by Mark Wheaton
As she did so, she looked down and saw the shepherd watching her, eyes full of curiosity. He didn’t seem to understand what was going on but knew she was in trouble and was standing by to help in any circumstance.
“Don’t worry, Bones,” she said. “I’ll be down in a second. I got myself into this. I can get myself out.”
• • •
It took two and a half hours for Sharon to die.
It was in increments, one arm weakening and then the next, the strangling being so slow that, if asked, Sharon would have likely reported that she was feeling sleepy when in reality the oxygen was being gently choked off from her brain. With the fingers of one hand keeping the rope from touching skin, Sharon felt safe, not realizing that the noose was pressing her own hand into her windpipe with enough force that it would soon kill her.
During the entire struggle, Bones had not left Sharon’s side. She found herself staring into his eyes more and more as she fought against the rope.
“Shepherd,” she had said, thinking about for how many people this dog had been the last living thing they’d ever seen. In her already deoxygenated state, she wondered about this as the true origin of the breed. Shepherd. She recalled the twenty-third Psalm, “the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s ake.”
But then she spoke the next lines aloud, her voice a whisper. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.”
She looked down at Bones, her shepherd, and smiled to herself. Emily would’ve laughed at the idea of a lost cadaver dog standing in for God. She’d heard the Psalm read at many a Jewish funeral and wondered if there’d ever be one for her and if it would be read then.
She looked down at Emily’s grave, her vision losing most of its color, and was happy that she would soon be reunited with her lover in death. She wanted to bargain with God to allow her to be cut down from the tree so that she could crawl over to the grave and bury herself in the same ground, but then she died.
Bones stayed with Sharon’s body as it swung in the wind for the rest of the day and on into the night.
• • •
When morning came, Bones looked up at Sharon’s blackened hands and legs where her blood had pooled and up to her completely ashen face, her pale pink tongue barely peeking out through slightly pursed lips. Bones took a sniff, smelled nothing but shit and death, and moved away. The person he had been so loyal to was now absent which vacated Bones’s feelings of responsibility.
Bones went for a long walk, ranging over miles and miles of ground. He reached a grocery store at one point and ate his fill from the racks, tearing into bags of everything from chips to bread to rice but then kept moving.
He reached the collapsed 405 Freeway and saw soldiers in Humvees scouting around as a group of civilians workers took readings off some sort of various instruments. Bones flinched as if readying his legs to hurry over and greet the troopers, but something kept him back.
Turning around, Bones trotted back into West L.A. He thought he had sniffed something worth eating a few blocks before and backtracked to pounce on it before it got away from him.
By the afternoon, Bones was back at the ocean, the thousands of dead bird corpses having rotted away. He ran the length of the beach barking at the brown pelicans that had come up from San Diego and even catching one that flew too low to the ground, quickly tearing out its throat and devouring the bird’s organs and muscles in seconds. When he discovered fish inside the pelican’s throat pouch, he ate those, too.
He took a nap under the remains of the Santa Monica Pier at nightfall and then decided to go on a night hunt once darkness fell. The beach was as quiet and dark as it hadn’t been for a hundred years, the glow of the moon and stars being the only illumination, the waves lapping on the shore the only sound.
Bones padded along at the surf’s edge for a moment, hopping out of the water as the night tide rolled in but then playfully jumping back in. He swam out a little ways, felt a fish investigate his foot, and promptly dove his snout into the saltwater to grab it in his jaws.
After devouring the fish, Bones trotted a few hundred yards further down the beach, but after a moment, broke into a run. He ran and ran and ran, the scent of saltwater still in his nose and the feeling of the unbroken sand sinking lightly under his paws.
By morning, he’d gone a mile. By noon the next day, he had gone six. He found an overturned boat in the early afternoon and took a nap underneath it. When he woke up, he started running back in the direction he’d just come, sometimes in the water, sometimes on the sand.
He didn’t see a human being the entire time and he was happy.
ALPHA
Lupus non mordet lupum
Prologue
Bones woke up from a nap and felt a chill down his back that reverberated all the way to his marrow. It built into a dull, throbbing sensation that continued to crescendo throughout his body for a full thirty seconds and then just as suddenly disappeared.
The German shepherd, a proud, strong animal, knew what the extended spasm meant, however, and got to his feet. The pain was visited in order to send him on a journey, but it would be a long one. He immediately set out for the east.
He was soon to die, and he would die where he was born.
I
The world had ended.
Well, it had ended for the humans, at least. An angry group of mercenaries of the Mayer Corporation, disgruntled with the way they had been treated in the wake of the Los Angeles earthquake disaster that had killed millions and thrown the economy of the United States into chaos, had broken into the Anniston Army Depot in Bynum, Alabama. They were in the process of raiding the armory with the vague hope of committing a string of bank robberies with their haul when something unexpected occurred. Though Anniston was one of seven depots in the U.S. that stored chemical weapons, the mercenaries couldn’t have known that the CDC was additionally using the facility to house surviving biological fragments of a large mutated sea anemone that had killed tens of thousands in Pennsylvania a few years before. So when they ran into sentries tasked with guarding said fragments with their lives, they figured they could get by with the kind of threats and bluster they’d made copious use of thus far.
