by Skylar Finn
Ailani checked their hand-drawn map, though she’d practically memorized the route they’d agreed upon already. “Yup. I’m right behind you.”
Walt wore the heavier duffel bag while Ailani carried the backpack. If this weren’t the end of the modern world, the two of them could pass for travelers, the kind of people like Sage and her boyfriend, who lived out of a van and could fit all of their belongings on their backs. Ailani wished that were the case. She envisioned Walt emptying a septic tank from a camper van and laughed out loud.
“What?” Walt asked.
“Nothing,” she said, snickering.
He turned around and walked backward. “Keep it down. We don’t want to wake anyone.”
Most of the other squatters were asleep, but those who stirred as the duo passed stared curiously at what they carried. Thankfully, no one bothered them. It was a miracle, but the amount of drug paraphernalia littered in the streets around the studio explained the passivity of those around them. For whatever reason, this area had attracted the type of person who was perfectly content to watch the apocalypse pass them by as long as they were too stoned to know what was happening.
“Where do they get the stuff?” Ailani muttered, carefully stepping over a used syringe.
“It’s best not to ask,” Walt answered.
They made slow but steady progress. For the most part, they were able to stick to the route they had outlined on the map. They took a detour through a back alley to avoid one particularly bad car accident. The road wasn’t blocked, but neither Ailani nor Walt had the desire to lay their gaze upon the destruction. Unfortunately, the other streets weren’t much better, and Walt kept stopping to search the cars for anything they might find useful. He collected unstained clothing, two reusable water bottles made out of hardy metal, and even a box of ammo that Walt said would fit the pistol he carried. Best of all, they found a real road map of L.A. so that they could cast aside their hand-drawn, inaccurate one.
Walt sat on the hood of a car with the map in hand, scribbling calculations in the Pacific Ocean and muttering under his breath. Ailani’s impatience caused her to drift like an uprooted buoy, but each time she ventured too far from Walt, she jogged back to him, scared to be alone.
“Well?” she prompted for the tenth or so time. “What’s the verdict?”
“I haven’t done math in, like, ten years,” Walt admitted. “But if I calculated our speed and the mileage correctly base on the amount of ground we’ve covered already, it’s going to take us another fifteen hours to walk to LAX.”
“Fifteen hours?” Ailani groaned. “That’s forever!”
“It’s less than a day,” Walt said. “And you knew this was going to take some time.”
“It’s a thirty-minute drive usually!”
Walt hopped off the hood and peered inside the car through the broken driver’s window. “We could hotwire a car.”
“And go where?” She flung her arms out, indicating the blocked roads. “We wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with all these other cars in the way.”
“Then stop complaining.”
She looked sharply at him. “What?”
“You heard me,” he said. “Stop bitching. This was your idea. You want to find your sister or not?”
“Why are you being mean to me?”
Walt folded the map, careful to get all the creases in the paper to lie just right. “I’m not trying to be, but we can either stand here and fuss about the trip ahead of us, or we can keep going. I’ve been on longer hikes. We can do this. It’s going to suck, but I’m here for you.”
Ailani took a deep breath. She had been on long hikes too, back when she lived on Kauai. “My mom used to hike. She loved it. I did too.”
Walt took a few steps in the direction of LAX, waiting for Ailani to follow him. She did. “What was your favorite part about hiking?”
“The waterfalls,” she answered. “On Kauai, there was always a waterfall at the end of a hike.”
“I want to see that.”
She caught up to him and linked their arms together. “Maybe you will. If we get through this, I’ll take you home.”
He smiled down at her, the stars twinkling in his eyes. “I would like that.”
They carried on, eventually reaching the highway, where it was easier to navigate. Not many people had been on the main road when the EMP hit, leaving a decent amount of space between cars. Walt checked a few of the older-looking cars, hoping to find one they could hot wire and use to speed up their trip. It was no use. The people with working cars had taken theirs home. All that was left were vehicles with electrical components that had been fried by the blast.
