by Tom Abrahams
“I’m in,” said Jesse. “So long as you’re not my boss.”
Clint offered him a fist bump. Jesse reciprocated.
“Give me a few days,” said Clint. “I need to procure some more people like you. Then we gather up and head out.”
“I know some people,” said Jesse. “You want me to ask around?”
“Definitely,” said Clint. “You know the electronics shop over by the fortune-teller?”
“Yeah.”
“Meet me there at sundown. Bring your people. We’ll talk it out.”
Jesse nodded, picking at a scab behind his ear, above the top edge of a tattoo. Clint maneuvered his way out of the boxes and into the relatively more breathable ashy air of the outside.
He cupped one hand over his head like a visor and looked up, searching for the sun. He found the faintly bright smudge high above him. It was midday. There was still a lot of work to do. He made his way back to Filter, hoping his friend was lucid enough to communicate.
***
Clint waited for a wave of nausea to pass. Then he knocked on the door, assuming it was locked. He knocked again. When Filter didn’t answer, Clint tried the knob. It turned, and he gently pushed open the door. Its sand-ravaged hinges creaked and revealed Filter asleep, mouth agape, in the same position where Clint had left him a couple of hours earlier.
He shut the door behind him and scanned the room. The warm glow of candlelight still cast a luminous glow off the walls, giving the dank space a surprisingly cozy aura.
Clint chuckled to himself. All Filter needed was a cat and a cup of hot cocoa and Norman freaking Rockwell could have a field day in the place. He could call it Stoner in Closet. Or The Real American Dream.
He quietly stepped to Filter and peeled away the bag of joints. He fished around inside and found a fat one, pulled it out with one hand, and tossed the bag back onto Filter’s chest with the other. Then he crossed the space, grains of sand crunching under his boots, and he held the blunt to a candle. It sparked orange and he pulled it to his lips. He hesitated.
He hadn’t gotten high since the attack. And he’d managed, somehow, to stay clean for twenty-three days before that. He considered doing the math and totaling up his sobriety but thought better of it. The sweet smell of the rare Kush was intoxicating in both the figurative and literal sense. He pinched the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, as he’d done countless times in his life before heavier substances had consumed him, and sucked in a deep pull of the weed. He held it in his lungs, feeling the tingle in his extremities. A familiar rush of calm washed through his body, as if he could feel the sensation of the THC-laced smoke traveling through his blood vessels. He closed his eyes and slowly, reluctantly exhaled.
He stood there for several minutes, enjoying the treat and relishing the first anxiety-free moments he’d felt since running from the outer edges of ground zero.
That moment, the instant the first bomb exploded, was tattooed into his memory. It was vivid and disturbing. And as he replayed it in his mind, as he’d done a thousand times or more in the weeks since it had happened, it was as if he were there again—the bright, distant flash.
It was bright, like a bang of magnesium, and then he felt the heat as an invisible punch that knocked him onto the ground. When he awoke seconds or minutes later, the color of things was what struck him first. Everything around him was either red, black, or brown. There were bodies not far from him whose fingertips were on fire. Like wicks, the fingers helped feed the flames to the rest of their bodies and they burned whole. Gray liquid dripped from the hands, instantly deformed, and morphed into something grotesquely inhuman.
He didn’t know at the time that he too was burned. The skin on his palms was raw from having pressed them onto the searing asphalt when he pushed himself to his feet, but he didn’t know a whirlpool of fire from which he ran had roasted the back of his neck and arms. The backs of his ears were still tender now, more than a month later.
He remembered the woman on the cell phone and how he’d thought about robbing her, about taking whatever it was she had to help him survive. He’d since regretted moving past her without action, thinking wrongly he’d quickly rise to the top of the ashen heap.
