Dead in L.A. (A Gathering Dead Novel)

by Stephen Knight

  This ain’t too cool, he thought. No pun intended.

  He called Faye to the bedroom and spoke to her while she stood outside in the hall. He quickly explained what he thought was going on. She wanted to take him to the hospital, but that wasn’t going to happen. The last thing Wallace wanted was to be caught outside in the middle of an emergency while ill and unable to respond. He had her fetch some water for him and some food—not that he was hungry, but he would need something later, in the event he wasn’t ambulatory.

  “You guys need to stay out of the room,” Wallace told her. It was getting hard to breathe, and his lungs felt as if they were on fire. “Don’t come in. Spay everything down with Lysol, and those antiseptic wipes in the laundry closet.”

  “Robert, you need to get to a doctor,” Faye hissed. The panic was clear on her face.

  “Not happening,” Wallace said. “They’re turning away everyone. I’m not that sick yet, and I don’t want anyone going outside. Stay here. I’ll either get better, or I won’t.”

  “And what if you don’t get better? What will we do?”

  Wallace considered that. “Take care of Matthew, no matter what. Go to the house in the hills,” he said finally. “Take everything you can carry, including the weapons. Get up there, and stay there until things blow over.” He was developing tunnel vision, and a bout of intense dizziness struck him. He was certain his fever was peaking. He needed to get off his feet, and unless he did it himself, he would just fall over and do a face-plant right then and there.

  “Mom?” Matthew had come out of his room, and he looked up the hallway.

  “Son, don’t come in,” Wallace said. “Stay with your mom. I’m sick.” To Faye: “Gotta lie down. I’ll—” He paused as a sudden coughing fit overwhelmed him. Every contraction sent a burst of fiery pain through his chest. He tasted foul mucus in the back of his throat. “I’ll be fine,” he managed to croak, and then he closed and locked the bedroom door.

  Still coughing, he crept toward the bed and collapsed across it. His last thought before he blacked out was that he needed to take off his clothes, but then the darkness descended upon him, as fast and furious as an out-of-control freight train on iced-over tracks.

  The dreams were terrifying. Wallace didn’t know how long he lived in the nightmare world of his sickness, but the nightmares and hallucinations were the worst thing he’d ever experienced. Grim, forbidding images full of demons and blood and torn flesh, the stench of rotting offal on the air as thick curtains of black, diseased smoke curled across the blood-red sky. And amidst the cries and screams of the dying came the moans of the dead.

  For a few precious seconds, he would emerge from the madness, half-mad with fever, the sheets stained with his sweat and urine and old, dried bile and mucus. He was always struggling to catch his breath, and felt as if he was drowning in his own juices. Sometimes when he awoke, it was dark. Other times, bright sunlight outlined the shape of the drawn shades. But he couldn’t make sense of where he was. Everything was foggy, out of focus. Was he alive? Was he dead?

  When he tried to contemplate his position, he would inevitably slip back into the world of death and despair, where the stench of death made him cough and choke. There was no relief; his suffering was total.

  Wallace stirred and opened his eyes. Still dazed and dizzy, he came out of a twilight fugue state he had been in and found himself lying on the stinking bed in his own mess. His throat was dry and raw, as if he’d spent hours shouting. But he could breathe. It still hurt to do so, and a deep breath brought forth the coughing once again, but it wasn’t as deep, wasn’t as debilitating as it had been before. He definitely felt better.

  “Faye?” he called, and his voice was barely a husky whisper. He swallowed, but his mouth was as dry as a tomb. Blinking against the sunlight that crept around the shades, he turned his head. It seemed to take Herculean effort, but he saw the bottles of water on the nightstand a few feet away.

  “Faye? Matthew?” Again, his voice was no more than a tortured whisper. He needed water, and he tried to reach out toward the bottles that were so near, yet so far. The effort was gargantuan, and his arm trembled from the strain. With a moan, he tried to rise up on his elbow to turn toward the nightstand, but the burden of action was too much.

  He passed out.

