Bones Omnibus (77 page)

As the Flagstaff survivors were only of these people, Denny thought that if the plague was tied to this deeply buried genetic strand, that could mean there were other pockets of survivors in Korea and Scandinavia. While yes, that also suggested a Korean or Finn or Ypandes-Apache living in Argentina or Tunisia might have survived as well, it was difficult to imagine such isolated numbers being able to link up with enough other survivors to do much more than attempt to survive in the hostile new world, much less establish and populate a new society.

Denny figured he’d be long dead before his theory might be proven or disproven, but it was an idea that gave him hope.

“You’re telling me this as a roundabout sort of way to suggest we get pregnant?” Carrie had asked when Denny laid out this theory one day. “I mean, I’m all for it, but don’t you think it could be a little dangerous giving birth these days?”

As the conversation was mostly in jest, they had left it there until a middle-aged woman named Lucille Amaro arrived with one group of survivors and explained that she had worked as a doula. Carrie and Denny had then had a second conversation, came to a conclusion, and then began having regular, unprotected sex. Denny wondered if it was the kind of thing they should bring up with Lester first, but both decided that the decision was theirs and no one else’s.

But now, here was Denny leading Bones back into the Flagstaff Sheraton on a makeshift leash, another decision made outside the purview of the group that he thought might not go over all that well.

“You couldn’t just shoot it?” snarled someone Denny recognized from the Jicarilla party who, like the others, must have been waiting to hear a rifle shot.

“He’s a police dog,” announced Carrie, as if that was enough to silence any critic. “He’s too valuable to be killed.”

Denny said nothing but simply led Bones through the lobby to the manager’s office, where he knew Lester would be.

“Denny,” Lester said heavily as he regarded the trio. “You need to get that dog out of here. You don’t want to shoot it? Fine. Let it go. But you’ve got a group of people here who just watched all their friends and relatives survive one plague, only to get massacred by dogs. On top of that, you’ve got a second group who just heard that story and are jumping at every shadow.”

“He was a military dog,” Denny said but knew from the look on Lester’s face that wasn’t going to carry much water with him.

“Be that as it may, you have to get rid of it. These people are looking for a reason to let out steam, mix it up, get a little violent, and here you come, throwing a cat among the pigeons. This just isn’t what we need right now. I’m pulling rank.”

Denny heard the challenge in Lester’s voice loud and clear. Old dog, young dog, alpha dog, team dog. But Denny knew that Lester’s words rang true.

He nodded and turned, but Carrie shook her head. “We need this dog. If we’ve got a dog problem, he’ll bark…”

“How do we know they won’t just come up, trade a couple of sniffs with your friend there so he lets them waltz right in?” Lester asked, now sounding exasperated. “Having a dog is one thing, trusting our security to one is another. If this was yesterday morning, I might have a different thought, but I’ve never heard of any dogs acting like the ones that attacked those people on the road. Yes, this dog looks perfectly fine to me, but I’m not willing to give much of anything the benefit of the doubt these days.”

Carrie was about to protest again but caught a look from Denny and silenced herself, following him out.

“This is a mistake,” Carrie said as Denny walked Bones out of the front of the hotel to the gates.

“Maybe it is and maybe it’s not,” Denny replied. “Some things you can’t know.”

Bones looked up at the two humans with confusion as they took off his leash, led him out beyond the gate, and then let the two guards close it behind him. The shepherd pranced around a little as they turned their backs on him and headed back towards the hotel. He then stood there for a long moment, waiting for their return, before ambling away into the city again.

“Guess we know which side you’re on,” said a stern-faced woman, another Jicarilla survivor, as Denny and Carrie walked back inside “Gotta be stronger than that to make it in this new world.”

Denny gave her a hard stare, and she looked right back at him with a scowl. Denny later found out that she’d lost her great-uncle and a cousin to the dogs and regretted the confrontation.

