Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (24 page)

“That it?” asked Nashon, who was on point.

Paul looked up ahead and saw the Beverly Hilton rising on the right, obscured only by the bell tower of an Episcopal church that had somehow managed to say upright. From that distance, the Hilton looked as if it had suffered a bomb blast that had shattered all its windows and generally made a mess of things, but it also looked relatively intact.

The Hilton was actually a series of buildings that included the main hotel, a ten-story, V-shaped building that contained 570 rooms, but also two additional buildings that housed innumerable ballrooms and conference rooms that extended out from the main structure bordering on either side a long, U-shaped driveway/turnaround that could accommodate the countless limos and town cars of the hotel’s most famous annual event, the Golden Globes.

Unlike the sheer devastation seen elsewhere in Beverly Hills, the miraculous sight of the still intact Beverly Hilton would give anyone reason enough to believe that someone inside during the quake may well have survived.

As they reached the hotel, Paul switched from speaking seldom to hand signals only. He signaled for the two trucks to stop at the mouth of the driveway but still out of sight from anyone passing on Santa Monica.

In Nashon’s care at the end of a makeshift leash, Bones watched as Paul went first down the Hilton’s driveway, his eyes everywhere at once, looking for movement. The team leader looked like a gunfighter in a movie stepping through a quiet Old West town he felt sure was teeming with the enemy on both sides. He walked with his hands wrapped tightly around the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, swinging it in different directions as if hoping any would-be sniper might flinch and give away his position if finding himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel.

There were actually a handful of bodies lying around the driveway, which only added urgency to Paul’s caution, but when he got closer to them he could see that they’d died of severe trauma likely after falling or jumping from the windows above. Disturbed by the sight, Paul moved on and tried to shake the images from his head.

Through all of this, Bones remained completely still. He understood what was required of him and maintained his rigid composure.

It was about a hundred yards from the mouth of the driveway to the hotel entrance, ground Paul covered in a little more than a minute. The hotel lobby appeared open air until one realized that all the glass had been blown out and the flapping curtains and splintered marble weren’t simply evidence of a crazy architect’s mad aesthetic. Paul peered into the dark recesses of the building for a moment but then turned back to his men and nodded.

“Let’s go,” Nashon whispered to Bones.

The commandos, Sharon, and the shepherd now moved down the driveway to join Paul. They were just as careful as their team leader, knowing that some ambushes simply hold their fire until the point man has passed, but no attack came. As the soldiers’ boots crunched down on the broken glass of hundreds of different windows, Bones stepped lightly to avoid getting shards in his pads. For his part, Nashon couldn’t help but stare up into the wall of potential snipers’ nests above them, all empty hotel rooms, all with wind-carried curtains to mask the movements of a rifleman.

After they reached the hotel’s entrance without incident, Nashon and the others could immediately see that visibility would be spotty at best. There was some breakage that allowed light in here and there, but the group could see that large chunks of the ceiling and walls had crashed down, smashing through the floor into whatever was underneath, which would make for treacherous going. It would be impossible to tell how stable the ground beneath their feet would be.

Paul turned and nodded to Nashon.

“Let the dog go.”

“Just like that? What if he wanders away?”

“This is his job. If he wanders away, then he’s no use to us anyway.”

Nashon nodded and unchained Bones. The shepherd looked up at Paul.

“Do your thing,” said the team leader.

Bones looked inside the building and knew what was expected of him. Taking a couple of tentative steps forward, pieces of glass still crunching under his paws, Bones entered the hotel, his head low and back stiff as he kept a suspicious eye on the ceiling. He kept moving, seeing and smelling no sign of life. When he was about fifty feet into the lobby, Paul nodded to the others and they began to follow.

•  •  •

Bones’s eyes were the weakest part of him. It wasn’t the fact that he was in his eighth year and they were hardly as sharp as they’d once been but more that his nose and ears were just that much better. This meant that he’d learned to over-rely on them, so the darkness of the hotel did little to halt his advance. He listened as he stepped and, more importantly, continued to inhale the cornucopia of scents wafting through the lobby.

