Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga

by Mark Wheaton

  “Keep me out of this,” Arthur chortled, laying back down on his cot. “If you had been listening carefully, you’d know that Miss Wiseman and I were actually playing a rather strident game of chess.”

  “Without a board or pieces?” Gary scoffed. When Sharon just rolled her eyes at him, the young man realized that was exactly what they meant. He scoffed a second time and flopped down on his cot.

  Bones, for his part, had fallen asleep five seconds after Chris had left the room.

  • • •

  The reason the Deco Building hadn’t even partially collapsed during either quake was actually both complicated and secret, at least outside of a handful of people in the Los Angeles City Planning and Transportation Services Departments. When the Metro Station at Hollywood and Vine was being built, the tremors from the digging equipment had produced massive cracks in the building’s foundation that had gone completely unnoticed by its owners, a consortium of cardiologists who lived in Agoura Hills and owned a number of east side apartment buildings as well as a handful around Hollywood. When it was quietly brought to their attention, the city planners debated doing nothing about it at all but feared that if the building subsequently fell in a quake, the inevitable liability lawsuits might spur the cardiologists to hire powerful enough lawyers to get to the bottom of it. Once they did, the city would be sued into oblivion.

  After two closed-door consulting meetings with the city’s legal team, it was decided that the amount the city would likely be made to pay out in damages would surpass the dollar figure of repairs, just as long as they were done in secret. If the cardiologists and subsequently the media were alerted to this accident, it would likely create a frenzy in the press as reporters, concerned citizens, and anybody else looking for handout began sniffing around for cracks in other buildings that might have been created by the never-ending Metro dig. This could even lead to court actions resulting in the most feared word of all: injunction.

  So the necessary repairs were clandestinely made to the Deco Building, and the planners were assured that even the strongest earthquake on record wouldn’t be able to bring it down. As it turned out, that boast was not only correct but also surpassed all expectations. Unfortunately, none of the planners or the contractors who mounted this quiet achievement would ever know of their success as, to a man, they were all dead.

  The fact remained, however, that Metro tunnels were running under the building. And in a city that stank of nothing but dust, oil, rotting food, and rotting corpses, the attendant smells of the living: freshly cooked food, fecal matter, sweat, etc., stood out like a beacon in the night.

  The rats, including the main army that Bones had encountered, had already begun to utilize the underground routes to travel across the city en masse. More recently, they had picked up on the smells from the Deco Building and were endeavoring to determine their source.

  At one point, the rats had been a group numbering in the dozens, but that had swiftly become tens of thousands within the first forty-eight hours after Alpha. By the time Saturday night arrived, a mere few hours before the one-week anniversary of the first quake, the number of rats assembled into a single pack was numbering right around six million, a sea that stretched almost a mile. If it had been seen from the air, the rat army would appear like a great black snake winding through the city, searching for a substantial food source to feed its Herculean number. But the rats stayed underground and out of sight, since when they did surface, they became easy prey to the various predatory birds now encircling the city.

  It wasn’t as if any of these stragglers fed to the birds were mourned, however. The rats were in a state most similar to rabid. They had a poison running through their system but in the way rabies manifested itself with insatiable thirst, this poison from the Nivec did the same with hunger. The rats would never be able to eat enough, and this would eventually kill them. But while they were alive, it meant that no living thing in the Los Angeles basin was safe.

  • • •

  Just past midnight, Bones was awakened by screams and gunfire.

  He got to his feet just as Gary, Sharon, and Arthur all did the same, staring bleary-eyed at one another as what began as sporadic incidents of shooting quickly became a fusillade of bullets echoing up from below as if a war was being fought two levels down in the building.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” cried Gary, freaking out. He leaped up and started pounding on the door. “Hey! Let us out!! What’s going on?!”

  Arthur raised a hand. “Did you ever think it might be better to stay be locked in here in a situation like this? Maybe even keeping quiet?”

