by Chuck Rogers
The day you wipe your ass with a hundred dollar bill is something.
The urge to open the hatch was becoming overwhelming. On the other hand? I had plenty of food and water. I had power. I still had a lot of movies to watch.
I looked at the calendar and grinned at myself.
I set a goal. I drew a circle on the date.
The days of eating, sleeping and training passed.
I had been well trained in hand-to-hand fighting by the Marines, high school wrestling and the school of life. I had dabbled in several martial arts. The only art I had almost earned a black belt in was Kenpo.
I had been thrown out for fighting.
In the end I always got thrown out.
Of everything.
But I added the rusty katas and drills to my training. I linked them together into an endless loop that turned into my second, evening hour of training a day and that shit got sweet. Like Elvis, Don't make me use my stuff on ya, baby! sweet.
Frame.
Naked, ripped, in berserker mode doing kung fu down in the bunker.
I hoped Bobby was exploding into a non-relativistic jet of joy.
In the end?
I spent three months in the hole.
One morning I epically reached one thousand free squats without stopping to earn my coffee.
I stood there boldly, sweating, shaky, grinning back at the grinning, naked war-god in the mirror.
I turned to the calendar and grinned at the big red circle drawn around March 20.
I poked it with my finger in anticipation.
I felt like a million. I'd never felt this strong.
I had wintered the Apocalypse underground.
Prison lingo? I'd sat. In the hole. I'd done my time standing on my head with massive doses of self-improvement.
No cigarettes. No liquor. No jerking off.
I was tight as a drum.
The first day of Spring seemed like an auspicious day to emerge.
I'd open the hatch tomorrow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Unbreakable Benji Frame
THE ALARM WENT OFF at 7:00am. I wasn't in a rush but I wanted to get to work by nine. I ran through a few kata to limber up. I bathed. I shaved. I ate a hearty breakfast of Mountain House biscuits and gravy. I finished my coffee. I got dressed. After three months it felt decidedly odd to be clean-shaven and wearing pants. I had not seen the sun in three months.
I applied sunscreen.
Your first reconnaissance is a careful reconnaissance. You don't go far. You don't expose yourself. Don't get lost. The first reconnaissance is really just a reconnoiter.
I was just going to stick my head out and check local conditions.
I grabbed one of Bobby's messenger bags and packed binoculars, a notebook, pen and two bottles of water.
I packed the bottle of beer and what might possibly be the last box of toaster-pastries on earth.
Blueberry.
I grabbed the Uzi and the bandolier of spare magazines.
I climbed up the ladder. The dosimeter was green. I pulled my boonie hat low and slipped on my sunglasses. Nothing for it. I unlocked the hatch. My hand rested on the red-painted wheel.
Moment of truth time.
I had been waiting for this for three months. I stood on the ladder with my hand on the hatch. One thing was for certain. Line had given me a time and date and planet earth had hung up on me down to the second. What was up there? Sodium yellow skies and Soylent Green? Monkeys riding horses? Bands of attractive teenagers fighting some dystopian YA novel future? Had the righteous ascended leaving behind a genuine hell on earth for the rest of us unwashed heathens?
The lurking fear was nothing.
That there was nothing outside the hatch worth coming out for.
That the only choice was wandering the wreckage alone or going back down and closing the hatch over me a final time.
The fact was, we all come into the world in the same fashion, and we all leave it in the same condition. In between? Even misanthropic, doesn't play well with other primates like me needed other primates. If the sentence was solitary? For life? Without possibility of parole? I might poke around for a bit, but at the end of the day.
I'd be joining Line.
Staring up at that red steel wheel I understood her choice completely.
But the air coming in was still good.
I rebooted the dosimeter. Again. I was scared and I was stalling. Dosimeter was state of the art. Dosimeter wasn't some Magic 8-ball that you kept shaking for new answers and dosimeter wasn't being pushed around by some homo sapien who'd dropped out of high school. Dosimeter was science. Dosimeter stood by its story:
harmful radiation negligible
Fuck this hiding in the dark.
If the mighty Frame is hiding in the dark it's because he's stalking you. Not because he's infatuated with you.
It is with ill intent.
Fuck hiding from the future under a rock. I'd done my time in the cocoon. It was time for the caterpillar to emerge, and you all know what underground caterpillars turn into.
Ripped, violent primates.
Like me.
Time to spread my violent primate wings and fly.
Fly primate, fly! Up into the sky!
The wheel spun. The hinges were gritty but the hatch and the concealment section of hedge popped right up, and I snarled in agony as I went blind. I squeezed my eyes shut and dropped back down the ladder. Even wearing shades and a hat my eyes had not been hit by sunlight in 12 weeks.
I blinked and checked the time.
It was 9:05am.
Why was the sun beating straight down the shaft like it was noon?
Was my watch broken? Had I lost my mind down there and didn't know it?
I let my eyes adjust.
I held the Uzi like a giant pistol as I tried that again. I emerged, deployed the stock and crouched in the hedge.
I looked around.
It was a beautiful spring day in California. My first impression was that nothing had happened. The sun was in the wrong place but it was shining brightly. The sky was blue with a few white clouds. A pair of hummingbirds jousted by.
