by Mark Wheaton
Bones started barking, a sharp, alarm-filled bark that again was meant to call out to any other human who might respond to this and know what to do. This was what Bones was trained to do, sure, but it was also the instinct of a domesticated canine. Instead of feeling threatened, the flesh-eaters all turned towards Bones, eyeing him with unmistakable hunger. Intimidated, Bones jumped back just a step but then squared off against them to continue barking. The flesh-eaters, ten in all, gradually rose from the bodies they were devouring, and started moving towards Bones.
That’s when Bones experienced something he hadn’t felt in a lifetime: fear.
He kept barking and started prancing around on his injured legs like a giddy faun, but was unwilling to give ground. The flesh-eaters, some shambling, some at a half-jog, got closer and closer to Bones until it reached the point of fight or flight and he glanced towards the woods, marking his escape route. He’d just about made the decision to bolt when a pair of hands reached out from behind and grabbed at this throat.
Bones yelped and leaped away. When he turned back around, he saw the dead patrolman whose life he had defended only moments before now crawling towards him, teeth bared and hands outstretched. The patrolman looked purple and gray, as if blood had pooled in his face, and Bones knew from one sniff that he should be dead. But, of course, he was not.
Having had enough of this, Bones turned and launched himself towards the woods, only to find his path blocked by one of the other flesh-eaters, who managed to get close enough to half-grab, half-fall on the now-panicked cadaver dog. Though Bones quickly feinted and dodged the attack, the falling flesh-eater landed on his injured right haunch, causing the shepherd to twist it badly. As Bones scrambled to get to his feet, he found himself boxed in. Two more flesh-eaters came around the back of the line of police vehicles and effectively flanked any escape Bones could make. He had nowhere to run.
Tail between his legs and the fight-or-flight decision now made for him, Bones turned towards the nearest flesh-eaters, flattened his ears to his skull, and began to growl a warning, long, low, and increasing in volume leading up to a savage bark. This did nothing to dissuade the flesh-eaters, and the largest of them lunged for Bones.
BLAM!
Merely inches away from Bones’s neck, the large flesh-eater hit the ground and didn’t move. Bones, unaware of what had driven it into the mud, went for its throat, only to find that it had been shot directly in the forehead. Bones whirled around as the other flesh-eaters moved closer to him, ignoring the fate of the first-mover. Just as quickly, they joined him face down in the muck as the gunfire continued.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Like tin ducks in a carnival shooting gallery, every last one of the flesh-eaters tumbled to the ground, blood splashing out of wounds from a couple of them but noticeably absent from others, particularly those in greater states of decay. Bones had to skirt and dive to avoid all of the falling bodies, but then he found himself alone.
Click.
Though the odor of fresh corpses was heavy in the air, Bones quickly picked out the scents of living people and turned towards the woods, where he saw a trio of human males emerge carrying hunting rifles: a stout middle-aged man with wisps of brown-gray hair over his ears; a pale, skinny, blond-headed teenager wearing a green John Deere ball cap; and a second, shorter, brown-haired boy with an open, trusting face who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. The middle-aged man raised his rifle and aimed it at Bones, but the teenager shook his head.
“I don’t think he’s one of ’em, Mr. Arthur.”
The middle-aged man—Mr. Arthur—eyed Bones carefully but didn’t lower his rifle.
“Be that as it may, he’s still a wild dog,” the man said. “Good chance he’ll try and attack us anyway. He looks pretty spooked.”
Bones, still panicked, started barking, which did little to help his cause. Mr. Arthur took one step closer to get a better shot, but then the younger boy moved in front of him, setting down his gun as he walked.
“Ryan!” the teenager cried. “Don’t be stupid!”
But the youngster—Ryan—kept coming, dropping to one knee when he was about eight feet away from Bones. He stared at the shepherd for a moment, his eyes traveling to the bright, black-and-yellow collar around his neck.
“I think he’s a police dog,” said Ryan. “You can get in a lot of trouble shooting a police dog.”
