by Mark Wheaton
At the rear of the building, Bones caught the twin scents of the hotel’s outdoor latrines and then a large garbage pit that had been dug just on the other side of the back fence. The pit itself was twenty feet by twenty feet and an impressive thirty-five feet straight down. Though it was within the fenced-in grounds of the hotel compound, a second, three foot-high fence topped with barbed wire had been erected around it as well. Trash was then dumped in, but securely tied in paper bags that were then periodically covered with dirt.
Bones, who was trained in such things, quickly scaled the chain-link fence and hopped into the yard before moving over to the pit. It took him less than a minute to dig under the three-foot fence, squeezing through the tight hole, and then bounded down the slanted pit wall to the piles of trash.
When he reached the first bag, he tore it open to get at the fish smell he had detected, only to find a couple of empty tuna and sardine cans that were already so clean it seemed they had been washed before being thrown away. Bones licked the last remnants of oil from the cans and then moved on, hardly sated. He tore through the rest of the accessible bags and found only more of the same, hardly enough to satisfy the hungry dog.
After fruitlessly wandering through the now strewn-about trash for a few more minutes, Bones discovered a dirt-covered corner of the pit out of the way from the rising sun and settled in to take a nap.
• • •
“See? Told you we found a dog. It’s right there.”
Bones opened his eyes and looked up to see a handful of people looking down at him in the trash pit. The sun was now up, but the shepherd was still very much in the shadows of a far corner of the pit.
“I saw the hole under the fence but didn’t think whatever dug it would still be there,” the youngest man of the group, a twelve-year-old kid named Joseph was saying. “Then I saw the dog.”
Denny, who held a rifle, stared at the animal before raising the gun and lining the shepherd up in his sights. He had never killed anything before and had only recently become proficient with a gun, but he knew what he was willing to do to preserve the Flagstaff group. This was a dog. Norman’s words about the great suffering that came from underestimating the species were already ringing in his ears.
“Might be others around,” Denny said to another of the recent arrivals, a fifty-something fellow named Gutierrez. “Why don’t you get Joseph and the others inside?”
Gutierrez nodded and the group wandered back in, except for Carrie.
“Where’s the rest of the pack?” Carrie said. “This one looks pretty harmless.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know what he’s been through or if this is some kind of trick. You heard what they were saying. The dogs were doing all kinds of things to draw people out.”
“Yeah, but this guy? Look at him. Hardly looks like a killer.”
As if on cue, Bones rose to his feet and began trotting over to where Denny and Carrie stood. Finding a path up to the fence line (cut into the sides to allow those who dug it easy access to the pit floor), Bones wandered up to the surface, tongue hanging out as he stretched a little. He felt a real stiffness in his bones, a likely result of the coldness of the ground he had settled onto.
Though he detected no threat from the shepherd, Denny kept the gun on Bones as he continued his ascent. When the dog reached the fence, he began sniffing around the air, inhaling the scent of the two closest humans. Dissatisfied, he then stuck his nose through the fence, obviously seeking an extended hand.
“See? He’s just a dog,” Carrie said. As if to prove her point, she held out her hand and Bones first sniffed it and then gave it a couple of quick licks. Denny remained skeptical.
“Is that blood on his snout?” Denny asked, eyeing the dog’s mouth.
Carrie looked but shrugged. “Could be from a mouse, Denny. He’s not acting like a killer. He’s acting like somebody’s pet.”
That’s when Denny finally noticed Bones’s frayed collar. There was barely anything left of it, but Denny could see that it at least appeared military. He lowered the gun and squatted down to get a better look as Bones edged closer to sniff the young man. Denny raised his hands to show that he meant no harm, let Bones give him a quick lick, and then reached through the fence and turned over the collar. Immediately, he saw that it showed not only the shepherd’s name but also that he had been attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry, a holdover from when the animal had been utilized as a cadaver dog in the ruins of Los Angeles.
“Jesus, he’s some kind of military dog, maybe worked with the MPs,” Denny said. “His name is ‘Bones.’”
Upon hearing his name, Bones stood upright and eyed Danny.
“That’s morbid,” Carrie scoffed.
“If we bring him in, we’;; upset a lot of people,” Denny said. “I think we have to shoot him.”
“If there’s some kind of feral dog pack out there capable of sneaking up on even large groups of people in broad daylight, don’t you think having a dog around might be useful?”
Denny had, in fact, thought of that as he ran through what he might say to Lester about why a dog, particularly a German shepherd that had some military experience in its background, would be a good addition to their group. But as soon as Carrie said it, he realized that he didn’t want to have to make excuses. The truth was he wanted to keep this dog because he didn’t want to kill it. After all that had happened, the idea was downright abhorrent to him. He understood the need for survival and had certainly taken part in hunts with the other Flagstaff survivors into the surrounding desert, but pointing a rifle through the fence to shoot a defenseless animal wasn’t something life had prepared him to do.
“All right,” Denny said to Carrie, but then turned to the shepherd. “Don’t make me regret this.”
