Bones Omnibus (74 page)

Judy didn’t have to be told twice and disappeared into the stairwell as Damon rushed to Greg’s side, flailing violently at the dog biting into his friend’s arm as a second one leaped forward and bit his foot.

Greg screamed and violently rolled to his side, which shook the second dog off as Damon kicked the first one in the side, sending it sprawling. Unfortunately, this forced Damon to turn his back on the other dogs, which was when he caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye that the ridgeback he had first seen out on the street was immediately to his left and was about to spring at him. He screamed and turned, but it was too late, as the dog was already in flight. But that’s when he saw a brass pole swing around and smash into the ridgeback’s side, batting it away. Damon looked and saw the bikini-clad Judy standing over him, thinking he’d never seen a sexier sight in his life.

“Come on!” she yelled, and the two men clambered to their feet and followed her into the stairwell.

As soon as they were inside, she slammed the door behind them just as several of the dogs hit the door at once, snarling and attempting to claw their way through.

“The door will hold,” Greg said with confidence, and they all hastened up the steps.

When they reached the penthouse, the most glaring problem was that they didn’t have that much food stockpiled. The long trek up the stairs may as well have been Annapurna to the oft-drunk survivors, so it was an unenviable task to be sent for food. When it was Damon’s turn, for instance, he would go down to the casino floor, tool around for awhile, and then eventually raid one of the numerous gift shops or bars for booze, chips, jerky, nuts, or candy before wandering by the kitchen to see how much canned food he could fit in the couple of gym bags and wheeled suitcases he would then have to drag up the stairs, since the electricity and hence the elevators were long dead. He had never been angrier than when he caught Judy and Greg throwing cans out the penthouse window to see what they would look like when they exploded on the concrete below, given how much energy he had expended getting them up there.

It was bad enough to know that every time he went down, the other members of his survival party were using his absence as an excuse for a fuck.

The dog attack had come at a time when they were running particularly low on food. Greg had, in fact, planned to go down with Damon to retrieve supplies that afternoon to relieve him of some of the burden and make up for the four or five days that there hadn’t been a run. They’d never simply dragged everything up, as it had been thought that they would get bored with the penthouses in the Venetian after awhile and they’d move on to another hotel, but in the end, the Venetian was where their drugs were stockpiled, so they stayed put.

“Were those fuckers rabid?” Greg asked as he used one of the first-aid kits they’d brought up in their first, less drug-fueled days to bandage his wounds.

“I don’t think so,” Judy said. “They weren’t foaming at the mouth.”

“Then what the fuck was that about?”

“They were hungry,” Damon suggested. “We were lunch.”

“Those weren’t fucking
wolves
, man, they were dogs -
pets
,” Greg countered, reaching for an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels. He slipped a fingernail under the black plastic seal and stripped it off in one move before taking a long drink.

“Didn’t you just take a handful of pain pills?” Judy admonished, eyeing the bottle.

Greg was about to lash out at her but then realized she was right and put it aside. “Fine. But what do we do?”

“We could go down and try and kill them,” Damon suggested. “We have a few guns.”

Which they did, liberated from dead security and police officers. The only problem was that they hadn’t figured out how to undo the trigger locks on all but two of them. These lucky two, naturally, were out of bullets, as one particularly drug-fueled night led them to firing them into the city from the roof.

“They’re moving pretty fast, and we’re pretty fucked up,” Greg retorted. “Next idea?”

“We could just wait them out,” said Judy. “They’ll probably move on once they realize we’re not coming back down.”

“How long do we wait?”

“As long as we have to. I know it’s not much, but we never raided the honor bars of the last penthouse suite down the hall. With what we have in here combined with that, we should last for awhile. Maybe even a couple of weeks if we’re smart about it.”

This seemed the best idea, so they agreed to it.

Twelve hours later, Greg was half-asleep, half-unconscious on the sofa, having given up on Judy’s advice and drained the entire bottle of Jack. Damon and Judy had both slept a little themselves, but when Judy woke up, she realized that they still hadn’t made good on their plans to grab food from the other room and woke Damon. As they walked through the pitch-black hallway to the other penthouse, Judy realized that the idea she’d been toying with, that she needed to have sex with Damon, would happen right now. She didn’t like the way Greg treated him but also thought it would be good to have him in her pocket now in case things got bad.

