Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (16 page)

“Bones!”

This time, Bones stopped in his tracks at the sound of a very familiar voice. He turned and looked in every direction, but saw no sign of the speaker. He woofed a little as if to invite the person to announce his presence, and on cue the voice came again, though blended with feedback.

“Bones. Stay right there, buddy. We’re coming in after you.”

Bones suddenly felt a sharp pain in his neck and yelped. He whipped around, barely able to glimpse the little red feather fletchings of the dart already pumping a sedative into his bloodstream. He could feel his shoulder numbing when he turned to escape, and this caused him to stumble awkwardly and plow his snout into the dirt. He attempted to pull himself up on all fours, but both of his front legs were weakening.

Snuffling, Bones slid to the ground, eyes darting all around in panic at his sudden vulnerability. This did not last for long, however, as his panic was soon replaced by a dull numbing of his senses that resolved itself with sleep.

•  •  •

Bones awoke as he was being hauled through the woods on an Indian-style travois, two posts crossed at the head with a plastic tarp tied up between. Bones’s mouth felt as if it was full of cotton, so swollen was his tongue. He was groggy and glanced up at the people hauling him in. They were in typical cold weather gear, like the hunters he occasionally saw from a distance.

That’s when he noticed one pair of eyes looking down at him in particular, a grim smile under them.

“Hey, Bonesy,” said former police sergeant Lionel Oudin. “You’ve put on weight. You’re looking real good. Guess outdoor life agrees with you.”

Bones looked up at his old trainer, a man he’d known since he was a puppy but who had also become his partner when he became a police dog, first for the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and then the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. When Lionel retired, Bones had been assigned a new trainer, but that man had been killed in the incident leading up to Bones’s eventual escape into the wild.

Lionel leaned over and poured some water from a bottle into his hand, allowing Bones to lap up the liquid as the travois bounced along.

“Hate to tear you away from the woods,” the old man continued. “And I wouldn’t have, either, ’cept there’s a national emergency, so much of one that they didn’t blink when I suggested using that whirlybird to track you down. Bet you were wondering how we did that, huh? Well, that’s a Pennsylvania state-thing, embedding you with a tracking device like they use on soldiers nowadays. I’d forgotten you even had it when I got the call looking for you.”

Lionel reached down and touched a raised spot under Bones’s left leg.

“They put that in right after we got here from New Mexico, but you were knocked out,” Lionel explained. “Guess they figured you’re too expensive a piece of police property to let get away. Still can’t believe it worked after all this time.”

Bones listened awhile longer, drank water when Lionel offered it, but then looked out over the disappearing treetops. The farther they went, the less he smelled the wilderness and the more he smelled what the men had brought with them: oil, beer, tobacco, plastic, guns, deodorant, sweat.

Bones glanced back towards the woods one last time and saw a single curious timber wolf just within the trees. He stared back at it for a moment, wishing he had the strength to clamber off the tarp and go after it, but he didn’t. Resigned, he sank back onto the tarp and stared up into the sky.

•  •  •

The next few hours were a blizzard of activity. Bones was brought first to his old haunt, the K-9 school attached to the police training academy on Washington in Pittsburgh, where a police veterinarian gave him a clean bill of health.

“I’m surprised,” the vet admitted to Oudin. “He’s in tip-top shape. I don’t know what he’s been eating out there or how much exercise he’s gotten, but I’d say he’s fit for service.”

Bones could detect a hint of disappointment in Lionel’s face, but then the former police sergeant turned to the dog and smiled, scratching him between the ears as he led Bones off the examination table.

Two hours later, Bones found himself on a platform alongside four other enforcement/detection dogs, two German shepherds like himself and two Belgian Malinois, all younger. They were lined up at Pittsburgh police headquarters behind the chief of police as he prepared to give a speech to an assemblage of local press. Lionel was in attendance, too, standing just behind Bones with the other dog handlers, though he was the only one out of uniform, favoring a simple polo shirt with a Pittsburgh Bureau of Police badge embroidered on the chest.

“Because of the recent tragedy in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh is sending five of its best search-and-rescue dogs to aid in the city’s recovery efforts,” the Chief announced. “These animals have a combined thirty-two years of service to our community and are of the very best trained in the country. Along with the number of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen and women already en route to the devastated city, we hope that our contributions will continue to help lead that city back from the brink.”

A reporter raised his hand. The chief nodded in his direction.

“Are these dogs going to be used on a short-term basis to look for survivors? Or are they going to be part of a longer process to look for the remains of the estimated four to five million dead?”

The chief hesitated a moment.

“As I understand it, these animals will be asked to participate in a three-pronged process utilizing their skills at search and rescue, but also as enforcement animals used to control looting and criminal activity and, yes, also as cadaver dogs to help recover the deceased.”

Bones noticed Lionel bristling at this list of tasks, his hand tightening on the leash as if regretting getting his friend caught up in all this.

•  •  •

“Good-bye, Bones,” Lionel was saying, leaning down and stroking the head of his old partner when they reached Pittsburgh International Airport with the rest of the team. “I’m sorry to say that I’m not going with you on this one. They asked me to, but, well, all those years of no smoking, no drinking, and healthy eating have caught up with me, and I’ve managed to pick up a nasty case of cancer. But you know what they say, you live long enough, you’re going to get it. I just didn’t think that meant sixty-one.”

Bones stared up at his old friend, knowing something was worrying him but having no idea what it was. He nuzzled his snout into Lionel’s hand, and the former police sergeant pulled close to him.

“You be careful out there,” Lionel admonished the shepherd. “It’s full of crazies and that was even before the quake.”

Lionel chuckled, coughed, then chuckled again.

“Anyway, keep your head down. You never know when there’ll be another aftershock.”

