by Mark Wheaton
Leaving the woods behind, Bones led the other dogs over the hill and into the devastated training facility. They raced past the outdoor shooting range, the Daryl Gates Cafeteria and the three-tiered and tree-shaded waterfall and reflecting pool that stood as a memorial to fallen human officers. As they passed the pool, a couple of dogs stopped for a drink, but then the group carried on out into the parking lot and down towards the shattered 101 Freeway, which served as an ad hoc border between East L.A. and the rest of the city.
• • •
Despite their roving, the dogs were easily rounded up the next morning by the search-and-rescue team. Miraculously, including Wieneke, there had only been four deaths in the base camp, though there were a couple dozen minor injuries reported. The National Guard would later be commended for their selection of Dodger Stadium as a staging ground, but as soon as they had re-established communications with the superiors at the Burbank Airport, they learned that they were one of the only groups so unaffected. All across the broken city, other search-and-rescue teams hadn’t been as lucky and were reporting casualty rates of seventy to eighty percent. At the Burbank Airport itself, the rate was around fifty percent, with a majority of their vehicles rendered inoperable by Omega.
“The long and short of it is that our situation has become untenable and we’re being forced to pull back to Edwards,” the high command repeated over the radio to each of the search-and-rescue team commanders in the field. “As that means we will no longer be able to provide support to your team, you are to be extracted as well.”
A couple of the team leaders protested, but their hearts clearly weren’t in it. The surviving members of the teams were demoralized and were ready to leave. The fear was that the ground had just become so unstable that no one could predict what might happen next.
No one was more surprised by the events of the day than Elizabeth. To her surprise, she had survived Omega with barely a scratch having made it to the rubble of the already-collapsed home side of the stadium and finding there a narrow path between what had been the Dodger bullpen and the field seats behind the foul pole. As the ground continued to shake, she slipped between spears of broken railing, fearing they could impale her at any moment, but then reached the parking lot beyond and managed to escape.
The only problem was that she had left her pants back at the dugout and was completely naked from the waist down, being forced to pick her way across the broken-up pavement of the circular parking lot to get back to base camp in her bare feet. In the darkness with aftershocks hitting every ten to fifteen minutes, it took her an hour and a half to make the journey, tripping and scraping her knees as she went, which was why she practically burst into tears upon finally seeing the generator-fueled lights over the camp. With everyone else distracted by the hubbub of repairing the camp, she was able to make it to her temporary shelter, grab new pants, shoes, socks and underwear, and reclaim at least some of her dignity before going to the head of the paramedics.
“Wieneke was in there,” she said, pointing to the devastated stadium.
The paramedic didn’t have to ask why she knew this, but Elizabeth burst into tears anyway. She was given a sedative and led back in her shelter to ride out the night. The next morning, the news of their extraction was music to her ears. All she wanted to do was get out of California and go back home.
She went to check in with the soldiers who had rounded up all the escaped dogs, placing them carefully in their travel crates for transport, and that’s when she noticed the one absence.
“Wait, where’s Bones?”
• • •
The night before, Bones just hadn’t stopped running. When the voices of the soldiers started calling out for the other enforcement dogs, the others had all stopped and eventually trotted back towards the stadium. Bones, however, ignored the cries, as he was busy exploring a cracked culvert that ran alongside the highway. Though the quake had hit at five in the morning, the 101 had still been busy with cars and trucks utilizing the stretch of road as one of the many NAFTA-highways that connected Mexico with all the major cities of the California coast and beyond up to Canada. When Alpha hit, most of the drivers didn’t even feel it at first, the swaying light poles alongside the highway being their first indication. But then the long network of bridges and overpasses that ran from south of downtown all the way to the Valley began to domino downward, as their earthquake-reinforced columns were only tested effective up to an 8.5 quake.
Due to all the new technological advances made in strengthening a vehicle’s “roll cage,” many people actually survived the initial collapse. Their vehicles may have hurtled down like bolts from above with engine blocks crushing legs and spines upon impact, but the roll bars kept people’s upper torsos intact. Instead of being killed instantly, several hundred drivers and their passengers found themselves in the unenviable position of being slowly bled to death in excruciating pain. In a bygone era, those without roll cages, they would’ve been put out of their misery immediately.
Some of these people were still alive all the way until Omega.
It was over these broken overpasses that Bones now wandered as he made his way out of East L.A. The stench of death rose from below Bones’s feet. Though it was easy for the shepherd to differentiate between those who had died a few days before and those who were in the process of dying just now, he still couldn’t get to them. He whined a little, looked around for a human handler he might alert to the situation, but then moved on.
“Hey! Heeeey! Is someone up there?”
Bones stopped short and looked around in the dark but saw no movement. He nosed around a little and then discovered a crack out of which he could inhale the scent of a still living, breathing man.
“Hey! Who’s that? Who’s there?” came a voice from about fifteen feet below. “Hello?!?”
Bones whined a little and heard a sigh in response.
“Oh, Jesus, a fucking dog? My legs are crushed, I’m starvin’ like Marvin, and you’re a fucking dog?”
