Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (40 page)

“All right, Bones,” Denny said finally. “Let’s go home.”

Denny opened the driver’s-side door. Bones tried to jump up onto the seat but slipped and fell backwards onto the parking lot.

“Oh, shit, are you okay?” Denny asked the dog before helping him back up.

Bones snapped at Denny’s hand when he accidentally touched Bones’s throbbing right rear haunch, but it was only a warning. Denny angled his hands around and tried a second time to help the dog up. This time he made it.

Denny grinned and patted Bones on the snout. “We make a good team, you and I.”

At that moment, Denny heard a new sound from behind him, something clicking out a fast rhythm on the parking lot, and knew it was a dog. Cats retracted their claws, dogs didn’t, a lesson taught to him by his grandmother at one point when pointing out tracks in the mud. This was clearly a dog.

Having been distracted while attempting to climb into the SUV, Bones had not immediately picked up on the new scent in the air. The shepherd turned, saw the Rhodesian ridgeback racing full-tilt for Denny, and started barking as he wheeled around. He awkwardly tried to launch himself forward from the seat to defend Denny but slipped again, this time smashing his snout on the dashboard as his legs went out from under him.

Denny had set down his rifle to help Bones but now turned his head and was frantically looking for it as the large dog grew closer. He had just spotted it leaning up against the back door of the vehicle when he sensed movement in the air behind him, and before he could react, two hundred pounds of muscle and claws slammed into him, smashing his body down onto the driver’s seat of the car. He felt the hot breath of the snarling ridgeback at the back of his neck just before the animal began tearing into his flesh with its claws.

“
Fuuuuuck!
” Denny screamed.

He fought against his canine attacker, trying in vain to lift himself up enough to shrug the heavy animal back out of the SUV, but it was just too heavy. The ridgeback’s powerful front paws were pressed down against his shoulders with his left arm curled under him and his right straight out in front making it impossible to get any lift as the animal’s claws shredded his skin. He felt so helpless in the face of his own death that he became furious, his face reddening in frustration as he pushed with all his might but was still unable to move his body up a single inch.

Meanwhile, Bones worked hard to regain his footing on the cab floor. He was dazed from the dashboard-inflicted shot to the snout, but he could tell Denny was in real trouble. With a tremendous effort, he finally found the strength to pull himself back up onto the seat and lunged for the ridgeback. The ridgeback, having believed Bones incapacitated, staggered backwards in surprise just as the shepherd lowered his head, ducked under the ridgeback’s snout, and clamped his jaws directly onto her throat. Terrified, the ridgeback lifted herself off Denny and thumped back down on all fours, effectively dragging Bones out of the truck. The dog’s teeth were still embedded in the ridgeback’s throat. As the shepherd slid over Denny and onto the parking lot, he relaxed his jaws. The ridgeback yanked herself free from Bones’s grip.

But no sooner was Bones outside the truck than the female lunged straight for Bones’s weakened hind leg and sank her teeth into it. Bones yelped but then quickly swung around and bit into the ridgeback’s ear, tearing into the soft flesh. The ridgeback yanked away, losing much of the ear in the process but then clawed into Bones’s underbelly.

Bones rolled away from the ridgeback but was already winded. He had given everything he had to his first attack and was now almost drained after less than half a minute. He bared his teeth as the ridgeback prepared to spring one last time, knowing he wouldn’t have the energy to fight back.

The roar of a rifle echoed through the empty parking lot, causing Bones to flinch. The ridgeback had been in mid-spring, and the bullet had cut across her back, cooking the fur, burrowing through the flesh, and exiting out the other side after chipping bone.

The ridgeback hit the ground with an agonized yelp. Bones sprang to his feet to go in for the kill, only to have his legs buckle out from under him. Denny turned the rifle on the ridgeback’s head as it slunk away behind Ches’s truck, but then he saw them.

While they had been distracted by the ridgeback’s attack, the entire pack had moved into the parking lot, forming a horseshoe-shaped ring around the three vehicles, hanging back ten to twenty feet.

