He stopped running and felt his front pocket, then his back. His cell phone wasn’t there. Neither was his wallet. He’d left them behind. Danny cursed himself as he stood flat against the wall of an Asian grocery. It was closed. The doors were padlocked. He didn’t have to worry about anybody seeing him here.
Maggie stood at his side, looking up at him expectantly. Her tongue and tail wagged.
“You know what my dad used to say,” he said to his dog. “This world is made up of protons, neutrons, electrons, and morons.”
The dog cocked her head to one side. She blinked and shifted her weight on her front paws as she sat.
“Guess which one I am?” he asked. “We’ve got no money, no ID, and no phone.”
The dog tilted her head the opposite direction. She shifted her weight again. Her tail whipped back and forth along the concrete sidewalk in front of the grocery’s entrance.
“I’m the mor—”
A rumble stopped Danny midsentence. He pressed his back against the metal bars that protected the glass doors leading into the grocery. The entry was recessed from the rest of the frontage. He was trying to hide while at the same time watching for whatever it was that was rolling in his direction.
The rumble grew louder. It was coming from his left. He squeezed himself into the corner of the recessed entry, hoping that whoever, or whatever, was about to pass by him would be looking straight ahead and not see him from their vantage point. He snapped his fingers and Maggie pressed next to him before lying down on the cement.
Danny could feel the noise in his chest as it amplified. It vibrated the metal bars. It made his teeth chatter. It was a mechanical roar, the sound of metal and grinding gears. He caught his first glimpse of the monster that made the noise in the reflection in the glass opposite him in the alcove. It was warped and somewhat obscured by the vertical bars protecting the glass. It was a tank. A military freaking tank. It wasn’t alone; rolling behind it in a parade of desert brown and olive green came Humvees and other large trucks that Danny couldn’t identify other than to say they were mean looking.
He’d heard on the news, when the anchor talked about the emergency declaration, that the California Military Department, known as Cal Guard, was divided into the Army Guard, the Air Guard, the Reserve, and youth programs. The governor had activated the Army and the Reserve and was planning to mobilize the Air Guard if needed.
As a pair of Black Hawk helicopters thundered overhead, Danny guessed they were mobile already. He remembered something about the 146th Airlift Wing, but it didn’t mean anything to him.
He crouched, squatting with his butt on his heels, and covered his ears. The parade of war machines thundered past him with a deafening roar. He didn’t know where it was heading, but he could guess. If the state was rounding up healthy people and putting them in secure locations, they’d need guards to keep them there.
Danny figured there’d be roadblocks too. The state would want to limit movement and restrict access to areas that were either clean or infected.
He did notice that none of the soldiers in the trucks or Humvees were wearing the bright yellow Tyvek hazmat suits he’d seen on the soldiers who had broken into his apartment. He couldn’t see all of them, he was sure, so he considered that maybe only the ones tasked with direct contact were wearing the suits.
The last of the vehicles rolled from sight and Danny’s pulse slowed a bit, although it was still pounding against his neck and in his chest. He leaned back against the bars and wondered what he should do now. Where should he go? It wasn’t like he could just up and drive out of southern California. Even if he could evade the Cal Guard, which was unlikely, and get to his VW, he couldn’t afford the gas.
He chuckled thinking about the uselessness of a car he couldn’t afford. He’d thought so many times about selling it. He figured he could get a couple of grand for it, but he couldn’t part with the only asset he owned. Danny was someone who liked owning his own things. The VW was the last vestige of a life where he owned everything, including his dignity.
Now the VW sat parked in a garage two blocks from his cheap apartment. He only took it out for a spin once a month to keep its engine running smooth. If he didn’t have money in the bank, he could always grab some cash from the stash he kept in the glove box.
The glove box.
His emergency gas stash. There had to be sixty bucks in the car.
He didn’t have his keys on him. But that wasn’t a big deal. He’d left a spare set with the garage attendant in case they had to move the car for some reason. There was round-the-clock access to the office in the basement. If he could get there, he’d be golden. If he could get there.
