by Tom Abrahams
He was sitting on a curb in a service alley behind a house large enough to house a third of the people on the beach he’d left behind ten days earlier. He blinked his vision back into focus and relished in the swirl of a refreshing, if not toxic, breeze tunneling through the alley.
Before the fit, he’d thrown up into one of the half-dozen trash cans next to him. Some of them, most of them actually, were recycling bins. But they were teeming with trash. And rats.
He’d eaten one of them the night before, having charred it over a small fire Filter had managed to construct with trash and a lighter. He couldn’t be sure if the vomiting was from the rat or the radioactive poison slowly killing him.
He’d seen more and more dead bodies littering the roads and gutters as the days had passed. He wondered about the conditions on the beach. How much had they worsened since they’d left? How many of the tents and boxes housed people as sick as him, or worse? As much as he regretted having left the beach, and its access to the easy trade of goods, it was much more desirable not to be in a place where morning brought it closer to a sand-packed graveyard replete with makeshift mausoleums.
His heart rate having slowed and the pain in his chest subsided, Clint pushed himself from the curb and trudged through the newly accumulated mounds of ash toward the street. He emerged from the alley as he stuffed his hands into his pockets.
Awaiting him was what was left of his army. What had been forty was down to ten. And that ten was threatening to shrink to five or three or one.
None of what he had promised had come to pass. The march here had been harder than he’d expected. Gusts of ash and coldness had made it challenging at best and demoralizing at worst.
And the estates on the city’s west side were more secure than they had imagined. Fences, gates, security systems, dogs, and armed homeowners had left them empty-handed for the most part.
Sure, they’d managed some food, clothing, and some other supplies through the occasional mugging, but it wasn’t much. They’d even killed one man when ripping his pack from him. While Jesse distracted the man, begging for help for nonexistent children, one of the other men had snuck up behind the unsuspecting loner and yanked his pack from behind.
The man had fallen back and hit the back of his head on the asphalt. He was dead within minutes. They’d taken the pack, his clothing, and left his body in the street, nude and bloodied.
The one house they’d managed to penetrate was devoid of food and heat. The owners, or some previous squatter, had even taken the sheets off the beds. While it served as a base of operations and a place to stay out of the ash at night, it wasn’t much more than a fancy tent. The toilets didn’t flush, the water in the sinks and tubs was sporadic, the water in the pool out back was ash-laden and worthless. The liquor cabinet was empty aside from Cointreau. The men had finished it the first night.
Filter had been particularly nasty about it. Despite having stuck around, he repeatedly reminded Clint of what he’d left behind. He’d had four solid walls and a roof. He’d had privacy and security. He’d given it up for a far less valuable prize behind door number three.
Clint had shot back that the choice had been Filter’s. Nobody had forced him to make the choice to search for something better. No one had put a gun to his head.
Filter didn’t want to hear it. He blamed Clint. Their relationship was strained, and many of the remaining men were looking to the perpetually stoned Filter rather than Clint for guidance and leadership.
Instead of Washington crossing the Delaware, Clint had found himself more akin to Captain Bligh on the HMS Bounty. He was getting sicker by the day and wondered if maybe his men might kill him before the radiation did but had stopped believing in miracles long ago. His strength, his resolve, and his ability to shoot down rebels was diminishing by the day. He was approaching what was left of his ineffective army, ready to tell them to give up on him, when the radio on his hip squawked.
He didn’t even realize he’d turned it on, so the squelch of noise startled him. He froze in the street a few yards from his men and unclipped the radio from his belt.
Jesse and Filter drifted from the group toward Clint. Filter glanced at the radio in Clint’s hand and pointed at it with the blunt he had between his thumb and index finger.
“That thing getting a signal?” he asked. “Somebody talking?”
Clint shrugged.
“You look like a dead man,” said Jesse. He pulled his shirt over his girth, but it wasn’t big enough to cover it much below his navel. “Seriously, bro, you look like you died. Like a zombie. You know, one of those—”
Clint wasn’t interested in hearing the opinion of a man whose head looked like a scab receptacle. “I get it, Jesse. I feel worse than I look.”
Jesse and Filter exchanged glances. The radio crackled again.
“…copy you. This is Michael,” said the voice over the speaker. It was relatively clear. “Can you hear me, K6VWV? Over.”
“You gonna answer that?” Filter asked and took a drag, holding it in his lungs.
Clint shook his head. “No, I’m just going to listen. I wanna see who K6VWV is. Let’s see if they—”
“We copy you,” came a second voice. This one sounded older than the first. It was calmer too. But the transmission carried with it more static, indicating they were farther away.
“Glad you hear us too,” said the second voice. “We’re on our way. All is good and on schedule so far. Be packed and ready to go as discussed. Over.”
Clint turned up the volume on the radio. Others from the group wandered over to join him, Jesse, and Filter.
One of them asked, “What are you doing?”
Clint held a finger and pressed it to his lips. He looked at the frequency on the radio’s LCD display: 146.52. He pointed to it and showed it to Jesse. “Remember this number,” he whispered as it crackled to life again.
“How much of our food do you want us to pack?” asked Michael. “We have plenty. Over.”
