Bones Omnibus (75 page)

It was a meal well-earned.

It had been just over two months since Denny had joined the Flagstaff survivors, a group that now numbered forty-eight, and he was still adjusting to his place in the new and still growing community. Though Lester had become the de facto leader, Denny was the man people turned to when they had internecine conflicts. With his mild, non-confrontational stance and teacher’s patience, folks found it easy to like Denny, and he was often called in to play peacemaker between the harsher Ingram and the leaders of incoming groups, who sometimes found it difficult to learn they would no longer be the unquestioned top dog.

Because the pair spent so much time together, many of the newcomers thought that Carrie and Denny must have known each other from before the catastrophe. The duo always teamed up for work details and took their meals together in the makeshift mess hall that had been established in one of the hotel’s ballrooms, and when there were forays out into the city for supplies, they inevitably went together. The truth was, whereas many of the other survivors got through their own pain by “talking about it” with others, Carrie and Denny did not and respected the other for discussing almost any topic other than those concerned with loss.

They kept busy, they continued to help each other out, and they quite naturally fell in lust, but just as naturally (for the two of them), hated themselves for being able to so quickly put their spouses behind them and didn’t act on it for weeks, when it all boiled over. In fact, the first time they had sex was on the first day they kissed. They had been on a mission to find a department store that carried cold weather gear, as so few did in summertime in Arizona summertime, but with fall upon them and winter around the corner, everyone knew such items would be at a premium.

The actual event happened soon after they found themselves wandering through a Sears furniture showroom and Carrie made a comment about how difficult she had once found it to pick out a sofa in a store, as the department had been in a sub-basement and she found it impossible to get her husband’s opinion remotely, since her cell phone got no service. As the memory of her late husband began getting the better of her, Denny stepped in and kissed her, an act she gladly reciprocated. They made out for less than a minute before their clothes were half off and they were having what would inevitably turn out to be guilt-inducing sex on a nearby chaise lounge.

When they finished, they dressed quickly, hoped no one back at the hotel would miss them/make assumptions, and then loaded up the back of one of the many brand-new pickup trucks they’d “requisitioned” (a word the group now used for everything, almost as a survivor joke – “we’re heading off to requisition water,” “I’ve got a hunting party together to see if we can requisition a couple of cows or a deer,” etc.). They had climbed into the cab to head back to the hotel when they started kissing again.

They had sex a second time then and there in the truck, but it was much faster and furtive, both keeping an eye out the window in case another vehicle pulled up with some of the others out looking for them.

But by the time they got back to the Sheraton, dropped off the clothes to the hotel’s one-time laundry room that was set up as a community “wardrobe,” and checked in with Ingram, who was working with two newcomers to repair the pumps that were pulling water into the now six working stalls of the basement locker room showers, it was all they could do to keep their hands off each other. Once the truck keys were turned in, they headed straight upstairs to Denny’s room, made sure no one saw them as they went in, and had noiseless, but richly passionate sex for most of the afternoon. It wasn’t the best sex either had ever had, but it was probably a moment where they both needed it the most. But far from being about personal pleasure, it was much more about trying to feel needed by the other person.

“That was just about perfect,” Carrie said after. “If I’d known how good it would be, I would’ve tried to get you in the sack earlier.”

Denny grinned, but both knew this wasn’t true.

“Think it’ll be weird downstairs?” Denny asked. “I’m not saying people will know, but we sure will.”

“Nah,” Carrie replied, shaking her head. “Most people think we’re together already anyway.”

Denny laughed. “True.”

They were lazing around and talking, slowly getting their clothes back on, as Carrie had a shift to take down in the kitchen, when they heard a commotion from outside the window as a group of vehicles arrived out front.

“Those don’t sound like ours,” Carrie said, the slightest warning in her voice.

Denny walked over to the window, where he saw six trucks with at least three or four dozen people in them at the makeshift front gate. The driver of the lead vehicle spoke quickly to whoever was on guard duty there, and the man or woman immediately swung open the fence and let the trucks race down the driveway towards the front entrance. As they arrived, Lester and others of the Flagstaff group hurried out to meet them.

