by Mark Wheaton
“Bet you need a walk, huh, boy?” the biker said. He nodded towards the gray-suited fellow. “Unchain him. Bring him with.”
“You’re kidding…”
The pistol was out of Chris’s waistband and aimed at the younger man’s face so fast that everyone in the room save the tattooed man gasped.
“Turns out I’m not,” grunted the gunman. “You gonna get him or what?”
• • •
A couple of minutes later, the group was walking through the crumbling building. The biker had said his name was “Chris,” so the young woman introduced herself as Sharon Wiseman and the gray-suited man as Gary Loeb. As they walked, the trio passed first a ladies room, then a men’s room, and Gary got a little nervous.
“I thought you were taking us to the bathroom,” Gary said, trying to sound tough.
“The building’s intact, but the plumbing ain’t,” explained Chris. “You piss in there, it goes all over my friends downstairs. You might not have a problem with that, but they would. There’s a latrine outside.”
Once they’d gone down the three flights of stairs to street level, Gary’s initial fears fell away as he became preoccupied with the building around him.
“So why this one?” Gary was asking to no one in particular. “I mean, it looks like what, 1920s? We’re in Hollywood, right? It’s not like this area wasn’t affected, but was this one just built a little stronger? Retrofitted after the Northridge quake slightly better than it should’ve been?”
Sharon rolled her eyes and Chris caught it, grinning back despite the fact that he’d threatened to murder her as recently as the night before.
Once they were outside the building, Gary’s point was driven home. Every other building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine had collapsed or at least lost a major part of its super structure: the new hotel, the new condominiums, the old theaters (the Montalban and the Pantages), the Metro station, the old office building in the northeast corner. and almost every other piece of architecture in sight, right up to the once space age-looking Capitol Records Tower up Vine that had pancaked down on itself.
For anyone who might have seen the area in years past, it was now unrecognizable as even being in the same city. In fact, it more resembled post-war Dresden or Nagasaki, a forest of multi-story corners or facades of buildings with no floors in between, the contents of each poured onto the sidewalks, which were now covered in everything from broken glass and office furniture to file folders and ducting.
“We dug a latrine behind the parking lot,” Chris said, nodding to a spot behind the Deco building. “Unisex.”
Sharon nodded, but like Gary she was taking in the sight of the numerous armed men who came into view, patrolling around the building and the adjacent streets. Some were using piles of rubble to elevate their vantage points, while others had created blinds in the other buildings despite many looking as if they might come down on themselves at any moment. Abandoned vehicles had been rolled from nearby streets to create defensible barriers at the end of each block. These in particular disallowed any kind of transport from getting close to the men’s base of operations.
“Worried about looters?” Gary joked as he nodded towards the road blocks.
“It’s for your protection, not ours, asshole,” Chris scoffed.
“From what?” Sharon asked.
Chris paused as if the answer was self-evident but then shrugged, turning to Sharon first. “Sharon Wiseman, some muckity-muck with a banking giant out of Baltimore, right? In charge of a large number of accounts, apparently a genius at picking stocks on the international marketplace.” As Sharon looked surprised, Chris turned to Gary. “And you, your father is the CEO of an aerospace giant in Colorado doing the real work while you blow all his money telling nineteen-year-old wannabe actresses you’re looking to finance movies.”
“How’d you know all that?” Sharon finally asked.
“You’re both on the list.”
“What list?”
“Bounty list,” Chris explained. “Everybody knows L.A.’s fucked. Millions are dead. Millions. It’s unprecedented. But as soon as it happened, a bunch of companies and a bunch of rich guys started putting bounties out for people. Most of them were for family, but some are for business people like Sharon whose companies can’t move forward without knowing the status of certain employees and starting a chain of succession in earnest. The U.S. government’s our biggest client but also the easiest as a lot of military guys now have to get those GPS tracking implants in their wrists like our friend here.”
Chris looked down at Bones, who had gone mostly unnoticed for a couple of moments. The shepherd hadn’t waited for the latrine to urinate having just whizzed on a nearby pile of broken cinder blocks.
“We even thought this guy was one of ’em,” Chris continued, nodding at the dog. “He had a tracking device, was on the move and there’s a $20,000 reward from the government per trooper, so we went for it, and it turned out to be some kind of enforcement dog. Hell, we’re still trying to figure out what kind of money we can get for him.”
“But you’re holding us against our will,” Sharon said, her agitation level rising. “How can that be legal?”
“Let me assure you, it’s for your own protection,” Chris countered. “I don’t know if you have a sense of just how feral it’s gotten out there. Lotta crazy gangbangers picking through the rubble, lotsa thieves who’ll knock over anybody who gets in their way. And those are just the humans. L.A.’s also got this big rat problem now, too, isn’t that right, boy?”
Chris looked down at Bones and rubbed the shepherd’s snout.
“So you’ve got me on a list and you’re probably talking to my dad,” Gary asked. “When do I get out of here?”
“Soon as he deposits a million dollars in our company’s account,” Chris replied. “He went into the press all earnest about finding you, but the more days go by, the more it looks like he figured a pussy like you wouldn’t be able to survive.”