VII
There was another reason Denny wanted to save the dog, but it wasn’t something he found easy to articulate. He knew something of the history of the Ypandes-Apache people despite having grown up with a mother and grandparents who had about as little interest in imparting such information to the young man as possible. Instead, he found the answers in books, and one of the things he learned early on was the relationship between the Apache and dogs.
There was a school of thought that suggested dogs would have been marginalized, possibly even extinct, if it wasn’t for the establishment of domestication ties between humans and canines, likely during Neanderthal times. Dogs became hunting companions and watch animals while humans protected and fed them as an essential part of the tribe. This continued as both species evolved through the millennia and dogs were eventually brought over the land bridge that had once existed over the Bering Strait, known to native locals as Imakpik, and settled across North America.
Dogs quickly became an essential part of several Native American cultures, used by nomadic tribes to haul things just as mules or horses would later be. The dog was a member of the family, and some tribes caught wolves to crossbreed with their dogs in order to make them more effective for hunting. Dogs ate with their masters at every meal, dogs were part of many Indian creation myths and dogs were given some of the same burial rituals and rites as their human counterparts.
For the Apache, dogs were as important to the tribe as they were to several others in the American Southwest, but it was the detail about the tribes bringing them across what had come to be known as Beringia that had Denny thinking these days.
The Ypandes-Apache tribe was not known for having participated in famous battles or sired chiefs renowned for their abilities as killers or diplomats, but in the late twentieth century, something had been discovered about the Ypandes that put them on the map regardless. Their language was very distinct, different from many of the others in the area, and had sparked some interesting comparative research that had identified similarities between it, some early dialects of Korean (Proto-Korean/Buyeo) and then a Laplander language spoken in the Arctic nether regions of Finland. Blood tests were taken and genetic testing done that show
ed a common ancestry shared among the three ethnicities. Scientists postulated that during the last Ice Age, which sent several of the northern tribes south, a group of the northern tribesmen headed east with a large group breaking off and going south when they reached Siberia to end up in the Korean peninsula while the others continued on into North America, similar to how many believed the Altaic language groups were proliferated. In both cases, the various clans intermingled (read: inter-bred) with others, producing larger clans but traces of the blood line survived to the modern day.
As the Flagstaff survivors were only of these people, Denny thought that if the plague was tied to this deeply buried genetic strand, that could mean there were other pockets of survivors in Korea and Scandinavia. While yes, that also suggested a Korean or Finn or Ypandes-Apache living in Argentina or Tunisia might have survived as well, it was difficult to imagine such isolated numbers being able to link up with enough other survivors to do much more than attempt to survive in the hostile new world, much less establish and populate a new society.
Denny figured he’d be long dead before his theory might be proven or disproven, but it was an idea that gave him hope.
“You’re telling me this as a roundabout sort of way to suggest we get pregnant?” Carrie had asked when Denny laid out this theory one day. “I mean, I’m all for it, but don’t you think it could be a little dangerous giving birth these days?”
As the conversation was mostly in jest, they had left it there until a middle-aged woman named Lucille Amaro arrived with one group of survivors and explained that she had worked as a doula. Carrie and Denny had then had a second conversation, came to a conclusion, and then began having regular, unprotected sex. Denny wondered if it was the kind of thing they should bring up with Lester first but both decided that the decision was theirs and no one else’s.
But now, here was Denny leading Bones back into the Flagstaff Sheraton on a makeshift leash, another decision made outside the purview of the group that he thought might not go over all that well.
“You couldn’t just shoot it?” snarled someone Denny recognized from the Jicarilla party who, like the others, must have been waiting to hear a rifle shot.
“He’s a police dog,” announced Carrie, as if that was enough to silence any critic. “He’s too valuable to be killed.”
Denny said nothing but simply led Bones through the lobby to the manager’s office where he knew Lester would be.
“Denny,” Lester said heavily as he regarded the trio. “You need to get that dog out of here. You don’t want to shoot it? Fine. Let it go. But you’ve got a group of people here who just watched all their friends and relatives survive one plague, only to get massacred by dogs. On top of that, you’ve got a second group who just heard that story and are jumping at every shadow.”
“He was a military dog,” Denny said but knew from the look on Lester’s face that wasn’t going to carry much water with him.
“Be that as it may, you have to get rid of it. These people are looking for a reason to let out steam, mix it up, get a little violent, and here you come throwing a cat among the pigeons. This just isn’t what we need right now. I’m pulling rank.”
Denny heard the challenge in Lester’s voice loud and clear. Old dog, young dog, alpha dog, team dog. But Denny knew that Lester’s words rang true.
He nodded and turned, but Carrie shook her head. “We need this dog. If we’ve got a dog problem, he’ll bark…”
“How do we know they won’t just come up, trade a couple of sniffs with your friend there so he lets them waltz right in?” Lester asked, now sounding exasperated. “Having a dog is one thing, trusting our security to one is another. If this was yesterday morning, I might have a different thought, but I’ve never heard of any dogs acting like the ones that attacked those people on the road. Yes, this dog looks perfectly fine to me, but I’m not willing to give much of anything the benefit of the doubt these days.”
