Bones Omnibus (81 page)

“How they’d get in?” cried Lester as he made his way out of the hotel, still barefoot but carrying a pump-action shotgun.

“Hell if I know,” called Denny. “But there are a lot of them!”

That’s when Denny saw a number of the dogs racing inside the hotel itself. “Carrie,” he whispered.

Bones caught a glimpse of Denny hurrying back into the building from the corner of his eye and wheeled around to follow, springing away from one fight to get into another.

Denny entered the building and just realized that the screams he’d been hearing for the last minute or so weren’t solely contained to the exterior of the building. There were dogs in the lobby, dogs on the stairs and in the offices, and, Denny had to assume, dogs wherever Carrie was. He slammed a fresh magazine into the breech of his rifle and was halfway to the stairs when he heard Carrie’s voice calling from the kitchen.

“Denny!!! DENNY!!!”

Bones caught sight of Denny as he made his way back towards the kitchen and went to follow even though several dogs were already close at his heels. Lester and another of the survivors were following in after them, shooting their guns at the dogs, but Bones also felt the hot breath of the bullets as they whizzed by overhead, chips of plaster splintering out of the walls upon impact.

When Denny got to the kitchen door, he found it blockaded but managed to push his way through, only to see a gun pointed at his face. “Carrie, it’s me!! Don’t shoot!”

He stumbled the rest of the way in and saw that Carrie, Lucille, and a couple of others had locked themselves in with the still caged ridgeback who, detecting the members of her pack, was bounding about in her cage. Denny quickly went to re-blockade the door but then saw Bones coming, too, and allowed the shepherd in before slamming the heavy kitchen tables Carrie and Lucille were using as barriers back in place in front of the door.

“What about the ballroom entrance?” Denny asked.

“Closed that one off, too,” Carrie said. “There’s more than two hundred dogs out there. I looked out the window. I think there’s at least twice that.”

“They’re just tearing through everybody out there,” Denny said, catching his breath. “And now they’re inside.”

As the humans discussed their next move, Bones moved over to the ridgeback and saw that she was actually substantially better. She calmed herself for a moment and exchanged a quick couple of sniffs with Bones, who sat down next to her. The shepherd sniffed at her wound and gave it a few licks, though his tongue could barely reach through the bars.

Denny watched all this, knew the time had come but was reluctant to act.

“How is this supposed to work?” Carrie asked. “We just take her out of her cage and kind of hope she doesn’t tear us to pieces?”

“I have no idea,” Denny said as he walked over to the cage.

Upon seeing the man approach, the ridgeback immediately jumped to her feet and bared her teeth at Denny, growling low. As if hearing their alpha’s distress, the sound of the pack scratching and beating on the kitchen door only got louder.

“Easy, girl,” Denny said, but the ridgeback only backed up and lowered her head, increasing her look of ferocity.

“Shit,” Denny muttered, the memory of an attack at the hands of this dog still fresh in his mind.

That’s when the ridgeback, cage or no cage, flung itself forward at the bars as if figuring they would give way under her assault, and she was almost right. The cage rocked forward as she hit the metal, and the hinges of the cage door buckled with the vicious hit. Denny did a quick calculation and decided it would only take two more strikes like that for the ridgeback to break through.

“Okay, so maybe this was a stupid idea,” Denny admitted as he raised his rifle and prepared to shoot the ridgeback.

The caged dog moved to the back of her pen to launch a second attack, but it was at that moment that Bones came around and stood in front of Denny. Just as the ridgeback was about to spring, Bones began barking like a demon. He bared his teeth, which could plainly be seen under his curled lips throughout his vocal assault. The ridgeback halted her attack but then began barking back at Bones and then growling at Denny.

That’s when Bones did something that no one in the room expected. He suddenly
stopped
barking, yawned, and lay down at Denny’s feet. The ridgeback continued barking, but Bones didn’t seem to give a shit. His eyes were still on the ridgeback, but his head was now resting on his front paws. Outside, the rest of the pack continued their angry cacophonous roar, punctuated by the occasional blast of gunfire or human scream.

