Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (5 page)

“Toss your weapons away and stay on the ground! Move an inch, and we won’t hesitate to shoot.”

Mr. Arthur did as he was told, pushing his rifle away from him. Ryan did the same, but a quick glance back at Jesse suggested he was already halfway into shock and couldn’t be made to do a thing. Luckily, his rifle had been thrown a few feet away after the first bullet hit, and the shotgun was momentarily obscured behind his body.

“All right! We’re unarmed!” yelled Mr. Arthur. “You’ve got an injured child over here. Maybe two.”

A group of black-clad, helmet-and-gas-mask-wearing SWAT team members emerged from the woods, guns aimed at the little group of survivors. Bones continued barking at the approaching officers, standing his ground between them and Ryan. The team leader nodded at a man with an oddly-shaped gun.

“Knock him down.”

The gunman nodded, stared down the sights at Bones, and
fired
.

“
No!!”
cried Ryan, but the rubber bullet was already in flight, smashing Bones in the shoulder before Ryan had finished shouting. Bones smacked into the ground and rolled over but was getting ready to jump right back up as if it was nothing when a second officer with an animal-control pole and lanyard raced over and tossed the loop around Bones’s neck. As he pulled it tight, like a noose, a second officer looked over and stopped short.

“Bones?” said a voice filtered through layers of plastic and charcoal.

But Bones was already back on his feet, gnashing at his tether as the officer at the other end of the pole kept the shepherd at a distance, prodding him ahead by what now looked like a spear jutting out of his neck. The officer who had recognized Bones walked over and took the pole away from the other officer.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got this.”

The pole officer bent to one knee, keeping Bones at a distance but inviting him to look his way.

“Bones?
Bones
. Hey, boy.”

Bones, giving the air a sniff, managed to ignore the leash long enough to manifest some sort of recognition. The cop pulled the pole closer to him, allowing Bones to get within a foot.

“Bones, hey,” the officer said, raising a hand to his gas mask, as if to take it off. “I’m a friend. We’re on the same team. We trained together.”

“You keep that mask on, Purnell!” cried the team leader, a little incredulous.

“Yeah, sergeant—I forgot,” the officer—Purnell—said but then waved the sergeant over. “But sir, this is Bones. He’s Billy Youman’s better half in the K-9 unit.”

“No shit?” grunted the sergeant. “Guess we know what happened to Commander Zusak and the others out on 790, then.”

Mr. Arthur stared up at the men as they checked him over for additional weapons.

“You can quit with the stormtrooper act now,” he grunted, though he was still in pain. “You can see we’re not one of them.”

“One of who?” asked the sergeant, as if having not a clue what Mr. Arthur could be referring to.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” grunted Mr. Arthur. “Come on. You’ve seen a movie, read a comic book or two. You got cannibalistic dead guys running around the western Pennsylvania countryside.”

“Sir, all we know is that we’re dealing with an outbreak here,” the sergeant replied. “For all we know, the three of you and maybe the dog, too, are infected.”

“Are you kidding me?” asked Mr. Arthur as a medic bandaged his wound. “There’s a big damn difference between me—
us
—and what we’ve been fighting out here all morning while you assholes sat on each other’s dicks. Do I look dead to you?”

“At present, you may be merely a carrier, but should your ‘status’ change, you would express the characteristics of what we’re currently labeling the ‘Stage 2,’” the sergeant explained.

“Oh, you say that like it wasn’t almost you guys who just about changed my ‘status,’” Mr. Arthur bellowed. “So I guess if you’d shot me dead and then I’d gotten up and run over there to bite your head off, that would’ve been considered what—friendly fire? I’m sure you would’ve gotten a medal for it, but you’d still be dead.”

The sergeant stared at Mr. Arthur through the shaded black eye holes of the gasmask and shook his head angrily.

“Sir, we probably have less of an idea of what we’re dealing with out here than you do. You three are the first survivors we’ve come in contact with, and we have our orders. I’m sorry if that conflicts with your idea of due process, but right now, ‘containment’ is taking precedence. Maybe you’ll come around to understanding that.”

With that, the sergeant turned and headed away, deciding there was no need for further debate. Officer Purnell watched this exchange with a satisfied grin but then turned back to Bones, discreetly taking off one of his gloves and giving Bones a pat.

