Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (18 page)

Using her boot, she kicked at the door with her heel and managed to crack it across the middle. Two more kicks, and it caved in. She quickly pulled out the broken pieces of door and tossed them into the yard. Getting down on her stomach, she looked inside the garage and knew this wasn’t going to be easy. The garage must’ve been a mess already and then the quake just threw everything into the blender as even with her flashlight, she could barely see in due to the piles of trash. It looked like a landfill in there. It was obvious she wouldn’t be able to stand up inside, much less move. But then she realized if she had a pathfinder that didn’t have to solely rely on his eyes, it might be easier.

“Bones,” she said, turning to the shepherd. “Get in there!”

Bones didn’t have to be asked twice. He’d been standing nearby watching as Elizabeth worked on the door and was obviously very happy to finally be allowed to explore the hole. He slithered under the top half of the door. For a second or two, just the last half of his tail was visible, but then it also disappeared.

“Okay, wait for me!”

Elizabeth got down on her hands and knees and crawled after Bones, pulling herself into the garage. She was fairly thin, but her height made such close quarters awkward. But as soon as she was a few feet inside, she discovered that there was more space than she’d initially led herself to believe.

“Bones?” she asked, shining the flashlight ahead. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see the sun creeping in through a few breaks in the roof and from under the broken garage door, which increased her visibility.

She heard something moving up ahead of her next to what she thought was a station wagon. She reached out to find something to steady herself on and realized she’d grabbed the heel of a man’s shoe, the man’s foot still in it.

“Jesus!!”

Beep…beep…beep…

“Sir? I’m right behind you. Are you okay? Can you speak?”

Beep…beep…

With all the debris, it took another couple of minutes for Elizabeth to get closer to the man’s face to check his vitals. When she finally did, she saw Bones’s snout illuminated in the dim light of a cell phone as the dog’s tongue lapped gently against the face of an elderly man. His fingers were tightly wrapped around the phone.

•  •  •

It took about ten minutes for the search-and-rescue team to pull the old man out of the garage. By then the news cameras were there broadcasting images.

“After five days and little to rejoice about in the devastated city of Los Angeles, a ray of hope for those hanging on to the belief that loved ones may still be alive in the rubble has been uncovered,” announced a female reporter up from Melbourne in a heavy accent. “A man whose identity has still not been released has been discovered in a demolished house where he was trapped in his own garage since the earthquake of last Sunday…”

Elizabeth found this idea so strange.

This isolated little spot miles and miles from what anyone would consider civilization was at this moment being seen by millions, and soon would be seen by tens and maybe even hundreds of millions of people by the end of the day. The man’s name, Victor Romo, was known, but it had been decided that it shouldn’t go out until at least a cursory attempt to notify relatives was made. Elizabeth’s name, however, was getting a ton of play. She was interviewed by one camera crew after another and did her best to explain point-by-point what had happened, knowing a “Hero Dog” story would go over even better than a hero-person one. Even though she was a civilian, her team encouraged her to do as much press as she felt able to do, not only to help the morale of her fellow workers but also to spur on the much-needed donations the various service organizations were already starting to solicit.

Happy for a break from all the misery, Elizabeth settled into a routine of spelling her name, explaining who she was and what she did, and then writing out the URL of her dog training business so that each outlet could run it over her interview in case people wanted to learn more.

Only a few camera crews had arrived in time to actually watch Victor Romo get extracted from his house. But there were several in attendance when the search-and-rescue team brought out the body of the elderly man’s wife, who had been found crushed in a bedroom. At death’s door though he was, the old man had refused to be airlifted away until her body had been removed, and the press had dutifully turned off their cameras as his body quaked in anguish at the sight of her being hauled out on a stretcher.

As the reporters hung around, perhaps hoping more gold might be mined from this unexpected vein in Echo Park, Elizabeth found herself again with the paramedic, Wieneke. “Why don’t you just drive him out of here?” Elizabeth asked, helping load Romo onto a Humvee that would drive him to an area open enough to attempt a Medevac. “Wouldn’t it take about the same amount of time?”

