Bones Omnibus (43 page)

But back out in front of the junkyard on Spur 790 about forty-five minutes north of Pittsburgh, the police man on the ground outside his cruiser in the mud and muck had no way of knowing this, which was why it came as a surprise when Bones had applied the canine equivalent of a forward tackle to the man who had been tearing at his flesh.

What was probably even more surprising, maybe even
terrifying
, was then watching as the same dog tore the man’s hand off at the wrist, then proceeded to bite his neck in two. Terrifying, but useful, given the circumstance.

“Bones!! Over here!!” the officer cried, before thinking – for the briefest of instances – that Bones might mistake him for a target, too.

Bones turned away from the now-dead-a-second-time fellow and ran back towards the officer, grabbing his assailant at the ankle and dragging him off the young patrolman. Again, Bones sensed immediately that there was no fear in this man. A typical response to a police dog pulling at a person’s foot was that the person whose foot it was would stop what they were doing, panic, and try to pull away from the dog, turning it into a game of tug-of-war, which Bones quite enjoyed and had the jaws to win. In this case, the man seemed to barely notice the dog and continued tearing at the officer’s throat.

“
Bones!!!
” yelled the patrolman as the dead man’s fingers, skin flayed to the point that they’d become sharp, skeletal pincers, punctured his windpipe while his teeth tore at his throat.

Bones finally managed to yank the man off the officer to the point that the attacker realized Bones was enough of an obstacle to what he was hoping to accomplish that he’d better deal with the dog first. The man turned and lunged at Bones with a feverish growl.

“
Grrraaaahhhh!!
”

This gave Bones the opening he wanted and he launched himself at the man’s neck, repeating the quick, reflexive motion to sever the man’s head, a move that was becoming surprisingly rote through its repetition. Still, the taste of dead flesh in Bones’s mouth from the two men he’d just killed was abhorrent to him, the reason Billy had learned to just walk into a supermarket, pluck a steak straight out of the butcher’s case, and feed it to Bones in the parking lot, blood and all. Fresh or the illusion of fresh was all Bones needed to be happy. Anything else was like eating paint.

“
Booonessssss…
” gurgled the mortally wounded patrolman. Blood drooled out of his mouth and throat as he called for a familiar face to look at, even if it was a dog’s, while he died.

Bones wandered over and sniffed at the patrolman, who moved weakly, only to finally pass a few seconds later, his pupils quickly becoming fixed.

Filling his nose with his scent, Bones gave the face of the just-dead officer an optimistic lick, but there was no response. Though the scent of the living quickly became the scent of the dead, in the actual instant of death, it was relatively similar. So Bones continued giving the man’s face and hands a couple of friendly, encouraging licks before the body began to cool and Bones recognized it as a corpse. Bones took a few steps back from the body, but that’s when he heard a sound coming from the other side of the cars. A
snapping
sound, like a broken branch.

Bones padded around to the other side of the line of parked police vehicles and looked towards the junkyard. Just inside the gate, he saw a number of other people – men
and
women – tearing apart the dead flesh of the police officers who had gathered out here to search for the body of Tracy LeShoure. They all had the same death-stench as the men whose throats he’d just torn out.

Bones started barking, a sharp, alarm-filled bark that again was meant to call out to any other human who might respond to this and know what to do. This was what Bones was trained to do, sure, but it was also the instinct of a domesticated canine. Instead of feeling threatened, the flesh-eaters all turned towards Bones, eyeing him with unmistakable hunger. Intimidated, Bones jumped back just a step but then squared off against them to continue barking. The flesh-eaters, ten in all, gradually rose from the bodies they were devouring, and started moving towards Bones.

That’s when Bones experienced something he hadn’t felt in a lifetime:
fear
.

He kept barking and started prancing around on his injured legs like a giddy faun, but was unwilling to give ground. The flesh-eaters, some shambling, some at a half-jog, got closer and closer to Bones until it reached the point of fight or-flight, and he glanced towards the woods, marking his escape route. He’d just about made the decision to bolt when a pair of hands reached out from behind and grabbed at this throat.

Bones yelped and leaped away. When he turned back around, he saw the dead patrolman whose life he had defended only moments before now crawling towards him, teeth bared and hands outstretched. The patrolman looked purple and gray, as if blood had pooled in his face, and Bones knew from one sniff that he should be dead. But, of course, he was not.

