by Mark Wheaton
“I don’t know,” she said, clambering to her feet.
She looked around and saw that two commandos were dead on the floor, three were missing and, she presumed, had gone over the ledge of the building. Paul, who was being attended by Nashon, had been at the very least blinded by the birds. She moved over next to him and saw that he was sitting upright in a massive pool of blood surrounded by empty cartridges and shredded birds.
“Who’s alive?” Paul croaked, his commanding voice intact but sounding punch-drunk from blood loss.
“I am,” reported Zamarin. “Ms. Wiseman, the dog, and then Corporal Sahar.”
“No one else?” Paul said, though he didn’t sound that surprised.
“No, sir.”
“And what are the birds doing?” Paul asked.
Sharon looked out towards the sky and saw that the two flocks had merged, but rather than turn and blast directly back into the hotel to finish the job as she expected, they appeared to be killing one another. The corpses of literally hundreds of birds were cascading down to the rubble-strewn wasteland of Beverly Hills in a torrent.
“They’re fighting…or something,” Sharon said. “There are birds dropping out of the sky. They’re killing each other. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I think they’re infected with whatever got into the rats,” Paul suggested. “Either that or God’s decided to take pity on us for a moment. Either way, let’s not spit in His face by wasting it.”
VI
With the birds momentarily preoccupied with tearing each other apart, the survivors of their initial assault helped each other to the stairwell and shut the door. Once there and safe, Sharon pulled bandages from Paul’s woefully under-stocked first aid kit and wrapped them around his head, covering his empty, bleeding eye sockets as well as the numerous cuts on his face and scalp. Nashon started to do the same for Sergeant Zamarin, but there was a question as to what could be done with the still attached eyeball hanging from the end of the optic nerve.
“You can have that reattached,” Sharon said, though she was loath to actually look at it. “It’s not that uncommon a procedure. Just try and pack it back into the socket in some way. Then we’ll pad it with bandages.”
“You have any idea how quickly it’ll get infected?” the sergeant asked. “Minutes, not hours. And that close to my brain? Thank you, no.”
Zamarin pulled a knife out of his belt, snipped through the optic nerve and caught his severed eyeball in his hand.
“Oh, I can’t believe you just did that,” Sharon said, turning her head. Nashon looked as if he might throw up.
A bit delirious himself from blood loss, Zamarin clearly enjoyed the attention.
“If this is to truly be one of my last days on earth, there’s something I’ve always been curious about,” Zamarin began, a whimsical tone in his voice as if reciting a children’s rhyme. “What does it look like, the inside of a dog?”
With that, the commando fed his severed eyeball to Bones who swallowed it in one gulp. “Oh, dear God,” Sharon said, her mouth agape.
“Did he just feed his eyeball to Bones?” Paul asked, surprisingly matter-of-fact.
“He did.”
“You are one sick bastard, sergeant,” Paul said, shaking his head. “You take the prize.”
Zamarin shrugged, but then looked down the dark stairwell. “Be that as it may, I’d imagine the plan couldn’t go much more topsy-turvy. We can’t stay here. God only knows what’s waiting for us below. And if we step back out onto one of these floors chances are the birds will come right back to play another Hitchcock number on us.”
“Well, it just doesn’t make sense,” Paul said. “We got intel as recently as yesterday that there were survivors in this building. There were heat scans, they were moving and alive. Where could they be?”
That’s when a thought occurred to Sharon and she looked down the stairs. “The conference was being held in the subbasement ballrooms, which are right off the kitchen. If they stayed intact, wouldn’t that be the place to go?”
Paul nodded. “Only one way to find out.”
• • •
With Zamarin taking point and Nashon leading Paul, the group slowly made their way down the stairwell back to the first floor. Bones took his lead from the surviving commandos, staying close and not straying ahead. This allowed Sharon to keep a hand on the shepherd as they walked, the darkness giving her a sort of vertigo on the way down she hadn’t experienced on the way up. Even with the dog, she found herself stumbling every few steps when she missed the handrail.
“Shit!” she cried, tripping but then catching herself on the wall.
“You all right?” asked Paul.