•  •  •

Bones and the other dogs, as well as their handlers, were loaded onto a C-130 military transport plane, along with a large cache of supplies gathered from Pittsburgh-based businesses. Bones was knocked out for the flight and slept in a large carrier alongside the other animals. He woke up an hour before the plane was to touch down and stayed awake, his snout resting on his paws as he looked around the inside of the massive plane. He smelled gunpowder and gun oil in the air, but also a different scent, one he recognized from the same incident of the previous year that had claimed his handler. It was a harsh chemical smell of almost a thousand biodegradable polyvinyl body bags that were stacked in the back and had the distinct odor of an old children’s swimming pool that had gotten musty in the garage.

Bones had been around crime scenes in his career long enough to know that where those smells were, there would soon be others, including the souring stench of rotting corpses.

The plane landed at Edwards Air Force Base, the longtime military aircraft proving ground with a runway so long it was where the space shuttle landed when inclement weather clouded the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Northeast of Los Angeles out on the high desert of the Mojave, Edwards was still far enough away from prying eyes to host the occasional top-secret craft but was mostly used in modern times to test unmanned and transport vehicles.

The C-130 bucked and bounced along the runway, but if the passengers found that unusual, they didn’t say anything. It was only when the ramp was lowered and they saw the condition of the base that their looks turned to astonishment.

“Dear God,” said one of the Malinois’s handlers, her face falling as she saw what the quake had done to the base. “It looks like it was bombed.”

In truth, the base looked less bombed and more like it had long since fallen into disrepair, maybe fifty or sixty years before. Most structures were still standing but with giant cracks through their walls, broken windows, partially collapsed roofs, and, in some cases, large chunks of concrete and metal cracked off and smashed onto the ground nearby.

But then there were the hangars.

Rather than an earthquake, the row of seven massive hangars alongside the runway looked more like they’d run afoul of a hurricane, a great wind having twisted their steel frames, wrenched away their walls and roofs and then started a chain reaction that sent whatever was left over tumbling to its foundation and crushing whatever planes were inside. The hangars were so big that it seemed almost impossible that something had been able to pulverize them in such a way.

“Looks like God Himself came down and did a few cartwheels,” another of the dog handlers joked. “We pretty close to the epicenter or something?”

A mechanic who’d been dropping blocks around the plane’s wheels grinned over at the newcomer.

“We’re just past the 100-mile mark. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

T
he mechanic wasn’t exaggerating.

The dogs and handlers were driven by Humvee from Edwards, down the devastated 14 Freeway towards a staging area at the Burbank Airport just on the valley side of the Los Angeles basin, and got their first taste of the devastation. Before the quake, it was a trip that took twenty minutes without traffic. Now, with broken vehicles, trees, dirt and rocks from landslides, utility poles, and everything else strewn out across the highway, it took two hours.

The closer the convoy got to the city, the more pronounced the damage. Apartment buildings, houses, professional buildings, grocery stores, shopping centers—they had all been driven into the ground. This included modern structures that had likely been built not only up to code but to actually withstand even larger quakes, depending on the building owner’s insurance rider. None of these things seemed to matter, though. There had never been a recorded 10.2-magnitude earthquake in California history. The likely reason for this was because it was so outside the realm of possibility that it meant there might no longer be a California.

But that’s what had happened.

“All right, everybody in line!”

A tall, drill sergeant looking fellow in digi-pattern camo fatigues and combat boots named Dalton was waiting for the Humvees as they arrived at the Burbank Airport. Though the dog handlers were all from various law enforcement agencies, they were technically in Los Angeles as civilian advisors to the Los Angeles Police Department. While they were in the air, things had changed.

“All of you are now under the umbrella of Pentagon ‘total force,’” the sergeant announced. “You will not be subject to the military’s chain-of-command, but you will have the enforcement authority of the Defense Department. The president has designated Los Angeles, Orange, Imperial, San Bernardino and Kern Counties as disaster areas and has declared martial law.”

A nervous reflex resounded through the dog handlers. Dalton noticed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Dalton said. “No matter the situation, ‘martial law’ is just one of those boogeyman terms that can make its enforcers as nervous as those its meant to protect. But for the survivors here and especially on the other side of the hill, it lets them know that we’re here and that we’re doing something about the situation. There are fires, there’s no water, no electricity, no way to move food, nothing. Because of that, you’ve got folks going to bed praying that somebody doesn’t come in all ‘Straw Dogs’ on ’em in the middle of the night. If the ACLU wants to watch over my shoulder for abuses of power over the next stretch of days, they’re more than welcome but should be ready for a diet of MREs and iodine-tasting water.”

This made the handlers laugh.

For his part, Bones wasn’t paying much attention. Since they’d arrived in Burbank, his nose had been going into overdrive. All around him he could smell the dead. There were the bodies that had already been recovered from the surrounding area and were awaiting identification in the one standing hangar. In addition, he could pick up the scents of dozens of others still buried in the surrounding buildings, particularly emanating from a large hotel just off the airport entrance. Once the largest such structure for miles, it was now little more than a pile of rubble.

•  •  •

Bones had been assigned to a female handler named Elizabeth Acho who had come down from Portland, where she’d been a civilian dog trainer for the local sheriff’s department. For years now, she had traveled the country, delivering seminars to law enforcement on how to better utilize a dog’s natural desire for play and exploration to make the animal an even more effective detection dog and a healthier, happier animal in general.

She had a German shepherd of her own that she was training named Charlie, but he was still young. She’d left him behind in Oregon. When she’d heard that Bones, a semi-legendary dog in police circles, was being shipped to Los Angeles for quake duty but would need a hander, she put herself on the next plane. She hadn’t known if she’d be lucky enough to get assigned the shepherd but hoped that if she put herself in the right place at the right time, she could make it easy for whoever was to make the decision.