Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (3 page)

Bones lowered his nose and trotted in the direction of the police cars to investigate. What he saw when he arrived were two men tearing at the flesh of a third, a police officer in uniform, face down in the mud, struggling to get to his feet. It was at this moment that the officer managed to lift his head and see Bones.

“Bones!” the man cried.

Upon hearing his name, Bones snapped into action and ran towards the officer. As he did, the injuries he suffered on the road hammered on him with every step, but he still managed to close the distance in less than three seconds and clamped his jaws down onto the leg of one of the two men tearing at the fallen officer. The second he did so, the same scent of death he’d received when he’d bitten the old man in the Taurus filled his nostrils. If seventy percent of taste was smell, Bones’sd well-trained nose ratcheted that up to about eighty-five, making the grip he had on this man particularly unpleasant.

Though his intention was to drag the man off the officer, the sheer force of Bones’s attack had done the job for him, shoving the cadaverous fellow back and smacking his head against the door of one of the squad cars. But no sooner had Bones done this than the man got back to his feet, raised his arms angrily at Bones, and let out a deep, angry, guttural growl from behind teeth hanging with bloody strips of flesh.

“
Gnnnnnnh…!!!”

B
ones had originally been trained as a police dog at a small facility outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Once he’d become a full member of the Doña Ana Sheriff’s Department, he’d been used in exercises all up and down the U.S.-Mexico border by the local police in concert with the ATF, the INS, and the Border Patrol. The job primarily called for sniffing out drugs and illegals from cars and trucks at the Puerto de Anapra and Puerto Palomas border crossings. His secondary training as a cadaver dog was primarily utilized when anonymous calls about dead illegals out in the Chihuahuan Desert came in—usually, it was believed, from the very coyotes who took them out there.

After a nationwide call went out for cadaver dogs needed in Allegheny County, Bones and his partner/trainer—an older fellow and longtime veteran of law enforcement named Lionel Oudin who had raised Bones from a pup—moved up to Pennsylvania. There, they went to work for the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, doing double-duty at the K-9 school attached to the training academy on Washington Boulevard (with plenty of heavy woods across the street for “extracurricular” training), and then assisting with homicide and missing persons cases across all six of Pittsburgh’s new policing “zones.” Only two years into the new position, Lionel took early retirement. When the department asked if they could keep Bones on (“Bones” being the name given to him by Lionel’s now-grown daughter, Amy, despite most figuring it was a vocational nickname), Lionel said “yes” without a second thought. It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t miss his near-constant companion of almost seven years, but he knew how much Bones enjoyed his work and didn’t think he’d adjust so well to sitting on a “doggie bed” all day watching the paint peel.

That’s when Bones was introduced to Sergeant Billy Youman, only his second partner.

Billy couldn’t have been more different from Lionel. Decades younger, unconcerned about his often slovenly appearance, and, counter-intuitively, something of a ladies’ man though anyone in the department would be hard-pressed to describe one of Billy’s typical Friday night hook-ups as a “lady.” For Bones, Billy’s smells were those of a late twenty-something man who sweated fast food and soft drinks, a 180 from Lionel, who patted his face with harsh-scented aftershave and preferred Latin American cuisine, which he’d taught himself to make in his own kitchen. When Bones first walked into Billy’s apartment, he spent days giving every inch the nose-over. When they’d first come up to Pittsburgh, Lionel had rented an old house on the outskirts that had retained pungent smells going back its eighty years. Billy’s apartment had been around for less than fifteen and smelled primarily of the pets that had come before Bones, as the complex was one of the few affordable buildings in that part of Polish Hill that allowed animals. The department paid the pet deposit, though it took Billy three months to push all the paperwork through.

