by J. Thorn
“Roy, you got anybody in there?” he called through the door. Sometimes he slept with Marta, the Mexican girl whose age might have put Roy on the wrong side of statutory rape charges, but she dropped by only once a week. Campbell kept his nose out of such things unless Marta happened to have a “friend” who “was down for partying.” Which was every three months if Campbell was lucky. Not that he cared that much. Women were complicated; Left 4 Dead made linear sense.
“Roy! Did you pay the power bill?”
After pounding hard three times and getting no answer, Campbell tried the door. If Roy was gone from the apartment, he locked the door because he was dealing nickel bags of weed on the side. Not that Roy didn’t trust Campbell. Paranoia just came with the territory.
The handle turned, which meant Roy was snoozing through a hangover. Pete pushed the door open, bulldozing a pile of dirty clothes. The room smelled of old socks, cheap aftershave, the rusting metal of Roy’s weightlifting set, and a permanent booze/pot smell that blended into one tarry and potent smog.
Campbell felt along the wall—widescreen TV, lift bench, dresser piled with bottles—until he reached the window. He wracked the curtains wide so that the sun streamed onto Roy’s bed.
There, asshole, I hope that drives fishhooks into the backs of your eyeballs and yanks them out.
Roy didn’t move. His face was turned toward Campbell, mouth hanging open, the tongue lolling in there like a fat, pink grub. Campbell kicked the bed. “Wakey wakey.”
Roy quivered but didn’t awaken. This time Campbell wedged one bare foot on his roommate’s thigh and shoved. Roy rolled partway over, not even muttering his annoyance. Campbell leaned in and studied Roy’s pale face.
Don’t look so hot. Like he’s been shooting heroin or something.
Campbell leaned closer. A new kind of foul stench came from Roy’s mouth. But it wasn’t bad breath, because Roy wasn’t breathing.
Damn damn damn.
He pressed a finger to Roy’s neck like they did in the movies. He wasn’t sure what a pulse would feel like, but it didn’t matter, because he felt nothing.
Shit shit shit. He’s dead.
Campbell retreated to the living room, eyes now adjusted to the gloom. He fished his cell from his pocket. But should he call an ambulance? What about the drugs? Would Campbell get in trouble? Sure, he could blame everything on Roy, but a police search of the place would be a big hassle.
In the end, he decided to make the call. Except his phone didn’t power up. It had been fully charged an hour ago, when his manager called to remind Campbell about his shift.
No power, no phone. What the hell is going down?
Campbell opened the apartment door. A man was sprawled on the sidewalk outside, huddled like a lump of clothes. A red Jeep wheeled wildly through the parking lot of the complex, shearing the bumpers of three vehicles before plowing into a Ford truck. The Jeep’s driver crashed headfirst through the windshield, hanging there like a trophy deer mounted on a red plate. Screams rang out from the surrounding streets.
All hell was breaking loose, and Campbell did the only thing he could think of under the circumstances.
He stepped back, slammed the apartment door, and locked it.
And wondered how long it would take for the power to come back on, and how long before Roy started to stink for real.
CHAPTER TEN
Rachel heard the screams as she clawed her way out of sleep.
As usual, she’d been underwater in her restless dreams, probing the murky depths for something she could never find.
Something banged against her apartment wall, and she thought the neighbors might be having one of their cozy little spats. But the screams were muffled and distant, coming from somewhere outside the apartment complex.
And there were several, a chorus line of wailing, shrieking, and bellowing. A grinding metallic crash, punctuated with broken glass, brought her fully awake. Somewhere down the street, a car horn blared incessantly and then gave way to an abrupt silence that was much too deep for a weekday dawn in Charlotte.
Rachel rolled into a robe and rose to the window, assuming an auto accident. She had to remove the box fan to get a good look. The street was a mess. Cars were jumbled in a chaotic array, with traffic completely stalled. A city transit bus had slewed to a stop in the intersection. Two service vans had collided, one of them spilling bundles of blue towels from its cargo bay. Steam rose from beneath the hood of a Toyota sedan, and the driver’s arm dangled from the window. The hand was deathly still.
