Bones Omnibus (50 page)

“Bet you’re pretty sick of all the travel, huh, Bones?” Celek asked, keeping a hand between Bones’s shoulders, while petting him at the base of his neck instead of on his head with his other hand. “This’ll probably be the longest ride you’ll take today but then – with a little luck – you’ll call it a day.”

Bones, lying on the floor of the helicopter, glanced from Celek to the one female MP, Sergeant Connie Holt, who was eyeing him, too.

“You really think he can figure out where these things went?” she asked skeptically.

“It was Colonel Daniels’ idea, and even he said it was a long shot,” replied Celek with a noncommittal shrug. “But have you seen this guy’s record? Even before today, he was one of the best cadaver dogs in the state, if not the whole northeast. You’ve got a hell of a sniffer, huh, Bones?”

Celek reached down and stroked Bones’s snout. Bones looked from Celek across to the other two MP Sergeants, Edwin Plume and Darryl Moore. Moore was either asleep or meditating, but Plume was eyeing Bones back, what looked like a thin smile on his face either of incredulity at the team’s desperation or of optimism that they might finally have a workable solution to the current problem, though he said nothing.

“You believe what that kid said about the dog killing the Stage 2s?” asked Holt. “Made it sound like he’d torn through over a hundred.”

“Kid’s probably full of shit,” Sgt. Moore suggested.

“You have any idea how many different blood and tissue samples they found in this guy’s jaws?” retorted Celek. “Hell, in his fur? That kid walked out of Ground Zero alive, and it’s not because he’s some junior Quick Draw McGraw. He had help.”

Sgt. Holt looked at Bones for a moment, meeting his gaze as she wondered if this one animal could be responsible for all that was being attributed to him, but then shrugged.

“Well, we’re not asking him to fight anything, just borrow whatever he’s got of a scent-memory,” she said finally. “Probably won’t get to see him in action.”

She glanced back to Bones as he licked his chops, as if getting hungry even at the memory of fighting flesh-eaters.

The helicopter set down about an hour and a half later, just as the sun was beginning its morning arc in earnest. The landing zone was up in the Allegheny Mountains just outside the small hamlet of Coughlin, a coal mining town of about four or five hundred residents tucked a couple of miles off the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, U.S. Route 6, which one could take all the way to California or Massachusetts, depending which way they were so inclined (though locals suggested that CA and MA were both pretty much full of assholes).

While there were no signs of even a single local, the population had still increased exponentially that day, as a thousand or so National Guardsmen and women were swarming the place, some having arrived by helicopter but many more in canvas-backed trucks and armored vehicles from Fort Indiantown Gap in Annville. On top of that, there were also a couple hundred Army Rangers who had been quick-deployed up from Fort Benning, Georgia, in C-130 transports that had landed in Erie the previous night and were then trucked down. These were the men who had recovered Ryan and Bones the afternoon before, utilizing twin Apache helicopters from the Air National Guard base in Johnstown, but who were now miles from their mop-up assignment in Gainey.

When the MPs disembarked from the helicopter, Sgt. Celek walking Bones on a leash, they were immediately met by an officer who, after returning four salutes, introduced himself as Major Buntin.

“You’ve been briefed on what you’re going to be looking at?” Maj. Buntin asked.

“Yes, sir,” came the unified response.

“Then follow me.”

The four military policemen and their three K-9 cohorts were led to the outskirts of the small village – little more than a post office, a motel, a diner, and a handful of small wood-frame houses and even fewer trailers that stretched up into the foothills. While it looked like there was also a structure originally constructed to be a church, it had long since been boarded up. It took only four minutes to walk from the motel parking lot, which had been deemed suitable for helicopter take-offs and landings, all the way across town to the Coughlin city limits. A single one-lane gravel road separated the community from the woods. But as the three dogs neared the first tree line, they all picked up on what brought them there at once as their noses went into overdrive.

“Christ on a cracker,” muttered Plume, the humans getting a nose-full as well. “What
is
that?”

