Текст книги "Day Zero"

Автор книги: Summer Lane

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 6 страниц)

Summer Lane
DAY ZERO
A Short Collapse Series Companion Adventure

For you, readers.

Thank you for everything.

Prologue

Hollywood was dark. That was the first thing Elle noticed when she stood on the ridgeline, just behind the Hollywood sign. She had never seen it like this before. The city had always been brimming with life, with activity. Even after Day Zero, when the lights went out, there were fires and riots. Noise.

Now there was nothing.

Elle pulled her jacket tighter, trying to stop herself from shuddering. If the stories were true… if Uncle was right… then there would be nothing left for Elle here. The silence was telling – no noise meant no people.

Of course, she couldn’t be entirely sure.

There might be people somewhere.

She started climbing down the ridgeline, onto the dirt trail. The hill was dry. Dead grass snapped under her shoes. She had never felt so alone or cold in her life.

Later, as she hit the streets of Hollywood, the utter silence overwhelmed her. It was thick, like a curtain. The darkness, the quietness. The deadness. She knew she had made a mistake coming back here. She needed to go back to the ranch, back to Aunt and Uncle. They would understand why she left, and they would welcome her home.

She didn’t get the chance.

A man came around the corner, thickset and heavily tattooed.

Elle stared at him.

She shouldn’t have come back.

Chapter One

West Hollywood, California

Elle sat cross-legged on the edge of the roof, watching the empty street. She’d been up here for a while. This was the first time in a week it had stopped raining long enough to sit outside.

She brushed her black hair out of her blue eyes. The bank across the street was quiet. So was the bus stop, the pizza restaurant next door and the clothing shop catty corner to the streetlights. Elle swung her legs over the top of the roof, climbing back down to the street. She rounded the front of the building and peeked through the broken windows. The menu above the counter said Millions of Milkshakes in bright letters. It had been a prominent place, once. A milkshake bar known for hosting celebrities and athletes in the heart of the most famous city on earth.

Everything had changed since the electromagnetic pulse.

Planes had fallen from the sky and technology had failed, leaving Hollywood and all of its glamour in the dark. The power was out for good. The world was a different place.

The world was dangerous.

The front counter was dusty. Most of the restaurant was dirty and looted. Elle wondered if there was any food left. An ice cream parlor wouldn’t be the first place people would look for food. After all, ice cream melts.

She checked over her shoulder and slid a small knife from her shoe. She angled her thin, short frame under the slivers of broken window glass and slipped inside, feet crunching against plastic wrappers and dirt.

She didn’t like being this exposed.

The building was cold. It smelled fetid. Something was rotting. A dead animal? Putrid food? She didn’t really want to know.

Elle walked behind the counter. The back of the kitchen was dark. Elle wasn’t crazy about searching it, but she pressed ahead anyway, the possibility of finding something to eat overcoming her anxiety.

She slid into the kitchen, squinting to make out the shape of the counter and the fridges. There was just enough light coming in from the front windows to see the cupboards. She yanked them open. There were several containers of sprinkles inside, a package of paper cups and a stack of napkins. Elle sighed, disappointed, and removed her backpack from her shoulders. She stuffed the cups and napkins inside. She could use them later.

She searched the other cupboards. There was an expired bottle of chocolate sauce, a box of toothpicks and a sealed box of sour candy. Elle tossed the candy and toothpicks into her backpack, searched the place one more time, and zipped it back up.

Her heart sank. She was hungry, and a box of candy wasn’t going to fill her empty stomach. She strapped the backpack on again and headed toward the front of the building, pausing at the window, scanning the street.

There. At the east end of the boulevard. Someone was watching. A man.

She dropped into a crouch, heart pounding against her ribcage.

Elle didn’t dare move. She knew how this game worked. The American Apparel building next to the crosswalk was where she had seen the flicker of movement.

She kept looking, searching. There it was again.

A black flash, a tiny streak. Another one by the bus stop. Two people? Three?

Great. I’m surrounded.

She looked up and down the street. Counted the dead cars sitting at the curb, estimating the amount of cover she would have on her way from Point A to Point B. It would be close, but she could do it if she moved fast.

And she was good at that.

