Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (7 page)

“Disgusting,” Mr. Arthur said, blasting one of the two heads, only to have the flesh-eater remain upright, the jaws of the second head still opening and closing in hunger. Mr. Arthur just shook his head at the sight and shot the second head between the eyes.

Ryan and Jesse reached Mr. Arthur just as he was reloading, pulling his last remaining magazine from his pocket. He slammed the clip home, drew a chamber into the breach, and nodded at the boys.

“All right, I’ll cover your retreat,” he cried. “Whatever you do, don’t look back, keep running, and if I don’t catch up to you, just keep running. Do
not
come back for me.”

Ryan was surprised but saw the dead serious look on Mr. Arthur’s face and nodded. Helping Jesse along, the pair limped into the woods. Bones, who had been with the boys, went with them for a few feet but then came back alongside Mr. Arthur, who smiled.

“I appreciate the assist, Bones,” he said. “You see that idiot SWAT officer, you’ll drag his ass back over here, won’t you? If he’s still alive, mind you?”

Bones wasn’t paying attention, instead barking at the mass of flesh-eaters. Mr. Arthur sighed and raised the gun, firing a few more rounds into undead foreheads. It was easy shooting, but there were just so many of them. He’d had nightmares like this from his hunting days—one afternoon the turkeys finally rose up and fought back. He had to suppress a grin at the memory but then kept shooting.

That’s when a flesh-eater emerged from the woods behind him and bit down squarely on both his carotid artery and jugular vein at the same time with a mouth wide enough to make any dentist proud.

“ARRRGGH!!!” screamed Mr. Arthur as he immediately sank to his knees. Hearing this, Bones wheeled around and quickly tore the flesh-eater’s throat out, but it was clearly too late for the middle-aged former resident of Duncan.

“The
boys
…” Mr. Arthur managed to whisper to Bones, who immediately got the message. The shepherd turned and went after Ryan and Jesse, leaving Mr. Arthur to die.

As the flesh-eaters moved closer, Mr. Arthur figured he had a single bullet left and raised the gun as he leaned against the trunk of a tree. He momentarily considered taking his own life but figured one more dead flesh-eater was more pressing. Suddenly, one of the mass lunged for him and Mr. Arthur squeezed the trigger, blasting the final bullet directly into the forehead of the surprised, still living but only for a nanosecond more SWAT officer, who had just escaped the cannibalistic horde only to now be blasted directly back into their arms.

This ended up being the last thing Mr. Arthur ever saw.

“
Crap
.”

Meanwhile, Bones was galloping through the forest, able to easily follow the scent track of Ryan and the wounded Jesse. But as he went, he suddenly heard a voice saying his name from just behind him.

“
Boooones
.”

Bones looked around and saw Officer Purnell approaching, limping through the underbrush on the devastated stump that was once his foot. Bones recognized the now-twin smells of the officer, the remnants of the once-living man but also that of the corpse he had now become. Bones whipped around and launched himself at Purnell’s throat, tearing it out in a single motion.

Before the officer had even sunk to the ground, Bones was back charging after Ryan and Jesse.

T
he boys and their canine companion had raced along as best they could for a good twenty minutes before Jesse finally collapsed alongside a dry creek bed. These flesh-eaters weren’t very fast, particularly the ones now bound together, and the boys had put a good couple of miles between themselves and their attackers. Unfortunately, the jostling hadn’t done Jesse much good, as the two bullets still lodged in his body made each step impossibly painful. Despite this, he still protested when Ryan laid him up next to a tree.

“Why are we stopping?” he asked, though he slurred the words.

“You’re bleeding again,” Ryan replied simply, pointing at the teen boy’s wounds.

“
Shiiiit…
,” cried Jesse as he rolled up his tattered jeans and sleeve, seeing that both wounds were trickling blood through torn scabs, soaking his shirt and jeans.

“Don’t worry,” said Ryan, trying to sound reassuring. “We have to be pretty close to people by now.”

Meanwhile, Bones was sniffing a wide perimeter around the boys, finding nothing at first but animal scents: a deer, a few rabbits, a possum or two, a bobcat and its two kittens and what may have been a raccoon. But then he caught the scent of humans, live ones, and followed it a little ways away from the boys, through the dense underbrush, newly lush and green from the morning rain after a long dry spell.