“Come here,” she said to him as they walked into the room, already unlocked, since they’d broken in to make sure there were no bodies in it the day they took over the floor. Damon knew exactly what she was after and, three minutes later, Judy began to regret her decision, as it turned out that he couldn’t fuck half as well as Greg and was actually a quite terrible lover.

“Come on, just go a little easier,” she said, a gentle request, getting firmer by the minute.

“Sure, sure,” Damon said but changed nothing about his Yeti-humping-a-cedar-tree approach. “Is that what you tell Greg?”

Great, this is a hate-fuck
, Judy realized and hoped he’d finish soon.

She was trying to think of something to reply when she suddenly heard something in the hall. Terrified that it was Greg, she pushed away from Damon and the wet bar he had bent her over, and grabbed her clothes.

“What the hell?” cried Damon, his erection shriveling.

“
Shhh…
,” she whispered.

But that’s when she saw the first dog sniffing its way into the dark penthouse. It bobbed its head twice, spotted Damon and Judy, and immediately it curled its lips back into a growl. Illuminated only by the stars outside the window, Judy could plainly see its bright white teeth cast in a dull blue.

“Oh, shit,” Judy said.

Back in his room, Greg woke up when he heard screaming from down the hall and clambered out of bed. He went to the door and swung it wide, only to see that he had surprised a pack of about a dozen dogs creeping towards the far penthouse. They registered his presence immediately and as two lunged back for him, he slammed the door shut.

“Holy fuck,” he whispered to himself.

“GREG!!!!” screamed Judy from the other penthouse. “GREG!!! Wake up!! They got through the door!!!”

“Where are you?!” Greg shouted back.

“In the last penthouse! Damon and I were getting supplies!! The dogs are trying to get into the bathroom!”

Greg looked around the dimly lit room for Damon and knew, with a roll of his eyes, what the dogs likely interrupted.

Hearing smashing sounds coming from the far room, Greg considered abandoning them and striking out on his own, but then heard dogs scratching on his own door and realized this might be easier with some ballast he could cast off in an escape. He wandered over to the bar, where they kept the guns in an empty refrigerator. There was one pistol that he thought he might be able to crack the trigger guard off in a pinch by utilizing a wine opener. He fumbled around for the right gun and then set it up on the counter, positioning the tip of the corkscrew between the two plates on either side of the trigger. Raising his hand, he smashed it downward to break off the panels and succeeded, but then the corkscrew slid under the trigger guard and sent its point into the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“
Shiiittt!!
” he screamed as blood gushed out of his hand.

Fuming, he grabbed a towel, stiffened with his blood from the first dog attack of the day, and angrily wrapped it around his fist.

Fucking Damon and fucking Judy
, he thought.
I should be high.

He went to the door, took a deep breath, clicked down the safety on the gun, and wondered, for a moment, if he should fire off a test shot to make sure it was okay before figuring that would just mean one less bullet for the dogs. Closing his eyes, he swung open the door, popped his eyes back open so that all he’d really see was movement in that blurry quick second of pupil adjustment, and fired the gun at the first dog he saw.

Back in the other penthouse’s bathroom, Judy and Damon heard the shot and knew Greg was on the way. The pawing at the door continued as the shots got nearer but then finally subsided after about the seventh or eighth bullet as the dogs retreated.

“Greg?!” Judy cried.

No answer.

“Oh, shit,” Damon whispered.

“GREG?!?” Judy yelled out again but then heard something padding towards the bathroom door. She raised the toilet’s tank lid to bring down on any dog’s head, but then the door handle rattled, and she realized it was Greg.

“You assholes okay in there?”

Judy breathed a sigh of relief and then opened the door to see Greg standing there in his boxer shorts, holding a gun.

“I don’t mind if you fuck,” Greg said. “Just don’t be bitches about it and try to hide.”