She focused on her breathing as the adrenaline surged. She could hear the blood rushing in her ears. This was a bad situation. They were always out there, looking for victims.

She shuddered and refocused her mind.

Stay focused. Don’t let them trap you!

Elle checked the back door in the building, but it was locked tight, rusted shut. She returned to the front, kneeling near the broken windows. She leaned forward on her fingers, like a runner preparing for a sprint. She ran fast and smooth on the wet sidewalk, straining to keep her footsteps silent. She huddled behind the first car that was parked on the curb, breathing hard.

Elle dared a glance behind her. Nobody. Yet.

She ran again, to the next car. Cover to cover. They could be anywhere, and staying behind something big was the only way to make sure that she would be safe. She made it all the way down the block.

I’m almost there.

She stopped behind the last car on the block, her fingers pressed against the cold asphalt. Someone jumped onto the hood of the car, making a heavy thud. Elle jerked backward and stood, holding her arms up defensively.

He was tall, dressed in black. Snakelike dreadlocks hung down his back. His dark eyes looked dead. He was holding a sword, a Japanese Katana. He leaped forward and charged at Elle.

Elle didn’t scream. She reached inside her jacket and drew her handgun. The words Smith and Wesson were engraved on the side of the barrel. Elle pointed the weapon at the center of his chest and fired. The shot was piercing. It echoed down the street, shattering the unearthly silence of the city. He jerked backward, hitting the car. He landed on his knees, staring at Elle as blood seeped through the material of his shirt. She stepped forward and kicked him in the chest, knocking him flat on his back. Elle never took her eyes from his as the life left his body. A red ribbon of blood streamed from the side of his mouth, his eyes fixed on the sky.

Elle scanned the area. She saw no other threats, so she holstered the handgun and stepped forward, kneeling next to his body. She searched his jacket and pants, finding a handful of bullets and a package of gum. She took the goods and picked up the sword, testing its weight in her hands. She took the scabbard and stood, overlooking the street.

The gunshot had sent others into hiding. Other people – more dangerous ones – would regroup and emerge again. It was time to get moving.

All was silent once again.

______________________________________

The city had been a warzone for ten months. After the collapse – after the world ended – they came: Omega. The shadow army. The invasion force. They were everywhere and nowhere all at once. An eye in the sky. A patrol on the street. Where did they come from? Nobody knew. What did they want? Us.

They wanted all of us.

They used chemical weapons against us. They destroyed millions of the civilian population of Los Angeles. Omega moved their center of operations to the Port of Los Angeles and downtown L.A., leaving Hollywood and Santa Monica mostly abandoned.

Those places belonged to the dead now.

Well. The dead and people like Elle: foragers and survivors.

The rest of the state was squashed under the Omega invasion. Concentration camps corralled citizens into forced slave labor. Omega ruled with an iron fist, and anyone who dared challenge them died.

But not all hope was lost. Grassroots militia groups sprung up in the areas controlled by Omega, and the people resisted the takeover. In the Central Valley, Omega had been pushed back, had suffered heavy casualties.

Few civilians remained in Los Angeles after the chemical attacks. Those that did were usually looking for food, medical supplies or lost family members. The chances of finding either of those things were slim to none. Yet some people returned, and many formed the street gangs of Los Angeles. It was a place dictated by the brutality of an invading army and the savagery of desperate survivors.

It was a deadly game; the survival of the fittest. Only the smartest – or the most ruthless – survived. The rest fell by the wayside, either starving to death or falling prey to Omega or the street gangs. Those who managed to avoid death by starvation or murder clung to the hope that order and peace would somehow be restored.

There was no more order, no more security. No more civility between average citizens. It was kill or be killed. Common trust was gone. The rules had changed.

No one knew that better than Elle.

When the electromagnetic pulse hit Los Angeles, she had been fourteen years old, a student at Beverly Hills High School, and the daughter of wealthy Hollywood socialites. Raised in a house where strict discipline and work ethic were encouraged, she pursued her passion of martial arts and gymnastics. Elle, her parents, and her brother lived in an apartment in Westwood, just a few miles from Hollywood Boulevard.

Her first semester as a freshman at Beverly Hills High School came to an abrupt end when the electromagnetic pulse hit. Her world changed in an instant.

