Rick got straight to the point. “Are Melody and Richard around?”
“They went out,” Stacy said. There was some background noise, as if Stacy was talking to somebody. “Doug and I are chilling out on the back deck with a few drinks. It’s noisy out here tonight, though. Sounds like a fourth of July party is still going on in places. We were wondering if you and Jeanette want to come by some night. We could chill on the deck, have some beers, maybe a little something extra.”
“Sure,” Rick said. “About my kids, though…”
“They’re out with Max Wellington. Paul met him at Palos Verdes High. A nice kid. You’d like him.”
“Did they take their phones? Can you give me Paul’s cell number, or even Mary’s?”
“But of course.”
It took awhile for Stacy to get the numbers to him. First, she had to retrieve them from Doug’s cell phone. As he waited, Rick heard sirens in the distance. He looked out the window, not knowing why he felt uneasy about all those sirens. He could hear them in the distance forty miles north, too, from over the connection with the Bryant residence. “Is everything okay over there?” he asked Stacy when she came back on the line. “I hear a lot of police sirens.”
“That’s been going on all evening. Like I said before, probably due to all those fireworks.”
Still, it didn’t sit well with Rick. “Can I have those numbers?”
Stacy rattled the numbers off to Rick, who jotted them down on a scrap of paper from the pad Jeanette kept mounted on the refrigerator by a magnet. “Thanks,” he said. He hung up just as Stacy said she was looking forward to seeing him again, then he began dialing Paul’s number. As the phone rang on the other end, Rick had a fleeting thought that at another time, Stacy might have been a hell of a lot of fun back in the day. She’d probably been the kind of girl he would have loved to get stoned with and fuck all night. She exuded that vibe.
Paul’s phone rang an even dozen times but it never went into voice mail.
He tried Mary’s number. Same thing.
Rick stood at the kitchen counter, looking out the window at the dark night beyond. There were more police sirens.
This isn’t right, he thought.
He dialed the Bryant house again.
This time, Doug Bryant answered. “Did you get a hold of them this time?”
“No. Paul and Mary aren’t answering their phones, either. How do I get in touch with this Max kid?”
“Let me get his number.” Paul sounded worried too. “Jesus, that wasn’t a firework!”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, sorry, Rick. I was talking to Stacy. Sounds like there’s gunshots in our neighborhood.”
Rick started to respond, but just then, somebody screamed outside his home. And for the first time that night, a real spike of fear stabbed into his gut and Rick felt very, very afraid.
San Pedro, California
They hadn’t gotten very far from Sunken City when they heard the fireworks.
They were running down a dark street toward Max’s car, which was parked in a lower middle-class neighborhood. Roy Conklin, the homeless guy who had initially warned them, was behind them, shouting at the top of his lungs. “They’re coming to get us! They’re going to eat all of us! And when they do, the Great Iguana King will eat them! We’ll have a great big barbecue! Bwwhahahahaha!” Richard wished the weird fuck would shut the goddamn hell up and stop following them!
As they ran past a small cracker-box house with several jacked-up cars in the driveway, the sound of the fireworks went off like gunshots. Just then, two dark clad figures stepped out of a classic Lincoln Continental that had just pulled in to park across the street. As Richard, Melody, Paul, Mary, and Max drew abreast to the house, several figures ran out the front door, as if they were fleeing a crime scene, and Richard saw they were all brandishing what looked to be assault rifles. The two dark clad figures who’d got out of the Lincoln suddenly drew handguns. One of them shouted out, “Eight Trey Crips, muthafucka!” and started shooting.
“Oh shit!” Richard said. He stopped running and the others stopped too, Melody almost crashing into him from behind. For a brief moment it was like an old cartoon, where the characters crash into each other only to abruptly run in another direction. That didn’t happen. What happened next occurred so fast that Richard was left breathless by its sudden intensity of violence.
Several of the men that had come out of the house were hit by the gunfire, but some started to shoot back at what Richard assumed were members of the notorious Crips street gang. The burst of gunfire that came from the assault rifles was deafening. They cut the two Crip members down and then there were only two men left from the group that had left the house. They started heading toward a Toyota and a Datsun that were idling at the curb. “Let’s go, let’s go!” One of them shouted.
A short man with a rifle shouted to one of the cars. “Cyclone and El Gato were hit. Go!”
The Datsun tore away from the curb and sped off into the night.
The small man dove for the Toyota. His partner was on his heels when he noticed Richard and Melody and their friends. He started toward them, turning the barrel of the rifle toward them.
“Fuck those putos!” Yelled the small man from the Toyota to the man approaching them. “Let’s go!”
The two dead Crips who’d been gunned down in the street suddenly got up. Richard gasped. He could see them clearly from the glow of the streetlight. They were clearly gang members—both men were black, wore baggy jeans and white shirts and had large gold chains around their necks. One of them had a huge hole in his chest. His partner had his left arm blown off by the gunfire. Both started across the street toward the man that was brandishing the rifle.