The floor had been marble but was now jagged and broken due to the falling ceiling. Bones stayed away from the holes. The floor was more unstable around the cracks, even though it was through them that the smells of the dead wafted up. Bones could tell that despite the building having survived mostly intact, there were still several corpses both in the floors above but also below.

Amidst all this and combed through with the now-familiar stench of pulverized concrete and rotting food, Bones could also detect the scent of the living, and there almost as many of them throughout the building as there were dead. However, they weren’t making their presences known yet.

“If he’s anything like the dogs we used in Gaza,” one of the commandos, a man named Zamarin, began, “he’s going to be responding to the living first, then the dead. Not sure why it works that way, but it seems to be how they’re trained.”

Bones didn’t hear this. His attention had turned to a broken door leading to fire stairs. He poked his head in, took a couple of deep sniffs, and proceeded inside. The stairwell was completely intact, with no real sign of earthquake damage on the first couple of floors. Bones ascended the steps with ease, only vaguely aware that he was doing so in abject darkness.

“Lights,” Paul said, turning on the rail-mounted tactical light attached to his MP5. The other commandos did the same, except for the weaponless Sharon. She looked at the stairs but then back at Paul, a querulous expression on her face.

“What is it?”

“If the stairs are so easily accessible, why would anyone still be up there? Don’t you think the fear of a second quake would empty the place?”

“If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t underestimate the stupidity of people under duress,” Paul replied before turning to head the steps. “We’d need to sweep these rooms anyway. No one’s coming out of the woodwork to welcome us. Wherever they are, we’re going to them.”

Bones kept moving until he’d reached the eighth floor. He smelled living things on the other side of the door but also a heavy acrid stench like phosphorus or nitrogen. Bones tried to get through the door, but it was shut tight and he had to wait for the humans.

“The dog has stopped on eight,” Zamarin, currently in the point position, called back down to the team. Paul and the other commandos hurried up the steps as Bones whined at the closed door.

“Pull him back,” Paul ordered Nashon who quickly took Bones’s leash and moved him away.

“Breaching in five…four…three…,” said Paul, going silent for the last two, then swinging the door open for Zamarin to head in first.

“Oh, God…!” were the first words out of Zamarin’s mouth, words that were followed by a torrent of vomit, the entire contents of his stomach.

Hearing this, Paul nodded to Nashon. “Send in the dog.”

Nashon released Bones. The shepherd bounded up the steps and out onto the eighth floor. Actually, it was now the eighth and ninth floors of the hotel. The ninth had collapsed down a level giving the floor the feel of a cavernous rooftop atrium with two-story walls and windows. The outer walls had held so the framing was still in place. It just seemed the ninth floor had buckled and spilled everything out onto the eighth.

But that wasn’t what made Zamarin lose his breakfast.

There were at least four or five dozen human corpses on the level, likely hotel guests from both the eighth and ninth floors who had been killed in the initial quake, but the corpses were in no way “intact.” In fact, it was as if the bodies had been hooked onto the back of a vehicle and dragged around for a few days, allowing them to slowly be torn apart over time. The entrails had been consumed. Nothing was left but desiccated skin and muscle tissue left behind on scattered bones. In addition to the human bodies, there were also amongst them the torn and ragged corpses of around a thousand rats.

Like the humans, the rats had been torn apart. Their bodies had been opened and their organs ripped out, but it wasn’t as a complete a job as what happened to the humans. Whereas the human carcasses were only identifiable by surviving skeletal structure, the rats often still had their fur and heads and tails attached, their attackers hardly licking their plates as clean as those who devoured the humans.

Bones barked a couple of times as the Israeli commandos looked around in horror.

“What the hell are we dealing with here?” asked one of the commandos, a fellow named Levy, staring around the room.

“No idea,” replied Paul. He turned to Sharon. “We had people on these floors, correct?”

“We had two suites on the ninth floor,” Sharon said.

“You’re not still thinking of ‘retrieval,’ are you?” asked Zamarin.

“We knew the bodies might not be intact,” Paul said, then nodded towards Bones. “He did his job. Now it’s time to do ours. At the very least, we need to make an attempt at identification.”

