Pulse ; No Power

by Skylar Finn

  There was only so much of his weight Ailani could bear without getting injured herself. She caught him under his arms, then went down with him. As they hit the deck, a loud snap echoed through the salty air. Trip groaned in pain.

  “What is it?” Ailani demanded. Trip had practically landed in her lap, and the entire back side of her body had taken the force of his fall. She was definitely going to bruise. “What hurts?”

  “Broke my ankle,” Trip said through clenched teeth.

  “Hold still. Let me get your shoe off before it starts swelling.”

  She pulled the laces free and carefully wormed Trip’s sneaker off his foot, but the swelling had already begun. It was a bad break, one that definitely needed resetting and a cast. His foot had caved inward, forcing the bone in his ankle to the outside. Ailani tried not to make a face, and apparently, did not succeed.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Trip asked. “Don’t answer that. I know it’s bad.”

  “Come on.” She helped Trip to his feet. “Let’s get you inside. It needs ice and elevation.”

  She settled Trip in a massive leather armchair, propped his foot up on the matching ottoman, and blanketed the injury with damp towels and ice bags. Trip winced every time Ailani accidentally brushed his ankle the wrong way.

  “Sorry,” she said, tapping four ibuprofens from a bottle and handing them to him. “It’s not going to feel better anytime soon. That bone probably needs to be reset.”

  Trip swallowed the pills dry. “I’m such an idiot. I can’t believe I did this.”

  Walt, appearing for the first time that day, bounced into the living room. “Good morning, everybody! Who’s ready for another day of card games and lost hope—whoa.” He stopped short of Trip’s chair. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “He fell of the roof,” Ailani answered.

  “How?” Walt said.

  Once they had caught Walt up on that morning’s setback, he pulled up a chair to examine Trip’s ankle. As he did so, he let out a low whistle.

  “This looks like shit,” he said.

  “Coulda fooled me,” Trip muttered.

  “If you let it stay like this, it’s going to heal all wonky.” Walt pointed to the bone sticking in the wrong direction. “You have to line this up properly.”

  “Let me guess,” Ailani said. “You learned orthopedics out in the woods with your weird uncle too?”

  Walt winked at her. “Not orthopedics specifically. Rolled and broken ankles were pretty common out there, especially with everyone trekking over the woods all the time. I can straighten this out if you trust me enough, Trip. It won’t be perfect, but you’ll at least be able to use your ankle in due time.”

  Trip hoisted himself onto his elbows and eyed Walt. “You sure you can do this?”

  “Yup. It’s going to hurt like a bitch though.”

  Trip leaned back again and covered his eyes. “Don’t tell me when—AGH!”

  Without warning, Walt had taken Trip’s ankle between his hands and set the broken bone in the proper position. It was over before Trip had realized what was happening. Sweat broke out on Trip’s forehead as Walt patted his shin in comfort.

  “The painkillers should kick in soon,” he said. “Meanwhile, we should wrap this. Do you have any bandages?”

  Ailani handed him a rolled bandage from the first aid kit. Walt gently wrapped it around Trip’s foot, applying enough compression to promote healing, but not so much that it would cut off the blood flow.

  “What now?” Trip asked.

  “Rest,” Walt ordered. “Stay off that ankle. If I see you put any kind of weight on it, I’ll push you over myself. Understand?”

  Trip saluted Walt. “Yes, sir.”

  They spent the rest of the day taking care of Trip, mostly trying to keep his mind off the pain and swelling in his ankle. The ibuprofen only went so far, and he had used the last of his Vicodin for the missing teeth in his mouth. Walt and Ailani kept him busy with card games and conversation. When he needed something, they brought it to him. Walt escorted him to the bathroom when he needed to go. Trip fell asleep early, exhausted by the day’s events. Walt and Ailani left him in the living room chair and escaped to the nearby study to chat.

  “In some ways, nothing has changed,” Walt commented. “We’re still waiting on Trip hand and foot. Literally.”

  “Except now he has less teeth and a broken ankle,” Ailani reminded him. “Also, we’re no longer obligated to help him.”