“Oh, shit,” Denny whispered. “Oh,
shit.
”

He fumbled with the rifle as Bones joined him on the side of the truck. The ridgeback was whining now, attempting to lick its wound but having little success. Bones moved next to her and, to Denny’s surprise, began licking at the wound himself.

But then his attention turned back to the rest of the dogs. None were growling or making any sign of attack. They were skittish and confused by what was going, which made the one human in attendance believe they were seconds away from simply tearing him and Bones apart.

That’s when Denny got an idea. Below his feet was a Heckler & Koch 9mm that one of Ches’s men had dropped and beside that, a pump-action shotgun. He slowly bent down and picked up the automatic, dropped the safety, and stepped in front of Bones and the ridgeback.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!” Denny roared, pulling the trigger.

The pistol kicked so hard that Denny almost dropped it, but when he regained his stance, he fired another flurry of rounds into the air. When the gun was empty, he raised his rifle and emptied that into the air and when that was drained, he picked up the shotgun and did the same.

From the first shot, the dogs started moving away though their eyes were still on their fallen alpha. When Denny had switched to the rifle, the dogs were already beginning to scatter, but after the final empty shell had been ejected from the shotgun, the only dogs left in the parking lot were Bones and the ridgeback.

Denny looked down at the two wounded canines, then pushed every bit of advice he’d ever heard about dealing with injured animals out of his mind as he opened the back of the SUV and grabbed a towel. The ridgeback had lost some blood, but he thought he could still manage to lift her into the truck if she would let him.

“Bones,” Denny said as he walked back around to the dogs. “Get in the truck.”

At first, Bones wouldn’t leave the ridgeback’s side. Denny was incredulous at how instantly devoted the shepherd was to an animal he was fighting to the death moments before. Feeling a stabbing reminder of his own battle with the dog as his shredded shirt brushed against his shoulder wounds, he pointed out to himself that he was doing the same thing.

However, his reasons for requisitioning the bitch were far different from Bones’s.

“T
hat’s it!” Norman was shouting. “That’s the fucking dog that attacked us!”

Denny was lying face down on a kitchen table as Carrie and the doula, Lucille, cleaned up his wounds while a young woman named Beth did what she could to disinfect the ridgeback’s wound through the bars of an animal cage that Denny had picked up from a giant pet food retailer on the way back, though she continued to circle and snap at her as she did so.

Bones sat nearby on a pile of towels. Denny looked over at one point and was sure Bones had fallen asleep, but when he looked back, the dog was wide awake and paying attention.

As Norman ranted, Lester looked from Bones to the ridgeback to Denny, appearing like a man harassed to the edge of sanity. He finally raised a hand to silence the Jicarilla survivor and turned to Denny.

“You brought this dog back, why?” Lester asked.

“She’s the pack’s alpha,” Denny explained. “She’s the key to stopping these dogs from attacking us and, hopefully, other packs in the future.”

Lester let this soak in, realized it didn’t make sense to him and eyed Denny. “What are you talking about?”

Denny tried to raise himself a little, but Carrie just pushed him back down. “Hold still.”

Denny nodded but then looked over at Lester. “These dogs were pets two months ago. How many dogs you think there are in America?”

“I don’t know. A million?”

“Almost a hundred million,” replied Denny, happy to surprise the group. “Some student every year would do a science fair project involving their family pooch with that factoid glued to their trifold display board, though I think the real answer was closer to 77 million. How many humans do you think are left in America? Optimistically what, a few thousand? Let’s go as high as 100,000. Do the math. Two hundred dogs killed seventy people in fifteen minutes two days ago. One hundred dogs killed ten people earlier today. One hundred dogs almost killed another ten at the same time. The only thing that saved them was another dog.”

The room did the math and didn’t like what they came back with. Lester looked over at Bones a little dubiously but then nodded. “It sounds like you’re getting ready to make a point.”