But Bones just lay there. There was a break in the ridgeback’s vocal assault, and that was when Bones made a small woofing sound. The ridgeback looked as if it might start snarling all over again, but then it didn’t.

After a moment of quiet, Carrie looked over at Denny with a questioning gaze.

“Fuck if I know,” Denny said.

Slowly, the ridgeback began moving towards Bones. The shepherd held back for a second but then slipped forward a little bit as well. When the ridgeback’s nose reached the cage door, Bones took the last step and touched his nose to the other dog’s nose. Then the ridgeback lay down, too.

Denny looked at this and then up to the ceiling. He thought that if they could climb up onto the stove, they could reach the crawlspace between floors and get into the higher levels of the building from there. He hastily suggested this to the others, and though they weren’t sure of his plan, they agreed that the kitchen was soon to evaporate as an option, so they had to go somewhere. The dogs in the hallway were already starting to claw through the door, and their combined weight would easily push aside their hastily stacked kitchen equipment.

“Let’s do it,” nodded Lucille as if they had simply decided on which color to paint a bathroom.

With a little bit of help from each other, the assembled group climbed up and out of the kitchen, with Denny being the last to go. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the ridgeback the entire time but now he moved towards her cage. She leaped to her feet and began snarling at him, but he didn’t flinch. He just kept staring at her, reached his hand down to the door latch, and unhooked it. He then turned his back on her and walked over to the stove, hearing Bones getting to his feet to defend him as the ridgeback nosed her way out of the cage.

Denny didn’t take his time, but he didn’t run, either. He was no prey to be run down, and he had the added confidence of a pistol in his hand that had been handed off by one of the others who had gathered in the kitchen with Carrie and Lucille.

As soon as he was in the ceiling, he looked back down at Bones to see the shepherd staring straight back up at him. Denny knew Bones was sick and wondered if this was the last time he’d ever see the animal that had saved his ass a couple of times now. He didn’t think the ridgeback or the others of the pack would kill him, but he didn’t think Bones’s own body would let him see many more days.

“Thanks, Bones,” Denny said to the dog. “Thanks,” he said again, then disappeared after Carrie and the others.

T
hrough a couple of signals and more than a few yells, Denny, Carrie, and the others directed the survivors of the pack attack up to their barricaded hideout on the top floor of the hotel. It had been a controversial idea, but Carrie suggested lighting controlled fires in barrels at the top of the stairwells, utilizing trash cans and laundry bins to block the paths of the dogs. After bashing out a few holes in the ceiling and in various windows to allow the smoke to ventilate, Denny set the fires himself, and the dogs did steer clear.

It turned out there were more survivors of the assault than they had initially believed. Lester had led several folks out of the compound, around the back, and to the trucks, where they took off, circling the grounds and firing at the pack to draw them away from the hotel and back into the city, though this meant leaving many wounded behind.

Denny knew this decision must’ve killed Lester, knowing how much he cared about the survivors inside the hotel, and it had been his idea to get on the roof with some blankets at dawn to do a Warner Brothers cartoon version of an Indian smoke signal to communicate to the others that some had made it.

By then, the pack had receded, and Lester and the others returned mid-morning, joining Denny on the top floor of the hotel after a careful reconnoiter up the stairwells. Over the next few days, small, heavily armed groups were sent downstairs, where doors were nailed shut, entrances and exits sealed, and supplies brought back up, but no one ventured outside and the groups only stayed down in the building for an hour or less at a time, generally during the heat of the day.

It was a full week before they stepped out onto the grounds.

On the seventh day, Lester and Denny led a small group out to the trucks to bring up ammunition that had been left in Denny’s SUV. When nothing happened, when there wasn’t so much as a single dog sighting, a slightly larger group composed of an armed escort and the strongest of the survivors went out to bury the dead in the same plot of ground just outside the gate, where those who had only lived long enough to reach the hotel after the massacre of the reservationists were buried.

The next day, a day Denny told Carrie “felt like a Monday” even though nobody except Lester really kept track of the calendar, the survivors moved back downstairs and began repairing the damage to their various “public works projects” in an attempt to pick up from where they left off. They were still very much mourning the recent dead but were similarly determined to move forward.

