Bones Omnibus (84 page)

“Wait, you didn’t have to put in stakes since you’re on the slab,” Ruthie interjected. “I think Jess won.”

Jess was surprised that Ruthie had her back over her boyfriend, but then heard the hint of jealousy over their little competition.

“Oh, whatever,” Jess conceded. “Given how bad his team is about to lose the Reyes case, he could probably use the victory.”

Ruthie laughed as Dan scoffed. But then all three caught a familiar sweet scent on the air.

“What?” Patrick asked, puffing on a newly rolled joint. “You’re telling me you’re not going to want some of this later?”

In the end, it took an hour for Patrick to erect his tent, which Jess took for metaphor, and this was even with Dan’s help. By then, a fire crackled in the fire pit, and Ruthie had already started a second round of veggie burgers.

“Mmm, don’t these smell good?” she taunted Patrick, who’d already expressed his dismay at the absence of real meat.

“Come on, Ruthie,” Patrick whined. “That can’t be
all
you brought?”

Ruthie just shrugged as Jess passed her another hamburger bun.

“How many emails did I send around this week, asking you guys to send in any special food requests? And how many did you reply to? And of course, you could’ve brought your own food. But you’d rather complain.”

This shut Patrick up for a while. A few minutes after Ruthie cut him down to size, however, the smell of another joint wafted over to the fire. This time when Patrick asked if anybody wanted some, the other three campers partook.

Four hits in, Jess remembered why she didn’t smoke marijuana. Rather than offer a relaxing high, it made her melancholy, like a sorority girl after two glasses of red wine. As happened so often these days, this made her think of Scott and all that gone wrong.

There’d been a plan, and it had gone swimmingly. They’d gotten together freshman year of undergrad at Drexel and stayed together all four years. They ended up at Penn State for law school, and though there had been rough patches, mostly born of the intense pressure and stress exacted by the elite and highly competitive program, they made it all the way to graduation then, too. Even better, they’d both accepted coveted summer associate positions at Jankis, Leonard, Whitehead, and Clarke in Pittsburgh the summer before their senior year and had been among the twenty who’d received offers at season’s end. They were going to finish up at Penn, find a place in Pittsburgh, study for the bar, then start at Jankis, Leonard as first-years when they passed.

After that? A decade of hard work, a hoped-for move from an apartment to a house, the inevitable wedding, a hoped-for partnership, maybe kids, and the building of a beautiful life.

But soon after they started at the firm, something changed.

On their first case, Scott, Jess, and several other first-years were tasked with sifting through thousands of boxes of medical files in a documents warehouse. A group of clever doctors had determined how to over-bill for simple procedures by tricking the very computer system meant to root out such malfeasance. And it had worked for going on thirteen years before, unbeknownst to the users, the system was updated by the insurance company and suddenly, every instance of fraud, however minor, was illuminated like a slaughtered sheep on a bed of snow.

Jankis, Leonard took the case knowing that the discovery period would likely be longer than a year and would require a great deal of work done by hand.

Which is precisely why they took it.

“We’re all happy now because we just started at a big prestigious firm and are making six figures for the first times in our lives,” Scott had announced to the group during a fifteen-minute lunch break (brought in, of course, as there was no time to go to a restaurant), three weeks into the project. “But if you break down how many hours we’re putting in on this case, we’re making $18.25 an hour. The firm is billing the client over $100
per associate
. Let’s say we’re good for $20 apiece in overhead costs — that’s still $60 in pure profit for the firm. Who pockets that? The partners, still riding their fat contracts, those fat contracts they signed in the eighties. And they’ve already told us it’s eight years before anyone here will even be considered for a junior partnership, which means twice that or longer for partner. They expect us to quit and be replaced by a fresh crop next year. This is a sweat shop designed to weed out any non–true believers. We drank the Kool-Aid.”

At the time, Jess had thought Scott was simply venting his frustration, the twelve- to fourteen-hour days getting to him. But that Sunday, while they worked across the table from each other at a breakfast place near their apartment, Scott put the file he was going over back into his backpack, sipped his coffee, and smiled for the first time in days.