Bones noted the semi-relaxed expression on the little boy’s face as he stuck out his hand, inviting the dog to come over and take a sniff. Bones was still pretty agitated but found the solemnity of the child calming. Besides, he knew the child didn’t smell of death and, under the circumstances, thought this was a good sign. He took a couple of tentative steps forward, climbing past one of the twice-dead flesh-eaters, and took a sniff of Ryan’s hand. He snorted once as if having inhaled pollen, then took a step back and peered into the boy’s eyes.
“You’re okay, boy,” Ryan said, rising and slowly reaching for Bones’s head. “You’re okay.”
Bones allowed the boy to stroke the hair between his ears, though it was matted with wet earth and blood. Bones ran his nose up and down the little boy as well, inhaling a healthy odor of blood, from what seemed like a host of different human sources. It was on his shoes and jeans and blended with the distinct smell of dried urine coming from inside his pants, creating a record of the past few hours of the boys’ life as it wafted into Bones’s olfactory canal.
As Mr. Arthur and the teenaged boy walked over, Ryan eyed the collar around Bones’s neck.
“Is your name Bones?” Ryan asked. Bones looked up upon hearing his name. The little boy smiled, turning to his human compatriots. “He’s a K-9 officer of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.”
“And he’s the only one that survived this?” Mr. Arthur said. “Doesn’t say much for our chances. Jesse, see if there’s anything worth having in any of these police cars. Shit, where were these assholes a couple of hours ago?”
The teenager, Jesse, ran to the different squad cars and saw that they were, for the most part, unlocked. “They’ve got shotguns, but they’re all racked in. Keys must be in their pockets.”
“Make sure you give each of them a couple of slugs to the head before you get too close,” said Mr. Arthur, walking over to the patrolman who had tried to grab Bones. “Looks like this one’s got a Heckler & Koch 9-millimeter. Our tax dollars at work.”
Mr. Arthur reached down and secured the man’s weapon, placing it in his belt, and then grabbed a couple of extra magazines and the man’s handcuffs. He couldn’t find the cuff keys but kept the cuffs anyway.
Bones moved away from the hunting party and walked back towards the junkyard where the bodies of Detective Nessler and Commander Zusak were lying, just beside the trailer home that served as the yard’s office. Zusak’s head had been torn clean off, his weapon still in his hand, though much of the rest of his body had been devoured. Nessler, on the other hand, looked perfectly normal, almost as if he had just lain down for a nap—unless you looked below his shoulders or above his belly button, as his entire chest had been hollowed out by the flesh-eaters who had snapped through his ribcage and torn out his heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, and intestines. The flesh-eaters had dug through his torso so viciously that claw marks could be seen in the mud under the body, as if they had believed there was even more of Nessler that had somehow sluiced into the ground on which he was lying. Just as Bones began to move away, he caught sight of Nessler’s fingers flexing and his eyes glancing around.
Immediately, Bones jumped back and started barking. Ryan, noticing the same thing, stepped forward, aimed his rifle at Nessler’s head, and fired.
BLAM!
Ryan’s gun was a single-shot, bolt-action.22, so he could only fire one bullet at a time. A metal plate had been screwed over the slot where a magazine would be placed; a child’s training rifle. As soon as he had fired, Ryan pulled back the bolt, ejected the spent shell and inserted a bullet from his pocket
that he jammed with his pointer finger into the breach. Once it was snug, he pushed the bolt forward, chambering the round, and locked down the bolt handle. He aimed for Nessler’s head and fired a second time, his re-load time being less than four seconds.
BLAM!
The impact of the second bullet caused Nessler’s skull to fragment, sending pieces of cracked bone in a number of different directions while the rest of his life’s blood slipped away into the mud. Bones had continued to bark at Nessler throughout all this and kept at it even as Ryan moved away.
“C’mon, Bones,” called Ryan.
Bones barked a few more times at the dead detective but then followed Ryan back out of the junkyard and over to one of the squad cars. Jesse was trying different keys on a shotgun’s trigger guard, having freed it from the driver’s-side gun rack. He finally wiggled the key in just right, and the troublesome guard snapped off. After all that, when he checked the breach of the shotgun, he found it unloaded.
