“How’d you get away?” asked the armed man.
Danny started to tell them and then thought better of it. “How’d you get away?” he countered. “I’ve been telling you a lot about me. You haven’t said anything about who you are. How do I know you’re not spies?”
Danny knew that idea was ludicrous. They weren’t spies any more than he was. But he needed to deflect, to put them on their heels. The whole idea of spies was paranoia as far as he was concerned.
Even in the midst of martial law, there was no way the California government was organized enough to employ spies in the early hours of a crisis. They couldn’t even balance a budget or figure out how to manage a water crisis, how were they going to fund and manage espionage?
The man with the gun cocked his head to one side. His tone softened. “Good point. Even if you were a spy, you couldn’t contact anyone without a phone. Not without running to one of those checkpoints. By then we’d be gone.”
The woman coughed. It was a bark more than a cough, but it was wet. Her body jerked and the man with the bat quickly moved to her, putting his free hand under the swaddled child.
The man with the gun stared at the two of them for a moment, glanced at the other man, and they exchanged a nod. He took two more steps toward Danny. Maggie grumbled. Her tail swept across the concrete once, twice.
“We gotta go,” said the man with the gun. “We’ve got somewhere to be. Sounds like you do too. We’ll forget we saw you if you forget you saw us.”
Danny nodded. While he didn’t fully understand why they were so edgy, so wary of a passing stranger on an empty street, he didn’t question it.
“Sounds like you know as much as us,” said the man with the gun, “but in case you don’t, we’re hearing that everybody gets tested when they get to the secure location. The healthy go to one site, the sick to the other. Doesn’t matter if it’s a kid or a mom, a husband, or whatever. They’re separating the good eggs and bad eggs. No questions. No answers.”
Danny wondered what they’d done to escape the secure location. What had they already seen that made them so…whatever it was they were? Danny noticed for the first time the bat had a dark stain on its sweet spot, and it looked like there was a clump of hair stuck to it.
“Go ahead,” he said, trying not to stare at the bat. “Be careful a couple of blocks up. It looks like the Cal Guard is using it for transport.”
The woman coughed again, this time louder and with sharp edges. Her face squeezed with pain and she hunched her shoulders. A dark spot appeared at the center of her mask and leached into the fabric, spreading into an abstract circle. It was blood.
Danny unconsciously took a couple of steps back. The trio moved back into the center of the road and kept walking. The man with the bat now had an arm around the woman’s waist. She wobbled as she walked.
She wasn’t drunk, and the slur was from exhaustion. The woman was sick. She was drugged.
Danny watched them disappear around a corner and squatted on his heels from the release of tension in his body. Maggie came over to lick the sweat from his face. Her hot breath was not the kind of unconditional love he wanted right now. He rubbed her behind the ears, moving her face from his, and thanked her. “Good girl, Maggie. You’re a good girl.”
She grunted and tried to lick his ear. Her tongue lapped at the air.
After a minute, Danny stood. He wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve and started walking again. If his next encounter with a person was anything like the one he’d just had with the triumvirate of creepy, he was fine with never seeing another human again, that was for sure. It was the only certain thing at the moment in a world he realized he didn’t understand anymore.
It took him two hours to wind his way to the garage. He avoided any street where there appeared to be traffic. He stayed away from pedestrians and listened for sirens and the sounds of military trucks. Finally, after walking five times as far as he’d originally planned, he crossed the street and into the first floor of the parking structure. It was cooler in the garage, a welcome break from what had become an abnormally warm and dry afternoon in the city.
His footsteps and Maggie’s panting echoed off the concrete walls of the garage. As they trudged toward the office, they shuffled along.
He leaned on the door and knocked.
No one answered.
He pressed the service buzzer and got no response, pressed his face to the door, and yelled through it for help. Nobody came.
He looked at Maggie and shrugged. She stared back at him with nothing to offer.
“All right, girl, we gotta figure this out.”
He tried the door handle, feeling stupid for not having attempted that first. But it didn’t budge. He stood there for another minute, considering whether he should try to break into the office or break into his car. Neither was appealing.
Then he decided his car might be unlocked. That was a possibility. So rather than damage the office window unnecessarily, Danny trekked up the ramp and around to his spot.
His VW sat there, as it did most days. It was a beater. The tires were bald, the tint on the rear windows and back glass had bubbled and was peeling in spots, and the passenger-side door had a dent the size of a grapefruit.
He sighed and walked to the passenger door first. He tried the handle and tugged. No luck. Then he walked around to the driver’s side and tried it. Nope.
Maggie was sitting in the middle of the garage. She scratched her ear with one paw and then licked the paw. She scratched again.
Danny tried the door again, just because, and then banged his fist on the roof out of frustration. The sound reverberated through the structure and Maggie stopped mid-scratch to stare at him.
“Sorry, Maggie. My bad.”
She resumed her scratching, her collar jingling.
Danny walked to the back of the hatchback GTI, leaned his butt against it, and folded his arms across his chest. The car sagged on its rear tires under his weight. He rubbed his chin and scratched his elbow. It was dry and his light brown skin had turned chalky white at the joints.
