Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (35 page)

“Come on, just go a little easier,” she said, a gentle request, getting firmer by the minute.

“Sure, sure,” Damon said but changed nothing about his Yeti-humping-a-cedar-tree approach. “Is that what you tell Greg?”

Great, this is a hate-fuck
, Judy realized and hoped he’d finish soon.

She was trying to think of something to reply when she suddenly heard something in the hall. Terrified that it was Greg, she pushed away from Damon and the wet bar he had bent her over, and grabbed her clothes.

“What the hell?” cried Damon, his erection shriveling.

“
Shhh…
,” she whispered.

But that’s when she saw the first dog sniffing its way into the dark penthouse. It bobbed its head twice, spotted Damon and Judy, and immediately it curled its lips back into a growl. Illuminated only by the stars outside the window, Judy could plainly see its bright white teeth cast in a dull blue.

“Oh, shit,” Judy said.

Back in his room, Greg woke up when he heard screaming from down the hall and clambered out of bed. He went to the door and swung it wide, only to see that he had surprised a pack of about a dozen dogs creeping towards the far penthouse. They registered his presence immediately and as two lunged back for him, he slammed the door shut.

“Holy fuck,” he whispered to himself.

“GREG!” screamed Judy from the other penthouse. “GREG! Wake up! They got through the door!”

“Where are you?!” Greg shouted back.

“In the last penthouse! Damon and I were getting supplies! The dogs are trying to get into the bathroom!”

Greg looked around the dimly lit room for Damon and knew, with a roll of his eyes, what the dogs likely interrupted.

Hearing smashing sounds coming from the far room, Greg considered abandoning them and striking out on his own. But then he heard dogs scratching on his own door and realized this might be easier with some ballast he could cast off in an escape. He wandered over to the bar where they kept the guns in an empty refrigerator. There was one pistol that he thought he might be able to crack the trigger guard off in a pinch by utilizing a wine opener. He fumbled around for the right gun and then set it up on the counter, positioning the tip of the corkscrew between the two plates on either side of the trigger. Raising his hand, he smashed it downward to break off the panels and succeeded, but then the corkscrew slid under the trigger guard and sent its point into the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“
Shiiittt!!
” he screamed as blood gushed out of his hand.

Fuming, he grabbed a towel, stiffened with his blood from the first dog attack of the day and angrily wrapped it around his fist.

Fucking Damon and fucking Judy
, he thought.
I should be high
.

He went to the door, took a deep breath, clicked down the safety on the gun and wondered, for a moment, if he should fire off a test shot to make sure it was okay before figuring that would just mean one less bullet for the dogs. Closing his eyes, he swung open the door, popped his eyes back open so that all he’d really see was movement in that blurry quick second of pupil adjustment and fired the gun at the first dog he saw.

Back in the other penthouse’s bathroom, Judy and Damon heard the shot and knew Greg was on the way. The pawing at the door continued as the shots got nearer but then finally subsided after about the seventh or eighth bullet as the dogs retreated.

“Greg?!” Judy cried.

No answer.

“Oh, shit,” Damon whispered.

“GREG?!?” Judy yelled out again but then heard something padding towards the bathroom door. She raised the toilet’s tank lid to bring down on any dog’s head, but then the door handle rattled. She realized it was Greg.

“You assholes okay in there?”

Judy breathed a sigh of relief and then opened the door to see Greg standing there in his boxer shorts holding a gun.

“I don’t mind if you fuck,” Greg said. “Just don’t be bitches about it and try to hide.”

Judy looked down, feeling bad about her decision. Damon attempted a look of defiance, but it seemed pretty silly as he stood there flaccid and naked opposite a man with a pistol.

“Come on. We should get back to the room and try out the other guns,” Greg said. “Guess dogs can get through cheap-ass casino doors, huh?”

•  •  •

The trio made a beeline for the refrigerator back at their home base and spent half an hour trying to break the trigger guards off further guns, with only limited success.

“We should’ve prepared better,” said Damon. “What if we’re the last three people on the planet Earth and we’re about to get fucking killed by dogs?”

