Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga

by Mark Wheaton

  When he got to the edge of the garage though, new smells suddenly filled his nose and he didn’t even have to look up to know that others of the pack were directly overhead on the roof, ready to pounce down on him like wolves. The problem was that Bones’s own stench was some great that it had temporarily diminished his abilities to scent out the others.

  Bones growled but then saw the Rhodesian ridgeback appear alongside the house. It was clear that the other dogs were following their pack alpha’s lead by not attacking. Bones bared his teeth ready to battle the animal to the death…

  …until a new smell filled his nose.

  It had been a while since he’d taken in such an odor, but he knew exactly what it was. The ridgeback whined a little and slunk closer to Bones, whose own instincts in the matter began to take over. He was sick, he was dying, but he was still the male of the species, and when the ridgeback wandered into the garage on the far side of an old ‘76 Mercedes and “presented,” Bones complied with the unspoken request to the best of his abilities.

  VIII

  “It’s a necessity. We have guns, they don’t have the element of surprise anymore if they’re even out there, and we’ll be in vehicles. We need supplies and we know where they are. This will be fine.”

  Everyone listened as Ches Marzan, a survivor from Cottonwood who had come in with two others a month after Denny, addressed Lester and a number of the others in the ballroom that night. The lights dimmed as one of the generators outside the fire exit sputtered as if to emphasize the seriousness of Marzan’s words, but then glowed back to life when Lester appeared to be in agreement.

  “All right,” Lester said. “But in two groups: one for the medical supplies and a second for the guns. You guys leave first thing in the morning.”

  It had never been a question in Denny’s mind that he’d be in one of the next day’s requisition parties. He’d always been a part of them, he knew the streets as he’d been a resident, and he had seniority, so it came as a surprise when he went out to the loading docks the next morning and found Ches shaking his head when Denny went to climb into the back of the truck he was fueling up.

  “We’ve got enough people, man, but thanks,” Ches said.

  Denny stared at Ches incredulously. “Are you kidding? Who knows where all the good pawn shops are? Me. Who knows where the sporting goods stores are? Me.”

  “And me, because you showed them to me. But that’s precisely why we need to be showing other people the routes, too. We’ve got new folks and there’s no telling what happens next, you know? We’ve got to get everybody up to speed.”

  It was a good enough manufactured reason to show Ches wasn’t going out of his way to show up Denny, the former school teacher thought, but he saw the looks on the faces of the men already loaded into Ches’s truck and could see the truth. Each held a rifle and regarded Denny the way his classmates once did in elementary school. He was the one going unpicked for this assignment, his position on the delicate pecking order sliding downhill due to his inability to kill a defenseless animal that morning. He supposed none of these men would’ve thought twice about it and this made them better suited, but he disagreed.

  He turned and walked over to the group seeking medical supplies, this one led by Anna Blackledge.

  “Do I have to beg?” he asked her.

  She shook her head and nodded to the back of the SUV. He clambered in, and the two small convoys left the hotel grounds.

  • • •

  When Bones woke up for the second time that day, he was still feeling weak but was better able to stand this time. When he looked around, he saw that the Rhodesian ridgeback and the rest of her pack were gone but had left behind half of a deer carcass that Bones could tell had only been killed a few hours before. He sniffed the dead animal, realized he had no appetite, and left the garage without taking a bite.

  There was only a slight chill in the morning air, but Bones felt it all through his body. His fur was getting stiff and the skin beneath it loose, as he had lost some weight over the course of his journey. But he still knew which direction he had to go and began moving that way, wandering towards the rising sun.

  His gait had accumulated a serious limp, his right rear leg quivering every time his right rear foot touched the ground. He hopped along for a few steps, found that even worse, and continued limping.

  When he heard trucks, he didn’t care so much and made to slink down an alley to avoid detection. But as he did so, Bones caught the scent of the dog pack. He moved down a side street, around the back of a small strip mall and spotted a couple of the dogs—two Belgian shepherds—in a resting position just alongside a small staircase leading to the second floor of a one-time Mexican restaurant. About two hundred yards away were the trucks Bones had heard, now parking in front of a large building.

  Though Bones could only see the two shepherds, he could smell a great number of the others. They were in the area and were watching and waiting, none moving. The strange thing was that he could tell it wasn’t the whole pack as he caught no scent of the ridgeback.

  • • •

  “I used to have eighty guns all told, three gun lockers around my place,” Ches was telling the man in the passenger seat, an older fellow who went by Pepe, as his last name was Pepoy. “I got with this girl who had a young son, and I really had to keep the guns locked up tight around him. But you know every time I opened one of those lockers, he’d just stare in there like I had all the treasure in the world behind that door. So I took him out shooting while his mom was at work. Would you believe it, he was a natural. Guns got demystified for him real quick, he saw that they weren’t like on TV or video games; they were just tools. Anyway, I had just gotten him NRA-certified, which is when we were going to tell his mom and we came home and found her in flagrante with one of my long-barrel revolvers…”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Pepe said, his first words in twenty minutes.

