Bones Omnibus (91 page)

Jess eyed the woman with incredulity, but saw only a gentle earnestness in the woman’s eyes as she stared back, definitive proof that she was completely insane.

“May I continue?” the old woman asked.

“By all means,” Jess replied evenly.

“Have either of you ever had an abortion?”

“No,” said Jess.

“Y…yes,” Christy replied.

“When?”

“When I was seventeen,” Christy admitted, though she was staring at the ground.

“Was it healthy?”

“I don’t know. I terminated it when it was still in the first trimester.”

“Were there complications during the abortion?”

“Not that I remember.”

This seemed to satisfy the old woman, even please her.

“I know that couldn’t have been easy to admit, but I appreciate your candor,” she said. She then plucked a small blue plastic case from her pocket. “Does this belong to one of you?”

“Not me,” Jess said, recognizing it as a birth control pill case.

“You don’t use birth control?” the old woman asked.

“I’ve had a violent reaction to every type of pill I’ve tried,” Jess confessed. “I eventually gave up.”

“But remained sexually active?”

“I did. But I kept a pretty close eye on my cycle,” Jess continued, the back-and-forth having reached the plane of the surreal. “And I tend to stick with partners I trust to wear a condom.”

This seemed to satisfy the old woman, who turned her attention to Christy.

“Those are mine,” she said.

“Are these new?”

“No, I’ve been on the pill since soon after my abortion.”

The old woman signaled one of the sasquatches standing behind the women. It stepped forward, gripped Christy’s head under the chin and beside her left ear, and bloodlessly snapped her neck before the girl even realized what was happening.

Screaming at the top of her lungs, Jess launched herself sideways as Christy’s body dropped limply to the ground. Pain exploded from points throughout her body, but she ignored it all, wriggling in the dirt as she crawled away on her knees and shoulders. Dirt kicked up into her eyes, nose, and mouth, but even then she forced herself forward.

The sasquatches and humans reacted as one, propelling themselves after Jess, ready to fling her back at the feet of the old woman. But their leader again stopped them with a lift of her hand and moved a few feet ahead of Jess.

“What you need to understand is that you, your friend there, the people you grew up with, your family, everyone in your day to day life, is about to die,” the old woman calmly explained. “Humanity is on the precipice. A great apocalypse is on its way, and very, very few will survive.”

The old woman paused, giving the young lawyer a moment to absorb this. Jess could have had a thousand moments, however, and barely scratched the surface of why what she was being told was just about the most ludicrous nonsense anyone had ever tried to shove down her throat.

“The good news is, by a quirk of fate, or actually genetics, you’re looking at what will likely be one of the larger pockets of survivors.”

“You’re some kind of ‘chosen people’?” Jess scoffed, spitting dirt. “That’s what you’re telling me?”

“That would imply a choice was made,” the old woman said. “And that is the opposite of what happened. But for us to survive in the next world, and by that, I mean our children and children’s children, we must become strong. We are being caught almost unawares at a time when we have allowed ourselves to become weak in ways we didn’t even know.”

As the old woman continued, Jess let her eyes travel up to the caves. It was only then that she recognized one of the pairs of eyes staring back at her.

“Oh, my God! Patrick?”

The crows had arrived at first light. There was only one at first, but its calls, a guttural clicking in its throat, soon brought over a dozen. Each lighted on a branch above Bones’s body, which lay on its side in the clearing, for a few seconds, but then glanced around, as if waiting to see who might go first. The stench of blood hung heavy in the air, as far more had been shed alongside the fire tower than had issued from the German shepherd. The flies had beaten the crows, as they always do, and buzzed from drying pool to drying pool, unable to differentiate or uncaring as to which had flowed from human, sasquatch, or dog.

In the end, two crows flew down at the same time. The dog’s eyelids weren’t completely closed, revealing the tantalizing prize: two watery orbs that were as much delicacies to the birds as the testicles would be to a passing fox. The first crow had landed about three feet from Bones’s snout, while the other had chosen a spot just beside the dog’s tail. This one cheekily clamped its beak on the spiky clump of hair on the tail’s tip, trying to spark a reaction. When there was none, it hopped closer.