“Cops are such pussies,” Jesse scoffed, reaching for a box of shells he’d earlier uncovered in the driver’s seat armrest. He proceeded to load the shotgun with shells and prime a round into the chamber. The cinematic kla-klack of the forestock made Jesse smile. “Let’s see them come at us now!”
Mr. Arthur came around the car after walking off a perimeter and only offered the teenager a bemused grimace. He’d been through too much that morning for shows of bravado.
Bones padded around in a semi-circle a little ways away from Ryan, keeping his nose in the air. All he could smell was the dead, and he was having a hard time differentiating between the corpses that lay all around him on the ground and any more of the flesh-eaters that might emerge from the junkyard or woods. Still, he kept trying, pacing in circles and sniffing the air.
Once it looked like they’d collected anything useful from the police cars, Mr. Arthur nodded to the boys.
“We should keep heading towards the highway,” he said. “We just have to flag somebody down and get into the city.”
“But if these guys were already out this far, don’t you think they’d have reached Gainey by now?” Jesse asked, indicating the pile of dead flesh-eaters. “That’s right in our path.”
“It’s unfortunate for them, but these cops probably slowed them down a bit,” Mr. Arthur suggested. “They’re not going in a straight line. They’re running into people on the road, people on the farms, and each time, well…taking their own sweet time at the trough.”
Jesse nodded silently, as if recalling a troubling thought. Mr. Arthur recognized this and didn’t continue along this train of thought.
“Come on, now,” Mr. Arthur said, indicating for the boys to follow him. “Time’s a’wastin’.”
Ryan walked up alongside Jesse but then glanced back at Bones, who was still sniffing around the police cars.
“Come on, Bones. You’ll be a lot safer if you come with us.”
Bones watched the three humans walk away and knew he didn’t want to be left behind. He trotted after them, quickly pulling up the rear, though his right haunch still caused him to limp, which was made worse by the soft mud. Every time one of Bones’s left feet sank into the muck, he reflexively caught himself with his right haunch for balance, sending a shooting pain through his entire body. When he yelped the first time—really, more of a “yip” than a full cry—Mr. Arthur turned, scowling.
“Shh! Quiet, dog.”
Bones knew what “shh” meant and moved along in silence, a little more gingerly now.
III
It was only a few minutes’ walk before the three spotted a thin plume of black smoke rising into the sky up ahead. Mr. Arthur indicated for the boys and Bones to move off the road, closer to the woods to avoid being seen, but when they got down to the wreck of Billy’s truck and the beige Taurus, he relaxed again.
“Pheeew-eee!” Mr. Arthur said as he walked around the smoldering cars and dead bodies, including that of the old man whose throat Bones had torn out. He turned to the shepherd, a little surprised. “Your handiwork?”
Bones looked up, as if confirming Mr. Arthur’s suspicions.
“Who is that?” Jesse asked, peering at the body. “I think I recognize him.”
“Charles Harvey!” Mr. Arthur reported with what sounded like satisfaction after he took a closer look. “One of the assholes-in-chief of the local HUD branch. Loved to screw with people by executing foreclosures first thing in the morning before most people even had their coffee.”
But then, Mr. Arthur’s face changed as he looked into the front seat of the Taurus.
“Hell,” he muttered. “Means that’s probably his daughter, Joyce. She was every bit the peach he wasn’t. Sorry, darling.”
Meanwhile, Bones was sniffing around Billy’s truck, but the smell of his one-time master had all but vanished, as the fire had not only cooked him but also the vinyl upholstery, which obfuscated all other scents. Ryan followed Bones around the side of the immolated Bronco and saw the official police markings as well as the “K-9 Unit” designation on the wrecked door. He could just make out enough of the remains of Billy Youman in the driver’s seat to realize there had been a person there at all. He nodded to the police dog.
“Your master?”
This time, Bones didn’t turn when he heard his name. He completed his sniff-around of the truck and then moved away to sit in the nearby grass.
Mr. Arthur looked up and down the highway, scanning for vehicles, seeing none. Overhead, a jumbo jet flew in a northeasterly direction, leaving no contrails in the gray sky, the only sign of life.
