Bones Omnibus (76 page)

“We ran into a problem with a couple of aggressive hoarders outside Cameron who fired a couple of shots in the air to show us how tough they were,” Norman said. “It was a silly reaction. We wanted to say, ‘Hey, bet we know something you don’t know’ and then show that we were Ypandes, too, but everybody’s got to make their own way through this, you know? So the scouting party came back and said that you guys had these sheets out the windows here and didn’t seem to be looking for trouble.”

Denny nodded. The sheets now had writing on them, a massive painted message in English and Athabascan (Apache) that both said the same thing: “You are welcome,” though the Apache phrase suggested something greater. Not just “you’re welcome here,” but carried the implication that if you did come in, you would also be protected, almost like the Pashtun notion of nanawatai.

“We were happy to know there were more survivors but also glad that we might have access to water and more permanent shelter after being on the road for a time,” Norman said, slowing his narrative as if trying to make sure he had the details right. “When the attack came, we were packing up our supplies and loading the trucks. We weren’t in any real hurry as, after all, we thought we had reached our destination. Then somebody shouted. I don’t know who. I was with my sister, and we were packing her son in the truck we’d been using. I thought it was a fight or somebody hurt themselves on their truck or maybe spotted somebody else on the road. But then we saw the dogs, and they were coming fast. I didn’t think. I shoved my sister inside the truck next to her boy and slammed the door.

“Anyway, the dogs were hunting us like any kind of pack predator moving on a herd. They had us circled and were just picking us off, a few dogs coming in at a time in small groups, all coordinated against one person at a time. They were organized, as if they were lions more than dogs. It was like something on the Discovery Channel, but instead of going after the young or old or weak or sick, there didn’t seem to be a plan. We had a few guns, but it took a minute or two for people to react. We still thought we were looking at dogs. One of the biggest guys in our group was laughing his ass off as one of the dogs bit his arm because it was this little bitty thing. He didn’t see that there were three others behind him.”

Norman shook his head, frustrated in hindsight.

“We kept thinking we could scare them off. People were honking horns, waving towels and T-shirts, firing guns into the air like they were sheep, but it did nothing. The dogs kept coming, more and more and more of them. Every time we thought we’d seen all of them, another dozen or so would show up to block our escape. I’ve only ever seen crows do that. A group of crows will harass and herd a hawk away from their nests that way, driving the bird of prey to a stand of trees where four more crows are waiting to join the chase, just to make the hawk wonder if there are crows at every turn. The dogs were doing it like this.

“I’d say it took us a whole five minutes to wake up to the situation, but twenty people were already dead. By the time we started fighting them with guns, we’d already lost the fight and the dogs were on the run, having done the damage they’d set out to do. We knew they’d be back, so we took off, even though we didn’t have enough room in the trucks for the dead.”

Norman looked down for a moment and exhaled a long troubled breath before he finished up. “When I got back to my own truck, once it was obvious things had gotten completely out of hand, I saw that the front windshield had been completely smashed in and knew I wouldn’t be seeing my sister or nephew again. You know what kind of glass they use in a truck windshield? Big heavy shit, shatter-proof. It’s supposed to withstand just about anything. Tell me you think a dog, a fuckin’
dog
, is supposed to get through that.”

Norman finished his story and looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. Denny didn’t have any words, so he simply reached out and put his hand on Norman’s hands. “I’m really sorry.”

The man started shaking, and Denny realized that he was crying.

Back at the city limits, Bones finished his meal and turned towards the city of Flagstaff still a few hours before the dawn. He had picked up the dog pack’s scent and knew they were heading north, though the smell of exhaust told him that the most recent human travelers on the road had gone south. Bones turned to follow the humans’ trail, which was made easier by the fact that the drivers had been going fast, just choking out the fumes, which lingered heavy in the air.

