Bones Omnibus (86 page)

Recognizing the futility of his efforts but still lathered into a fury, the shepherd charged the tree trunk, jammed his snout inside, and barked furiously. The mama porcupine responded by swiveling around again and stabbing yet more quills into the dog’s face.

Yipping in pain, Bones backed up, banging the top of his head on the trunk as he did. He repeated his attempts to clear the quills with as little success as before. He kept at this for a few more minutes, at least until the pain became bearable, then crept back to the trunk. As blood and drool trickled down his face, the shepherd flopped down onto his belly to wait out his nemesis.

The previous night, he’d startled a rabbit and, after a brief chase, caught and killed the thing, so it would be some time before he would be hungry again. He could wait all day for the family of porcupines to show.

Midway through the morning, however, the sun became too much for the shepherd, and he fell asleep. When he awoke again a few scant hours later, the scent of the porcupines had somewhat faded. He rose to his feet and moved to the hollow trunk, his eyes confirming what his nose already knew: His quarry had vanished.

Sniffing around the tree, Bones picked up their scent. The trail led northeast toward the river falls. The shepherd was just about to follow in pursuit when he heard a weak voice calling from the nearby brush.

“
Help
…
me
….”

It had been a while since Bones had heard human speech, and he was momentarily curious. Only, the scent of the porcupines lingered in his quill-filled nose, luring him to their trail.

“
Please, I can hear you
,” the voice continued. “I need
help
.”

Bones turned his head and, in doing so, banged his nose into a nearby bush, tweaking his injury. He yelped and shook his head.

“Hello?” the person queried, now confused.

Bones finally picked up the scent of the human, who was upwind and covered in dirt. But slowly the smells of blood, traces of perfume, deodorant, hair products, and even marijuana drifted over to him. He followed the aromatic cornucopia a few yards from the hollow tree, finding Jess splayed out on her back. She stared up at the imposing animal in fear, her knees and hands grass stained and caked in earth as if she’d already crawled a great distance.

But as the dog lowered its head and sniffed around her body, she breathed a sigh of relief. The beast appeared to be domesticated.

“Where’s your owner, boy?” she said, having easily determined Bones’s sex from her low angle. “Can you go get them?!”

The shepherd eyed her with confusion for a moment, which was when she glimpsed the quills. She also noted that he wore no collar. Though a little boy named Ryan had put a collar on the shepherd before sending him out into the wilderness a few weeks back in the hope that strangers would recognize the dog as domesticated, Bones had torn it off in a matter of hours.

“Oh, shit. You’re alone, aren’t you?”

In response, Bones stick his nose in Jess’s face and gave her a couple of quick licks, grazing a couple of the broken quills across her cheek. She shrieked and rolled away, but the dog kept after her, thinking it a game.

“Cut it out!” she cried, shoving him away.

But the second she did this, the movement spawned a ripple effect of searing pain through her muscles and nerves. She gasped in indescribable agony, trying to hold her body perfectly still to prevent the feeling from returning. As the tormented internal shockwave ebbed into a throb of manageable misery, she exhaled and looked back at the dog.

“I could use some help on this one.”

Jess had woken up at first light and knew immediately that she was in bad shape. She was covered in blood from a myriad of contusions that began at her scalp and ended at her shoeless feet. Her mouth was numb, and a quick check with her tongue revealed a handful of chipped teeth. A gash had been opened on her left shoulder, and her arm looked like it had been painted a reddish-brown. Every breath felt like a heart attack, which Jess took to mean that she had either broken her ribs or pierced a lung, or both. Her back ached as if she’d fallen downstairs. Her legs were cut, but appeared the least damaged, though it seemed like she’d broken a couple of toes.

She was disoriented and dehydrated, and being out in the sun didn’t help. She brushed her hair aside and found it was matted with dirt and a large amount of blood that she tracked back to a cut in her forehead. She worried that she had a concussion but had no mirror to check her pupils. She’d risen to her feet and limped along a little, but couldn’t keep her balance. Crawling turned out to be the best alternative, despite the wear on her already tormented joints.

