by Mark Wheaton
As soon as he was in the ceiling, he looked back down at Bones to see the shepherd staring straight back up at him. Denny knew Bones was sick and wondered if this was the last time he’d ever see the animal that had saved his ass a couple of times now. He didn’t think the ridgeback or the others of the pack would kill him, but he didn’t think Bones’s own body would let him see many more days.
“Thanks, Bones,” Denny said to the dog. “Thanks,” he said again, then disappeared after Carrie and the others.
XII
Through a couple of signals and more than a few yells, Denny, Carrie, and the others directed the survivors of the pack attack up to their barricaded hideout on the top floor of the hotel. It had been a controversial idea, but Carrie suggested lighting controlled fires in barrels at the top of the stairwells, utilizing trash cans and laundry bins to block the paths of the dogs. After bashing out a few holes in the ceiling and in various windows to allow the smoke to ventilate, Denny set the fires himself. The dogs steered clear.
It turned out there were more survivors of the assault than they had initially believed. Lester had led several folks out of the compound, around the back, and to the trucks, where they took off, circling the grounds and firing at the pack to draw them away from the hotel and back into the city, though this meant leaving many wounded behind.
Denny knew this decision must’ve killed Lester, knowing how much he cared about the survivors inside the hotel. It had been his idea to get on the roof with some blankets at dawn to do a Warner Brothers cartoon version of an Indian smoke signal to communicate to the others that some had made it.
By then, the pack had receded. Lester and the others returned mid-morning, joining Denny on the top floor of the hotel after a careful reconnoiter up the stairwells. Over the next few days, small, heavily armed groups were sent downstairs where doors were nailed shut, entrances and exits sealed, and supplies brought back up, but no one ventured outside and the groups only stayed down in the building for an hour or less at a time, generally during the heat of the day.
It was a full week before they stepped out onto the grounds.
On the seventh day, Lester and Denny led a small group out to the trucks to bring up ammunition that had been left in Denny’s SUV. When nothing happened, when there wasn’t so much as a single dog sighting, a slightly larger group composed of an armed escort and the strongest of the survivors went out to bury the dead in the same plot of ground just outside the gate, where those who had only lived long enough to reach the hotel after the massacre of the reservationists were buried.
The next day, a day Denny told Carrie “felt like a Monday” even though nobody except Lester really kept track of the calendar, the survivors moved back downstairs and began repairing the damage to their various “public works projects” in an attempt to pick up from where they left off. They were still very much mourning the recent dead but were similarly determined to move forward.
That afternoon, Lester, Denny, and a couple of others climbed into a truck and went on a scout of the city.
Again, no dogs.
Instead, they found a small herd of deer in Thorpe Park eating the grass, about fourteen all told. The men readied their rifles, aimed, and killed the entire herd. The deer were all does and what looked like a handful of juveniles born in the spring and had barely turned to run when they were cut down.
The men brought the hunt back to the hotel, skinned and butchered the deer, prepared the pelts for tanning, and cooked the meat over three great fires in the courtyard. Soon, the scent of roasting venison was all anyone in the hotel could smell, a rich, inviting aroma that eased its way through the windows and walls of the building but also rode the warm evening updrafts out and over the surrounding neighborhood.
Denny saw the first dog about forty-five minutes after the meat had been placed over the flames. It was one of the many wolf hybrids that were a part of the pack, snowy white fur with a handful of black patches dotting its haunches and coloring its snout and ears. Even in the dim light, Denny could make out the paleness of its eyes.
Seeing the same thing, Lester rose to retrieve his rifle, but Denny held up his hand. “Give it a minute. No sudden moves.”
Lester nodded and sat back down by the fire, using a broom handle swaddled in towels soaked with makeshift barbecue sauce (more tomato paste than anything) to baste the meat as it cooked. Another minute passed. The survivors began to see more dogs. When the meat was deemed ready and taken off the fire a few minutes later, there were now at least a hundred dogs outside the fence line.
The next part, Denny knew, would be tricky.
Donning gloves, he collected half the roasted, still warm meat in a wheeled laundry tub and then wheeled it over to the fence. With Joseph’s help and a couple of riflemen waiting in the shadows, Denny tossed large chunks of their kill over the fence to the dogs. At first, the dogs flinched back as if under attack but quickly reversed gears and tentatively approached the inviting meat. It didn’t take long before the meat drew more and more dogs out from the surrounding area to the human-made feast.
Denny waited a little while, knowing that the meat would hardly be enough for the dogs and then settled into a large communal meal with the other survivors. Some were so nervous that they cried as they ate. One, from the Jicarilla reservation, prayed rather than ate. As the dogs finished their meat, a couple of fights breaking out here and there over scraps, they all pressed close to the fence, but none attempted to come in.
When the humans were done eating, there was plenty of meat left. Denny loaded up the laundry tub a second time, rolled it to the front gate, and tossed it over the fence. The dogs dove in and ate the leftovers. When the meat was done, the dogs disappeared again.
As Denny watched them go, he realized that he had seen no sign of either Bones or the ridgeback.
