Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (11 page)

“Here we go,” Sgt. Celek said, inhaling sharply.

Sgt. Holt nodded and joined the small group following a few yards behind Bones, a company of National Guardsmen flanked by a platoon of Army Rangers falling in line behind them. Slowly but surely, Coughlin and the tree line disappeared behind them as they wandered farther and farther into the woods.

B
ones, flanked by Thor and Asra, led the phalanx of about a hundred military policemen, soldiers, and Rangers for more than two hours, deep into virgin forest. Several times, the MPs had to cut trail just to keep up with the dogs as the trees and underbrush grew impenetrably dense. The bone trails had continued for over a mile, which the army had been able to mostly ascertain from the air, but now the soldiers on the ground had to rely solely on the dogs’ senses of smell to continue leading them forward towards the retreating multipedes, wherever they might be hiding in the vast and circuitous Allegheny Mountain range.

Bones alternated between keeping his nose in the air and then back to the ground. He routinely paused after finding traces of the sticky substance that had decorated the human bones on nearby rocks and trees which he sniffed around on, and, in one instance, even urinated on, before continuing.

“We have any idea what that stuff is yet?” asked Sgt. Moore, indicating the brownish-red resin that hung like thin webs of molasses.

“It’s organic, full of human blood and tissue but also a lot of other stuff,” said a Lieutenant Nelson, the second female in the group after Sgt. Holt and the ranking officer of one of the National Guard platoons. “They’re still trying to determine what the rest is, but what makes it different from animal blood is that there’s very little oxygen or other gasses within it, as well as no hemoglobin, which you’d expect to find in a mammalian circulatory system.”

Sgt. Celek let this process for a moment but then looked back down at Bones, who seemed to have found something next to one of the trees.

“Whatcha got, Bones?” Celek asked, leaning down.

Bones moved aside and Celek pulled on a latex glove he extracted from a pocket. He reached over and picked up what looked like a long, smooth tree branch, completely stripped of not only leaves but any kind of buds or bumps. Instead, the surface had a bright, almost metallic sheen the same color as the sticky substance that had covered the bones.

“Hey, any idea what this is?” he asked, handing it back to Lt. Nelson.

She stared at it for a moment, weighing it in her hands, but was unable to render a verdict.

“It looks organic but feels manmade, like a piece of pipe,” she offered. “But that can’t be it, can it? Not way out here.”

As she looked closely at it, a similar—albeit larger—branch-like object of the same type swept out from a tree branch above her and lopped her head off. It bounced onto the ground in front of the surprised MPs and rolled until it came to a stop against the trunk of a tree, her hair immediately getting stuck to the sap-like substance Bones had been using to trail the multipedes.

There was one more millisecond of quiet as the soldiers stared at the severed head, but then all hell broke loose.

“Holy shit!!” yelled Sgt. Moore, as he and a number of the other troops looked up and saw literally hundreds of the so-called “multipedes” descending on them from the deciduous tree canopy above. “Get ’em!”

As one, the soldiers raised their weapons, dropped their safeties, and began firing rounds up at their swarming attackers, but the minute amount of time it took to complete this simple task was still too long for a handful of troops who found themselves impaled on the long, sword-like mandibles of the fastest multipedes. Their comrades, staring in horror at the fallen men, so quickly and easily dispatched, found their panic levels rising and translated this into more erratic firing patterns. The multipedes, however, remained eerily calm, going about their slaughter—even as many of their number were blasted to pieces—with a cool, methodical attitude that only made them more frightening to behold. If they weren’t afraid of this, what
did
they fear?

As the tremendous firefight exploded around him, Bones began barking like crazy and lunged at any multipede that got near, easily tearing off a few legs. The other enforcement dogs did similarly, though the Malinois, Asra, only managed a couple of yips before a giant multipede dropping from a branch several stories up landed two feet away from them and cut her and her handler, Sgt. Plume, in half with its mandibles.