“I’m going to quit,” he said.

“What’re you talking about?” Jess scoffed. “We knew it was going to be hard. Let the other people quit.”

But the look on Scott’s face told her his decision was final. The conversation devolved from there, Scott reiterating how this wasn’t why he’d gotten into law, Jess telling him that the firm was a means to an end, the thing that would allow them the security and lifestyle they wanted.

“In a time when everybody else we went to high school or college with is just struggling to find work or figure out what to do with their liberal arts degree, we’re in the catbird seat.”

“It’s just not what I want out of life,” Scott had replied.

Their relationship ended in that moment, but both parties lived on in denial for the next couple of months, seldom seeing one another except late at night or for a few hours on weekends. Scott tried out the nonprofit sector but soon realized this wasn’t what he was looking for, either. Then, after they hadn’t slept together for a good month, he announced that he’d met someone, or more accurately, reconnected with someone from his old high school online, and he was going back to Philadelphia to take a job at her father’s lumberyard in Berwyn.

Even though he suggested he’d be coming back, Jess knew this was a permanent change. Six weeks later, when he called about driving out to Pittsburgh to pick up his things and maybe “have lunch,” Jess made sure it fell on a date where she’d be working and then hired a moving company to box up all of his things so he’d only spend a minimal amount of time in their old place.

When she’d informed him of this via email, he wrote back thanking her and saying that “Laura” would be coming out with him to help load the U-Haul, so he thought they’d be in and out in less than an hour.

Whether the mention of the girl he’d so suddenly abandoned her for was simply informational or a parting shot, Jess wasn’t sure. She hadn’t responded to the email and didn’t hear from him again. Only when she came home one Friday night and the boxes that had been stacked in the hall and living room, as well as a few pieces of furniture, were suddenly gone did she realize he hadn’t even confirmed his move-out date.

Rather than bask in the apartment, which suddenly felt twice as big with all the new empty space, she turned on heel, drove to a coworker’s birthday party at a bar downtown despite having earlier declined the invitation, and hooked up with a married junior partner from the Denver office in town for business, staying the night in his hotel room.

Anything to avoid spending that first night in the emptied-out apartment alone.

This was ten months ago. Since then, Jess had thrown herself into her work, rocketed her billable hours into the stratosphere by working long hours during the week and on weekends, and tried to take on only projects that would matter during her every-six-months performance review. She’d passed her first one with a “leading the pack” designation, a consulting firm’s version of an A, which was somehow better than the “ahead of the curve” grade given to almost everyone else, and she’d celebrated by embarking on a six-week affair with a newly divorced senior partner. Contrary to most men she’d encountered, this one was loath for anyone at the firm to find out about their relationship, likely for fear he’d be seen as jeopardizing the firm’s financial position by leaving it open to a potential harassment lawsuit, and this was just fine with Jess. When she’d ended it a month and a half later, mostly due to lack of sleep and its impact on her work, he’d looked downright relieved.

But now, taking yet another drag on Patrick’s joint as she warmed herself by a fire instead of in the arms of her one-time “true love,” she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d made a grave error in judgment by allowing Scott to slip away so easily.

“Are you going to take a hit or just let it burn all the way down?”

Jess snapped out of her ruminations long enough to pass the joint to Ruthie.

“Sorry,” Jess mumbled, reaching for her bottle of water.

The winds had picked up, blowing through the tops of the trees with even greater ferocity. As Jess glanced through the nearby trees, she could see the flicker of far-off campfires that illuminated only those closest to the flames. All else was cast in darkness.

“When we were kids, I remember going camping with the Boy Scouts in parks just like this and discovering you could only see firelight from other campsites at night,” Patrick slurred, his half-shut eyes suggesting he was stoned beyond recognition. “Figuring if we could see them, they could see
us
, so we’d get naked and see who could jump over the fire pit. I singed a few ass and ball hairs then.”

“Christ, Patrick,” Dan sighed, even as he stifled a laugh.