“Say a third of those 77 million dogs died in the plague because they were locked up, couldn’t find food, whatever,” Denny continued. “That’s still 500 dogs to every one human. We are no longer the dominant species here. These feral dogs have proven that they’re extremely capable of making us go extinct very quickly. If not in this generation, then in future ones. But you see how Bones reacts to us. He recognizes that there’s this tie of domestication between humans and dogs. He respects that. The other dogs, well, they respect and follow their alpha, this other dog here. Somewhere in her mind, this dog and the other dogs remember that they were domesticated at one point. But a generation of dogs from now isn’t going to have those memories. We have to take this opportunity and try to re-establish ties of domestication between our two species the way our forefathers did. If we don’t, the human race may well be on its way towards extinction.”

•  •  •

The room had gone quiet after Denny explained what he hoped to accomplish, but this was broken by Norman shaking his head at Denny with a scolding glance.

“We have bullets. We have
guns
. We can wipe them out. This is absurd, specious reasoning.”

“You think we can wipe them out for good?” Lester asked. “Fifty million dogs breeding other dogs? Chasing down deer like wolves out there away from where we are? We’re going to have bigger fish to fry than exterminating dogs.”

Lester waited for a response but continued when he got none. “They always said we didn’t have many predators in North America. Snakes, bears, a few wolves,” he said, shaking his head. “We never thought we were cultivating a damn army in our own houses. We can’t kill all of them. It’s that simple. We’re barely able to survive right now. It’s not like that’s going to get better. We’re having to teach ourselves how to gather food and water, basic necessities. How soon until we run out of grocery stores and medical warehouses and pawn shops and we have to start fabricating what we use again? We’re at the beginning again. Luckily, we still have our books and our memories of how a light bulb works or how a battery works, so we can get there again, but we have to get moving. It’s not going to work if we’re looking over our shoulders the whole time waiting to get attacked.”

Lester turned to Denny, a serious look on his face. “If you have some way to fix that, you’ve got my support.”

With that, Lester exited the room. It was obvious that Norman and some of the others who had gathered still thought Denny’s plan was insane, but they eventually walked out as well to leave Denny to be patched up.

When Lucille finished stitching up Denny’s back, she glanced from Carrie to Denny and smiled. “You’re planning to get pregnant, aren’t you?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“We’ve talked about it,” Carrie said.

“Well, get to it! You heard the man. We’re at the beginning! Your child will be one of the first born ‘after,’ a little baby Jesus.” The doula laughed, though Denny thought it sounded more like a cackle.

Nobody talked much beyond that. Lucille took off when she was done.

As soon as they were alone with the dogs, Carrie looked at Denny with concern. “Do you intend to domesticate all fifty million yourself? That’s the part I can’t wrap my head around.”

“No,” Denny said. “In fact, I’m sure there are a bunch out there that haven’t joined a pack yet. We can feed them, bring them into our pack. We’ll probably have to put down some of them, unfortunately, but I think we have to try to domesticate this pack at least. If there are a couple hundred of us and a couple hundred dogs working with us, we’ll be better hunters, be safer. There’s the emotional centeredness that comes with it. There are reasons our ancestors did this. Good ones.”

“But you’re also asking dogs who are out there leading their own packs, fending for their young and surviving in the wild to effectively enslave themselves,” Carrie replied. “It just sounds impossible.”

“So does everything these days. There aren’t so many alternatives. But if we just start with one dog and move out from there, we could make this work.”

Denny looked over at Bones, who had settled in next to the ridgeback for the night and knew that he was right.

•  •  •

During the night, Bones stayed beside the ridgeback as she floated in and out of delirium. She had lost a lot of blood and hadn’t allowed anyone to really stitch her wound, so it still bled periodically. Bones, however, pressed his body up against the bars of her cage and eventually the ridgeback lay down next to him and was warmed by the large shepherd.

Slowly but surely, the ridgeback seemed to accept Bones’s presence so when he passed food to her from his own bowl to the cage a few hours later, she was as much grateful as grudging. Eventually, she went to sleep.

•  •  •

Though he desperately needed the rest, Denny just couldn’t find his way to sleep that night. Aspirin helped the pain, but nothing could make the stitches not itch. He struggled to get comfortable in the bed he shared with Carrie until finally she awoke.