That’s when Rachel realized the only movement on the street was a woman in business suit running awkwardly between the stranded vehicles, one high-heel missing, hair trailing out behind her in tangles.
No, there were others.
Chasing the woman.
The nearest was a man in a khaki uniform shirt with a cloth insignia on the shoulder, like some sort of delivery driver. He slapped against the side of the bus has if not seeing it and staggered for a moment before continuing after the screeching woman. As if drawn by her cries, a man in a scuffed leather jacket dodged between vehicles toward her. His pursuit was blocked by two cars that had collided bumper to bumper, and he scrambled over the hood of an Audi sedan, sending bits of broken glass winking to the street. They were both gaining on the woman, who was too frantic to remove her lone high heel. She hobble-clopped toward the storefront of an electronics repair shop, where an old woman was collapsed against the door.
Then Rachel noticed the other bodies…at least four that she could see at a glance. She recognized a pink cardigan sweater she’d loaned to Mira, and then recognized the long dark hair splayed out around her head where Mira lay prone on the sidewalk near a bus stop.
Call 9-1-1.
Rachel reached for her cell phone on the nightstand, although surely the police already knew about an incident this big. But the phone was dead.
Her grandfather had tried to teach her about firearms, but she had resisted, refusing to buy into the violence of the world. Now she wished she had a weapon. But she didn’t know whom to shoot. Or why.
Rachel shoved the screen out of the window and yelled at the panicked woman, hoping to draw the attention of her attackers. But while the woman turned and looked up, the two men plunged ahead, closing the distance. They were on her in an instant and began tearing at her clothes and hair.
A rape, in broad daylight?
But that didn’t square with the carnage below, or the dead bodies. This was big. Way big.
And she remembered the stories about solar flares. She squinted at the rim of flaming orange that burned like a promise across the city skyline.
Rachel didn’t yet realize it, but she was witnessing the glimmer of a new dawn, a world where death claimed its throne and the few survivors could hardly count themselves as lucky. Because the survivors would be alive and nothing more, while others among them—those who’d been sparked into a cataclysmic upheaval of evolution—would be more than alive.
This was the first light of After.
Someone pounded on the door.
***
Scott Nicholson is the international bestselling author of more than 20 thrillers, including the Solom series, The Home, Disintegration, Liquid Fear, and Speed Dating with the Dead. His books have appeared in the Kindle Top 100 more than a dozen times in five different countries. Visit his website at AuthorScottNicholson.com or view his Amazon Author Central page. Sign up for the Tao of Boo newsletter for giveaways and free books: http://eepurl.com/tOE89.
Look for the other books in the After post-apocalyptic series: After: The Shock, After: The Echo, and After: Milepost 291
After: The Echo
© 2012
EDWARD W. ROBERTSON
THE COMPLETE BREAKERS SERIES
Breakers (Book 1)
Melt Down (Book 2)
Knifepoint (Book 3)
Outcome (Novella)
Reapers (Book 4)
Cut Off (Book 5)
These
and all my other books can be found on Amazon.
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I:
PANHANDLER
1
If he'd known the world had already started to end, Raymond would have kept the drugs for himself. At least that way he wouldn't have to lie to his wife about it. It wasn't the drugs themselves that were the problem—they were casual smokers, Mia would greet the pine-skunk scent with a smile—or the amount, two ounces of weed, no more than he'd handled in college whenever he needed a few extra bucks. Instead, it was what the drugs meant: very soon, they would be out of money.
He turned away from the overgrown back yard, the wood of the deck creaking beneath him, and finished his lie. "We can even get a dog soon. Isn't that what you've been wanting? To clean stains out of the carpet five times a day?"
Mia's dark hair fluttered around her chin, the breeze bringing with it a whiff of salt. "I want to get a great big one. A wolfhound. Something big enough to eat you if you kick it."
"You think I'd kick our dog?"
"People get up to all kinds of bad things when no one's looking."
He smiled back. "Gotta run. Interview in Beverly Hills."
"Look at you."
"I won't be coming home in a Porsche. The guy just wants some cover art."
She cocked her head, brown eyes questioning. "He needs an interview for that?"
