Bones Omnibus (45 page)

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 German 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 whether “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 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 his closest friend on the team, 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.”

Whump
.

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.

“Fuck! What are they doing?” Purnell yelled, jamming down the parking brake.

The shapeless mass struck the car again with such force that Purnell found himself scanning the bodies in front of the car, figuring they must have a makeshift battering ram hidden amongst their number. The parking brake continued to hold the car in place, but Purnell didn’t know for how much longer that would be the case. The radio buzzed to life.

“Purnell, what the hell are they doing to your car?”

“I don’t know,” Purnell radioed back. “Whatever it is, it’s not going to work. They’re just going to pound themselves flat.”

This time, the flesh-eaters’ impact was such that the mic tumbled out of Purnell’s hand and landed on the floor of the vehicle. As he reached down to pick it up, he felt the car beginning to shift not backwards but sideways on the road.

Then rise up.

This time, the car buckled as it bounced upwards a good two or three feet, as if being carried off by a flash flood. Purnell and Bones were suddenly up over the action, the attacks having been used to get the bodies of flesh-eaters under the wheels of the car, which then bucked upwards like a primitive hydraulic jack.

“Fuck!! What the hell?” Purnell cried, the car rising and falling like a boat on the ocean. “Are they trying to carry us off somewhere? This is nuts!”

In the back seat, Bones began barking like mad. At first, Purnell thought this was out of surprise and fear, but when he looked back at the shepherd, he saw that Bones was no longer barking at the windows but straight down at the floorboards.

“Bones?” Purnell asked, sobering. “What is it?”

Bones’s bark became a growl as the sounds of dozens of hands tapping around the undercarriage of the car became audible. In the front seat, Purnell stared down at the steel floorboards and blanched as he heard the piercing
sccccrrrreeeeeeccchhhh
of tearing metal.

“Oh,
shit!
”

Purnell yanked his 9mm from his holster as the floor of the passenger side was ripped downwards and away. A bloody-faced flesh-eater appeared in the empty space just below it, the creature’s mouth looking like it had taken a shotgun blast, which is how Purnell realized that the bottom of his car hadn’t been torn away by fingers alone but also teeth. Purnell aimed his pistol at the flesh-eater and blasted it twice in the forehead.

BLAM-BLAM!

“FUCK!!!” Purnell screamed as the body fell away. He grabbed the radio mic and hit the button. “They’re coming in through the floor of the car!”

Another flesh-eater popped its head up through the floorboard, and Purnell shot that one in the head, too, and then returned to the radio.

“You hearing me over there?” Purnell cried as he looked back towards the paddy wagon in the rearview. “They must have been testing every part of the car until they found a weak spot.”

As the squad car rocked back and forth, Purnell looked back and saw that the flesh-eaters were shaking the paddy wagon as well, the van tilting like a jetty in rough seas.

“I think they’re getting under us over here, too!” cried Charlie over the radio, his voice sounding dangerous, like he was losing it. Purnell could hear a familiar
tink-tink-tink
in the background and then Charlie screamed, “Shit – they’re coming up!”

This sound was followed by a couple of gunshots before Charlie took his finger off the button. Purnell looked back towards the paddy wagon and watched as Charlie fired it up and slammed on the gas out of panic.

“Oh, crap!” Purnell cried, trying to turn on his own car, but it was too late.

CRUNCH!!!

The paddy wagon
slammed
into the back of the patrol car, decapitating a flesh-eater just as it was lunging at Paul, the torn floorboard flying forward just under its chin at the right angle.

“Shit!” Purnell yelled again as he smacked into the steering wheel.

In the back, Bones watched as hands viciously tore at the back seat floorboard. The smell of leaking oil and gasoline heavy in the air, a flesh-eater’s face appeared, and Bones instinctively launched himself at it, locking his jaws at either temple and working to tear the head clean off the body.

In the front seat, Purnell tried to get the patrol car to start, but too many of its vitals were now lying on the highway. Cursing, he grabbed the radio, but then saw in the rearview mirror that Charlie was still dazed from bashing his head into the steering wheel after plowing the wagon into the rear of the squad car.

“Charlie – get it together!” Purnell roared. “Come on, man! They’re just waiting for us to give ’em an opening!”

But as Purnell watched, something yanked Charlie out of his daze and he looked down, as if realizing there was something below him. Charlie and the officer in the passenger-side seat snapped into action and began fighting against the unseen assailants. Purnell even saw a couple of muzzle flashes before both men were yanked below the dashboard and disappeared under the car. Seconds later, he saw the flesh-eaters carting Charlie’s body away from the paddy wagon, literally tearing him apart as they walked.

“Aw, man, Charlie,” Purnell exclaimed, disgusted at what he realized might soon be his own fate. He turned back to Bones, who continued lunging at any flesh-eater that popped through the back floorboards, his teeth bared.

“I’m sorry, Bones, but I don’t think we’re going to get out of this one,” Purnell said, unlocking the shotgun from its rack and sliding it down off the muzzle plug. “If you see an opening, take it, buddy.”

He loaded the shotgun and aimed it at the passenger-side floorboard as flesh-eaters tried to squirm up into the hole but only got in each other’s way. When the larger of the two forced the other aside and popped up, Purnell took satisfaction in rewarding it by blasting its head to pieces.

For Charlie
, he thought.

But then he began to feel movement under his own feet, fingers rapping, drumming, and scratching at the metal plates, looking for any edge to get a finger-hold on. Purnell quickly lifted his feet from the floor and scrambled up on his seat, aiming the shotgun straight down between his legs.

“C’mon, you fuckers,” Purnell said, training the barrel of the gun directly at the sound but knowing one blast wouldn’t do much good.

Suddenly, a flesh-eater launched itself up from the hole in the passenger side and managed to grab Purnell’s foot, yanking him to the side with great force, which smashed the back of Purnell’s head into the driver’s-side window. Stunned, he wheeled the shotgun around and fired in a panic.

BLAM!!

But at the last moment, the flesh-eater had jerked Purnell’s leg to the side, trying to get a better grip to drag him under. This had the effect of pulling his leg directly into the shot pattern as it left the barrel, the blast instantly shredding his boot, pant leg, and flesh, all the way to the bone.