There was Bobby's house, just the way I had left it.
That was first impression, and I think some of it was shock. I had spent inordinate amounts of time contemplating worst-case scenarios.
Then I started noticing things.
Bobby's house is an Eichler. Giant windows. In fact except for the frontage most of the walls are windows. The windows were filthy. His lawn and garden were mostly dead and weeds were popping up everywhere. The pool had lost a good three feet of water, was algal green and full of leaves. The gazebo looked battered but it was still standing. I scanned the patchy back lawn and saw nothing but a few split-heart tracks of deer hooves in the bare patches.
I left the hedge and took a wider look around and that was when business picked up.
The nearest mountain to the east was gone. Well, not gone but it looked like Mars. I lived in California and had seen this kind of devastation before. Huge fires had burned the mountainside and then the rains had washed away everything with massive mudslides. I grimaced. It looked bad, and the huge swathes of the scraped-clean mountains had included communities where a lot of people lived.
Of course that happened in California all the time, and without the help of non-relativistic jets from outer space.
I took out my binoculars and looked around more. It was really, really bad. I was starting to think no one had fought these fires. Like they had been at zero containment and the only thing that had stopped them was a Noah's Ark worthy month of rain. A lot of the local Santa Monica Mountains had been denuded. Still, a surprising amount of acreage was swathes and oasis patches of green, including the patch I was standing on.
Fire is fickle.
I jumped up on top of Bobby's brick barbecue station and did a full 360. The burn had been huge in all directions. The mudslides had been nothing short
of catastrophic. I didn't see any houses or much in the way of wreckage. The bare patches had been burned and washed clean. I looked down into one nearby valley and the deadfall at the bottom was Egyptian pyramid worthy. In the trees? Most Malibu residences were built for privacy. I needed a helicopter. Barring that I needed a high peak, or I was just going to have to go look for myself.
I looked west.
I couldn't see downtown Malibu or LA for that matter. There were mountains in various states of repair in the way. Bobby was rich, but he wasn't mega-mansion rich and he couldn't afford a house in Malibu with that kind of view. Don't get me wrong. His view of the mountainsides were fantastic. I turned west and north. Here at the very corner edge of the property Bobby's place did a have a pie-slice view of the ocean in the distance.
There she was.
The Pacific Ocean. Flat as glass at the moment and gleaming in the sun. I squinted up at the out of place sun again and gave it a frown.
To be continued.
I looked back at the ocean and then it hit. Bobby's little visible strip of ocean view was just a thin bit of beach and the Pacific Coast Highway. You could obscure it by holding your hand in the way. It was Wednesday. 9:20 in the AM, and there were no cars on the PCH.
Then it really hit me.
There were no cars on the Pacific Coast Highway because there was no Pacific Coast Highway.
It was too far with glass of this magnification but my first impression?
The PCH had been washed away.
Malibu was famous for its surfing.
What size waves did that take?
I jumped down.
First secure the perimeter. I circled the house. None of the windows were broken. All the doors closed and locked. The security system was still armed. I went to the gate. It was still closed. I took a careful look up and down the road but Bobby's house was on a pretty steep curve and you couldn't see any other houses.
No movement.
I lurked in the bushes by the gate for an hour and ate cold Pop-Tarts and drank a warm beer.
Nothing passed by.
Well, a bee did, and then another.
There was no sound but for the breeze and the birds in the trees.
All right. I'll admit it. Things were a little creepy, like Omega Man creepy, but there were trees and bushes. There were birds and bees and squirrels and I had seen fresh deer tracks. I mean, there had to be humans?
Right?
Maybe Malibu and the surrounding municipalities had been evacuated.
I looked up at the anomalous sun starting to dip towards the west.
At least it was moving in the right direction.
There it was. That was my recon for the day. No poking around while losing the light. I decided I'd put the house in order and sleep above ground tonight. Though I wasn't going to announce my presence to the world just yet. No lights and no noise after sunset.
I went all happy homemaker.
I opened up all the doors and windows to air out the place and got to work on eats that wouldn't tap into my dwindling cache in the shelter. Bobby didn't cook, but he had a lovely Guatemalan gal who on top of her domestic duties made him home-cooked meals several times a week. His pantry was still well stocked. I'd left the water or energy intensive ingredients behind when I had ransacked the place. I found a sack of rice and started a pot of beans speed soaking. The spices were all three months old and there wasn't a ham hock to be found but beans and rice was comfort food and a pot would last me for a couple of days.
Bobby's kitchen had salt, flour and baking powder, and that meant fry bread. I mixed the dough with my hands and covered it with a tea towel to let it rest while the beans soaked.
Beans, rice and fry-bread. The fuel of my youth.
While the dough rested I gave the house a thorough, non-violent toss and inventoried every last inch of it.
I drained the beans added the rice and poured in more water to cover and simmered.
I checked Bobby's vehicles over thoroughly and found their spare keys. I checked the water tank, the propane tank and went up on the roof and checked the solar panels.
By then it was time to fry.
