Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (34 page)

After Denny told his story, he learned that Lester had been a real estate appraiser in his former life, was divorced, no kids. Carrie had been a housewife with a three-year-old son and a husband who had been her high school sweetheart. Anna had, at one point, been a city planner with four children, all of whom she had buried forty-eight hours before alongside her husband, an auto mechanic who owned his own shop. She described the business and insisted Denny must’ve at least seen it if he wasn’t a patron.

“Huge place, big sign that read Big Mike’s, over on Humphreys,” she explained. “Started on one lot but then just bought out the three adjacent and kept right on expanding. American cars, Japanese, even had an old Romanian fellow who could fix European cars, Andreas.”

Denny went along with her illusion and agreed that he’d seen it a number of times.

“On Humphreys, right?” he said, earning a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile from Carrie.

“He was a good man, a good father and our kids were the best,” Anna explained passionately, though Denny thought it sounded rehearsed to maximize sympathy. “I barely got to say good-bye.”

Denny looked over at Carrie and could tell her mind had traveled to her own losses, but he didn’t say anything.

“The good news is, if we’re alive, then there are others alive,” Lester summed up. “Others are probably gathering in their respective cities. We’ll hear about it. Right now, I figure it’s our job to get everyone in the Flagstaff area together. We have to be smart about boiling water and using the generators only for essentials. For now, we also have plenty of food and if we’re smart, we should be okay in that department. What I would ask, if you want to put in with us, is that you bring any supplies you’ve stockpiled to be shared.”

Denny nodded but said nothing about the gasoline he’d taken back to his apartment. A part of him, the part that had preferred the school library to the classroom as a youngster, wanted to keep something in reserve just in case things got bad and he came to the conclusion that he’d have a better shot back on his own.

I
n Las Vegas, two hundred and fifty miles to the northwest, two men and one woman who had discovered each other alive the day after everyone else in the city died, were racing through the fourteenth floor of the west tower of the Venetian Hotel and Casino.

“Shit, where are they coming from?!”

“I don’t know! I thought they were all upstairs. We have to get to one of the other rooms!”

The noise echoing in from the stairwells grew louder and louder as a strong feeling of dread set in, accelerating their heart rates even more than the running. As a dull throb began pulsing behind the eyes of the woman, Judy, she realized that so soon after narrowly evading death she was now going to die, horribly, and there would be no escape this time.

•  •  •

Unlike their counterparts in Flagstaff, the trio of Las Vegas survivors had reacted to their survival of the plague by indulging in the kind of Bacchanal the city was known for, though it would still be considered extreme in anyone’s book. The men, Greg Stokes and Damon Mebane, friends since their kindergarten days in San Jose, had been in Vegas together with four others (all dead) when the plague came. They had gotten caught in the gluts at the airport and car renters and were unable to get home. Greg was in finance and advised several wealthy clients, while Damon was always bouncing from this start-up to that, given that he knew a variety of software suites but didn’t have the business savvy to self-promote himself into any kind of career permanence. Greg was the good-looking one and Damon the one who looked like he spent most of his day hunched over a computer lit by fluorescents.

Judy Albert lived in Las Vegas, was originally from Florida, and worked at a gift shop. She didn’t have the kind of looks that drew glances from even the drunkest of her shop’s patrons, but after she ran into Greg and Damon, she found herself being competed for by two men ten years her junior, and a tension emerged almost immediately, a tension made worse when Judy selected Greg to sleep with a few nights later. Any hurt feelings that erupted were just as quickly erased, as the primary activities of the trio involved getting drunk, getting high, and treating the Las Vegas strip as their personal playground.

That was, of course, until the dogs showed up.

Damon had spotted a group of them wandering the Strip one day when he went to retrieve more water bottles from downstairs at the Venetian where they’d been staying. They’d seen plenty of birds around, including the various exotics that had escaped the enclosure behind the Flamingo; had visited the Mirage, where they saw that the lion keepers had had the decency to euthanize the famed white lions there when it looked like no one would feed them anymore and even gone to check out the aquarium at Mandalay Bay to see if the keepers there had done similarly (they had not).