Her first move was to try to return to the road to check on Patrick. But the tree trunk and the surely wrecked Mazda were gone. There wasn’t a single sign of the accident, not even a pebble of windshield, much less the other law firm associate, which made her wonder how she escaped detection by whoever did the cleanup.

Worried that that “whoever” might soon return, she slowly spun around on her stomach and crawled off into the trees. The ground was littered with rocks and fallen branches, but as her shoes had come off when she’d been thrown through the Mazda’s windshield, every time she considered limping along on broken toes instead, she remembered why she’d chosen this method of travel.

But at one point it had just become too much, and she’d collapsed. She’d meant to rest only for a moment or two, but had swiftly sunk into unconsciousness. Hours later, it was the whine of the stricken dog that lifted her back to the land of the living.

“So, what’s your name?” Jess asked, realizing immediately that such a question suggested she was worse off than she imagined. “Well, whatever it is, we should be moving on. We need to find something to get those stickers out of your nose, and I need to get to a doctor.”

This time when she touched his neck, it was to pet him. Bones let her, making no move to give her a lick in return.

It took the awkward pair two hours to find a trail and another forty-five minutes to reach a map. Jess hoped there was some quick route that would take them directly to the ranger station at the front of the park, but it appeared that her late-night escape had driven her farther into the park rather than closer to the exit.

“There’s no way I can do ten miles on all fours,” she grimaced, eyeing the map.

At first she’d imagined that once they were on a trail, she’d simply flag down the first hiker she saw, who would go get help. It was a three-day holiday weekend, after all, and any state park within driving distance of Pittsburgh would be packed with tourists. But after an hour had gone by, a bad feeling began to take hold in the back of her head. What if, due to the slaughter at the campsites, the park had been closed as first-responders and cops cleaned up the mess?

Would they know to look for her?

Heck, were they the ones who had towed the car while she slept?

As her panic level rose, she noticed the symbol for a fire tower on the map. It was just off the trail, about half a mile north.

“There’s got to be some kind of radio in there,” she announced to Bones, who rested nearby. “Think we can make it?”

The shepherd sprang to his feet.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’” Jess smiled.

It took another hour to get to the fire tower, but on the way, Jess found a large branch that worked perfectly as a crutch. Once the tower appeared over the trees in the near distance, Jess forgot her pain and hopped along faster, Bones dashing ahead and around her, as if in encouragement.

“If you don’t have an owner, you can certainly come home with me,” she advised the dog. “I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”

This was proven again when Jess missed the unmarked path to the tower altogether. Her eyes had been so glued to her objective and the smaller trail was so unkempt that it was easy to miss.

But not for Bones.

Likely scenting off the tower’s previous tenants, Bones alerted to the trail head and circled back to Jess until she finally turned. When she saw that it really was a path, she shook her head in alarm.

“Wow. You deserve a medal.”

The narrow path through the woods brought the trees and bushes claustrophobically close to Jess and her companion. Before, they’d been on open ground in broad daylight. She’d told herself that if the monsters that killed her friends returned, she’d at least see them coming. But amongst the trees, she wasn’t so sure, and freaked herself out imagining every branch to be a hairy arm swinging for her head.

She hadn’t wanted to say, much less think, the word “Bigfoot,” but this was clearly what had come into the campsite. She generally had no opinion one way or another on the supernatural. She didn’t
really
believe in ghosts any more than she did angels, but if pressed to specify why she felt this way, she would’ve had a hard time with her answer. But Bigfoot? It wasn’t even a consideration, as she just assumed everyone knew they were made up, right?

But if presented with compelling evidence, she might’ve had just as hard a time explaining why she didn’t think they existed, either. That evidence had tried to kill her the night before, so all questions were off the table, replaced only with thoughts of survival. Any consideration as to the “how?” or “why?” or “what?” would have to wait.

“Oh, Jeeeez,” she sighed as she and Bones finally reached the fire tower.

