Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (26 page)

“That doesn’t make sense. It’s all over the city. That suggests it could be picked up from multiple sources, which suggests it’s either airborne or waterborne. If that was the case, we’d be infected. And if doesn’t affect humans, then Bones would probably be affected.”

“Could it just be animals with simple nervous systems? In both of these cases we’re looking at animals that are prone to hive-mind activities.”

Paul was about to reply when he realized that Bones had gone completely silent. “What’s Bones doing?”

Sharon looked over and saw that he was staring expectantly down the stairwell, his ears perfectly erect.

“He went rigid,” Sharon said quietly. “I think he hears something.”

Paul got to his feet with Nashon’s help and picked up his machine gun. “I’m not crazy enough to fire this thing blind, but in case it’s someone that can be easily intimidated…”

That’s when they all heard what Bones had heard, a distant
creak
from below. Paul bent over, felt around for the shepherd and then leaned in close to the dog’s ear.

“Go get ’em, Bones,” Paul whispered.

Bones leaped to his feet and zipped down the remaining four flights of stairs. He was out in the lobby in seconds.

“What if it’s a friendly?” asked Sharon, incredulous.

“Then we’ll know soon enough. But I’ve never had a problem with the idea of pre-emption.”

•  •  •

When Bones reached the lobby, he quickly looked around for the source of the sound, only to hear it again coming up from the stopped escalators leading to the lower ballrooms. He wheeled around, raced down the escalators and immediately found himself in another dark part of the building.

The sub-level was filled with dead bodies, the corpses of about thirty people lining the hallways. It looked like a few had been carried down by collapsing ceilings and columns rather than having been in the sub-basement for the quake. But though the stench of death hung heavy in the air, Bones was able to immediately pinpoint that one scent distinctive from the others:
the living
.

Leaping across the bodies, Bones made his way down the dark hallway to where a thin slit of light was framing a door.

“Someone’s coming!” came a voice from the dark. “I hear them!”

“Is it the rats?” came a second voice.

“No, I don’t think…”

But before this person could finish, Bones reached the door and with very little effort forced it open. The man who had been standing behind it, a fifty-something named Sebastian Zobrist, was knocked backwards. Bones immediately stood on top of the fellow, drooling in his face as he gave him a sniff-over.

“Christ, get it off me!” Sebastian cried. “It’s going to kill me!!”

Bones glanced up and saw that there were about as many living people on the inside of the ballroom as there were dead outside. He looked back down at Sebastian and licked his face for good measure.

That’s when Bones sensed something coming towards him and looked up in time to receive a broadside in the form of a metal chair that a middle-aged woman swung against Bones’s ribcage, sending him sprawling.

“Jesus Christ, you’ll just make him mad, Greta!” Sebastian said as he scrambled to his feet. “You should’ve killed him!”

“With what?” Greta asked, nodding around the room.

“We have those knives,” someone offered from the back of the room.

Before Greta could reply, Bones was back on his feet and pissed. Rather than growl, he kept his head low to the ground, his spine straight as he wasn’t “threatening,” more slipped into about-to-leap-up-and-tear-your-throat-out mode. The humans saw this and flinched backwards.

“Oh, shit,” Sebastian exhaled. “Now what?”

“That’s enough, Bones,” came the voice of Paul, stepping through the door and into the ballroom, his machine gun surprisingly well-aimed directly at Sebastian’s rotund middle.

Bones quieted as Nashon walked over and put the leash back on the shepherd, pulling him back to the group as Paul and Zamarin stepped forward.

“Who are you?” asked a woman in a thick South African accent.

“Tzva Hahagana LeYisra’el,” Paul snapped back, returning to martial mode.

“Israelis!”

Nashon, Sharon and Zamarin, looked in the direction of a man, obviously of Arabic descent, who stepped forward. “I guess, if anybody was going to get to us, it would be
katsas
.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, but we’re not Mossad, we’re Army special forces,” Paul said. “Your accent is Lebanese?”

“Your accent is the West Bank?” the man replied, challengingly. “Perhaps even Gush Etzion? Bet you wouldn’t have come all this way if you knew there was a chance you’d be saving an Arab life.”

“That situation can change,” Zamarin said, voice mixed with threat and sarcasm.