  Gary turned and was about to unleash an expletive-filled rant at Arthur, but then realized what he was saying might be true and stepped away from the door. As he did, the massive Humvee-mounted cannons in the courtyard began firing over the other gunfire, and the trio of humans raced to the window, only to be surprised at what they saw.

  “Why are they firing into the building?!” Gary asked, his eyes going wide.

  It was a bizarre sight to see so much firepower blazing away into the very structure they were being housed in, but they could also see a great number of men running away from the Deco Building, obviously terrified. For a moment, the group thought that looters might have taken over the guns and there was a battle going on between the mercenaries and locals. But soon they could see that those mounting the Humvee cannons were the same as had been standing guard earlier.

  Bone heard it first, a single sound rising so high in its intensity that it even dulled out the gunfire. It was a low rumble that echoed as it traveled up the walls, sounding not unlike the coming of yet a third earthquake. Arthur heard it next, then Sharon, and finally Gary, all three of whom initially believed it to be an aftershock, though a couple of seconds later they began to realize it was something else entirely.

  “It’s everywhere!” Gary said, stepping away from the window.

  The rumbling came up from the stairwells, down from the ceiling, over from within the walls, and beneath them in the floors. The room began to vibrate. In a panic, Bones started barking and tugging at his chain so hard that it finally unraveled off the radiator and clinked around the room.

  “Quiet!” Arthur yelled at the dog but to no avail.

  The noise of the rats got louder and louder, sometimes a rattling, sometimes a scratching, sometimes a pounding. Sharon thought it was as if she had suddenly found herself inside an echo chamber surrounded on all sides by an enthusiastic phalanx of snare drummers who couldn’t decide a rhythm. Instead, they had simply agreed to play louder.

  Just as the noise reached its apex, Gary disappeared.

  More accurately, the floor beneath Gary’s feet disappeared, crumbling away and carrying Gary and about four dozen rats down into an office full of unused furniture below. Gary screamed the whole way down until he landed amidst a cluster of wooden chairs with a sickening crack, the bones of both his legs splintering as he landed. A blood-soaked spur, looking every bit like a cracked tree branch, shot out through his flesh.

  “FUCK!” he cried, tears instantly welling in his eyes.

  Sharon and Arthur gazed in horror at the sprawled-out young man and saw that though he was already partially covered in rats that had come down in the fall with him, even more were now racing across the floor towards his prone body. He screamed in horror as they dug their teeth into his skin, but when one ran straight to his face and sunk its incisors into his left eyeball, causing a geyser of blood to shoot a good two feet up into the air, Gary’s screams became even more high-pitched.

  “Oh, God,” Sharon said.

  As she spoke, rats began emerging from the edges of the broken floor and were now looking up at her, Bones and Arthur..

  “This isn’t going to be pleasant,” said Arthur, as if describing an unappetizing piece of salmon.

  The rats spilled out from the broken floor, but as they launched themselves at the humans, Bones playfully leaped towards them. He kicked a
few over, nipped at this one or that, but when one of the rats had the bad manners to bite the shepherd on the foot, Bones snatched the squealing rodent up into his jaws and bit it in two. The other rats didn’t seem to notice and continued moving at Sharon and Arthur, but Bones decided to involve himself.

  Without a thought, the large German shepherd jumped into the fray and began tearing the rats apart, but with an almost genteel touch. Bones would lean down like a mother cat, gently pick up the rat in his mouth, but then bite its head off. At the same time, he would use the great claws on his fore paws to tear open the soft flesh of other rats’ underbellies, killing them just as easily.

  Within fifteen seconds, Bones had killed as many rats. Others began to get the message and stopped short at the edge of the hole in the floor.

  “They’re not just going to stop,” Arthur said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Sharon was about to respond when the wall behind them broke apart, pouring literally hundreds more rats into the room. Some immediately slid to the hole in the floor as if being flushed to a drain where they were dropped onto their comrades devouring Gary below. But as Sharon screamed, the remaining rats massed together and then turned towards the other occupants of the room.

