Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (30 page)

Paul, sensing her distress, leaned over next to her. “What is it?”

“The birds are in this park. This is where they sleep.”

Paul froze. Zamarin moved over, having heard this, and took Paul’s arm. “It’s dark. Let’s keep going. We’ll stay quiet.”

Paul nodded but then leaned down next to Bones.

“You’re going to need to be quiet,” he whispered, gently holding Bones’s jaws shut. “Absolutely silent. Do you understand?”

Paul removed his hand and Bones licked his chops but didn’t bark. Sharon took Paul’s arm and the group slowly made their exit. The park wasn’t particularly sizable, but given how few structures were standing as well as how few trees, it might have been the one place in the entire city that a flock that large could bunk down together. The irony that it just happened to then be precisely in the path of the survivors was not lost on them.

Bones did his part by not making a sound. He could tell that the humans were being stealthy and he copied this, keeping low to the ground and quiet. He hadn’t smelled the birds as his nose was still awash in the stench of the burning rats, obscuring all else. But after poking his nose into the ground under the trees, he could at least inhale the smell of the nitrogen and phosphorus of their shit.

Stepping lively, the group made it out of the park in under a minute and were soon on their way again. Sharon looked ahead and realized that she could see the ocean. Well, not precisely the water, per se, but where it was meant to be on the horizon with no more obstructions.

“We’re only about eight blocks to the beach,” Sharon said. “We’re as home free as we’re going to be, I think.”

“You want to jinx us?” Zamarin snarled. “Watch. We’ll get to the pier and the boat will be covered in birds.”

Paul chortled at this. “Well, let’s get there first. How much longer until the sun comes up?”

“Fifteen minutes?” Zamarin suggested.

T
hey made it in ten.

The boat, a converted cabin cruiser that wouldn’t attract much attention if discovered, was anchored just offshore in a marina surrounded by a number of sailboats. It had been painted white, but if someone knew what an LRAD looked like, they might be able to identify the large version mounted to the front deck. Originally designed to be attached to the top of a truck, the mounting had been modified to fit on the boat and painted the same color before being shoved in the bag of a transport plane and brought to the American West Coast with the Israeli commando team.

Zamarin climbed into a skiff and made the quick journey out to the boat, powered it up and then drove it to the pier, where Sharon helped Paul get aboard. Bones stood on the dock looking uncertain, but then Sharon turned to Paul.

“We’re taking Bones, right? No more you’re going to shoot him?”

Paul shrugged as if he didn’t care. Sharon reached out to the shepherd. He hopped on board. Within seconds, Zamarin had the boat turned around and was leaving the shore.

Sharon stared back at Los Angeles as the sun began to rise over the hills. There was a part of her that felt this was not what was meant to be and that her lot was cast with the City of Angels. But here she was leaving, Emily still buried in the rubble some miles away. She was leaving with unfinished business.

That’s when she felt Bones’s head moving under her hand, the shepherd nuzzling up next to her. She kneeled alongside him, stroking his ears, then glanced back to Paul to see that he had already fallen asleep on one of the benches. She looked over at Zamarin, who grinned.

“Yeah, passed right out. Hopefully that’ll be us soon.”

“I’m running on adrenaline myself,” Sharon said. “When I crash, it’ll be for hours and hours and hours.”

“Sounds good to me. Except, the moment we’re in safe waters, I guarantee the U.S. military is going to swoop in and demand to debrief us.”

“Let them try.”

Zamarin snorted and turned back to the wheel as Sharon looked back over at the city. She saw the birds coming, the entire flock from the day before, and chuckled. Her brain told herself that it was an optical illusion, that it was smoke, that it wasn’t aimed anywhere near their direction, but she knew all of this to be untrue. She wasn’t in a nightmare, like her subconscious was also trying to convince her of. No, she had thought she was going to escape, and here came the engines of her destruction.

She turned away and sat down, staring in the direction of the ocean. She watched as the waves approached the boat, and then glanced to her right and saw the white water of the boat’s wake churning through the green of the Pacific.