Among all the horrific mind-staining images, and the piercing wails for help that still awoke him on nights when he could sleep, more than anything the smell of death was what stuck to him. Burning flesh and whatever else burned after the skin was gone was worse than the common death odor to which he’d long ago become accustomed. It was something altogether sinister, an odor not meant for Earth. It was a lingering scent that occasionally drifted past him with the ash fall and only reinforced his core belief that he, and everyone else, was living in Hell.
Even before the attacks, he’d convinced himself that he deserved torment after he met his maker. He was a vague believer in a higher power, something slightly more faithful than agnostic, and understood he’d have to pay for what he’d done. As such, he believed the toll paid and any further transgressions wouldn’t make his damnation any worse than it was already. That was why there were repeated moments when he thought maybe he’d died in the attack and that this was his eternity. He’d read Dante at Sac State. He recognized the seven levels when he smelled them, tasted them, felt their heat against his broiling skin.
This was a mental rabbit hole he kept traveling, and the pot only made the fall more acute. He’d have stayed there for hours if not for the irritated, raspy voice yanking him back to the surface.
He opened his eyes and saw Filter leaning on the edge of his easy chair, his bony elbows on his knobby knees. He was staring at the half-burned joint in Clint’s hand. He pointed at him with his finger.
“Dude,” he said, “you could have asked. That right there is uncool.”
“You offered,” said Clint.
Filter rolled his eyes and blinked in slow motion. He sat back in the chair and ran his palms along the wide chair arms. The bag of weed slid from his lap and into the crack between the cushion and side of the chair. He ignored it.
“You declined,” said Filter.
Clint held up the joint, toasting Filter mockingly, and took a long pull. He held it in his lungs for a long moment, then blew out the smoke in Filter’s general direction.
“I changed my mind,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
Filter glanced at the door. “And you broke in too, eh?”
“You left it unlocked.”
“It’s still B and E,” said Filter. “You know that.”
“You pressing charges?”
Filter scratched his chin and then ran his fingernails along the uneven stubble that peppered his angular jaw. He raised his eyebrows, feigning consideration of Clint’s question, then yawned. Filter’s movements, or lack of them, and the lazy extension of his extremities reminded Clint of a cat. A hookah-smoking Cheshire cat.
“I’ve got a proposition,” said Clint.
“What’s that?”
“It’s an offer that—”
Filter waved his hands in front of his face. “Dude, I know what proposition means. I’m not a moron. I’m asking you what the proposition is. What is your offer?”
“I’ve invited some people over. They’ll be here in an hour. We’re getting out of here. We’re making a better life than what exists out on that beach. I want you to come with us, be part of the group.”
Filter’s nostrils flared, and he inhaled a deep breath. He sat there for what felt like a long time to Clint, clicking the roof of his mouth with his tongue. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and spoke. “Why would I leave here? I’m not out on the beach. I’ve got four walls and a roof.”
Clint stepped forward. His face lit up like a salesman on a home-shopping television channel. Even his voice affected a different, silkier tone. He gesticulated with big sweeping motions as he made his pitch. “Wouldn’t you like more than four walls and a roof? Wouldn’t you like to have a real bedroom? Maybe a kitchen with a gas bu
rner that works? Women?”
Filter chuckled. “You know I got no use for women. And you really think anybody’s got a gas burner that still works? No chance.”
Clint ignored his negativity. “Huge pantries full of food,” he said, subtly licking his lips. “Clean sheets. Blankets. Swimming pools full of water.”
“Radioactive water full of ash,” countered Filter.
“It’s water we can use to flush toilets,” said Clint. “Real toilets. With real toilet paper. The soft quilted kind.”
“You are high,” said Filter. “The only place you’re going to find that stuff, if you find it at all, is the west side. Brentwood, Bel Air, Beverly Hills. Those places are gated. They have security.”
Clint furrowed his brow. “You’re thinking like someone who isn’t living in the apocalypse. We are in some next-level shit here.”
Filter shook his head in disagreement. It was a derisive shake, scolding Clint for naiveté. “Beverly Hills is Beverly Hills. I’m not buying it. You’d need a small army. And those people have money to keep security, Clint. You know this.”