  Walt examined Trip’s extensive library. “Yeah, but I want to. He’s a good guy.” He paused by the enormous desk. “Wow, I never thought I’d say that in my entire life.”

  Ailani smiled. “It keeps surprising me too. Do you think he’s going to be okay? His ankle, I mean.”

  “I hope so,” Walt said. “But without proper medical treatment, it’s not going to heal very well. We can immobilize it until the bones heal, but it’s going to be a long shot.”

  “I shouldn’t have let him go onto the roof.”

  Walt tugged on a strand on her hair. “It’s not your fault. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

  “We have enough to worry about without Trip’s ankle.”

  “We’ll get through it,” Walt assured her. “For now, we’re safe. We still have power in some areas of the house. We have food and water. Focus on those things.”

  “You’re right,” Ailani said. “I shouldn’t blow things out of proportion—”

  Crash!

  The sound of shattering glass sent Ailani and Walt sprinting from the study and into the main living area, toward the source of the noise. Walt flung his arm out to stop Ailani from getting closer. A group of people stood out on the deck, armed with baseball bats, driftwood, and whatever else they could find. Some were vagabonds from the beach. Others, Ailani recognized. They were Trip’s friends, and Jacob Van Peel was leading the charge.

  8

  The intruders had taken their weapons to the glass walls of Trip’s house. The enormous sliding door that led out to the deck was now in pieces, moonlight glittering off the broken glass. The glass crunched underfoot as the intruders made their way inside. They had doubled in number. At least twelve people invaded the living room and circled around Trip, Walt, and Ailani. Trip was already awake, his eyes wide and terrified as his “friends” closed in on him. Jacob brandished his baseball bat. He had decorated the weapon with rusty nails to give it the ultimate destructive effect.

  “What the hell are you doing, man?” Trip demanded. He attempted to get up, but his ankle wouldn’t hold his weight. “Get out of my house!”

  “I don’t think you’re in any position to be giving orders,” Jacob said, smirking. “I was the one that threw the rock at your solar panel by the way. Originally, I thought it might be fun to watch you squirm without electricity, the same way you threw us out onto the beach and left us for dead.”

  “You asshat—” Walt growled.

  Jacob swung his bat toward Walt, and he stepped back to evade it. “Trip, tell your assistant to shut up. Unless he wants these rusty nails in his mouth.”

  Walt glued his lips together.

  “Much better,” Jacob said. “As I was saying, I thought it might be fun to watch you suffer. Then I realized how stupid it would be to let all of this space to go to waste. I made some new friends on the beach who agreed with me. Should we do introductions now or later?”

  The beach vagabonds wore expressions ranging from determined to hesitant. Some of them wanted shelter no matter the cost. Others obviously didn’t know what they had gotten themselves into.

  “I recognize you,” Ailani said suddenly, pointing out one of the vagabonds. “You’re the guy from the beach, the one who offered me vegetables from your garden. Why would you do something like this?”

  The fisherman lifted his shoulders. “You made a mistake trusting me. That’s the thing with survival. Never show a potential enemy your entire hand. As soon as you said you lived here, I knew this was going
to happen sooner or later. If you let us stay—”

  “Let us?” Jacob interrupted. “There’s no ‘let’ here. I’m done playing second best to you, Trip. This is my house now. You can stay. We’ll take good care of you.” He grinned and laughed at his own joke. Clearly, he had no intentions of helping Trip get back up on his feet. “Your assistants, on the other hand, aren’t welcome here anymore.”

  “You can’t do this,” Trip said. “You can’t come into my house—”

  “We already have,” Jacob replied, “and we’re not leaving.”

  Out of nowhere, Walt yanked the handgun from the waistband of his jeans, aimed at the ceiling, and pulled the trigger. The bang went off right next to Ailani’s ear, rendering her partially deaf on one side. The warning shot had the opposite effect of Walt’s intentions. Rather than scaring off Jacob and the rest of the intruders, it sent them into a wild frenzy. Weapons flew as everyone started yelling. Jacob swung his bat toward Walt, but the fisherman stopped him before the blow landed. A fight broke loose as the mob separated into two sides: those who were willing to do harm in order to stay at Trip’s house, and those who wanted no part in the violence.

