Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (31 page)

Throughout all of this, Bones kept her company but aided neither in the transport or burial of Captain Paul Harazi, born in Ashgelon, died at the age of thirty-six leaving behind an ex-wife and three children. But Sharon couldn’t have made the trek without the shepherd. After she’d noticed that no birds were coming to kill her, she kept an eye on the sky regardless, but none came. She didn’t know if the rats would come with night fall, but something told her all of this was over.

When night did come, she realized that neither she nor Bones had eaten yet so they tromped up San Vincente in search of food. When they reached their first convenience store, she was afraid that there’d be nothing left. It was sure to have been ransacked by previous scavenging survivors. But then she found that virtually nothing had been touched. Bones had quickly discovered the dead clerk in the stock room, likely having been refilling the trays of Marlboro and Camel Lights as the quake hit, but there were corners of the store that looked pristinely unaffected.

Avoiding all refrigerated goods, Sharon filled bags with bread, Spam, chocolate, trail mix, water, breakfast cereal and anything else she thought they could use, loaded it onto the Day-Glo red and yellow trailer, and moved on.

They bunked in for the night in a park across the highway from the vast Los Angeles National Cemetery, where thousands of the war dead from the Pacific Campaign of World War II had been buried, and waited for the rats. They never came. By midnight, Sharon had even managed to fall asleep, her head resting against Bones’s stomach as a pillow.

When morning came, Sharon felt a real sense of exhilaration. She had survived the quakes, she had survived the rats, she had survived the birds, and she had survived the ocean. There was nothing she could not surmount.

Ever since she had buried Paul, she knew what direction she intended to go with Bones. It only took half a day to travel from the cemetery back to the Wilshire Corridor, where the pair turned south and moved down what had once been Westwood Boulevard. Throughout the previous day and now this morning, there hadn’t been so much as a flyover. Sharon began having visions of the earthquake “spreading,” devastating the entire country until the only living things were herself and her dog. She found this a ridiculous thought but enjoyed it nevertheless.

But then they reached her old apartment complex, the ironically named Shamrock Village. It was a mountain of broken concrete and splintered drywall, with broken pipes and pieces of furniture jutting up at odd angles from within the rubble. Her apartment had been in the northeast corner on the third floor, but as the building had been so hopelessly crushed, she thought Emily could be anywhere in there.

“Bones? Ready to go to work?”

•  •  •

Both the birds and the rats had begun dying off the morning that Sharon, Paul, Bones and Sergeant Zamarin were on the water. By noon, they were all gone and began to rot along with the rest of the Los Angeles dead in the hot sun.

The U.S. government did not know what to do about Los Angeles, an understatement of ridiculous proportions, but the American people didn’t have anywhere near the sentimental attachment to the place as they had to post-Katrina New Orleans. The same magazines, ie.
National Geographic
,
Time
, that had listed all the reasons to rebuild New Orleans now ran similar cover stories explaining why it was pointless to rebuild L.A. Scientists and the military had moved in to explore the area and remove any last survivors, as well as to investigate the reports of massive tribes of killer rats and birds but came away with very little in either department.

Everything in the Los Angeles basin was dead, it was determined. Any survivors living in the broken city had likely been so traumatized by the events that they were hiding out and refusing extraction and probably wouldn’t survive more than a few months.

There had been a push by the military to bomb Los Angeles or use it as a testing facility, but that was where public opinion had stepped in. So many had died there that leaving it intact was memorial enough for now. Also, scientists from around the world were extraordinarily curious to analyze what would happen next in the city as nature reclaimed the land. A real memorial was constructed outside the Presidio in Golden Gate Park a few hundred miles to the north in San Francisco. When the president and state governor dedicated it, more than a million people were in attendance.

When asked why San Francisco took this tragedy so to heart, the answer was simple: “It could’ve been us.”