The team split up, half starting at the far end of the level and the other the near in hopes of meeting in the middle. Sharon tried to indicate which rooms the Israeli delegation had been in, but it wasn’t easy.

“Sorry, I’m getting a little turned around,” she admitted as she tried to imagine where the elevator bank had been. “We had 912 and 914, I think, which were on the far side of the elevators, wherever they were.”

“Southwest corner,” Paul said, indicating a floor map.

Sharon nodded and tentatively stepped down the hall, only to have her feet squish through a pulverized rat corpse. “Oh,
shit
.”

Bones walked over, sniffed her shoe, and padded ahead, deftly springing over this corpse or that to get to the end of the hall.

At the opposite end of the building from the stairwell, Paul indicated into the rubble where suites 912 and 914 had landed, but it was clear to everyone that the collapse was total. Any human who might have been in either room was now squashed under tons of concrete.

“Oh, no,” cried Sharon, seeing something she recognized.

She clambered over the rubble of the combination of rooms 812 and 910/912, having spotted human remains near the edge of the building. More of a skeleton with hair now, the corpse was that of a woman who seemed to have been pinned by chunks of ceiling in the calamity but had been unable to get free. From her outstretched arm, it appeared that she might have died reaching out to the now non-existent window to try to get help.

The rats had then come and eaten all of her skin off. There were bite marks up and down her bones. The only conclusion one could draw was that this person’s last hours or, worse, last days were in agony. Her jaw seemed to be frozen in a scream with bite marks even there, covering her teeth and nasal cavity.

“Do you recognize her?” Paul asked quietly.

“Keren Paransky, the Finance Minister’s wife,” Sharon said, then added simply, “We were close.”

Paul nodded, silently bringing out a list and making a notation. Bones glanced up at Sharon, and then regarded the semi-skeletal remains with a quick sniff before wandering over to where the floor ended and the wind was gently blowing in the curtains. Bones looked down the eight floors to the driveway below.

“Hey, boy, you okay?” asked Nashon, walking over to the window and squatting next to the dog. “Want some water?”

Nashon poured a little water from a canteen into the canteen’s cap. Bones slurped up three helpings. Nashon was about to pour him a fourth when he noticed something out the window.

“Um, sir?”

Paul looked over. Nashon pointed down to the street. “They’re gone.”

Paul hurried over next to Nashon and scanned the driveway. The two trucks were in place, but there was no sign of the drivers or Arthur. Paul hefted up his MP5 and looked down the scope. This only revealed, to his horror, a single severed human foot glistening red out in the morning sun.

“Did anyone hear any shots?!” Paul roared, calling out to the entire team. “Anybody?!”

No one had. Suddenly, Paul got a bad feeling. Sharon could see his entire body tense.

“What is it?” Sharon asked.

“I think something got to them,” Paul said.

“Why didn’t we hear shots?” Zamarin asked, hurrying over. “If it was those fucking rats again, they would’ve opened up. No way we wouldn’t have heard them.”

“Yeah, but the rats are moving at night, not day,” said Paul. “This is something else. Pass the word. We’re out of here in one.”

Two rooms down, Bones had wandered over to a different ledge and nosed through the curtains until he was looking out directly over the decimated buildings of Century City. Though there hadn’t been as many buildings in that direction as, say, Hollywood or the Wilshire Corridor, all of them—hotels, offices buildings, hospitals, an outdoor mall, etc.—had been these truly massive structures. So when they all came down, the rubble made the district look like a quarry.

Their absence, however, now afforded a view from the eighth floor of the Beverly Hilton directly to the Pacific Ocean. Though pollution might have still made this difficult in the past, in the week following the first quake the sudden lack of ongoing air pollution seemed to have changed the color of the sky. There was still a smoky gray haze from where the wind picked up concrete dust and carried it on the wind alongside the smoky embers rising from the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains fires. But the yellow, the orange, and the toxic green hues that were part of everyday atmospheric life in the City of Angels were already fading away. Eight days without people, and already the place looked better.