Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga

by Mark Wheaton

  Bones looked inside the building and knew what was expected of him. Taking a couple of tentative steps forward, pieces of glass still crunching under his paws, Bones entered the hotel, his head low and back stiff as he kept a suspicious eye on the ceiling. He kept moving, seeing and smelling no sign of life. When he was about fifty feet into the lobby, Paul nodded to the others and they began to follow.

  • • •

  Bones’s eyes were the weakest part of him. It wasn’t the fact that he was in his eighth year and they were hardly as sharp as they’d once been but more that his nose and ears were just that much better. This meant that he’d learned to over-rely on them, so the darkness of the hotel did little to halt his advance. He listened as he stepped and, more importantly, continued to inhale the cornucopia of scents wafting through the lobby.

  The floor had been marble but was now jagged and broken due to the falling ceiling. Bones stayed away from the holes. The floor was more unstable around the cracks, even though it was through them that the smells of the dead wafted up. Bones could tell that despite the building having survived mostly intact, there were still several corpses both in the floors above but also below.

  Amidst all this and combed through with the now-familiar stench of pulverized concrete and rotting food, Bones could also detect the scent of the living, and there almost as many of them throughout the building as there were dead. However, they weren’t making their presences known yet.

  “If he’s anything like the dogs we used in Gaza,” one of the commandos, a man named Zamarin, began, “he’s going to be responding to the living first, then the dead. Not sure why it works that way, but it seems to be how they’re trained.”

  Bones didn’t hear this. His attention had turned to a broken door leading to fire stairs. He poked his head in, took a couple of deep sniffs, and proceeded inside. The stairwell was completely intact, with no real sign of earthquake damage on the first couple of floors. Bones ascended the steps with ease, only vaguely aware that he was doing so in abject darkness.

  “Lights,” Paul said, turning on the rail-mounted tactical light attached to his MP5. The other commandos did the same, except for the weaponless Sharon. She looked at the stairs but then back at Paul, a querulous expression on her face.

  “What is it?”

  “If the stairs are so easily accessible, why would anyone still be up there? Don’t you think the fear of a second quake would empty the place?”

  “If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t underestimate the stupidity of people under duress,” Paul replied before turning to head the steps. “We’d need to sweep these rooms anyway. No one’s coming out of the woodwork to welcome us. Wherever they are, we’re going to them.”

  Bones kept moving until he’d reached the eighth floor. He smelled living things on the other side of the door but also a heavy acrid stench like phosphorus or nitrogen. Bones tried to get through the door, but it was shut tight and he had to wait for the humans.

  “The dog has stopped on eight,” Zamarin, currently in the point position, called back down to the team. Paul and the other commandos hurried up the steps as Bones whined at the closed door.

  “Pull him back,” Paul ordered Nashon who quickly took Bones’s leash and moved him away.

  “Breaching in five…four…three…,” said Paul, going silent for the last two, then swinging the door open for Zamarin to head in first.

  “Oh, God…!” were the first words out of Zamarin’s mouth, words that were followed by a torrent of vomit, the entire contents of his stomach.

  Hearing this, Paul nodded to Nashon. “Send in the dog.”

  Nashon released Bones. The shepherd bounded up the steps and out onto the eighth floor. Actually, it was now the eighth and ninth floors of the hotel. The ninth had collapsed down a level giving the floor the feel of a cavernous rooftop atrium with two-story walls and windows. The outer walls had held so the framing was still in place. It just seemed the ninth floor had buckled and spilled everything out onto the eighth.

  But that wasn’t what made Zamarin lose his breakfast.

  There were at least four or five dozen human corpses on the level, likely hotel guests from both the eighth and ninth floors who had been killed in the initial quake, but the corpses were in no way “intact.” In fact, it was as if the bodies had been hooked onto the back of a vehicle and dragged around for a few days, allowing them to slowly be torn apart over time. The entrails had been consumed. Nothing was left but desiccated skin and muscle tissue left behind on scattered bones. In addition to the human bodies, there were also amongst them the torn and ragged corpses of around a thousand rats.