Bones spent the rest of the morning wandering around Flagstaff. He stayed relatively close to the Sheraton, as now that he found people, he knew he’d have a semi-consistent food source from what they threw away, but he also scouted around in search of more food on his own. The grocery and convenience stores in the immediate area had long been picked clean, so Bones ended up slipping into this house or that office building as he had done in Los Angeles, following his nose to vending machines and pantries full of non-perishables that only required stepping over a few corpses to get to, something that the residents of the Flagstaff Sheraton were still avoiding due to potential contamination. As Bones didn’t consider such things, he feasted on precisely what he was hoping to: beef jerky and chips in a suburban utility room.

It was while he was eating this that he caught the scent of a feral cat outside and decided to make a run at it. He slipped out the door he’d come in through and spotted the cat feasting on a dead mouse in the garage. The cat didn’t seem to notice the shepherd in the slightest, so it was easy for him to slip over to only a few feet away and then spring at the animal, slaughtering it before its heart rate had time to quicken. On top of that, the mouse had been freshly killed, so he ate that, too.

It was while he was chewing the mouse that something inside him seemed to rupture, sending Bones’s entire body into spasm, and he loosed his bowels. All of a sudden, Bones found himself sitting in a puddle of his own blood and shit as his vision began to cloud. He tried to stand up, but felt too weak and toppled to his side. As he panted for breath, he found himself urinating down his leg.

That’s when the pain came, a tremendous throbbing sensation in his bowels that quickly traveled up his entire body, causing him to quake and whine. After another moment passed, he drifted into unconsciousness swathed in as much agony as he had ever felt.

Back at the Sheraton, Denny found himself ostracized by the other survivors, so he figured he’d make himself useful and push it out of his head. He went to help in the makeshift infirmary that had been set up in the hotel’s kitchen and learned that two others from the Jicarilla massacre had died in the night and a third was just barely hanging on. Though they had plenty of medical supplies, an early priority for Lester, they still didn’t have access to fresh blood, which was a real problem, given how much the victims had lost. No matter how skillfully their wounds had been washed, disinfected, stitched, and dressed, their bodies could not make up the difference with blood.

But even if they had been able to conduct transfusions, they also had no way of typing blood, so it would be a crap shoot unless someone just happened to know they were O-negative, but no one was.

“I’m sorry,” Denny found himself saying time and time again to folks as he tried to bring them something to alleviate their pain, even if it was only the itching from their stitches.

Additionally, the lack of refrigeration meant that several drugs they’d found in this hospital or that were now useless and, to no one’s surprise, the morphine and codeine supplies around Flagstaff had almost been exhausted by those in the medical profession who attempted to ease the suffering of the quickly dying, which in many cases meant euthanizing their patients and then themselves.

Something would have to be done.

“You’re the guy who brought in the dog, right?” one of the wounded Jicarilla men asked. “I’m not blaming you, as I would’ve probably done the same. But if you had seen what we had out there, you would never want to see another dog for the rest of your life. It was like sharks. All teeth and instinct.”

Denny nodded and offered the man a glass of three-hundred-dollar Scotch, which he readily accepted.

When night fell, Bones awoke knowing he was in really bad shape. He was cold all over and could sense that his bowels had let go at least one more time that day while he was out. He struggled to stand up, and when he finally got on all fours, he discovered that he wasn’t alone.

Just outside the garage on the driveway, he could see the six dogs watching him. He got their scent and knew immediately that they were of the same pack he’d run into the night before.

Bones also knew that they could smell his weakness and lowered his head, baring his teeth. He struggled to make a deep, guttural growl to suggest that even if they came at him in this weakened state, he wasn’t about to make it easy on them.

But the dogs didn’t attack.

Perplexed by this, Bones stepped forward challengingly, suggesting – basically - that he would come to them if they didn’t have the balls to attack him, a move that from the various smells sluicing through the air was painfully obvious false bravado to all concerned. But the shepherd didn’t know any other way and started limping through the garage to confront the waiting animals.