  Ailani ducked as Israel swung a piece of driftwood at her. She punched him in the crotch while she was down there, and he doubled over to clutch his important parts. She crawled across the floor to Trip’s chair.

  “We gotta get out of here!” she yelled over the noise of the fray. “We can’t stay. Come on!”

  She tugged Trip’s arm across her shoulder and tried to stand up with him, but he weighed too much for her to carry on her own. Walt was frozen against the far wall of the living room, the gun hanging limply in his right hand. Ailani heaved Trip upward again. This time, she managed to get him standing, but as soon as they took a step forward, his foot buckled beneath him. He couldn’t walk.

  “Come on, Trip!” she urged.

  But Jacob’s hand came down on Trip’s shoulder, forcing the actor back into the leather armchair. Ailani grabbed a handful of Jacob’s matted hair, but he hit her in the stomach with the handle of the baseball bat. The sharp jab forced her to let go.

  “Everyone shut up!” Jacob hollered.

  The room quieted.

  Jacob’s chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath. “I won’t say it again, Trip. Get your assistants out of here.”

  “Or what?” Trip spat.

  Jacob gestured to the fisherman. The fisherman reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a pistol. It was smaller than Walt’s handgun, but unlike Walt, the fisherman was confident when he aimed it at Trip.

  “Don’t make me do this, kid,” the fisherman said. “I wasn’t born to hurt people.”

  “Then don’t,” Trip begged.

  Walt unstuck himself from the wall and moved into the center of the chaos circle. Slowly, he lifted his own gun at the fisherman’s head. His hand shook. “You’re not the only one with a gun.”

  The fisherman eyed Walt from head to toe without turning his head. “No, but I am the only one who has the guts to use mine. Use your head, son. Put that down before you or someone else gets hurt.”

  A tear hovered on Walt’s eyelashes as he rested his finger on the trigger. “You put your gun down, and tell everyone to get out of our house—”

  Bang!

  Everyone screamed and ducked as the gun went off. For a few moments, Ailani couldn’t tell who had fired. Then she saw the blood pouring from Walt’s arm. The fisherman had turned his gun on Walt and fired before Walt had any hope of retaliating.

  “Walt!” Ailani yelled, crawling toward him through the frenzy. “Walt!”

  He clutched his bleeding arm with his free hand, the gun still glued to his other palm. His eyes were wide with shock. Ailani dragged him to his feet.

  “Get out!” the crowd screamed at them. “Go, go, go!”

  The chant echoed in Ailani’s ear as she tried to get Walt through the throng. People pushed them this way and that, jeering and yelling to scare them. A hand grabbed Ailani’s shirt to stop her. It was Trip.

  “Please,” he gasped. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me with them.”

  Jacob stepped between them and knocked Trip’s arm away from Ailani. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he said, nuzzling Trip’s head. “We’ll take good care of you.”

  Ailani reached for Trip, but the crowd closed in again, forcing her away from the actor. They pushed her and Walt toward the front door. The last thing she saw as the angry beach goers forced them out of the house and into the front yard was Trip’s terrified expression as Jacob raised the baseball bat above his head.

  The heavy doors slammed, cutting Walt and Ailani off from the chaos inside the house. It was a testament to the architecture that they couldn’t hear a single bit of noise from the outside. If anyone passed by, they would never expect the mutiny occurring at the address.

  Ailani pounded on the door. “Let us in! You don’t have to do this. Please!”

  No answer came from the other side. Walt staggered down the steps and almost collapsed. Ailani caught him just before he hit the ground and slowly lowered him. She peeled his hand away from the wound on his arm and hissed through her teeth.

  “You’re lucky,” she said. “It grazed you. No bullet. Just raw skin.”