She vaguely heard it when Zamarin shouted in alarm when he, too, saw the birds, and Paul rocketed awake. Bones began dancing around the deck as the birds moved closer and closer, but Sharon didn’t care to look.

Instead, she sat as if meditating on her life. She closed her eyes but continued picturing what had been directly in front of them moments before: the never-ending expanse of ocean. She remembered seeing footage of a group of Mahayana Buddhist monks burning themselves alive in protest of the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government in the early sixties. She imagined the supreme concentration and focus that act must have taken. She remembered seeing one of the burning monks topple over and out of his lotus position, only to quickly right himself in the flames. Their composure had been unbelievable. She was determined to follow their example and as her body was torn apart, she wouldn’t flinch and she wouldn’t flail. She would embrace the experience and disregard the pain.

Her eyes were closed when Paul ordered Zamarin to wheel the boat around and face the birds head on. The sound of the boat engine practically blotted this out, but she felt the boat come around and realized what Paul had said. She heard an electric whine as the LRAD on top of the boat was charged and magazines were inserted into submachine guns.

She heard Zamarin coaching Paul on where to aim, his voice filled with naked terror as the birds neared. She could hear them now, clucking and crying as they flew, though they didn’t sound like birds. Their “voices” were strained. They struck Sharon as sick.

“Come on, goddammit!” Zamarin was shouting. “Motherfuckers!”

“Sharon!” Paul cried. “Help us out!”

But Sharon didn’t move. Bones tripped over her feet as he continued his circuits of the deck but righted himself. He barked and barked in answer to the cries of the gulls.

The sound of the birds got close enough that they couldn’t have been more than a couple dozen feet away. That’s when all the sound was sucked out of Sharon’s ears and replaced with an impossibly high-pitched whine. She felt it in her head but also her throat, stomach, and bowel. Unlike the hand-held disruptor, this was something else entirely. Sharon found herself vomiting across the deck.

The birds screamed and she heard what sounded like hail as the animals smacked into the ocean and the boat, several dead.

This broke her trance. She turned around to see what was assuredly a bizarre sight. As the LRAD continued to sound, birds tumbled dead out of the sky. Carried by inertia, they spun out of control and splashed down into the waves. The effect in the sky was similar to the earlier parting of the rat sea, only this was mass death on a different scale. Dots of black and white were suspended against the hazy white and blue of the morning sky but as they hit a certain spot in the sky, the radius of effect for the disruptor, they tumbled down like lemmings over a cliff straight into the water.

Hundreds upon hundreds of birds soon lay dead.

But then, the LRAD shut off and Zamarin shouted to Paul. “All right. Steady…three…two…one…”

As the disruptor recharged, Sharon watched as Paul and Sergeant Zamarin blazed away into the sky. She was shocked at how well Paul did, given his blindness. She supposed he’d been able to lock in at least a little bit on the sound. He and Zamarin fired out a magazine, tossed it out, and reloaded in quick succession, sending several more birds to a watery grave.

When Zamarin activated the LRAD again, Sharon realizing that the ringing hadn’t left her ears in the first place so when it began anew it had little effect on her.

Then she saw something that amazed her. The flock, sensing the device’s range in some way, shot out to the west, angled upward, and flanked the boat.

“SHIT!” Zamarin cried as he spun the wheel so quickly that Sharon and Bones were both knocked off their feet.

But the birds were too fast. They came around the craft at a perpendicular angle and swooped in. They cut the distance in seconds. Though Zamarin turned and got a couple of shots off, the birds quickly reached the boat and tore directly into his face.

“Sharon, jump!” cried Paul.

Without thinking, Sharon did just this, abandoning ship without a second thought. She hit the water and turned to get her bearings, only to have the boat, which was still turning, smash her in the face. She was knocked unconscious and immediately began sinking beneath the waves into the depths of the dark, cold ocean.

•  •  •

Sharon woke up with the midday sun bathing her in warmth. Her clothes were almost dry, but her hair was still damp. She was lying on a beach, her face cupped in a shallow divot of sand. After a moment, she pulled her legs up, brought herself up on all fours, and then threw up. She had so little in her stomach that it was nothing but acid and bile and tore at her throat as it came up.

