by Mark Wheaton
“Dear God,” said one of the Malinois’s handlers, her face falling as she saw what the quake had done to the base. “It looks like it was bombed.”
In truth, the base looked less bombed and more like it had long since fallen into disrepair, maybe fifty or sixty years before. Most structures were still standing but with giant cracks through their walls, broken windows, partially collapsed roofs, and, in some cases, large chunks of concrete and metal cracked off and smashed onto the ground nearby.
But then there were the hangars.
Rather than an earthquake, the row of seven massive hangars alongside the runway looked more like they’d run afoul of a hurricane, a great wind having twisted their steel frames, wrenched away their walls and roofs and then started a chain reaction that sent whatever was left over tumbling to its foundation and crushing whatever planes were inside. The hangars were so big that it seemed almost impossible that something had been able to pulverize them in such a way.
“Looks like God Himself came down and did a few cartwheels,” another of the dog handlers joked. “We pretty close to the epicenter or something?”
A mechanic who’d been dropping blocks around the plane’s wheels grinned over at the newcomer.
“We’re just past the 100-mile mark. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
II
The mechanic wasn’t exaggerating.
The dogs and handlers were driven by Humvee from Edwards, down the devastated 14 Freeway towards a staging area at the Burbank Airport just on the valley side of the Los Angeles basin, and got their first taste of the devastation. Before the quake, it was a trip that took twenty minutes without traffic. Now, with broken vehicles, trees, dirt and rocks from landslides, utility poles, and everything else strewn out across the highway, it took two hours.
The closer the convoy got to the city, the more pronounced the damage. Apartment buildings, houses, professional buildings, grocery stores, shopping centers—they had all been driven into the ground. This included modern structures that had likely been built not only up to code but to actually withstand even larger quakes, depending on the building owner’s insurance rider. None of these things seemed to matter, though. There had never been a recorded 10.2-magnitude earthquake in California history. The likely reason for this was because it was so outside the realm of possibility that it meant there might no longer be a California.
But that’s what had happened.
“All right, everybody in line!”
A tall, drill sergeant looking fellow in digi-pattern camo fatigues and combat boots named Dalton was waiting for the Humvees as they arrived at the Burbank Airport. Though the dog handlers were all from various law enforcement agencies, they were technically in Los Angeles as civilian advisors to the Los Angeles Police Department. While they were in the air, things had changed.
“All of you are now under the umbrella of Pentagon ‘total force,’” the sergeant announced. “You will not be subject to the military’s chain-of-command, but you will have the enforcement authority of the Defense Department. The president has designated Los Angeles, Orange, Imperial, San Bernardino and Kern Counties as disaster areas and has declared martial law.”
A nervous reflex resounded through the dog handlers. Dalton noticed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Dalton said. “No matter the situation, ‘martial law’ is just one of those boogeyman terms that can make its enforcers as nervous as those its meant to protect. But for the survivors here and especially on the other side of the hill, it lets them know that we’re here and that we’re doing something about the situation. There are fires, there’s no water, no electricity, no way to move food, nothing. Because of that, you’ve got folks going to bed praying that somebody doesn’t come in all ‘Straw Dogs’ on ’em in the middle of the night. If the ACLU wants to watch over my shoulder for abuses of power over the next stretch of days, they’re more than welcome but should be ready for a diet of MREs and iodine-tasting water.”
This made the handlers laugh.
For his part, Bones wasn’t paying much attention. Since they’d arrived in Burbank, his nose had been going into overdrive. All around him he could smell the dead. There were the bodies that had already been recovered from the surrounding area and were awaiting identification in the one standing hangar. In addition, he could pick up the scents of dozens of others still buried in the surrounding buildings, particularly emanating from a large hotel just off the airport entrance. Once the largest such structure for miles, it was now little more than a pile of rubble.
• • •
Bones had been assigned to a female handler named Elizabeth Acho who had come down from Portland, where she’d been a civilian dog trainer for the local sheriff’s department. For years now, she had traveled the country, delivering seminars to law enforcement on how to better utilize a dog’s natural desire for play and exploration to make the animal an even more effective detection dog and a healthier, happier animal in general.
She had a German shepherd of her own that she was training named Charlie, but he was still young. She’d left him behind in Oregon. When she’d heard that Bones, a semi-legendary dog in police circles, was being shipped to Los Angeles for quake duty but would need a hander, she put herself on the next plane. She hadn’t known if she’d be lucky enough to get assigned the shepherd but hoped that if she put herself in the right place at the right time, she could make it easy for whoever was to make the decision.
“You have experience with this kind of animal?” the head of the K-9 unit, a Marine MP up from Camp Pendleton, had asked.
“Absolutely,” Elizabeth replied. “In fact, he’s something of my specialty.”
And just like that, Bones was hers.
She’d been there when he’d arrived in the convoy from Edwards and knew from the moment he’d stepped out of the Humvee that he was different from the animals he rode in with. The other dogs paid attention to the people around them, while Bones, though not entirely oblivious, already had his nose in the air and was actively assessing his new surroundings. His was obviously an independent spirit accustomed to working alone, but also one inculcated with enough training and routine to accept his mutually beneficial affiliation with the humans.