Unlike an officer, whose schooling primarily ended at graduation from the Academy, aside from a few annual and required refresher courses along the way, Bones was constantly in training at the K-9 school. While these workouts were more to train future K-9 officers as well as to get regular cops comfortable and familiar with the K-9 units it might eventually have to work with, it served to keep Bones in an almost permanent state of readiness. He may have known the obstacle courses by heart, but when doing scent training, Billy and the other trainers made sure to change up the exercises to make it ever more difficult for Bones to discover his quarry. It had been decades since thieves rubbed ammonia on their shoes and tossed steaks to throw off police or guard dogs, and TV cop procedurals had taught a generation of criminals how better to cover their tracks. Now the trick that impressed visitors to the K-9 school the most was watching Bones discover rotten meat that had been buried three or four feet underwater, something dogs were allegedly unable to do. Bones would slosh through the training pond, stand on the bank, and then run back and forth to try and catch even the faintest scent of his target long after any residual smell of the burial detail had evaporated. When he inevitably locked in on it and leaped back into the pond to mark the exact spot, the visitors’ eyes would go wide, their jaws would drop and they would applaud with the same fervor one might reserve for a virtuoso violin performance.

As part of his training, Bones had also learned the finer points of various takedown strategies. This meant grabbing a suspect at the wrists or ankles and holding them long enough for a human officer to arrive and make the arrest. Police dogs were not weapons, as usually the threat of a dangerous animal was all one needed in the enforcement of public order, the primary mandate of a K-9 unit. They weren’t fight dogs, counter to the public perception, and were not trained to kill.

But Bones was different.

Almost immediately after Billy had taken over as Bones’s handler, he saw evidence of the shepherd’s feral instincts and tendencies lying just below the surface, something you wouldn’t see cultivated in an otherwise domesticated animal. It seemed to him that Lionel had wanted to make it so that, in an emergency, Bones was like having a.38 in an ankle holster or a collapsible baton in a hidden pocket. It’s not like Bones was some kind of ticking time bomb ready to explode at any moment, but Billy could tell there’d been some “auxiliary” training from the way Bones would react in this real-life situation or that. The thing was, it only made him feel more comfortable with his dog than less (as long as he never had to draw down against retired Sergeant Oudin, he’d joke to himself). If he ever had his back up against the wall and it was life or death, he was confident that Bones would step in and defend him to the death.

But back out in front of the junkyard on Spur 790 about forty-five minutes north of Pittsburgh, the police man on the ground outside his cruiser in the mud and muck had no way of knowing this, which was why it came as a surprise when Bones had applied the canine equivalent of a forward tackle to the man who had been tearing at his flesh.

What was probably even more surprising, maybe even terrifying, was then watching as the same dog tore the man’s hand off at the wrist, then proceeded to bite his neck in two. Terrifying, but useful, given the circumstance.

“Bones! Over here!” the officer cried, before thinking—for the briefest of instances—that Bones might mistake him for a target, too.

Bones turned away from the now-dead-a-second-time fellow and ran back towards the officer, grabbing his assailant at the ankle and dragging him off the young patrolman. Again, Bones sensed immediately that there was no fear in this man. A typical response to a police dog pulling at a person’s foot was that the person whose foot it was would stop what they were doing, panic, and try to pull away from the dog, turning it into a game of tug-of-war, which Bones quite enjoyed and had the jaws to win. In this case, the man seemed to barely notice the dog and continued tearing at the officer’s throat.

“
Bones!
” yelled the patrolman as the dead man’s fingers, skin flayed to the point that they’d become sharp, skeletal pincers, punctured his windpipe while his teeth tore at his throat.

Bones finally managed to yank the man off the officer to the point that the attacker realized Bones was enough of an obstacle to what he was hoping to accomplish that he’d better deal with the dog first. The man turned and lunged at Bones with a feverish growl.

“
Grrraaaahhhh!!
”

This gave Bones the opening he wanted and he launched himself at the man’s neck, repeating the quick, reflexive motion to sever the man’s head, a move that was becoming surprisingly rote through its repetition. Still, the taste of dead flesh in Bones’s mouth from the two men he’d just killed was abhorrent to him, the reason Billy had learned to just walk into a supermarket, pluck a steak straight out of the butcher’s case, and feed it to Bones in the parking lot, blood and all. Fresh or the illusion of fresh was all Bones needed to be happy. Anything else was like eating paint.

“
Booonessssss…
” gurgled the mortally wounded patrolman. Blood drooled out of his mouth and throat as he called for a familiar face to look at, even if it was a dog’s, while he died.