Sharon raised her hand. “Please! Let’s see if during this Apocalypse maybe we can set aside our differences for even a moment. Given the gravity of our situation, can’t we see each other for a moment as fellow human survivors and not avatars of our governments?”

The Lebanese man shrugged, then nodded towards Paul. “He’s the one with a machine gun aimed at unarmed civilians.”

Paul sheepishly lowered his weapon, but Zamarin kept his raised. “Unarmed? Didn’t I hear somebody say something about knives?”

A young woman in the tatters of a catering uniform held up a stack of breakfast silverware, hardly a threat to anyone. Zamarin lowered his weapon.

“I know you,” said Greta, nodding towards Sharon. “You work for the Stephane Foundation.”

“I do,” Sharon replied. “We’re here to rescue you.”

“We’re here to rescue the Israeli contingent,” Paul corrected.

Murmurs went through the ballroom. The Lebanese man scoffed as if Paul was confirming everything he’d ever believed about Israel.

Sharon wheeled around on her heel. “The Israeli contingent, if we had found all alive, would’ve been around forty people. We are looking at thirty. I believe we can accommodate them given the situation.”

“Are you forgetting that we are down two-thirds in force?” Paul hissed back.

“Are you forgetting that you’re blind and that you guys need us more than we you?” Sharon said, then spotted the half-grin, half-sneer on Paul’s face before turning back to the assembled group. “First of all, we need to know how many of you are injured.”

•  •  •

It turned out that a tiny slip of a woman, Lisa Nong who had grown up in St. Petersburg the child of Japanese diplomats, was a doctor. She had come to the Stephane Foundation conference as the representative of a large Asian medical consortium to lobby for economic partnerships in other countries. She had patched up the injured as best she could in the ballroom, which had at one time incorporated a number of local Beverly Hills residents who had made their way to the hotel once they saw it was still standing.

“After the first quake, we probably had a good one or two hundred people in here, maybe more,” Lisa told Sharon and Paul as she cleaned up Paul’s wounds and re-bandaged his eyes. “We had food, we had candles, we had some lanterns and we even had a couple of generators that we knew to use sparingly. As survivors made their way here, we were afraid that we’d be over-capacity within hours, but that just never happened. And after the second quake, a number decided to try and get out of the city.”

“Where did they hope to go?” Paul asked.

“Over the Hollywood Hills and into the San Fernando Valley. They thought they’d be safe despite the fires and the landslides. A few said they were going to try for the ocean and said that if they found rescue, they would send people back. We haven’t heard from any of them. You’ve encountered the rats?”

“Last night,” Paul nodded. “We were going overland into Hollywood to retrieve Ms. Wiseman here. Our satellite linkups kept showing this massive heat signature that had been building around the city for days. We thought it had something to do with burning gas lines, but then we saw the tribe of rats for ourselves.”

“We saw rats within hours here the first day when we started making the first meals. They were curious and seemed to be going after the food in the kitchen, but they weren’t as feral as the ones that started coming by a couple of days later. We noticed they were getting more aggressive, and, worse, they attacked a couple of people that went out on a supply scout. Then on the third night, they swarmed into the hotel and killed six people. We had to beat them back with torches. That’s when we sealed ourselves in this one ballroom. The fourth night, we were pretty well sealed in here in case they came back, but then there was the second quake. The people you see out there in the hall? They bolted when it struck. The rats were waiting.”

“And the birds?” Paul asked.

“That’s new,” Lisa sighed. “We only started to see them a couple of days ago. Somebody came in here and told us that they’d seen large swarms of birds patrolling around downtown, including gulls feasting on corpses. We didn’t believe them. There have been a lot of rumors. But then they attacked a supply party yesterday. That’s when we stopped sending people out. That’s when we decided it was just no longer safe to leave this room. We’ve been here ever since, driving each other crazy.”

“Have you had any contact with the outside world?” Sharon asked.

“Couldn’t get a single phone to work,” Lisa said. “We saw all the military helicopters the first few days and figured they’d get to us eventually. But then, the second quake came and the over-flights ended. Any idea when they’re starting up again?”

Paul shook his head. “What’s worse is that once they get wind of this rat and bird situation, that’s going to delay them even more. I don’t think they’ve ever had to deal with something like this.”