And that was the fear for much of the rest of the spring, into the summer, and into the fall—that another massive earthquake would strike somewhere, causing a similar disaster. But the truth was, the double-quake of Alpha and Omega had actually brought to temporary rest the more major incidents of seismic activity around the Pacific Plate. A correction had been made and now the planet could live on in the peace for the time being.

But for Los Angeles, this was cold comfort. Almost immediately following the earthquakes, the city had begun to decay. The few remaining buildings began to fall and the last trees died off. When the spring rains came, new plant life began to push out through the acres of concrete to start the long process of wiping the place off the map forever.

•  •  •

It had taken a month, exactly thirty days, for Sharon to uncover Emily’s remains. Like one person working a quarry, Sharon had taken apart the broken site brick by brick over several days until it resembled an archaeological dig. After the first couple of days proved difficult to even begin, Sharon had gone on a hunt for a hardware store and when she finally found one, had retrieved picks and shovels galore knowing that many would break when working against concrete rather than dirt.

On the eighth day, she had seen a helicopter but had ignored it. When one returned and called to her through a bullhorn, she ignored that, too. Then one landed up on Wilshire. A detachment of soldiers came to talk to her. She explained her situation, showed them her food and her dog, and asked them to leave her alone, as they were now standing in her home. The soldiers understood the desire not to leave someone behind and, to their credit, did not report the day’s incident.

There had been a couple of false positives during the dig where Sharon had uncovered a desiccated corpse, only to have it turn out not to be Emily. She buried those, too. But on the thirtieth day, she had had a feeling that her hunt was over, given the number of personal items from her old apartment she was discovering, coupled with Bones’s insistence that a corpse lay under the next chunks of flooring.

And then there she was, identifiable only from her tattered hair and tattered pink pajamas. Sharon wept for almost an hour as she slowly pulled Emily’s remains from the shattered apartment and laid them out on a blue blanket that she had retrieved expressly for this purpose. She had made a meal for herself and Bones and then sat with the wrapped body for the rest of the day, praying to no one in particular but really trying to send her thoughts out to Emily in the great beyond. She had done what she’d set out to do, but it gave her no pleasure. Instead, it extinguished any figment of Sharon’s imagination that suggested Emily might have been injured but not killed, had survived, was in a hospital somewhere. Was already recovering. Was waiting for her. Missed her. Still loved her.

All of that went away with the discovery of the corpse lying a couple of feet from Sharon by the campfire.

Across the thirty days, the only animals that had bothered Sharon and Bones were coyotes, which Bones scared off, and a few rats that had begun to re-emerge. Unlike the massive, rabid tribes, however, these rats scurried away when so much as a brick was tossed their way and the shepherd made quick work of those that didn’t. Sharon worried, though, that having an unburied corpse with them overnight (she’d buried the other corpses nearby within hours of their discovery) would bring the animals out in force, but then she realized there was hardly anything on Emily’s bones worth feasting on.

The thirty-first day came. Sharon loaded Emily’s body onto the trailer for the hike back to the ocean. She fed Bones, drank some rain water, and started walking back to the spot where she buried Paul. She had long decided this would be where she would bury Emily as well.

Bones walked alongside her as they left Westwood, the shepherd picking up on Sharon’s somber mood. With a complete absence of other humans, Bones had taken to Sharon and accepted her as his new partner and handler of sorts. Her moods affected his mood just as much as her determination and drive had egged him on over the last month as they attempted to excavate the corpse.

But when they reached the end of San Vicente Boulevard where they’d so recently buried the Israeli commando team leader, Bones found Sharon in such a state of distress that he didn’t know what to do. He tried to nuzzle her hand, but she pushed him away. He stayed close to her as she began to dig a new hole, but every time he stepped into the hole himself, he got shooed away.

“C’mon, Bones,” came Sharon’s quiet voice, the most she seemed able to manage.

Finally, Bones lay down on the ground, put his snout on his forepaws, and simply watched as Sharon dug Emily’s grave. She had a pick and shovel this time, so it went much faster than when burying Captain Harazi.

