Bones Omnibus (51 page)

“How many are there?” cried Sgt. Holt, sidled up next to Sgt. Celek, blasting up into the trees as the multipedes swarmed back among the branches in an attempt to find new angles of attack against their pesky targets.

“Looks like hundreds,” Celek replied, shredding the tree above him with bullets. He pointed at the thick, sticky substance that exploded out of the multipedes whenever they were hit. “That’s why the dogs didn’t start barking. The scent they’ve been tracking all morning is the same as what’s coming out of the multipedes. I’m sure even their sniffers have a saturation point.”

“But what are they doing out here?” asked Sgt. Holt. “Before they dumped their skeletons, they were rampaging all over the place, completely disordered. Those trails implied some kind of order, and now even their attack patterns are coordinated. They were
waiting
for us.”

Like with a hive mind
, thought Celek, but he didn’t give voice to the opinion. He didn’t like how what he was seeing completely changed the day’s equation all over again.

For his part, Bones found fighting these new multipedes easier than the ones back in Gainey. Before, when he would crunch into a Stage 2 or 3, they could flail and beat him away with their bony limbs, which would eventually extract a toll. Now, without skeletons, it became a muscle game, and as the multipede would try to pull itself from Bones’s jaws, all the shepherd had to do was lock in its jaws and wait for the creature to tire itself out. Then he’d bite off its head.

In doing this, however, he became quickly covered in the sticky blood of the multipedes and kept trying, in vain, to pull it off his fur by rolling on the grass during breaks in the action. While he was doing this, a thick, rich smell cut through the odor of the blood that had been filling his nose for some time. It was a new smell, and Bones momentarily ignored the multipedes and followed the scent, only to find that it was coming from straight down, the rich aroma of old, dry soil from deep within the ground, the kind that was seldom exposed to the air and elements, so that it could never be mistaken for topsoil. Somehow over the ceaseless machine gun fire, Bones also heard a new sound, one that seemed to be coming from…

Immediately
, the shepherd began jumping around on the spot, barking and pawing at the dirt. At first, none of the soldiers noticed, but after a couple of seconds, Sgt. Celek finally saw what his charge was doing and ceased firing for a moment to watch, wondering what had gotten into him. It was then that he realized the vibrations he had been feeling for the last few seconds weren’t, in fact, from having switched his AR-15 from semi- to full-auto.

“Everybody look down!!” he shouted. “I think something’s com…”

But then the ground opened up and there was no need for him to continue.

Dozens of the worm-like multipedes erupted out of the ground like geysers, launching skyward a few feet before descending directly on top of individual soldiers whose positions they had easily navigated to due to the vibrations of their machine guns. The panicked troops began shooting wildly, only to have their fire chew into their nearest human comrade, so desperate were their fire patterns. The multipedes took easy advantage of their shock and horror to slice through the momentarily stunned friendly-fire soldiers, sending them to join their fellow corpses on the ground.

Sixty seconds later, there were only a dozen humans still standing, the forest floor an endless abattoir of corpses and spent shells.

Sergeants Celek, Holt, and Moore, who had managed – in the millisecond before the underground attack – to ready their defense and fend off the first wave, now found themselves the target of the surviving multipedes as they slithered in a circular pattern, flanking the survivors.

“What now?” Sgt. Holt screamed over the roar of her machine gun as her bullets cut through another multipede. “We don’t have enough ammunition to kill all of them!”

Sgt. Celek knew she was right. At a certain point, the multipedes, by sheer force of numbers, would overwhelm them. But then he looked around and saw both Bones and Thor tugging apart the torso of one of the multipedes.

“I’ve got an idea,” he cried. “Get over to Bones.”

The MPs and a couple of the other surviving soldiers edged over to the two shepherds until Celek could get his hand on Bones’s leash. He pulled him close as the other troops gave him cover.

“Go home, Bones!” he cried, pointing away from the action. “Find us a hole.
Go!”

It took him a moment, but then Bones understood what was desired of him and bolted away, leading the group up a nearby rise and deeper into the woods but away from the multipedes.