That’s when Denny saw the blood.

Carrie and Denny were downstairs in five minutes, just in time to watch as eight horribly wounded individuals were brought into the lobby. It looked as if they’d been shot or in car accidents, as each had multiple wounds on different parts of their bodies. Denny shot a quizzical look over at one of the more recent arrivals, a fellow named Riley who’d come up from Yuma with a twelve-year-old girl and an elderly woman.

“Dog attack,” Riley said quickly. “They were camping outside the city. Said there was something like two hundred dogs.”

“Two
hundred?
” Denny exclaimed.

Riley nodded. “Yeah, and they keep saying, ‘They weren’t wolves, they weren’t coyotes,’ they were just fucking dogs. People’s pets gone ape shit.”

Riley hurried on as Denny looked over at Carrie, who appeared similarly incredulous.

“Jesus. Let’s see if we can help.”

On the afternoon that the wounded arrived at the Flagstaff Sheraton, Bones was still a few miles away from the city, taking a nap on a dog bed inside the office of an Arizona Highway Patrol station. Bones didn’t know why, but there was something nice, cozy, and familiar about the place. Recognizable smells like gun oil, coffee, cigarettes, and boot polish had soaked the fiberboard ceilings with their unique brew over the course of several years, and for Bones it was like coming home.

He’d found the dog bed in one of the offices and curled onto it for a nap that lasted hours, and when he woke up, it was dark outside. He searched the station for food, only to find that even the vending machines had been previously ransacked, and went about on his way.

He hadn’t gotten a mile before the smell of slaughter entered his nose. At first he thought it was close, but then after raising his nose for a fresh sniff, the shepherd realized it wasn’t that it was nearby but instead was a substantial kill site with more than one victim. Bones kept walking, but strayed off the highway and kept his nose in the air. The odor of death grew heavier in the air, but then he smelled something else as well, an animal other than human. Cautiously, Bones crept ahead through the dark until he reached the first human corpse.

The body had been torn to pieces, a leg here, an arm there, the head ignored but the torso shredded and the entrails stretched in multiple directions. Judging from the smell, Bones could tell that it had actually been the work of several dogs and that this was hardly the only carcass.

As he nosed around, he discovered at least seventy corpses on the ground next to a collection of tents, extinguished cooking fires, and a few vehicles. There were also guns among the dead and a smell of cordite hung in the air, suggesting that at least a couple of the humans got off shots at the dogs before being killed, though Bones found no dog carcasses.

The shepherd was about ready to head away when he heard a growl coming from out of the darkness. He peered into the black and saw a single animal trotting towards him through the abattoir-like surroundings

Bones woofed a warning of his own but was unwilling to bark. He wasn’t alarmed and didn’t want to suggest as such. The dog came into view and Bones saw that it was a female, a bitch Rhodesian ridgeback. As he stared at her, trying to collect her scent, he realized that due to the sheer amount of blood in the area, his senses had been dulled and that there were a number of other dogs around as well, likely watching the encounter.

The ridgeback stopped and stared at Bones for a moment as the large shepherd lowered his head, ready for a fight. At the same time, Bones heard the other dogs circling around him, getting into position on either side. Though the ridgeback was in front of him, Bones knew the first attack would come from either his right or left to distract him and that the ridgeback would probably wait and go in for the kill when the shepherd was distracted.

But Bones wasn’t going to wait.

As his two would-be flankers got into position, Bones suddenly bared his teeth and moved as if to charge the ridgeback. Instinctively, the bitch took a step back, only to have Bones change his course and lunge at the animal to his left, a wolf hybrid – seventy-percent wolf, thirty-percent Siberian husky. The dog was taken completely by surprise, and Bones tore out its throat in a single, vicious move. Beside the wolf hybrid was an Australian shepherd who immediately turned, wanting no part of Bones, but the shepherd launched himself at this animal, too, and ripped out its throat as well.

