that had taken the lives of just about the rest of the world, he broke down and cried tears of self-pity.

T
he ease with which Bones took to living off the land as a hunter and scavenger would not have surprised various handlers of his through the years, since they had detected something that seemed to suggest the shepherd was never fully domesticated in the first place. There was always a certain quickness to violence, a deep sense of territoriality, and a keen hunter’s instinct that seemed out of place with the dog’s ferocious loyalty to his handlers even when it didn’t feel earned; something that made more than one trainer wonder if the loyalty part was artificial in any way.

One such trainer of his in the Pittsburgh Police Department worked with Bones for a single day before the shepherd had apparently decided that he would defend this man with his life, something the man hadn’t observed in an enforcement dog before. Wondering if there was some sort of vestigial closeness the shepherd felt to male handlers based on his loyalty relationship with his original partner, a Doña Ana County Sheriff named Lionel Oudin, the trainer teamed Bones with a veteran female handler to see what would happen. The woman reported the same experience as the male trainer, finding Bones remarkably quick to accept and defend his trainer.

No one seemed quite sure what to make of this until a visiting ATF agent observing at Pittsburgh’s K-9 training facility remarked that he’d worked with a dog like that before.

“It’s a rarity in an animal,” the agent explained. “The dog I worked with like that had an equally unusual response in a pack situation with other dogs. It couldn’t identify and bond with a canine alpha or pack leader, so it never settled into the traces. But with humans, it was just like your dog here.”

When it was asked if that meant Bones would lack the qualities of great enforcement animal, the ATF agent replied that it “actually quite the opposite” and that Bones would make an excellent addition to the force, as he would take commands readily and execute them without fail.

“Don’t think of him like a partner in the traditional sense,” the ATF officer said. “Imagine yourself as king or shogun, and he’s your faithful knight or samurai. You want something done? You won’t get questions, and there’ll be no debate. Some dogs, even the best trained in the world, hesitate when their instinct tells them something’s dangerous and they, and possibly their partner, can lose a step. That will never be the case with this animal. He won’t question the notion that your commands are gospel and won’t think he might know better. He will simply execute.”

But Bones was no longer the same dog he was back in Pittsburgh. He’d now gone through two long periods away from having a human alpha where he’d been forced to fend for himself, hunting, gathering, and killing when necessary to stay alive. He proved an adept enough hunter on his own, though going it alone against large game, particularly ones that ran in herds, was never simple. In his encounters with timber wolves in Pennsylvania and then packs of coyotes in Los Angeles where he might have become a member of that grouping, or, potentially, that pack’s new alpha despite a difference in species, he never did. His instincts kept him solitary, so he remained on his own.