Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Saga (27 page)

The ballroom survivors looked at Bones with new eyes, most having figured him for some kind of companion or mascot.

Potential savior? Not really.

Paul waited a moment, sensing the feeling of dread creeping over his audience, all wondering if they chose poorly when voting for the escape. But then he continued:

“Personally, I think we have a better shot against the rats. There are more of them, possibly millions, but we’ll be fighting on an X-Y axis. With the birds, it becomes X-Y-Z, as they’ll be above us. That’s a hard variable to overcome. Also, there’s that slim chance that the rats will simply be too far away to get to us. By the time they catch on, we might be able to outrun them to the beach. The birds, of course, can cover that same amount of ground in a tenth of the time.”

The feeling in the room was obviously going Paul’s way now. Nashon whispered as such into Paul’s ear.

“All right,” Paul concluded. “If you’ve decided to come with us, we’ll leave at dusk. Be ready to go.”

•  •  •

Paul’s pronouncement had come around noon, so there was plenty of time to prepare. Weapons were fashioned from broken chairs and the sharper edges of kitchen implements. What little food was left was gathered. A couple of items that perhaps no one had considered as being easy to weaponize had been acquisitioned by Nashon on Paul’s instructions. Almost more important than all of these things, routes were determined. Gregoire and Trent, despite both having initially voted against the excursion, were key to this last point, having been on several of the scouting excursions out into Beverly Hills and down to Century City.

“You have to understand how fucked up it gets the further west you go,” explained Trent, indicating along a map to Zamarin and Nashon as Paul listened. “There were fewer tall buildings to topple over and create obstacles, but it becomes about the road itself. Santa Monica Boulevard was under construction and got hit pretty hard. The road becomes almost impassable just beyond Century City. You won’t be able to drive vehicles.”

“Wasn’t planning on it anyway,” said Zamarin. “If anything’s going to invite the rats in an otherwise quiet empty city, it’d be the trucks. We’re on foot.”

“Good point,” agreed Trent. “But that still puts us on the ground for two or three hours at least. You’re going to have people climbing over broken concrete in the dark and not everyone here exactly in the best shape.”

Trent nodded over his shoulder at Sebastian and Trenchard.

“Yeah, we’ll be shouldering them through, I’d imagine,” suggested Nashon. “It won’t be easy.”

“That’s where natural selection comes in,” said Zamarin. “Some will be fed to the enemy so the rest of the pack can survive. It’s like ballast for a balloon.”

“You can’t be serious,” exclaimed Gregoire.

Zamarin got right up in Gregoire’s face and sneered. “You want to hear me say that every last one of us is going to make it to the beach alive and well? And tomorrow we’ll be doing this big happy joint press conference in San Diego about our harrowing escape? I mean, I can tell you that, sure, if you need to hear the words. But I’d be full of shit.”

Gregoire thought about this but then shut up.

•  •  •

In the kitchen, Sharon and Lisa gathered food as Bones padded alongside. The shepherd occasionally got underfoot and poked his nose where it didn’t belong, but Sharon had realized that in this whole mess the only time she felt any sense of safety was when Bones was near.

“So you’re from here?” Lisa was asking. “Where were you when the quake hit?”

“At home,” Sharon said. “In bed. Not far from here, actually. Westwood.”

Sharon fell silent. Lisa sensed that she didn’t want to talk about it. Instead of pressing the matter, Lisa moved on with the preparations, only to hear Sharon exhale.

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Lisa said.

“It’s like a superstition,” Sharon said. “If I don’t say it aloud, it didn’t happen, you know? I lost my partner, my girlfriend, of four years in the quake. It could’ve been me that died, but I was just faster.”

Lisa nodded but then put her hand on Sharon’s shoulder as the younger woman stared glumly at the floor. It was such a depressing thought, life without Emily. She’d so successfully put it out of her mind, but here it all was.