The first bird was faster, however, jogging along, then flapping its wings to go airborne for the last several inches or so. When it landed directly in front of Bones’s face, it lowered its head to stab its sharp, 6.5-centimeter beak directly into the dog’s retina. This would cave it in, allow for easier extraction.

But before it was able to do so, Bones rolled onto his stomach, opened his jaws, and fired his snout forward, biting down hard on the bird’s neck and upper torso. The crow’s hollow bones splintered like a handful of dry pine needles, its ribcage piercing its heart to deliver the death blow.

The second crow hopped backward and spread its wings. Unlike smaller birds that could get aloft relatively easily, it usually took a crow a few flaps to gain even a couple of inches of altitude. The great black bird was hovering a foot off the ground, a flap away from beginning its ascent in earnest, when Bones whirled around and caught its wing in his mouth. Violently jerking his head back and forth, the shepherd soon tore the wing off the crow’s body, then pinned the rest of the dying bird’s body to the ground. Another flash of teeth, and the bird’s head was severed from its body as well.

The crows in the trees watched in relative silence. A couple on lower limbs fluttered upward but soon landed again, their black eyes fixed on the carnage below. They would soon lose interest and move on, but not before waiting a few minutes to see if the large mammal below would collapse from his wounds again, making him a valuable prize all over again.

Bones devoured the birds quickly, tearing off the feathers, spitting them aside, them ripping in the meat. It was hardly enough food to satiate the dog’s hunger, but it was better than nothing. Once every edible piece had been consumed, Bones turned to the tiny bits of crow blood staining the soil and lapped them up as well.

The pain in the German shepherd’s back leg was tremendous, worse when he tried to put weight on it. He whined for a few minutes as he attempted to walk, staggering around the clearing with the haunch raised, limping along on three legs instead of four. Unfortunately, the uneven ground and the occasional rock made this near impossible, as time and time again the dog’s brain told its body that balance could only be achieved if the injured leg touched the ground. Six or seven jagged needles of pain being stabbed directly into Bones’s spine later, and he learned to keep the foot aloft.

He smelled food up in the fire tower, but could barely get up four rungs of the ladder before hopping back down to the ground. He whined a few more times, but then stuck his nose in the dirt and sniffed.

The scent of the sasquatches was all around him. They’d left a while ago, but their smell was so distinctive that it was impossible to miss, particularly for a dog like Bones. He sniffed some more and smelled the humans as well, both the dead and the living.

The crows followed the shepherd from above as the scents led him north. As he hopped along, the wound in his leg began to bleed again, a thin trickle that the dog barely seemed to notice, but whose odor excited the nerve endings in the birds’ noses.

They would be patient, wait for the dog to falter, then swoop in as he lay dying.

Patrick had broken a ridiculous amount of bones in the car crash, over a dozen, but they were all contained within his right arm. His fingers had been twisted and splintered, his knuckles shattered, and his wrist snapped. Both the radius and ulna of his forearm were broken in multiple places, and his humerus was fractured as well. Even worse, the humeral head had been chipped and yanked from its socket.

“It was the craziest pain,” Patrick told Jess. “It felt like I was wearing this heavy plate armor over my arm, like something that over weighed two hundred pounds, and every time I moved, it pressed down on me as if trying to crush my arm flat. The car had crumpled when you hit the tree, and somehow my arm got caught between the door and the roof as they crumpled together. No other part of me was scratched.”

“That’s awful,” Jess exclaimed. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Like it was your fault?” Patrick asked. “Don’t be. Besides, I could’ve been killed, and I wasn’t. That’s a bonus in my book.”

After her back-and-forth with the old woman, Jess had been led into one of the caves. Since they were barely lit by beeswax candles, the young lawyer had the feeling of descending deep into the ground rather than into a mountain. In a large cavern lit with dozens of candles, the ceiling scorched and yellowed by what looked like centuries of the practice, Jess was made to sit, provided with food (corn, roasted deer meat, cranberries, and squash), and told to wait. A moment later, Patrick was ushered in. He sat beside her and was also handed a plate.