“Symbolism again,” Wieneke answered. “Every morning, everybody sees those Medevac choppers out there on the runways, fueled up and waiting for a call that never comes. Seeing one of those birds lifting off, seeing it overhead, it will just do so much for morale. Everybody’s going to be talking about it. You know, ‘well, if they found somebody alive maybe we can, too.’”

Elizabeth smiled and nodded. She let Wieneke patch up the cuts and scrapes she’d acquired getting to the old man. In the course of this, she also gathered intel on the location of his base station. She figured it might be nice to get good and laid that night.

Something to look forward to.

Soon, however, the paramedics, the reporters, and the search-and-rescue teams were all gone, and it was just her and Bones again. The team had fed the shepherd, and he had been resting comfortably under the one still standing tree on the block when Elizabeth walked over and slumped down next to him.

“We’re going to keep going, Bones,” she said, as if trying to convince herself more than the dog. “If some old guy can survive five days under all this, you’d better believe there’s somebody else out there.”

•  •  •

Bones spent the rest of the day mostly on his own, as Elizabeth was off in her own head. He went from house to house, often locating multiple corpses in each, some old, some young, men and women alike. The smells got more distinctive and easy to trace as the afternoon sun continued to cook the rotting human meat for yet another hour. Finally, Elizabeth couldn’t take it anymore and wrapped a bandanna soaked with water around her mouth.

Of course, this didn’t bother Bones. He had a job to do. When he smelled something dead, he went to it and alerted his handler by moving in a circle, pawing at the area where the smell was emanating from and barking. Elizabeth had long run out useful rewards for Bones. He didn’t respond to a ball or toy and wasn’t hungry. Luckily, she had realized early on that he was one of those rare multi-purpose canines who didn’t require one every time. His training was so ingrained that when surrounded by the smell of this many corpses, locating the dead superseded all other interests he might have pursued.

But every time Bones moved into a collapsed or semi-collapsed building, the same thing happened. He’d take a couple of steps in, his own scent would hit the air, and he’d suddenly hear the skittering of tiny feet. The light galloping gait of a rat. He’d seen more than a few rodents as they moved away from his approach, and he found even more of their fecal matter, sometimes all around the dead body it was eating but more often, particularly in the newer homes, around the walls. In these homes, the rats appeared not to be eating so much the people, but gnawing on the insulating layer between the dry wall and the outer stucco, a tart-smelling, poly-fibrous material that had been laid between the interior rooms. Everywhere they went, Bones would see the material, the exposed sheets being silver on both sides with a third sticky red-colored sheet in between, each time pockmarked by rat bites.

At one point, Bones took a couple of sniffs of the material, gave a chunk of it a healthy lick-and-chomp but found that it just gummed up his jaws. He tried to spit it out, but it instantly clung to his teeth, and with each breath the tiny fibers were pulled back towards his windpipe.

With a yelp, Bones took a couple of steps back and did what came naturally: he vomited.

A healthy torrent of the contents of the shepherd’s stomach hosed most of the insulation out of his mouth and onto the floor of the room. Sniffing over what he’d just puked out, Bones resisted the urge to lap it back up and moved into the next room to hunt for the dead body he’d initially scented out in the house.

•  •  •

There had been almost constant aftershocks since the initial quake. As almost all of them were relatively minor, however, the fears of survivors and government officials alike were easily quelled. Seismologists, however, were becoming increasingly alarmed by the erratic nature of these additional quakes and, too late, it turned out, began to suggest that they weren’t aftershocks at all but a precursor to a second major event. Generally speaking, an earthquake
was
the event, a build-up of pressure between plates that was alleviated when the tension reached its peak and an earthquake resulted and after which the plates were allowed to settle. In this case, however, scientists were beginning to believe that a second earthquake was pending.

