by Tom Abrahams
All he knew, as he resumed his climb toward his dorm, was that life had changed. The world in which he studied, partied, played basketball, and hung out with his girlfriend didn’t exist anymore.
He checked his phone. It was useless. When he reached the top of the steps, he faced east toward the smoke. It was coating the sky now, expanding upward and outward. The red hue was gone. Everything was turning gray.
He swung open the door to his building, sidestepped a pair of coeds walking outside with their fingers pointed toward the sky, and found the elevators. He repeatedly thumped the call button as if he were playing a video game and stuffed his phone into his deep pockets.
Michael and Barker were with him. The others had gone to their dorm across the plaza. Their faces had questions. Their minds were whirling like his. But none of them spoke. He punched the elevator call button again.
“I don’t think it’s working,” said Barker. “We’d better take the stairs.”
They huffed their way up five flights of stairs, their heavy steps echoing against the concrete and metal of the stairwell. When they reached their floor, a tall, slender brunette was waiting for them in the hall.
Keri Monk, whose every move usually carried with it a fluid Zen-like quality, raced toward them and threw her arms around Dub. She was breathing heavily, her chest heaving. She held him as if she couldn’t get close enough.
“It’s okay,” Dub said, his large hand gently cradling the back of her head. “It’s okay.”
Keri buried her head in his chest. “No, it’s not,” she said, her voice muffled. “It’s not okay. Did you see the explosions?”
Dub gripped Keri’s shoulders and pulled her back. Her eyes glistened with the welling tears pooling at the bottom of them while they searched his for some sense of comfort.
Dub swallowed hard. Usually it was Keri who calmed him. She was the yoga-loving boxer, a study in beautiful contradictions who never sweated the small stuff. But he was the psychology major, so he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“I saw them,” he said. “And I saw the fires. No doubt we’re under attack.”
She stepped back and addressed all three of the roommates. “Who?” she asked. “Who attacked us?”
Michael shrugged. “Someone who hates us? The North Koreans. The Russians. The Iranians. The French.”
Barker slapped Michael on his chest with the back of his hand. “The French?” He shook his head. “You’re not funny, dude.”
Michael pouted and ran his hand through his thinning hair. He tugged on his shirt, stretching it across his ample gut. “I’m just saying we have no idea. That’s all.”
Dub unlocked the room and shouldered open the door. “Let’s figure this out,” he said and ushered in his friends.
It was summer and most of the dormitory was empty. The Hill was a shadow of what it was during the three other quarters of the year. And while the roommates likely could have had doubles, they couldn’t leave an odd man out, so they stuck with their cramped triple packed with three beds, desks, wardrobes, and dressers.
Dub had the lofted bunk with a desk and short wardrobe underneath it. He pulled out the chair and offered it to Keri.
Michael opened their waist-high refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water, uncapped it, and took a swig.
Barker dropped onto his lower bunk, the bed opposite Dub’s and under Michael’s, shaking his head. He pointed at the sweating bottle in Michael’s hand. “You might want to save that,” he said. “We’re going to need to ration that stuff out if this is the real deal.”
“This is the real deal,” said Keri. “This is seriously the real deal.”
Dub looked out the window. He pressed his face to the glass and looked across the hill toward south campus. The sky wasn’t deep red anymore. It looked more like a sunset on Mars. There were hints of red mixed with the orange glow of the fires radiating off the low-hanging clouds of smoke.
“It’s hot in here,” said Barker. “I don’t think the AC is working.”
Michael took a couple of steps toward the thermostat. “No, it’s off. No power. It’s better if it’s off anyhow. We wouldn’t want the system circulating whatever is out there and pulling it in here.”
“What about the computers?” asked Barker.
Keri reached across the desk and tapped the space bar on Dub’s laptop. “Nothing,” she said.
“It’s an EMP,” said Barker.
Michael put his bottled water back in the refrigerator. “An EMP?”