As Sgt. Celek methodically fired away, picking a target, blasting it apart and then choosing a new one, it became quickly evident to him that this creature they were fighting was not the same as the multipedes back in Gainey but a further mutation of the Stage 3s. Instead of human faces, body shapes, arms, and legs, these creatures were far more snake-like and elastic after having shed their skeletons, and pulled themselves along with much shorter, stick-like legs that gave them the appearance of worms as they slithered around trees. In fact, the only thing that confirmed that these were even of the same species was that the body segments, while becoming uniform, still had the look of several humans fused together like vertebrae, all in fetal positions.

“This must be a completely new stage,” Celek bellowed out to the other MPs between bursts of his machine gun, the overlapping muzzle flash like lightning through the trees. “The Stage 2s merged bodies to become Stage 3s. Then they dumped their bones and mutated into these worm-things.”

Despite their vastly superior firepower, it was less than a minute before the hundred man—strong force was halved. Arriving in a hail of broken branches and leaves, the multipedes had swept down, already working their mandibles forward in a chopping motion, resulting in a maelstrom of severed arms, legs, heads, and torsos raining down on the forest floor. These were followed swiftly by the human bodies to which they were once attached. Blood erupted, splashed, poured, oozed, and seeped from the now dozens of corpses soaking the ground.

But after a few minutes of this, the heavily armed and well-trained squad of Rangers and MPs (it was the Guardsmen with their lighter weapons that seemed to have fallen first) quickly improvised a workable defense and gathered almost back-to-back, laying down cover fire for each other as guns were reloaded and reset before being turned back on the enemy. But for every one multipede that was blasted away, two more seemed to take its place.

“How many are there?” cried Sgt. Holt, sidled up next to Sgt. Celek, blasting up into the trees as the multipedes swarmed back among the branches in an attempt to find new angles of attack against their pesky targets.

“Looks like hundreds,” Celek replied, shredding the tree above him with bullets. He pointed at the thick, sticky substance that exploded out of the multipedes whenever they were hit. “That’s why the dogs didn’t start barking. The scent they’ve been tracking all morning is the same as what’s coming out of the multipedes. I’m sure even their sniffers have a saturation point.”

“But what are they doing out here?” asked Sgt. Holt. “Before they dumped their skeletons, they were rampaging all over the place, completely disordered. Those trails implied some kind of order, and now even their attack patterns are coordinated. They were
waiting
for us.”

Like with a hive mind
, thought Celek, but he didn’t give voice to the opinion. He didn’t like how what he was seeing completely changed the day’s equation all over again.

For his part, Bones found fighting these new multipedes easier than the ones back in Gainey. Before, when he would crunch into a Stage 2 or 3, they could flail and beat him away with their bony limbs, which would eventually extract a toll. Now, without skeletons, it became a muscle game, and as the multipede would try to pull itself from Bones’s jaws, all the shepherd had to do was lock in its jaws and wait for the creature to tire itself out. Then he’d bite off its head.

In doing this, however, he became quickly covered in the sticky blood of the multipedes and kept trying, in vain, to pull it off his fur by rolling on the grass during breaks in the action. While he was doing this, a thick, rich smell cut through the odor of the blood that had been filling his nose for some time. It was a new smell. Bones momentarily ignored the multipedes and followed the scent only to find that it was coming from straight down. It was the rich aroma of old, dry soil from deep within the ground, the kind that was seldom exposed to the air and elements. It would never be mistaken for topsoil. Somehow over the ceaseless machine gun fire, Bones also heard a new sound, one that seemed to be coming from the same direction.

The shepherd began jumping around on the spot, barking and pawing at the dirt. At first, none of the soldiers noticed. But after a couple of seconds, Sgt. Celek finally saw what his charge was doing and ceased firing for a moment to watch, wondering what had gotten into him. It was then that he realized the vibrations he had been feeling for the last few seconds weren’t, in fact, from having switched his AR-15 from semi—to full-auto.

“Everybody look down!!” he shouted. “I think something’s com…”

But then the ground opened up and there was no need for him to continue.