Bones emerged from the woods onto an old logging trail, twin tire track gutters bending the grass into a road as they cut through the forest. Bones sniffed in a southeasterly direction, and the human scent strengthened. He turned and ran back into the trees.

“Bones?” Ryan asked as the dog came jogging back to the creek bed. Bones stopped, turned around,
woofed
once, then turned around again and cantered back up in the direction of the logging trail. Unmistakably, he wanted to show them something.

“Can you get up?” Ryan asked Jesse.

“Probably?” Jesse replied, a little unsure, though he’d managed to staunch the blood flow with strips torn from his shirt. “The second I walk anywhere, it’s going to move those bullets around and I’ll start bleeding again. Wherever we’re going has to be close.”

“Well, we can’t stay here,” Ryan said. “I think they can smell us. We have to keep moving or we’ll get caught. Like Mr. Arthur.”

Neither boy had mentioned him since they’d fled the highway, but as Jesse had ripped apart his shirt for bandages, each had kept on eye in the direction they’d come from, hoping, by some miracle, that he’d show up. It was obvious, however, that this wasn’t going to be the case.

“We don’t know what happened to Mr. Arthur,” began Jesse, tightening the strip of cloth tied around his wounded elbow. “But if something like that happens to me, you make sure you don’t let it happen to me, because if they really can smell us, then I’d probably come right after you. You understand?”

Ryan nodded quickly but couldn’t find the words to reply with. Jesse got to his feet, patted Ryan on the shoulder, and started limping after Bones. A second later, Ryan hurried over to him, giving him an arm to hang onto.

It only took a few minutes for Bones to lead the boys to the logging trail and made the decision for them as to which direction they were going to go, leading them towards the human smells. But when Jesse looked down the trail, he blanched.

“This could go for miles,” he protested. “They might have even cut it to go around any town. We could be out here for hours.”

Ryan just looked at him for a moment with a
you’ve-got-a-better-plan?
kind of baleful expression but then began following Bones and the tire tracks. It wasn’t ten minutes later that they could see the break in the dense trees up ahead and, a few minutes after that, the first couple of houses. Ryan shot a proud look at Bones, which he then turned on Jesse. Jesse, however, wasn’t so certain and moved forward with suspicion.

“Bones?” Jesse nervously queried the dog, hoping for some kind of reassuring response as to the flesh-eater-free makeup of the homes ahead. Bones kept walking, sniffing the ground and sniffing the air without any hint of alarm, which Jesse finally took as a good sign.

They soon moved off the logging trail and onto a paved road, emerging at the back of a subdivision. They figured out which direction the highway was in and decided to head the opposite way. But as they passed by the eerily empty houses, they didn’t see any more signs of normal humans than they did flesh-eaters.

“If they think there’s food on the road, then they’re going to stay out there,” suggested Ryan. “And once that’s gone, they’ll probably head for the city.”

Jesse nodded, though it was hard to tell if he believed Ryan or not. The trio took a right at the intersection of Bayless and Rohmer, finding another long street of houses that exhibited a strange, post neutron bomb kind of feeling. It was as if the entire populace had gathered elsewhere for some sort of city-wide event, which, in effect, they had.

Ryan looked over at Jesse and noticed that his wounds were starting to bleed again.

“There’s got to at least be a Band-Aid in one of their bathrooms,” Ryan said, pointing at the houses. “We should just pick one and go in.”

Jesse was about to roll his eyes at this suggestion but then realized that if there was a Band-Aid, there might be other medical supplies.

“All right,” he nodded.

Jesse looked down the row of houses, his eyes hunting for one that seemed to suggest it belonged to a family that probably made regular trips to the drug store for such supplies, and settled on the only two-story home on the block. He limped over to Bones, took him by the collar, and slowly led him to the house.

“We’re going in here, Bones,” Jesse whispered as Ryan followed behind, looking every which way for company. “But we’re going to need you to make sure the coast is clear first.”

They reached the front door of the house and found it locked, but then Ryan ran around to the side and found that not only was the garage door open, the door leading into the house from the garage was unlocked. Jesse took Bones to the door, pushed past Ryan, and opened it before half-leading, half-shoving Bones inside. Then Jesse, quickly as he could manage, stepped back out into the garage and slammed the door behind him.