  She ripped one of the sleeves off her T-shirt, folded up the material, and stuffed it into the open wound. Then she used her other sleeve to tie the bandage in place. Walt gnashed his teeth together while she worked.

  “That’s not going to hold for long,” she said. “We have to find something else to stop the bleeding. I guess we have to find somewhere to sleep too.”

  “That’s it?” Walt said. “We’re going to give up? We’re going to let those assholes take over Trip’s house?”

  “Those assholes have a few things that we don’t,” Ailani reminded him. “Like weapons and the will to hurt us if we don’t do what we’re told. We can’t go back in there.”

  Walt wiped the blood pouring down his arm but only succeeding in smearing it. “You know what that means, right? We’re on the streets. No supplies. No food or water. We have nothing.”

  A window on the second floor opened and someone catapulted one of Trip’s art pieces—a statue made of glass—through the opening. Ailani pushed Walt out of the way as the makeshift bomb shattered on the sidewalk and showered them with glass.

  “Get off the property!” yelled the unseen assailant.

  Ailani ushered Walt out of range. “We won’t be any better off here, not with all those idiots inside.”

  “Did you see what happened to Trip?”

  Ailani winced. The vision of Trip as Jacob raised the baseball bat flashed before her eyes. “I have a feeling he’s not going to make it.”

  “Shit.” Walt buried his head in his hands. “This is all my fault.”

  Ailani guided Walt through the wrought iron gates that closed Trip’s driveway off from to the rest of the Malibu neighborhood. They were officially out in the open with no protection other than Walt’s gun, which he couldn’t bring himself to fire under pressure.

  “You can’t break down,” Ailani said as she steered Walt up the street. “Not now. We have to figure something out, and if you break down, I’m all alone. Don’t leave me alone, Walt.”

  He raised his head and squared his shoulders, then winced because of the gunshot wound. “I won’t leave you.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  They had no plan, so they did what they had to. First, they went door to door, scoping out each house in the neighborhood for someone or something that might help them. They had no luck. Every house was already occupied, either by its original owners or people who had broken in and claimed the space for themselves, like the beach vagabonds at Trip’s house. No one was willing to help them. No matter how much Ailani begged, no one opened their doors to them or offered supplies. It was a simple decision on their part: they couldn’t spare supplies when they had their own
people to take care of.

  “I would do the same thing,” Ailani admitted. They had just visited the last of the houses in the neighborhood and been shot down again. “If someone came up to my door, I would turn them away. It’s common sense. Save your supplies for yourself, you know?”

  “This is the fall of humanity,” Walt muttered. He had been losing steam ever since they’d left Trip’s house. The makeshift bandage on his arm was soaked through with blood. If they didn’t find a way to better bind the wound, he was going to pass out and possibly not wake up again. “I didn’t think I’d be alive to see it.”

  “It’s been happening for years.” Ailani slipped her arm around Walt’s waist to take some of his weight off his feet. “We’ve all been ignoring it.”

  Walt murmured a reply that Ailani couldn’t hear. She let it go, instead using her energy to get Walt out of the Malibu neighborhood and into the streets. Night had fallen. The utter darkness—a world without light pollution—still felt foreign to Ailani after all these weeks. She was used to street lights and headlights and that subtle glow on the horizon that was always there no matter what time of night it was. The world felt dangerous without it, and it was.

  The deeper they got into the city, the worse it smelled. At least near the beach, the ocean air had done a relatively decent job of driving out the stink of human waste. Between the buildings in the city, that wasn’t the case. The gutters were lined with trash and waste. Worst of all was the unmistakable scent of decomposing bodies. Ailani averted her eyes when they came upon the corpses, but it was impossible not to see some of the carnage. Maggots crawled in and out of eye sockets. A family of raccoons feasted on a car accident victim. Ailani’s knees shook, her body ached, and her head spun. All she wanted to do was collapse and cry, but she made herself move forward. At the very least, she didn’t want to stop amongst this amount of wreckage.

  When the moon was in the middle of the sky, Walt tripped over a curb and sprawled to the ground before Ailani could stop him. She helped him sit up and checked the gunshot wound.