Sgt. Celek watched him for a moment, then nodded to the others. “Come on! This might be our shot!”

The survivors chased after Bones as best they could, Thor leading the way after Bones escaped from view. The multipedes rushed after them in the trees and overland, their mandibles launching forward after their heels, but they weren’t as fast as the soldiers on open ground, the element of surprise being their primary advantage. Some burrowed back underground as if hoping to flank those retreating, but they couldn’t keep up, either.

Soon the multipedes were far behind, but this did little to slow Celek and the other survivors. They kept running, putting as much ground between them and their dead as they could.

“Central command, this is Wolf Team, over. Central command, this is Wolf Team, over. We
need
assistance!”

Even though Sgt. Moore continued trying to raise their commanders, it was obvious to everyone that the field radio had been too badly damaged in the attack to function. The handful of communication devices still carried by the others, mostly cell phones and walkie-talkies, satellite-enabled though they were, were having similar problems with signals bouncing around the high rocks of the Alleghenies, so high were they. That said, the soldiers figured they were much safer among the rocks, hoping the multipedes couldn’t drill through black shale.

“What the hell, those things looked like worms or caterpillars or something, man,” declared one of the surviving Rangers, a corporal who had introduced himself as “Romeo” when they’d slowed down enough to catch their breaths. “The ones we shot up outside Gainey still looked like people. These were like…
animals
. We sure they’re even the same thing?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Sgt. Celek, shaking his head. “Whatever’s going on here keeps mutating every time we get a handle on how to fight the previous incarnation. Now we have to worry about it
digging
, for Chrissakes. The only good news is, if it’s organized and can think, it’ll be easier to fight than the randomness of the Stage 2 flesh-eaters, as we can try to predict its moves.”

“Yeah, but the bad news is, we don’t know how many more of them there are or how soon they’re going to start popping up in Allentown, Scranton, Reading, or hell, downtown Philly to ring the goddamn Liberty Bell to add to their numbers,” said Sgt. Moore. “And we’d been worried there might be a Stage 4 before, so now that we know there is, what’s to say there’s not some Stage 5, 6, or 7 out there that can really turn our lights out? What if it gets out of Pennsylvania? Over to Europe? Look how much damage it’s done in twenty-four hours alone. Twenty thousand people? I’d say it’s a lot more than that by now.”

Sgt. Celek could only nod as Sgt. Moore outlined his worst fears. He glanced over at Sgt. Holt, who looked shell-shocked, and then moved over alongside her.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Not even close,” she replied. “But I figure if he can keep going like it’s nothing, who am I to complain?”

Sgt. Holt nodded over towards Bones, who was wandering around on the rocks, still shaken by the attack but for completely different reasons than the soldiers. While the smell of the Stage 4’s blood was pretty bad, it wasn’t all-consuming. It was the hot breath of the cordite exhaled by a hundred smoking machine guns that had burned itself into Bones’s nose for the time being. Nothing messed with a cadaver dog’s nose like a smell of burning, and Bones was having a particularly hard time shaking it off. Thor seemed to be having similar problems as he padded alongside Bones, the two animals moving in tandem as if Bones’s actions back in the woods had well-established him as an alpha to be followed.

“That dog’s some kind of a survivor,” Sgt. Celek agreed. “If I’d been through everything he’d been through, I’d be curled up in a ball in a corner somewhere by now.”

“Good thing for us you’re not, then,” replied Sgt. Holt, attempting a joke. “But do you really think he can walk us out of here? I have no idea where we are, and we’re completely without support. If there’s another attack like that last one, we’re not going to survive more than a few seconds.”

Sgt. Celek didn’t have a reply for this. He looked back over at Bones but saw that the shepherd was suddenly standing still, his snout pointed straight ahead like an arrow, finally smelling something different. As Sgt. Holt shot Sgt. Celek a worried look, Bones
woofed
but just enough to get his handler’s attention, then trotted ahead a few feet before stopping again, Thor close behind. Celek, fearing the worst, rose to join them.

“Bones? You got something, boy?” Celek asked, the other soldiers seeing what was happening and tensing. Hands reached for weapons that had only just cooled.