“Guess we have to hoof it for now,” said Mr. Arthur. “The good news is it might mean word’s gotten out and traffic’s been blocked from coming out of the city.”
“And back there?” Jesse asked, pointing in the direction they’d come in from.
Mr. Arthur shook his head. “If we see a car coming from that way, I think we find a good firing position in the woods and take steady aim.”
The group began moving down the shoulder of the highway, Bones walking a line between the paved shoulder and the grassy, gravel-strewn fringe that bled out to the neighboring woods. He kept his nose to the air, though they were walking into the breeze, making it easier on anyone coming up behind them. Even so, Bones’s ears, while nowhere near as perceptive as his nose, were still sharp enough to hear a twig snap anywhere within a fifty—to sixty-yard radius, and in his heightened, hunting state, Bones was listening for just that.
The farther they walked, though, the more Mr. Arthur nervously glanced behind them, as if needing to be constantly reassured that they weren’t being followed. Even though they appeared to be well in the clear, it was obvious he wasn’t going to feel safe any time soon. Jesse seemed to be similarly nervous but drew a lot of confidence from the rifle clutched tightly in his right hand and the shotgun clutched in his left. Ryan, for his part, gained the same feeling from his proximity to Bones.
“That looks like it hurts,” Ryan said, eyeing Bones’s beaten-up face. Bones glanced at Ryan but then looked back ahead, whiskers twirling a little in the breeze. “They killed my dog. She was just trying to keep them from getting in our house, but they got her. It was one the neighbors. After they came in through the door, the lady-one bit her in the neck. Then they got in the kitchen and then the bathroom and they got my mom and my sister…”
By the time Ryan said this last part, his voice was quivering. Jesse saw this and walked over, giving him a kind of half-hug, half-nudge.
“Enough of that,” said Jesse. “You know who got out? You. Now, you’ve got a reason to revenge yourself on these assholes. Keep that anger in you. It’ll keep you alive, man.”
Ryan nodded, but half-heartedly. Bones looked back at Ryan again, but halfway through the motion he noticed Mr. Arthur stopping in his tracks.
“Boys.”
Jesse and Ryan followed Mr. Arthur’s gaze and saw a large farmhouse appearing up on the left. Very quickly, everything got quiet.
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“Think they’d have come this way?” asked Jesse.
“No telling,” replied Mr. Arthur, seeing no sign of life at the farm. “If they’d come through the woods…”
Mr. Arthur looked over at Bones, who had also gone completely still. His nose pointed dead ahead. It was obvious that the shepherd had picked up on at least something from the farmhouse, though what was unclear. Bones took a tentative step forward, as if stalking some newly detected prey, his ears straight up and down, his shoulders rigidly upright and squared towards the house.
“What is it, boy?” Mr. Arthur whispered, tightening his grip on his gun.
Suddenly, the woods just beyond the farmhouse erupted with muzzle flash. Leaves were clipped, branches snapped, and bullets began splashing against the gravel and asphalt around Mr. Arthur and the boys.
“Shit!” cried Mr. Arthur as a bullet winged his left tricep. “Get down, boys!!”
Jesse tried to hit the deck but immediately caught two bullets, one in the calf, one in the elbow, and screamed as he was thrown back.
Ryan managed to flatten himself on the ground as Bones bounced around, barking like mad at the incoming fire. Amazingly, he wasn’t hit.
“What the fuck?“ screamed Mr. Arthur from his prone position on the road. “We’re human, you assholes!!”
The fusillade kept coming, though, and it was a full ten seconds before it finally abated. As the trio stayed on the ground, trying to catch their breaths, a voice came booming out of the woods, amplified by a bullhorn.
“Toss your weapons away and stay on the ground! Move an inch, and we won’t hesitate to shoot.”
Mr. Arthur did as he was told, pushing his rifle away from him. Ryan did the same, but a quick glance back at Jesse suggested he was already halfway into shock and couldn’t be made to do a thing. Luckily, his rifle had been thrown a few feet away after the first bullet hit, and the shotgun was momentarily obscured behind his body.