  “I shit you not,” Ches said, holding up his hand as if swearing on the Bible. “She had a condom on it so it looked like it was in one of those World War II movies where that’s how the soldiers keep their muzzles dry. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that lube was just about the worst thing possible to get rubbed into a gun. Anyway, she freaked out, demanded to know where we’d been. When I told her, the argument became all about me—you cretin, you dipshit, you asshole—and what I’d been doing behind her back. She split that very night and I never saw either of them again, but part of me feels like I did my good deed teaching that kid about guns. One more person out there who knows his way around firearms. Oh, well, shit—he’s probably dead now, but whatever.”

  Ches finished his story right as they parked. He swung open the door of the truck and hopped out, glancing up and down the street before nodding at the others.

  “Think we’re good to go.”

  His requisition party was ten men strong, all armed, but Ches was still cautious. He’d been in the Navy at one point and felt that put him in a natural leadership position. Some of the survivors at the Flagstaff Sheraton knew how to fire this piece or that, but he knew how to fire all the guns they’d come across, which gave him a leg up, especially now that it looked like firepower might count for something. No more being led by a school teacher or a real estate appraiser, whatever-the-fuck that was. For Ches, it was time to treat an apocalypse like an apocalypse.

  “What’re we looking for in here?” one of the party asked.

  “Easy, light rifles for the women and some of the men,” Ches said, pausing for the laugh. “And then whatever you feel comfortable with for yourself. Now, I don’t want to see a bunch of compound bows and big game guns that require fancy ammunition we’re never gonna see again. Be smart. Load up on cartridges like it’s the last time you’re ever going to see any and then let’s move out quick as we came.”

  Everyone nodded and moved into the store where an entire rack of shotguns and rifles waited at back of the shop.

  “Oh, yes,” Ches
added. “Look for hunting and scaling knives. Probably could use a couple of those, too. Maybe even some fishing line if they’ve got it. Think like a soldier ’cause that’s what you are.”

  • • •

  Across town at a medical supply warehouse they’d found in the phone book, Denny walked along with Anna as their group, also about ten persons, gathered up everything in sight. Occasionally, someone would wheel an oxygen tank or portable defibrillator over to Anna who would have to judge if it was worthy to bring back (“no” to the tank, “yes” to the defibrillator given that it’s battery could be recharged by the generators), but there were few things they couldn’t imagine needing.

  “I have to admit, I’m a little jealous of you and Carrie,” Anna said, her back turned to Denny as she swept boxes of medical tape off a shelf and into a basket. “Yeah, I’m probably too old to have any more kids, but I think I’d really enjoy the regular sex part, the excitement of the time. It’s not like I don’t get propositioned, but you guys seem to have a nice thing going on. Am I right?”

  Denny shrugged. This wasn’t a subject he would like to discuss with anybody, but Anna Blackledge least of all, knowing how she talked.

  “It’s hard enough being alone,” she mused. “But physically alone is a different story, especially when you’re surrounded by other people who feel the same but for some reason just can’t make that connection.” Anna looked like she was getting ready to cry. “What I’m trying to say is that you have an open invitation. If it makes more comfortable to bring Carrie in on it, I don’t have a problem with that either.”

  Denny fought hard not to laugh at the absurdity of what he was hearing but accidentally let out a snort, which Anna couldn’t have missed in any circumstance. She reddened, turned, and walked down the aisle until she was out of sight and left Denny feeling truly uncharitable.

  He shook his head wondering what she must have thought his reaction would be. That’s when Denny heard the barking of a dog.

  “Shit,” he whispered as all the humans in the warehouse suddenly became extremely alert, like deer who’d heard that distant twig snap.

  He hurried to the front of the store and grabbed his rifle, slinging it over his shoulder as he peered out the front window. Anna and the others quickly joined him and saw that the barking had come from a familiar German shepherd who was now dancing around in front of the closed doors of the supply warehouse. Bones paused for a moment, glanced inside at his audience, and then continued to bark.

  “There’s no way that’s the same dog,” said one of the men who had been at the edge of the trash pit the day before.

  But Denny caught a glimpse of Bones’s collar and shook his head. “That’s him,” he said simply.

  “He’s going nuts,” Anna said. “Think he’s just excited to see us?”

  Denny didn’t think this at all. There was real alarm in the dog’s bark and as he scanned around the street, he spotted a couple of other dogs racing straight for Bones.

  “No,” said Denny, his pulse starting to race. “He’s warning us.”

  • • •

  “And yeah, there’s that one chick, Anna? Holy shit, is she hot for it. Never seen a chick so much in heat, particularly an older broad.”

  Pepe, cradling four shotguns in his arms, considered what fun it would be to just shoot Ches to shut him up but knew he’d get busted by the others. Ches was popular. Shoot him, and there’d be consequences even for an old convict like himself, a fact he’d been keeping on the down-low. Still, it was a nice thought.

  Pepe was contemplating this very thing as the gun group exited the sporting goods store to an empty parking lot. They had checked it out pretty thoroughly from the windows and had seen no sign of any dogs or other threat, but now Pepe was hearing a sound coming from above him. As he stepped out from under the store’s porch roof, he saw an angry-looking Rhodesian ridgeback looking back down at him.