“You’ve probably been through hell, huh, boy?” Purnell said. “Shit, man. Bet this means Billy’s bought it, huh? He wasn’t too bad a guy.”

Bones gave Purnell’s hand a friendly lick. Ryan, being led towards the farmhouse alongside a patched-up Jesse, saw Bones and cried out. “That’s
my
dog, you jerk!”

Purnell was a little startled by this outburst but then sighed as Ryan scowled at him. He shook his head as he turned back to Bones, stroking him between the ears.

“Sorry, kid,” he said, though out of earshot. “But this guy’s property of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. You’ll just have to find another.”

T
en minutes later, a pair of police vehicles drove away from the farmhouse and headed back down the highway in the same direction Mr. Arthur, the boys, and Bones had just been going, only now they were in custody. Bones rode in the back seat of the lead vehicle, a patrol car driven by Officer Purnell, while Jesse, Ryan, and Mr. Arthur were stuck in the back of a paddy wagon, driven by a pair of SWAT officers with a third riding in back with the “prisoners.” The convoy was making good time, as both lanes of the highway were clear. Purnell set the pace up around eighty miles per hour and kept it there.

When Bones climbed into the back of the car, he had lain down almost immediately, exhausted. Purnell poured a little water from a plastic bottle into a Styrofoam cup that he tore the top half off in order to create a small bowl, which Bones promptly drained in one gulp. Purnell emptied the rest of the bottle into the cup and snagged a second one, continuing the routine until Bones had drunk his fill.

“Now you’re going to have to hold it all the way to the city,” Purnell joked from the front seat as they hurtled down the highway. “Think you’ll be okay?”

Despite his fatigue, Bones was too keyed up to fall asleep and eyed Purnell through the steel-cage prisoner partition as they drove. Purnell grinned at the dog in the rearview but then his nose inhaled a big whiff of wet dog.

“Jeezus!” Purnell exclaimed. “No offense, Bones, but you smell like you’re carrying about three miles of bad road in your coat back there.”

Bones didn’t look offended. Purnell reached over to the dashboard and fiddled around with the air conditioner, switching it from closed to open circulation to bring in fresh air from outside.

Two seconds after the first outside air swept into the car, Bones leaped to his feet, his nose bouncing up in down in every direction as he looked all around. A second later, he started to bark, loudly and forcefully.

“Bones!!” cried Purnell, a little alarmed. “What the hell?! Have you gone crazy back there? Quiet down!”

But Bones continued barking, sounding panicked now.

“What’s gotten into you?” Purnell asked, glancing back at the antsy shepherd. But then, he turned back around in time to see precisely what had been troubling Bones’s nose. “Oh,
shit
…”

Like rising floodwaters, a vast horde of flesh-eaters, easily numbering in the hundreds, poured out of the woods on both sides of the highway and launched themselves at the convoy. A slow-moving vise, the monsters massed towards the vehicles in a collapsing V-formation until they completely blocked the road.

“Jesus Christ!!!” Purnell said, instinctively spinning the wheel to avoid the attackers, but as they were suddenly everywhere, it only served to skid the car into the flesh-eaters at an odd angle, causing them to go flying as they bounced off the hood, roof, and windshield like bowling pins.

Purnell finally managed to slam on the brakes, stopping the car dead in the middle of the highway, the sudden halt throwing Bones off the seat. Behind him, the paddy wagon did the same, screeching to a stop about ten feet behind Bones and Purnell. The flesh-eaters immediately threw themselves against both vehicles as Purnell made a mad scramble for the door locks. Finding them secure, he grabbed the radio.

“Charlie, Purnell,” he cried, trying not to sound as frantic as he felt. “You guys all right in there?”

He craned his neck around, seeing the driver of the paddy wagon—Charlie—reaching for the radio as he signaled Purnell from behind the reinforced windshield.

“Yeah, still in one piece,” came Charlie’s voice, crackling over the speaker. “The vehicles are secure, but I’m not sure what the play is here. These are citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If we start mowing them down and there turns out to be some kind of cure, we’re suddenly Katrina doctors euthanizing patients.”

Purnell snorted but figured the same thing.