Bobby didn't have lard, and come the day Bobby bought lard I would very leery about what he intended to do with it.
I had taken his olive and vegetable oil below.
What Bobby had was a jug of coconut oil.
Coconut fry bread.
There you go.
I poured two inches in a pan and commenced to frying.
It smelled good. It wasn't grandma on the rez approved. Then again, grandma on the rez said things like Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without!
Yes, ma'am.
Fry bread. Salt, flour and baking soda.
Don't let simplicity fool you.
There is an art to it.
2-4 minutes a side until golden. The first piece came out of the oil and it looked good. The kitchen was really starting to smell like something. I took a bite into the goodness as I flipped the second piece and found myself well pleased and suspected so would grandma.
Fresh meat would be good.
Tomorrow, once I was convinced the neighborhood was secure I might see about those deer tracks and maybe culling the local squirrel population with the silenced Ruger. I had never set a snare but I had read up on the process down in the hole.
A dog barked in the distance.
I almost took this as a positive sign, but then it barked again and again. It sounded like a big one. I took my Uzi off the counter as I listened. I had worked with dogs and been attacked by them. This dog kept barking, and it was either angry, scared or both.
The dog let out a single horrifying "YIPE!" of agony.
I moved.
The sound had come from the back and down in the canyon. I grabbed the binoculars and ran to the barbecue station. I knelt and listened. The dog didn't bark again. No human voice said " Good work, Old Blue! We sure put paid to that possum !"
My instincts told me Old Blue had gotten Old Yeller'd by something and he might be what's for dinner.
The land behind Bobby's place was steep. Just short of a cliff, and I had installed the motion sensors. I scanned the canyon land below but there was no movement.
I scowled at the sun as it started going down at 3:00pm.
All right, that was it. Enough freakouts for the day. Tomorrow I would—
I jumped out of my skin as Bobby's smoke detector went off with all the windows and doors open.
The oil was burning.
I had announced myself to the world.
God, damn it!
I bolted back inside. I took the pan off the heat and waved a towel frantically at the alarm. The alarm finally shut up. I ran around like a castrated ape locking down the house and with difficulty took a hot pot of beans down the shelter ladder and locked the hatch.
I put the beans on the hotplate to finish simmering.
I put Star Wars in the DVD player to soothe my shattered nerves.
I spent the night hiding in my cave like the frightened troglodyte I was.
CHAPTER FIVE
Malibu Frame
I SET THE ALARM for 4:00am and was fed and armed to the teeth by 4:30.
I was coming out of the hedge and I was coming crepuscular.
M-14 rifles are three and a half feet long and weigh ten and a half pounds plus when loaded. They are awkward to come out of a hole with, but the big .308 caliber battle rifle could shoot through one side of an Eichler and come out the other if I had hostile guests. If flicked it to full auto it would destroy the engine block, kill the front passengers and most likely those in the rear of any standard automobile in two bursts.
I swung open the hatch ready to light up the dawn.
It was a bright sunny morning in California at 4:37am.
God, damn it.
and,
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot.
I stayed where I was with just my head out of the hole and the '14
shouldered.
The good news was that unless they were hiding in the bathrooms or the closets Eichlers are hard to hide in. There were no visible invaders in the house. I waited in my spider-hole in the hedge for a good half hour before I moved. I checked the lawn. No new tracks. I did a circuit around the premises then came in through the back door and cleared the house room-by-room.
No marauders. No one swipe/one yipe, dog-eating cryptids.
The kitchen smelled like burnt coconuts.
I opened up the house, plugged in an air-freshener and considered my fate.
Besides repeatedly scaring the shit out of myself my post-apocalypse was remarkably anti-climactic.
It was official. I was bored, I was lonely and I still had no idea what was what. I needed to find out what had happened and what was currently happening. If there were people around I wanted to at least get eyes on them if not initiate the meet and greet.
I decided to take a trip into town, or at least see how far I could get without getting into trouble.
A ride in the country would do me good.
I decided to take the Prius.
Pros:
Bobby's was what Toyota called "sea glass pearl' color. Not exactly camouflage but easier to hide in the trees than white or red. What sold me on the idea was that the Prius was a hybrid. Hybrid electric automobiles are quiet. So quiet that people get hit by them more than any other car. Nearly all the houses around here are tucked back from the road. There was a good chance I wouldn't be seen or heard. If I was seen, with luck I was already zipping past. It was also electric and I had solar, so it wouldn't dip into my very limited supply of gasoline.
Cons:
A Prius was a small car. It wouldn't fit much loot.
It barely fit me.
But this was a reconnaissance.
I'd just see if it I could make it to town. Failing that, maybe just map which roads were passable. Gearing up was quick and light. I put the three-day box of food and water from my apartment in the boot in case getting back took longer than expected. Lunch was the last chub of salami I'd been saving and a bottle of water. Fighting out of a car was a bad way to fight. Ask Bonnie and Clyde. Fighting an M-14 rifle out of a Prius was impossible. The Uzi I could at least stick out both front windows and the sunroof like an over-sized pistol. All six spare mags and I put the Beretta in the glove in case I needed a back up.