After a few hours, Ailani’s feet began to ache. She ignored it and plowed onward. Walt, consulting the map, led the way. She followed him without question, putting her faith in his homegrown navigation abilities. Her mind wandered to Keiko. She kept picturing her little sister on a 737 as the EMP blast rocked the sky and took out all of the things that kept the plane in the air. She thought about oxygen masks dropping, the passengers screaming, and the flight attendants doing everything possible as the pilot shouted mayday to the closest control tower. When the imagery got to be too much, Ailani shut her eyes as tightly as possible, forcing herself to look at the floaters inside her eyelids instead of the tragedy her brain had come up with. It helped for a few minutes, but she always replayed the scenario in her head again.
Near dawn, as the sky started lightening from navy to a lighter purple, Walt stopped suddenly. Ailani crashed into him, lost her footing, and fell backward as the weight of her backpack pulled her off balance. She landed with a crunch.
“Damn!” she shrugged off the pack and checked the inside. “I crushed the chips. Give me a little warning next time, won’t you? Your brake lights are out.”
“Shh.”
“Did you just shush me?”
She’d been shoving everything around in the backpack, trying to see what else might have gotten damaged, but when she finally noticed Walt had gone as still as a rock, she paused in her efforts.
“What is it?” she whispered, taking his cue at last.
He nodded across the highway.
A few cars over, maybe a hundred feet from Ailani and Walt, was a group of three wolves. Real, live wolves. They had been feeding off something in one of the cars, a body probably, but Ailani didn’t want to acknowledge that. The wolves had noticed the duo before the duo had noticed them. Each one stood with its front paws at shoulder width, hackles raised, and teeth bared.
“What do we do?” Ailani asked in a hushed voice.
“Stay calm,” Walt ordered. “Stand tall. Keep eye contact. Make yourself seem like the bigger threat. Whatever you do, don’t r—”
Ailani took off without warning, sprinting perpendicular to the wolves. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her quads shook with the end of each long stride. She had no intention of sticking around to let a small pack of wolves devour her whole. Besides, she had a plan.
“Ailani!”
Walt charged after her, and the wolves rapidly took chase. They barked and growled, gaining on Walt as he caught up with Ailani. He took an abrupt turn and hurdled over the hoods of two cars that had hit each other head-on, forcing the wolves to slow down and find another path. Ailani’s breath burned in her lungs. Up ahead, a safe place loomed.
“The camper!” she yelled at Walt. “Head for the camper!”
Not far from their position was a camper van that looked exactly like the one Sage and her boyfriend had stayed in by Trip’s beach. If they could get inside, they would have a safe place to wait until the wolves lost interest.
The wolves, unfortunately, weren’t going to let a potential meal get off so easy. They picked up their pace and closed in around Walt and Ailani, one on the left, one on the right, and one directly behind them. They herded Walt and Ailani through the maze of frozen cars, getting closer with every additional step.
Walt, his legs longer and his st
ride wider, pulled ahead of Ailani. He leapt up to the door of the camper van and yanked on the handle. It was locked, so he sent his fist through the window and climbed through the opening.
Ailani gasped for air as he disappeared into the camper. She was almost there, but the wolves were too close. One nipped at her heel, and she stumbled a foot away from the camper. Walt kicked the door open at the last second and grabbed her hand before she fell, but not in time to prevent the lead wolf from sinking its teeth in Ailani’s calf.
Walt doubled his grip on Ailani’s arm and aimed a kick at the wolf’s head. It let of Ailani’s leg and retreated, barking all the while. Walt heaved Ailani into the camper and slammed the door shut in the wolves’ faces. When he turned around to face her, his eyes were filled with anger. She had never seen him like this before.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why would you run?”
She was speechless, rendered mute by the low rumble of rage in Walt’s tone.
“Why?” he yelled again.
Ailani passed out.