“What was her name?” Lisa asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“Emily,” Sharon replied, her voice cracking on the third syllable, making it almost sound like a question. “She was a student. We met when she was seventeen at a club, but I didn’t pursue anything for propriety’s sake until she was eighteen. I needn’t have worried, though, as she was far more mature and worldly than I ever was. I’d been married when we met, but my husband and I both knew something hadn’t been right for a while. So we finally packed it in. He went back to Tel Aviv telling everyone I threw him out for cheating on me.”

Sharon chortled a little, shaking her head. “I’ve never understood how that was better than admitting the relationship didn’t work. Even worse, he made it sound as if the accusation had merit. It has always made me wonder if something had been going on and I just never noticed. Anyway, I had kept in contact with Emily and we went on a date. True to stereotype, she moved in
maybe
three weeks later. She was eleven years my junior, but we were absolutely in love.”

Sharon looked as if she might cry. Lisa put her arm around her shoulder. Sharon continued, “The hardest part of this is, well, we were moving out. We’d bought a house out in Agoura Hills. But when the Stephane conference hits, it takes over my whole life for the months leading up. So Emily had been packing on weekends, the new house was being painted and we were all set to move…”

Sharon hesitated, trying to remember the date. When she realized when it was to be, it gave her pause. Even Bones, who had sat down at her feet, looked up, sensing her distress.

“…tomorrow morning.”

Lisa hugged Sharon, drawing her close as Sharon began to cry, her body quaking a little with the tears.

“It’s okay,” Lisa said. “I know it’s hard, but we’ll be out of here soon enough and you’ll be able to grieve for real.”

“I’m not worried about me,” Sharon said, shaking her head. “It’s just, how long is Emily’s body going to be in the rubble of our apartment? Weeks? Months? A couple of years? She’s not buried. Even though we’re not the most traditional of relationships, in my culture you’re supposed to bury someone within three days of the death. It bothers me a lot, like I failed her. It makes it hard for me to want to leave.”

“I can only imagine how you feel,” Lisa replied softly. “But if she loved you as much as you love her, you have to know that she would want you to survive and carry on. Hold that close.”

“I do, but it doesn’t make it any better.”

•  •  •

“All right,” Paul said, addressing the group at fifteen minutes until six, the agreed-upon departure time. “We’ll be going straight down Santa Monica Boulevard to the coastline, no stops. We’re going to be as quiet as possible, doing nothing to give away our position. If we encounter any enemy, we will only engage as a last resort. We’re trying to escape and we’re not prepared to fight. Understood?”

No one replied. Paul nodded to Zamarin, who raised the one-shot sonic disrupter.

“I don’t know how many of you are familiar with our crowd-control methods, but this is what’s known as an LRAD—long-range acoustical device—or just sonic disruptor, which admittedly sounds more sci-fi. It emits a piercing blast of intense acoustic energy that can momentarily stun anything with a sense of hearing. On the low end, it can burst a human’s eardrum if jacked all the way up. On the high end, it can do similarly to the rats. That said, it has a very limited range and, like a taser has one shot in it before needing to be recharged. We only have one, but it just might buy us some time. You see the sergeant or Corporal Sahar raising it, you stop, cover your ears and open your mouth. Got it?”

Incredulous as some of the people looked, they all nodded and agreed.

“Okay. We leave in ten. Be ready to hit the ground running.”

•  •  •

They actually left in eight.

Trent had been stationed in the lobby and alerted the group just as the sun set over the distant ocean. The entire group of survivors were up the broken escalators in a flash, led by Zamarin and Nashon. Paul hung back with Sharon and Bones, who acted as something of a seeing-eye dog even though he was too excited to do anything but gallop.

Following behind were the rest, a mob of people desperate not to be left behind but also terrified of being out in the open. Greta was the last one out onto the driveway. As she looked back at the hotel, a gallows smile spread across her face as she nodded at Sebastian. “I feel I’m stepping out of my grave to run off to my funeral.”

“I know the feeling well, my dear, believe you me,” he replied, already sweating. “But whatever happens, you can count on me to be by your side.”

Up at the front, Sharon was keeping an eye on the skies. She didn’t see any birds, but she kept telling herself that the absence of anything flying overhead didn’t mean they weren’t there, waiting. She looked down at Bones, the only member of the party that didn’t seem to have a care in the world, and wished she shared his optimism.

