by Kat Parrish
“This is why people don’t trust cops,” he’d say earnestly.
People don’t trust cops because they shoot first and ask questions later, I always thought, but after I’d said that a few times, I gave up.
My phone buzzed before I could ask for more details.
I looked at the screen. Kaz.
“My sister,” I said and answered the call.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Rose,” she said, sounding panicked.
“What’s wrong?”
“there’s a riot. There’s all these people and they’re attacking all these other people.”
“Where are you?”
“Rose, they’re chewing off people’s faces!!!”
“Kaz, where are you?”
“I’m on Buena Vista. The corner of Buena Vista and Alameda.”
I wondered what she was doing there; the only buildings on that block are a movie studio and St. Joseph hospital. But then I remembered she’d told me Lyle had a meeting with some studio exec about some project.
“Are you sure they’re not shooting a movie?” I said, even though I knew it would annoy her.
“They are not shooting a movie,” she said, her voice going up an octave. “They’re eating people.”
“Are you in your car?”
“Yes,” she said, breathless.
“Lock the doors,” I said. “I’m coming to get you.”
“Don’t hang—”
But I already had.
Buena Vista was right around the corner and we still had half an hour of our lunch break left.
“We’ve gotta go,” I said, and bless him, Emmet pushed back from the table and signaled for the check.
He was signing the credit card slip when his own phone beeped. He looked at it.
“We gotta go,” he echoed. “Something’s going on at St. Joe’s.”
That was the hospital on Buena Vista.
Oh. No.
By the time we got to the corner, the entire block was jammed with screaming people and honking cars. It wasn’t clear who was doing what, only that there was a lot of blood. A lot.
Panicked men and women were streaming out of the hospital and trying to battle their way through the gate of the movie studio across the street as the security guards desperately tried to hold them back.
Our radio was going crazy as dispatch tried to keep up with calls.
I could hear the sirens coming from every direction, saw fire engines and paramedic squad trucks trying to find a path through the people.
Overhead military copters buzzed, keeping the news copters and the police choppers from closing in.
There seemed to be two different groups battling it out on the street.
Predators and prey, I thought as I saw one man stalking another and pouncing. Just as Kaz had said, he started chewing on the guy’s face.
Oh shit.
“Emmet,” I yelled as a bloodied hand reached in through the open window to grab at him. Emmet knocked the guy back and slammed him with the car door.
“Find your sister,” Emmet said as he got out of the car, “and get her out of here.”
“Get back in the car Emmet.”
But he had already waded into the fray, wielding his tactical baton like a Jedi master.
I looked around and saw Kaz’s car where she said she’d be. Thank God she was right on the corner so there weren’t any other vehicles blocking her in.
I got to the car and looked in the window.
She was huddled into the passenger seat with the steering wheel club clutched in her hands like a weapon.
Good girl.
I banged on the car window. She jumped, then opened the door and slid in.
“Keys?” I said.
“Lyle’s got them,” she said.
“He’ll be out any minute. Kaz pointed to the studio gate, now about five feet deep in rioters.
“Nobody’s coming out of that gate any time soon,” I said, fishing my own keys out of my purse and thanking the universe that Kaz had given me a spare. It’s not that easy to hotwire a care manufactured after 1990 and one of the ways involves popping the hood and fooling around underneath. There was no way I was getting out of the car.
I turned the key.
“We can’t leave Lyle here,” she said.
“He’s safer inside than we are here,” I said. “And we can’t stay.”
I started backing out and nearly got rear-ended.
“Where are we going?”
“My place,” I said. I planned to stash my sister in my apartment and then come back and see what I could do to help contain the situation.
“What about Lyle?”
God, Kaz could be like a little kid when she was fixated on an idea.
“He’s inside a fence with guards at the choke points,” I said. “There are turnstiles. Whatever’s going on he’s safer hunkering down. There’s a cafeteria and bathrooms at the studio. He’ll be safe for the time being.”
I guess that sounded reasonable enough to her that she didn’t offer any more objections.
I wondered what kind of supplies I had at my apartment.
I keep an earthquake kit in the spare bedroom with jugs of water I rotate regularly and stacks of cereal bars. I also have my off-duty gun and rounds of ammunition.
All the essentials.
As I drove, Kaz stayed slouched in the passenger seat, pulling her hoodie around her like a security blanket.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly. I was sitting in the car waiting for Lyle and suddenly I saw a bunch of people running out of the hospital.”
“Patients? Doctors?”
“Everybody,” she said. “I saw one guy pushing a gurney with someone strapped to it.”
“Sounds like a bomb scare or something.”