• • •
A few more days went by. When a hunting party was sent out to “requisition” deer, an animal to be found in some abundance in the silent city often seen grazing on subdivision front lawns instead of eking out an existence in the nearby deserts and valleys, the dogs appeared, too, trotting alongside the vehicles. They were obviously allying themselves with the hunters but kept at least a block away.
In cases like these, Denny had a standing order. Half the kill goes to the dogs.
Day after day, this went smoothly. The dogs would sometimes even chase the herd towards the riflemen, coming by their half of the prize honestly.
It was on one of these outings that Denny finally saw the ridgeback again, right at the head of her pack. Her injury looked well on its way to being healed, leaving behind a healthy-sized scar but nothing more. Still, Denny had hoped to see Bones with her but the shepherd was nowhere to be seen.
It was only three days after that when he was listening to the stories of a group of incoming survivors that he learned where Bones had gone.
“Yeah, we saw dog packs up in Denver, big, crazy fuckers going after everybody but we got outta there,” a Colorado woman, Ines, was saying. “They were like wolves. Before coming here, we dropped south into New Mexico and took I-10 west. Saw more dog packs down there but managed to avoid them. Didn’t see any more dogs until we were camping one night right near the border. A lone German shepherd showed up at our campfire, some kind of military collar. He stayed a little out of sight, but we threw him some food and soon he got close. He stayed near the trucks that night and when some wolves showed up, he barked like hell. Earned his keep as far as we were concerned.”
“Where did he go after?” Denny asked.
“We were perfectly willing to take him with us, but in the morning he was gone. We saw him up the highway heading east, I guess. Hate to say it, but he was looking pretty thin. Was he your dog?”
Denny took this information straight to Lester with a request to go after him. Lester told him he was crazy and that it was a complete waste of resources, but let him have a truck anyway. Denny then went to Carrie, who understood b
ut was also violently opposed. Sure, the group had talked about trying to send somebody out to see if there were groups like them in Santa Fe, Tucson, Albuquerque, and even El Paso-Juarez, but no one had ever suggested it be one person. But Denny was adamant and soon got his way. Most of the Flagstaff survivors figured he’d earned the opportunity to be a little wasteful and reckless through his repeated acts of heroism over the past few weeks anyway.
He set out at nightfall and drove without stopping to the Arizona-New Mexico border.
As he went, Denny listened to a CD on the truck stereo. Music hadn’t been any kind of priority to the group, but Denny had often passed a library on his various excursions into the city and had later suggested it as a place for Lester and him to retrieve books on carpentry, plumbing and electrical work. He’d seen the baskets of compact discs and remembered them when he went to go look for Bones.
When he put in a disc of Soviet-era film music by Shostakovich, a rival of Prokofiev and one of his favorites as it had been one of his wife’s favorites, he found himself weeping behind the wheel. It wasn’t so much that the music was beautiful or so surprising to hear after so long, it was more that it immediately put him in the mindset of where he was when he last heard it, sitting alone with Jennifer in their living room trying to place themselves in the lives of the Minsk Chamber Choir when they recorded it (not realizing that their CD was from a more recent recording of the score). World War II was over, the Cold War was just beginning and the never-ending putsches and purges of the Stalin era kept the citizenry on their toes, Shostakovich himself being denounced the same year he wrote the score Denny was currently listening to. But here they were, singing like angels for the soundtrack of a film neither Denny nor Jennifer had ever heard of, much less seen.
The couple had talked about what their lives had been like and whether any of them could possibly still be alive. He knew the answer to that one now. They discussed the Orwellian hardships much of the citizenry faced, both mentally and physically and wondered aloud if having found one another as Denny and Jennifer had done would be enough to make life worth living.
Denny cried because he missed his wife but also because so many of the things he had wanted to do in life were now gone. He would never go to Europe, he would never sit on the school board, he would never watch his children go to a better college than he did, he would never win any kind of awards for his teaching or possibly coach his students into awards of their own. He would never see any of those same students graduate. Now he had no goals other than those directly tied to his survival. He had mourned his friends and wife before but now, selfishly he thought, he mourned the loss of his own life as he knew it.
He reached what was pretty obviously the campsite of the Coloradoans (they had left notes for other travelers explaining the size of their party and where they were heading) well before dawn and then kept going east though at a greatly reduced speed now, down to twenty from seventy-five. He debated halting his progress until daybreak so he wouldn’t miss spying Bones but then realized the dog, having had a day on him, was probably at least a few more miles down the road so he’d be okay.
Just as the sun got a little higher in the sky, he pulled off to the side of the road to urinate, did so behind a tree though the likelihood of anyone coming along at the moment was next to none. When he turned around to walk back to his truck, he got the scare of his life as he found Bones sitting beside the passenger side door looking at him.
“Jesus, Bones!” Denny cried. “I didn’t even hear you come up.”
Bones woofed in acknowledgement, however weakly.
Denny walked up and knelt beside the shepherd, only to see that he was little more than skin and bones now. “Ah, jeez, Bones,” Denny muttered as he stroked the animal, the fur even stiffer than it had been. “Glad I found you.”
