by Rod Rayborne
The sun was closing down the day, bright streamers of ethereal clouds merging with the smoke to throw unearthly pastels across the buildings around him. The weird flashes of multi-hued lightening had all but ceased the day before. Except for the sounds of his shoes crisping over the debris and Rabbit's gentle snoring, the world was hushed.
At one point, far in the distance he heard something metallic fall. Impossible to hear at this distance days before, the sound easily carried across several miles of intervening city now. A light fixture perhaps or a length of rain gutter finally released from its nailed moorings when a fire burned through the last bit of fascia board holding it aloft.
A brief gust of cool wind wrapped itself over them. Rabbit shifted slightly, a small intake of air all that indicated that she had felt the now unnatural drop in temperature. Hershel looked up, wondering if the rain from the day before was going to make another unexpected showing. But a wave of heat slid over them again and he knew the zephyr was a fluke. Perhaps one never to be repeated again, he thought sadly.
He supposed that they had about an hour until sunset. He wasn't sure as the light was filtered through layers of thinning smoke, making a single broad stroke of bright yellow paint, from his vantage point, several inches above the sea. He wanted to find a place where they could get a good night's sleep. He turned down a street lined with tall, leafless trees.
The neighborhood he found himself in had been an obviously wealthy one. Small mansions squatted close to one another, each guarded by high walls of thick wrought iron or brickwork. Tall, dead ferns, browned ficus and ivy reinforced the look of excess.
Glass still remained in some of the windows, bullet proof panes purchased by nervous home owners eager to protect the things they thought most valuable in their worlds, teak desks, zebra skin covered couches, crystal chandeliers, organic rope carpets, bronze nudes, grandfather clocks. And free-standing, two inch thick safes hiding cash, gold coins, diamond studded Rolex watches and property deeds. Less important family photos lay about inside bureau drawers or hanging crooked on stingy nails.
Hershel approached a house, less damaged than others he had seen and pushed against the gate. It swung open slowly, it's weight resisting his efforts. It creaked as he supposed it might, reminding him of an old TV show he had enjoyed back in the day, The Munsters. He climbed a short rock staircase and stood before the front door, listening. It was a large affair, planks of heavy oak and iron hinges, arched on top.
No sound met his ears and he pushed against the wood. It swung open slowly. Unlocked. It was darker inside but still navigable. He wound around scattered belongings and climbed the rounded staircase.
At the top, he stood and looked back the way he had come. The building was surprisingly free of odor. He'd chanced on an empty home. Empty of bodies, that it. He supposed the owners had heard something was going down and beat a hasty retreat, hardly bothering to shut the door behind them.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he walked to a large door and pushed it open. A king sized bed stood in the middle of the room, freshly made. He imagined the fastidious homeowner making the bed for the last time while her panicky husband, Samsonite suitcases under both arms, shouted at her from the open downstairs doorway. Get a move on!
Hershel turned from there and walked across the hall to another room. Looking inside, he saw two smaller beds. A kid's room, he guessed. A wall full of posters with pop idols assured him he was right. He pulled back the blankets on one of the beds and gently laid Rabbit down. He pulled a thin sheet over her and noticed that she was awake, watching him.
"Are you ok, bunny?"
She stared at him reproachfully. Then she reached out for his hand and pulled it to her.
"Now I'll just be right there in that room. I promise your safe. First thing in the morning well get us some breakfast anywhere you want and see the ocean. Does that sound good?"
He began to stand but Rabbit held onto his hand.
"Rabbit, you need to get some sleep. I'm tired too. It'll be tomorrow before you know it. I promise. You gotta turn me loose though."
Reluctantly she released his hand and he patted her head gently.
"Goodnight now little bunny. I'll see you tomorrow."
Hershel stood and walked to the door. He looked back and saw the girl holding her eyes tightly shut. Smiling, he walked out leaving the door open. In the larger room he dropped onto the bed, listening to it groan under his weight.
He laid there thinking about his walk to the east, wondering what the rest of the country would be like, if he could survive such a journey alone. Just how strange things could get. Consciousness faded peacefully and he was soon asleep.
Chapter Forty Eight
D
erek stood, shovel in hand, to stretch his back. He had been topping off the wheel barrel from the refuse pile behind the house for the last two hours and it still looked like he'd hardly made a dent in it. Each barrel full he rolled to the side of a narrow ravine a hundred yards away, lifted the handles and watched the sun marinated goo tumble into the abyss.
Minutes later he was back with another barrel full. He didn't know how long the pile had been building up but from the size of it, he guessed a very long time. Pops explained to him that trash service on the mile long stretch of dirt road above the cliffs had been suspended indefinitely over a decade before. For a while, he had loaded everything into the back of his pickup and trucked it himself to the dump but as he got older, he found it to be too much effort for his increasingly frail body. That's when the mountain began.
When Derek and Suzy came by, the stench was to their young noses, overpowering. Pops, they decided, had either grown used to the smell or had lost the ability to smell at all. Missing though was the flies that Pops assured them once swarmed on the mountain in their millions before the Blow. So many, he said, that when they settled on the windows to rest on that side of the house, the kitchen there would be cast into darkness.