Carrie was about to protest again but caught a look from Denny and silenced herself, following him out.
“This is a mistake,” Carrie said as Denny walked Bones out of the front of the hotel to the gates.
“Maybe it is and maybe it’s not,” Denny replied. “Some things you can’t know.”
Bones looked up at the two humans with confusion as they took off his leash, led him out beyond the gate, and then let the two guards close it behind him. The shepherd pranced around a little as they turned their backs on him and headed back towards the hotel. He then stood there for a long moment, waiting for their return, before ambling away into the city again.
“Guess we know which side you’re on,” said a stern-faced woman, another Jicarilla survivor, as Denny and Carrie walked back inside “Gotta be stronger than that to make it in this new world.”
Denny gave her a hard stare. She looked right back at him with a scowl. Denny later found out that she’d lost her great-uncle and a cousin to the dogs and regretted the confrontation.
• • •
Bones spent the rest of the morning wandering around Flagstaff. He stayed relatively close to the Sheraton as now that he found people, he knew he’d have a semi-consistent food source from what they threw away, but he also scouted around in search of more food on his own. The grocery and convenience stores in the immediate area had long been picked clean, so Bones ended up slipping into this house or that office building as he had done in Los Angeles, following his nose to vending machines and pantries full of non-perishables that only required stepping over a few corpses to get to, something that the residents of the Flagstaff Sheraton were still avoiding due to potential contamination. As Bones didn’t consider such things, he feasted on precisely what he was hoping to: beef jerky and chips in a suburban utility room.
It was while he was eating this that he caught the scent of a feral cat outside and decided to make a run at it. He slipped out the door he’d come in through and spotted the cat feasting on a dead mouse in the garage. The cat didn’t seem to notice the shepherd in the slightest, so it was easy for him to slip over to only a few feet away and then spring at the animal, slaughtering it before its heart rate had time to quicken. On top of that, the mouse had been freshly killed, so he ate that, too.
It was while he was chewing the mouse that something inside him seemed to rupture, sending Bones’s entire body into spasm, and he loosed his bowels. All of a sudden, Bones found himself sitting in a puddle of his own blood and shit as his vision began to cloud. He tried to stand up but felt too weak and toppled to his side. As he panted for breath, he found himself urinating down his leg.
That’s when the pain came, a tremendous throbbing sensation in his bowels that quickly traveled up his entire body causing him to quake and whine. After another moment passed, he drifted into unconsciousness swathed in as much agony as he had ever felt.
• • •
Back at the Sheraton, Denny found himself ostracized by the other survivors so he figured he’d make himself useful and push it out of his head. He went to help in the makeshift infirmary that had been set up in the hotel’s kitchen and learned that two others from the Jicarilla massacre had died in the night and a third was just barely hanging on. Though they had plenty of medical supplies, an early priority for Lester, they still didn’t have access to fresh blood, which was a real problem given how much the victims had lost. No matter how skillfully their wounds had been washed, disinfected, stitched and dressed, their bodies could not make up the difference with blood.
But even if they had been able to conduct transfusions, they also had no way of typing blood, so it would be a crap shoot unless someone just happened to know they were O-negative, but no one was.
“I’m sorry,” Denny found himself saying time and time again to folks as he tried to bring them something to alleviate their pain, even if it was only the itching from their stitches.
Additionally, the lack of refrigeration meant that several drugs they’d found in this hospital or that were now useless an
d, to no one’s surprise, the morphine and codeine supplies around Flagstaff had almost been exhausted by those in the medical profession who attempted to ease the suffering of the quickly dying, which in many cases meant euthanizing their patients and then themselves.
Something would have to be done.
“You’re the guy who brought in the dog, right?” one of the wounded Jicarilla men asked. “I’m not blaming you, as I would’ve probably done the same. But if you had seen what we had out there, you would never want to see another dog for the rest of your life. It was like sharks. All teeth and instinct.”
Denny nodded and offered the man a glass of three-hundred-dollar Scotch, which he readily accepted.
• • •
When night fell, Bones awoke knowing he was in really bad shape. He was cold all over and could sense that his bowels had let go at least one more time that day while he was out. He struggled to stand up, and when he finally got on all fours, he discovered that he wasn’t alone.
Just outside the garage on the driveway, he could see the six dogs watching him. He got their scent and knew immediately that they were of the same pack he’d run into the night before.
Bones also knew that they could smell his weakness and lowered his head, baring his teeth. He struggled to make a deep, guttural growl to suggest that even if they came at him in this weakened state, he wasn’t about to make it easy on them.
But the dogs didn’t attack.
Perplexed by this, Bones stepped forward challengingly, suggesting—basically—that he would come to them if they didn’t have the balls to attack him, a move that from the various smells sluicing through the air was painfully obvious false bravado to all concerned. But the shepherd didn’t know any other way and started limping through the garage to confront the waiting animals.