The world came into focus slowly as Ailani opened her eyes again. She was lying on the camper’s sofa. Walt had wrapped the bite on her calf with gauze and propped her leg up on several pillows. She experimentally flexed her foot and winced when it stretched the gashes in her skin.
“It’s deep,” Walt said. She hadn’t noticed he was sitting in the reclined driver’s seat behind her, watching as she slept. “But he didn’t get the muscle. That’s lucky.”
The sun was up, shining through the front windshield of the camper. Ailani shielded her eyes to look at Walt. He had calmed down, but his eyelids drooped from exhaustion that wasn’t just physical.
“I saw the camper,” she said. “That’s why I ran. I thought if we could reach the camper, we would be safe. I didn’t know they could move so fast.”
He gazed at her with his heavy eyelids. “You should have trusted me.”
“I didn’t know—”
He sighed and turned around to face the wheel instead. “They’re wild animals, Ailani. They’re naturally scared of humans. If you had listened to me and stayed calm, I could have made them run away. That’s not the first time I’ve come face to face with dangerous wild animals.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t try to apologize,” he said. “Not right now at least. I get it. You were scared. Fight or flight kicked in, and you chose flight. But you didn’t trust me, and now you have a freakin’ wolf bite in your leg. What if that thing had rabies?”
Ailani groaned as she pulled her leg in to inspect Walt’s bandages. “Let’s hope it didn’t.”
“I used a bunch of those non-stick pads and all of the gauze to wrap that,” Walt said. “That means we have little to no first aid supplies to keep both our wounds clean. If you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t be in this position.”
“I get it,” Ailani snapped. “I made a dumb decision. Sorry for not knowing how to escape an angry pack of wolves.”
Walt let her stew in silence for a few minutes. He tapped his fingers without rhythm against the steering wheel. “I’m not trying to scold you. I know you did what you thought was best, but we can’t make mistakes out here. Mistakes mean injury or death now. That’s our reality.”
She rolled over and pulled a blanket over her head to block out Walt’s voice. No matter what he said, she felt like a child being admonished for doing something wrong. Her face flushed under the covers, and she wondered if it was out of embarrassment or a reaction to wolf toxins in her body. The thought was unreasonable. Symptoms of rabies or anything else wouldn’t happen so fast.
“They’re gone, by the way,” Walt went on. He didn’t care that she was trying to hide from him in a camper that had less space than the kitchen in their own apartment. “The wolves. They lost interest pretty quickly and disappeared. We should be good to keep going. It’s only another hour or two to LAX.”
Though she desperately wanted to stay in the camper and fall asleep for several hours, the mention of LAX jolted her to her sense. Keiko. She was the reason they were on this escapade to begin with. The longer Ailani dawdled, the longer it would be until she discovered if Keiko was alive or dead. They had to keep going.
She flung the blanket off her face and swung her legs off the couch to plant her feet firmly on the floor. For the first time, she got a good look at the inside of the camper. It was homey and perfect, outfitted for a life on the road, not an occasional camping trip here or there. It had a shower, a composting toilet, and even an oven. A huge silver water filter sat atop the counter in the “kitchen.”
“It’s got a few gallons in it,” Walt said when he saw her staring at it. “Lucky for us. We can refill all our water bottles.”
“That’s not it.” She got up, careful not to put too much weight on her wounded leg, and wandered over to the water filter. “Sage, the girl I used to surf with, said their camper had something like this. I wonder—”
She stopped short as the sight of a picture pinned to a cabinet. She picked it up, studying the faces of the couple featured in the photo.
“It’s them,” she murmured. “It’s Sage and her boyfriend.”
Walt got up and looked at the picture over her shoulder. “The camper was working while they stayed at the beach?”
“Yeah. That’s where they were staying.” She put the picture back and rubbed her eyes. She wanted to cry, but she was too tired to make tears. “I wonder what happened to them.”
“Well, the camper doesn’t work now,” Walt said, his lips turning down in a frown. “The keys were in the engine and everything. It moans and groans but won’t go anywhere.”
“They broke down?”