Clint’s pulse quickened again as he listened. The others drew closer, all of them transfixed by the possibilities. Sensing their interest and trying to soften their palpable resentment, Clint turned up the volume and held out the radio so all of them could hear more easily. He offered a weak smile, which none of them returned.
“Pack whatever you can carry,” came the reply. “You’ll need it for the trip back. Over.”
Jesse tugged on his shirt again and whispered, “Where are these people?”
Others shushed him, and Clint shrugged. He held up the radio, aiming its antenna skyward.
“Copy that,” said Michael. “Again, it’s four of us. We’ll be ready and waiting on the Hill. Let us know when you’re close. Over.”
The response was immediate. “It could be midday tomorrow,” said K6VWV. “The ash is bad out here. The wind has picked up again. It’s slow going. Over.”
“Copy that,” said Michael. “I’ll keep the channel open. Over.”
Clint waited for a response from K6VWV. There wasn’t one. After a minute, he turned off the radio and clipped it to his waistband. The others looked at him expectantly, as if the brief transmission between two strangers had magically restored his sway.
He put his hands on his hips. “All right, this is good. We’ve got a lead on some food, and we know where it is. It’s close too.”
“We do?” asked Filter, the blunt sticking to his lower lip, hanging there.
“The Hill,” said Clint.
“Dude,” said Filter, “this is LA. There are as many hills as there are douchebags.”
“Probably more hills,” added Jesse. “A lot of those douchebags are dead.”
“Good point,” said Filter. He chuckled, leading the rest of the group to laugh.
Clint clenched his jaw and exhaled slowly. He didn’t want to lose his cool. He couldn’t afford to spend the energy on frustration.
“It’s the Hill,” he said. “At UCLA.”
“What’s tha
t?” asked Jesse.
“It’s where the students live,” said Clint. “All of the dorms are there. It’s on the other side of Sunset, a few miles from here. That one voice on the radio, Michael, is a student. No doubt. Easy pickings.”
“How are we going to find them when we get there?” asked Filter. “There’s more than one dorm, right?”
Clint unclipped the radio and waggled it in front of the others. “We’re closer than the people coming for them,” he said. “We get there; we turn this on; we pretend we’re K6VWV. They come out to us. We do what we do.”
“College kids,” said Jesse.
“College kids,” said Clint. He surveyed the others. They shrugged or nodded their agreement. They were in.
“Let’s get our stuff from the house and head out,” said Clint. “We could be there in a couple of hours.”
Filter took a final toke and flicked the stub of his blunt onto the street. He exhaled slowly; a warm cloud of smoke billowed from his nose and mouth before evaporating into the ash.
It wasn’t windy in Bel Air. The occasional breeze blew through the dense but thinning canopy of brown oaks and sycamores. The brittle branches rustled and creaked. The ash was thinner in the air at the moment, a fine dust like that which was once visible in fans of sunlight slicing through the rooms of an unkempt house.
Clint watched the others disband and trudge up an incline toward their gated base of operations. It was a five-minute walk from where they’d heard about their possible salvation on the radio that was now affixed to Clint’s hip.
He dragged behind them, taking his time to consider what was next. His arms swung at his sides, propelling him up the slope. He ran his tongue along his teeth. He could taste the blood from the back of his throat.
He listened to the clop of the boots and shoes of the men ahead of him, measuring the random rhythm of the rise and fall of their soles on the ash-coated street. Small clouds of the particulate hung at their ankles as they moved forward.
Clint knew he didn’t have long. That much was evident in his inability to hold down food, the blood in what little stool he produced, and his unshakable malaise. A couple of the other men were sick too. None of them had very long. There was too much fallout.
They’d all been too close to the attack, whether it was on the fringes of ground zero as he’d been, or on the edge of the city, where the ash relentlessly fell. It invaded everything. It was like sand in a desert, seeking and finding secret places to hide. It had found its way into his lungs, or stomach, or both. He crept slowly up the rise, thinking about what that meant.
If he was honest with himself, it meant that whatever he did in the next few days was pointless. However much food he stole, however many college kids he robbed of their homes or lives, he would still end up dead, his emaciated corpse in a pool of his own blood. There was no doubt about that.
But Clint was never a man who was honest with himself. He lied to himself, justifying his foul actions one way or another. It was how a man like him could sleep at night after doing the things that he’d done. He was a victim. His cards were low numbers and unmatched suits. Everything he did was justified, no matter what it did to others.
With that in mind, what this meant to Clint was that the trip to the Hill and potential bounty that awaited him there was one last adventure. It was one final opportunity to exact on the world the kind of pain and misfortune the world had pressed upon him. It was a chance to show the wavering band of men trudging in the ash up ahead of him that he’d been right all along. There was a pot of gold at the end of their rainbow, and he would lead them to it.
Clint smiled to himself. This was what he needed. One. Last. Hurrah.
Yes!
A renewed sense of purpose swelled in his chest, and he picked up his pace. He swallowed the blood collecting beneath his tongue and took a long drag of the ashy air, filling his wounded lungs with energy and suppressing a phlegmy cough.