That afternoon, Lester, Denny, and a couple of others climbed into a truck and went on a scout of the city.

Again, no dogs.

Instead, they found a small herd of deer in Thorpe Park eating the grass, about fourteen all told. The men readied their rifles, aimed, and killed the entire herd. The deer were all does and what looked like a handful of juveniles born in the spring, and had barely turned to run when they were cut down.

The men brought the hunt back to the hotel, skinned and butchered the deer, prepared the pelts for tanning, and cooked the meat over three great fires in the courtyard. Soon, the scent of roasting venison was all anyone in the hotel could smell, a rich, inviting aroma that eased its way through the windows and walls of the building but also rode the warm evening updrafts out and over the surrounding neighborhood.

Denny saw the first dog about forty-five minutes after the meat had been placed over the flames. It was one of the many wolf hybrids that were a part of the pack, snowy white fur with a handful of black patches dotting its haunches and coloring its snout and ears. Even in the dim light, Denny could make out the paleness of its eyes.

Seeing the same thing, Lester rose to retrieve his rifle, but Denny held up his hand. “Give it a minute. No sudden moves.”

Lester nodded and sat back down by the fire, using a broom handle swaddled in towels soaked with makeshift barbecue sauce (more tomato paste than anything) to baste the meat as it cooked. Another minute passed, and the survivors began to see more dogs. When the meat was deemed ready and taken off the fire a few minutes later, there were now at least a hundred dogs outside the fence line.

The next part, Denny knew, would be tricky.

Donning gloves, he collected half the roasted, still warm meat in a wheeled laundry tub and then wheeled it over to the fence. With Joseph’s help and a couple of riflemen waiting in the shadows, Denny tossed large chunks of their kill over the fence to the dogs. At first, the dogs flinched back as if under attack, but quickly reversed gears and tentatively approached the inviting meat. It didn’t take long before the meat drew more and more dogs out from the surrounding area to the human-made feast.

Denny waited a little while, knowing that the meat would hardly be enough for the dogs, and then settled into a large communal meal with the other survivors. Some were so nervous that they cried as they ate. One, from the Jicarilla reservation, prayed rather than ate. As the dogs finished their meat, a couple of fights breaking out here and there over scraps, they all pressed close to the fence, but none attempted to come in.

When the humans were done eating, there was plenty of meat left, and Denny loaded up the laundry tub a second time, rolled it to the front gate, and tossed it over the fence. The dogs dove in and ate the leftovers. When the meat was done, the dogs disappeared again.

As Denny watched them go, he realized that he had seen no sign of either Bones or the ridgeback.

A few more days went by, and when a hunting party was sent out to “requisition” deer, an animal to be found in some abundance in the silent city often seen grazing on subdivision front lawns instead of eking out an existence in the nearby deserts and valleys, the dogs appeared, too, trotting alongside the vehicles. They were obviously allying themselves with the hunters but kept at least a block away.

In cases like these, Denny had a standing order. Half the kill goes to the dogs.

Day after day, this went smoothly. The dogs would sometimes even chase the herd towards the riflemen, coming by their half of the prize honestly.

It was on one of these outings that Denny finally saw the ridgeback again, right at the head of her pack. Her injury looked well on its way to being healed, leaving behind a healthy-sized scar but nothing more. Still, Denny had hoped to see Bones with her, but the shepherd was nowhere to be seen.

It was only three days after that when he was listening to the stories of a group of incoming survivors that he learned where Bones had gone.

“Yeah, we saw dog packs up in Denver, big, crazy fuckers going after everybody, but we got outta there,” a Colorado woman, Ines, was saying. “They were like wolves. Before coming here, we dropped south into New Mexico and took the I-10 west. Saw more dog packs down there but managed to avoid them. Didn’t see any more dogs until we were camping one night right near the border, and a lone German shepherd showed up at our campfire, some kind of military collar. He stayed a little out of sight, but we threw him some food and soon he got close. He stayed near the trucks that night and when some wolves showed up, he barked like hell. Earned his keep as far as we were concerned.”