“Electromagnetic pulse,” said Barker. “If it was a nuclear bomb, it could knock out the power and kill electronics with a huge blast of electromagnetic energy.”
Dub was transfixed by the genesis of the apocalypse unfolding beyond the glass. The smoke was thickening, the sky was darkening, the sun virtually blanketed by the burning debris in the air.
“It’s nuclear,” he said, his back to his friends. “We all know that. We all saw the mushroom cloud.”
“So what do we do?” asked Keri. “All of us are out of state. It’s not like we can go home.”
“What about Chang?” asked Michael. “He lives in Brentwood. Like five minutes from here.”
“Bobby Chang?” asked Barker. “I don’t think he’s here. He’s in Spain for the summer.”
“Yeah,” said Michael, rubbing his forehead, “but we’ve all been to his house. His parents know us.”
Dub looked over his shoulder and then faced his friends. “I don’t think we should go anywhere. We’re seconds into this. We need to stay here. Hunker down. See how things unfold.”
“Why?” asked Keri.
Dub squatted on his heels and took Keri’s hands. He pressed his lips together, considering his response before he answered. “All right, all of you are going to laugh at me, but—”
“You’re not about to spout psychobabble, are you?” asked Michael. “I know you’re some genius psychology student, but seriously, dude?”
“Dude,” said Dub, “this isn’t psychobabble, whatever that is. This is real stuff. Check your pulse. Check your breathing. Both are elevated, right?”
His friends held their fingers to their necks, measuring their heart rates. One at a time they nodded.
“And your appetite?” Dub asked. “Barker, you said you were starving before we went to the gym. Mike, you’re always hungry.”
Michael self-consciously touched his gut. Barker’s brow furrowed.
“You’re not hungry now, right?” asked Dub. “No appetite?”
Both shook their heads. Keri shrugged.
“That’s because your sympathomedullary pathway is regulating your stress,” said Dub. “Fight or flight. Now’s not a good time to make a decision. Your bodies are figuring out how to survive. Your minds aren’t clear.”
Dub rubbed his thumbs along the backs of Keri’s hands and laced his fingers with hers. He held her gaze as he talked.
“We’re safe here, as far as we know,” he explained. “We’re certainly safer here than we would be wandering out into whatever is going on beyond the campus.”
“What do we do, then?” asked Michael.
“We take stock,” said Dub. “We go room to room looking for other students. We figure out who’s here and who’s not. Then we formulate a plan. We could be here a while. We need a plan.”
“Okay,” said Michael. “I’m good with that if everybody else is.”
Barker agreed. Keri squeezed Dub’s hands and nodded.
“Then we stay here,” said Dub.
CHAPTER 4
Saturday, June 21, 2025
DAY ZERO
Santa Monica, California
Danny Correa banged on the door. Nobody answered. He waited a beat and tried the knob. He looked over his shoulder at the approaching menace and banged again.
No response.
“Is anyone there?” he said with urgency.
He cupped his hands to the glass sidelights next to the door and peered into the house
. There was a small foyer in the hallway that led straight back to the rear of the home. There was an overstuffed sofa covered with chambray and a large leather easy chair with worn, wide arms.
Light filtered into the otherwise dim room through a pair of glass French doors at the rear of the home. Maybe they were unlocked.
Danny bit his lower lip and looked down at his dog, Maggie. He was losing time. He couldn’t risk being outside any longer. He’d wasted enough valuable hours caught in a day full of shock and disbelief.
He ran around the side of the house, Maggie in tow, and the two of them passed through an open gate into the small sandy backyard. Danny bolted for the door at the rear of the house, trying not to pay attention to the approaching toxic threat. He reached out to the handle, hesitated, then cranked it to one side. The door creaked and swung inward. Danny let Maggie into the single-story bungalow and called out, “Is anyone here?”
He was half hoping someone would answer and half hoping he was alone as he stepped over the threshold and into the house. It smelled like lemons. He shut the door and called again.
