Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (10 page)

Ryan nodded and looked out the window of the helicopter as they flew over first Allegheny, then Butler, then Armstrong Counties. He could see smoke rising from a couple of fires in the distance, as well as a great number of helicopters heading off in multiple directions, some in lines of six or seven, like great aerial convoys.

As they went, they also passed over a great many neighborhoods just like the one—until a few hours ago—Ryan lived in. When he looked down into them, he couldn’t see a single moving vehicle, a single person, or a single flesh-eater, just empty houses, streets, and yards as far as the eye could see.

Pretty soon, the sun began to set, and Ryan grew tired. It wasn’t long before he joined Bones in sleep.

•  •  •

Some hours later, Bones awoke on a metal table. Everything around him was white, and the air was heavy with the scent of antiseptic cleaner meant to mask a lingering smell of blood and tissue, all human. A hand was laid gently on his neck and, though groggy, Bones immediately twisted to bite it but didn’t have the strength.

“Easy there, Bones,” came the voice of a tall, wispy-haired man in a military uniform who stood alongside the table. “I’m a friend.”

Bones licked his chops, his mouth desert-dry. The man removed his hand and walked over to a sink, where he filled a kidney-shaped metal tray with water. He brought it back to Bones and placed it on the table. When Bones couldn’t raise himself to get his tongue into the tray, the man put his hands under Bones’s head and lifted it up enough for the shepherd to drink.

“To hear your buddy Ryan tell it, you’ve had a heck of a day,” the man said. “Unfortunately, that included being exposed to a lot of pathogens. We had to run some tests on you, which is why you were knocked out. The anesthetic is why your mouth is so dry.”

Bones continued lapping up the water and then tried to move again, this time attempting to get to his feet, but his already-clumsy paws couldn’t get a grip on the slippery table and slid out from under him.

“Careful, boy,” said the man, placing his hand on Bones’s torso to discourage movement. Ignoring this advice, Bones immediately tried to get to his feet again with a similar result, this time almost tumbling off onto the floor. The man’s voice turned grave.

“If you keep doing this, I’m going to have to put you under again.”

Finally, Bones sank back down on his side, panting a little as he recovered his bearings. The man stroked his fur, gingerly avoiding Bones’s wounds as he rubbed the dog’s head, then patted the fur along his back.

“You’ll be all right, boy. Just take it easy.”

It was less than a minute before Bones fell back asleep.

•  •  •

When he woke up the second time, Bones found himself in an animal cage, lying on a towel. In a different room now, this one with windows that revealed it was the dead of night, Bones picked up an entirely new range of smells. Instead of human ones, these were all chemical and emanated from literally hundreds of plastic bottles lining rows of shelves alongside the cage. The combined scents were so heavy that Bones almost threw up as they pounded at his nose. Whoever stuck him in there had no idea what they were inflicting on him.

Bones woofed a couple of times but then lay back down and buried his nose in the towel. The towel, at least, had the smell of a geriatric old man which was better than the pharmacological attack he was currently weathering.

Outside the room, he could hear a great deal of activity, people hurrying back and forth through the hallways with confusion and panic in their voices. Nothing sounded business as usual, even when someone was just asking directions to an office or particular wing. Bones kept his eyes on the translucent window in the door where the shadowy silhouettes of people could be seen. Having slept for hours and hours, Bones wasn’t tired anymore, though his muscles were aching more now than they had. On top of that, he was pretty hungry by now but didn’t bark, preferring to stay silent and sink his nose into the towel as he waited to be discovered again.

It was about an hour later that a group of silhouettes came right up to his door, talking fast as one of them fumbled with keys to unlock it.

“He’s in here unless they moved him,” said a young soldier who entered the room first, followed quickly by four officers; no sign of the wispy-haired man. The soldier spotted Bones and smiled. “Here’s your man, sir.”

The ranking officer walked past the soldier and stood over the cage, his hands on his hips as Bones looked up at him, his wounds seeming to give the officer pause.

“He looks like shit.”

Bones’s eyes flitted from the officer to his cohorts, then back down again.