“That’s why I suggest you take a few of these, my friend,” Greg said, handing over a pile of pale brown amphetamines. “You don’t want to know what it’ll feel like if these things really do get a hold of us.”

Judy stared at the pills and then realized she wanted some, too. She’d been curbing her drug use the last couple of days but knew that she didn’t want to feel the flesh torn from her bones by animals. Besides, the only reason she’d been holding off was because she figured they might need her womb healthy at some point, but now she thought that was just not going to be in the cards.

“Give me some, too,” she said.

Greg complied.

The dogs returned within the hour. Despite the weight of all of the penthouse’s furniture against the door, the dogs managed to crack through and then wriggle between two sofas to get at the humans. Greg had a plan for this and put it into action, which had the three move from their balcony to the one teasingly close next door. They were a little off-balance as they climbed over one guardrail and onto the next, but Greg had been just sober enough to help the other two.

Once they were in the room, they fled out the door and down the stairs, only to find dogs waiting in the stairwell.

“Holy shit,” Greg exclaimed, incredulous that the animals would leave guards almost as if expecting a flanking maneuver, as they bolted onto the fourteenth floor.

As they ran, Judy could hear the dogs coming from behind them but also ahead of them in the stairwells that ran down the center and far corner of the tower. It wouldn’t be long now.

“I’m sorry, guys,” Judy said, having no idea what else to say.

A few minutes later, Judy sobbed her eyes out from a second locked bathroom as she listened to the dogs tearing through Greg and Damon’s bodies in the next room. The morning sunlight was just starting to come through the windows of the bedroom and she could see the shadow of a dog standing at the bathroom door and lowering its nose to sniff under it. As the dog began pawing at the frame and whining to the others, Judy began to scream hysterically, violently shaking her head as the sound at the door got louder and louder.

I
t took Bones a week to walk into Arizona. He couldn’t have known it, but he was on Interstate 40, which ran from Barstow, California all the way to Wilmington, North Carolina, crossing several mountains ranges and states along the way. Bones had been on the Albuquerque to Oklahoma City section of the road once before when he and Lionel had packed and moved to Pittsburgh after a call for enforcement dogs had gone out a few years before, but he didn’t know that, either.

As he went, Bones was continuing to survive on whatever he found along the way, which often meant whatever he could catch. This was becoming an increasingly unreliable method of getting by, exemplified by a moment when he was stalking a bobcat and gave up his position when his legs buckled and he brushed against a bush. Hearing this, the cat immediately sprinted away, but Bones gave pursuit having chosen his ambush location after first determining the exact spot on the bobcat’s nightly constitutional with the fewest avenues of escape. Quickly, Bones cornered the animal, but the bobcat seemed to realize that its attacker was hardly in tip-top shape and fought back like a lion, bloodying Bones’s face and right front haunch with its claws.

Angered at the situation, Bones managed a second wind and threw his entire weight on top of the bobcat, surprising the smaller animal as it made the shepherd’s soft underbelly a perfect target to inflict even greater damage. It immediately went to try to tear out Bones’s entrails, not realizing that the dog had exposed himself on purpose in order to get a clean shot on the bobcat’s neck. Though the bobcat tore three deep gashes into his ribcage first, Bones’s jaws were soon around the bobcat’s neck. He sank in his teeth and then shook the animal violently, killing it in seconds.

Once the bobcat was dead, Bones collapsed in a heap, bleeding and panting. He licked his wounds for a few minutes but then tore open the flesh of his kill to feast on.

It was a meal well-earned.

•  •  •

It had been just over two months since Denny had joined the Flagstaff survivors, a group that now numbered forty-eight and he was still adjusting to his place in the new and still-growing community. Though Lester had become the de facto leader, Denny was the man people turned to when they had internecine conflicts. With his mild, non-confrontational stance and teacher’s patience, folks found it easy to like Denny. He was often called in to play peacemaker between the harsher Ingram and the leaders of incoming groups, who sometimes found it difficult to learn they would no longer be the unquestioned top dog.