“Besides,” Charlie continued. “We roll over too many of them, and we’ll start losing our tires.”

Purnell laughed at this, his voice as jittery with adrenaline as Charlie’s, but then replied, “Yeah, this wasn’t exactly in the
Patrol Guide
, so whatever we do, we’re the ones whose asses are on the line. Look, I’ll radio the sergeant back at the command post and at least let them know they’ve been flanked even if they don’t know it yet. Should keep them from sending anybody else back down this road.”

“Sounds good,” squawked Charlie on the radio, his voice almost washed out by the sounds of flesh-eaters pounding on either side of the paddy wagon.

“One question. We have any idea who all these people are?” asked Purnell.

Charlie sounded ready to answer with a verbal shrug when Purnell heard another voice from inside Charlie’s wagon, which spoke for a few seconds. Then, Charlie came back on the radio, sounding incredulous.

“One of the residents of Duncan we’ve got on board said he thinks it’s the entire town of Gainey,” said the paddy wagon driver. “Said he recognizes one or two of them. One had on a booster T-shirt for the high school soccer girls soccer team, if you can believe it.”

Purnell flipped on his GPS and toggled around until he found Gainey, only a few miles away.

“Gainey’s a little south, then directly east of here,” Purnell exclaimed. “Christ, there’s no telling how far they’ve gotten and all on foot. This is why we have to get some air support up here. We’re going to be telling our grandkids about this day.”

“Yeah,” came Charlie’s reply, as if momentarily uncertain whethe “grandchildren” were still in his future.

Bones continued barking as the flesh-eaters pounded on the doors and the windows, though they hadn’t managed to even chip the reinforced-glass windows or dent the riot-proof roof. Still, the constant battering was driving the shepherd nuts, and his barks now included actual strikes, biting into the air at invisible targets.

“All right, my dog’s going cocoa-bananas in here,” Purnell said. “I’ll give you a horn honk if there’s any kind of break in the flood, but maybe the play here is we just have to wait it out. They’re going to get tired of this at some point, right? Over and out.”

Purnell hung the radio mic on its hook and waved back at Charlie, who nodded from the paddy wagon. Purnell then turned back to the undulating mass of flesh-eaters squashing themselves up against the windows of the patrol car.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, getting a much more close-up view of the creatures than he was comfortable with, but then he noticed something
different.

That morning, Purnell had come out with the rest of the SWAT unit with little knowledge in the way of what was actually going on out in north Allegheny County, but after they’d encountered an entire family of flesh-eaters in the farmhouse, his team had wised up fast. What he was looking at here wasn’t the same thing. The flesh-eaters back at the farm were clearly dead, some gravely wounded, others in various states of decay. The ones he was looking at now were oozing a greenish-black suppuration through reddish-brown sores that appeared all over their skin, something he figured he would have remembered seeing earlier. It was a gruesome sight, but what made it even worse was seeing that this grotesque substance was acting as a sort of adhesive, gluing together various parts of the flesh-eaters when they got too close to one another. Well, was “gluing” the right word? It actually looked more like a scab, as if the substance was excreted from one body to scab over an open wound on another, but then they were stuck together. Purnell saw one trio that appeared to almost be a single organism, though each of the three bodies was trying to push and pull it in different directions.

He had the presence of mind to reach into his pocket, pull out his camera phone, and take a couple of photographs of the difference.

“Nasty,” he exclaimed, looking at the pictures on the phone. He tried to e-mail them back to the SWAT forward command post, specifically to a guy named Sobel, who he thought would know the right person to forward them to, but there wasn’t enough of a signal for them to go through. Giving up, Purnell just sank back into his seat with a sigh, wondering how long they were going to be stuck there.

In the back seat, Bones continued to bark at the many faces that pressed themselves against the windows, some baring their teeth in a mawkish way. As he kept it up, his voice became weaker and weaker as the day’s events took a toll.

“C’mon, Bones,” Purnell said. “You’re not doing yourself any good, and these guys sure don’t seem to care.”

This was the second time in one day that one of Bones’s handlers was interrupted by a hit to the side of their vehicle, though this one with far less fatal results. Purnell was slammed against the steering wheel and Bones jolted against the back of the front seat as a sudden surge of bodies rammed into the front of the patrol car with great force.