“He’s probably starving,” offered the soldier.

The officer squatted down and looked closely at Bones. The German shepherd got slowly to his feet and met him at eye-level, then stuck out his nose and gave the fellow a sniff.

“You think you can help us out?” the officer asked Bones. “A lot of my officers think you’re our best shot, ‘the little police dog that could.’ While you’ve been out of commission, well, things have taken a turn for the
fucked
, and we’re hoping you might be able to help us
un
-fuck it.”

Bones stared at the officer expectantly, still wondering if this contact would result in food. After another moment, the officer turned back to the soldier.

“Get him fed. Check his wounds. Get him out to the heli-pad in five minutes.”

•  •  •

As the sun began to purple the eastern sky, Bones found himself on the move yet again, this time airborne and headed north-northeast. He was accompanied by a four-person team of MPs that obviously had a lot more experience with law enforcement dogs than anyone else Bones had run into since the death of his handler twenty-four hours before. More than anything, this was meted out by the fact that they’d simply treated him like a dog instead of a person, a confidante, a savior or a soldier.

With them, in twin cages, were two military police dogs—a Belgian Malinois named Asra and a second German shepherd, Thor—but Bones was enjoying the privilege of flying cageless at the feet of a Sergeant Mickey Celek, a square-jawed, sandy-haired farm boy of an MP who had assumed primary control of Bones.

“Bet you’re pretty sick of all the travel, huh, Bones?” Celek asked, keeping a hand between Bones’s shoulders, while petting him at the base of his neck instead of on his head with his other hand. “This’ll probably be the longest ride you’ll take today but then—with a little luck—you’ll call it a day.”

Bones, lying on the floor of the helicopter, glanced from Celek to the one female MP, Sergeant Connie Holt, who was eyeing him, too.

“You really think he can figure out where these things went?” she asked skeptically.

“It was Colonel Daniels’s idea, and even he said it was a long shot,” replied Celek with a non-committal shrug. “But have you seen this guy’s record? Even before today, he was one of the best cadaver dog’s in the state, if not the whole northeast. You’ve got a hell of a sniffer, huh, Bones?”

Celek reached down and stroked Bones’s snout. Bones looked from Celek across to the other two MP Sergeants, Edwin Plume and Darryl Moore. Moore was either asleep or meditating, but Plume was eyeing Bones back, what looked like a thin smile on his face either of incredulity at the team’s desperation or of optimism that they might finally have a workable solution to the current problem, though he said nothing.

“You believe what that kid said about the dog killing the Stage 2s?” asked Holt. “Made it sound like he’d torn through over a hundred.”

“Kid’s probably full of shit,” Sgt. Moore suggested.

“You have any idea how many different blood and tissue samples they found in this guy’s jaws?” retorted Celek. “Hell, in his fur? That kid walked out of Ground Zero alive, and it’s not because he’s some junior Quick Draw McGraw. He had help.”

Sgt. Holt looked at Bones for a moment, meeting his gaze as she wondered if this one animal could be responsible for all that was being attributed to him, but then shrugged.

“Well, we’re not asking him to fight anything, just borrow whatever he’s got of a scent-memory,” she said finally. “Probably won’t get to see him in action.”

She glanced back to Bones as he licked his chops, as if getting hungry even at the memory of fighting flesh-eaters.

•  •  •

The helicopter set down about an hour and a half later, just as the sun was beginning its morning arc in earnest. The landing zone was up in the Allegheny Mountains just outside the small hamlet of Coughlin, a coal mining town of about four or five hundred residents tucked a couple of miles off the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, U.S. Route 6, which one could take all the way to California or Massachusetts depending which way they were so inclined (though locals suggested that CA and MA were both pretty much full of assholes). While there were no signs of even a single local, the population had still increased exponentially that day, as a thousand or so National Guardsmen and women were swarming the place, some having arrived by helicopter but many more in canvas-backed trucks and armored vehicles from Fort Indiantown Gap in Annville. On top of that, there were also a couple hundred Army Rangerswho had been quick-deployed up from Fort Benning, Georgia, in C-130 transports that had landed in Erie the previous night and were then trucked down. These were the men who had recovered Ryan and Bones the afternoon before, utilizing twin Apache helicopters from the Air National Guard base in Johnstown. They were now miles from their mop-up assignment in Gainey.