“Fine, fine,” Sharon scoffed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“You’re dehydrated, you’re overloaded with adrenaline which has contracted your blood vessels and exploded your heart rate. You’re probably in shock, at least mentally,” Paul explained. “What’s worse, you keep demanding your body move forward. This is it reacting.”
Sharon exhaled sharply, knowing Paul was right but not willing to concede that she might not be fit for this kind of duty. “I’m fine.”
“We all need rest,” Paul said. “I’m near a full system collapse.”
“Then why don’t we abort the mission?” Sharon asked. “Turn ourselves over to the U.S. military, get extracted?”
“I don’t know if you heard, but the American military has suspended all operations inside the Los Angeles basin,” Paul stated, groaning as Nashon slipped a little and bumped the team leader against the railing, confirming to Sharon that he was more hurt than he had wanted to let on. “They’re not coming in here, no matter what. We’re on our own. We have a boat in Venice that’s fueled and ready to go. That’s our extraction.”
“You really think we can get out all the way out there?” Zamarin asked. “Rats by night, now birds by day. Los Angeles is getting pretty feral. Never seen such aggressive birds.”
“Those birds weren’t being aggressive,” Sharon said. “That was some kind of defensive behavior, as if protecting a nest. Only—no nest. It’s what the Mayer guys said about the rats. The rats are poisoned with something that affected their sympathetic nervous system and now it’s been passed on to the birds.”
“That doesn’t make sense. It’s all over the city. That suggests it could be picked up from multiple sources, which suggests it’s either airborne or waterborne. If that was the case, we’d be infected. And if doesn’t affect humans, then Bones would probably be affected.”
“Could it just be animals with simple nervous systems? In both of these cases we’re looking at animals that are prone to hive-mind activities.”
Paul was about to reply when he realized that Bones had gone completely silent. “What’s Bones doing?”
Sharon looked over and saw that he was staring expectantly down the stairwell, his ears perfectly erect.
“He went rigid,” Sharon said quietly. “I think he hears something.”
Paul got to his feet with Nashon’s help and picked up his machine gun. “I’m not crazy enough to fire this thing blind, but in case it’s someone that can be easily intimidated…”
That’s when they all heard what Bones had heard, a distant creak from below. Paul bent over, felt around for the shepherd and then leaned in close to the dog’s ear.
“Go get ’em, Bones,” Paul whispered.
Bones leaped to his feet and zipped down the remaining four flights of stairs. He was out in the lobby in seconds.
“What if it’s a friendly?” asked Sharon, incredulous.
“Then we’ll know soon enough. But I’ve never had a problem with the idea of pre-emption.”
• • •
When Bones reached the lobby, he quickly looked around for the source of the sound, only to hear it again coming up from the stopped escalators leading to the lower ballrooms. He wheeled around, raced down the escalators and immediately
found himself in another dark part of the building.
The sub-level was filled with dead bodies, the corpses of about thirty people lining the hallways. It looked like a few had been carried down by collapsing ceilings and columns rather than having been in the sub-basement for the quake. But though the stench of death hung heavy in the air, Bones was able to immediately pinpoint that one scent distinctive from the others: the living.
Leaping across the bodies, Bones made his way down the dark hallway to where a thin slit of light was framing a door.
“Someone’s coming!” came a voice from the dark. “I hear them!”
“Is it the rats?” came a second voice.
“No, I don’t think…”
But before this person could finish, Bones reached the door and with very little effort forced it open. The man who had been standing behind it, a fifty-something named Sebastian Zobrist, was knocked backwards. Bones immediately stood on top of the fellow, drooling in his face as he gave him a sniff-over.
“Christ, get it off me!” Sebastian cried. “It’s going to kill me!!”
Bones glanced up and saw that there were about as many living people on the inside of the ballroom as there were dead outside. He looked back down at Sebastian and licked his face for good measure.
That’s when Bones sensed something coming towards him and looked up in time to receive a broadside in the form of a metal chair that a middle-aged woman swung against Bones’s ribcage, sending him sprawling.
“Jesus Christ, you’ll just make him mad, Greta!” Sebastian said as he scrambled to his feet. “You should’ve killed him!”