Dozens of the worm-like multipedes erupted out of the ground like geysers, launching skyward a few feet before descending directly on top of individual soldiers whose positions they had easily navigated to due to the vibrations of their machine guns. The panicked troops began shooting wildly, only to have their fire chew into their nearest human comrade, so desperate were their fire patterns. The multipedes took easy advantage of their shock and horror to slice through the momentarily stunned friendly-fire soldiers, sending them to join their fellow corpses on the ground.

Sixty seconds later, there were only a dozen humans still standing, the forest floor an endless abattoir of corpses and spent shells.

Sergeants Celek, Holt, and Moore, who had managed, in the millisecond before the underground attack, to ready their defense and fend off the first wave, now found themselves the target of the surviving multipedes as they slithered in a circular pattern, flanking the survivors.

“What now?” Sgt. Holt screamed over the roar of her machine gun as her bullets cut through another multipede. “We don’t have enough ammunition to kill all of them!”

Sgt. Celek knew she was right. At a certain point, the multipedes, by sheer force of numbers, would overwhelm them. But then he looked around and saw both Bones and Thor tugging apart the torso of one of the multipedes.

“I’ve got an idea,” he cried. “Get over to Bones.”

The MPs and a couple of the other surviving soldiers edged over to the two shepherds until Celek could get his hand on Bones’s leash. He pulled him close as the other troops gave him cover.

“Go home, Bones!” he cried, pointing away from the action. “Find us a hole.
Go!”

It took him a moment, but then Bones understood what was desired of him and bolted away, leading the group up a nearby rise and deeper into the woods but away from the multipedes.

Sgt. Celek watched him for a moment, then nodded to the others. “Come on! This might be our shot!”

The survivors chased after Bones as best they could, Thor leading the way after Bones escaped from view. The multipedes rushed after them in the trees and overland, their mandibles launching forward after their heels, but they weren’t as fast as the soldiers on open ground, the element of surprise being their primary advantage. Some burrowed back under ground as if hoping to flank those retreating, but they couldn’t keep up, either.

Soon the multipedes were far behind, but this did little to slow Celek and the other survivors. They kept running, putting as much ground between them and their dead as they could.

•  •  •

“Central command, this is Wolf Team, over. Central command, this is Wolf Team, over. We need assistance!”

Even though Sgt. Moore continued trying to raise their commanders, it was obvious to everyone that the field radio had been too badly damaged in the attack to function. The handful of communication devices still carried by the others, mostly cell phones and walkie-talkies, satellite-enabled though they were, were having similar problems with signals bouncing around the high rocks of the Alleghenies, so high were they. That said, the soldiers figured they were much safer among the rocks, hoping the multipedes couldn’t drill through black shale.

“What the hell, those things looked like worms or caterpillars or something, man,” declared one of the surviving Rangers, a corporal who had introduced himself as “Romeo” when they’d slowed down enough to catch their breaths. “The ones we shot up outside Gainey still looked like people. These were like…
animals
. We sure they’re even the same thing?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Sgt. Celek, shaking his head. “Whatever’s going on here keeps mutating every time we get a handle on how to fight the previous incarnation. Now, we have to worry about it
digging
, for Chrissakes. The only good news is, if it’s organized and can think, it’ll be easier to fight than the randomness of the Stage 2 flesh-eaters as we can try to predict its moves.”

“Yeah, but the bad news is, we don’t know how many more of them there are or how soon they’re going to start popping up in Allentown, Scranton, Reading, or hell, downtown Philly to ring the goddamn Liberty Bell to add to their numbers,” said Sgt. Moore. “And we’d been worried there might be a Stage 4 before, so now that we know there is, what’s to say there’s not some Stage 5, 6, or 7 out there that can really turn our lights out? What if it gets out of Pennsylvania? Over to Europe? Look how much damage it’s done in twenty-four hours alone. Twenty thousand people? I’d say it’s a lot more than that by now.”

Sgt. Celek could only nod as Sgt. Moore outlined his worst fears. He glanced over at Sgt. Holt, who looked shell-shocked, and then moved over alongside her.

“You okay?” he asked.