Clint pulled back his shoulders, bristling at Filter’s surprisingly condescending tone. He flicked the blunt at him. “Money doesn’t mean anything anymore. That’s why I paid you with this. And that’s why I paid the hookup with double A batteries, and the dude who gave me the batteries got a bag of dried milk.”
Filter, unfazed by the blunt hitting him in the cheek, picked it up from his lap, dusted away the ash, and held it between his fingers. The tension on his face relaxed, and the deep furrows in his forehead gave way, symmetrically disappearing as if someone had taken a rubber eraser to them.
“We’re in a barter economy now,” Clint pressed, “and the only thing separating the rich from the poor is a safe space and access to food, water, and toilets. If we have ten guys, we can flip the script. We can be living in one of those big houses with however much food they’ve got left.”
Filter pulled one leg up over the chair’s arm and draped it across, letting his heel tap against the fabric stretched across its side. He pinched out the joint and dropped it into the bag next to his lap. “All right. You get an army. I’m in.”
CHAPTER 9
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
DAY FORTY-FIVE
Westwood, California
Dub had his trembling hands raised above his head in surrender. His goggles were fogged, but his eyes were on the barrel of the gun pointed at his face. Despite the icy wind that somehow cut through the burlap on his face, sweat bloomed on his forehead and at his neck. His breath was suddenly hard to find. He was screwed.
“I don’t have anything,” he said from beneath the burlap. “I can’t give you anything.”
It was the fourth time, they were aware of, in the last week a gang of desperate people had used violence, or the threat of it, to rob somebody on campus. There were rumors that a couple of missing students from Oregon, presumed to have left on their own, might have been mugged, killed, and their bodies dragged away.
Dub was alone at the base of the hill, returning from a trash run. It was his turn to remove the waste his group had accumulated over the past three days. It was in a pair of trash bags he’d already deposited in a large dumpster near an abandoned construction site near Ackerman. UCLA, as the students had long joked, was an acronym for Under Construction Like Always. What had been a constant source of irritation and detours before the attacks had been a boon of both construction supplies and places to dump waste.
He’d gone alone, against Keri’s wishes and his own common sense, because it was a particularly cold day. The ash fall was heavier than it had been in more than a week. He didn’t want her exposed. He’d promised to be right back and joked that if he wasn’t, to send the cavalry.
He didn’t hear any bugles or see any horses. He was alone. He cursed himself for having disobeyed one of his own basic rules, which was to always travel in groups. The six people stopping him near Pauley Pavilion had apparently employed that strategy.
The person holding the weapon, who looked like a man but could have been a large woman, rattled the weapon at Dub. When the thug spoke, Dub concluded he was a man.
His voice, muffled by the heavy scarf that covered his mouth and most of his face, was a baritone but scratchy. Most people who’d spent any length of time outdoors exposed to the fallout had developed a painful-sounding rasp to their voice. It was as if they both needed water and to clear their throats from excess phlegm. A thin wisp of breath puffed from beneath his scarf and disappeared.
“We know you got food,” he said. “Take us to the food.”
The other five people closed around the armed thug, ready to advance or pounce on Dub. Even though their faces were mostly covered, their eyes were wild. Feral. They were more than desperate. They were dying. They knew it. Their basest instincts had overridden whatever decency they might have held days or weeks earlier. Now they were standing between Dub and the stairs that would lead him back to relative safety.
Dub’s arms already felt heavy. He shook his head. “I don’t have any food.”
“We know there’s food,” said a woman standing to the gunman’s left. “We’ve seen it.”
Dub studied the body language between the gunman and the woman who spoke. She hung off his shoulder. Then he noticed that, of the other four people, only one of them was as tall as the gunman or the woman. The other three were much shorter.
“Are you a family?” asked Dub without thinking about it.