  Like the humans, the rats had been torn apart. Their bodies had been opened and their organs ripped out, but it wasn’t as a complete a job as what happened to the humans. Whereas the human carcasses were only identifiable by surviving skeletal structure, the rats often still had their fur and heads and tails attached, their attackers hardly licking their plates as clean as those who devoured the humans.

  Bones barked a couple of times as the Israeli commandos looked around in horror.

  “What the hell are we dealing with here?” asked one of the commandos, a fellow named Levy, staring around the room.

  “No idea,” replied Paul. He turned to Sharon. “We had people on these floors, correct?”

  “We had two suites on the ninth floor,” Sharon said.

  “You’re not still thinking of ‘retrieval,’ are you?” asked Zamarin.

  “We knew the bodies might not be intact,” Paul said, then nodded towards Bones. “He did his job. Now it’s time to do ours. At the very least, we need to make an attempt at identification.”

  The team split up, half starting at the far end of the level and the other the near in hopes of meeting in the middle. Sharon tried to indicate which rooms the Israeli delegation had been in, but it wasn’t easy.

  “Sorry, I’m getting a little turned around,” she admitted as she tried to imagine where the elevator bank had been. “We had 912 and 914, I think, which were on the far side of the elevators, wherever they were.”

  “Southwest corner,” Paul said, indicating a floor map.

  Sharon nodded and tentatively stepped down the hall, only to have her feet squish through a pulverized rat corpse. “Oh, shit.”

  Bones walked over, sniffed her shoe, and padded ahead, deftly springing over this corpse or that to get to the end of the hall.

  At the opposite end of the building from the stairwell, Paul indicated into the rubble where suites 912 and 914 had landed, but it was clear to everyone that the collapse was total. Any human who might have been in either room was now squashed under tons of concrete.

  “Oh, no,” cried Sharon, seeing something she recognized.

  She clambered over the rubble of the combination of rooms 812 and 910/912, having spotted human remains near the edge of the building. More of a skeleton with hair now, the corpse was that of a woman who seemed to have been pinned by chunks of ceiling in the calamity but had been unable to get free. From her outstretched arm, it appeared that she might have died reaching out to the now non-existent window to try to get help.

  The rats had then come and eaten all of her skin off. There were bite marks up and down her bones. The only conclusion one could draw was that this person’s last hours or, worse, last days were in agony. Her jaw seemed to be frozen in a scream with bite marks even there, covering her teeth and nasal cavity.

  “Do you recognize her?” Paul asked quietly.

  “Keren Paransky, the Finance Minister’s wife,” Sharon said, then added simply, “We were close.”

  Paul nodded, silently bringing out a list and making a notation. Bones glanced up at Sharon, and then regarded the semi-skeletal remains with a quick sniff before wandering over to where the floor ended and the wind was gently blowing in the curtains. Bones looked down the eight floors to the driveway below.

  “Hey, boy, you okay?” asked Nashon, wal
king over to the window and squatting next to the dog. “Want some water?”

  Nashon poured a little water from a canteen into the canteen’s cap. Bones slurped up three helpings. Nashon was about to pour him a fourth when he noticed something out the window.

  “Um, sir?”

  Paul looked over. Nashon pointed down to the street. “They’re gone.”

  Paul hurried over next to Nashon and scanned the driveway. The two trucks were in place, but there was no sign of the drivers or Arthur. Paul hefted up his MP5 and looked down the scope. This only revealed, to his horror, a single severed human foot glistening red out in the morning sun.

  “Did anyone hear any shots?!” Paul roared, calling out to the entire team. “Anybody?!”

  No one had. Suddenly, Paul got a bad feeling. Sharon could see his entire body tense.

  “What is it?” Sharon asked.

  “I think something got to them,” Paul said.