Now the ridgeback’s entire pack began moving backward, as if realizing their quarry wasn’t quite the lackluster specimen they initially thought, and regarded Bones as a group of well-armed hunters might a wounded, yet capable grizzly bear despite their superior numbers.

Bones didn’t stop there. He wheeled around and went for a Rottweiler that had been circling around on his right despite the dog outweighing him by a good forty pounds, with layers of fat and muscle around its neck, both things making it far more difficult for the shepherd to use his typical attack throat-gouging attack. Instead, Bones leapt up and used his claws to jab at his opponent’s eyes until he had managed to gouge out the left one. After this, he proceeded to tear off the Rottweiler’s left ear.

Panicking, the dog moved backward, but Bones merely launched forward like a wrestler and grabbed the Rottweiler’s front left leg in his jaws. He plunged in his teeth and quickly tore it off, yanking the bone from its socket and then tearing the epidermal layer away before tossing the whole thing aside. As the Rottweiler limped away, mewing and crying like a wet cat, Bones turned back to the ridgeback and was ready to kill it, too.

However, the ridgeback had a different idea and was already backing up, bobbing her head up and down and woofing a little in supplication. The dog then moved over to one of the human corpses that hadn’t been completely devoured yet, tore off a chunk of meat from a ragged, bloody thigh, and dropped it a few feet in front of Bones.

The shepherd eyed the ridgeback but didn’t move towards the meat. After another long moment, the ridgeback simply turned around and walked away in the direction she’d come from. Within seconds, Bones’s nose told him that the many other dogs of the pack that had been just out of sight were now gone as well.

Bones waited a moment longer but then approached the chunk of human thigh, sniffed it over, and proceeded to gulp it down in four quick bites.

A
t the same time in Flagstaff as night continued to shroud the hotel, Denny, acting on behalf of Lester, who was helping the wounded, finally got the whole story out of a couple of the attack survivors.

“We’re from the Jicarilla Reservation out near Moenkopi,” one of the middle-aged survivors, Norman Devers, told him. “When the plague hit, we fully expected to die as so many in the towns had but then a good fifteen, twenty percent of us survived. We buried our dead and, like your group it seems, began collecting supplies. We had no intention of leaving reservation land, but after we had to go further and further to locate fuel for our generators, we voted, and it was decided to strike out for Flagstaff. We hoped that if we weren’t the only ones, we would find more of our people here.”

Our people
. Denny nodded when the fellow said this but was still amazed by what it implied. He kept waiting for the one white person, the one Mexican or Latino, the one black person to show up, only for it to always be the same: Indians.

More specifically? Apache Indians. More specific than that? Apache Indians of the Ypandes tribe.

There had been many discussions of this abnormality, and it was pretty quickly decided that just like certain races showed a more marked susceptibility to certain diseases, blacks to sickle-cell anemia, Jews to Tay-Sachs, etc., the Ypandes-Apache Indians appeared to have a sort of genetic resistance to the plague, at least so far. Denny knew the other survivors had all sorts of theories about this, many of them relating to their own spiritual beliefs and thoughts that God might have spared them for some greater purpose, but Denny had another theory, one he kept to himself as the most recent arrival continued his tale.

“We saw the dogs here and there as we traveled but never that many of them. We imagined they were content to pick through our trash, but we didn’t have enough food to try and feed any of them, even if we thought one or two looked like they would make good watch dogs.”

“Were they ever aggressive?” Denny asked.

“Not really. At least not that we talked about or was discussed, I guess. When we got onto the road, crows and vultures were following us, too. Thought of them the same as the dogs. Just scavengers.”

“Then what happened yesterday?”

Norman took a deep breath and then described something that sounded incredible even to the young schoolteacher, who was accustomed to the fanciful stories of elementary school kids. The day had apparently started like any other. They’d camped the night before just outside of town and when dawn came, they sent a group on foot into Flagstaff, a dozen all told, to scout for any potential dangers.