Bones sniffed through the crack, smelling bread and other baked goods, an incongruous scent certainly, but one that seemed to be in abundance. The smell overlapped with oil and gasoline, but there was enough of the bread-scent to tell Bones there was at least some kind of food supply below. This kept his attention.
“Come on, boy. Go get help or something. Do you have a master? Are you search and rescue?”
Bones ignored the man’s voice as he circled around, trying to determine if there was some way to he could get down to the food source. The collapsed overpass appeared as solid as a tomb, and Bones whined a little in frustration.
But then Bones heard something echoing up from below. At first it sounded like somebody was spilling ball bearings out onto the concrete and they were rolling closer to the injured man. As the sound neared, a new smell appeared attendant with it, but with all the oil, food, shit and corpses below and the dust from the collapsed buildings and the on-and-off fires in the nearby hills clogging the air above, it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world for Bones to fix in on the new scent and identify it. Whatever it might be, the scent was nothing if not powerful.
“What is that?” asked the man below, more to himself than the dog he’d identified up on the surface.
The sound grew louder and louder as its source drew near. The man below didn’t speak, but Bones could hear him shifting, trying to get into a better position to see what was going on.
That’s when Bones finally recognized the scent: rats.
Lots of them.
“Oh, my God!” shouted the man as the herd of rodents finally reached him. He sounded as incredulous as he was scared. “What the fuck?!”
Then he started screaming.
Bones took a couple of steps back as the man’s terrified high-pitched squeals were soon joined by the sound of others beneath the broken overpass, indicating the fellow in the bread truck was hardly the only to have survived so long. One sounded like a small child, another lik
e an elderly man. As the smell of the rats became omnipresent, the screams rose to a crescendo only to then go silent one by one. Bones could smell the blood of the man directly below him as it was drawn out through multiple wounds, the rats chewing into him from dozens of different spots. His screaming was cut off and his breathing got ragged, but then both were strangled.
Bones woofed a couple of times in the direction of the rats but then began moving away. As he looked down the overpass to the south where the sound had originated, the shepherd noticed movement in the dark as if the night sky itself had touched down and was rippling over the roadway like a black tide. It didn’t take long for Bones to realize it was more rats.
Bones woofed an alert to any humans in the area, but the rats kept coming.
Normally, rats only moved as one when fleeing. Sailors reported watching herds of rats sweeping up from the bowels of a ship when it was sinking, having had no idea such a pulsing mass of creatures had been living among them during the voyage. This colony, however, was traveling in that way in pursuit of something which was wholly unusual. These animals were like army ants in their single-minded mission. A mission that, at present, appeared to involve a German shepherd staring at them from only about a hundred yards away.
Bones woofed a third time and then pranced around as if to assert his unquestionable dominance on the food chain. The rats didn’t seem to notice. They moved without fear. The closer they got, the more Bones could pick up on the oily odor that emanated from their skin. It was much more pungent than the rats he’d encountered even earlier that day. He could also tell that they had picked up another scent: blood.
Blood was in the rats’ fur, in their claws, and dripping from their teeth. And it wasn’t just human blood, either, but all types of animals. It was such an eclectic mix that it was as if they had stopped off at the Griffith Park Zoo before descending on the 101 Freeway.
Though they were only rats, Bones knew better than to stand and fight. He could’ve easily gone up against a dozen or so at once, but something about the new smell bothered him. It was a reflex like the kind an animal has to alcohol. Bones knew something wasn’t right about the rats and didn’t stick around to discover what it was.
Instead, Bones turned ran north on the crushed highway, leaving Echo Park behind and heading in the direction of Hollywood. As he ran, he could hear the rats behind him but soon heard the sound of other rats rising up from below joining the chase.
Deciding on a detour, Bones made a lateral move and leaped over the broken median, crossed the southbound lane of the highway and ran up a grassy embankment to what had once been Sunset Boulevard. The street was littered with abandoned and demolished cars, but Bones flew by the old CBS complex and through the rubble of collapsed buildings away from the highway. For cars, the avenue would be hopelessly impassable as it wasn’t only the shattered buildings that blocked the road but also everything inside them that had been vomited out into accidental roadblocks. For a dog like Bones, however, this was easy enough to hurdle, and he simply jumped over this pile of cinder blocks and that busted billboard as he fled the rats.
The trouble for the shepherd was that scent worked both ways. His blood was pumping and the rats could smell it, which egged them on. Bones’s nose informed him in no uncertain terms that he would soon be overtaken. His tongue lolled out of his jaws and he was just beginning to feel winded when a new sound entered the fray, followed quickly by a man-made light source cutting through the night from the north.
,In his peripheral vision, Bones could see a dozen or so motorcycles, followed by two garish yellow civilian Humvees, weaving their way down to Sunset on a side street. The Humvees bounced over the rubble on the streets like it was nothing.
“It’s a dog!” came a cry. “What the hell’s a dog doing setting this thing off?”