Everything fell apart.

__________________________________

Elle turned and ran. Her best defense was her speed and agility. The sun was setting, and she knew what that meant.  Before long, street predators would be roving the city. She needed to get back to her hiding place.

The shot that she had just fired still rang in her head. She hated having to defend herself from people like that, from desperate, starving killers. Elle’s guess was that the man she had killed had been a member of the Klan, the city’s most organized gang. They were powerful.

They were deadly.

Santa Monica itself was a beautiful city, once. The apartment complexes rose like sharp bits of broken teeth into the sky. Vegetation wound its way through apartment balconies and around dead car frames. Elle kept running, breathing hard, sweat running down her forehead, the back of her neck. She had blood on her cheek – she’d caught a spray of it when she had shot the gang member at Millions of Milkshakes.

She hooked a left and dropped prone behind an overturned trashcan. She could smell the ocean, fresh and salty and cold. Across the street, there was a beautiful, unattended park, wet with rain. It looked like nature was taking over, taking back everything it had owned before the rise of modern civilization. And beyond that, Highway 1 – The Pacific Coast Highway – paralleled the beach below the cliff. The shoreline extended as far as the eye could see, dotted with empty beach houses. In fact, you could even see the blackened remains of the cliff-side mansions of Malibu if you looked hard enough.

But Elle had already seen all that.

To her back was a white apartment building, long ago abandoned by the residents before the chemical weapons. A stairway led to the front entrance. Elle checked left, checked right. She stood and sprinted up the stairs, pushing the door open. She slammed it shut behind her, lowering the lock – a heavy piece of wood, serving both as a crossbar and an intruder alarm. It was dark inside.

This was her safe zone, her hideaway.

She felt her way up a dark hallway, trotting up steps. She could barely see anything besides the general shape of the railing and the steps. She reached the fourth floor and counted her steps.

Seven, eight, nine, ten… here we are.

She felt for the door handle. There it was, just like she had practiced.She turned the handle and the door opened. A slit of late sunlight fell across her face. She stepped inside and closed the door, locked it. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Safe. For now.

The apartment was a modern loft. One bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen. Whoever lived here had been some kind of a poet. Poetry books were everywhere – along with CDs and DVDs of poetry reading. Some of it was weird, some of it was pretty. Elle was never into poetry, but reading it sometimes helped to pass the long, lonely hours of the day.

She hated those hours.

She dropped her backpack on the carpet and walked to the window. She pulled back the curtain enough so that she could watch the street below. She was on the corner, so she could see Santa Monica Boulevard and Ocean Boulevard at the same time.

Her only blind spot was the alley behind the apartment building, but she had no way to get a good view of that. She’d been living here for three weeks, and so far she hadn’t had any trouble. She hoped it stayed that way.

From her spot at the window, Elle could see the Santa Monica Pier. The brightly colored rollercoaster wound around the Ferris wheel. It looked lonely. Empty. It had been a long time since the pier had glowed with lights and echoed with the laughter of fun-seeking crowds.

Tomorrow, she would visit the pier.

Chapter Two

Elle had been looking at the Santa Monica Pier for nine months. Every evening, every day. She would look for any sign of movement, of habitation. But there was never anything, other than the occasional nomadic fisherman.It made Elle curious. It made her brave.

It made her stupid, too, sometimes. Reckless.

She sat on the floor of the apartment, legs propped up on the couch, head on the floor. The window was open just a crack, enough to let the cool sea breeze inside the stuffy room. Elle closed her eyes and pretended that she was home, watching television while she waited for her mom to come back from the grocery store.

She sat up abruptly.

Mom was never coming back from the grocery store.

Elle was alone.

She rolled to her knees and stood up, walking into the kitchen. She didn’t have a lot of supplies here. A few canned goods – carrots, peas and creamed corn – and two tins of tuna. Elle hated tuna, but she’d eat it anyway if it were all she had. She’d eaten worse in the last year. A lot worse.

The sour candy that she’d found at Millions of Milkshakes hadn’t filled the hole in her stomach. Sooner or later she’d have to face reality: Santa Monica and Hollywood was running out of food. She was going to have to move on.

It’d probably be better that way, she told herself. Right…?