Instead, the sentries immediately drew down per standing orders, a massive gun fight erupted, there was an explosion, followed by another within minutes, and a toxic cloud was released. The minutiae of wind direction, weather conditions, barometric pressure, and the proximity to water sources would be studied closely over the next few days by desperate scientists looking for a way to stop this new airborne killer, a further mutation of the Arctic-originating anemone that was now aspirating into people’s lungs at a tremendous pace, where it simply killed them rather than turning them into flesh-hungry monsters, as had happened previously. Unfortunately, these scientists were fated to fail.
Within minutes, everyone on the entire base had been killed; within hours, most everyone in the surrounding counties of St. Clair, Etowah, and Talladega had joined them; and within days, the entire southeastern United States had been similarly decimated. When winds carried the plague out to Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica, delivering a devastating toll to their nations, the world powers and their respective citizenry realized that this was it and anarchy began to break out the world over.
A violent coup erupted in Pyongyang, rioters took to the streets of Moscow, London burned, and Paris was swept by mass suicides that soon became contagious across Europe. In many places, the larger cities rapidly depopulated as residents led themselves to believe that they stood a better chance of surviving away from others. Johannesburg lost a third of its number in two days. Rangoon was a ghost town in three. In Stockholm, the people took to the sea and spread out to the many islands of the Swedish archipelago, but were no safer there in the enclaves
of their Norse ancestors. In Canada, many headed to the northern territories. In Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, a number of Indians whose families had spent generations transitioning to urban life left their homes and vanished back into the Amazon.
Some went underground. In Rome, the catacombs and sewers beneath the city were opened, and thousands took their possessions and hid there. In Hue, the vast dormant tunnel systems utilizing during countless colonial wars were filled with a terrified but strident group of locals who eventually sealed themselves in, leading to armed confrontations with those who tried to get in later. In Athens, many fled to the old crumbling temples of the past, begging long-dismissed gods and goddesses to save them. Deities whose names hadn’t been called out with any real meaning for centuries were suddenly being voiced in earnest from Norway to Cape Town, Kyoto to the Rocky Mountains.
And then, little by little, these voices went silent.
As the inevitable set in, people found it hard to comprehend. How could something like this have existed on the Earth for centuries beneath the ice that, once dredged up so easily could turn around and kill every member of only one species in particular? Why were there to be hundreds of millions lying dead, stinking under the noon day sun, an entire race erased, but a carefree flock of starlings was allowed to whiz past unmolested? Pet owners stared helplessly from their death beds as the family dog, cat, hamster, and goldfish looked on in perfect health while their meal ticket expired. Those who took to the sea, which were many, thinking it would save them (rightfully so, it turned out, at least in the extreme short term) watched as the entire ocean-borne ecosystem continued to flourish unabated in the waters around them. Many had prepared themselves to stumble across massive fish-kills, gulls pecking the corpses of bloated sperm whales and other scenes of horror but were to be disappointed as it was business-as-usual in the animal kingdom.
Basically, the question on everyone’s mind was why were just Homo sapiens being shown the door despite being the most evolved, most capable, most prevalent species on the planet? The fact that this was specious reasoning at best, as humans were none of these things, occurred to few. Humanity slowly died off before accomplishing all of those many things it occasionally announced it was hoping to achieve.
Except.
Except for Frank Flores, a Pensacola man who was the first to be identified by the Centers for Disease Control as an actual survivor. He had been quarantined in Toronto, where it was soon discovered that he wasn’t even a carrier, had never even fought off an infection, as he was immune. The plague looked at him, didn’t recognize the man as a target, and passed him by.
Cases like this began appearing in various places of the world in a wide variety of concentrations. A handful in Africa, a great number in Korea, an even larger number in Norway, some in Russia, virtually none in South America, same with Australia, and then several scattered across the United State, though the majority were concentrated in the American Southwest.
Frank Flores, who had lost his wife and five children in front of him, learned that he had lost all of his friends, and many relatives except a handful on his mother’s side out in Oregon and thought that, as they would be next, why should he hang around?
As people in the Toronto facility began dying, Frank approached a sympathetic Army Ranger who allowed him access to his sidearm. Frank Flores put a bullet through his soft palate.
Frank Flores would have been wise to stick around and investigate those maternal relatives. He would’ve learned that though the plague came to Oregon and slashed its way through many, it also spared an aunt, two cousins, a niece, and a favorite nephew. He would hardly have been alone. Death would continue to follow them in the coming months and years, but this was the scourge of privation and other disease. They, too, were immune from this plague.
II
It had been a while since Bones had smelled a fresh corpse.