Bones stopped short when one of the motorcycles got close enough to almost run him over and then he smelled cordite from a recently fired gun. With a clank, two turret guns, typical of a military Humvee but hopelessly incongruous on a consumer model, were readied and aimed at the oncoming rats.
“Light ’em up!”
With a tremendous burst of muzzle flash, hot lead screamed out of the twin guns and chewed through the incoming rats. The bullets moved so quickly and the targets were so near that it looked like a sci-fi movie laser beam was being used to sear through Bones’s attackers.
Bones turned and barked at the spectacle, though his voice was easily blocked out by the tremendous thrum of the mounted machine guns. Satisfied that he was no longer being pursued, Bones wheeled around to run off, only to have a harness thrown around his neck by one of the motorcyclists.
“Where do you think you’re going, puto?” the biker, a large Latino wearing a sweatshirt and ball cap, asked as he reeled the shepherd in.
Bones struggled against the leash every inch of the way to the motorcycle until the biker produced a cattle prod and jammed it against Bones’s shoulder. As 9,000 volts coursed through Bones’s body, the shepherd dropped to the deck, unconscious. As the hail of bullets continued shredding the air around him, the last thing Bones smelled was the oily-scented blood of a thousand dead rats.
• • •
Bones awoke a few hours later in great pain and found himself the subject of a surgical procedure. The tracking device that had been placed in his left leg was being removed by three people he could not see. The pain had jarred him out of unconsciousness.
Naturally, he wheeled around and sunk his jaws into the would-be surgeon, the iron-flecked taste of the man’s blood quickly oozing across the shepherd’s tongue.
“Zap him, man! Zap him! He’s awake!!!”
The cattle prod was quickly brought around and jammed into Bones’s side. Bones shuddered and sank back into unconsciousness after the second recharge.
• • •
When Bones woke up a second time, his muscles were sore to the bone, and his skin was burned wherever the cattle prod had touched. On top of that, his leg was in tremendous pain from the impromptu surgery, and despite the expert way that his fur had been shaved away before a careful incision had been made, no painkillers had been administered to ease his transition into consciousness.
So when Bones immediately stood up, the other four people in the room, folks who only showed up as smudges to Bones’s bleary eyes, all jumped as well.
“He’s awake!” said a twenty-something man in a gray suit, clearly terrified.
“Don’t worry,” said the younger of the two women in the room who appeared dressed in business casual. “He’s chained.”
“My neighbor had a Siberian husky when I was growing up,” said the older woman, who wore sort of green pajamas. “That thing bit right through its chain. They bought another one. It bit through that, too.”
“Yeah, well, this a German shepherd,” said the fourth man, an older fellow in a sweat suit.
“I knew a guy who had the rear tire of his Volkswagen chomped into by a German shepherd,” said the older woman. “He had no idea that it had happened, so he drove away and pulled onto the 134. His tire blew and he had to pull over, but got plowed into by an eighteen-wheeler. His widow sued the owner of the shepherd and won.”
“Should’ve sued the company that had contracted the eighteen-wheeler,” the twenty-something said. “Would’ve gotten more money.”
Bones had been looking from person to person and hadn’t noticed the chain they’d been referring to until he took a step and felt himself jerked backwards. He tugged at it, found it sold enough, and decided to voice his disdain for it with a huge torrent of barks that echoed all around the room and scared the hell out of the four humans.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted gray suit. “He’s pissed!”
Bones tugged at the chain a second time and discovered that it was wound around an unused, many-times-painted-over radiator under the one window in the room. Angry, Bones grabbed the chain in his jaws and tried to chew through it.
“S
ee?” said the older woman. “He’s going to bite right through it!”
But Bones took a couple more snaps at the chain, didn’t like how it felt against his teeth, and promptly lay back down on the floor to the surprise of his fellow prisoners. He had given them something of a sniff-over, detected nothing but the scent of abject terror in their sweat, and decided he couldn’t be bothered with anything else. Moments later, he went back to sleep.
It appeared that Bones and his fellow captives were being held in a small office in what must have been one of the last still standing buildings in all of Los Angeles, a multi-story Deco design that was likely apartments at one time, now converted into office space. Though one wall was marred by a gigantic crack and the glass of the window had shattered (though it was mostly still held in place by wire “quake-proof” mesh), those were the only signs of the recent seismic event.
Though the group had talked earlier in the day, they now fell mostly silent in hopes of not riling up the snoozing German shepherd. They stayed that way for an hour until someone finally opened the door.
“Bathroom break,” came a guttural voice that, unsurprisingly, belonged to a bulldozer-sized, biker-looking type with an intimidating shaved head and mustache combo and least three visible Iron Crosses tattooed on his neck and shoulders. “Anybody?”
“Me!” said the gray-suited man.
The biker grunted at the man.
“Me, too,” said the younger woman. “Is there a ladies room?”
In response, the shave-headed man shrugged but then turned to make sure that the group could see the gun in his belt to know that questions weren’t welcome. He waited for any other takers, but when there were none, he looked over at Bones who was waking up.