Bones, now with Celek at his side, stood still for another moment but then
woofed
a second time and moved forward, climbing across the rocks. Realizing that Bones didn’t appear to be intimidated so much as curious, Celek relaxed a little, nodded to the others, and began following after Bones.

The group trailed Bones across the mostly treeless cliff side for a tenth of a mile before finally reaching the end of the rocks. Bones moved to the edge and looked straight down. Sgt. Celek, a few yards behind, indicated for the soldiers to fan out around the rocks in case something was waiting for them just under the lip but then joined Bones at the ledge.

“Oh, shit...,” Celek whispered.

After crossing all those rocks, they were now dead-ended, overlooking an expansive coal mining operation. Appearing like a low volcano in the middle of the forest, the mouth of the mine pit was easily half a mile across, the crater floor several hundred feet straight down. On the floor of the pit were two large yellow earthmovers as well as an angled conveyor belt that carried freshly mined coal many stories up into the air before launching it into a massive coal pile on the east side of the pit, where two steam shovels waited to load it onto dump trucks. A zigzagging road led up the side of the pit, allowing trucks access from the base to a single road on the opposite side from where the soldiers stood. The road cut through the forest towards what Celek presumed must be a railroad spur that would then whisk the coal to civilization. The conveyor belt, empty of coal, was still chugging along, the electric whine of its heavy generator being the only sound emanating from the otherwise deserted-looking job site.

But everyone’s eyes were focused on one thing – the eight or nine mine shafts at the base of the black shale walls that descended deep into the earth. The same thought had occurred to everyone at once; this is where they all went, and this is where they were all hiding.

“We seeing any signs of life?” Sgt. Celek quietly asked the other survivors, referring to people or multipedes.

Everyone nervously scanned the operation, from a pair of double-wide trailers – one up top near the service road, one down at the base of the pit – that served as the mining outpost’s offices to the cabs of the large construction vehicles to the mouths of the mines themselves, but they didn’t see movement. There were some relieved sighs, but not many.

“Check this out,” said Sgt. Holt, waving Celek over after returning from a quick reconnoiter of the cliff’s edge. They hurried to her, and she pointed down to a spot on the pit wall smeared with the now telltale blood substance they associated with the multipedes. “They’re down there.

Sgt. Celek leaned over the edge of the cliff and was able to pick out multiple blood smears running all the way down. Bones followed his nose over to the ledge, drawing in the familiar scent.

“What do you think, Bones?” he asked. Bones’s sniffing increased, followed by a snort.

Celek and the other MPs walked back to the surviving Rangers.

“They’re down there, people,” Sgt. Celek reported. “Maybe all of them. Doing what, well, that’s anyone’s guess.”

“How many is ‘all of them’?” one of the Rangers asked.

“Thousands? Tens of thousands?”

This piece of information caused a few stomachs to leap into throats. The surviving soldiers looked around at each other nervously, knowing how close they must be to a potentially devastating enemy.

“So, what do we do about it?” asked Romeo, turning up the volume on his radio to reveal it still echoed with nothing but static. “Can’t really call in an air strike, can we?”

“With the rate these things are mutating, by the time an air strike got out here, there’s no telling if they’d even accomplish that much anyway,” replied Sgt. Celek. “We have to come around to the fact that we may be the only thing standing between these monsters and everybody else on the Eastern seaboard. I’m afraid we’re going to have to go down there and check it out.”

“And do what?” asked Sgt. Moore incredulously. “Start the world’s shortest firefight?”

“It’s a mine, and where there’s a mine, there’s blasting equipment,” Sgt. Celek countered, indicating a shed at the base of the pit alongside the office trailer. “If they’re in there, we can send explosives down the shafts, blow them remotely, and sink this thing with all of them inside. That should buy the air force enough time to come in and mop up. They’ll just have to follow the smoke.”

“Doesn’t sound like a plan with much of an exit strategy,” another Ranger said. “What happens when they see the ‘remote’ explosives coming down the shafts and decide to see who sent them? How fast you think we can climb out of there when we’re surrounded?”