Danny took stock of where he was. He figured he was maybe two miles from the garage. In his VW, he’d have a place to sleep for the night, somewhere to stay out of sight while he planned his next move, and he could grab some much-needed cash. There might even be a can of stale Pringles under the passenger’s seat, and he was pretty sure he’d left a half full bottle of water in the driver’s side door when he’d last driven it two weeks earlier. It wasn’t ideal. It was something though.
He stepped slowly from the alcove and stretched his neck to check both ways. The street was empty in both directions, save the shrinking parade, which was rolling farther away from him. He patted his thigh and Maggie followed. The two of them stuck close to the low-slung buildings that lined the street. He passed a nail salon, another grocery, a poke restaurant, a coffee shop, a secondhand clothing store that claimed to sell vintage fare, and a pharmacy. All of them were closed. All of the doors were locked, the lights off.
He carefully crossed an intersection and led Maggie along the edge of another row of commercial buildings in various states of disrepair: an electronics repair shop, a travel agency, another nail salon.
Los Angeles, Danny had decided, was a never-ending collection of block-long strip centers, apartment houses, and hillside bungalows. Its buildings, like its people, were rife with has-beens and wannabes at the bottom, with the allure of fame and wealth sitting on high like an attainable dream. It was those dreams at high altitude, perched on the hillsides, that kept everything below grinding away.
Danny was certainly a has-been, even if he hadn’t aspired to the Hollywood lifestyle and failed. Thing was, he’d been a wannabe and failed. That was what made him who he was now. He was a man whose dreams had never materialized, not yet.
His dream had up and left him for the Bay Area. He was little more than a man who had been in love, had been a husband, and had been driven. None of this, however, was on his mind as he turned right and sprinted diagonally across the empty street to the other side.
That was a good thing about a plague. It took your mind off your problems.
Danny darted between two parallel-parked cars and hopped onto the wide sidewalk. As he moved with hurried, short steps, he noticed there weren’t any parking spaces. That was another thing about Los Angeles. There was never any free parking, apparently even in the direst circumstances.
He wondered if the cars were there because their owners were in secure locations, if the Cal Guard had managed to corral them and take them to wherever it was the healthy people were going.
None of the cars had tickets on the windshields. That was another giveaway that things bigger than parking enforcement had engaged police. Danny stopped, trying to slow his pulse and the rhythmic throb that radiated from the back of his head.
He found an alcove, a recessed entrance to a vitamin shop, and bent over at his waist. He rested his hands on his knees and took slow, deep breaths. It was something his sensei had taught him: how to slow his heart rate and breathing by consciously controlling it. It was a tactic meant to preserve energy and strength. The sensei also told him it slowed the buildup of lactic acid in muscles, but Danny wasn’t so sure about that.
Maggie panted, wagging her tail, and looked up at her master as if awaiting instructions. She was the smartest dog Danny had ever o
wned. Truthfully, she was the only dog he’d owned. He’d never been a dog person until he found her on the street. She wouldn’t leave him alone, following him back to his place. They’d been virtually inseparable since. He was grateful for her unconditional love, something he’d never found anywhere else, beyond maybe his mother. Regardless, Maggie’s love was the kind that only dogs provided. It was always there, on the surface, available for consumption.
Maggie was grateful for him too. She thanked him daily with her tail wags, her desire to be close to him, and what to Danny looked like a perpetual smile. Well, it was perpetual when she wasn’t tearing into the hazmat-suit-covered arm of a Cal Guard intruder.
“We’re headed to the car,” said Danny. “Maybe we’ll find a treat there.”
Maggie’s ears pricked at the word treat. She shifted her weight on her paws and looked in the direction they were headed.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said T-R-E-A-T. Not fair. Look, if there’s anything there, you can have it. You don’t even have to share.”