He flexed his fingers as he swung his arms at his sides faster and with more vigor. He balled those fingers into fists and pushed them through the air, working to catch his men so he could lead them.
CHAPTER 12
Saturday, August 9, 2025
DAY FORTY-NINE
Westwood, California
“You don’t think this is overkill?” asked Keri. “They said they had food.”
“I think we should take what we can carry,” said Michael. “That’s what they said.”
They were standing inside the walk-in cooler that was barely lower than the ambient temperature of the dry storage surrounding them. None of the food in the cooler was cold, and they’d long ago consumed the majority of the food that needed refrigeration.
They’d been using the cooler to store as much of their food as they could fit inside it. The cooler, unlike the dry storage, had a thick metal door with a lock on it.
After the incident with the gun-toting family, they’d decided a secure location was far better than one without any deterrent. Now all four of them stood inside picking through what they thought were the best options for travel. It was getting late in the day. They’d spent much of it packing their clothes and emergency supplies, which were in bags in their room. Packing the food was their last task before getting to bed early. There were only a few hours of daylight left.
“How much water you think we should take?” asked Dub. He was standing in front of a pallet with their last five cases of bottled water. “My thoughts are all of it.”
Barker was stuffing sleeves of wheat crackers into a drawstring bag. It was the kind of cheap swag given away at extracurricular fairs. He gave Dub a sideways glance. “We can’t carry all of it. Way too heavy and way too far to go. It’s what, like ten or twelve miles?”
Michael nodded. “That’s what they said.”
“Where exactly is it again?” asked Barker.
“They didn’t say,” said Michael. “On the coast. That’s all I know.”
Barker pulled the stuffed nylon bag closed and slipped it onto his back. “And who are they again?”
Michael rubbed the top of his head with both hands. “I told you this already, Barker. We’ve discussed it. We don’t know exactly who they are. They have an underground bunker, running water and power, and sustainable food.”
“I’m still iffy on this,” said Barker, adjusting the drawstrings on his shoulder. “How do we know they’re not cannibals or something?”
“Cannibals?” asked Keri. “Seriously?”
Barker shrugged. “Just saying.”
“Back to the water,” said Dub. “We don’t have to carry all of it. We can have our tour guides take some too. They’ll have packs, I’d guess. How many of them are there?”
“Four,” said Michael. “I think.”
“Four cannibals,” said Barker.
Keri rolled her eyes. “That’s not helping.”
“I’m just glad Michael’s chunkier than I am,” he said. “They’ll eat him first.”
Michael’s face reddened. He touched his gut, which was flatter than the day before.
Keri smiled at Michael. “I don’t know about that, Barker. He’s been looking good. Plus, I think cannibals would eat the most muscular dude first.”
Barker frowned. “Whatever,” he mumbled. “I’m going to grab a case of water and head back to the dorm.”
“You’re not going to wait for us?” asked Dub.
Barker shook his head. “I’ll be back to get another one. If we’re taking all of that water, better to carry it up to the dorm and divvy it out. Whatever we don’t take, we leave behind up there.”
Dub shrugged. “Okay. Grab the one on top. I’ll fill up my pack and be right behind you.”
Barker retrieved the rifle, which he’d leaned up against the cooler’s insulated wall, and slung it over one shoulder. Then he grabbed a case of water, his fingers digging under the thick plastic shrink-wrap so he could carry it in front of him. He shuffled out of the cooler, whistling “The Bat
tle Hymn of the Republic” as he disappeared from sight.
“That dude kills me,” said Keri. She was stuffing pull-top cans of tuna into her drawstring bag. “I mean he’s a total pain, but he’s funny.”
Michael looked at her flatly. “Yeah. Funny.”
“He doesn’t mean anything,” she said, touching his shoulder. “Don’t worry about him.”
Michael was about to respond when his radio squawked. It was perched at eye level on a box of vinegar bottles, leaning against the wall. The red light turned green.
“This is K6VWV,” came the call. “Calling Michael. Over.”
The voice sounded different from Michael’s recollection, but there was less static. The signal was clear. They were close. But he wasn’t expecting them before the next twelve hours.
Michael shot Keri a glance with a furrowed brow and reached for the radio. He pressed the PTT.
“This is Michael. I copy you. Where are you? Over.”
The red light turned green. “We’ve made great time,” said the voice on the other end. “We’re here.”
Michael held the radio in his hand, staring at the display. With his free hand he scratched the crown of his head, his fingers rubbing his expanding bald spot. He again eyed Keri. Her face wore an identical look of concern. Dub stepped closer to them, his hands on his hips.
“How should I respond?” Michael asked nobody in particular. “This isn’t Victor.”
“Are you sure?” asked Dub.
Michael nodded. “The transmission is clearer, so I guess that could account for some of the tonal difference. I don’t know though. This voice is rougher, not as soothing.”
Dub ran his hands through his hair and squeezed it at the back. He puffed his cheeks and sighed. “This is the same frequency?”
Michael looked at the display to confirm and nodded.
“How would they know your name?” asked Dub. “How would they know the other call sign?”
“They could have been eavesdropping,” said Keri. “It’s an open channel, right?”
“It’s a common channel,” Michael said. “It’s not secure.”