Bones Omnibus (82 page)

“Where did he go after?” Denny asked.

“We were perfectly willing to take him with us, but in the morning he was gone. We saw him up the highway heading east, I guess. Hate to say it, but he was looking pretty thin. Was he your dog?”

Denny took this information straight to Lester with a request to go after him. Lester told him he was crazy and that it was a complete waste of resources, but let him have a truck anyway. Denny then went to Carrie, who understood but was also violently opposed. Sure, the group had talked about trying to send somebody out to see if there were groups like them in Santa Fe, Tucson, Albuquerque, and even El Paso-Juarez, but no one had ever suggested it be one person. But Denny was adamant and soon got his way. Most of the Flagstaff survivors figured he’d earned the opportunity to be a little wasteful and reckless through his repeated acts of heroism over the past few weeks anyway.

He set out at nightfall and drove without stopping to the Arizona-New Mexico border.

As he went, Denny listened to a CD on the truck stereo. Music hadn’t been any kind of priority to the group, but Denny had often passed a library on his various excursions into the city and had later suggested it as a place for Lester and him to retrieve books on carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work. He’d seen the baskets of compact discs and remembered them when he went to go look for Bones.

When he put in a disc of Soviet-era film music by Shostakovich, a rival of Prokofiev and one of his favorites, as it had been one of his wife’s favorites, he found himself weeping behind the wheel. It wasn’t so much that the music was beautiful or so surprising to hear after so long, it was more that it immediately put him in the mindset of where he was when he last heard it, sitting alone with Jennifer in their living room, trying to place themselves in the lives of the Minsk Chamber Choir when they recorded it (not realizing that their CD was from a more recent recording of the score). World War II was over, the Cold War was just beginning, and the never-ending putsches and purges of the Stalin era kept the citizenry on their toes, Shostakovich himself being denounced the same year he wrote the score Denny was currently listening to. But here they were, singing like angels for the soundtrack of a film neither Denny nor Jennifer had ever heard of, much less seen.

The couple had talked about what their lives had been like and whether any of them could possibly still be alive. He knew the answer to that one now. They discussed the Orwellian hardships much of the citizenry faced, both mentally and physically, and wondered aloud if having found one another as Denny and Jennifer had done would be enough to make life worth living.

Denny cried because he missed his wife but also because so many of the things he had wanted to do in life were now gone. He would never go to Europe, he would never sit on the school board, he would never watch his children go to a better college than he did, he would never win any kind of awards for his teaching or possibly coach his students into awards of their own. He would never see any of those same students graduate. Now he had no goals other than those directly tied to his survival. He had mourned his friends and wife before but now, selfishly he thought, he mourned the loss of his own life as he knew it.

He reached what was pretty obviously the campsite of the Coloradoans (they had left notes for other travelers explaining the size of their party and where they were heading) well before dawn and then kept going east, though at a greatly reduced speed now, down to twenty from seventy-five. He debated halting his progress until daybreak so he wouldn’t miss spying Bones but then realized the dog, having had a day on him, was probably at least a few more miles down the road, so he’d be okay.

Just as the sun got a little higher in the sky, he pulled off to the side of the road to urinate, did so behind a tree though the likelihood of anyone coming along at the moment was next to none. When he turned around to walk back to his truck, he got the scare of his life, as he found Bones sitting beside the passenger side door, looking at him.

“Jesus, Bones!” Denny cried. “I didn’t even hear you come up.”

Bones woofed in acknowledgement, but weakly.

Denny walked up and knelt beside the shepherd, only to see that he was little more than skin and bones now. “Ah, jeez, Bones,” Denny muttered as he stroked the animal, the fur even stiffer than it had been. “Glad I found you.”

Denny opened the passenger side door and pulled out the fresh meat he’d brought for the dog, but Bones barely touched it. The shepherd whined a little, got up on its feet and pranced a bit, and Denny understood.

“All right,” he said, tossing the meat away and helping Bones up into the truck.