“It was worth it the next morning. Our troop would be hiking, swimming, or just hanging out, and every other camper came by, giving us dirty looks. There was this one Scout Camp alongside some kind of girl’s camp, maybe cheerleading. Anyway, we did that there, too, but they called the cops. They couldn’t bust us because they couldn’t identify us off our asses alone. I mean, we were a bunch of skinny teen boys. So the Scoutmasters picked out the only troublemakers on their collective radar and sent them home.”

“Let me guess,” Ruthie snarked. “It was this grave injustice that sent you into law?”

“Not at all!” Patrick shook his head. “That night, all the girls did the same thing over their campfires, and we started signaling back at ours. Eventually, a rendezvous was arranged, and we had, like, this total orgy in the woods.”

Patrick chuckled at the memory, but Jess shook her head.

“I call bullshit on that story. Not that you dumb-ass guys didn’t jump over the fires, but that the girls did it the next night. Or that you guys had an orgy.”

Ruthie fell silent as Dan sent Jess a funny look. Patrick took Jess’s measure for a moment and then shrugged.

“You can think whatever you want to think,” he sniffed, unconvincingly. “I know what happened. Just ’cause you wouldn’t be up for that kind of adventure….”

“All right, all right,” Dan cut in, waving his hand. “Let’s take two steps back, okay?”

Jess was about to chide Dan, telling him she could fight her own battles, when something appeared in her peripheral vision. There was a flurry of movement beside one of the campfires to the northwest of their site. As Jess peered through the trees, she could just make out several large shapes racing in front of the blaze. This was followed by distant screams.

“Wait, what was that?” Ruthie asked, suddenly alert.

“Something’s going on over there!” Jess said, leaping to her feet.

But the words were barely out her mouth before there was a great crash and the fire was doused, as if by a fallen tree.

“Holy shit!” Patrick exclaimed. “What was
that
about?”

“Over there!” cried Ruthie.

Everyone turned in time to see the same rush of silhouettes pass another campfire, this one closer by, followed by more screams. Again there was a large crash as a tree trunk snapped from its base and collapsed on the fire, extinguishing it in seconds.

“Get in the car!” Dan yelled, grabbing for his keys. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Of course, Jess knew he was right, but in her stoned condition, she lost a step, worrying that they should put out their own fire first. She glanced between the campsite’s fire pit and Dan’s Mazda, as if unable to comprehend which was the more urgent move.

“Come on, Jess!” Ruthie yelled.

As she said this, the surrounding forest came alive. Though the trees had been swaying in the wind, they now quaked and shuddered, as if an earthmover was bashing them aside as it neared the campsite. Two more neighboring campfires were snuffed out by trees as cries of anguish echoed through the night.

Something finally clicked in Jess’s head, and she broke for the car. She had only a couple dozen feet of ground to cover, but before she could reach the vehicle, a giant figure lumbered out of the woods, grabbed Ruthie, and lifted her off her feet.

The beast was easily nine or teen feet tall, covered in stringy, matted hair, though the color was hard to discern in the low light. At first glance, it could be mistaken for a bear standing on its hind legs. Only, it had long humanoid legs and arms. Instead of a bear-like snout, its nose was pushed in like a pug. It had wolf-like ears peeking out from behind the shaggy mass of hair hanging from its head, but its eyes were completely human.

And at the end of its feet and hands were great claws, a point driven home by the blood pouring from each currently driven into Ruthie’s scalp as she was held aloft, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Ruthie!” Dan roared, his eyes filling with terror.

A second monster emerged from the woods and grabbed at Ruthie. It caught hold of her feet, and a savage game of tug-of-war began. As Ruthie’s shrieks rose to an inhuman octave, her body was torn in two like a piñata struck in the middle. As her entrails rained down onto the campsite, the creature with her legs whipped them over its head as it whooped in victory.

Jess stared into Ruthie’s eyes as the life drained from them and her pupils rolled up into her head. Jess forced herself to turn away and climb into the front passenger-side seat of Dan’s car. He threw himself in next to her as Patrick leaped into the back seat. The beasts were now coming out of the woods from every direction, tearing at the nearby trees as if to bring them down upon the car.