“With what?” Greta asked, nodding around the room.
“We have those knives,” someone offered from the back of the room.
Before Greta could reply, Bones was back on his feet and pissed. Rather than growl, he kept his head low to the ground, his spine straight as he wasn’t “threatening,” more slipped into about-to-leap-up-and-tear-your-throat-out mode. The humans saw this and flinched backwards.
“Oh, shit,” Sebastian exhaled. “Now what?”
“That’s enough, Bones,” came the voice of Paul, stepping through the door and into the ballroom, his machine gun surprisingly well-aimed directly at Sebastian’s rotund middle.
Bones quieted as Nashon walked over and put the leash back on the shepherd, pulling him back to the group as Paul and Zamarin stepped forward.
“Who are you?” asked a woman in a thick South African accent.
“Tzva Hahagana LeYisra’el,” Paul snapped back, returning to martial mode.
“Israelis!”
Nashon, Sharon and Zamarin, looked in the direction of a man, obviously of Arabic descent, who stepped forward. “I guess, if anybody was going to get to us, it would be katsas.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, but we’re not Mossad, we’re Army special forces,” Paul said. “Your accent is Lebanese?”
“Your accent is the West Bank?” the man replied, challengingly. “Perhaps even Gush Etzion? Bet you wouldn’t have come all this way if you knew there was a chance you’d be saving an Arab life.”
“That situation can change,” Zamarin said, voice mixed with threat and sarcasm.
Sharon raised her hand. “Please! Let’s see if during this Apocalypse maybe we can set aside our differences for even a moment. Given the gravity of our situation, can’t we see each other for a moment as fellow human survivors and not avatars of our governments?”
The Lebanese man shrugged, then nodded towards Paul. “He’s the one with a machine gun aimed at unarmed civilians.”
Paul sheepishly lowered his weapon, but Zamarin kept his raised. “Unarmed? Didn’t I hear somebody say something about knives?”
A young woman in the tatters of a catering uniform held up a stack of breakfast silverware, hardly a threat to anyone. Zamarin lowered his weapon.
“I know you,” said Greta, nodding towards Sharon. “You work for the Stephane Foundation.”
“I do,” Sharon replied. “We’re here to rescue you.”
“We’re here to rescue the Israeli contingent,” Paul corrected.
Murmurs went through the ballroom. The Lebanese man scoffed as if Paul was confirming everything he’d ever believed about Israel.
Sharon wheeled around on her heel. “The Israeli contingent, if we had found all alive, would’ve been around forty people. We are looking at thirty. I believe we can accommodate them given the situation.”
“Are you forgetting that we are down two-thirds in force?” Paul hissed back.
“Are you forgetting that you’re blind and that you guys need us more than we you?” Sharon said, then spotted the half-grin, half-sneer on Paul’s face before turning back to the assembled group. “First of all, we need to know how many of you are injured.”
• • •
It turned out that a tiny slip of a woman, Lisa Nong who had grown up in St. Petersburg the child of Japanese diplomats, was a doctor. She had come to the Stephane Foundation conference as the representative of a large Asian medical consortium to lobby for economic partnerships in other countries. She had patched up the injured as best she could in the ballroom, which had at one time incorporated a number of local Beverly Hills residents who had made their way to the hotel once they saw it was still standing.
“After the first quake, we probably had a good one or two hundred people in here, maybe more,” Lisa told Sharon and Paul as she cleaned up Paul’s wounds and re-bandaged his eyes. “We had food, we had candles, we had some lanterns and we even had a couple of generators that we knew to use sparingly. As survivors made their way here, we were afraid that we’d be over-capacity within hours, but that just never happened. And after the second quake, a number decided to try and get out of the city.”
“Where did they hope to go?” Paul asked.
“Over the Hollywood Hills and into the San Fernando Valley. They thought they’d be safe despite the fires and the landslides. A few said they were going to try for the ocean and said that if they found rescue, they would send people back. We haven’t heard from any of them. You’ve encountered the rats?”
“Last night,” Paul nodded. “We were going overland into Hollywood to retrieve Ms. Wiseman here. Our satellite linkups kept showing this massive heat signature that had been building around the city for days. We thought it had something to do with burning gas lines, but then we saw the tribe of rats for ourselves.”