  Later, he regained consciousness once again. How long he was out, he had no idea. The room seemed the same to him, and there was still light coming around the shades. He could have been unconscious for seconds, or for days. There was no way to tell. He found he could breathe easier, though he was still weaker than he’d ever remembered being. The bottles of water called to him like plastic sirens, promising to slake the thirst he felt if only he could make it to them. Wallace became aware he was under a white comforter, and he was naked beneath it. Clearly, he had either managed to undress himself or Faye had done so, against his instructions not to enter the room. The bedroom door was closed, and across the room, he could glimpse his clothes in the laundry basket.

  Moving inch by inch, he managed to turn onto his side and reach for the nightstand. His movements were stiff, clumsy. He knocked the water bottles over, and all but one fell to the floor, well out of his reach. The remaining bottle rolled backwards, caught between the lip of the nightstand and the wall. With tingling fingers, he managed to pull it toward him. An eternity seemed to pass before he was able to unscrew the plastic cap and bring the bottle to his lips. He drank half of it in one great draught, his throat burning as he swallowed the lukewarm water in a torrent. He stopped to gasp for a breath, and wound up coughing again. Water splashed across his face. He ran a hand over his mouth and chin, and felt a thick collection of whiskers there. From that alone, he knew he’d been out for days, maybe more than a week. He was well down the road to growing a beard.

  “Faye?” he called, and the water had helped make his voice stronger. “Matty?”

  The house remained silent. Too silent. The room was warm enough to him that the air conditioning should have been running, but it wasn’t. Wallace sipped more water and listened. The silence was disconcerting. No cars drove past, no lawn mowers rattled, not even the omnipresent beat of helicopter rotors which were a 24/7 piece of living in Los Angeles. No sirens. No voices, no sounds of children playing.

  No nothing.

  He called for his family again, but the house remained silent. Wallace finished the water and slowly sat up in the bed. He wrinkled his nose as the stench coming from the fouled sheets. He had evacuated his bladder and, from the looks of it, the contents of his stomach. When he pulled the comforter aside, it got worse. He hadn’t just pissed the bed; he’s actually shit it, too.

  “Fuck,” he said, his voice still a hoarse whisper. “What the fuck.”

  He managed to more or less throw aside the filthy comforter. He was shaky and weak, but he found he was able to ease his legs out of bed. He definitely felt better.

  Guess the worst is over, he thought. A bucket sat next to the bed, mostly empty except for some staining. Rumpled towels were on the floor next to it. The throw rug that had been there for years was gone; Wallace had no idea where it went. He had to hold onto the nightstand to get to his feet. His back was sore and stiff, and his legs felt rubbery. He felt filthy, which was to be expected. He half-turned back to the bed, but didn’t like what he saw smeared across the sheets.

  Looks like a new one of those is in my future.

  “Hey, is anyone home?” he called out. Just standing up and moving seemed to make his voice stronger. There was no response. Using the wall as a brace, Wallace moved to the bedroom door and twisted the knob. It was locked. He unlocked it and pulled it open.

  The hallway beyond looked just as it normally did. A little darker, and maybe a little dustier than he’d remembered, but essentially the same. From here, he could see all the way into the dining room. There were bottles and empty packages of food there—cereal, oatmeal, other items he couldn’t identify.

  “Faye!” he
called. “Hey, Faye! Matty!”

  Nothing.

  Turning back into the room, he could smell the stench of his own bowels and bladder. He made a face and closed the door, locking it behind him. Lurching toward the bathroom, he made it into the small room. He turned on the tap. A weak stream of water issued forth from the faucet, and he rinsed his hands, then his face. He checked his face in the mirror. He looked pale and gaunt, and had a good two weeks’ worth of beard. His chin and cheeks itched quite a bit, and his hair was matted and greasy from a combination of sweat and, he presumed, vomit. A long line of dried mucus made one of his thick, dark eyebrows look gray. Basically, Wallace looked like shit on a stick.