Chris led the pair to the latrine, taking Bones’s chain from Gary. Parking himself on a nearby pile of broken bricks to wait, Chris stared out towards the south as Bones lay down.
“You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” Chris asked before reaching in his pocket and producing an energy bar. Bones angled his head up expectantly. “Oh, now I’ve got your attention, huh?”
Chris unwrapped the bar and took a small chunk for himself but then tossed the rest to Bones who wolfed it down in one gulp.
“Guess you were hungry,” Chris said.
Chris talked for a moment longer about how happy he was to have a dog around, but Bones wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was focused on a large flock of pigeons that seemed to be circling overhead as if guided by a dervish waving a sword. They’d duck low, roll, sweep back around, then race skyward again in an elaborate pattern, always perfectly in unison.
That’s when Bones spotted a red-tailed hawk sitting atop a nearby outcropping, a single surviving corner of an otherwise collapsed six-story building. The hawk was watching the pigeons as closely as Bones but seemed to be intimidated by their movements even though it was the predator. Though the pigeons would normally regard the raptor with fear, their swirling flock moved closer and closer to the hawk until it finally took flight. As it did, the pigeons swarmed towards it, engulfing the large bird in their midst and tearing it apart. Unseen by Chris or any of the other men, the hawk’s shredded corpse soon fell from the sky dropping soundlessly into the rubble of the Montalban Theater.
Disinterested, Bones turned away and saw Sharon returning from the latrine.
“That was a most disgusting experience,” Sharon said.
“Yeah, well, everybody else still alive in L.A. is pulling water from whatever they can find, not realizing most of it is run through with human piss and fecal matter. We’ve got about a day and a half before cholera wipes out anybody left alive out here.”
“Why don’t you rescue them, too?” Sharon asked. “Or is
this simply a mercenary operation?”
“Oh, absolutely a simple mercenary op,” Chris replied. “We have enough manpower to rescue and defend the elite and that’s it. The rest is the government’s responsibility. Bet you’re glad to be important, huh?”
Sharon didn’t say it, but she had to admit that she was.
IV
Chris brought Gary and Sharon back to the room on the third floor of the Deco building where the pair quickly brought the other two (the older man, Arthur Nguyen, and the panicky older woman, Barbara Kuhn) up to speed.
“What’s the name of your company?” Arthur asked.
Chris hemmed and hawed but then replied: “I guess you could say we work for an umbrella corporation called Mayer, but we’re mostly freelancers getting paid by a middleman Mayer hired.”
“Is this like a Blackwater thing?” Gary asked.
“A lot of us are ex-military, ex-special forces, but we get hired on a mission-by-mission basis. Blackwater couldn’t afford us full-time even if they wanted to.”
Chris waited around for a moment, didn’t answer any more questions and then took Bones out with him.
“You stay in there too long and you’ll walk out a bitch, am I right?” Chris asked Bones who just seemed happy to not be cooped up.
Chris brought Bones back out into the courtyard to walk the perimeter, which consisted more of the handler stopping to shoot the shit with a number of his comrades as they went. The big topic of discussion was the rat encounter from the previous night. Everyone had a “the rats are going nuts” story to tell from the last couple of days. One saw hundreds of the creatures devouring the still living residents of a well-built nursing home. Another mentioned a “shower of rats” endured by a fellow when the ceiling above his head collapsed. Four or five dozen rats tumbled through along with piles of skeletons covered with tiny rat bites. No one ventured a guess as to whether the victims had been dead or alive during these encounters.
Throughout the stories, there was another constant. Though the rats were primarily focused on devouring people they had also been seen gnawing on the walls of buildings. From what Chris and a couple of the others could recall from their limited knowledge of rodents, rats gnawed on walls not out of hunger but out of a desire to sharpen and whittle down their teeth or enlarge a living space. But as Bones had observed, the rodents had a taste for the material found between the interior and exterior walls of newer buildings.
“What’s worse is then you see it in their shit,” one of the guys, a fellow named Rodney, exclaimed. “They can’t digest it, but they can’t get enough of it. What is that stuff?”
“It slows fires,” an older guy named Eswin explained. “It’s this high-tech fibrous material that’s got a really, really high flashpoint. Think it’s called Nivec. So if there’s a building fire, it takes longer for it move from room to room, as it really has to cook the walls to finish the job. It won’t completely contain a fire but just slows it down for awhile, like wet wood.”
“How come the rats like it so much?”
“How the hell should I know? Maybe it tastes like rice pudding.”
Chris snickered. “We’re going to see a lot of shit worth writing home about before we pull out, I’ll bet. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Everybody nodded in agreement at Chris’s statement, not realizing they’d all be dead by morning and wouldn’t be writing home about anything any time soon.
• • •
Bones found patrolling with the Mayer-hired mercenaries boring.
He missed being out on in the broken city doing his job. Though he was classified as a work dog by law enforcement, his training made it so that the retrieval of bodies registered in his mind as instinct. Rather than being a hunter-gatherer like his ancestors or the timber wolves, Bones’s brain told him his job on the day was to look for the dead. Being tied down to Chris in and around the Deco building almost felt like punishment in contrast, particularly with the heavy chain the men insisted on keeping around his neck. In the evening, Chris went on break and took Bones up on the roof to finally deliver on the big meal he had been promising the dog since sunrise. It was mostly canned beans and tins of meat, but Chris had liberated all his two hands could carry from the mess hall, so it was in abundance.