When the hole was finally almost too deep for Sharon to climb out of, she finally stopped digging and moved the blue blanket next to the mouth. She lowered herself back into the grave and then brought Emily’s body down with her. But she knew how much Emily weighed, how she felt in her arms. This wasn’t Emily. That person was long, long gone. Sharon momentarily wondered why she had gone to so much trouble for something that wasn’t much more than a token reminder.

She laid Emily at the bottom of the grave, considered staying down there with her for a few more minutes but then climbed out and began covering the body.

Sharon had plans for what she was going to do next. She and Bones would follow the broken 405 to the Valley, where the soldiers had told her, if she ever changed her mind, a sprawling command post had been set up. There she’d contact her parents, fight tooth and nail to keep the shepherd with her, and then head east, maybe to New York, maybe to the Carolinas, which she had decided sounded nice.

But as she stood her looking at Emily’s grave, the tears came all over again. She realized that she couldn’t leave her lover all alone here. Just because her body was buried didn’t mean that it wasn’t just another faceless victim of the quake.

There’d been a part of her that had considered this and had kept a rope with the materials. She looked to a nearby tree and eyed what she thought might be the strongest branch.

Bones watched as Sharon retrieved the rope and tied a makeshift noose at the end, little more than a loop set with a strong knot. She climbed the tree easily enough, secured the free end around the branch ,and placed the noose around her neck.

Time froze for a moment as she felt the rough twine around her neck. She remembered the last time she was at death’s door out on the boat when the birds attacked for the last time, and she wondered why she couldn’t be as Zen about this moment as she had been at that one.

That’s when she realized that this was unnatural. This wasn’t what humans did. She’d survived all that she’d survived for what, to kill herself? Hey, last one to die in L.A., don’t forget to turn off the lights!

She looked down at Emily’s grave and forced herself to remember who she was without her. She was an individual and would continue to be even now. She would endure.

Bones had watched Sharon climb into the tree and was now watching as she scooted back as if to come down. She was working apart the knot when she slipped off the branch and fell.

“Oh, God!” she cried as she fell, managing to grab the noose with one hand and the rope with the other. When the rope went taut, she had just managed to arrest enough of the force that it didn’t snap her neck. Instead, she found herself hanging in mid-air, desperately trying to pull herself back up to the branch. “Bones!”

Sensing Sharon’s distress, Bones hurried over to the tree but found himself a good three feet or so below the dangling woman.

“Please, Bones,” Sharon whispered, barely able to breathe. “Help me, find help. Jesus, c’mon…”

Misunderstanding, Bones leaped up and grabbed Sharon’s foot, giving her a tug. Sharon yanked her foot away but the force caused her to swing away making it harder and harder to keep from strangling.

“No, Bones! No! No more!”

Bones understood this and stayed on the ground, looking up at Sharon as she steadied herself, coming to a rest after a few seconds. She took a deep breath and began trying to undo the knot, this time doing her best to keep her cool and work methodically.

As she did so, she looked down and saw the shepherd watching her, eyes full of curiosity. He didn’t seem to understand what was going on but knew she was in trouble and was standing by to help in any circumstance.

“Don’t worry, Bones,” she said. “I’ll be down in a second. I got myself into this. I can get myself out.”

•  •  •

It took two and a half hours for Sharon to die.

It was in increments, one arm weakening and then the next, the strangling being so slow that, if asked, Sharon would have likely reported that she was feeling sleepy when in reality the oxygen was being gently choked off from her brain. With the fingers of one hand keeping the rope from touching skin, Sharon felt safe, not realizing that the noose was pressing her own hand into her windpipe with enough force that it would soon kill her.

During the entire struggle, Bones had not left Sharon’s side. She found herself staring into his eyes more and more as she fought against the rope.

“Shepherd,” she had said, thinking about for how many people this dog had been the last living thing they’d ever seen. In her already deoxygenated state, she wondered about this as the true origin of the breed.
Shepherd.
She recalled the twenty-third Psalm, “the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s ake.”