  He tottered toward the shower and turned it on. The water pressure was low, but a small fan of water emerged from the showerhead. It remained cold, failing to warm even after he’d turned the handle all the way to the hot position. Flicking the light switch, he saw the overhead lights remained dark. So there was no power, which explained the lack of hot water, among other things. With no other choice, Wallace stepped into the shower.

  The cold water was beyond bracing, and he gasped and trembled in its embrace. Nevertheless, he soaped up and broke out the shampoo, still sitting conveniently in the shower tray before him. The longer he stayed in the cold stream, the more he got used to the temperature. But his body continued to shiver and tremble, so he washed himself as thoroughly as he could and got out as soon as possible. His teeth were practically chattering by the time he reached for his towel. Once he was dried off, he tottered back into the bedroom. If the bed wasn’t soiled, he would have returned to it. Instead, he pulled a clean pair of jeans and a long-sleeved shirt from the closet, and from the dresser he removed a pair of underwear and socks. His movements were slow and clumsy, as if he had aged thirty years during his illness. Judging by the beard he was growing, he’d been out for the better part of two weeks. He knew that was more than enough time for his muscles to start to atrophy, and lying in his own mess for days on end made him wonder how he’d been able to avoid bed sores, or some rather serious skin infections. He checked himself in the full length mirror that Faye used. He was shocked to see how gaunt he was. He’d lost at least twenty pounds, and his ribs and hipbones were strikingly prominent, bony protuberances that seemed ready to erupt through his pale skin. While Wallace wasn’t a gym rat, he had kept in shape. He saw almost no recognizable muscle tone. That further explained the weakness he felt.

  Getting dressed was almost exhausting. By the time he’d pulled on his now loose-fitting jeans and pulled his shirt on, he was breathing hard and felt dizzy. He had to sit on the foot of the rancid bed and rest for a few moments before getting up to leave the room. As he stood up, a gigantic bolt of dizziness struck, and he fell back to the bed once again.

  Easy, man, he counseled himself, his heart hammering in his chest. He coughed again, and spat a small clump of foul-tasting mucus into the bucket. Bouts of shivering still wracked his body, so he just sat there on the bed, waiting for them to pass. Minutely, bit by bit, he began to feel better. Just the same, he looked around the room in a bid to reset his internal compass. Everything looked normal. Dirty, but normal. A layer of dust lay on the dresser and bureau, and the full-length mirror was coated with it, as well. His shotgun was propped against the dresser, something he would never do. That meant Faye or Matthew had moved it. He examined the weapon’s muzzle from where he sat. It was still clean, with none of the telltale mottling that would indicate it had been fired.

  Finally, he felt good enough to slowly clamber to his feet. He was still unsteady, so he grabbed the shotgun and used it as a crutch after first checking to ensure the tang was in the safe position. He opened the door again and hobbled down the hallway. Matthew’s room was empty, and as messy as it usually was. Across the hallway, the guest room/office was in a similar condition; clearly, Faye had been sleeping on the sleeper sofa there. The desk that Wallace used to review scripts and the like was covered with folded clothes. The monitor of his Mac was dark and expressionless.

  He hobbled through the rest of the house. Disarray, or at least more disarray he had seen while Faye had been at the helm, was everywhere. Discarded food wrappers, dirty paper plates, empty water bottles, dust, and specks of detritus on the floor. The plants in the living room were all dead or dying, their leaves and fronds yellowed and curling.

  He entered the kitchen, looking to the white board hanging on the wall. There was a note, written in Faye’s neat script:

  GONE TO GREG’S.

  There was no date, no time. Wallace stared at the message for a long moment, trying to divine when it might have been written. Was it an hour ago? Fifteen minutes ago? A week ago? And what did it mean—did Faye and Matthew relocated there, in the processing leaving Wallace to fend for himself? That didn’t make sense, and it was out of character for both of them.