The group of men that had been gunned down on the front lawn of the house—Richard could clearly see they were of Hispanic descent, some heavily tattooed—also got up. All of them bore multiple gunshot wounds, all of them fatal. As this group got up, the first of the dead men from inside the house shambled outside. More black gang members.
“Oh shit,” Max said. The five friends had remained frozen, crouched near a parked SUV.
“They’re here! Behold, they’re here!” Roy Conklin had finally reached them. He was twenty feet behind them on the sidewalk. He was barely panting.
The two black gang members lunged for the Toyota. One grabbed the driver, the other leaped over the car and went for the small man sitting in the front passenger seat. The driver tried to drive away but immediately crashed into the SUV Richard and his friends were hiding behind.
The men on the lawn and the gang-bangers who’d just come out of the house headed toward them. The man standing on the sidewalk with the rifle was quick thinking and moved fast. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he said to the advancing corpses. He opened fire on them. Bullets riddled the men but they had no effect. The burst of gunfire was quick, only a few seconds worth, but enough to convince the man that this wasn’t normal. “Shit!” he cursed. He turned and started running toward Richard and his friends.
That single act, from seemingly different random events, was like flipping a switch. Richard, Melody, Paul, Mary, and Max also turned and ran back down the street in the direction they’d come. The six of them ran past Roy Conklin and somebody collided with him, knocking the hobo to the ground. Whoever it was that ran into him kept going—Richard wasn’t sure if it was Max or Paul. He was thinking of only one thing—getting as far away from this weird, fucked up shit as quickly as possible.
Behind them, the dead Crips and the dead Hispanic men, who Richard had pegged as gang members also, gave chase. A moment later, Roy Conklin started screaming.
As they ran down the street back toward Sunken City, people came out of their homes, attracted by the commotion going on outside. “What’s all the racket about?” A middle-aged black lady dressed in a long robe said. Richard didn’t have to see what happened to know the outcome. Judging by her screams, one of the dead men—zombie
s, Richard thought—had gotten her.
Thanks to the looky-loos who ventured out of their homes, Richard, his sister Melody, their friends, and the Hispanic gang member they were running with made a clean getaway. They ran past some of these pour souls as they stood on the sidewalk, obviously slow in realizing what exactly was going on. They became quick lunch for the reanimated dead.
Before they knew it, they were back in Sunken City, slipping through the chain-link fence. Richard didn’t know if they were being pursued. He only knew that they had to get away from the zombies.
“Hold up, hold up!” Paul said. He stopped running, grabbed Max and pointed down the cracked street that led down the rocky cliff. “Don’t you remember those things?”
Richard remembered. “Those crab things…shit!”
“What crab things?” The Hispanic man with the assault rifle had stopped with them. He no longer looked like he wanted to kill them for being witnesses to a mass murder.
Richard ignored him, his mind racing as he quickly surveyed his surroundings. What looked to be an old apartment building loomed in front of them. The first floor windows and doorway were boarded up, graffiti dotting the face of the building. Richard pointed to it. “There! Quickly!”
They moved toward the building and Max tried to pry the wood off that had been nailed over the front door. “It won’t budge!”
“Around the back,” the Hispanic man said. He darted down the side of the building, still cradling the rifle. Max and Paul followed him.
Richard started to follow but was grabbed by his sister. “Are you crazy? That guy was going to kill us!”
“And those zombie things are trying to kill all of us,” Richard said. “We have no choice. Come on!” He returned Melody’s grip and pulled her along. Mary stayed close by her friend’s side.
They ran down the side of the apartment building and rounded the corner. The Hispanic man was crouching down to access a window set along at ground level. He pulled at a board that had been set across the window, grunting. “There,” he said. He gestured for them to crawl in. “This building has a basement. Get in, quickly.”
Max and Paul slipped through the window. Richard ushered Melody and Mary in ahead of him. Melody cast him a look. Are you sure? Richard nodded. Melody darted down and squeezed through the window. Mary followed.
Richard paused at the window. “How are we going to get this thing back over the window?” he asked, motioning toward the sheet of plywood the Hispanic man had pried off.
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll pull it back into place. Just go.”
The sounds of screaming people, of police and fire sirens, decided it for him. Things were disintegrating very rapidly. Richard slipped through the window. He hoisted himself down into the darkness, sensing Melody and Paul there to guide him down. He dropped lightly to the floor, surprised that this building had a basement. A moment later, the Hispanic man was slipping through the window. He dropped down, his chest and abdomen hugging the basement wall as he pulled the sheet of plywood down over the window. “Hold me up,” he urged. Paul and Max darted forward and boosted him up, each grabbing him at either side. With sufficient support, the Hispanic man was able to pull the sheet of plywood back into place. “Okay,” he said, and Max and Paul helped ease him to the ground. “That’s not gonna hold them if they find out we’re in here. But from the outside it’ll look like it’s firmly in place.”