  Sharon began preparing herself for a most horrific death, when a noise like nothing she’d ever heard tore the room.

  Well, to say she “heard” it is a misnomer. More like her ears momentarily sealed themselves up to allow a dull, hollow throb to pound incessantly within her skull, so much so that she felt as if she’d been deafened by a blow to both temples. She and Arthur both dropped to their knees and saw that Bones seemed to be affected by it even worse than they had been, since he shook his head violently and then battered it against the nearby sofa as if trying to shake something free.

  What Sharon saw next shocked her. The rats fled as if the building was on fire. They escaped into the wall and into the hole in the floor where Gary had fallen. A few even exited through a small space in a corner of the ceiling that Sharon hadn’t noticed before. They vanished so quickly that Sharon had to remind herself that they’d been real in the first place and not just a terrifying figment of her imagination.

  As she contemplated this, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  Turning to look, she saw a man in full body armor and military-style urban night camos looking down at her. The uniform had no insignia or distinguishing markings to it, but she still recognized the pattern as that utilized by Israeli special forces. She had done her two years of service in the IDF and had hardly been part of any elite unit, but she’d seen the digital blue and gray she was looking at now once when a special forces team had temporarily bivouacked at her base in Mishmar Ha Negev. The special forces team hadn’t fraternized with the regular IDF soldiers as much as some of the female soldiers had wanted them to, but that only added to their mystique.

  “Sharon Wiseman? We’re here to rescue you.”

  Finer words, she had never heard.

  • • •

  The special forces troopers, led by a tall, olive-complected lieutenant named Paul (“Just Paul”), would not listen to Sharon when she demanded that both Arthur and Bones be extracted with her.

  “Our mission is to retrieve you and you alone,” Paul said. “We don’t have the resources for an additional player, much less a dog.”

  “Then I’m staying here,” Sharon replied.

  “Then we’ll remove you by force.”

  “Do you know who my father is?” Sharon shot back. “And who my grandfather was and what he meant to the nation?”

  Paul was about to rip right into her but then held his tongue. He could hear the Mayer soldiers regrouping downstairs and the last thing he wanted to do was be discovered.

  “Just the man,” Paul said.

  Sharon looked at Bones but then reluctantly nodded, despite the dog having saved her life. “All right.”

  Sharon and Arthur were brought over to the window. They saw how the special forces team had breached the room, coming across Vine on a wire connected to the last standing corner of the shattered hotel across the way where Bones had earlier seen the hawk. The team hooked a harness around Arthur and sent him across. Once he was safely away, Paul harnessed Sharon into a similar apparatus.

  “Wait a sec,” she balked. She moved over to Bones and unhooked the chain from around his neck so that he was completely unfettered. She then rubbed his snout.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said to the shepherd. She then allowed herself to be harnessed and zip-lined across the street

  . Paul, the last one in the room, glanced back at Bones who was now sniffing around the bloody hole in the floor.

  “Don’t make me regret not shooting you,” Paul said, though Bones didn’t seem to notice.

  With that, Paul exited across the zip-line. A second later, the rope was cut as Bones stood by. As if on cue, the door to the room was kicked open by four of the Mayer men.

  “Where the hell’d they go?” barked Gerson, the leader of the group.

  Bones galloped over to the window and began barking up a storm. Gerson and his men saw the group of Israeli commandos retreating through the broken building across the way.

  “Fuck!” shouted Gerson. He pointed his AR-15 tactical carbine out the window and began spraying the hotel with 5.56 NATO rounds.

  Almost immediately, one of the Israeli commandos took a million-to-one shot to the neck, spun around, and fell four stories down to the street, where he landed with a dull thud, not unlike the hawk before him. The rest of the commandos immediately formed up and fired back but with much heavier fire power.