He had spent about two-thirds of a year mostly alone in the devastated city of Los Angeles, the victim of a double earthquake dubbed “Alpha” and “Omega” by the nation’s papers (though when it was believed to be a single quake, Alpha had been tagged with the less Biblical “The Big Sleep,” as so many had been killed while in bed and, after all, it was L.A.). After his involvement in the “mutation incident” in Pennsylvania, Bones had been free to run about the Ohiopyle woods for much of the winter, only to be hunted down by the Pittsburgh police, who recognized what an asset he would be in the City of Angels due to his abilities as a cadaver dog. While assisting a team in Echo Park, Omega had struck. Bones found himself helping a small group of survivors make it across the city as flocks of rabid rats and birds tried to devour them, driven mad after ingesting chemical residues from the flashing of more recently-constructed buildings.
The lone survivor, a middle-aged woman named Sharon, had used Bones to help her locate her dead partner in their collapsed apartment building and, after burying her, she (somewhat accidentally) took her own life, leaving Bones to fend for himself in the broken city. Bones had returned often to the woman’s body as time went on, though he spent most of his days in search of food. The mania that had driven the rats and birds of Los Angeles to madness had also swiftly killed them off. But the U.S. government didn’t take chances and regularly dusted the L.A. basin with poisonous pellets to eradicate any that were left behind. Bones had learned to avoid eating any bird or rat that carried the scent of poison in its belly after a particularly harrowing night of shitting and vomiting endured by the shepherd, who almost died from a toxic pelican he’d caught in Marina del Rey.
Bones had seen plenty of living people over the course of his time in Los Angeles, but he’d assiduously avoided them. Scientists, military and governmental officials and eventually federally funded teams of archaeologists entered the quake zone, always heavily fortified against the possibility of contamination, as literally millions of bodies continued to decompose. It had become an issue of national debate: What was to be done with Los Angeles and its dead? No one seemed to know. Before a definitive decision was to be made at the Congressional level, the rest of the country joined the dead of L.A.
Bones, though a creature of habit, still did not notice the absence of planes flying overhead nor the sudden drop-off in vehicles entering the area when it happened two months previously, but as he now left the city, he found bodies that obviously hadn’t been part of the earthquake dead. Rather, these people were in an almost uniform state of decomposition and had been feeding the bands of coyotes, ravens, and rats (normal ones) that had rapidly multiplied in the hills around the city at unprecedented rates after the quakes. Bones sniffed around these fresher corpses for a moment but quickly moved on to their packs of belongings. These seemed to indicate a misguided hope of hiding out from the plague in the quake zone. Though he found no food on the persons of the dead, the shepherd got lucky at a nearby camp site where he discovered bags and bags of non-perishable food stuffs that were still in edible shape. Using his claws, the shepherd tore apart a few of the bags, gorged himself on beef jerky and Twinkies, and then kept moving, leaving the eight-week-old corpses to continue their slow return to the earth.
• • •
Denny Edwin Tallchief, as was occasionally pointed out, hardly lived up to his last name. Never growing past a squat five-foot-five and shoveled food by an over-protective mother who used same to express love, Denny spent elementary school and junior high as a short, fat kid who no one would ever mistake for a class leader. As unexceptional in sports as he was in his school work, Denny learned to hate just about everything school-related, with the one big exception being the school’s library. His mother worked in downtown Bullhead City as a secretary for a construction company. With school out at three-thirty and Sheila Tallchief getting off at five on a good day, this left at least a half-hour drive before Denny would get picked up. Denny’s father, Gene, had never married Sheila, which was just as well, since he was in prison for armed robbery at the super-max facility at the Arizona State P
rison in Florence, but this meant almost every dime of Sheila’s paycheck went to living expenses with nothing left over for after-school care.
But Denny’s principal, a kindly old man named Mr. Heiden, who had started his teaching career in Mohave County after returning from the Pacific theater in World War II, often did things to help his students and their families and was considered more akin to a pastor than a school administrator at times. He struck a deal with Sheila to let Denny camp out in the library after school if he helped the current librarian, a revolving parade of part-time substitute teachers, shelve returned books. Denny took to this task with relish and soon was entrusted with a key to not only the library but also the school building. So efficient was he that the temporary librarians found it easy to fudge their time cards, knowing Denny was more than happy to take on all the after-school responsibilities of keeping up the library, from writing up the overdue notices to mending broken spines with just the right amount of book tape.
Additionally, Mr. Heiden began letting Denny borrow books from his own voluminous library that he kept in the principal’s office. His shelves were filled, but Denny noticed early on that the vast majority of them were focused on World War II, particularly actions Mr. Heiden had been a part of: Kwajalein and Engebi in the Marshall Islands, Ormoc and Valencia in the Philippines, and then Okinawa, where Heiden had been wounded and shipped home.
Denny never forgot Heiden’s personal touch with his students, and after surviving his school years, he went to Arizona State University with the intention of going into teaching himself. He’d slimmed down in high school, was still no one’s idea of attractive but ended up dating a handful of girls who were as socially awkward and prone to spending Friday nights in the campus library as he was.