No. Omega was everywhere. Nowhere was safe.

But she didn’t want to leave. She knew these streets, and it was the only thing in her life that was familiar. She had grown up here. She had visited the theater with her father, eaten lunch on Saturday afternoons with her mother at the beach and built sandcastles with her brother. This was her home.

If she left, she would be a nomad. A wanderer.

No one really knew what was beyond the city.

Elle put the cans back on the counter, ignoring her growling stomach. The food was a precious commodity. Flavorful stuff like carrots or green beans was becoming less available. Elle had become a skilled forager, but even she could barely find enough to eat anymore.

She organized her backpack again. She kept it filled with essential supplies: water, food, matches, bandages, iodine, maps, a knife and ammunition for her 1911 Smith and Wesson handgun.They were necessary items, important for survival.

Several times during the night she heard noises coming from somewhere inside the apartment building. Creaks, groans and thumping sounds. She would freeze with every sound, terrified that she would hear a footstep. But no. For the most part, the noises were just from loose boards or windows moving in the September breeze.

Birds had started returning to Los Angeles a few months ago. The chemical weapons – whatever they were, no one could be sure – had wiped out all forms of life. Dogs, cats, birds and bugs. Elle often wondered if a low level of poison was still seeping out of the walls of every building in the city, slowing killing her. It was a terrifying thought, but she didn’t care as much as she should.

If she died, she died.

Nobody was going to miss her. There was nobody left.

Elle finished restocking her backpack. She kept her pack with her at all times, always filled with a little bit of food and medicine. The possibility that she might not make it back to the apartment at the end of the day was very real. She’d found that out months ago, shivering and starving for three days in the basement of a sushi house, waiting for Klan gang members to move on. She’d wished that she’d had food in her pack then.

She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

As a general rule, Elle wouldn’t eat anything in the city that wasn’t sealed in an airtight container like a plastic bag or a can. She didn’t know what kinds of chemical weapons had been released on the city, but it would be stupid to eat food that might be soaked in the stuff. She’d seen seagulls fly in off the coastline, eat garbage from the overflowing trash containers, and drop dead.

She was living in a biological waste zone, and she knew it.

Yeah, I should definitely move on, she thought. But what if what’s out there is worse than what’s in Los Angeles?

The fear of the unknown is what kept Elle in the city.

Omega had power. So much power that they had destroyed the technological infrastructure of the most powerful nation on earth. For all Elle knew, they might have taken over the entire world by now.

There might not be a safe place anymore.

Chapter Three

Zero.

There it was, spray-painted across the first board on the Santa Monica Pier. Elle stared at it, swallowing a nervous lump in her throat. The pier was creaking in the wind. Every time a wave hit the support beams below, the boardwalk shuddered in the early morning light. It was foggy, wet and cold.

Elle hauled a fishing pole over her shoulder, one of the most valuable items she had foraged from the city. She had bait in her backpack, a can full of worms she had dug up from the muddy soil in the park above the beach. Coming to the pier to fish was something she had been trying to work up the courage to do for a long time. She’d heard that people used to fish from the pier in the past. Elle was starving, and she would do anything for food.

Zero.

It had been painted across the railings, on the back of buildings, on cars parked in the parking lot next to the pier. Elle knew what it meant. It meant the world was over. The modern world, anyway. It meant back to the drawing board.

The boardwalk stretched far into the water. Abandoned amusement attractions paralleled the pier – a merry-go-round, a bicycle shop. The once-famous Muscle Beach stretched out on the left, below the pier.

Elle remembered seeing this place at night as a little girl. Before the Collapse. It was lit up like a Christmas tree, rainbow colored and glowing.

She started walking. She was aware of how exposed she was. Anybody could be watching her. Anybody.

Her hunger drove her onward.

She kept walking down the boardwalk, moving from cover to cover, staying in the shadows, watching for danger. The sound of the waves and seagulls on the railing were the only things she could hear. It was so silent. So sad. She continued, reaching a sign that said Pacific Park.

The letters stretched across the entrance, colorful but faded. Elle stood and looked at it. A rollercoaster and other amusement rides were clustered around the pier. Elle walked under the lettered archway. Every building here was a faded neon color. Green, blue, red, and yellow. It was cheery, but in this atmosphere, little more than a sick joke.