“If they didn’t, I’ll bet it’s a feeding frenzy, sharks against all the other fish and then shark versus shark,” Greg said, soon to be disappointed when they arrived and found that the lack of electricity meant the water temperature had dropped severely, killing all inside.

But now, here were dogs.

Damon thought at first they were coyotes or even wolves as they were so large, but then realized they were domesticated pets of a variety of breeds probably from the vast suburbs that had sprung up around the city in recent years.

“Hey, pooch, you hungry?” he called out, though the dogs hardly looked starved.

But rather than regard him with any kind of friendly recognition, dog to human, the animals immediately halted, their ears standing straight up in alarm. This reaction was puzzling to Damon, as if they’d never seen a person before, but he pressed on.

“Hey, we’ve got food,” Damon continued. “It’s okay. We’re not gonna eat you.”

He bent down on one knee in a sort of supplication, extending his hands to call over the dogs and they sprang away as if he was a predator. That is, except for one of them, a light brown Rhodesian ridgeback that kept its gaze glued on Damon. It didn’t growl, it didn’t bare its teeth, it simply regarded Damon appraisingly for a moment and then trotted away.

The next time Damon saw this dog, it would be trying to kill him.

•  •  •

In the days following the first encounter, more dogs started coming around the Venetian and, Damon having related his experience to the others, the three agreed that they were just taking Damon up on his offer and were scavenging around for handouts. From their windows, they’d see them scurrying around on the sidewalks below. When they’d go down to the casino floor to retrieve supplies or wander to another hotel, they might catch the sight of a tail, encounter a pile of shit in a corner (or, far more common, the stench of urine sprayed on a slot machine or gaming table), or spy a couple racing across the street as the sun went down. They tried to make friends and left food out for them, but it was never touched. With so much else going on, however, Judy, Greg, and Damon paid the dogs little mind.

It was only one afternoon when they’d come in out of the pool, the only of the Venetian’s amenities that they made even passing attempts at keeping up, and were about to make the long slog up the stairs to the penthouse when they discovered that though they might have been paying little attention to the dogs, the animals were paying plenty to them. Every encounter having been a test, every venture into the casino a scoping of geography as sure as when wolves became aware of a herd of deer in a certain patch of forest and were moving in to pick the area clean.

The dogs were hunting them.

Judy saw them first: a pair of dogs approaching from the cashiers’ cage but without the skulking deference they typically showed the humans when they’d been stumbled upon.

“Oh, shit,” Judy exclaimed, at first more amused than scared. “Dogs.”

As soon as she pointed, she caught a flash of movement behind them and then saw a dog standing on a table watching them from a little ways away. She glanced back and saw that a couple more animals were trotting around behind them, closing a circle.

“Guys…?”

Greg turned and was just becoming aware of the warning in Judy’s voice when he saw one of the dogs approaching from the cage spring at Judy. Without thinking, he lunged forward and pushed Judy towards the open stairwell door only to catch the brunt of the dog’s attack as it sank its jaws into his arm.

“Fuck!” Greg shouted, trying to bat the thing away. “Damon, give me a hand!”

Damon was already moving to do just that when he saw that the dogs that had moved behind them were readying their attack. “Judy! Run!”

Judy didn’t have to be told twice and disappeared into the stairwell as Damon rushed to Greg’s side, flailing violently at the dog biting into his friend’s arm as a second one leaped forward and bit his foot.

Greg screamed and violently rolled to his side, which shook the second dog off as Damon kicked the first one in the side, sending it sprawling. Unfortunately, this forced Damon to turn his back on the other dogs which was when he caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye that the ridgeback he had first seen out on the street was immediately to his left and was about to spring at him. He screamed and turned, but it was too late, as the dog was already in flight. But that’s when he saw a brass pole swing around and smash into the ridgeback’s side, batting it away. Damon looked and saw the bikini-clad Judy standing over him, thinking he’d never seen a sexier sight in his life.