“Or someone sabotaged them,” Walt said.
Ailani set too much weight on her bad leg. The wolf bite throbbed. “I thought they’d be okay. Out of everyone, I thought they were most prepared.”
Walt hugged her to his chest. “I’m not sure anyone was prepared for this.”
11
There was no time to let Ailani’s leg heal. They ate, drank, and refilled their bottles from the filter. They cleaned themselves with the water they couldn’t carry and searched the camper for anything else they could use. Sage and her boyfriend didn’t have much left, but Walt found some tin camping bowls and a fire-starting kit that might come in handy later if they couldn’t find another place to hunker down.
The sun was hot overhead, and Ailani was slow on her feet. With every step, she felt the hole in her calf where the wolf had sunk its teeth in. The wound had started to scab over that morning, but it couldn’t heal when her movement kept forcing it open. Blood seeped through the gauze, dribbling down her leg and staining her sock. She limped on, ignoring the sticky mess in her shoe.
Walt used Ailani’s decrepit pace to keep checking cars. He peered in windows as he passed. If there was nothing interesting at first sight, he kept moving. If the car contained a horror—like a dead body—he quickly averted his gaze. Twice, he reached through a broken window to take something. The first time, he found more gun ammo, but it wasn’t appropriate for the handgun, so he left it. The second time, he pulled a cane from a backseat and handed it to Ailani.
“Use it,” he ordered, propping the cane under her hand. “You should keep the weight off that leg.”
Feeling silly at first, Ailani leaned on the cane to take her next step. It was much easier to walk without the searing pain in her leg. The pain faded to a dull ache, but as she passed the car Walt had retrieved the cane from, her heart dropped. An elderly man was slumped over in the driver’s seat, his eyes closed and jaw slack, almost as if he had fallen asleep at the wheel. Ailani’s face fell. The EMP spared no one.
“Thank you,” she muttered, though the man couldn’t hear her. Walt took her free hand and led her on. Together, they left the man behind.
The predicted two hours to LAX turned into four on account of Ailani’s injury. At long last, they saw signs of the airport in the distance, the firs
t of which was a crashed plane, its burnt and smashed pieces scattered for miles across the road. A fist tightened around Ailani’s lungs as they approached it.
“Different airline,” Walt said upon spotting a piece of the fuselage that sported the unmistakable colors of a Spirit aircraft. “It’s not Keiko’s plane.”
Ailani’s relief only lasted a few seconds. As she scanned the horizon, she spotted several piles of debris and plumes of smoke, no doubt the remains of other crashes.
“I wonder how many people died,” she murmured. “How many planes dropped out of the air that day?”
Walt tugged her along, drawing her away from the wreckage. “Let’s not think about it until after we find Keiko.”
They continued on until they reached the main entrance to LAX. The famous sign had been knocked over, though it was unclear if something catastrophic had happened to it or if a group of determined vandals had toppled the enormous letters. As they neared the terminal, another challenge appeared. The airport was surrounded by caution tape and orange barricades. A group of determined firefighters from the nearby department paced the buildings. The terminals had taken several hits from the falling aircraft. Some of them were still smoldering, the fires not quite burned out yet. The firemen had no trucks or equipment other than their suits and matching expressions of exhaustion.
As Ailani and Walt approached a set of sliding doors that had been propped open, a man in heavy gear stepped into their path.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked in a gruff voice. He was a big guy to begin with, at least two feet taller than Walt and twice as large. Half of his face was covered by his helmet and the collar of his protective jacket, making him all the more intimidating. “The airport is off limits to civilians. Get out of here.”
Ailani stood her ground. “My sister is here,” she said. “Her flight was coming in when the EMP hit. I want to check—”
“If her flight was coming in when the blast hit, she’s dead,” the firefighter said without regard for the cruelty of this statement. “There were a ton of fatalities. We came out and did triage the best we could, but without emergency vehicles, we couldn’t get anyone to the hospital. There weren’t many survivors.”