The gunman took a step forward, kicking up a cloud of gray ash. He spread his stance, protecting his brood, and jabbed the gun in Dub’s direction. “Tell me where the food is,” he said again, “or I pull the trigger.”
“You’re not going to shoot me in front of your children,” said Dub. “You don’t want them seeing—”
The shot cracked, echoing through the air until the wind squelched it. Dub instinctively ducked and turned his body away from the gun. He waited an instant, thinking he was shot. Then he wondered if the man had missed. He peeked back over his shoulder to see the gun raised into the air, the last tendrils of smoke drifting with the wind.
“That was a warning,” said the man. “I won’t give you another one.”
Dub’s pulse thumped in his temples and against his chest. His mouth was dry, his palms sweaty. He stood up straight, a little wobbly, and nodded. “Okay,” he said reluctantly through short gasps for air. “I’ll show you where we keep some of the food. Follow me.”
Dub started toward the stairs, but the man again aimed the gun at him, so he stopped. He pointed beyond the man and his family. “I need to go that way.”
The man and the woman ushered the others to one side, keeping enough distance, Dub assumed, so that he couldn’t try to wrestle the gun away or use a child as a bargaining chip. He moved past them and trailed a gloved hand along the metal railing that ran up the length of the steep concrete steps.
His legs tingled as he drew himself up one step at a time. Behind him, he sensed the huddle of followers sticking closely to him. He half expected the man to put the barrel into the small of his back and whisper something trite about making a funny move.
They moved in relative silence. The collective shuffle of their feet up the steps was the only sound other than the gusts of wind that whistled through the empty, dead branches of the once-flourishing trees that decorated the walk up to the hill.
One of the desperates sneezed. It sounded like a bird chirping, and Dub assumed, without turning back to confirm it, it had been the smallest of the group. It was followed by another two identical, muted chirps.
“Bless you,” said Dub. It was more out of habit than consideration or an attempt to curry favor with those who sought to steal from him, or hurt him, or worse. Dub didn’t even realize he’d said it until the soft, raspy voice of a little girl said, “Thank you.”
Dub’s hand dragged along the elevating railing, displacing a new healthy layer of ash.
The color was a different shade of gray. It wasn’t as dark as the earlier layers of ash had been. He wondered absently what that meant as he climbed higher, taking the steps deliberately.
Not only was he concerned about slipping on the ash, as he’d seen several others do on their treks up and down the hill, but he was struggling to catch his breath. He couldn’t get his heart rate under control, and the thick burlap that covered his nose and mouth didn’t help. He pulled himself upward, halfway to the top of the first flight of steps.
“When is the last time you ate?” he asked. “And what did you eat?”
One of the children started to answer, but the father interrupted. His voice sounded like a seal barking. “Don’t talk,” he snapped. “Walk. Take us to the food.”
“You’re not going to kill him,” the woman whispered through the rasp. “What are we going to do if he refuses to take us? What if he stops?”
“Shhh,” the man responded brusquely. “If he stops, I will kill him.”
“I don’t want the kids seeing that,” she said loudly enough that Dub could hear her. “That would be traumatizing.”
“As would watching all of us starve to death,” the man said through his teeth. “You want that? I’m going to do what I have to do.”
Dub wondered if the couple was speaking for his benefit. They had to know he could hear them. They were only a few feet behind him. Maybe they were trying to scare him. It had worked. He was frightened. Desperation and fear, hunger and exhaustion made people do things they otherwise might not have been capable of. Mix them together and reason evaporated. He wondered if once he showed them where the food was, they might kill him anyway. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Nothing was. He tried clearing his mind of it but couldn’t. He thought of ways to escape, none of which ended without a bullet in the back.
He tried sucking in a deep breath through the burlap, which was beginning to scratch against his nose and upper lip, irritating them. He exhaled loudly and reached the top step. He glanced ahead. Up the hill and to the right, he caught a flash of movement.