“How’d you know it would be loose?” Max asked.
The Hispanic man nodded at the basement. “Hold your cell phones out to light the place up and I’ll show you.”
Paul and Max did that. The light from their phones gave them enough illumination to see that they were in an empty cement basement. The floor and the walls were stained with a dark maroon substance. There was trash in the corners, empty beer cans, and what looked to be empty shell casings. “What the hell is this?”
“Old buildings like this are common meeting places for underground fight clubs or dog fighting rings,” the Hispanic man said. “I had a hunch this place had been used for something like this. I’m glad I was right.”
“Yeah,” Max said. He looked absolutely spellbound by the remains of old violence that had been spilled in this basement.
“I don’t want to be stuck down here, though,” Richard said. “This is like being trapped.”
“We should head upstairs,” Paul suggested.
“What if there’s somebody here?” Melody asked. She hadn’t left Richard’s side since they’d entered the basement.
“Then I’ll take care of ‘em,” the Hispanic man said. He brandished the rifle.
“Yeah, and then what?” Paul said. “You saw what was going down out there! You kill anybody, they come back.”
“Maybe if you shoot them in the head they stay down.” Richard shrugged and caught Paul’s eye in the feeble light from their cell phones. “You know, like Dawn of the Dead.”
From outside, they heard a sound, muffled from being in the basement. CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK!
The cell phones were flipped shut, turned off. They stood there in absolute silence.
CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK!
The sounds moved up the street toward the outskirts of Sunken City. Beyond Sunken City, in San Pedro and probably beyond, was the sound of civilization falling apart: hoarse screams of pain, of panic; warbling police sirens; cars crashing into each other, people running and shouting at each other ending in frenzied screams; the sounds of explosions.
Through it all, they huddled together in the dark in absolute silence.
“I want to call Dad,” Melody said. Richard drew her close, hugging her. He could tell she’d been crying silently. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and fished her cell phone out, flipped it open. Four bars. They had a strong signal in here.
Melody’s fingers stabbed at the keypad. She put the phone to her ear. Richard glanced at the Hispanic man; he still didn’t know the man’s name, but as threatening and dangerous as he appeared to be, things had changed. What had once been an immediate threat had now become an ally.
“Dad? It’s Melody.”
Richard could hear his father’s voice as he spoke to Melody. “Dad, I don’t know what’s happening…we’re in Sunken City, in this basement and—”
“Let me talk to him,” Richard said. Melody was quickly loosing control of her emotions. He took the phone from Melody and put it to his ear. “Dad, we’re in San Pedro.”
“What the hell are you doing in Sunken City?” Dad sounded surprised and panicked. “I’ve been trying to reach both of you for the past two hours! Why haven’t you been paying attention to your phones?”
“I’m sorry, Dad, but—”
“Where are you again? Exactly?”
“San Pedro. In the basement of this old apartment building in Sunken City.”
“Are Paul and Mary with you?”
“Yes. Dad, what’s happening? It sounds like…”
There was no sound from the other end of the line. Richard looked at the display on the phone. The connection had been broken. There was no signal anymore.
“Damn it!” He folded the phone, flipped it back open, hoping to jar the signal back into existence again. That didn’t work. The signal was completely gone.
“Let me see if I can get a signal,” Paul said. He pulled his cell phone out. Richard handed the phone back to Melody and dug for his own. The rest of them dug for their phones as well, all except the Hispanic man who stood close by, holding the rifle. Five different cell phones, each display showing no cellular signal.
The five friends looked at each other, then turned to the Hispanic man. The light from all five phones showed his face more clearly. He looked to be in his late thirties, of medium build with a shaved head. His forearms were heavily tattooed and the left side of his neck bore a tattoo. He looked hard. But he was on their side now. “Signal’s lost,” Richard said.
The Hispanic man took this news with stride
. He showed no emotion. Outside, the muffled sounds of a dying city continued. “My name’s Carlos Garcia, but my homies call me Sparky. We should head upstairs. We’ll be able to see shit better.” He turned and headed for the stairway that led up to the first floor.
The five friends regarded each other silently amid the glow of their cell phones, then followed Sparky upstairs to the ground floor of the condemned apartment building.
Thousand Oaks, California
Augustus and his wife, Marion, were sitting in the rear of the limousine, heading to the airport, when the shit really hit the fan.
Their driver navigated through the snarl of traffic on Foothill Drive, muttering under his breath. The man was in his early sixties with a walrus mustache and longish graying hair. He even dressed the part, with a blue cap and a dark suit. His hands were large and knobby on the steering wheel.
Augustus held Marion’s hand, caressing it. She was worried sick about the kids. They couldn’t get in touch with George and his wife, but their other three kids were meeting them. Andy was bringing his wife and the new baby; Susan was on her way to the airport from Woodland Hills, and Heather and her husband Mike were taking a later flight. It bothered him that they couldn’t reach George and his wife, Kelly.
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