It was quiet in the garage. Even the distant sirens were barely audible within the three stories of concrete. It felt like a trip back in time, a spot the chaos hadn’t claimed yet. It reminded him how fast things had deteriorated.
As he scratched the dry patches of rough skin at his elbows, he realized he was thirsty. When was the last time he’d had anything to drink? The day before? Two days ago?
Danny reached up and touched the tender spot on the back of his head. It exploded with pain. He winced and an aftershock rolled to his extremities. He craned his neck to one side and widened his eyes to clear the discomfort.
He considered the headache might be as much dehydration as it was the knot on the back of his head. At least he wasn’t bleeding.
“I’m trying to think of the positive,” he said to Maggie. The mixed lab tilted her head back, her tongue wagging. Danny squatted and motioned for her to come closer.
She did, putting her paws on his knees and licking his face. He rubbed behind her ears and reminded her how good a dog she was.
“Gotta be positive, right?” he said to her. “I think if—”
There were voices. They were a floor below. They were low, muffled even. Danny was sure there were people in the garage. He held his finger up to his lips and motioned for Maggie to hop down. She did and lay at his feet, her tail sweeping slowly along the garage floor.
Danny listened for the voices again. Maybe he’d heard something else and mistaken it for voices? No. There they were again. Maggie’s ears pricked and she picked up her head, looking for the source of the noise.
There were two voices, and they were moving. Along with their voices, there was the sound of heavy feet on concrete. Both the voices and the footsteps echoed up the structure.
Danny wondered if it might have been the motley trio of armed survivors he’d encountered earlier. Then he remembered, as the voices grew l
ouder and more discernible, that the men and the baby-carrying woman had been heading in the opposite direction. They couldn’t have followed him.
Rather than risk another encounter with whomever the voices belonged to, he stood, softly patted his thigh, and started up the ramp toward the roof. Maggie’s collar chimed as she trotted alongside him. Danny stopped and took off her collar, stuffed it into his pocket, and resumed his climb.
He felt the burn in his thighs as he ascended, turned one hundred eighty degrees, and climbed up in the opposite direction. His muscles were tired. They lacked water. The barest hint of a cramp gnawed at his calf.
Once he’d reached the fourth of five levels, daylight peeked through the opening that led to the roof. He walked up, paying attention to the shifting angles of light as he moved around the final corner.
He emerged from the garage, stopping at the opening once the ramp had flattened out. He surveyed his surroundings and caught his breath. He took small controlled sips of air through his nose and mouth until the throbbing in his head subsided. The bright sunlight and its sharp contrast to the dim gray illumination in the garage didn’t help.
He exhaled and trudged forward to get a better look. The garage had twenty-five or thirty spots on the roof. It was empty. Not a single car, truck, or scooter occupied the open surface. In sunny California, everyone was always looking for the shade when possible. The only time he’d ever seen the roofs of parking garages occupied was when every covered spot was taken. Surrounding the rectangular space was a waist-high brick wall. In one corner was the phone-booth-looking entrance to the stairwell.
As trying as the ramp had been, given the circumstances, he could only imagine the burn and relative exhaustion the stairs would have induced. The sky was blue. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen until his eyes settled far to the west. Over the Pacific, which he couldn’t see from here, there were fluffy pillows of white clouds laden with dark gray in their bellies. From one cluster, the dark gray extended downward in a sheet. Rain. Not far offshore there was rain. Danny licked his dry lips, his tongue catching on cracked peels of skin.
He turned his head back toward the mouth of the garage and looked into the darkness. He couldn’t hear any voices beneath him. That was the good. The bad was that there was nowhere to hide on the roof should the people attached to the voices find their way up top.
He’d hoped there might be a couple of cars or small SUVs he could use to conceal Maggie and himself. No such luck.
Content there was no imminent approach, Danny walked across the roof to the eastern-facing edge and leaned his body against the brick. The top of it came to his chest and was hot to the touch. Despite the time of year, the sun still packed a punch.
Maggie found a spot along the northern wall that apparently housed a particularly interesting odor. Her nose was to the ground, buried in the hunt for the scent’s source.
He pressed his weight into the wall, careful not to burn his fingers on the ledge, and looked out across this part of the city. Midrise buildings and the occasional thirty-story tower blocked some of his view. Even from this limited vantage point, it was obvious the city was different. Its pulse was altered.
The usual sound of whooshing traffic, or the idling of engines in congestion, was missing. No honking horns, no ambient white noise that made a city like Los Angeles what it was. Traffic was every bit a part of LA’s personality as was the movie business and transplanted, sunshine-fed palm trees.
He could hear the sirens now. There was the echo of a bullhorn squelching somewhere nearby. Someone barked orders he couldn’t quite make out. There was the lone rumble of a diesel truck. A random pop. Then another.
Was that gunfire?
It had been, what, three days since he’d first heard about some horrible illness wiping out homeless camps? People were dropping dead after convulsing and bleeding from every hole in their bodies.