“Hello?” he called. “Is anyone here?”
Again, there was no answer. The darkened sky outside was casting thin shadows that were falling across the furniture inside the house.
Danny didn’t like the idea of breaking into a home. He had enough problems swirling around his sour existence that he didn’t need trespassing among them. But here he was, hiding in a stranger’s house, trying to save himself from something from which he knew there was no ultimate escape.
The world as he knew it had already ended once. A second apocalypse, this one affecting everyone, shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to a man whose outlook was at best negatively realistic.
But it was a surprise, and he had reacted in a way most might. Instead of running when he’d seen the billows of smoke engulfing the Southern California sky, he’d stood still for more than a minute. More than two. More than five.
When the bomb exploded, he’d stood on the beach, unable to move. He’d wanted to run. He’d wanted to scream. The surf had washed his feet deeper into the sand as he’d looked east. Maggie had pawed impatiently at his leg, whimpering for the gnawed, orange plastic Frisbee he held at his side.
He’d been unaware of the people around him, their collective day on the shore interrupted by the thickening smoke that poured skyward. They’d talked and cried, pointed, and huddled. Most of them, though, had been as frozen as Danny, unable to move or react to something from which every one of them should have known to run.
An older man standing only a few feet away had motioned with his chin toward the blossoming blackness over downtown Los Angeles. “That’s nuclear, isn’t it?” he’d asked Danny. “Looks nuclear.”
Danny had nodded blankly, another wash of the Pacific rolling over his ankles. The tide had been rising. He hadn’t really processed what the man had said. He’d heard him, but he wasn’t listening. The nod was rote.
“I didn’t see the bombs drop,” the man had said. “Didn’t hear ’em either. Just felt the blast and saw the smoke and the flames.”
Then Danny had faced the man, whose bronzed face was mapped with the wrinkles of someone who’d spent a lot of days on the beach. His eyebrows were bleached whiter than the wet, shaggy hair on his head, such that they were nearly translucent. A thin gold chain hung around his neck. He’d been shirtless and wearing board shorts, his hands planted on his narrow hips. An appendectomy scar stretched across the right side of his abdomen.
The man had glanced at the retriever mix. “Nice dog,” he’d said, nodded, and walked off toward the fallout. He’d rubbed the back of his leathered neck as he strode along the beach, his balance compromised by the shifting sand.
Danny had awoken from his trance, the shock of what was unfolding around him, and shook the Frisbee. He’d teased Maggie, coaxing her to follow him. “Let’s go,” he’d said. “We need to get back.”
The dog had nipped at the plastic disc, pimpled with divots from her bite marks, as Danny led her up the shore toward their old Volkswagen GTI. The amber glow of raging fires and the thickening layers of smoke had repeatedly drawn his attention as he marched away from the water. Maggie’s tongue had wagged.
The world had been spinning in slow motion when he’d reached his VW. The first hints of burning debris had stung his nostrils, and he’d looked overhead to the wisps of gray filtering across the sky.
He’d known he should run. His mind had told him he was in danger. Everyone was in danger. However, instead of panicking, he’d slid into the driver’s seat as if going out for a six-pack before the store closed. Maggie had hopped over him into the passenger’s seat to sit down and stuck her head out the open window to sniff the air. Danny had fished the key from his pocket, dropped it into the center console, and pushed the ignition button next to the steering column.
Nothing had happened. He’d pushed it again. Again, nothing.
He’d felt his pulse accelerating, his breathing becoming shallow and faster as he noticed the beachgoers starting to run. It was as if they’d flipped switches at the same time and simultaneously realized the gravity of what was happening.
Danny hadn’t found the switch yet, let alone flipped it. But he was groping for it. He’d sensed that as cool rivulets of sweat formed at his temples and on the back of his neck. He’d worked so hard for so long to retreat from the world, to find a hole and bury himself in it.
He’d pushed the button again. The car was dead.