“No,” she said, and she sounded kind of strangled.
“The people that were running? They were being chased.”
I heard the thwap-thwap-thwap of a helicopter overhead, moving fast. It had an unfamiliar shape and I realized it was military. A gunship.
They’ve called out the National Guard?
My phone rang. Kaz grabbed it. “It’s Emmet.”
“Put it on speaker,” I said.
“Rose?”
“Talk to me, Emmet.”
I could hear screams in the background.
“They’re telling us to pull back,” he yelled.
“Who?”
“Stay away,” he said. “Call the station.”
And then I heard another sound, closer than the screams. A bestial kind of grunt.
“Fuck,” Emmet said, and the phone went dead.
“Emmet. Emmet.”
I looked at Kaz. Her eyes looked twice as big as normal.
“Call my number at work.”
Someone whose voice I didn’t recognize picked up the phone and whoever it was sounded panicked.
“I can’t talk right now,” he said, as if I’d called to chat.
“Who is this?” said another voice coming on to the line.
“Who is this?” I said.
Instead of answering my question, the guy on the other line must have fed my phone number into our database because the next thing he said was, “Detective Zelnick?”
When he said “detective,” I recognized the voice of the black-clad stranger who’d been going through my locker.
I felt a chill go down my spine.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“The situation is being contained,” he said.
No it is not, whoever the hell you are.
“You’re misinformed,” I said. “There are crazies running amuck on the streets of Burbank like a bunch of zom—”
I stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly struck by a horrible thought. People walking around when they were supposed to be dead. Why did that scenario seem so familiar?
Oh God.
“Like a bunch of what De
tective?”
I hung up.
“Like a bunch of what Rose?” Kaz asked me.
Chapter Three
“Did you call dad?” I asked instead of answering her. Because I really didn’t want to finish the sentence I’d started. Because if I did, it would make it real and I was really not ready for zombies to be real.
“I called him before I called you. He didn’t pick up.”
“It’s the middle of the day. He’s probably taking a nap.”
A nap is what we called it when he got drunk in the middle of the day and zoned out in front of the television.
“We should go there.”
“No,” I said. “We need to get some more information.”
She was trying to connect to some news. but the connection kept dropping. I turned on the radio. Of course, all her pre-sets were to music.
“Find some news,” I said.
“I don’t know the stations,” she said.
“Just push buttons until you get some news.”
But by the time we got something that wasn’t static, we were at my apartment building. The parking area was open, which I didn’t like, but our entry was gated.
We got inside and up to my apartment, which faces west and is directly over the 134 freeway.
I could see traffic backing up in a way you don’t usually see unless it’s a holiday.
I kept dialing and redialing my office. Each time I got the “All circuits are busy, please try again” message. And then the television screen filled with a “Special report” logo, a scene that always made my stomach clench.
There’d been what they were calling a terrorist incident at the hospital.
Scores were dead in the emergency room.
When I heard those words I went cold.
Kaz turned to look at me but I was already dialing a number from memory.
My ex was an emergency room physician at St. Joseph’s.
The call went to voice mail.
“David, it’s Rose. Are you all right? Give me a call.”
I thought about calling Cilla, my replacement, but hesitated.
“Should I call Cilla?” I asked Kaz.
“You have her number?” she asked.
Oh, I have her number, I thought, and then I realized it was neither the time nor the place to revisit my many, many grievances against Cilla Bachman.
I found her number in my contacts list and sent her a brief text.
I didn’t really expect an answer but five seconds later, she called me back, sounding breathless.
“Rose, David isn’t answering. And they’re saying there was a terrorist incident in the emergency room.”
“Calm down,” I said, which is the one phrase that is absolutely guaranteed to escalate an incident.
“Don’t you tell me to calm down,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I can’t get in touch with my dad and my sister’s boyfriend is trapped and I don’t know what the hell’s going on. Are you somewhere safe?”
“I don’t know,”’ she said. “I’m at home.’
Home. That would be the cute little house in Toluca Lake I’d helped David buy with the money I inherited when my mother died. It was fifteen minutes from where the rioting was going on and who knew how safe it would be.
The house had had a security system but no fence.
She was safer in the house.
Unless…
“Are Tim and Julie home?” I asked. I knew their next-door neighbor had a gun.
“No,” she said.
“Is Mukluk in the yard?”
Mukluk was the neighbors’ husky, because who wouldn’t own a dog with a double coat in a place where the temperature hits triple digits on a regular basis?
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, good. The dog’lll go nuts if anyone gets too near the house.”
That was an understatement. Mukluk had separation anxiety and there were times he barked all the damn day while they were at work.