It had sounded foreign to him. It was like something he’d see on a Facebook or Snapchat feed that claimed to be informing him of some dire emergency in a far-flung part of the world he’d never been and would never go. It might be some sick-looking photograph attached to 140 characters on Twitter. It was a push alert to a video on the cable news channel. He hadn’t given any of it much attention until he had. They were homeless people and he wasn’t homeless. Or he hadn’t been. He wasn’t sure what he was at the moment. Could he go home? Would he ever go home?
Risking a burn on his palms, he lifted himself up onto the ledge. He lay on it with his stomach, the bricks’ heat leaching through his thin shirt. It was uncomfortable but tolerable enough, so he held himself there and peered over the ledge to the streets below. He started at one end of the street and worked his way toward the other but stopped in front of the garage directly beneath him.
There was a pair of large tan Humvees parked there. Outside one of them were two people in Tyvek suits. Their bright yellow costumes made them stand out against the grays, blacks, and dull reds of the surroundings. They were standing at the front of one of the Humvees with a large piece of paper, maybe a map, stretched across the hood. One of them was pointing at the map. The other would jab a gloved finger at it and then wait for the first to locate another spot.
Movement farther to his right caught Danny’s attention, and he craned his neck to focus clearly on it. Two more yellow suits were positioning orange and white barriers at the intersection. One of them was flush with the sidewalk on Danny’s side of the street. Several feet away, the next one was abutting the sidewalk on the opposite side. A third matched the first. They were constructing a serpentine barrier. It was the kind of thing he’d seen in movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers protected checkpoints or the entrances to bases and embassies.
The sound of an engine shifting gears pulled his attention back to the left end of the street. A third vehicle rounded the corner, this one a large truck with a canvas, covered-wagon type of roof sheltering its bed. It slowed to a stop, its brakes squealing, and the engine cut off. Hazmat-suited soldiers hopped out from underneath the bed cover and began hauling out barricades.
Danny watched them for about ten minutes while they secured the barricades and created a serpentine entrance that mirrored the one on the other end of the street. He gave the street one final scan and backed away from the ledge.
Maggie was following an invisible lead along the edge of the roof, sticking close to spots where the brick met the concrete. She was onto something. Danny guessed it was cat poop. She loved the stuff. It was protein packed and irresistible to her. He didn’t deny her the treat, but wouldn’t let her tongue near him for a day or two after she’d ingested the prize.
Danny marched past Maggie to the opposite side of the garage. He repeated his reconnaissance on that side, and then on the two remaining, to get a better picture of what he faced.
The crazy trio with the baby had been right. The authorities were restricting movement. They were creating zones. On one street, instead of the serpentine barrier, there was a designation spray-painted onto the street in an orange color whose fluorescence was matched only by the yellow of the Tyvek suits.
INFECTED ZONE A4
The word infected was actually just “infect” and zone was “zn,” but Danny extrapolated the actual designation. He read the paint several times to make sure there wasn’t some other possible meaning for the abbreviated words. Certain there wasn’t, he lowered himself to the roof and sat down with his back to the brick. He’d found a narrow sliver of shade cast by a nearby billboard advertising the latest film adaptation of a popular R. E. McDermott novel. Danny had listened to the book on Audible, as had millions of others, and had been excited to see the movie. Not now.
It hit him as he sat there, movies were a thing of the past for the time being. Anything leisurely was on hold. Surviving was the important thing now. Getting out of Infected Zone A4 and finding his way to somewhere safe from disease and the Cal Guard was the priority.
Infecte
d Zone A4. That meant there was an Infected Zone A3. And A2. And A1. Were there also Infected Zones B and C? Were there uninfected zones? Or were those places the secure facilities in which Cal Guard had promised him a spot?
His head was swimming. He was stuck inside an infected zone, surrounded by people who wanted to quarantine him and his dog. Who knew what they’d do with Maggie? They’d probably separate them.
No, they’d definitely separate them. Once they did, he was sure he’d never see his best friend again, so that wasn’t happening. He wasn’t risking getting caught.
As if she could hear him thinking about her, Maggie padded her way next to Danny. She spun in a circle a couple of times as if chasing her tail, then curled into a ball on the shaded concrete. He put his hand on the top of her head and gently rubbed his fingers over it. She didn’t move.
The good news was that as long as they were up here on the roof and nobody could get in or out of Infected Zone A4, he couldn’t get sick. If he hadn’t contracted the illness already, he was as isolated from it as he could be atop a garage.
The bad news was that they couldn’t stay on the roof of a garage forever. He needed water. Maggie needed water. They’d both need food soon enough.
He listened to the undulating whine of emergency sirens. There was another shout from a bullhorn. He couldn’t be sure it was the same one. It sounded closer this time. Or it was farther away. Overhead, the thwap of helicopter blades cut through the still air. He worried about a chopper flying overhead spotting him and reporting him to one of the hazmat relocation teams downstairs. When he opened his eyes, he saw two large Black Hawks flying close to one another as they made a wide arcing turn a good half mile from him. Their dark, sleek shapes disappeared behind the skyline and reappeared in the warped, angled reflection of a glass tower next door.
He closed his eyes, stealing a moment of rest, and swallowed. The scratch of his dry throat made it uncomfortable, and when he tried to swallow again, he subconsciously hitched.
The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction Page 7