But as soon as Bones entered the city, the stench was almost entirely muffled by the overwhelming stench of corpses still left unburied in city whose population had, at one time, been over 60,000. The worst was likely over, the organs having long since decomposed, with the muscles coming next and then the hair and skin beginning their long decline into dust, but the stink had infected the walls and carpets and ceilings of where the person died, and without so much as an open window, the odor took weeks to slowly air out. For the average human nose, this smell wouldn’t be much more than that of passing a garbage dump with its mountains of decaying food, plant waste, and other organic material. But the shepherd’s nose picked up everything else as well, the uncovered waste and rotting sewage that lay just under the smell of tens of thousands of unburied carcasses.

Through all of this, though, Bones could still detect the unmistakable scent of the living. It was faint, like a faraway radio signal near impossible to locate on the dial, but the shepherd kept at it, determined to follow it to its source.

He turned on West Route 66 Drive, and the distant smell suddenly got stronger until he was finally able to zero in on its location, the large, fence-ringed structure of the Flagstaff Sheraton. As Bones got closer to the front fence, he could see two men with guns standing at the gate but could also smell the blood of the dying. An instinct told him to hold back, so he followed the fence around to the back from a few dozen yards away to get the lay of the land. He didn’t smell any of the dogs, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

At the rear of the building, Bones caught the twin scents of the hotel’s outdoor latrines and then a large garbage pit that had been dug just on the other side of the back fence. The pit itself was twenty feet by twenty feet and an impressive thirty-five feet straight down. Though it was within the fenced-in grounds of the hotel compound, a second, three-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire had been erected around it as well. Trash was then dumped in, but securely tied in paper bags that were then periodically covered with dirt.

Bones, who was trained in such things, quickly scaled the chain-link fence and hopped into the yard before moving over to the pit. It took him less than a minute to dig under the three-foot fence, squeezing through the tight hole, and then bounded down the slanted pit wall to the piles of trash.

When he reached the first bag, he tore it open to get at the fish smell he had detected, only to find a couple of empty tuna and sardine cans that were already so clean it seemed they had been washed before being thrown away. Bones licked the last remnants of oil from the cans and then moved on, hardly sated. He tore through the rest of the accessible bags and found only more of the same, hardly enough to satisfy the hungry dog.

After fruitlessly wandering through the now strewn-about trash for a few more minutes, Bones discovered a dirt-covered corner of the pit out of the way from the rising sun and settled in to take a nap.

“See? Told you we found a dog. It’s right there.”

Bones opened his eyes and looked up to see a handful of people looking down at him in the trash pit. The sun was now up, but the shepherd was still very much in the shadows of a far corner of the pit.

“I saw the hole under the fence but didn’t think whatever dug it would still be there,” the youngest man of the group, a twelve-year-old kid named Joseph was saying. “Then I saw the dog.”

Denny, who held a rifle, stared at the animal before raising the gun and lining the shepherd up in his sights. He had never killed anything before and had only recently become proficient with a gun, but he knew what he was willing to do to preserve the Flagstaff group. This was a dog, and Norman’s words about the great suffering that came from underestimating the species were already ringing in his ears.

“Might be others around,” Denny said to another of the recent arrivals, a fifty-something fellow named Gutierrez. “Why don’t you get Joseph and the others inside?”

Gutierrez nodded and the group wandered back in, except for Carrie.

“Where’s the rest of the pack?” Carrie said. “This one looks pretty harmless.”

“Yeah, but we don’t know what he’s been through or if this is some kind of trick. You heard what they were saying. The dogs were doing all kinds of things to draw people out.”

“Yeah, but this guy? Look at him. Hardly looks like a killer.”

As if on cue, Bones rose to his feet and began trotting over to where Denny and Carrie stood. Finding a path up to the fence line (cut into the sides to allow those who dug it easy access to the pit floor), Bones wandered up to the surface, tongue hanging out as he stretched a little. He felt a real stiffness in his bones, a likely result of the coldness of the ground he had settled onto.

Though he detected no threat from the shepherd, Denny kept the gun on Bones as he continued his ascent. When the dog reached the fence, he began sniffing around the air, inhaling the scent of the two closest humans. Dissatisfied, he then stuck his nose through the fence, obviously seeking an extended hand.

“See? He’s just a dog,” Carrie said. As if to prove her point, she held out her hand, and Bones first sniffed it and then gave it a couple of quick licks. Denny remained skeptical.

