Bones: The Complete Apocalypse Trilogy by Mark Wheaton

Author:Mark Wheaton [Wheaton, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Lang:en
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2012-04-25T15:19:55+00:00

Bones’s eyes were the weakest part of him. It wasn’t the fact that he was in his eighth year and they were hardly as sharp as they’d once been but more that his nose and ears were just that much better. This meant that he’d learned to over-rely on them, so the darkness of the hotel did little to halt his advance. He listened as he stepped and, more importantly, continued to inhale the cornucopia of scents wafting through the lobby.

The floor had been marble but was now jagged and broken due to the falling ceiling. Bones stayed away from the holes. The floor was more unstable around the cracks, even though it was through them that the smells of the dead wafted up. Bones could tell that despite the building having survived mostly intact, there were still several corpses both in the floors above but also below.

Amidst all this and combed through with the now-familiar stench of pulverized concrete and rotting food, Bones could also detect the scent of the living, and there almost as many of them throughout the building as there were dead. However, they weren’t making their presences known yet.

“If he’s anything like the dogs we used in Gaza,” one of the commandos, a man named Zamarin, began, “he’s going to be responding to the living first, then the dead. Not sure why it works that way, but it seems to be how they’re trained.”

Bones didn’t hear this. His attention had turned to a broken door leading to fire stairs. He poked his head in, took a couple of deep sniffs, and proceeded inside. The stairwell was completely intact, with no real sign of earthquake damage on the first couple of floors. Bones ascended the steps with ease, only vaguely aware that he was doing so in abject darkness.

“Lights,” Paul said, turning on the rail-mounted tactical light attached to his MP5. The other commandos did the same, except for the weaponless Sharon. She looked at the stairs but then back at Paul, a querulous expression on her face.

“What is it?”

“If the stairs are so easily accessible, why would anyone still be up there? Don’t you think the fear of a second quake would empty the place?”

“If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t underestimate the stupidity of people under duress,” Paul replied before turning to head the steps. “We’d need to sweep these rooms anyway. No one’s coming out of the woodwork to welcome us. Wherever they are, we’re going to them.”

Bones kept moving until he’d reached the eighth floor. He smelled living things on the other side of the door but also a heavy acrid stench like phosphorus or nitrogen. Bones tried to get through the door, but it was shut tight and he had to wait for the humans.

“The dog has stopped on eight,” Zamarin, currently in the point position, called back down to the team. Paul and the other commandos hurried up the steps as Bones whined at the closed door.

“Pull him back,” Paul ordered Nashon who quickly took Bones’s leash and moved him away.

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