•  •  •

Running through the night, Bones was thrilled to finally be out of the hotel, as the smells were really getting to his sinuses. The corpses, the fine concrete powder hanging in the air, the sweat of the living, the rotten food, the myriad odors of asbestos, plastic and various chemical cleaners all mixed together in a toxic brew had done nothing but give the shepherd a severe headache. But now that he was outside, these horrible smells that the humans seemed only vaguely aware of now absent, he inhaled deeply and bounded along beside Paul.

“Slow down a little, Bones,” Paul said, angrily yanking back his leash.

“You still planning to shoot him at the end of the mission?” Sharon asked.

“He’s not coming on the boat, if that’s what you mean. Shooting him would be doing him a favor given what we’d be leaving him with.”

Sharon scoffed but kept going. She planned to revisit the issue once they were at the boat. Maybe give the dog another couple of chances to save Paul’s life and he’d change his tune.

The group had raced away from the Beverly Hilton and onto Santa Monica Boulevard as if it was a sprint, but then Zamarin and Nashon had slowed the pace to something that could be maintained. The sun had almost completely disappeared over the horizon now. Everything was colored in shades of gray, purple and black.

When they reached the toppled buildings of Century City only a few minutes later, it began to get treacherous, but Trent’s knowledge of the jumble of rubble helped immensely as he showed Zamarin a path he’d taken earlier. Bones’s keen senses helped with this as well. Soon the group had crossed over the worst of it with only a minimum of twisted ankles.

Once they were on the other side of the fallen buildings, Trent’s admonition proved true in that the road was in utter disrepair and there were more stumbles, but part of this was because the farther away from the Beverly Hilton they traveled, the less likely it would be to race back there in retreat should something happen. More and more, they were at the mercy of the city.

For Sharon, this was the part of the trek she was dreading. She watched as the familiar streets passed by: Avenue of the Stars, Century Park West, Beverly Glen. Sharon had driven this road home from work for years and had taken it back from the Beverly Hilton the night of the first big quake. These very roads, now long gone. She looked up ahead. Even though nothing was standing, she knew they were within a few hundred yards of her collapsed apartment building and Emily’s broken body somewhere within.

She forced herself not to cry and ran on.

•  •  •

Much closer to the ground, Bones found it easy to navigate the rubble and therefore hadn’t suffered the mental fatigue of the others, either. Paul, who was beginning to tire, yanked back more and more on Bones’s makeshift tether.

“Come on, Bones,” Paul said. “Stay with me.”

But that’s when a different scent entered Bones’s nose. The buildings were farther away from the street on this part of Santa Monica. so he’d been light on smells for a while, fresh air cutting through the rotting trees and concrete. Butut now there was something new.

Bones slowed and sniffed the air, recognizing the oily odor of matted fur and blood that he’d first picked up on a couple of days ago now on the broken Hollywood Freeway. As Bones slowed, Paul knew immediately from the break in the shepherd’s stride what he’d picked up. He leaned down to the shepherd, feeling his snout and could tell Bones had picked up a scent.

Paul hesitated, feeling cold and alone and isolated in his new blindness, practically naked out on this desolated rubble-strewn street in the middle of nowhere. Icy shivers ran down his spine as he realized just how disastrous this plan might turn out to be.

“Here they come!”

T
he Mayer men had been dead-on.

It was the Nivec that the rats had been chewing on which contained a chemical compound called methylstinine that caused a rabies-like reaction in rodents when they ingested it. But Paul’s idea that the birds brought it into their systems by eating the rats was completely false. Instead, when the buildings and houses fell and exposed the Nivec to the air, it released massive quantities of the already broken-down synthetic alkaloid that the birds then aspirated into their lungs, causing the same sort of mutation.

While the humans and every other animal in Los Angeles were breathing it in as well and often in just as heavy concentrations, the behavioral changes were expressed quickly in the lesser mammals and in birds. The rats got sick, Bones did not. The birds got sick, but the humans did not.