  He knew that Matthew’s friend Greg lived two streets away, and that his parents were a pretty solid sort, so much so that they had mutually agreed that their kids could go to each other’s houses in case of emergency. That Faye left a note on the whiteboard indicated that she fully intended to return, and that she expected Wallace to live long enough to see it. But Greg’s house was only a few minutes away, and he hadn’t heard any sounds inside the house for the better part of an hour. Surely, if someone was home, they would have heard the water running in the shower and waited for him to emerge from the bedroom? That would have been more in keeping with the family he’d been living with.

  Something’s wrong, he thought.

  When he heard the screaming from the street outside, Wallace knew that he was wrong. The worst wasn’t anywhere near being over. It hadn’t even started yet.

  CHAPTER 3

  WALLACE

  Wallace stayed holed up in the Redondo Beach garage apartment for an interminably endless night that was punctuated by stray gunshots and distant, blood-curdling screams. As he tossed and turned fully clothed on top of the lumpy bed in the bedroom, all he could think about was Matthew, and where he might be. Perhaps he had made it to someplace safe. Perhaps he was dead. Or perhaps he was out there, in the darkness, hurt and alone and frightened.

  Wallace wept. He was more helpless than he’d ever been in his entire life, and it was a difficult thing to reconcile in that strange, dark bedroom, listening to the sounds of the living being slowly enveloped by the dead and eaten alive. He made sure the baseball bat was still propped up against the night stand, and that his pistol was still on his belt.

  Eventually, exhaustion won out, and he descended into a fitful, restless sleep.

  When the gray light of a dawn shielded by the marine layer offered pictures through the windows, Wallace roused and sat up on the bed. His joints still ached, and his movements were still slow—but he felt much stronger than the day he had awakened in his soiled bed in Ranchos Palos Verdes. Not anywhere near where he should, but at least just sitting up in bed didn’t leave him with a vicious case of the spins. He slowly eased off the bed and got to his feet, listening to the sounds of the morning. Birds chirped outside, and the beat of helicopter rotors throbbed in the distance. There was no noise from inside the apartment, but he knew better than to trust that he was safe without verifying. He picked up the bat and slowly walked toward the closed bedroom door, mindful of the minute creaks of the floorboard beneath his feet. He stood at the door and listened for a long moment. Hearing nothing untoward, he opened the door and stepped back, bat held high.

  Nothing.

  He ducked out into the small living room/kitchen area outside. All was as he had left it the night before. No zombies, and the door leading to the stairs was still closed and locked. He went so far as to crane his head to look over the back of the battered couch he’d collapsed into the previous day, but there were no ghouls lying supine on its worn, flattened cushions. Wallace was still alone in the garage apartment, with no unwelcome visitors lurking about.

  He made use of the darkened bathroom,
and while the toilet flushed, no water emerged from the faucet, not even a rusty trickle. The end of modern day conveniences—in this case, running water—had finally come to pass.

  Matthew. Have to find Matthew. The thought resonated through Wallace’s mind like a high-speed train racing through a darkened tunnel. With it came an unbelievable amount of anxiety that made his heart race and his mouth feel dry. But tagging along at the end of all that was one small, sensible plea: Make sure you’re up for it, because you’re no good to him dead.

  With that, Wallace made himself a light meal, using ingredients he had found in the apartment. He wasn’t hungry—who could sit down to breakfast while agonizing over a missing son?—but it had to be done. Even though he felt better, he wasn’t ready for what lay in wait outside. LA was a tough place before the zombie apocalypse. It likely wasn’t improving under current conditions. So he forced himself to eat a cold breakfast, simply because to do otherwise would delay embarking on his search.

  Once finished, he walked over to one of the windows and gingerly peered around the curtain. There were no zombies out in the backyard—none he could see—but just the same, he studied his surroundings with great intensity. To his left he could see the main house, a white colonial that would have looked more appropriate somewhere in the northeast than in southern California. Its normalcy was inviting, nevertheless. His view looked pretty much straight across thirty or forty feet to a second-floor window. He studied the house for a few moments, then looked away.

  Justas he did so, he thought he caught a glimmer of movement. He turned back to gaze at the house, scanning its white surface, focusing on the windows. He watched and waited until it finally happened again—one of the curtains over a second floor window seemed to twitch.