“Come on!” she yelled. The two men clambered to their feet and followed her into the stairwell.

As soon as they were inside, she slammed the door behind them just as several of the dogs hit the door at once, snarling and attempting to claw their way through.

“The door will hold,” Greg said with confidence and they all hastened up the steps.

When they reached the penthouse, the most glaring problem was that they didn’t have that much food stockpiled. The long trek up the stairs may as well have been Annapurna to the oft-drunk survivors, so it was an unenviable task to be sent for food. When it was Damon’s turn, for instance, he would go down to the casino floor, tool around for awhile, and then eventually raid one of the numerous gift shops or bars for booze, chips, jerky, nuts, or candy before wandering by the kitchen to see how much canned food he could fit in the couple of gym bags and wheeled suitcases he would then have to drag up the stairs, since the electricity and hence the elevators were long dead. He had never been angrier than when he caught Judy and Greg throwing cans out the penthouse window to see what they would look like when they exploded on the concrete below, given how much energy he had expended getting them up there.

It was bad enough to know that every time he went down, the other members of his survival party were using his absence as an excuse for a fuck.

The dog attack had come at a time when they were running particularly low on food. Greg had, in fact, planned to go down with Damon to retrieve supplies that afternoon to relieve him of some of the burden and make up for the four or five days that there hadn’t been a run. They’d never simply dragged everything up, as it had been thought that they would get bored with the penthouses in the Venetian after awhile and they’d move on to another hotel, but in the end, the Venetian was where their drugs were stockpiled so they stayed put.

“Were those fuckers rabid?” Greg asked as he used one of the first-aid kits they’d brought up in their first, less drug-fueled days to bandage his wounds.

“I don’t think so,” Judy said. “They weren’t foaming at the mouth.”

“Then what the fuck was that about?”

“They were hungry,” Damon suggested. “We were lunch.”

“Those weren’t fucking
wolves
, man, they were dogs—
pets
,” Greg countered, reaching for an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels. He slipped a fingernail under the black plastic seal and stripped it off in one move before taking a long drink.

“Didn’t you just take a handful of pain pills?” Judy admonished, eyeing the bottle.

Greg was about to lash out at her but then realized she was right and put it aside. “Fine. But what do we do?”

“We could go down and try and kill them,” Damon suggested. “We have a few guns.”

Which they did, liberated from dead security and police officers. The only problem was that they hadn’t figured out how to undo the trigger locks on all but two of them. These lucky two, naturally, were out of bullets as one particularly drug-fueled night led them to firing them into the city from the roof.

“They’re moving pretty fast and we’re pretty fucked up,” Greg retorted. “Next idea?”

“We could just wait them out,” said Judy. “They’ll probably move on once they realize we’re not coming back down.”

“How long do we wait?”

“As long as we have to. I know it’s not much, but we never raided the honor bars of the last penthouse suite down the hall. With what we have in here combined with that, we should last for a while. Maybe even a couple of weeks if we’re smart about it.”

This seemed the best idea so they agreed to it.

•  •  •

Twelve hours later, Greg was half-asleep, half-unconscious on the sofa, having given up on Judy’s advice and drained the entire bottle of Jack. Damon and Judy had both slept a little themselves, but when Judy woke up, she realized that they still hadn’t made good on their plans to grab food from the other room and woke Damon. As they walked through the pitch-black hallway to the other penthouse, Judy realized that the idea she’d been toying with, that she needed to have sex with Damon, would happen right now. She didn’t like the way Greg treated him but also thought it would be good to have him in her pocket now in case things got bad.

“Come here,” she said to him as they walked into the room, already unlocked, since they’d broken in to make sure there were no bodies in it the day they took over the floor. Damon knew exactly what she was after and, three minutes later, Judy began to regret her decision, as it turned out that he couldn’t fuck half as well as Greg and was actually a quite terrible lover.