by Mark Wheaton
Ryan looked over at Jesse and noticed that his wounds were starting to bleed again.
“There’s got to at least be a Band-Aid in one of their bathrooms,” Ryan said, pointing at the houses. “We should just pick one and go in.”
Jesse was about to roll his eyes at this suggestion but then realized that if there was a Band-Aid, there might be other medical supplies.
“All right,” he nodded.
Jesse looked down the row of houses, his eyes hunting for one that seemed to suggest it belonged to a family that probably made regular trips to the drug store for such supplies, and settled on the only two-story home on the block. He limped over to Bones, took him by the collar, and slowly led him to the house.
“We’re going in here, Bones,” Jesse whispered as Ryan followed behind, looking every which way for company. “But we’re going to need you to make sure the coast is clear first.”
They reached the front door of the house and found it locked, but then Ryan ran around to the side and found that not only was the garage door open, the door leading into the house from the garage was unlocked. Jesse took Bones to the door, pushed past Ryan, and opened it before half-leading, half-shoving Bones inside. Then Jesse, quickly as he could manage, stepped back out into the garage and slammed the door behind him.
“What are you doing?” Ryan asked, wide-eyed with surprise.
“If he’s in there and somebody else is in there, he’s going to find them in like two seconds,” Jesse explained. “So if he goes crazy and starts barking, we need another house. If he doesn’t, then we’re okay.”
“But if he starts barking, that means he’s in trouble and we should have a plan to get him out of there,” Ryan countered.
“Of the three of us, I think Bones has proven he can best take care of himself,” Jesse said.
Ryan seemed to accept this and they fell silent for a couple of minutes, their eyes glancing around the well-stocked garage. Jesse finally had the good idea to at least close the garage door and did so. Though they didn’t comment on it, they both noticed that a family’s worth of bicycles were leaning up against the side of the garage between a faded red Civic and the wall. Absent appeared to be a second car, as there was an empty car-sized space alongside the Civic, complete with oil stains on the concrete.
As they waited, Jesse looked around the garage for a weapon, as they only had Ryan’s rifle between them. He spotted a rubber mallet but deemed it too soft; a sledgehammer, too unwieldy; and even an edge trimmer, which he thought would be a fun way to dispatch a flesh-eater, though he also knew it would require an extension cord. That’s when he picked up a simple claw hammer off a cobweb-covered workbench and put it through one of his belt loops, though Ryan immediately gave him a chastising look.
Jesse shrugged. “Hey, you were the one who suggested raiding some guy’s bathroom for Band-Aids.”
The pair finally figured it had been enough time and turned back to the door leading into the house, falling silent as they tried to hear Bones on the other side.
“I wonder if he’s gone upstairs yet,” Ryan whispered.
“You hear anything?” Jesse asked. Ryan shook his head and shrugged.
Jesse carefully pressed his ear to the door, as if fearing that somebody or some-thing might be doing the same on the other side. He paused, listened intently, but then turned back to Ryan, shaking his head.
“I don’t hear him,” he whispered.
Ryan put his hand on the doorknob, worried for Bones, but Jesse raised a hand. Ryan hesitated; Jesse took a deep breath, and then nodded dramatically. Ryan turned the knob and swung the door wide. Bones stood just on the other side of the door, looking up at them expectantly, his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he panted. Jesse rolled his eyes.
“Let’s get that Band-Aid.”
The two boys pushed past Bones, carefully closed and locked the door to the garage, and proceeded to raid the house. They started in the master bathroom with the medicine chest, Jesse pouring an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide across his two wounds, only to get a surprise when one of the slugs fell out of the wound and bounced onto the floor with a metallic click, having worked its way out of the entry wound as they walked.
“Gross,” was all Ryan could find to say.
They hit the kitchen next and found that a grocery run had probably been made as recently as that morning. They started gorging themselves, having had no idea how hungry they were until the sight of endless food was placed in front of them.