Denny opened the passenger side door and pulled out the fresh meat he’d brought for the dog, but Bones barely touched it. The shepherd whined a little, got up on its feet and pranced a bit. Denny understood.
“All right,” he said, tossing the meat away and helping Bones up into the truck.
XIII
Even with Bones in the car, Denny drove along slowly. He had the windows down, and Bones kept his snout to the wind as they went. They had only gone sixty miles by midday but Denny had enough fuel to take them all the way to Florida if need be, though he didn’t imagine that would be the case. No, something told him that the dog’s destination was closer than that, or he wouldn’t have been walking it. He got the idea that the shepherd knew exactly how bad his condition was and that he chose his time to leave the Flagstaff pack carefully, not too late, not too soon.
But then they reached the exit that would send them to the town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Bones began whining, which soon turned to barking. Denny didn’t know if it was a smell or a sight that had alerted Bones to their position on the map, but the dog couldn’t have made it clearer that this was where they going.
Las Cruces, “the City of Crosses,” was about the size of Flagstaff and located in the southern part of the state, surrounded by mountains. None of the buildings were very tall, a common sight in New Mexico, as there were ordinances about blocking views of the horizon. Church steeples were high, apartment buildings were not. As Denny rolled into it, he found it eerily silent and filled with the stench of death.
Having no idea where they were going, Denny drove around a little, circling the downtown mall area off Main Street until Bones indicated this direction or that. It was mid-afternoon by the time Bones had finally decided on a neighborhood, and after trolling up this street or that, Denny finally decided that the easiest thing to do would be to let Bones out on foot. He’d follow in the truck.
This easily proved to be the better plan. Though the dog was hobbled by illness, Bones’s nose seemed to instantly grab onto a scent and he made a beeline down the sidewalk, crossed two lawns, and took a side street down to a row of modest, single-story houses at the very edge of the neighborhood where the back fences abutted the arroyo. One of the houses didn’t have a back fence, its backyard invitingly open to all comers. It was to this lot that Bones ran.
Denny parked the truck in the driveway alongside an old Chevy Blazer and climbed out as Bones scratched on the front door. Self-consciously, Denny glanced around but saw no sign of people and was about to try to force the door when he discovered that it was unlocked. He swung the door wide. The shepherd immediately ran inside.
Denny had feared that they would be greeted with the scent of a rotted corpse, but this wasn’t the case. A heavy, musty smell permeated the air, but even the always attendant stench of spoiled food was absent from this place, as if it had been cleaned out after being abandoned.
As he walked through the small den, kitchen, and dining room at the front of the house, Denny realized that the house likely belonged to an older man, a belief confirmed when he went into a home office of sorts and saw the kind of jumbled, paper-strewn mess that no woman he ever knew would tolerate. On the wall were plaques celebrating the law enforcement career of a man named “Lionel Oudin,” and there were several photos of him in uniform.
And then there was a photo of Oudin in uniform alongside Bones.
“Oh, my God,” Denny whispered.
But he didn’t know what he was most reacting to, the fact that he was being given a window into this dog’s past or that Bones was able to navigate himself back from wherever he came from all the way to his master’s house.
Denny looked over a few more of the awards and photographs, Oudin clearly having had a particularly distinguished career, but then exited to find the shepherd.
He didn’t have to go far. There were only two more rooms in the house: a dusty, unused guest room with a four-poster bed in it surrounded by dust-covered boxes and then the master bedroom, which looked more like a hospital room. A large semi-electric hospital bed with heavy bed rails and an overbed table was set up in the middle surrounded by medical equipment th
at suggested someone quite infirm lived here.
The only thing was, the bed was empty and there was no sign of its one-time occupant.
Bones was going over the room with his nose, as if he’d picked up on the slightest of smells but couldn’t for the life of him find where it emanated from. He moved from the bed to the dresser to the closet where an old man’s clothes hung, the floor littered with boxes and shoes.
On a chest of drawers, Denny saw photos of Lionel with a young woman, probably a daughter, and then a few more of the woman alone through the years. A very young Lionel stared out of a wedding photo with a young lady who favored the daughter in the other pictures, further confirming Denny’s belief regarding their relationship though the wife appeared in only a few other photos in the room, all from younger days.
“You okay, Bones?” Denny asked the shepherd as the dog snuffled around in the closet with greater and greater intensity.
Denny walked over and looked at the dog as he made his search, until he finally figured out what the shepherd wanted. In the back of the closet hanging from a hook was an old leash that appeared to have been used in an official capacity, as it had the logo of the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department on it. Denny took it down and placed it on the carpet in front of Bones.
“Is that what you wanted?”
Bones replied by sniffing all around the thing, circling it over and over. Denny waited a couple of minutes but then walked away and left Bones alone with it.
A few minutes later, as Denny sat in the living room wondering what to do next, Bones wandered in and moved directly to the sliding glass door that opened out to the patio and scratched at it for a moment. Denny rose and slid it open, allowing the shepherd to scamper out and nose around the yard. Though he knew there was no fence and Bones could just walk away, he didn’t look on the dog as “his” in any way and didn’t think he’d ever feel that way about any animal again.