“Mr. Loeb’s lawyers are getting antsy about the money,” Chris told Bones with a laugh. “Apparently, the quake really fucked the market, and when you add up the son’s insurance policies, stock portfolio, and pieces of his would-be eventual inheritance pie, Daddy’s suddenly realizing his boy’s worth more dead than alive. Neither side wants to say it, but they’re both dancing around the same thing. ‘Cut him loose.’ Hell, they’d probably pay us a little something just to do that and look the other way.”
Chris and Bones had come across Chris’s boss at one point, a rugged-looking, deeply-tanned Britisher named Gerson. Gerson looked permanently annoyed as he tried to lock down bounty payments so that at least a few of his “charges” could be sent east in a pre-dawn helicopter evac the next morning to free up more of his men to go after further contracts. It sounded like Mayer had been the only game in town for a couple of days, but that was changing. Time and time again, Gerson was tasked with convincing the hopeful wealthy that his team was the best. By contracting them they were most likely to get their loved ones out of the quake zone.
“You have to understand what it looks like on the ground here,” Gerson would say. “The first quake was bad enough, but then the second one hit. Even the military pulled out. You can deal with the cowboy organizations, sure, but we’ve been handling private search-rescue-secure operations dating back to Hurricane Andrew. This is what we do. We’re the best.”
More often than not, this would do the trick, and the Englishman would close the deal. He’d give a thumb’s up to whoever was closest while waiting for a satellite-delivered image of the to-be-claimed package or information on the person’s possible whereabouts.
“Oh, shit,” said Chris after seeing the accompanying address on one of the pictures. “We went by there when we pulled that Kleiner fellow. Everything within ten blocks was rubble.”
Gerson shrugged. “Next best thing to a reunion is closure. Find me a body. I’ll see what I can negotiate.”
At some point during the day, Chris had decided to give Bones a name and started calling him “Butch.” He talked to his newfound companion about the last three days, how he’d been helicoptered in from offshore to a relatively untouched air strip in Long Beach that had been deemed unsafe for some reason by the military. He lived in Tucson but split his time between Arizona and California working as a trainer for the Navy, having been a SEAL himself. He’d established his digs on the fourth floor of the Deco building and had his kit all laid out, one that contained a full two weeks’ worth of supplies and at the end of the day he took Bones up there to settle in for the night. It was pretty spare with a cot, some clothes, a lantern and a bag, but perched in the window on a bi-pod was what Chris referred to as the most important part of his kit, an SR-98 Accuracy International sniper rifle complete with flash and noise suppressor, folding stock, and five-round magazine.
“There are looters for sure, but they know to leave us the hell alone,” Chris said, nodding out the window to the dark, rubble-strewn streets of Los Angeles, where distant sounds indicated that they weren’t quite the only people left alive in the city. “But still, gotta be ready in case the skinnies get brave, you know?”
Bones didn’t seem to care all that much, so Chris fed him another candy bar which the shepherd happily devoured. They hadn’t been down five minutes before one of the other guards knocked on the doorframe.
“Hey Chris. Some woman’s asking for you down in 310.”
“Young one or that old broad?”
“Older broad.”
Chris sighed but then nodded towards Bones. “Beggars can’t be choosers, right? You don’t mind bunking down a flight, do you?”
Chris led B
ones down to the empty office where he’d woken up that morning and found that Arthur, Sharon, and Gary had each eked out a corner of the room, where they’d set up the cots the Mayer men had issued to them. The group seemed surprised by Chris’s appearance having been ready to turn in for the night. All of them, that is, except for Barbara, who looked up at Chris expectantly when he opened the door and poked his head in.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Can we talk a minute? It’s about my husband and this ‘bounty’ that he may or may not be trying to raise.”
Chris nodded but walked Bones across the room first and re-chained him to the radiator.
“Oh, come on!” cried Gary. “You can’t leave him in here with us all night. I have allergies.”
“Company wants us to make sure everybody’s protected,” Chris reported sternly. “Somebody unauthorized gets within a hundred feet of you people, and you’d better believe that dog’s going to let everyone in the building know.”
With that, Chris escorted Barbara out and closed the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, Gary leapt to his feet.
“Shouldn’t we have tried to stop her?” he asked, sounding pissed. “This is textbook Stockholm Syndrome. He’s taking advantage. He’s abusing his power.”
“And what have you been doing all afternoon with me?” Sharon dryly retorted. “’Hey, we’re stuck in here, shouldn’t we try and make the best of it? C’mon, baby.’ I mean, I’d call it flirting, but I’ve never seen it so one-sided.”
Arthur started chuckling as Gary’s face got red.
“Oh, fuck you,” Gary snapped. “Like you weren’t doing the same thing. I’ve seen you two huddled together all day, thick as thieves.”
Arthur and Sharon looked at Gary with incredulity.