While the boys did this, Bones padded around the small living room and wandered into the master bedroom, hoping to avoid the smell of an ever-present throughout the house vanilla-flavored air freshener. Unfortunately, it was just as bad if not worse in the bedroom, which was decorated in pink with large, garish flowers on the drapes and bedspread with noisy bronze-colored carpeting to go with it, as if designed to clash. There were at least a couple of masculine touches: a nightstand with a dusty digital clock, a plaque announcing some kind of achievement in quarterly sales, and a dark wood chest of drawers, though in its reserve it only served to highlight the near-luminescent white dresser directly across from the foot of the bed covered with pink perfume bottles, jewelry with a similar bent towards the pink, makeup containers (again, in shades of pink), plastic jars for cotton balls and Q-Tips, and then a great number of family photographs, some framed but also a number tucked into the frame of the dresser’s mirror.
Bones sniffed around the dresser, but the scent of the perfumes blending with the smell of the vanilla air fresheners was so overpowering that the shepherd eventually had to leave the room and head for the stairs to try to shake it off.
“Hey, Bones. Do you want some food?” called Ryan, spotting the dog as he walked through the living room. Bones stopped and eyed Ryan, as if considering this, but only for a second before the dog turned and ascended the steps to the second floor.
The stairs led straight into a second-floor hallway with three open doors. Bones glanced in the first one, a bathroom, but then wandered into the second room, a bedroom for a little boy probably around Ryan’s age. The shepherd sniffed around the boy’s desk, closet, and bed and discovered a half-empty jumbo bag of Funyuns and a box of mini-donuts half-hidden under a pile of laundry. Bones dipped his nose into the box of donuts, scarfing up the contents and collecting powdered sugar on his snout in the process, which he greatly preferred to the stinging perfume that had saturated it for the last couple of minutes. He then used his claws to tear apart the Funyuns bag and ate the two dozen or so left of those as well.
The crinkling of the bag mixed with the crunching of the Funyuns in Bones’s teeth meant that it took him a moment before he heard Ryan screaming for his life.
“NO!”
Bones whipped around and galloped out the bedroom door. He barreled down the stairs and into the living room, where he saw Jesse, prone on the floor, being torn apart by the mistress of the house, her jaws pulling meat directly from Jesse’s now skin-free ribs as he lay prone on the floor. Ryan, meanwhile, was bashing away at the man of the house with a skillet as the flesh-eater cornered him on the sofa against the living room wall, Ryan’s barrage having little effect. Between the parents were two child flesh-eaters, torn between their desire to join in the attack on Ryan or to devour the already safely disarmed Jesse. The decision was made more difficult by the fact that all four of them were connected as a single, four-headed organism made up of four torsos, eight legs, and, effectively, five arms, as that was one of the primary areas where their bodies were fused. When the father went to strike at Ryan, his left arm was the same as his oldest child’s right arm, meaning that he virtually had to pull the whole creature forward with him in order to attack the boy. This fact was probably the sole reason Ryan was still alive.
As Bones stared at this bizarre sight, a whole host of new smells filled his nose, and he recognized, for the first time, that there was a subterranean component of the house.
A basement.
Though the woman was clearly dead, her perfume was still thick in the air, serving to mask the cadaverous odors coming off her body and the bodies of the rest of her family, though the fresh scent of Jesse’s blood, suddenly made to oxide into the air, was stronger yet. Bones could tell there was something else, too; he just couldn’t make out what…
“Bones!!” screamed Ryan, terrified. “Help me!!”
Bones snapped into action and leaped at the dead father, jaws sinking into the arm he shared with his oldest son and forcefully yanking him back from the sofa. Unfortunately for the shepherd, this brought on an attack from the younger child—a daughter—who kicked at Bones and leaned down to try and bite him in his wounded shoulder. It was only the fact that she was still attached to her feasting mother that kept Bones from being bitten.
Ryan leaped off the sofa and ran for the fireplace, grabbing a poker. The father-end of this strange creature wheeled around after him, the mother finally realizing a fight was on and momentarily leaving Jesse to join in.
“You killed my friend!” Ryan screamed at the four-headed monster, waving the poker around like a sword.