  “Why didn’t we hear shots?” Zamarin asked, hurrying over. “If it was those fucking rats again, they would’ve opened up. No way we wouldn’t have heard them.”

  “Yeah, but the rats are moving at night, not day,” said Paul. “This is something else. Pass the word. We’re out of here in one.”

  Two rooms down, Bones had wandered over to a different ledge and nosed through the curtains until he was looking out directly over the decimated buildings of Century City. Though there hadn’t been as many buildings in that direction as, say, Hollywood or the Wilshire Corridor, all of them—hotels, offices buildings, hospitals, an outdoor mall, etc.—had been these truly massive structures. So when they all came down, the rubble made the district look like a quarry.

  Their absence, however, now afforded a view from the eighth floor of the Beverly Hilton directly to the Pacific Ocean. Though pollution might have still made this difficult in the past, in the week following the first quake the sudden lack of ongoing air pollution seemed to have changed the color of the sky. There was still a smoky gray haze from where the wind picked up concrete dust and carried it on the wind alongside the smoky embers rising from the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains fires. But the yellow, the orange, and the toxic green hues that were part of everyday atmospheric life in the City of Angels were already fading away. Eight days without people, and already the place looked better.

  Bones turned and looked out towards the northwest, over towards the Pacific Palisades and Malibu beyond, and saw a thick black cloud of smoke rapidly making its way across the blue sky. It was as if a great conflagration had just been ignited and was consuming everything in its path. But then the cloud’s tail broke free from the earth. It became a wandering black splotch on the horizon following the coast down towards Santa Monica.

  Only, the wind was blowing northeast.

  Bones started barking but wasn’t sure why. He was definitely barking at the cloud, particularly now as it seemed to be changing direction again and moving less towards Santa Monica and more in the direction of Beverly Hills. Then, something even stranger happened as the sky darkened behind the hotel as well, casting the floor in shadow.

  Bones began barking in earnest.

  “Bones! Keep quiet!” Nashon cried, hurrying over to the dog, a shushing finger to his lips. “We’re getting out of here.”

  But the shepherd couldn’t stop. Something was clearly terrifying it. As if catching a scent on the wind, Bones bolted around and headed out of the room, across the hall and towards the east-facing side of the structure. He began barking even louder just as the shadow over the sun began getting more and more complete, dimming the light in the already dark hotel.

  Paul and Sharon hurried out of the “room” they had been in and watched Bones, the dog’s panic quickening their pulses.

  “Shit, what does he know that we don’t?” Zamarin asked.

  Paul, a little scared to do so, strode quickly over to Bones’s side and looked out into the sky towards where the shepherd was directing his alarm. Upon seeing what the dog was up in arms about, Paul immediately knew the casualty rate of the coming encounter would be large.

  In the eastern sky, blocking out the sun, was a collective mass of literally hundreds of thousands of birds, possibly millions, flying in from the ruins of downtown. Paul was amazed by the sight. He’d never seen so many birds outside of a documentary.

  “Sir? We’ve got birds incoming.”

  Paul turned and saw Levy pointing out towards the west.

  “What do you mean? They’re over here.”

  But then Paul saw through the building that an equal number of birds were coming in from the ocean side of the city. They seemed intent to marry up with the complementary fleet from the east at the Beverly Hilton’s brunch buffet consisting today of Israeli commandos, one young woman and a German shepherd. Paul turned and looked around, finally recognizing that the phosphorus and nitrogen smell, coupled with what he’d wrongly written off as some kind of chemical powder from the building’s fire extinguishers, was actually bird guano.

  He’d never been to Los Angeles before but understood that it, like many a metropolis, was overrun with pigeons and seagulls. It had never occurred to him that birds would have interest in devouring anything as large as a rat, much less meat off a human corpse.

  “Back to the stairwell—now,” he ordered.

  Paul didn’t have to convince anyone. The other commandos saw the approaching flocks and recognized malevolence in their movements. What they didn’t realize was just how quickly they were approaching.