Nothing was fun anymore. Even this was just an empty husk.

There was a rollercoaster, an elevator launch, an octopus spin, a Ferris wheel. There were kiddie rides and carnival games. She searched the rest of the park, pawing through a restaurant called The Harbor Grill. There was nothing edible left. It had been too long. Anything here had either been looted or exposed to the poison of the chemical weapons. There was no food.

Elle sat near the railing at the end of the pier, beyond the attractions, near an empty souvenir shop. She checked her line, baited and weighted the hook, and casted it into the water below. She had brought a plastic bag in her backpack, in case she caught a fish. She stared at the water below as she sat, cross-legged, trying to keep her mind off the pain in her stomach.

She was just so hungry.

Elle thought about Los Angeles, and how impossible it was to find food anymore. But leaving the city frightened Elle. What if the world outside Los Angeles was worse? What if Omega had really destroyed everything?

She shuddered.

I’ve got to make a decision.

And that’s when she heard it.

Human voices.

______________________________

Elle slid into the shadows. She hid beneath a plastic picnic table and looked up the pier, back toward the mainland. There were people. Several of them. At least eight – maybe more. She couldn’t tell from here.

Elle’s chest constricted.

Someone had seen her. Klan members, by the looks of it. Had to be. Omega didn’t come to the beach unless they had a very good reason.

Elle slowly crawled backward. She knew the Klan well, better than most.

The Klan members were sauntering up the pier, making no attempt to hide their presence. They knew that Elle had nowhere to run. She gritted her teeth.

I never should have come out here.

Now she would be forced out of the city. Or worse, killed.

She turned and sprinted to the back of Pacific Park. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. She looked at her fishing pole, wedged between the railing, the line moving in the waves.

She flinched as she turned her back on the fishing pole – such a valuable item.

Don’t think about that now.

The buildings were small and packed together. The Klan members would spread out and pin her down. She couldn’t hide here. Not for very long, anyway. She ran to the railing, peeked over the edge. The waves were deep and unforgiving.

She licked the salty spray of the sea off her lips and swung her legs over the side. “Please, God,” she whispered. “Let me survive this.”

She lowered herself below the boards of the pier, hanging by her hands. Her legs dangled over the water – a long drop if she fell. Mazes of wooden support beams crisscrossed beneath the pier like stiff webbing. Elle curled her fingers around the first one parallel to the underside of the pier. She swung her body back and forth, gaining enough momentum to latch the heel of her shoe onto a beam. Now she was balancing horizontally between two beams. She moved one hand forward, then the other. She pushed herself up and sat on top of the first beam.

It’s not so different from gymnastics class, she told herself.

She pulled her legs under her and crouched like a cat, studying the maze of wooden poles under the pier. They stretched from here to the shore. She could very, very carefully crawl back… if the Klan didn’t figure out where she was by then.

She moved with caution, slipping from beam to beam. The crash and bubble of the tide swirling below the boardwalk drowned out the sound of her movements.

The pier shuddered slightly and Elle stopped. She held her breath. They were walking right above her head. They were shouting, but she couldn’t make out their words. What were they saying? Probably something about killing Elle. That was the Klan way, after all.

Their boots made the pier shake, and Elle found herself sweating. But they couldn’t see her down here.

Come on, keep going. You’re almost there.

Almost being a relative term.

The pier was over a thousand feet long – and that didn’t count the boardwalk bridge. Elle had to crawl almost a fourth of a mile to get back to the mainland. And once she did, she would have to run.

She focused her mind on moving from one beam to another. Since the Collapse, she had learned to be patient. To think ahead, but to live in the moment. Panicking in a time of crisis didn’t do any good. She’d seen that.

Staying calm was what had saved her from the Klan in the past.

Focus, focus!

Hours seemed to pass. She stretched from beam to beam, until her hands were blistered from gripping the wood. Splinters bit into her palms. She was only thirty or so yards away from the beach. Once she reached the mainland, she would be able to drop onto the beach. And then she would run. She climbed, and as the pier jutted into the beach, she got about ten feet above the sand. Elle dropped. The tide swirled around her worn tennis shoes, cold and crisp.