Bones wandered over and sniffed at the patrolman, who moved weakly, only to finally pass a few seconds later, his pupils quickly becoming fixed.

Filling his nose with his scent, Bones gave the face of the just-dead officer an optimistic lick, but there was no response. Though the scent of the living quickly became the scent of the dead, in the actual instant of death, it was relatively similar. So Bones continued giving the man’s face and hands a couple of friendly, encouraging licks before the body began to cool and Bones recognized it as a corpse. Bones took a few steps back from the body, but that’s when he heard a sound coming from the other side of the cars. A
snapping
sound, like a broken branch.

Bones padded around to the other side of the line of parked police vehicles and looked towards the junkyard. Just inside the gate, he saw a number of other people—men
and
women—tearing apart the dead flesh of the police officers who had gathered out here to search for the body of Tracy LeShoure. They all had the same death-stench as the men whose throats he’d just torn out.

Bones started barking, a sharp, alarm-filled bark that again was meant to call out to any other human who might respond to this and know what to do. This was what Bones was trained to do, sure, but it was also the instinct of a domesticated canine. Instead of feeling threatened, the flesh-eaters all turned towards Bones, eyeing him with unmistakable hunger. Intimidated, Bones jumped back just a step but then squared off against them to continue barking. The flesh-eaters, ten in all, gradually rose from the bodies they were devouring, and started moving towards Bones.

That’s when Bones experienced something he hadn’t felt in a lifetime:
fear
.

He kept barking and started prancing around on his injured legs like a giddy faun, but was unwilling to give ground. The flesh-eaters, some shambling, some at a half-jog, got closer and closer to Bones until it reached the point of fight or flight and he glanced towards the woods, marking his escape route. He’d just about made the decision to bolt when a pair of hands reached out from behind and grabbed at this throat.

Bones yelped and leaped away. When he turned back around, he saw the dead patrolman whose life he had defended only moments before now crawling towards him, teeth bared and hands outstretched. The patrolman looked purple and gray, as if blood had pooled in his face, and Bones knew from one sniff that he should be dead. But, of course, he was not.

Having had enough of this, Bones turned and launched himself towards the woods, only to find his path blocked by one of the other flesh-eaters, who managed to get close enough to half-grab, half-fall on the now-panicked cadaver dog. Though Bones quickly feinted and dodged the attack, the falling flesh-eater landed on his injured right haunch, causing the shepherd to twist it badly. As Bones scrambled to get to his feet, he found himself boxed in. Two more flesh-eaters came around the back of the line of police vehicles and effectively flanked any escape Bones could make. He had nowhere to run.

Tail between his legs and the fight-or-flight decision now made for him, Bones turned towards the nearest flesh-eaters, flattened his ears to his skull, and began to growl a warning, long, low, and increasing in volume leading up to a savage bark. This did nothing to dissuade the flesh-eaters, and the largest of them lunged for Bones.

BLAM!

Merely inches away from Bones’s neck, the large flesh-eater hit the ground and didn’t move. Bones, unaware of what had driven it into the mud, went for its throat, only to find that it had been shot directly in the forehead. Bones whirled around as the other flesh-eaters moved closer to him, ignoring the fate of the first-mover. Just as quickly, they joined him face down in the muck as the gunfire continued.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Like tin ducks in a carnival shooting gallery, every last one of the flesh-eaters tumbled to the ground, blood splashing out of wounds from a couple of them but noticeably absent from others, particularly those in greater states of decay. Bones had to skirt and dive to avoid all of the falling bodies, but then he found himself alone.

Click
.

Though the odor of fresh corpses was heavy in the air, Bones quickly picked out the scents of living people and turned towards the woods, where he saw a trio of human males emerge carrying hunting rifles: a stout middle-aged man with wisps of brown-gray hair over his ears; a pale, skinny, blond-headed teenager wearing a green John Deere ball cap; and a second, shorter, brown-haired boy with an open, trusting face who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. The middle-aged man raised his rifle and aimed it at Bones, but the teenager shook his head.