“Is that blood on his snout?” Denny asked, eyeing the dog’s mouth.

Carrie looked but shrugged. “Could be from a mouse, Denny. He’s not acting like a killer. He’s acting like somebody’s pet.”

That’s when Denny finally noticed Bones’s frayed collar. There was barely anything left of it, but Denny could see that it at least appeared military. He lowered the gun and squatted down to get a better look as Bones edged closer to sniff the young man. Denny raised his hands to show that he meant no harm, let Bones give him a quick lick, and then reached through the fence and turned over the collar. Immediately, he saw that it showed not only the shepherd’s name but also that he had been attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry, a holdover from when the animal had been utilized as a cadaver dog in the ruins of Los Angeles.

“Jesus, he’s some kind of military dog, maybe worked with the MPs,” Denny said. “His name is ‘Bones.’”

Upon hearing his name, Bones stood upright and eyed Danny.

“That’s morbid,” Carrie scoffed.

“If we bring him in, we’ll upset a lot of people,” Denny said. “I think we have to shoot him.”

“If there’s some kind of feral dog pack out there capable of sneaking up on even large groups of people in broad daylight, don’t you think having a dog around might be useful?”

Denny had, in fact, thought of that as he ran through what he might say to Lester about why a dog, particularly a German shepherd that had some military experience in its background, would be a good addition to their group. But as soon as Carrie said it, he realized that he didn’t want to have to make excuses. The truth was he wanted to keep this dog because he didn’t want to kill it. After all that had happened, the idea was downright abhorrent to him. He understood the need for survival and had certainly taken part in hunts with the other Flagstaff survivors into the surrounding desert, but pointing a rifle through the fence to shoot a defenseless animal wasn’t something life had prepared him to do.

“All right,” Denny said to Carrie, but then turned to the shepherd. “Don’t make me regret this.”

T
here was another reason Denny wanted to save the dog, but it wasn’t something he found easy to articulate. He knew something of the history of the Ypandes-Apache people, despite having grown up with a mother and grandparents who had about as little interest in imparting such information to the young man as possible. Instead, he found the answers in books, and one of the things he learned early on was the relationship between the Apache and dogs.

There was a school of thought that suggested dogs would have been marginalized, possibly even extinct, if it wasn’t for the establishment of domestication ties between humans and canines, likely during Neanderthal times. Dogs became hunting companions and watch animals while humans protected and fed them as an essential part of the tribe. This continued as both species evolved through the millennia and dogs were eventually brought over the land bridge that had once existed over the Bering Strait, known to native locals as Imakpik, and settled across North America.

Dogs quickly became an essential part of several Native American cultures, used by nomadic tribes to haul things just as mules or horses would later be. The dog was a member of the family, and some tribes caught wolves to crossbreed with their dogs in order to make them more effective for hunting. Dogs ate with their masters at every meal, dogs were part of many Indian creation myths, and dogs were given some of the same burial rituals and rites as their human counterparts.

For the Apache, dogs were as important to the tribe as they were to several others in the American Southwest, but it was the detail about the tribes bringing them across what had come to be known as Beringia that had Denny thinking these days.

The Ypandes-Apache tribe was not known for having participated in famous battles or sired chiefs renowned for their abilities as killers or diplomats, but in the late twentieth century, something had been discovered about the Ypandes that put them on the map regardless. Their language was very distinct, different from many of the others in the area, and had sparked some interesting comparative research that had identified similarities between it, some early dialects of Korean (Proto-Korean/Buyeo), and then a Laplander language spoken in the Arctic nether regions of Finland. Blood tests were taken and genetic testing done that showed a common ancestry shared among the three ethnicities. Scientists postulated that during the last Ice Age, which sent several of the northern tribes south, a group of the northern tribesmen headed east, with a large group breaking off and going south when they reached Siberia to end up in the Korean peninsula, while the others continued on into North America, similar to how many believed the Altaic language groups were proliferated. In both cases, the various clans intermingled (read: interbred) with others, producing larger clans, but traces of the blood line survived to the modern day.