It was only a few yards into the trees that they saw the source of the stench. Or, at least, one small part of it. Just within the woods, marked off by yellow tape and surrounded by armed sentries, was a trail of human bones arranged haphazardly as if they’d been gradually dumped off the back of a four-wheeler. In some places, there’d only be a femur, a skull, or a clavicle to mark the path, but at other points, it was as if that same four-wheeler had hit a bump and dropped four or five skeletons’ worth in one spot. On top of that, the bones appeared to be covered in some sort of sticky brown glaze. The MPs stared at the sight with incredulity and horror, Sgt. Holt finally having to look away, as she felt sick to her stomach. That’s when she saw it was actually a lot worse than she could have imagined.

“Look,” she said, nodding left and right.

The group turned and saw that what they’d been looking at was only one trail of several dozen. Yellow “no crossing” tape could be seen wagging in the light breeze throughout the woods, marking bone trails fanning out as far as the eye could see.

“Do you know what kind of numbers we’re looking at, sir?” Sgt. Celek asked the major, ashen-faced.

“We’ve been working off a human skull count, and right now, we’re up around twenty thousand,” Maj. Buntin replied gravely. “The numbers are starting to match the combined populations of Duncan, Hammond, Gainey, Coughlin, Belton, Scottsburg, and Warsaw – the towns primarily affected by this morning’s outbreak. We have no idea what left these bones here or why they were arranged like this. Some of the bones show the kind of fusing we witnessed in the Stage 3s, which must have gone all the way down to the skeletal level, but we haven’t been able to determine where the rest of the creature has disappeared to.”

“You specified a ‘human’ skull count?” asked Sgt. Holt.

“We’ve found a number of other animal skulls in the mix – elk, bear, possum,” Major Buntin replied. “Yesterday’s assessment of the Stage 2s and 3s as being only cannibalistic, I feel, can be dismissed. Whatever these things are becoming, well, we can anticipate a different sort of ossification structure, to say the least.”

“Couldn’t this be it?” offered Sgt. Holt. “Maybe whatever this mutation is has a limited life cycle, and we’re looking at the end stage.”

Major Buntin offered Sgt. Holt a look filled with condescension but then shook his head.

“I don’t think anyone believes that’s what we’re looking at here. They’re still out here in the woods, and they’re all moving in the same direction to some specific location. We need your dogs to find them because, if not, who knows where they’ll show up next. This has to end. Now.”

Sgt. Celek allowed Bones to move closer to the bone trail and get a good whiff. It was almost too much for the shepherd, who snorted loudly and shook his head, immediately backing away from it.

“So much for Wonder Dog,” Sgt. Moore scoffed.

But then Bones turned his nose away from the bone trail and to the grass alongside it, then to the air, separating out the smell of the dead humans in order to pick up the fading trail of whatever left them behind. After a long moment, he finally began moving forward, heading into the trees.

“Here we go,” Sgt. Celek said, inhaling sharply.

Sgt. Holt nodded and joined the small group following a few yards behind Bones, a company of National Guardsmen flanked by a platoon of Army Rangers falling in line behind them. Slowly but surely, Coughlin and the tree line disappeared behind them as they wandered farther and farther into the woods.

B
ones, flanked by Thor and Asra, led the phalanx of about a hundred military policemen, soldiers, and Rangers for more than two hours, deep into virgin forest. Several times, the MPs had to cut trail just to keep up with the dogs as the trees and underbrush grew impenetrably dense. The bone trails had continued for over a mile, which the army had been able to mostly ascertain from the air, but now the soldiers on the ground had to rely solely on the dogs’ senses of smell to continue leading them forward towards the retreating multipedes, wherever they might be hiding in the vast and circuitous Allegheny Mountain range.

Bones alternated between keeping his nose in the air and then back to the ground. He routinely paused after finding traces of the sticky substance that had decorated the human bones on nearby rocks and trees, which he sniffed around on, and in one instance even urinated on, before continuing.

“We have any idea what that stuff is yet?” asked Sgt. Moore, indicating the brownish-red resin that hung like thin webs of molasses.