“We saw rats within hours here the first day when we started making the first meals. They were curious and seemed to be going after the food in the kitchen, but they weren’t as feral as the ones that started coming by a couple of days later. We noticed they were getting more aggressive, and, worse, they attacked a couple of people that went out on a supply scout. Then on the third night, they swarmed into the hotel and killed six people. We had to beat them back with torches. That’s when we sealed ourselves in this one ballroom. The fourth night, we were pretty well sealed in here in case they came back, but then there was the second quake. The people you see out there in the hall? They bolted when it struck. The rats were waiting.”
“And the birds?” Paul asked.
“That’s new,” Lisa sighed. “We only started to see them a couple of days ago. Somebody came in here and told us that they’d seen large swarms of birds patrolling around downtown, including gulls feasting on corpses. We didn’t believe them. There have been a lot of rumors. But then they attacked a supply party yesterday. That’s when we stopped sending people out. That’s when we decided it was just no longer safe to leave this room. We’ve been here ever since, driving each other crazy.”
“Have you had any contact with the outside world?” Sharon asked.
“Couldn’t get a single phone to work,” Lisa said. “We saw all the military helicopters the first few days and figured they’d get to us eventually. But then, the second quake came and the over-flights ended. Any idea when they’re starting up again?”
Paul sh
ook his head. “What’s worse is that once they get wind of this rat and bird situation, that’s going to delay them even more. I don’t think they’ve ever had to deal with something like this.”
Bones was lying down nearby, his eyes following the conversation as Lisa spoke, turned to Sharon, and then turned back to Paul. He even noticed when Lisa casually rested her hand on Sharon’s leg when making a certain point and similarly noticed when Sharon didn’t push it away.
“So what’s the plan?” Lisa asked. “Are you planning to take us out? Or was your earlier sentiment the most accurate: Look for Israelis, realize not a one survived down here with us, and slip away in the middle of the night when we’re not looking?”
“Well, it’s a risk either way and not just for us,” Paul stated. “As their food supplies begin to run out, the rats and the birds are going to get even more desperate, which means they’ll find a way in here, believe you me. But if you come with us overland, we’ll be attracting a lot of attention and the chances of being overrun are high. Either way, it’s not going to be a picnic.”
“So, what do you suggest?” Lisa asked.
“I think that decision should be left up to you and your people,” Paul said. “You’ve been savvy enough to survive this long so that’s a major indicator towards your instincts. Also, you’ve been negotiating this city post-quake longer than we have and have a greater sense of the risks.”
• • •
It didn’t take long for Lisa to explain the options to the others and even less for a vote to be decided on.
The group in the ballroom consisted of Lisa; Sebastian, who was an English real estate baron, but who had inherited everything from his father; the woman who’d struck Bones, Greta, who was an Austrian finance minister; Shahin, the Lebanese man who turned out to be the vice president of one of the largest construction entities in the Middle East; and Sally, the catering waitress with the knives who had originally come from Tennessee.
Additionally, there were two other members of Lisa’s medical consortium; a four-man Malaysian news team covering the conference who had been sharing a suite on the tenth floor and were, in fact, the level’s only survivors; an Australian finance minister named Garth Trenchard and a woman he referred to as his “secretary” named Kathryn, but who was obviously a highly-paid escort; a Hollywood agent named Jeremy who hadn’t been at the hotel at all but at an agency across the street when the quake hit; eight Latino hotel workers—four women and four men—all employees of the hotel who had been working around the kitchen and sub-basement when the quake hit and had survived entirely unscathed (though they had originally been a much larger contingent as a number of the hotel employees were the ones who had decided to “brave” the outside after the second quake); a lecturer on investment opportunities in heavy manufacturing of electronics in Taipei named Gregoire; and then there were two kids, an eleven year-old named Tony and his older sister, Heather, who was fifteen. They’d been staying on the sixth floor of the hotel, their mother having been an attaché to the finance minister of Ecuador and whose room had been crushed leaving no question as to the fact that their mother was dead.