She looked back at Danny and sat. She stopped panting and licked her chops. Then she glanced back up the street and her ears pricked again. She stood. Her stare was intense, expectant. She was on the verge of barking. Danny could see it in her posture, in the way she looked like a coiled wire ready to spring. She worked her front paws up and down as if the concrete sidewalk was molten.
Danny peered around the edge of the alcove. He’d caught his breath. His pulse was slow and the pain was dull now. He squinted to focus his vision and saw what had the dog’s attention.
A trio of people was walking toward them. They were in the middle of the street, not making any effort to hide themselves. As they drew closer, Danny could see they wore surgical masks. One of them carried a baseball bat. Another had a handgun. The third, perhaps a woman, held something in her arms. All three of them were laden with large packs.
Danny ducked back into the alcove. It was too late. They’d seen him. Or Maggie.
“Hey,” called one of them. A man’s voice. “We see you. We see your dog.”
Danny patted his thigh. Maggie glanced at him but stood her ground.
“Stay,” he said under his breath. “Good girl. Stay.”
Maggie let out a guttural-sounding growl. It wasn’t quite a bark, but it was the beginning of one. It was the same sound she made when she wanted to go out in the morning. She’d nudge him at the side of the bed and make that sound. If he ignored her, it grew into a full-fledged, weighty bark.
“Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay. Stay.”
The man’s voice echoed off the buildings and along the empty street. “Dude, we see you. We just want to walk past.”
“Feel free,” said Danny.
He could hear their footsteps now. They were getting close. Maggie was getting antsy. The hair was prickling at her neck.
“Your dog bite?” asked the other man. “We gotta worry about it?”
“Depends entirely upon you,” Danny said. If they went about their business and kept moving, Maggie would sit and watch. If they tried something, she’d rip into them. He wouldn’t have said that before today, before she’d done it to the yellow-suited soldier.
The footsteps stopped. Danny’s pulse quickened again. The throb in the back of his head returned. This was not a good day.
“We’d feel a lot better about this if you weren’t hiding behind that wall,” said the first man. “We just want to pass.”
Danny wasn’t armed with anything other than Maggie’s instinct. If they opened fire on him, he’d be a sitting duck. Actually, he was a sitting duck regardless. All they had to do was round the edge of the alcove. He had nowhere to hide.
He exhaled and took a large step forward. His hands were open and above his head. His eyes were on Maggie until he emerged from the alcove. That was when he saw the gun leveled at his chest.
Danny raised his hands higher. “I’m not armed. I don’t have any money. I don’t have a cell phone, no keys, nothing.”
He was so focused on the gun he couldn’t see the smile spread across the armed man’s face.
“Dude.” The man chuckled through the mask, the edges of words dulled by the filtering fabric that covered half of his face. “If I wanted your money, I’d take it.”
Danny’s eyes shifted and he got his first good look at the trio. The man with the bat had it slung across his shoulder like a baseball player on deck. He too wore a mask. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin was pale. He wore a black Dodgers cap and a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the hint of colorful tattoos on both biceps. He was muscular. His shoulders were broad and he stood there with an arrogance Danny had only seen in athletes, movie stars, and one particular tech gazillionaire from the Bay Area.
Then he saw the woman. Her eyes were red, swollen, and framed by large bruise-colored half circles. Even with the mask on, it was obvious she hadn’t slept.
In her arms she held a baby swaddled in a pink blanket. Danny couldn’t see how old it was, but the woman cradled it like a newborn. Her tight-fitting T-shirt, made out of a glossy wicking material, clung to her body and revealed what looked like the aftereffects of a recent pregnancy. She was thin, but carried the soft belly of a new mother.
The man with the gun was taller than his companions. He held the gun in a way that suggested he’d fired it before. He stood with his feet shoulder width apart, angled forward awkwardly, with his hips tucked behind his torso.
He wore eyeglasses with black rectangular frames. Thick, bushy black eyebrows curled over the tops of the glasses. It almost made him look like Groucho Marx but with a smaller, less impressive nose. His skin was ruddy, his hair wavy and slicked back with product. Or maybe it was wet. Danny couldn’t tell.