Danny’s home was toward the chaos. His apartment was likely one of those burning. He could go there, toward the fallout and the radiation. Or he could move away from it and to the restaurant where he was a short-order cook. He and Maggie could probably stay there. Chances were there wouldn’t be a lot of customers, if any. He imagined Arthur, another cook, or the resident know-it-all waitress, Claudia, had hunkered down in the kitchen. The two of them were always at the diner. They were fixtures every bit as much as the vinyl booths or laminate-topped lunch counter. They were as popular as the burgers and the pancakes. Okay, maybe they weren’t as popular as the pancakes, but they were good people. Still, he wasn’t sure going to the diner was the best bet. He’d opened the door and pulled a large camping backpack from his trunk, grabbed an insulated tumbler, and slung the bag over one shoulder.
“C’mon,” he’d said to Maggie. The dog hopped from the VW, and Danny had led her to the water fountains at the concrete-block bathrooms fifty yards from his car.
He’d filled the tumbler with water and stuffed it into his pack before sliding the straps onto both shoulders and marching across the Pacific Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue onto Wilshire.
He stole a glance at a billboard he’d seen a thousand times, but never given much thought. Lane Turner, the newsman on his favorite channel, smiled down at him. The man’s arms were folded across his chest and his impossibly white teeth sparkled almost as much as his eyes. Danny wondered, for a split second, what had happened to Lane Turner. Was he still broadcasting to an audience of none? Did his studio burn up in the attacks?
Truth be told, he hadn’t seen Lane on television in a while. He’d not watched the news. Everything was too depressing. He chuckled to himself at that thought now. He gave Turner’s towering image a final look and pushed ahead.
The street had been a parking lot. Stalled cars and bewildered drivers had littered the lanes in both directions and spilled onto the sidewalks. It had been impossible to distinguish the lines of cars normally parked along the curb from those powerless to move.
Maggie had stayed close to Danny’s side as he’d picked his way past a man cursing at a dead cell phone, holding it up to the sky as if that would make a difference.
Danny didn’t have a phone. Couldn’t much afford one anymore. He missed it, having been a regular consumer of news through apps and mobile websites. But rent killed every bit of his fifteen dollars an hour. Thankfully the restaurant gave him two meals a d
ay. Extra jobs as a dog walker and occasional handyman paid for the lights, the water, and diesel in the VW.
He’d trudged northeast until he reached the tennis courts at a local park, turned northwest up Seventh Street, and kept his head down. The acrid odor in the air was growing stronger. He’d slid his T-shirt up over his nose and mouth, replacing the burn with the sour odor of his sweat.
Men and women had coughed as he’d weaved past them. He’d moved faster, the sense of urgency finally translating from his brain to his feet. Maggie had trotted alongside dutifully. She was a good dog.
They’d traveled another five blocks. Danny had checked over his shoulder and looked above. The dark clouds were moving toward him, giving chase. Beyond the advancing layer of smoke, there was what looked like a curtain of rain. But it wasn’t rain. It was gray, almost black in color, and cascaded like snowflakes.
It was the radioactive fallout. The ash. It was coming for him, and he needed to move as if his life depended on it. So he’d found the house. Someone else’s house.
Now he stood in front of the chambray sofa and shrugged the pack from his shoulders. It dropped onto the cushions and toppled onto one side.
Danny moved toward a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that ran along one side of the living room in which he stood. Along with vegan cookbooks and coffee-table photography tomes that featured far-flung places with snowcapped mountains or desert valleys, he saw the photographs of the young couple who he assumed called the bungalow their home. They wore expensive-looking clothes, reflective sunglasses, and had impossibly white teeth.
He wondered where they were. Were they on the beach, staring helplessly at the smoke and flames, as he had done? Were they swallowed by the inferno and radioactive fallout? Maybe they were fortunate enough to be on an adventure. Maybe they were vacationing at one of the spots in their picture books. It was summer, after all.