It was the mountain, as Pops referred to it, that prompted Derek to offer him his services cleaning it up in exchange for a chance to stay for a few days after the van had unexpectedly quit miles back on the long, lonely road. Nor did he regret his offer to help when he realized that the old man would have let them stay for nothing. He liked keeping busy and he needed the exercise anyway. It was a mutually beneficial agreement.
Derek twisted from side to side to free the kinks two straight hours of shoveling had worked into his back. It was when he bent again to the task that he first heard the low rumbling. He straightened once more, looking about in wonder. Then he threw down the shovel and dashed around the house. Pops, as expected, was sitting on the porch. Suzy was nowhere in sight.
"Earthquake!" Derek shouted.
"Earthquake, my arse!" Pops replied. He sat forward, pushing up on the arms of the rocking chair. "Been in two big quakes in this house, Sylmar and Northridge. This here's different. Get inside!"
Derek helped the old man into the house, calling out to Suzy even before he opened the door.
"I'm here," he heard her call back from upstairs.
Pops turned to Derek. "Quick, grab some of this old junk and throw it into the yard. Clothes too, anything laying around. Spread it around but make sure it can be seen from the road. Be quick and then get into the out building. Leave the door open but stay out of sight."
Suzy came down stairs in a hurry and Derek told her what Pops told him. The couple looked at the old man in confusion but seeing the determined look on his face, set about doing as he had directed. Within five minutes, the front yard was a mess and the house looked abandoned.
As they turned to race towards the out building, they heard a crash and glanced back to see a porcelain cup bounce into the yard from the broken window through which it had been thrown. The old man stuck his head out of the window and waved them away. Then he walked back out to the porch and slowly sat back down in the rocking chair. Blue slept soundly through it all.
Derek and Suzy made
it to the rear of the house when they saw something top the road a hundred yards out. Something big and spotted with brown. They stopped then, fascinated by the sight. The out building was maybe fifty feet away but it was within full view of the road and the tank lumbering over it in their direction, dust floating around it.
Quickly they ducked behind the refuse pile and watched. Behind the tank came another and still another until they counted fully twenty of the things creaking along the road towards them. They looked about for a place to hide but there was nowhere nearby should a search ensue. At the last moment, they looked at each other, Derek with a grim smile on his face.
"No, I refuse!" Suzy shouted over the din from the tanks.
"Don't you mean ref-use?"
"I won't do it. I would rather die than that."
"Don't worry, I'll be right here with you."
"I can't," she wailed again, but even as she did, she had already lain back and Derek was covering her over with the black runny slime.
"Don't you dare!" she wailed as he spread the muck over her face. He made a breathing hole for her, listening to her gag when bile had gotten into her mouth. Then he laid down beside her and covered himself with the brine. As he was finishing, he heard the rumble slow down and a squeal of dusty brakes. Wondering if they'd been seen, he reached through the slime and took Suzy's hand. It was shaking.
On the porch, the old man sat staring out to sea. He could see a massive brown form stopped at the end of his property, blocking out the light from the setting sun. A man sitting atop the first tank called out something unintelligible and the tanks were shut down, one at a time until absolute silence reigned. The man turned to stare at the yard with its mounds of apparent discards and then at the house. He turned his attention to the old man.
"Hey mister. Mister!"
The old man sat silent, still looking in the direction of the ocean that the tank had now blocked from view.
"You there. I'm talking to you. What happened here?"
Still the old man said nothing. He clutched the arms of the chair in his weak trembling hands, hoping the soldier would decide to just move on.
The soldier turned and called back to the man on the tank behind him.
"I think he's deaf or something."
The other man shouted back. "Go find out."
The first man swore and then lifted himself out of the tank and jumped to the deck and from there to the road. Except for the sound of his shoes scuffing along the dirt path, it was quiet. As he walked, he glanced at the yard and broken window. Then he stopped before the porch, watching the old man.
"Can you hear me, old man?"
Pops suddenly jumped as though he had been unaware that anyone had been there.
"You back again?" he asked in a voice even more aged than usual. He held out his hand to find the man who spoke to him, looking slightly upward towards the sky. "I say you there, have you come back to rob me again?"
"I'm not here to rob you, old man. Is that what happened here?"
"Yesterday. People came, men and women. They took all my food, all that I had. Tore my house apart. Left me with nothing. Would you have any food you can spare an old man? I don't want to die, not yet at least."
"We have nothing to give you. We're representatives of the New States of America, sent to reestablish order in the country. It's well for you that you were robbed. If you hadn't been, we would have taken your food ourselves. We've an army to feed."
"Where did you learn your manners, son? No respect even for a dying old man. Shame."
"Can it. I have an important question to ask and you'd best answer truthfully. I can smell a liar a mile off so you better think before you answer. Have you seen any foreigners around these hills, Mexicans or blacks? Chinks? Anything like that?"
"Seriously? Half of the state are people of color. Or hadn't you noticed?"