Once Dalton had finished his address, Elizabeth went over and introduced herself to Bones by holding out her hand and squatting down until he could see her eyes. The shepherd seemed to understand immediately that this person would be taking on the role of his handler, but if he cared that much, he didn’t show it.
“I’m not here to get in your way,” Elizabeth said, knowing that though her words were meaningless, her tone was what mattered. “I’m just along to expedite what you’re already here to do.”
Bones stared at her for a moment but then looked back towards the collapsed buildings ringing the airport. Elizabeth found herself strangely envious. In a situation as grave as this, two dozen humans were useless compared to a single search-and-rescue dog. A person could spend days digging on a single site in a search for survivors, the same task being accomplished by a dog in a matter of minutes. A couple hundred dogs spread out in a grid pattern over the city would theoretically be able to locate any survivors within a forty-eight-hour period.
“We’re going to do some good, Bones,” Elizabeth said. “Mark my words. We’ll be on CNN before sundown.”
This prophecy proved untrue.
• • •
The earthquake happened on Sunday. Elizabeth had arrived by Tuesday and had hit the city with Bones for the first time Wednesday morning. By Friday, she was regretting her decision to come down, as the emotional toll of seeing the horrific destruction up close was weighing down on her like a broken promise.
Since she and Bones had been helicoptered into their assigned search zone, the neighborhoods around Dodger Stadium including Echo Park, Angelino Heights, and Elysian Park, they hadn’t uncovered a living soul. Though they had a small military escort coupled with diggers and paramedics
never more than ten minutes away, Elizabeth and Bones were mostly on their own as they picked across endless collapsed houses and businesses. She kept praying for the shepherd to stumble across one single survivor, but the devastating realization that there probably weren’t any was beginning to sink in.
Instead, they found corpses.
As they had started in a more easily accessible business district off Sunset while army engineers cleared the impassable roads that wound through the residential areas, the bodies were limited to a handful at first. They were mostly homeless people, a few clerks and stock boys, a couple of other late-night denizens. The quake had hit at just past five o’clock in the morning, which was why the military had given it the provocative nickname “The Big Sleep,” as so many had been killed in their beds. The media had picked up on it but had decided it was too ghoulish for prime time. In only two days, there were already more than 200,000 confirmed dead, though indications were that it was easily ten times that, with twenty or thirty not ruled out.
“What did you find?”
Elizabeth watched as Bones circled a spot atop the roof of a collapsed barrio-style house they’d climbed a gravel-strewn path to investigate. Try as she might, Elizabeth couldn’t determine if what they were looking at had previously been a one—or two-story house.
Bones circled again, whined, then nosed around near a shattered piece of roofing. Knowing about what to expect, Elizabeth gingerly picked her way over having learned her lesson after stepping onto seemingly stable surfaces that then gave way twice the first hour.
“Hello?” she called into the house as she pulled a flashlight out of her pocket.
She shined the beam down into the hole and looked around for signs of life, but that’s when the smell hit her. Stinking of rotten food, feces, and cooked flesh, made worse by the hot sun that had turned many of the crushed houses into pressure cookers. The stench just about overwhelmed her, and she took a couple of quick steps back. In doing so, she stepped through a pile of broken glass that had once been a skylight.
“Shit!” she cried, hopping on one foot to avoid shards piercing up through her soles. “Shit, shit, shit, shit!”
She looked over at Bones, who seemed to be eyeing her with incredulity. Why was his handler acting like an idiot? indeed.
“Sorry, boy,” she said for the umpteenth time in the past two days.
She regained her balance, pulled an aerosol paint can from her knapsack, and was getting ready to spray a large “X” over the front of the rumble with a “best guess” estimate of the number of dead inside based on smell when she heard movement coming from within.
“Oh, my God,” she said, clambering back onto the roof.
Bones yipped excitedly, having heard the sound as well.
“Bones? Where’s it coming from?”
Bones, understanding perfectly what was being asked of him, nosed around the break in the roof and then circled a spot a few feet away from it on the roof. Elizabeth grabbed her radio, having almost forgotten the code for survivors.
“Hello? This is Dog Team Alpha-Michael,” she exclaimed. “We have movement inside a house…” She quickly checked her GPS to give the search team precise coordinates now that everything from road names to address numbers had been rendered obsolete. “…1500 block of Sargent Place, cross street is Lavetta Terrace,” she said. “Again, we have movement.”
She pocketed the radio after hearing the quick-return call from the search-and-rescue squad announcing they were sending a four-man, quick-insertion team that would be there within minutes to start the digging. Though they admonished Elizabeth not to attempt the extraction herself, she thought that if the person below was on their last legs, hearing that a rescue was on the way just might pull them through.
“Move over, Bones,” she said, dropping to her knees as she tried to pick apart the roof tiles. “Hello?!?”