When the MPs disembarked from the helicopter, Sgt. Celek walking Bones on a leash, they were immediately met by an officer who, after returning four salutes, introduced himself as Major Buntin.

“You’ve been briefed on what you’re going to be looking at?” Maj. Buntin asked.

“Yes, sir,” came the unified response.

“Then follow me.”

The four military policemen and their three K-9 cohorts were led to the outskirts of the small village—little more than a post office, a motel, a diner and a handful of small woodframe houses and even fewer trailers that stretched up into the foothills. While it looked like there was also a structure originally constructed to be a church, it had long since been boarded up. It took only four minutes to walk from the motel parking lot, which had been deemed suitable for helicopter take-offs and landings, all the way across town to the Coughlin city limits. A single one-lane gravel road separated the community from the woods. But as the three dogs neared the first tree line, they all picked up on what brought them there at once as their noses went into overdrive.

“Christ on a cracker,” muttered Plume, the humans getting a nose-full as well. “What
is
that?”

It was only a few yards into the trees that they saw the source of the stench. Or, at least, one small part of it. Just within the woods, marked off by yellow tape and surrounded by armed sentries, was a trail of human bones arranged haphazardly as if they’d been gradually dumped off the back of a four-wheeler. In some places, there’d only be a femur, a skull, or a clavicle to mark the path, but at other points, it was as if that same four-wheeler had hit a bump and dropped four or five skeletons’ worth in one spot. On top of that, the bones appeared to be covered in some sort of sticky brown glaze. The MPs stared at the sight with incredulity and horror, Sgt. Holt finally having to look away, as she felt sick to her stomach. That’s when she saw it was actually a lot worse than she could have imagined.

“Look,” she said, nodding left and right.

The group turned and saw that what they’d been looking at was only one trail of several dozen. Yellow “no crossing” tape could be seen wagging in the light breeze throughout the woods, marking bone trails fanning out as far as the eye could see.

“Do you know what kind of numbers we’re looking at, sir?” Sgt. Celek asked the major, ashen-faced.

“We’ve been working off a human skull count, and right now, we’re up around twenty thousand,” Maj. Buntin replied gravely. “The numbers are starting to match the combined populations of Duncan, Hammond, Gainey, Coughlin, Belton, Scottsburg, and Warsaw—the towns primarily affected by this morning’s outbreak. We have no idea what left these bones here or why they were arranged like this. Some of the bones show the kind of fusing we witnessed in the Stage 3s, which must have gone all the way down to the skeletal level, but we haven’t been able to determine where the rest of the creature has disappeared to.”

“You specified a ‘human’ skull count?” asked Sgt. Holt.

“We’ve found a number of other animal skulls in the mix—elk, bear, possum,” Major Buntin replied. “Yesterday’s assessment of the Stage 2s and 3s as being only cannibalistic, I feel, can be dismissed. Whatever these things are becoming, well, we can anticipate a different sort of ossification structure, to say the least.”

“Couldn’t this be it?” offered Sgt. Holt. “Maybe whatever this mutation is has a limited life cycle and we’re looking at the end stage.”

Major Buntin offered Sgt. Holt a look filled with condescension but then shook his head. “I don’t think anyone believes that’s what we’re looking at here. They’re still out here in the woods, and they’re all moving in the same direction to some specific location. We need your dogs to find them because, if not, who knows where they’ll show up next. This has to end. Now.”

Sgt. Celek allowed Bones to move closer to the bone trail and get a good whiff. It was almost too much for the shepherd who snorted loudly and shook his head, immediately backing away from it.

“So much for Wonder Dog,” Sgt. Moore scoffed.

But then Bones turned his nose away from the bone trail and to the grass alongside it, then to the air, separating out the smell of the dead humans in order to pick up the fading trail of whatever left them behind. After a long moment, he finally began moving forward, heading into the trees.