  High-powered rounds arrowed through the walls, easily tunneling through the midsections of Gerson and the other Mayer shooters despite their heavy plate body armor. It took a fusillade of less than a dozen bullets to silence the four men.

  Having been just below the head—and chest-level shots taken by the commandos, Bones avoided getting shot, only to then have to dodge a falling mercenary who had taken three rounds to the stomach and was staggering backwards towards the hole in the floor. Bones ducked out of the way and let the man fall (directly onto Gary as it turned out, who seemed to groan upon the merc’s impact), but then skittered out the door.

  Instead of going downstairs, Bones followed the scent of Chris up to his squat on the fourth floor. He discovered both Chris and Barbara absent their clothes on Chris’s cot but also absent most of their skin, it having been chewed away by the rats. Still clinging to one another, it seemed as if they’d been taken completely by surprise when the rodents swept in and, rather than fight, had allowed themselves to be devoured in coitus.

  Bones sniffed around for a moment but then descended downstairs. When he reached the lobby, he saw that there were only a handful of the Mayer men left. They were all too preoccupied with trying to get back in contact with the outside world to notice a lone dog.

  “We’ve got a real emergency here!” shouted one of the men. “We need an extract!”

  “How many of the clients have been affected?” came a voice on the other end.

  “We don’t know. Too difficult to assess. You have to understand the gravity of the situation here on the ground! We have been breached. We’re at almost 100-percent casualties!”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line, but then a weary voice came back. “I’m afraid any attempt at extraction could be compromised by the current instability of the city. You’re advised to sit tight or attempt your own extraction via a southeastern, overland route…”

  The man smashed the radio receiver at this point and shook his head. “Those fuckers! When I get back there, I’m going bring their goddamn company down to its knees. They won’t even know what hit them. Pricks.”

  This man’s name was Richard Uhlmann. He would unwittingly destroy mankind two hundred and forty-two days from this proclamation.

  • • •

  Bones padded out of the Deco Building and found Hollywo
od completely dark now that the generator-fueled lights set up by the mercs had been mostly extinguished. On the street and sidewalk directly in front of the structure were the corpses of thousands of dead rats shredded into mincemeat by the quick-thinking men in the Humvees, but also more than a few dead humans. Skipping through the carcasses, nose filling with the scent of the recently dead, Bones wandered north to Hollywood Boulevard, picked up a new scent, and began walking west.

  The devastation along one of the most storied streets in the world was remarkable in its consistency. Very little was left standing. The buildings had come down on both sides of the street destroying the palm trees, signage, and even the “walk of fame,” granite stars placed in the sidewalk emblazoned with the names of media stars. Many were long-dead before the quake, far more after.

  Bones kept moving. He found himself hungry and had picked up the scent of food. He tracked this to a warm spot on the street five blocks down from Vine where he detected the smell of gasoline and cordite, the place where the Israeli commandos had parked their vehicles before beginning their operation. Bones sniffed around this for a moment but then kept moving.

  A few more blocks, and Bones found a hot dog stand storefront that had been demolished by the quake, but seemed to have proved impenetrable to looters. Bones, however, was a very determined animal and got down on his stomach, scratched his way forward, stretched out his spine, and finally edged his way into what had been the kitchen of the stand, now little more than a crawl space filled with rotting meat. Bones began feasting on the leftovers, scarfing down hot dog after hot dog until he couldn’t eat another bite. He almost fell asleep right there, but started to feel queasy and struggled back out onto the sidewalk.

  Once he was out, he staggered forward, threw up, and then shit all over the sidewalk. It was a disgusting evacuation to be sure, but Bones immediately felt a little better. At the very least, he wasn’t hungry anymore.

  As he walked, Bones looked up to the grassy hills above Hollywood most recently ablaze due to broken gas lines, but now only smoldering. He could see a couple of spots of orange that indicated fires that could have either been survivors or still burning homes. It was impossible to say.