E
ven with Bones in the car, Denny drove along slowly. He had the windows down, and Bones kept his snout to the wind as they went. They had only gone sixty miles by midday, but Denny had enough fuel to take them all the way to Florida if need be, though he didn’t imagine that would be the case. No, something told him that the dog’s destination was closer than that, or he wouldn’t have been walking it. He got the idea that the shepherd knew exactly how bad his condition was and that he chose his time to leave the Flagstaff pack carefully, not too late, not too soon.

But then they reached the exit that would send them to the town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Bones began whining, which soon turned to barking. Denny didn’t know if it was a smell or a sight that had alerted Bones to their position on the map, but the dog couldn’t have made it clearer that this was where they going.

Las Cruces, “the City of Crosses,” was about the size of Flagstaff and was located in the southern part of the state, surrounded by mountains. None of the buildings were very tall, a common sight in New Mexico, as there were ordinances about blocking views of the horizon. Church steeples were high, apartment buildings were not. As Denny rolled into it, he found it eerily silent and filled with the stench of death.

Having no idea where they were going, Denny drove around a little, circling the downtown mall area off Main Street until Bones indicated this direction or that. It was mid-afternoon by the time Bones had finally decided on a neighborhood, and after trolling up this street or that, Denny finally decided that the easiest thing to do would be to let Bones out on foot, and he’d follow in the truck.

This easily proved to be the better plan. Though the dog was hobbled by illness, Bones’s nose seemed to instantly grab onto a scent, and he made a beeline down the sidewalk, crossed two lawns, and took a side street down to a row of modest, single-story houses at the very edge of the neighborhood where the back fences abutted the arroyo. One of the houses didn’t have a back fence, its backyard invitingly open to all comers. It was to this lot that Bones ran.

Denny parked the truck in the driveway alongside an old Chevy Blazer and climbed out as Bones scratched on the front door. Self-consciously, Denny glanced around but saw no sign of people, and was about to try to force the door when he discovered that it was unlocked. He swung the door wide, and the shepherd immediately ran inside.

Denny had feared that they would be greeted with the scent of a rotted corpse, but this wasn’t the case. A heavy, musty smell permeated the air, but even the always attendant stench of spoiled food was absent from this place, as if it had been cleaned out after being abandoned.

As he walked through the small den, kitchen, and dining room at the front of the house, Denny realized that the house likely belonged to an older man, a belief confirmed when he went into a home office of sorts and saw the kind of jumbled, paper-strewn mess that no woman he ever knew would tolerate. On the wall were plaques celebrating the law enforcement career of a man named “Lionel Oudin,” and there were several photos of him in uniform.

And then there was a photo of Oudin in uniform alongside Bones.

“Oh, my God,” Denny whispered.

But he didn’t know what he was most reacting to, the fact that he was being given a window into this dog’s past or that Bones was able to navigate himself back from wherever he came from all the way to his master’s house.

Denny looked over a few more of the awards and photographs, Oudin clearly having had a particularly distinguished career, but then exited to find the shepherd.

He didn’t have to go far, as there were only two more rooms in the house: a dusty, unused guest room with a four-poster bed in it surrounded by dust-covered boxes and then the master bedroom, which looked more like a hospital room. A large semi-electric hospital bed with heavy bed rails and an over-bed table was set up in the middle, surrounded by medical equipment that suggested someone quite infirm lived here.

The only thing was, the bed was empty and there was no sign of its one-time occupant.

Bones was going over the room with his nose, as if he’d picked up on the slightest of smells but couldn’t for the life of him find where it emanated from. He moved from the bed to the dresser to the closet where an old man’s clothes hung, the floor littered with boxes and shoes.

On a chest of drawers, Denny saw photos of Lionel with a young woman, probably a daughter, and then a few more of the woman alone through the years. A very young Lionel stared out of a wedding photo with a young lady who favored the daughter in the other pictures, further confirming Denny’s belief regarding their relationship, though the wife appeared in only a few other photos in the room, all from younger days.