With her heavy gloves on, she made quick work of the shattered tiles, tossing them aside as Bones bounced around behind her, happy to have done well. Though part of the reason she was digging so quickly was elation, another driving force was guilt. She and Bones had worked the hillside below Lavetta Terrace the day before. It had been her decision how to break down the grid, figuring houses on the lowest part of the hill presented the greatest likelihood for survivors given they were mostly small, single-story affairs, whereas the houses farther up were larger, two-story buildings. How many people had she let suffer or even die because of this decision?
“Hold on!” she cried, adrenaline fueling her hysteria. “We’re almost to you!”
That’s when she heard the movement again. It was as if the person underneath the rubble had heard her and was trying to signal back. This made Elizabeth dig faster, literally throwing chunks of tiles behind her as she went. The smell got worse the deeper she dug. She realized with horror that whoever was down there had possibly been trapped with at least one or more corpses. This disgusted her, but she knew that the person’s ordeal would soon be coming to an end because of her.
Well, and Bones, she thought.
She glanced over at the shepherd and was surprised to see him with his ears pressed flat against his head, his teeth bared. After another second, he even began to growl.
“Bones!” Elizabeth reprimanded. “What’s wrong with you?”
This only seemed to make Bones’s growl deepen as he stared at the hole Elizabeth was digging in the roof.
Elizabeth looked at the dog with incredulity for a moment longer, but then reached down and found a large flat chunk of ceiling panel under the last couple of tiles. Realizing the person must be trapped underneath it, she squared up her feet and bent down to grip the edge of the wood.
As her gloved hands coiled around the edge of the plank, she suddenly felt something reaching out and grabbing onto her fingers.
“Shit!”
She dropped the plank but quickly regained her composure. Fearing she might have injured the very person she was trying to save, she grabbed the panel again and this time was able to force it up. As soon as it was even part of the way up, she could see the face of a middle-aged Hispanic man.
It took a second to realize she was only seeing half of it.
The other half, the bottom half, had been completely eaten away by rats of which there were at least half a dozen running around underneath the plank.
“Oh, no!”
It was a silly thing to yell, but it was how she felt. The rats had scattered when she’d raised the board, but were now back looking at her as if waiting for the human to recognize that the man was dead and should be left for them to deal with.
That’s when Bones moved in. With a growl, the shepherd launched himself at the rats, grabbing one in his teeth and shaking it so hard that it was quickly torn in half, the rodent’s blood drooling down Bones’s lower jaw as he dropped it and went for a second rat. This one he bit in half immediately gulping down the head.
“Bones! Stop it!” cried Elizabeth, but to no avail.
Bones stepped down into the hole in the roof, careful with his footfalls, and tore apart a third rat. As he did, Elizabeth looked at the men’s corpse and realized there were at least two more bodies lying next to it, that of a woman and, Elizabeth realized with growing dread, that of a small child.
• • •
When the search-and-rescue team arrived, they comforted Elizabeth as best as they could. She expected derision or, at least, a couple of sidelong glances, but things had been going so drearily that even the idea that there might have been someone still alive had recharged a couple of spirits. The rush of adrenaline, the launch into action—it had been good for morale, no matter the outcome. But this did little to alleviate Elizabeth’s melancholy.
“It’s all right,” said one of the paramedics, a Las Vegas-based RN named Chris Wieneke. “You’re not the only one out here needing a win.”
“I know. But it’s the rats, too. It was…shocking.”
“Yeah, we’re hearing they�
�re everywhere,” Wieneke said, nodding. “It’s like they saw an opening and decided the city was theirs for the taking.”
“They can have it,” replied Elizabeth, miserable.
• • •
Elizabeth and Bones spent the rest of the day doing more of the same, though Elizabeth worked harder to distance herself from what she was seeing. She accepted the fact that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending, no camera-ready rescue from deep within some crushed house revealing thankful survivors. And as the day went on, experience proved this out time and time again as she and Bones located another thirty to forty victims buried in the rubble, her spray can eventually running out of paint. To take her mind off it, she let her thoughts wander as she walked. She’d only been to Los Angeles once before, to give a training seminar to West Hollywood sheriffs and had only seen the city from the airport to WeHo and back again, since she hadn’t even stayed the night.
Still, she knew enough to know just how devastating the earthquake had been. The views had changed as completely as the skyline. Where once on the hills around Echo Park she figured she would have been looking down onto apartment buildings or telephone poles or houses or churches, with all the flattened buildings she could now easily make out the contours of the land that formed the L.A. basin and could even see as far as the ocean. She tried to imagine who the last person to see the Pacific from her unelevated vantage point might have been and decided whoever it was had probably been dead a century. She’d seen a number of collapsed Victorian houses in Angelino Heights at the end of the first day and had asked a local law enforcement officer about them. When she’d heard that it was only the second neighborhood ever built in the city and dated back to the late 1800s, she wasn’t surprised. There was no telling how many minor quakes these houses had weathered through the years. But with a seismic event on the level of the Big Sleep, these old buildings had crumpled under as if they’d been held together with Elmer’s glue.