When he got to the edge of the garage, though, new smells suddenly filled his nose, and he didn’t even have to look up to know that others of the pack were directly overhead on the roof, ready to pounce down on him like wolves. The problem was that Bones’s own stench was some great that it had temporarily diminished his abilities to scent out the others.

Bones growled but then saw the Rhodesian ridgeback appear alongside the house. The other dogs seemed to be holding back, waiting to follow their pack alpha’s lead. Regardless, Bones bared his teeth, ready to battle the animal to the death…

…until a
new
smell filled his nose.

It had been awhile since he’d taken in such an odor, but he knew exactly what it was. The ridgeback whined a little and slunk closer to Bones, whose own instincts in the matter began to take over. He was sick, he was dying, but he was still the male of the species, and when the ridgeback wandered into the garage on the far side of an old ’76 Mercedes and “presented,” Bones complied with the unspoken request to the best of his abilities.

“I
t’s a necessity. We have guns, they don’t have the element of surprise anymore if they’re even out there, and we’ll be in vehicles. We need supplies and we know where they are. This will be fine.”

Everyone listened as Ches Marzan, a survivor from Cottonwood who had come in with two others a month after Denny, addressed Lester and a number of the others in the ballroom that night. The lights dimmed as one of the generators outside the fire exit sputtered as if to emphasize the seriousness of Marzan’s words, but then glowed back to life when Lester appeared to be in agreement.

“All right,” Lester said. “But in two groups: one for the medical supplies and a second for the guns. You guys leave first thing in the morning.”

It had never been a question in Denny’s mind that he’d be in one of the next day’s requisition parties. He’d always been a part of them, he knew the streets, as he’d been a resident,
and
he had seniority, so it came as a surprise when he went out to the loading docks the next morning and found Ches shaking his head when Denny went to climb into the back of the truck he was fueling up.

"We’ve got enough people, man, but thanks,” Ches said.

Denny stared at Ches incredulously. “Are you kidding? Who knows where all the good pawn shops are? Me. Who knows where the sporting goods stores are? Me.”

“And me, because you showed them to me. But that’s precisely why we need to be showing other people the routes, too. We’ve got new folks, and there’s no telling what happens next, you know? We’ve got to get everybody up to speed.”

It was a good enough manufactured reason to show Ches wasn’t going out of his way to show up Denny, the former school teacher thought, but he saw the looks on the faces of the men already loaded into Ches’ truck and could see the truth. Each held a rifle and regarded Denny the way his classmates once did in elementary school. He was the one going unpicked for this assignment, his position on the delicate pecking order sliding downhill due to his inability to kill a defenseless animal that morning. He supposed none of these men would’ve thought twice about it and this made them better suited, but he disagreed.

He turned and walked over to the group seeking medical supplies, this one led by Anna Blackledge.

“Do I have to beg?” he asked her.

She shook her head and nodded to the back of the SUV. He clambered in, and the two small convoys left the hotel grounds.

When Bones woke up for the second time that day, he was still feeling weak but was better able to stand this time. When he looked around, he saw that the Rhodesian ridgeback and the rest of her pack were gone but had left behind half of a deer carcass that Bones could tell had only been killed a few hours before. He sniffed the dead animal, realized he had no appetite, and left the garage without taking a bite.

There was only a slight chill in the morning air, but Bones felt it all through his body. His fur was getting stiff and the skin beneath it loose, as he had lost some weight over the course of his journey. But he still knew which direction he had to go and began moving that way, wandering towards the rising sun.

His gait had accumulated a serious limp, his right rear leg quivering every time his right rear foot touched the ground. He hopped along for a few steps, found that even worse, and continued limping.

When he heard trucks, he didn’t care so much and made to slink down an alley to avoid detection. But as he did so, Bones caught the scent of the dog pack. He moved down a side street, around the back of a small strip mall, and spotted a couple of the dogs – two Belgian shepherds – in a resting position just alongside a small staircase leading to the second floor of a one-time Mexican restaurant. About two hundred yards away were the trucks Bones had heard, now parking in front of a large building.