Because the pair spent so much time together, many of the newcomers thought that Carrie and Denny must have known each other from before the catastrophe. The duo always teamed up for work details, and took their meals together in the makeshift mess hall that had been established in one of the hotel’s ballrooms, and when there were forays out into the city for supplies, they inevitably went together. The truth was, whereas many of the other survivors got through their own pain by “talking about it” with others, Carrie and Denny did not and respected the other for discussing almost any topic other than those concerned with loss.

They kept busy, they continued to help each other out, and they quite naturally fell in lust. But just as naturally (for the two of them), hated themselves for being able to so quickly put their spouses behind them and didn’t act on it for weeks, when it all boiled over. In fact, the first time they had sex was on the first day they kissed. They had been on a mission to find a department store that carried cold weather gear, as so few did in summertime in Arizona summertime, but with fall upon them and winter around the corner, everyone knew such items would be at a premium.

The actual event happened soon after they found themselves wandering through a Sears furniture showroom and Carrie made a comment about how difficult she had once found it to pick out a sofa in a store, as the department had been in a sub-basement and she found it impossible to get her husband’s opinion remotely, since her cell phone got no service. As the memory of her late husband began getting the better of her, Denny stepped in and kissed her, an act she gladly reciprocated. They made out for less than a minute before their clothes were half-off and they were having what would inevitably turn out to be guilt-inducing sex on a nearby chaise lounge.

When they finished, they dressed quickly, hoped no one back at the hotel would miss them/make assumptions, and then loaded up the back of one of the many brand-new pick-up trucks they’d “requisitioned” (a word the group now used for everything, almost as a survivor joke—”we’re heading off to requisition water,” “I’ve got a hunting party together to see if we can requisition a couple of cows or a deer,” etc.). They had climbed into the cab to head back to the hotel when they started kissing again.

They had sex a second time then and there in the truck, but it was much faster and furtive, both keeping an eye out the window in case another vehicle pulled up with some of the others out looking for them.

But by the time they got back to the Sheraton, dropped off the clothes to the hotel’s one-time laundry room that was set up as a community “wardrobe,” and checked in with Ingram, who was working with two newcomers to repair the pumps that were pulling water into the now six working stalls of the basement locker room showers, it was all they could do to keep their hands off each other. Once the truck keys were turned in, they headed straight upstairs to Denny’s room, made sure no one saw them as they went in, and had noiseless, but richly passionate sex for most of the afternoon. It wasn’t the best sex either had ever had, but it was probably a moment where they both needed it the most. But far from being about personal pleasure, it was much more about trying to feel needed by the other person.

“That was just about perfect,” Carrie said after. “If I’d known how good it would be, I would’ve tried to get you in the sack earlier.”

Denny grinned, but both knew this wasn’t true.

“Think it’ll be weird downstairs?” Denny asked. “I’m not saying people will know, but we sure will.”

“Nah,” Carrie replied, shaking her head. “Most people think we’re together already anyway.”

Denny laughed. “True.”

They were lazing around and talking, slowly getting their clothes back on. Carrie had a shift to take down in the kitchen. That’s when they heard a commotion from outside the window as a group of vehicles arrived out front.

“Those don’t sound like ours,” Carrie said, the slightest warning in her voice.

Denny walked over to the window. Six trucks with at least three or four dozen people in them at the makeshift front gate. The driver of the lead vehicle spoke quickly to whoever was on guard duty there. The man or woman immediately swung open the fence and let the trucks race down the driveway towards the front entrance. As they arrived, Lester and others of the Flagstaff group hurried out to meet them.

That’s when Denny saw the blood.

•  •  •

Carrie and Denny were downstairs in five minutes, just in time to watch as eight horribly wounded individuals were brought into the lobby. It looked as if they’d been shot or in car accidents as each had multiple wounds on different parts of their bodies. Denny shot a quizzical look over at one of the more recent arrivals, a fellow named Riley who’d come up from Yuma with a twelve-year-old girl and an elderly woman.