She leaned back on her feet for a moment and then sat up, staring out towards a row of ruined beachfront houses. As she looked up towards Ocean Avenue, her low angle afforded her a view straight to the bluffs of Temescal and Rustic Canyon. She couldn’t see any of the ruined houses on the cliff side or the hotels and apartment buildings down below.

The coastline as it was and now would probably be again.

Sharon slowly got to her feet, took a step, and kicked something. She saw that it was a dead seagull, its stomach having ruptured, its feathers waterlogged. Glancing around, she saw that the entire beach was covered in dead birds, literally thousands of them washed up on the shore. She looked back down at the one at her feet and saw that there was a pair of dark red streaks burnished into its beak just below the nostrils.

She stood there idly for a moment, but then realized that one of the corpses on the beach about fifty yards to her right was human.

“Oh, God, no…”

She walked over to it but found that her legs were borderline unresponsive. They were stiff as if they were asleep. The lactic acid churned inside her muscles as she walked. When she finally reached Paul’s body, she could tell that he was long gone. She leaned down next to him and saw that he was already being feasted upon by an army of sand flies and rove beetles. She looked at his bandaged face, bloated from being in the water but could also see that he had burns on his arms and torso. She imagined there must have been some kind of fire on the boat.

She couldn’t remember a thing. She had hit the water and then…nothing.

As she regarded Paul, a sand crab emerged out from under the bandage wrapped around his empty eye sockets and she almost vomited. She had a vague notion that she wanted to bury him but didn’t think she had the strength to pull him all the way up the beach and onto dry land where there’d be soil instead of sand.

But then she decided that that was exactly what she was going to do. What else? This man risked his life for her without a thought. She could at least do for him what she couldn’t do for…

Her train of thought froze as she looked up to a bicycle path running parallel to the ocean up by the PCH. She saw a certain German shepherd sitting there watching her, its tongue out and panting in the heat, giving him, like all shepherds, the appearance of a grin.

“Bones.”

She marched across the sand directly to the dog and immediately dropped to her knees and put her arms around him when she reached the path. The dog whined a little and tried to break free, but Sharon held him tight. His fur was still damp and she knew that he must have dragged her to shore.

“You saved my life. Thank you.”

Bones finally broke away from the human’s embrace and looked up at her for a moment. She stared back into Bones’s deep black eyes and smiled.

“We’re going to be good friends, you and me.”

•  •  •

As she thought it would, the burial of Paul, whose last name she didn’t know, took hours. His kit and uniform had been too heavy, so she’d eventually stripped him almost naked on the beach and tossed his clothes and weapons aside. In doing so, she kept thinking she’d find that one identifying card or letter or picture, but Paul was a professional and must have judiciously left all such things behind. Angry at having their meal taken away, the sand flies bit at Sharon’s arms and legs, but she eventually was able to drag him as far as the bicycle path. That was when she saw the ruins of a bicycle rental store nearby with rows of perfectly intact bikes and carts and buggies alongside the shattered building. It turned out that the bicycles were all chained together, but with a little doing she was able to wrench one of the trailers meant to carry children off the rear of one of the bikes and roll it back to Paul’s corpse. It wasn’t much easier to go up the hill with Paul on the trailer as opposed to simply dragging him, but she knew she wouldn’t have been able to get him even halfway up the steep incline without the wheels.

It took her a good couple of hours to find the right place to bury him, finally deciding on a spot at the end of what had once been San Vicente Boulevard overlooking the ocean. She had nothing to dig with until she found a bent “No Parking” sign and used it to at least start a hole. Once it was about a foot deep and roughly the size of a man’s body, she found herself using her hands more than the sign.

It was late afternoon before the grave was as complete as it was going to be, Sharon’s hands raw and bloody from clawing the earth out of the ground. About two feet short of the requisite six, Sharon had continued digging more out of a sense of fear than duty. She had no idea what she’d do once Paul was buried.