Judy looked down, feeling bad about her decision. Damon attempted a look of defiance, but it seemed pretty silly as he stood there flaccid and naked opposite a man with a pistol.

“Come on. We should get back to the room and try out the other guns,” Greg said. “Guess dogs can get through cheap-ass casino doors, huh?”

The trio made a beeline for the refrigerator back at their home base and spent half an hour trying to break the trigger guards off further guns, with only limited success.

“We should’ve prepared better,” said Damon. “What if we’re the last three people on the planet Earth and we’re about to get fucking killed by dogs?”

“That’s why I suggest you take a few of these, my friend,” Greg said, handing over a pile of pale brown amphetamines. “You don’t want to know what it’ll feel like if these things really do get a hold of us.”

Judy stared at the pills and then realized she wanted some, too. She’d been curbing her drug use the last couple of days but knew that she didn’t want to feel the flesh torn from her bones by animals. Besides, the only reason she’d been holding off was because she figured they might need her womb healthy at some point, but now she thought that was just not going to be in the cards.

“Give me some, too,” she said, and Greg complied.

The dogs returned within the hour, and despite the weight of all of the penthouse’s furniture against the door, the dogs managed to crack through and then wriggle between two sofas to get at the humans. Greg had a plan for this and put it into action, which had the three move from their balcony to the one teasingly close next door. They were a little off-balance as they climbed over one guardrail and onto the next, but Greg had been just sober enough to help the other two.

Once they were in the room, they fled out the door and down the stairs, only to find dogs waiting in the stairwell.

“Holy shit,” Greg exclaimed, incredulous that the animals would leave guards almost as if expecting a flanking maneuver, as they bolted onto the fourteenth floor.

As they ran, Judy could hear the dogs coming from behind them but also ahead of them in the stairwells that ran down the center and far corner of the tower. It wouldn’t be long now.

“I’m sorry, guys,” Judy said, having no idea what else to say.

A few minutes later, Judy sobbed her eyes out from a second locked bathroom as she listened to the dogs tearing through Greg and Damon’s bodies in the next room. The morning sunlight was just starting to come through the windows of the bedroom, and she could see the shadow of a dog standing at the bathroom door and lowering its nose to sniff under it. As the dog began pawing at the frame and whining to the others, Judy began to scream hysterically, violently shaking her head as the sound at the door got louder and louder.

I
t took Bones a week to walk into Arizona. He couldn’t have known it, but he was on Interstate 40, which ran from Barstow, California, all the way to Wilmington, North Carolina, crossing several mountains ranges and states along the way. Bones had been on the Albuquerque to Oklahoma City section of the road once before when he and Lionel had packed and moved to Pittsburgh after a call for enforcement dogs had gone out a few years before, but he didn’t know that, either.

As he went, Bones was continuing to survive on whatever he found along the way, which often meant whatever he could catch. This was becoming an increasingly unreliable method of getting by, exemplified by a moment when he was stalking a bobcat and gave up his position when his legs buckled and he brushed against a bush. Hearing this, the cat immediately sprinted away, but Bones gave pursuit, having chosen his ambush location after first determining the exact spot on the bobcat’s nightly constitutional with the fewest avenues of escape. Quickly, Bones cornered the animal, but the bobcat seemed to realize that its attacker was hardly in tip-top shape and fought back like a lion, bloodying Bones’s face and right front haunch with its claws.

Angered at the situation, Bones managed a second wind and threw his entire weight on top of the bobcat, surprising the smaller animal as it made the shepherd’s soft underbelly a perfect target to inflict even greater damage. It immediately went to try to tear out Bones’s entrails, not realizing that the dog had exposed himself on purpose in order to get a clean shot on the bobcat’s neck. Though the bobcat tore three deep gashes into his ribcage first, Bones’s jaws were soon around the bobcat’s neck. He sank in his teeth and then shook the animal violently, killing it in seconds.

Once the bobcat was dead, Bones collapsed in a heap, bleeding and panting. He licked his wounds for a few minutes but then tore open the flesh of his kill to feast on.