Having had enough of this, Bones turned and launched himself towards the woods, only to find his path blocked by one of the other flesh-eaters, who managed to get close enough to half-grab, half-fall on the now-panicked cadaver dog. Though Bones quickly feinted and dodged the attack, the falling flesh-eater landed on his injured right haunch, causing the shepherd to twist it badly. As Bones scrambled to get to his feet, he found himself boxed in. Two more flesh-eaters came around the back of the line of police vehicles and effectively flanked any escape Bones could make. He had nowhere to run.

Tail between his legs and the fight-or-flight decision now made for him, Bones turned towards the nearest flesh-eaters, flattened his ears to his skull, and began to growl a warning, long, low, and increasing in volume, leading up to a savage bark. This did nothing to dissuade the flesh-eaters, and the largest of them lunged for Bones…

BLAM!!

When it was merely inches away from Bones’s neck, the large flesh-eater hit the ground and didn’t move. Bones, unaware of what had driven it into the mud, immediately went for its throat, only to find that it was now permanently dead, having been shot directly in the forehead. Bones whirled around as the other flesh-eaters moved closer to him, ignoring the fate of the first-mover. Just as quickly, they joined him face down in the muck as the gunfire continued.

Like tin ducks in a carnival shooting gallery, every last one of the flesh-eaters tumbled to the ground, blood splashing out of wounds from a couple of them but noticeably absent from others, particularly those in greater states of decay. Bones had to skirt and dive to avoid all of the falling bodies, but then he found himself alone.

Click
.

Though the odor of fresh corpses was heavy in the air, Bones quickly picked out the scents of living people and turned towards the woods, where he saw a trio of human males emerge carrying hunting rifles: a stout middle-aged man with wisps of brown-gray hair over his ears; a pale, skinny, blond-headed teenager wearing a green John Deere ball cap; and a second, shorter, brown-haired boy with an open, trusting face who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. The middle-aged man raised his rifle and aimed it at Bones, but the teenager shook his head.

“I don’t think he’s one of ’em, Mr. Arthur.”

The middle-aged man – Mr. Arthur - eyed Bones carefully but didn’t lower his rifle.

“Be that as it may, he’s still a wild dog,” the man said. “Good chance he’ll try and attack us anyway. He looks pretty spooked.”

Bones, still panicked, started barking, which did little to help his cause. Mr. Arthur took one step closer to get a better shot, but then the younger boy moved in front of him, setting down his gun as he walked.

“Ryan!” the teenager cried. “Don’t be stupid!”

But the youngster – Ryan - kept coming, dropping to one knee when he was about eight feet away from Bones. He stared at the shepherd for a moment, his eyes traveling to the bright black-and-yellow collar around his neck.

“I think he’s a police dog,” said Ryan. “You can get in a lot of trouble shooting a police dog.”

Bones noted the semi-relaxed expression on the little boy’s face as he stuck out his hand, inviting the dog to come over and take a sniff. Bones was still pretty agitated but found the solemnity of the child calming. Besides, he knew the child didn’t smell of death and, under the circumstances, thought this was a good sign. He took a couple of tentative steps forward, climbing past one of the twice-dead flesh-eaters, and took a sniff of Ryan’s hand. He snorted once as if having inhaled pollen, then took a step back and peered into the boy’s eyes.

“You’re okay, boy,” Ryan said, rising and slowly reaching for Bones’s head. “You’re okay.”

Bones allowed the boy to stroke the hair between his ears, though it was matted with wet earth and blood. Bones ran his nose up and down the little boy as well, inhaling a healthy odor of blood, from what seemed like a host of different human sources. It was on his shoes and jeans and blended with the distinct smell of dried urine coming from inside his pants, creating a record of the past few hours of the boys’ life as it wafted into Bones’s olfactory canal.

As Mr. Arthur and the teenaged boy walked over, Ryan eyed the collar around Bones’s neck.

“Is your name Bones?” Ryan asked. Bones looked up upon hearing his name, and the little boy smiled, turning to his human compatriots. “He’s a K-9 officer of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police.”