She peeked around the corner, above her head. No sign of the enemy. If she stayed left, behind the shelter of the buildings on the pier, she might be able to avoid being seen.

She kept her head down and crawled along the side of the pier, out of sight. It was slow going. When she finally got even with the pier, she got down on her knees and crawled.

Think like a turtle, she told herself, smiling wryly. Slow and steady wins the race…

That’s what her mother used to tell her, anyway.

My dead mother.

She didn’t stop crawling until she reached the parking lot of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Then she stood up and sprinted to the back of the building, breathing hard. She snuck a glance at the pier. She could see the Klan members, small specks in the distance at the end of the pier. They couldn’t see her. But she could tell by the way they were spread out around Pacific Park that they were searching for her.

She turned. And she ran. She did not want to be around when they came back this way. Her legs and lungs were strong as she put distance between herself and the enemy. She passed SM Pier Seafood and the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, with its white paint and domed ceiling. She passed the massive parking lot on the left, full of dead cars and dead bodies. If you caught the wind, it carried the scent of the cadavers up the street.

The last collection of buildings on the strip was the dully-colored pastel restaurants and seaside souvenir shops. Vines and bushes had covered the exteriors of most of the buildings, but Elle could see that it had once been cute. A little rundown, perhaps, but because it was Santa Monica, it had probably been very pricey.

Whatever. Money didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did.

Elle didn’t look over her shoulder to see if the Klan members were coming back down the pier. She didn’t want to scare herself, and besides – there could be danger right in front of her face. The Klan had hundreds of members – if not thousands – that dominated the streets of Los Angeles and the surrounding urban areas.

Elle paused at a street called Moomat Ahiko Way. It curved left and paralleled the freeway. She stopped dead in her tracks. Following this road would take her all the way back to Ocean Avenue, back to her little apartment, back to what she was familiar with.

But if she turned left, she would be on her way out of the city for good.

Turning left would take her to Highway One, the Pacific Coast Highway. She had stared at the freeway from her apartment window for weeks, wondering when she’d be forced to leave.

In front of her, the city loomed dark and ominous. Huge. The distant rattle and boom of gunfire echoed off the empty buildings. Elle shuddered. The fights between the street gangs and Omega were escalating with each passing day.

The cold breeze ruffled Elle’s short hair. She looked behind her.

The Klan members on the pier were moving toward the beach. They had seen her, and they were running at a brisk jog. Elle wasn’t worried – she could outlast them in the end. She was light and she could run many miles before she needed to stop and rest.

Left? Straight? Do I stay or do I go?

Elle closed her eyes.

And she headed back into the city.

She wasn’t ready to leave yet.

____________________

Elle didn’t dare go home. If the Klan saw where she lived, she’d have to find a new place to hide. It always took time and patience to find a safe zone. Somewhere she could hunker down and relax without wondering if someone was going to slit her throat while she slept.

She kept moving, checking to see if the Klan remnants from the pier were still pursuing her. They were. At least for now. She would throw them off her trail. Elle knew Hollywood and Santa Monica better than anyone. Every street, every shop, every alleyway.

She worked her way onto Ocean Boulevard and hung a left, bypassing her apartment building. She ran up the street, diving right, into a small alley that led to the back of another apartment complex. This one had been very upscale. A wrought iron fence surrounded the parking lot. Elle jammed her boots into the small spaces between the vertical bars and swung her body over the top, landing with a soft thud on the other side.

She sloshed through puddles and hurried to the back of the building, behind rows of parked cars. A lonely wind swept through the alley, and she could hear the voices of the Klan members on the boulevard. They weren’t trying to be stealthy. Not at all. They wanted her to know they were coming.

To them, fear was part of the fun. It was part of the hunt.

She opened the back door and stepped inside. This was the rear entrance, and she had been here a few times before. It was her little secret. Her passageway for a quick escape.

The hallway was long and dark. It smelled of dust and… something else. She had been wandering the city long enough to differentiate between the scents of rotting food and rotting bodies. She shuddered and ran through the hall, locating the stairwell. She climbed to the top level and opened the door that led to the roof. A five-foot space between this building and the next stretched before her. Elle ran and jumped, easily clearing the distance. Yet another skill she could thank martial arts and gymnastics for.