“You okay, Bones?” Denny asked the shepherd as the dog snuffled around in the closet with greater and greater intensity.

Denny walked over and looked at the dog as he made his search, until he finally figured out what the shepherd wanted. In the back of the closet hanging from a hook was an old leash that appeared to have been used in an official capacity, as it had the logo of the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department on it. Denny took it down and placed it on the carpet in front of Bones.

“Is that what you wanted?”

Bones replied by sniffing all around the thing, circling it over and over. Denny waited a couple of minutes, but then walked away and left Bones alone with it.

A few minutes later, as Denny sat in the living room wondering what to do next, Bones wandered in and moved directly to the sliding glass door that opened out to the patio and scratched at it for a moment. Denny rose and slid it open, allowing the shepherd to scamper out and nose around the yard. Though he knew there was no fence and Bones could just walk away, he didn’t look on the dog as “his” in any way and didn’t think he’d ever feel that way about any animal again.

In fact, Bones going right to the leash surprised him. He thought of it as a symbol of subjugation, and why would a dog like Bones want to be subjugated? Then he realized that he was thinking of it as a human might, which had little or nothing to do with how the dog saw it. For Bones, the leash was not a symbol of subjugation so much as an indicator of his close relationship to this man who obviously meant the world to the dog. Denny wondered where the man’s body was, as it seemed clear that he was sick well before the plague came.

He sat back down in the recliner in the old man’s living room and, having now been awake for more than twenty-four hours, promptly fell asleep.

Denny woke up about ten hours later in the pitch dark. The first thing he did was grab for his gun and found it just where he’d left it. He hadn’t seen any dog packs roving Las Cruces on the drive in, but that didn’t mean they weren’t watching him.

That’s when he remembered Bones.

He went quickly to the patio door and slid it open, terrified that he might find the butchered carcass of the shepherd lying there, savaged by those very unseen dog packs while attempting to get back in. But there was no sign of the animal.

“Bones?” Denny asked, in case he had just walked out a little ways into the field beyond. When there was no response, he tried again. “Bones?!” Still nothing.

Denny went to the kitchen to see if there was any non-perishable food worth eating that might save him a trip to his truck and found only powders, vitamins, and prescriptions, Lionel clearly having been on a mostly liquid diet. Glancing through the prescriptions, he saw several related to the side effects of chemotherapy and realized that Lionel had been dying of cancer.

When the sun finally rose, Denny walked out in the backyard with his rifle and looked around for Bones some more. He called the shepherd’s name repeatedly, but there was no answer. Nothing moved but the birds.

Undeterred, Denny got behind the wheel of the truck, drove around to a dirt road that ran behind the row of houses and continued searching for the dog, slowing to call out his name while being careful not to drive anywhere too dangerous for fear of breaking an axle. While he figured he could easily trade in the truck for Lionel’s Blazer, there was a lot of ground to cover between the scrub behind the houses and Lionel’s back patio. If there were any dogs around, Denny would be greatly exposed to predation. This was the new mindset, Denny realized.

At midday, Denny began running out of fuel, decided that would be the moment he’d give up the search, and, half an hour later, stopped the truck to gas up from one of the many cans in the back.

“BONES!!!!” he cried one last time.

But the dog was long gone, having disappeared into the wilderness of his youth behind the home that had been the first and only place Lionel had ever owned, rented out during a couple of years while in Pittsburgh, and then returned to for his retirement, “to be close to his daughter,” he told friends.

After a long moment, Denny nodded to himself, tossed the empty gas can in the back of the truck, climbed behind the wheel, and began following the setting sun back to the west. He glanced into the rearview mirror but continued to see no sign of the German shepherd, though by now he didn’t expect to.

T
he moment Denny had opened the back door, Bones got the scent he knew he would. It was faint, now months old, but it didn’t matter, as this was what the shepherd was trained for, his specialty. He headed out through the scrub and mesquite trees, and within the hour he’d made it into the Organ Mountains east of the city.