“And he’s the only one that survived this?” Mr. Arthur said. “Doesn’t say much for our chances. Jesse – see if there’s anything worth having in any of these police cars. Shit, where were these assholes a couple of hours ago?”

The teenager, Jesse, ran to the different squad cars and saw that they were, for the most part, unlocked. “They’ve got shotguns, but they’re all racked in. Keys must be in their pockets.”

“Make sure you give each of them a couple of slugs to the head before you get too close,” said Mr. Arthur, walking over to the patrolman who had tried to grab Bones. “Looks like this one’s got a Heckler & Koch 9-millimeter. Our tax dollars at work.”

Mr. Arthur reached down and secured the man’s weapon, placing it in his belt, and then grabbed a couple of extra magazines and the man’s handcuffs. He couldn’t find the cuff keys but kept the cuffs anyway.

Bones moved away from the hunting party and walked back towards the junkyard where the bodies of Detective Nessler and Commander Zusak were lying, just beside the trailer home that served as the yard’s office. Zusak’s head had been torn clean off, his weapon still in his hand, though much of the rest of his body had been devoured. Nessler, on the other hand, looked perfectly normal, almost as if he had just lain down for a nap — unless you looked below his shoulders or above his belly button, as his entire chest had been hollowed out by the flesh-eaters who had snapped through his ribcage and torn out his heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, and intestines.

The flesh-eaters had dug through his torso so viciously that claw marks could be seen in the mud under the body, as if they had believed there was even more of Nessler that had somehow sluiced into the ground on which he was lying. Just as Bones began to move away, he caught sight of Nessler’s fingers flexing and his eyes glancing around.

Immediately, Bones jumped back and started barking. Ryan, noticing the same thing, stepped forward, aimed his rifle at Nessler’s head, and fired.

Ryan’s gun was a single-shot, bolt-action .22, so he could only fire one bullet at a time, since a metal plate had been screwed over the slot where a magazine would be placed; a child’s training rifle. As soon as he had fired, Ryan pulled back the bolt, ejected the spent shell, and inserted a bullet from his pocket that he jammed with his pointer finger into the breach. Once it was snug, he pushed the bolt forward, chambering the round, and locked down the bolt handle. He aimed for Nessler’s head and fired a second time, his reload time being less than four seconds.

The impact of the second bullet caused Nessler’s skull to fragment, sending pieces of cracked bone in a number of different directions while the rest of his life’s blood slipped away into the mud. Bones had continued to bark at Nessler throughout all this and kept at it even as Ryan moved away.

“C’mon, Bones,” called Ryan.

Bones barked a few more times at the dead detective but then followed Ryan back out of the junkyard and over to one of the squad cars. Jesse was trying different keys on a shotgun’s trigger guard, having freed it from the driver’s-seat gun rack. He finally wiggled the key in just right, and the troublesome guard snapped off. After all that, when he checked the breach of the shotgun, he found it unloaded.

“Cops are such
pussies
,” Jesse scoffed, reaching for a box of shells he’d earlier uncovered in the driver’s seat armrest. He proceeded to load the shotgun with shells and prime a round into the chamber. The cinematic kla-
klack
of the forestock made Jesse smile. “Let’s see them come at us now!”

Mr. Arthur came around the car after walking off a perimeter and only offered the teenager a bemused grimace. He’d been through too much that morning for shows of bravado.

Bones padded around in a semi-circle a little ways away from Ryan, keeping his nose in the air. All he could smell was the dead, and he was having a hard time differentiating between the corpses that lay all around him on the ground and any more of the flesh-eaters that might emerge from the junkyard or woods. Still, he kept trying, pacing in circles and sniffing the air.

Once it looked like they’d collected anything useful from the police cars, Mr. Arthur nodded to the boys.

“We should keep heading towards the highway,” he said. “We just have to flag somebody down and get into the city.”

“But if these guys were already out this far, don’t you think they’d have reached Gainey by now?” Jesse asked, indicating the pile of dead flesh-eaters. “That’s right in our path.”

“It’s unfortunate for them, but these cops probably slowed them down a bit,” Mr. Arthur suggested. “They’re not going in a straight line. They’re running into people on the road, people on the farms, and each time, well...taking their own sweet time at the trough.”