Bones was lying down nearby, his eyes following the conversation as Lisa spoke, turned to Sharon, and then turned back to Paul. He even noticed when Lisa casually rested her hand on Sharon’s leg when making a certain point and similarly noticed when Sharon didn’t push it away.

“So what’s the plan?” Lisa asked. “Are you planning to take us out? Or was your earlier sentiment the most accurate: Look for Israelis, realize not a one survived down here with us, and slip away in the middle of the night when we’re not looking?”

“Well, it’s a risk either way and not just for us,” Paul stated. “As their food supplies begin to run out, the rats and the birds are going to get even more desperate, which means they’ll find a way in here, believe you me. But if you come with us overland, we’ll be attracting a lot of attention and the chances of being overrun are high. Either way, it’s not going to be a picnic.”

“So, what do you suggest?” Lisa asked.

“I think that decision should be left up to you and your people,” Paul said. “You’ve been savvy enough to survive this long so that’s a major indicator towards your instincts. Also, you’ve been negotiating this city post-quake longer than we have and have a greater sense of the risks.”

•  •  •

It didn’t take long for Lisa to explain the options to the others and even less for a vote to be decided on.

The group in the ballroom consisted of Lisa; Sebastian, who was an English real estate baron, but who had inherited everything from his father; the woman who’d struck Bones, Greta, who was an Austrian finance minister; Shahin, the Lebanese man who turned out to be the vice president of one of the largest construction entities in the Middle East; and Sally, the catering waitress with the knives who had originally come from Tennessee.

Additionally, there were two other members of Lisa’s medical consortium; a four-man Malaysian news team covering the conference who had been sharing a suite on the tenth floor and were, in fact, the level’s only survivors; an Australian finance minister named Garth Trenchard and a woman he referred to as his “secretary” named Kathryn, but who was obviously a highly-paid escort; a Hollywood agent named Jeremy who hadn’t been at the hotel at all but at an agency across the street when the quake hit; eight Latino hotel workers—four women and four men—all employees of the hotel who had been working around the kitchen and sub-basement when the quake hit and had survived entirely unscathed (though they had originally been a much larger contingent as a number of the hotel employees were the ones who had decided to “brave” the outside after the second quake); a lecturer on investment opportunities in heavy manufacturing of electronics in Taipei named Gregoire; and then there were two kids, an eleven year-old named Tony and his older sister, Heather, who was fifteen. They’d been staying on the sixth floor of the hotel, their mother having been an attaché to the finance minister of Ecuador and whose room had been crushed leaving no question as to the fact that their mother was dead.

Tony hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived in the ballroom.

But now with this motley crew assembled, Lisa got them ready to vote.

“All in favor of holing up here for a little while longer until the military arrives?” she asked.

Trent raised his hand first, followed quickly by each member of the Malaysian news team. One of Lisa’s colleagues at the medical consortium raised her hand, but the other did not. Kathryn, the Australian escort, raised her hand, but upon receiving a dirty look from her lover lowered it. Gregoire raised his hand tentatively for a moment. Upon seeing how few others were of this mind, he lowered it.

“Okay, all in favor of making a run for the ocean?” Lisa asked.

Sebastian’s hand shot up, followed by Trenchard and Kathryn. Shahin’s hand raised next, followed by Sally’s. The others in the room followed suit, including the hotel workers who first conferred amongst themselves in Spanish before deciding on an option. The last to vote were Tony and Heather. They seemed as swayed by a desire to vote with the majority as Gregoire.

After making sure it was a clean majority, Lisa surrendered the floor to Paul, whom Nashon had kept abreast of the raised hands.

“All right,” Paul began. “First of all, anyone who wishes to stay can still do so. We won’t make anyone leave. That said, I firmly believe there is strength in numbers and would strongly invite you to change your mind. Both the rats and the birds have proved willing to sacrifice large numbers when they attack. They can move quickly, making them a foe you cannot fight, only elude. Whether we leave during the day or during the night, our scents will travel the second we leave here. Whichever predator is near will move on us and might spring unexpected. The
one
thing we have going for us is this dog, Bones. He’s an enforcement animal and could buy us a few minutes to get to cover.”