“What are you doing?” Ryan asked, wide-eyed with surprise.

“If he’s in there and somebody else is in there, he’s going to find them in like two seconds,” Jesse explained. “So if he goes crazy and starts barking, we need another house. If he doesn’t, then we’re okay.”

“But if he starts barking, that means he’s in trouble and we should have a plan to get him out of there,” Ryan countered.

“Of the three of us, I think Bones has proven he can best take care of himself,” Jesse said.

Ryan seemed to accept this and they fell silent for a couple of minutes, their eyes glancing around the well-stocked garage. Jesse finally had the good idea to at least close the garage door and did so. Though they didn’t comment on it, they both noticed that a family’s worth of bicycles were leaning up against the side of the garage between a faded red Civic and the wall. Absent appeared to be a second car, as there was an empty car-sized space alongside the Civic, complete with oil stains on the concrete.

As they waited, Jesse looked around the garage for a weapon, as they only had Ryan’s rifle between them. He spotted a rubber mallet but deemed it too soft; a sledgehammer, too unwieldy; and even an edge trimmer, which he thought would be a fun way to dispatch a flesh-eater, though he also knew it would require an extension cord. That’s when he picked up a simple claw hammer off a cobweb-covered workbench and put it through one of his belt loops, though Ryan immediately gave him a chastising look.

Jesse shrugged. “Hey, you were the one who suggested raiding some guy’s bathroom for Band-Aids.”

The pair finally figured it had been enough time and turned back to the door leading into the house, falling silent as they tried to hear Bones on the other side.

“I wonder if he’s gone upstairs yet,” Ryan whispered.

“You hear anything?” Jesse asked. Ryan shook his head and shrugged.

Jesse carefully pressed his ear to the door, as if fearing that somebody or some-
thing
might be doing the same on the other side. He paused, listened intently, but then turned back to Ryan, shaking his head.

“I don’t hear him,” he whispered.

Ryan put his hand on the doorknob, worried for Bones, but Jesse raised a hand. Ryan hesitated; Jesse took a deep breath, and then nodded dramatically. Ryan turned the knob and swung the door wide. Bones stood just on the other side of the door, looking up at them expectantly, his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he panted. Jesse rolled his eyes.

“Let’s get that Band-Aid.”

The two boys pushed past Bones, carefully closed and locked the door to the garage, and proceeded to raid the house. They started in the master bathroom with the medicine chest, Jesse pouring an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide across his two wounds, only to get a surprise when one of the slugs fell out of the wound and bounced onto the floor with a metallic click, having worked its way out of the entry wound as they walked.

“Gross,” was all Ryan could find to say.

They hit the kitchen next and found that a grocery run had probably been made as recently as that morning. They started gorging themselves, having had no idea how hungry they were until the sight of endless food was placed in front of them.

While the boys did this, Bones padded around the small living room and wandered into the master bedroom, hoping to avoid the smell of an ever-present throughout the house vanilla-flavored air freshener. Unfortunately, it was just as bad if not worse in the bedroom, which was decorated in pink with large, garish flowers on the drapes and bedspread with noisy bronze-colored carpeting to go with it, as if designed to clash. There were at least a couple of masculine touches: a nightstand with a dusty digital clock, a plaque announcing some kind of achievement in quarterly sales, and a dark wood chest of drawers, though in its reserve it only served to highlight the near-luminescent white dresser directly across from the foot of the bed covered with pink perfume bottles, jewelry with a similar bent towards the pink, makeup containers (again, in shades of pink), plastic jars for cotton balls and Q-Tips, and then a great number of family photographs, some framed but also a number tucked into the frame of the dresser’s mirror.

Bones sniffed around the dresser, but the scent of the perfumes blending with the smell of the vanilla air fresheners was so overpowering that the shepherd eventually had to leave the room and head for the stairs to try to shake it off.

“Hey, Bones. Do you want some food?” called Ryan, spotting the dog as he walked through the living room. Bones stopped and eyed Ryan, as if considering this, but only for a second before the dog turned and ascended the steps to the second floor.