"Psychologist," Raymond shrugged. "Don't ask me. But if it works out, he's got some other projects he wants me for." He leaned in and kissed her before she could say anything more. She tasted like fresh peaches, lip gloss sticky as melted sugar. "If I get the gig, we'll go out for Indian."
Inside the bungalow, he grabbed his wallet and hustled out the front door exactly as if he had a traffic-filled 90-minute drive into the city ahead of him. Wilting heat breathed from the door of his '96 Altima. From the outside, all looked good: crisp white paint, sunroof. Inside, the left turn signal didn't work, the speedometer crapped out half the time, leaving him to estimate his speed by RPMs, and the AC took a solid five minutes to quit blowing hot air. He was sweating before he left the cracked driveway.
It was a lie, but not one he felt particularly bad about. The details might have been bullshit, but the basics, those were whatever the opposite of bullshit was. Grass, maybe. Or a fine, aromatic meal. Probably not a productive line of thought.
He did have an interview. Of sorts. In any event, he would soon be handing over $400, borrowed from Kelsey, which he would exchange for two ounces of wholesale weed. He could flip that to his friends and friends' friends for $800. With Mia's part-time, $800 would get them through the month. If he hadn't picked up any extra design work by then, he'd give these guys another call and repeat. Clean. Simple. Low-risk. As loose as LA weed laws were, he doubted he was even committing a felony.
With the city waiting uselessly to the north, Raymond swung south on the Pacific Coast Highway, cruising past the Thai massage parlors, organic grocers, and colon hydrotherapy salons of the South Bay. Lukewarm air flushed the swelter from his open windows. On the cliffside hills above him, smooth white manors contemplated the ocean, protected from the syrup-thick traffic by winding residential roads, gates, and the inborn social understanding that you have no business there. The lesser hill of the PCH dumped him into Torrance.
Strip malls and chain shops bordered the boulevard. When he idled at long red lights, exhaust and the smell of hot asphalt poured through the windows. He swung off the PCH, passing a bowling alley, liquor stores. He'd written himself directions from Google and drove in the far right lane, peering for street signs. Pastel bungalows lined the side streets, two-bedroom joints that still appraised at $500K despite the bubble and recession. Not that anyone was buying. When he'd poked around his options for selling the house his mom had left them in Redondo, every realtor in town advised him that unless he was desperate, he should just rent and wait it out for a year or three until the rebound catapulted the old home back up into low seven figures. But Mia had always considered herself a California girl at heart, and from 1000 miles away outside Seattle, finding new jobs sounded perfectly simple, something normal people do every day. They'd moved down.
Nine months later, Mia was lucky to get 15 hours a week at the clinic. He snagged odd jobs on Craigslist, ebook covers and logo design for website startups, but biddings-wise it was a race to the bottom. In a lucky month, he could cover the utilities and gas for the car. His checking account had died a slow bleed. He didn't even have a credit card. He was reasonably certain they could mortgage the house, but he didn't even rightly know what a mortgage was besides something he couldn't pay. What happened with the electric company in three months? What happened when their bank account was as empty as their fridge?
He parked in a weedy lot behind a beige rectangle of apartments. When he'd left Redondo, it had been comfortably warm, just a few degrees above cool, but the Torrance heat was almost painful. The difference between coast and inland, separated by no more than five miles of six-lane avenues and CVS pharmacies, could be a twenty-point jump on the thermostat. Transitioning between the two always made Raymond feel insane, as if he'd left not just his hometown, but his entire reality.
The blacktop shimmered. He closed his door, yanking his hand away from the scalding metal. A couple blocks away, traffic whooshed like surf. A crow cawed, was abruptly silenced by the bleat of a child's whistle.
Two ounces in broad daylight in an empty parking lot. Bobby had set this thing up for him, and he'd been buying from Bobby since bumming him a cigarette outside a bar on the pier three months back, so it's not like he was worried, exactly, but that wasn't exactly how he planned to do business himself. Ideally, he'd deal out of the house, but Mia was back by 1:30 in the afternoon. He'd have to drive to clients, set his phone to silent to disguise his sudden popularity. On the other hand, why not tell his customers that if they weren't at his house by 1 PM, they'd be out of luck? Telling stoners to be up and at 'em by early afternoon was a little like lecturing a dog to chew with its mouth closed, but he'd be the one with the pot. The power. It'd be his way or the dry way.