  Sharon surprised herself by being the last to move as the previous week had found her exercising reflexes and response times she didn’t know she had. She’d been in bed in her Wilshire Corridor apartment when Alpha hit and was up like a shot. Her girlfriend had not been as fast, figuring the quake to be as mild as any they’d ever felt. Within seconds, she had been crushed under the full weight of their collapsing ceiling. From her vantage point in the living room, Sharon had just glimpsed this but had had a clear view of the panic on Emily’s face when she realized too late the mortal danger. Sharon had successfully avoided calling that image to mind for eight days now as she’d fought to survive, first to get food and water, then when having to fight off would-be rapists at Memorial Stadium on the USC campus where a number of survivors had initially gathered but then when hunted down by the Mayer men who seized her about half an hour after she had found a working satellite phone and had called the Stephane offices in New York.

  But she found something hypnotic about these birds. If she’d had the wherewithal to write it down, she’d admit that it looked like something out of a 3-D movie winding its way towards her from the screen. She actually loved birds. A couple of weekends before the quake had spent a morning with Emily photographing them at a bird sanctuary in Griffith Park. As she’d never seen birds exhibit anything remotely like this behavior before, naturally she was enraptured.

  “Come on!” shouted Paul, this time snapping Sharon out of it and making her run.

  The humans were all at different distances from the stairwell door when the birds coming in from the east slammed into the building first. It was a tremendous sound as several of the flock collided with the building itself both above and below the open-air eighth and ninth floors. Still, thousands drove in through the windows at the commandos, and within seconds, two of the commandos had been pounded so ferociously that they fell off the edge of the building. Another two had been similarly driven to the ground, their eyes bloodily torn out.

  “Shoot ’em!” screamed Paul, who turned and blasted into the birds with his machine gun.

  This proved disastrous for the team leader. The flock was moving way too quickly and as soon as he fired, he found himself pelted with just as many severed beaks and claws from the ones he’d killed as from the living. Gallons of bird blood splattered against his face as a gull reached his head, dug its claws into his temples, and tore out his eyeballs.

  Nashon didn’t even bother firing. He hit the
deck immediately and landed nose-down in a dead rat’s stomach. He retched, but kept his head down so that the worst he got from the birds racing by overhead was hair torn out of his scalp and his clothes shredded.

  Sharon actually managed to get behind a large chunk of rubble and survived without a scratch, save a gash she gave herself as she scraped her leg when she’d ducked down. A number of birds smacked into her temporary barrier, but those flying by overhead didn’t even see her.

  “Help me! God, help!”

  She looked over and saw the commando named Levy as he appeared to be physically carried over the edge of the building. It was an unbelievable sight, a man lifted aloft by birds. Even though he was flailing mightily against his attackers, Sharon felt the commando looked downright angelic as if he was being held aloft by some unseen Heavenly protector.

  But the moment passed and, like Icarus, Levy became all too aware of his limitations and that knowledge seemed to break the illusion and cause his body to fall. As with her girlfriend, Sharon managed to make eye contact with the man as he began his descent. He looked terrified but did not scream the entire way down to the concrete below.

  It suddenly occurred to Sharon that that explained the bodies down in the driveway.

  Well aware of what was coming, Bones had simply lain down on the ground behind a crushed piece of flooring and watched the birds pass over with amusement. At first, he made a couple of snaps at them, even pulling a mourning dove out of midair, which he promptly killed. But the action brought the attention of some of the other birds, who came and tore into his fur as they flew by. Realizing it wasn’t worth it, Bones knelt back down and sat out the action.

  It took the entire ocean-borne flock less than fifteen seconds to make their aerial maneuver through the hotel and come out on the other side where they faced off against the flock from downtown.

  “What the fuck was that?” screamed Zamarin.

  Sharon looked over at the older commando and saw that though he had managed to secret himself behind a broken concrete slab, his left eye had been torn from its socket and was now hanging down his cheek.