“Rose?”
“Did you set the alarm?”
“Yes.”
Okay, that was good. I tried to think of other ways Cilla could secure the house.
“Is the big wooden bookcase still in the bedroom off the laundry room?”
“Yes,” she said, sounding a bit annoyed that I was so familiar with the layout of her house and its furnishings.
“Pull it into the laundry room and block the door to the yard.”
“What about the windows?”
“they’re small enough it’ll be hard for someone to crawl through them unless they’re really skinny.”
“What about the other windows?” she asked, and I didn’t know what to tell her. The house had a zillion windows to let in the light. It was one of the reasons I’d loved it so much.
“The most vulnerable window is the one in the dining room,” I said, “the one that faces the porch.”
That window ran almost the whole length of the house and anyone who wanted to could just break it and step inside.
“turn the dining room table on its side and put it against the glass. And then push the credenza up against the dining room table.”
“It’s really heavy,” she said.
“Mothers can pick up cars to save their babies,” I said, trying not to sound too nasty. “You can do this Cilla.”
There was a brief silence and I wondered if she’d hung up on me.
“I’m scared Rose,” she said.
“Me, too,” I said. “Fear will give you the adrenaline you need to get your home secured. I’m going to hang up now.”
“No,” she said.
“I have to. Keep watching TV, see if you can get some more news.”
“Should I call the cops about David?”
“I don’t think you can get through. I’m dialing my own number and I can’t get through.”
“Will you tell me if you hear anything?” she asked, and this time I could hear the tears in her voice.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry, I really have to go.”
And then I hung up without saying goodbye.
Kaz gave me a look.
“What?”
“What’s the range on your car?” I asked.
“Battery only? A hundred and ten miles.”
“If the grid goes down you won’t be able to charge it.”
“Dad keeps gas cans.”
“I know. I think you should head out that way.”
“Me? Where are you going to be?”
“I’m going back to the station, see what’s going on. If this is a 9/11 situation, it’s going to be all hands on deck.”
She looked torn.
“Whatever’s going on, you’ll be safer there. And as soon as I can, I’ll come too.”
Dad wasn’t a prepper, exactly, but he was paranoid about civil disorder breaking out. He’d been a young beat cop during the L.A. riots of 1992 and seeing the disorder up close had scarred him. I was just four years old and my parents had lived on Corning, which was close enough to see and feel the smoke. Ever since then he’d kept a “go bag” packed and supplies to last in case something happened.
He had a generator.
He had floodlights.
He had MREs.
The house in Reseda was defensible space, my apartment wasn’t.
I have to get Dori,” Kaz said.
I’d forgotten all about Dori.
I tensed. Kaz and Lyle lived in an apartment in North Hollywood that was right on Riverside, just down from Burbank. I didn’t like the idea at all, but she couldn’t leave the cat behind if something bad was going on.
“Don’t dawdle,” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I expected Kaz to give me some “you are not the boss of me” shit but instead she said, “Be careful.”
“You too.”
Chapter Four
I was just about to leave when Emmet called to tell me he was okay and that it lo
oked like things were getting under control in Burbank. “National Guard is here,” he said, “and some guys from the CDC.”
“They sent doctors to the scene?”
“Yeah.” His already raspy voice dropped an octave. “Not on an open line, kid.”
I sighed.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said.
“Nobody knows you were ever gone,” he said and hung up before I could thank him.
I hadn’t really thought about how many rules I’d broken by leaving the scene to take care of my sister. I didn’t really want to think about how many kinds of trouble I was in. but I knew Emmet would understand.
I wasn’t sure my dad would.
I had been keeping up a front for Kaz, but it really bothered me that we didn’t know where he was.
When I got to the station I could see why no one had noticed I wasn’t there. News vans were parked three deep and citizens were pressing up against the doors. A makeshift podium had been set up and the chief and a guy in black fatigues were answering questions in the vaguest possible terms. I pulled out my badge and slung it around my neck and walked through a cordon of cops who were there to keep the public back.
I found Emmet sitting at his desk. “What did I miss?”
“Remember those bath salt cases?” he asked.
I must have looked confused. “Not the girlie kind of bath salts that make you smell good,” he clarified, “the synthetic drug that makes you crazy.”
I shook my head. “Before my time.”
“Okay,” he said. “So, six, seven years ago a guy in Miami attacked a homeless man and chewed off half his face.”
“Eeuw,” I said, which really isn’t the response of a trained police officer, but it had been kind of a day.
“Yeah, so they called him the ‘Causeway Cannibal’ and the ‘Miami Zombie.’ It was a big thing for a while.”