All four mouths moved at once in a great half-hiss, half-growl, which Ryan answered by jamming the poker directly into the open mouth of the father. As the poker snapped teeth aside, stabbed through his upper palate, and entered the dead man’s brain, the flesh-eater flailed wildly with his one free hand, staggering backwards and comically taking the rest of his family with him as he tumbled to the ground.
From just behind them, Bones prepared to make his own move, a lunge straight for the woman’s throat, but he suddenly got a second whiff of the one scent he couldn’t quite pin down. Sensing an approach, he turned and came face to face with a pair of house cats, one gray and one tiger-striped brown, which had joined their masters as denizens of the recently deceased. The cats were moving straight for Bones, their fangs bared and backs arched. Bones immediately started barking as the undead felines crouched, preparing to attack.
The gray cat leaped straight for Bones’s back while the tiger-stripe went for his throat. Bones was bigger than both cats combined but didn’t have the same level of craven bloodlust on his side. He backed up quickly, trying to throw off the gray cat as it sank its claws into his already wounded shoulders. The attack made Bones yelp in pain, and he jerked his head around, clamping his jaws on the one part of the gray cat he could reach—its face—and flinging it off.
Bones turned his attention to the tiger-stripe just as it reared up and was lunging at his face, the claws of both forepaws flared. Bones ducked down and arrowed his snout directly into the cat’s soft underbelly but then angled his head around at the last moment like a shark and clutched the cat around its torso in his jaws. Crunching down hard, the angry shepherd managed to snap the feline completely in half. Still hissing and “alive,” the top half of the cat still swung its claws and tried to bite Bones, but he’d already moved away from it.
“Bones! Help me!” cried Ryan.
Bones turned and saw that the family of flesh-eaters had finally regrouped enough that they were able to somewhat encircle the boy. Though it should’ve been dead, the father-end was still staggering around, the poker bashing into anything it got close to. The mother-end, however, was pursuing Ryan with a tremendous fury, one shared by her two children. They’d backed Ryan into a corner, and now the mother reached out and grabbed Ryan by the shoulders to pull him in for a bite.
Ryan screamed, swatting at her even as he closed his eyes, anticipating the sensation of her teeth tearing into his neck.
When he got hot breath and no teeth, he opened his eyes and saw Bones standing on the nearby cabinet, having snapped the mother’s head off with his jaws at the last moment.
“Oh, my God,” said Ryan, tears bursting into his eyes.
The two child flesh-eaters were pulled to the ground by their falling mother but grabbed at Bones’s tail and haunches as he hopped off the cabinet.
“Gggnnnnhhhh!” the two juvenile flesh-eaters railed angrily at Bones.
If Bones heard the threat in the flesh-eaters’ voices, he didn’t react, but simply stood on each of their chests and tore their throats out. With the second death of the two children, the father, poker still jutting out of his face, finally died as well.
“Bones!”
Bones turned just in time to see the gray cat, who had recovered from its toss across the room, leaping onto the coffee table to attack him again. Bones barked loudly and angrily at the cat, who jumped at him fearlessly. Bones reared up on his haunches and batted the cat to the ground with his forepaw, which he then used to hold it flat to the carpet. Bones’s jaws shot forward, and he quickly dispatched the animal, making for four kills in less than sixty seconds.
Though the tiger-stripe half-cat continued to mewl angrily and wave its forepaws in front of the family’s flat-screen TV and surrounding entertainment center, which took up almost all the space against the living room wall, the house had suddenly gone quiet. Ryan, who was heaving mightily, stared down at Bones, still sniffling.
“Where were you?” he whimpered, accusatorily.
Bones was panting now and looked at Ryan but then turned, walked around the sofa, and went to Jesse, who he sniffed all over. The smells were quickly changing. There was the familiar scent of Jesse himself, the food he’d only just put in his mouth that now sat in his now partially-exposed stomach, the rank odor of blood, but then, around his wounds, Bones could smell the saliva of the female flesh-eater…but also something else. He pushed his nose close in to the open wounds as the juices of the two people began to mingle. Though Jesse smelled of death, the scent was beginning to change into the more acrid odor of a flesh-eater before Bones’s nose.