A so-called double earthquake wasn’t uncommon. One had happened in New Brunswick in 1982 when a magnitude-5.7 earthquake struck on Saturday, January 9th to be followed by a second quake on Monday, January 11th that measured 5.1. As the Los Angeles earthquake had measured 10.2, the idea that the first quake could have merely been a preamble wasn’t even discussed. A double quake indicated that the job was only half done the first time and as a 10.2 was the strongest recorded earthquake in modern U.S. history, it was inconceivable that something twice that size could even occur.

This opinion was revised when powerful aftershocks started hitting every hour on the hour five days after the event. It was revised even further when the aftershocks began hitting in the upper 4s and even the lower 5s on the Richter scale, making them substantial seismic events in their own right. The opinion was completely thrown out the window and the very field of seismology was altered forever by what came next.

A
bout an hour after her shift was up, Elizabeth found and fucked Wieneke in what was once the visiting team’s dugout at Dodger Stadium. The locale was hardly romantic, but as the stadium parking lot had stayed at least somewhat intact, it had become base camp for the search-and-rescue units assigned to the eastern recovery zones and was handy. They had looked for somewhere better than the dugout, but there was no privacy in the camp itself, and beyond the guarded perimeter it had been whispered that gangs of looters operated with impunity by night.

So, they ended up slipping into the off-limits stadium. Off-limits because half the building had collapsed in Sunday’s quake including the entire home side of the park. The upper decks had come down on the mezzanine, which had collapsed on the field level, and all of it together spilled out onto the field. Half the bleacher seats in the outfield had collapsed as well, and if seen from above, the park would seem to be like a great, haunted maw with an intact upper jaw whose lower one was little more than a pile of twisted metal and shattered concrete.

The dust of the crushed cinder blocks still hung heavy in the air, and as Elizabeth gasped for breath in time with Wieneke’s thrusts, she wondered if she was unwittingly making herself a candidate for the same kind of health problems faced by World Trade Center first-responders who spent a few weeks inhaling all the pulverized asbestos and a few years on were suffering from cancers of many stripes.

As Wieneke dug his teeth into her neck just a little too much, Elizabeth pushed this thought aside and gently suggested to the paramedic that he should find a more constructive way to get out his aggression.

It was at this very moment that the second quake, soon to be dubbed “Omega” (renaming the initial quake “Alpha,” half-assed, media-friendly allusions to the Book of Revelations), arrived, though it came slowly at first. She flinched and knew immediately the bad joke Wieneke would make, as she had learned to her distress over the last hour that he was the king of such things.

“Yeah, you felt it, too, huh?” he smirked without a hint of irony.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes but then closed them. Aftershock or no, she was determined to focus on the sensations in her pelvis and not the idiot that was causing them, as she just wanted an orgasm. Because of this, she didn’t see the gigantic concrete block fall off the roof of the dugout and crack him on the head. The blow sent him reeling backwards as the block continued to roll until it came down on his foot, breaking several bones, though he was already well on his way to unconsciousness.

As soon as she felt his body go limp, Elizabeth opened her eyes and saw not only that her partner was now heavily bleeding from a gash in his skull, but also that their surroundings were beginning to shake in earnest.

“Oh, shit!” she cried and leaped forward off the dugout bench. She bolted for the guardrail and swung under it up onto the field, hoping that she’d be safer out in the open.

It was then that she looked up and saw the second half of the stadium beginning to come down. Large chunks of concrete crushed the media booths and bounced down through the seats like boulders aimed directly at her. With nothing in their way, they simply accelerated with every bounce and didn’t stop when they reached the field, tearing up the turf as they kept going.

Elizabeth had a feeling of helplessness in the face of the hailstorm of mortar. She didn’t want to believe, but she couldn’t escape the idea that all of these events were literally bigger than she was and that it would be seconds before she was pulverized and, perhaps, forgotten against the backdrop of the larger tragedy.