His eyes darted amongst them. They were fifteen or twenty feet from him.
Maggie stood still. Her muscles were tense, her jaw square. She was ready to go if Danny gave the word.
“What do you want, then?” asked Danny. “If you want to pass, just pass.”
“You’re the first person we’ve seen,” said the armed man. “And you’ve got Cujo here, so…”
Danny kept his hands as high as he could hold them. His shoulders protested. A throb of pain pulsed in the back of his head. He winced.
“Where are you going?” asked the man with the bat. “You’re not with Cal Guard, right? You don’t look like you’re with Cal Guard. They’re the only ones we’ve seen with dogs.”
“Them and LAPD,” said the armed man. His eyebrows moved up and down when he spoke.
Danny shook his head. “I’m not with either.”
The man with the gun glanced over his shoulder. Then he eyed Danny up and down again. “You can put your hands down, dude. I’m not gonna shoot you.”
Danny lowered his arms. Sweat trickled down his spine. He could feel cold perspiration under his arms now.
“Not yet.” The man chuckled. He lowered the weapon. “But you might want to ask Cujo to stand down. I got some questions for you.”
Danny glanced at Maggie and back at the trio. He realized the bruises under the woman’s eyes weren’t actually bruises. They were dark circles from lack of sleep. The baby shifted in the blanket. It looked like a caterpillar moving inside a cocoon.
“I doubt I have any answers,” said Danny. He motioned past the trio with his head. “I just wanna keep heading that way. That’s it.” He patted his thigh. “Sit, Maggie.” She did.
“You won’t get far,” said the armed man. “They’re setting up roadblocks and checkpoints. They’re hauling in everybody they can find within a five-mile radius. They’re saying this is one of the epicenters.”
“Epicenters?” Danny echoed. “Epicenter of what?”
“The Super Flu,” the woman said, her voice dripping with exhaustion. The words blended together as if she didn’t have the energy to enunciate. If Danny didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was drunk. Then again, maybe she was.
“It’s not a
flu,” said Danny. “The news called it that, but it’s not a flu.”
“Whatever it is, this is one of the places they think is responsible for it,” said Bat Man. “They’re sending everybody to a—”
“Secure location,” Danny cut in. “Yeah.”
The armed man took a half step forward. The gun was still at his side, but he adjusted his grip. His eyebrows lowered and his eyes narrowed behind the glasses. “You’re not clueless. You know about the quarantine.”
Danny’s eyes were on the gun. “I never said I didn’t.”
“You work for them?” asked the woman. Her tone was shrill, but the words still melted together.
“For who?” Sweat was coating Danny’s neck now. His lower back was drenched.
The muscular man shifted the bat from one shoulder to the other. The one with a gun took another step forward. Maggie stood.
“The government,” said the woman. It sounded more like “gubmuhnt,” but Danny understood her. She cleared her throat. The sound was thick and raspy, like she was trying to get something up and out of her chest.
“No,” he said defensively. He wanted to raise his hands again. “I’m a fry cook.”
“They got spies, you know,” said Bat Man.
“Spies?” Danny was confused.
He had no idea what they were talking about, but he could sense the situation deteriorating. He swallowed hard. A wave of pain thumped in the back of his head and stretched to his neck. “Look, why don’t you go your way and I’ll go mine? I’m just trying to—”
He stopped himself short. He wasn’t about to tell these people he had a car. That could be suicide. They already appeared stressed to the point of instability.
“To what?” asked the man with the gun.
Danny searched his mind for the right words. It was hard to think. The pain made it difficult to focus.
“To what?” Bat Man persisted.
“Get out of here,” Danny said. “I just want to get out of here. Cal Guard came to my house. They tried to take me. We barely got away. That’s why I don’t have any cash, phone, or keys. Now I’m screwed. I don’t want any trouble. I just want to go where I was headed. That’s it.”
The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction Page 6