  “Oh, shi…,” he started to say, but in the time it took him to get those two words out, the ridgeback had already leapt off the roof and had Pepe’s head firmly in its jaws.

  Ches whipped around in surprise as dogs started coming around both sides of the building.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Ches cried as he fumbled around for his pistol just as a wolf hybrid clamped its jaws on his wrist and violently snapped the bones within. Ches screamed as his hand was torn from his arm while a second dog went for the meaty part of his right calf.

  The attack was over in seconds.

  • • •

  Back at the medical warehouse, Denny’s first attempt to shoot down one of the dogs coming at Bones failed when the shot went wide, the dogs moving too fast. He fired a second time, missed again but then remembered something he’d heard a million times about shooting a moving target: lead the animal with the muzzle, keep the barrel a couple of feet out ahead. He did just that, pulled the trigger, and the dog’s skull exploded in a lingering mist of shattered bones and blood, looking like he’d shot a water melon rather than an animal.

  He turned the gun on the second of Bones’s would-be attackers and shot that one clean through the chest.

  “There are more coming!” cried Anna.

  And sure enough, there were. What looked like a hundred dogs were now coming at their location from every direction.

  Denny thought fast. The dogs were in hunting mode. Even if the group of surviving humans stayed in the warehouse to weather any potential siege, the dogs would assuredly find a way inside. Worse, if they were missed back at the Sheraton, Lester would probably send a search party that wouldn’t be any better prepared for a fight against this number of dogs than they had been.

  Basically, this wasn’t going to end well for anybody unless they moved out now.

  “Come on,” Denny exclaimed. “Into the trucks. We’re leaving before they can get pin us in.”

  Everyone remained still for a heartbeat, but Denny was already halfway out the door. He was still lugging a couple of bags of medical supplies and quickly threw them in the back of the nearest SUV, which had been left unlocked. He then climbed up on top of one of the SUVs and began shooting at the incoming dogs.

  Seeing what he was doing, Anna led the others to the SUVs, where they quickly threw in the harvested medical stuffs but then clambered in and shut the doors. Riley, who had been in the group as well, got up on top of the second SUV with a rifle and joined Denny in his turkey shoot.

  As the men blasted away, dog after dog after dog went down in a halo of blood. Denny exhausted three five-round clips in a row, each bullet finding flesh. Riley, who had claimed to have learned to shoot in the Boy Scouts but hadn’t fired a round in the thirty years following, was almost firing with the same level of accuracy putting down dogs one right after another. Some flipped over in the air like a marlin on a fishing line, such was their forward velocity when hit.

  For his part, Bones stayed between the two SUVs and barked his head off. He could smell the blood of the pack as they were killed only feet away, but he knew where he would be safe and stayed there.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

  Though Denny had fully expected to drain himself of ammunition and then be forced to drive through a mess of oncoming dogs, the animals ended up retreating after about a third of their number had been slaughtered. He thanked Providence for small favors and then nodded at Riley before climbing off the roof.

  “Okay, everybody in?” Denny asked as he got into the passenger seat of the SUV he’d been standing on. “They might be coming right back.”

  He found everybody staring back at him with a new level of respect. It was a surprising reaction, but he liked it nevertheless.

  “What about the dog?” one of the women asked.

  Denny looked out and saw Bones still standing there on the other side of the vehicle. He hesitated for a moment, but then nodded before clambering out and opening the back of the truck.

  “You know I’m the one who threw you out earlier, ri
ght?” Bones just stared up at Denny with a confused look on his face. “Well, I thank you anyway.”

  IX

  Back at the Sheraton, everyone listened in disbelief to the stories from Denny’s party. Carrie had almost passed out when she’d heard but kept herself from sending “I told you so” glances to everyone that had earlier pooh-poohed bringing in Bones.

  “He saved our lives,” Anna said. “We wouldn’t be here if not for him.”

  Lester praised Denny, Lester praised Bones, the group accepted the dog, and Denny got more than his share of reappraisal from those who had earlier judged him so harshly.

  But Denny’s redemptive makeover was becoming increasingly overshadowed by the fact that Ches’s team was staying gone for longer and longer. Lester and a couple of others went to the roof and tried to raise him on the battery-operated walkie-talkies that had been issued to the parties beforehand, but everyone knew in reality that the range was barely even four blocks. They were unable to get any kind of response.

  By the middle of the afternoon, the prevailing belief was that they had either skipped out, however unlikely or been attacked by the dog pack and were somewhere between the sporting goods store and the Sheraton, possibly in need of assistance.

  No one was sure what to do, least of all Lester, but then Denny came to him with an idea.

  “I’ll go find them,” Denny announced. “One truck, a couple of guns, and Bones. We’ll drive there and back. Won’t even get out of the truck. We get into trouble, we floor it right back here, but we’ll know what happened.”

  Lester thought about this for a moment, but then shook his head. “It’s going to be dark soon. Then what?”

  “That’s why we have to go now,” Denny pressed. “If they’re injured, they’re not going to make it through the night. If they’ve been killed, we need to know.”