“He’s going to turn into one of them, isn’t he?” Ryan asked quietly, indicating the dead family of flesh-eaters nearby. “It’s what the driver was telling Mr. Arthur. He said it was some kind of virus that spread from one infected person to the next. If one of them killed us, we’d be like one of them, too, and keep spreading it until everybody got it.”
Bones sniffed around Jesse’s neck as the strange new smell made its way from the wound up through his body and all the way to his brain. Bones recognized the smell as the same bilious stench that had emerged from the leaking sores of the fusing flesh-eaters on the highway.
Suddenly, Jesse began to stir; just a movement in his feet that could’ve been misinterpreted as the result of a death rattle in any other circumstance. Bones jumped backwards and began barking at the corpse. As Jesse continued to wake, Bones cautiously moved forward, still barking, with the goal of tearing the teen boy’s throat out.
“Bones—no!” ordered Ryan. Bones turned and looked at Ryan with confusion, wondering why he was being called off, but Ryan gave him a hard stare before uttering a second, sharp, “No!”
Bones held his ground but did as he was told. Ryan gave him one more harsh look before heading into the kitchen. The shepherd stared at Jesse’s body as it started to re-animate and began barking at it again. Ryan came back in, this time carrying his gun, and aimed it at Jesse’s head.
“Get back, Bones,” Ryan said, waving Bones away with the barrel of the gun.
Bones retreated a few paces as Ryan tried to stop trembling, the barrel of the gun moving around violently as his body was wracked by tears.
“I’m sorry, Jesse,” he whispered, almost sobbing as he fired.
The first bullet drove past Jesse’s head, directly into the floor where it made a dark, smoky hole in the carpet. Ryan yanked back the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge, then inserted and chambered a second bullet. This time, Ryan said nothing but held his breath and aimed.
“Gggnnnhhh…,” Jesse began under-his-breath, though his eyes were still closed, as if dreaming. “Gggnnnhhh…”
Jesse’s brains exploded all over the carpet behind his head as the second bullet entered his skull, instantly causing such a build-up of pressure that the ballooning
matter’s only recourse was to get blown out the back following in the wake of the exiting.22 projectile. Jesse’s body became instantly still. Bones stared at it for a moment, anticipating a cautious approach when he was startled by a third shot that was aimed elsewhere in the living room.
Bones looked over and saw that the “half-cat” was now a smoldering, bloody streak on the carpet as well. Bones barked at it a couple of times for good measure but then turned back to Ryan, whose tears had finally stopped. He ejected the spent cartridge, chambered another round and lowered the weapon.
“Let’s go, Bones.”
VI
But they didn’t leave—not yet anyway.
As they were heading through the kitchen, Ryan cast a look back at Jesse’s body, a look that then traveled over to the dead father-end of this new, strange multi-flesh-eater organism. Despite being impaled through the brain, he continued to fight on, a fact that was weighing heavily on Ryan.
He went to the kitchen cabinets and looked around for something, didn’t find it, and went to the garage. As he did, Bones stayed in the kitchen, taking a couple of sniffs down the basement stairs, having to step over the pile of chairs and other debris that someone (a neighbor? another family member?) had stacked in front of the door to keep the man, woman and presumably the cats at bay to give them enough time to escape. When Ryan came back in from the garage and saw what Bones was doing, he snapped angrily at the dog.
“Get away from there, Bones.”
Bones did as he was told, following Ryan into the living room, where the boy stood over Jesse’s corpse. In his hands, he held two things—a long cardboard tube filled with fireplace matches and a blue-and-white squeeze bottle of starter fluid for the barbecue. Setting down the matches, Ryan popped the nozzle up on the starter fluid and began spraying it onto Jesse’s body but also around the room in general, getting some on his shoes and pants leg. Slowly but surely, he was able to empty the entire bottle, which he tossed on the sofa. He then picked up the day’s newspaper and tore it into a number of long strips, which he then twisted together and jammed into Jesse’s pockets, the crooks of his arms, his shoes, and even his mouth and the hole in his forehead.