"Don't get flip with me, old man. We were attacked. You think them countries didn't have inside help? We've been given a new directive. Find the cancer and cut it out. Clean out the scum."
"You're going to reverse five hundred years of history with an edict?"
The man in the second tank shouted something then and the soldier turned and waved. He looked back at the old man with narrowed eyes.
"I'm not here to debate the law with you." He nodded towards the mess in the yard. "Took everything, did they? How about if I go and have a look myself?"
"Go ahead. Maybe you'll find something I couldn't. Can't see much with these eyes."
The soldier looked hard at the old man and then spat over his shoulder. Drool dribbled onto his army greens.
"Outta time, old man. This is your lucky day."
He turned and marched back towards the tank. Then he stopped and called out.
"It ain't all bad. You can always eat that mutt."
Laughing, he jumped up on the tank and looking behind him, twirled a finger in the air. The tanks all started once more and proceeded down the road.
When the last of their thunderous roar had died in the distance, Derek and Suzy pulled themselves out of the putrid slime. Tears were running down Suzy's cheeks and truth be told, Derek didn't look too far from that himself. They slopped off as much of the filth as they could and trudged back to Pops. When he saw them, he let out a loud guffaw.
"Good lord! What did you fall into?"
"Couldn't make it to the out building."
"There's a crick in the ravine."
"Who were they?" Derek asked, ignoring Pops last comment.
Pops sighed and stared back out to sea.
Chapter Forty Nine
G ordon and Sofia walked up North Mulberry, towards Hollywood Blvd. The temperature had dropped since the rain, but still topped 100°. Nevertheless, he had felt it expedient to find himself a shirt now that he had female company. Why Sofia hadn't felt the same in his presence he couldn't figure.
The treasures she had found along the way she reluctantly dumped, with the exception of the serpentine armlet of gold wrapped around her left forearm, when she realized they would do her no good in the new world. Though she greatly lamented the loss of the extravagant lifestyle she had pictured for herself in the last three days, she was happy not to be carrying around so much extra weight. Her shoulders still bore the pink grooves the straps of the overweighted pack had worn into them.
They exchanged stories as they walked. Sofia was thrilled with Gordon's account of the Blow, but less so when he told her about the murder he had witnessed at the hands of the soldiers.
Gordon, for his part, was quiet when she told him about being locked on the roof of the hotel. It occurred to him then that there might be many people in similar circumstances who were not so lucky as she had been who might even now be dying from exposure or lack of water or medicine. Shut-ins. People could survive weeks without food, he knew, but three days without water was the limit as far as he knew. There could be people everywhere, especially in a city the size of LA, who needed help, but would never get it in time.
He had considered finding something, a whistle perhaps or a horn to blow as they walked to call out, let people know that assistance was available but decided against it when he thought about the soldiers. As far as he knew, there might be more of them and other unfriendlies roaming around the city applying the law of the gun on whomever they happened to cross. The thought made his throat tighten.
When he was alone, he had felt less anxious for his safety, confident in his ability, should the need arise, to escape from danger in a city with so many places to hide.
With Sofia at his side, however, that confidence had evaporated. If anything happened to her, he would blame himself. As he did with his mother's death. It was ridiculous, what could he have done? Still the guilt harried him. It was something he'd lived with as long as he could remember. He couldn't add another death to his resume.
If he could pick up a gun, it might go a long way towards helping to keep her safe. But the brief image of his mother bleedi
ng out in front of him had frightened him so badly, he never lost his hatred of the weapons.
Now he found himself checking around them for anything that looked like trouble more often than he had wanted and stopping at every block to peer around street corners. Unless an assailant came at him in a fair bare knuckle fight, it was the best he could do. For the time being, he chose not to share his thoughts with her. Knowing that the man she was depending on was more nervous than she was would do little to improve her morale.
Sofia, for her part, hummed as they walked, her mood substantially improved now that she was no longer alone. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed the bustle of the city, so single minded had she been with getting out and reestablishing herself in some exotic location on the other side of the world. Had she discovered on her own, still believing herself the last survivor of the catastrophe in the city, how much things had changed, she wasn't sure just how she might have received the news.
She cast a sidelong look at Gordon, appraising her rescuer, for such she considered him to be. He had a good face, she decided, open and friendly. He's not bad looking either, she thought, nodding appreciatively at his physique. She judged him to be thirty, maybe thirty-five years old. A little soft around the edges, she supposed but if the outlook they faced was anything like the recording they'd heard on the radio had said it was, that would go. She hoped then that he might find her equally appealing and flushed when she thought about her present attire. Then, thinking longer, she shrugged and smiled. Let him look.
They walked for several blocks with hardly a word spoken between them, both lost in their own thoughts. Then Gordon jumped and pointed across Meander Street. The old Santa Monica public library stood there, still tall and impressive, its Gothic style architecture less damaged by the force that had shaken a few of the surrounding buildings to the ground. One long crack bisected the battlements from left to right and of course the stained glass windows were gone, neither of which did anything to lessen the majesty the building had always exuded. Even the bronze plaque bearing the name of the library still clung to the rough stone facade.