Then, to Jess’s surprise, they were left alone.

“So what happened when they found you?” Jess asked, continuing her line of questioning.

“I thought I was stuck in the car, but they tore it apart like it was nothing,” Patrick explained. “They put something under my nose, and I was out a second later. When I woke up, I was here. The food’s fine, so you know.”

Patrick pointed to Jess’s plate. She hadn’t touched a thing.

“It’s crazy to say it, but I’m not hungry. Not after what they did to that girl out there.”

“I hear you,” Patrick said. “But they probably did her a favor.”

Jess nodded, but then realized Patrick didn’t mean it the way she initially thought.

“Patrick…?”

“The old woman, Orenda, has seen the future,” Patrick explained. “The end of the world is coming. Not the whole planet, mind you, but a correction. Humans will no longer be the dominant species. Not by a long shot. In fact, we might not even survive in the new world. What
can
survive are these things, these
sasquatches
.”

Jess stared at Patrick as if he’d gone mad. He sighed.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Oh, do you?” Jess asked, bemused.

“‘The Stockholm Syndrome kicked in fast with Patrick,’ right?” he joked. “But then you’ll spend some time here, start to see things that don’t make any sense whatsoever, and you’ll begin to believe, too.”

“Believe what? In the end of the world?”

“Oh, yeah. And a lot more.”

Patrick related the story as he’d been told it. The sasquatches were of a tribe that predated most Native Americans. The Indians knew about them but stayed away for the most part, allowing them to occupy the remotest areas. This was just fine by the sasquatches, who wanted nothing to do with humans anyway.

Then at some point in the seventeenth century, other humans arrived. The sasquatches were warned of these people by intermediaries, mostly among the Iroquois. Then the invaders moved farther into the country, and the sasquatches were pushed into even smaller pockets, leaving the woods for the hills and, depending on the region, the mountains to the far north. A number now, apparently, existed north of Hudson Bay in Canada, almost in the Arctic Circle. Another band existed in the Rocky Mountains. Still another was rumored to have gone south and now lived along the remotest parts of the Amazon in Brazil.

“But what about the humans here?” Jess asked, now eating while actively wondering how this would tie into a foreknowledge of the end of the world.

“That’s the fascinating part to me,” Patrick admitted. “Apparently, in 1692 during the Salem Witch Trials, a handful of the accused from three or four of the villages closest to the frontier decided to escape into the woods and face the Indians rather than the persecution of the witch hunters. To hear them say it here, some of these witches actually did have some powers in the realm of hedge magic. The Indians they encountered had no interest in sheltering them, but suggested they might find a home amongst the sasquatches, particularly as neither had an interest in being discovered. The groups met at the Susquehanna River, apparently an almost formal event, and an agreement was arrived at. Orenda jokes that it was the one treaty made between Indians and white people in North America that’s still good.”

“Wow. So Orenda is a descendant of Salem witches?” Jess said. “This will totally help make my witch costume this Halloween that much more authentic.”

Patrick didn’t grin at the joke.

“You understand that, now you’re here, you can’t leave.”

“That’s bullshit!” Jess joshed, feigning indignation.

“
Jess
,” Patrick said, leaning in. “I’m trying to tell you that you and me? We’ve got less than a year to live. Things are falling apart. Those sasquatches that attacked the campsite? They were led by a female named Onatah who had split from Orenda to lead the raiding party. She knew time was running out and drastic measures had to be taken. They think she wanted to try to kill all the humans before they could infect the tribe. They have rules about exposing the group to the outside world, but she seems to have gone bonkers and taken a number of her compatriots down with her.”

“Is she still out there?”

“No, they hunted her down and killed her and her compatriots. There’s no way these killings can be covered up for long, not even with the most sympathetic of park rangers selling stories about gas leaks or toxic clouds of concentrated CO2 erupting from a nearby lake.”

“So why do they keep killing?! I watched Orenda and her band kill a park ranger
and
Christy.”

“Christy was collateral damage. What they need are people like you and me.”