“It’s organic, full of human blood and tissue but also a lot of other stuff,” said a Lieutenant Nelson, the second female in the group after Sgt. Holt and the ranking officer of one of the National Guard platoons. “They’re still trying to determine what the rest is, but what makes it different from animal blood is that there’s very little oxygen or other gasses within it, as well as no hemoglobin, which you’d expect to find in a mammalian circulatory system.”

Sgt. Celek let this process for a moment but then looked back down at Bones, who seemed to have found something next to one of the trees.

“Whatcha got, Bones?” Celek asked, leaning down.

Bones moved aside, and Celek pulled on a latex glove he extracted from a pocket. He reached over and picked up what looked like a long, smooth tree branch, completely stripped of not only leaves but any kind of buds or bumps. Instead, the surface had a bright, almost metallic sheen the same color as the sticky substance that had covered the bones.

“Hey, any idea what this is?” he asked, handing it back to Lt. Nelson.

She stared at it for a moment, weighing it in her hands, but was unable to render a verdict.

“It looks organic but feels manmade, like a piece of pipe,” she offered. “But that can’t be it, can it? Not way out here.”

As she looked closely at it, a similar – albeit larger – branch-like object of the same type swept out from a tree branch above her and lopped her head off. It bounced onto the ground in front of the surprised MPs and rolled until it came to a stop against the trunk of a tree, her hair immediately getting stuck to the sap-like substance Bones had been using to trail the multipedes.

There was one more millisecond of quiet as the soldiers stared at the severed head, but then all hell broke loose.

“Holy shit!!” yelled Sgt. Moore, as he and a number of the other troops looked up and saw literally hundreds of the so-called “multipedes” descending on them from the deciduous tree canopy above. “Get ’em!”

As one, the soldiers raised their weapons, dropped their safeties, and began firing rounds up at their swarming attackers, but the minute amount of time it took to complete this simple task was still too long for a handful of troops who found themselves impaled on the long, sword-like mandibles of the fastest multipedes. Their comrades, staring in horror at the fallen men, so quickly and easily dispatched, found their panic levels rising and translated this into more erratic firing patterns. The multipedes, however, remained eerily calm, going about their slaughter – even as many of their number were blasted to pieces – with a cool, methodical attitude that only made them more frightening to behold. If they weren’t afraid of this, what
did
they fear?

As the tremendous firefight exploded around him, Bones began barking like crazy and lunged at any multipede that got near, easily tearing off a few legs. The other enforcement dogs did similarly, though the Malinois – Asra – only managed a couple of yips before a giant multipede dropping from a branch several stories up landed two feet away from them and cut her and her handler, Sgt. Plume, in half with its mandibles.

As Sgt. Celek methodically fired away - picking a target, blasting it apart and then choosing a new one - it became quickly evident to him that this creature they were fighting was not the same as the multipedes back in Gainey but a further mutation of the Stage 3s. Instead of human faces, body shapes, arms, and legs, these creatures were far more snake-like and elastic after having shed their skeletons, and pulled themselves along with much shorter, stick-like legs that gave them the appearance of worms as they slithered around trees. In fact, the only thing that confirmed that these were even of the same species was that the body segments, while becoming uniform, still had the look of several humans fused together like vertebrae, all in fetal positions.

“This must be a completely new stage,” Celek bellowed out to the other MPs between bursts of his machine gun, the overlapping muzzle flash like lightning through the trees. “The Stage 2s merged bodies to become Stage 3s. Then they dumped their bones and mutated into these worm-things.”

Despite their vastly superior firepower, it was less than a minute before the hundred-man-strong force was halved. Arriving in a hail of broken branches and leaves, the multipedes had swept down, already working their mandibles forward in a chopping motion, resulting in a maelstrom of severed arms, legs, heads, and torsos raining down on the forest floor, followed swiftly by the human bodies to which they were once attached. Blood erupted, splashed, poured, oozed, and seeped from the now dozens of corpses soaking the ground.

But after a few minutes of this, the heavily armed and well-trained squad of Rangers and MPs (it was the Guardsmen with their lighter weapons that seemed to have fallen first) quickly improvised a workable defense and gathered almost back-to-back, laying down cover fire for each other as guns were reloaded and reset before being turned back on the enemy. But for every one multipede that was blasted away, two more seemed to take its place.