Her relief at the sight had been replaced by horror as she counted the rungs reaching up to the tower’s metal base. She’d known a climb was in store even when she saw it from a distance, but she’d guessed it would be no more than a dozen steps. Fifty-two — she’d counted twice to make sure — seemed downright impossible.

She reached out to grip the first rung and already earned the first jolt of pain, one which spread throughout her entire body in less than a second. She gasped, but was punished by her broken ribs or collapsing lung.

“There’s just no way.”

Ignoring her remark, Bones moved past her and skittered straight up the ladder. Jess couldn’t quite believe her eyes as the dog ascended higher and higher, expecting him to lose his nerve and come back down or slip and fall. When he instead reached the top, put his head against the trapdoor, and pushed upward, she realized this was not the first time he’d made the climb. That hardly made the feat less amazing to witness, but still.

“Okay, Jess,” she said, psyching herself up. “If the dog can do it, we can do it.”

She soon discovered that going up the ladder was much easier than crawling across the ground or limping with a crutch. By placing the arch of her foot on the rung, she was able to climb without knocking into her toes. She slipped a couple of times, but this simply necessitated the removal of her socks, which she pocketed. The remaining problem, her back, ribs, and shoulder, made it near impossible for her to raise her arms, much less pull herself up. But this soon seemed not such a monstrous problem as she learned to lean her torso against the ladder and only use her arms and hands for balance.

The one time she began to fall backward, she instinctively grabbed for the ladder, squeezing it tight. The misery that followed was so great that tears streamed from her eyes and her body quaked with sobs, making the pain in her chest that much worse.

But as it had before, the agony subsided, and the throbbing numbness slowly replaced it. She waited until her breathing became shallow again and continued.

When she reached the top of the ladder, she tried to lift the trapdoor with her head as the dog had done, but it didn’t give. She momentarily panicked, fearing that it was latched from the inside. She tried it a second time and it opened right away, Bones standing beside it now, eyeing her with surprise.

He’d been asleep on top of the trapdoor.

“That offer to come live with me when this over? Consider it rescinded,” Jess snapped.

Bones moved to one side as Jess climbed the rest of the way into the tower and let the trapdoor fall back down.

“We made it!” she exclaimed, feeling safe and unexposed for the first time all day.

Four walls, a floor, a roof, and a trapdoor with a latch will do that for a person
, she thought.

The fire tower was fairly spartan, like an empty cabin where even the furniture had been removed. What remained was a table nailed into the floor on the west wall of the tower, with a wooden rolling chair, its cushion long since frayed away into nothing, sitting under it. Windows making up the top half of the walls provided a wraparound view of the entire park. In any other circumstance, Jess would have found it almost unbearably beautiful. What looked like an emergency escape ladder, made of yellow nylon rope and plastic rungs, hung from hooks on the ceiling. As Jess stared at it, she realized that, stretched out, it would be nowhere near long enough to reach the forest floor below. That’s when she saw the ceiling panel alongside it and realized it allowed access to the tower roof.

The only place in the tower where the windows were obscured was in one corner where what Jess first took to be a large wardrobe stood. Only when she wheeled herself over to it in the rolling chair and opened the door did she see that it was a cramped chemical toilet, like the kind found on construction sites, with no running water, only a dispenser of evaporating hand sanitizer on the wall.

But across from the toilet was a large wooden chest painted green with a metal first aid kit resting on top of it.

“Oh, thank Christ,” Jess exhaled.

She opened the first aid kit, finding it fully stocked with Band-aids, packets of painkillers, sunscreen, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a tube of Neosporin. She wheeled this away from the tiny bathroom and came back for the chest. When she opened it, she found four large liter bottles of water. But even better, under the water was a treasure trove of unopened cases of trail mix, energy bars, and beef jerky, alongside large sealed packs of dried mangoes, banana chips, nuts, and even potato chips.

“This isn’t for you, is it?” she asked the German shepherd, who had come over to inspect the contents of the chest. “Well, take your pick.”