At the mouth of the lot, a gleaming black sedan turned off the road, bass thudding so hard Raymond could feel it in his chest. The car eased into the spot next to his. Engine idling, the passenger window slid down, washing Raymond's face with icy air. A skinny white guy with a shaved head leaned across the seats.
"You Raymond?"
He patted his pocket for the envelope of bills. "Are you Lane?"
"Get in."
Raymond popped the door and inserted himself in the passenger seat. Cool air rushed over his arms, raising his fine blond hairs. Lane stared at him like a bald basset hound. "Money?"
"Yeah. Two ounces, right?"
Lane nodded. Raymond squirmed the envelope from his pocket and passed over the last of his cash, most of which had been borrowed. Lane lifted the flap with one finger, shook the envelope up and down. "Cool."
"So?"
The man smiled like a kindergarten teacher. "You never done this before, have you?"
"Everybody does it their own way."
"Our way, you pay me the money, I send you to Mauricio. That dapper gentleman up there." Lane pointed to an apartment balcony across the way. Behind the black rails, a fat shirtless man sprawled in a lawn chair, a silver beer can propped on his gut. "Nobody's straight-up trading money for shit. Anything happens, we're all protected."
"Sounds like a good system." He raised his eyebrows. "When I sell this through, can you get me more?"
"There's always more." Lane stuck out his knuckles for a bump. Raymond fumbled for the door handle. Sunshine smothered him; Lane's car backed up and swung for the lot exit, gleaming. Raymond swept sweat from his hairline and scanned for the stairs. Heat roiled from the pavement. Sweat tickled his ribs as he jogged up the balcony to Mauricio.
"What's up?"
The fat man dragged a damp cloth over the folds
of his neck. "Sup?"
Raymond gestured at the empty lot. "Lane sent me up."
Mauricio's shoulders lumped together. "I don't know any Lane."
"The guy in the car. Shaved head. We were just down there."
"I saw him. Don't know him."
"He knows you. What is he, your stalker?"
The man wriggled upright in the lawn chair, grabbing his beer before it splashed over the concrete landing. "Look man, I don't go into this stuff. I'm an upstanding citizen. But that guy, I think he ripped you off."
Raymond's face prickled. "You'd be in a pretty good position to know that, wouldn't you?"
Mauricio spread his blunt palms. "I've just been sitting here. If they made that illegal, I need to go on the lam, man."
"What if I call the cops?"
The man's belly shook. "About how you were trying to buy weed? With intent?"
"I'll tell them Lane robbed me." He blinked sweat from his lashes. "Give them his plate."
"I wouldn't do that, bro."
"He's got my money."
"I just wouldn't do that. That would be rude. But mostly it would be a very bad idea."
"That was all I had left."
"Seriously?" Mauricio smiled past his beer. "My first lapdance tonight is going out to you."
The parking lot's heat thudded over Raymond's skin. He drove off on autopilot, lighting a cigarette—he usually only smoked when he drank; the battered pack of Dunhills had been in the glove box for weeks—sweating, face burning, swearing at everyone who switched lanes without a signal, which was fucking half the population of Los Angeles. The AC pumped hot air into his face. He drove past the turn to his house and parked two blocks from the pier where there were no meters to feed.
The coastal breeze was a cool hand. He scuffed over the time-fuzzed boards of the pier, past bars and fast food stands and the seafood places with the live crabs clambering over each other in the windows. At the far end, Asians and Hispanic guys lobbed lures into the waves beyond the breakers and waited for a bite. Could he do that? At least they'd have food. It's what his great uncle had done during the Depression—once a week, he and his brother and sister and parents would go to the creek and catch their limit, forty trout apiece, two hundred trout in total, and they'd eat trout until the next week rolled around and they did it again. His uncle had died unable to eat fish ever again, but they'd made it through. How would Mia feel about fish?