by Rod Rayborne
He looked at the old house Mika called home and frowned.
"You really ought to see it sometime. Do yourself a favor."
Mika stood up and pulled the gun out of the holster clipped to a leather band beneath her shirt. Holding it in both hands, she aimed it at the ground in front of her.
"I'm not going to say it again, Conrad. Leave. Now."
He put his hands up again.
"Have it your way, little lady. Can't say I didn't try. When you get your panties untwisted, look me up. I'm at the top of the hill on Liberty Drive. Kingston. There's a silver Porsche out front. I'll show you the other one in the garage when you come."
Mika lifted the gun an inch higher and Conrad turned to leave. He swaggered through the gate and slammed it behind him. The padlock that had been hanging on the release fell off and hit the ground. Mika walked over and picked it up, snapping it shut on the latch. She stood there a moment longer, frowning and shaking her head. Then she walked back to the garden.
Chapter Fifteen
G ordon pulled aside the curtains. A flicker of flames was the only movement reflected in his eyes and he let the curtain drop again. He slighted the door open and slid outside, pulling it quietly closed behind him. He stood in the semi-darkness for a moment and then slowly made his way downstairs. Where before he had almost marched across the deserted LA wasteland, now he crept, sliding from doorway to doorway in a spirit-like whisper as though he himself were the phantom he sought to avoid.
A sudden movement caught his eye and he yelped in fright. A house cat running from one black shadow to the next. Relieved, he supposed he had never seen anything so sweet in all his life. He briefly thought to knicker her over but changed his mind just as quickly. He stood watching the spot in the bushes where the cat had disappeared hoping to snatch another glimpse of her but she didn't reappear. He thought about her unhappily. What had the cat's life become in these last terror filled days, her owner gone, dish empty and predators about that would as quickly sift the flesh from her bones as a harvester in a field of rye.
Gordon thought about the man he had seen the night before. Was that what was happening to him, the shaking he had seen, body atremble, twitching in what Gordon had imagined a violent attempt to free a stuck bolt? Was he being sifted? And the cat sitting on his corpse, was he rending muscle from bone, yanking pectorals from clavicle, giving the body it's nightmarish shaking? He shook the vision from his head and ran across the street.
He thought in terms of days and nights but in reality there were no astronomical phenomena to which he could point to justify those designations. It was habit alone that forced his impressions, he knew. The only aid he had to help him to guess day from night was sleep. Yet when he awoke all he could see was dusk. An alien twilight lit only by fire. Fire and a drowsy tangerine behind the clouds where the sun hid. And arcs of multi-hued electricity stabbing at the Earth as though to finish the job mankind has so expertly begun.
What had taken him a few hours to accomplish yesterday took him many more today. When he had done so, he found himself not at Walmart but Foods for Less. He wasn't surprised. He gotten turned around on his long run the night before and didn't think it necessary or particularly safe to retrace his steps. It was possible that an ambush awaited his expected return. He didn't know how the cats operated and he wasn't particularly keen to find out. He had no reason to return to the apartment anyway in a city full of empty apartments, many surely in better condition than the last.
Gordon knelt between two parked cars and watched the entrance to the store through a sooty haze. He waited longer than he thought he needed to determine the safety of the situation, reluctant to put himself in a place he might be unable to get back out of again. Several minutes passed and he had almost decided it was safe to go in when a sound erupted from inside and he quickly knelt again. A minute later a man staggered out.
Gordon gasped. He wasn't alone! He thought to call out but hesitated, caution claiming the better part of his philosophy of late. He wanted no unexpected surprises upon his discovery by the stranger.
It was well that he did wait, for a minute after the man exited into the parking lot, another man followed behind him and then six more. Like Gordon, all shirtless. Dog tags swung from their glistening necks, sweat dripping profusely down bare chests. Respirators stowed beneath their chins. Below their waists, camo military fatigues held up by leather belts sporting holsters and knives. Then tall black leather boots. M-4 carbines swinging over their shoulders from long canvas straps completed the ensemble.
Gordon bent lower, peering just above the hood of the car behind which he had been crouching. The first man who had stumbled out of the store fell suddenly, sprawling face forward onto the asphalt. He groaned and tried unsuccessfully to get back to his feet. Gasping, he slipped back to the asphalt. He pushed once more, finding only enough strength to fall back again.
The man who was behind him in the lead of the other men, approached the man on the ground. Stopping abruptly, he stood over him, the butt of an M-4 buried in the crook of his arm. He said something Gordon couldn't hear and then pulled his foot back in a sudden quick movement.
His body swinging violently to the left, he lifted his arms for balance, kicking the fallen man in his side. Once, twice, three times. The man on the ground cried out, bending double and then flopped over onto his back. Then the other men closed the distance between them laughing sporadically and proceeded to kick him as well.
The man on the ground made no further sound, his body jagging back and forth with each blow from the heavy boots of the men ranged round him. Then the first man pushed the barrel of his rifle into the mouth of the barely conscious man. Gordon stared in horror, not really believing what he was seeing, unable to control his shaking. A second later a pop sounded and the body convulsed one last time. The men turned then and walked away, howling with laughter as they went.
One of the soldiers shouted out something as they walked away and was met by more guffaws. Only one word made it all the way to Gordon. "Owen."
This wasn't the first time Gordon had witnessed a murder. The first came when he was only three. Also at the point of a gun.
His hatred for firearms had, in the intervening years, only grown. The second murder he just witnessed did little to change that. He looked again in the direction the men had gone, a fierce look twisting his face into fearsome mask no one who knew him would have recognized. His jaw hurt from being clenched, blossoming into a headache that flared at his temples.
Gordon waited behind the car for several more minutes to make sure no one else was going to exit the store. There appeared to be no light inside, though his view was restricted to only that which he could see through the wide double doors. He berated himself for not thinking to look for some kind of light before going into the building, but after all, he had seen no one else since entering the city. No one alive, at least.
It wasn't food he thinking about. Not anymore. The man on the ground commanded his attention. Gordon was still shaking, shock pulling him down into a deep paralysis that kept his feet locked behind the car. His face was wet with tears, though like his shaking, he was unaware of it.
After a long while he forced himself to stand and move slowly towards the body. Stopping above him, he bent down, staring into what we left of the man's face. Just a pulp remained framed by a halo of bloody gray hair melted into the molten asphalt the shell had burned beneath his head.
The man's skin was medium dark. Gordon guessed he was Hispanic. Two fingers on his left hand twitched in a last futile effort to live. Gordon's stomach tightened as he took the hand in both of his. Closing his eyes, he breathed a silent prayer. Then he stood and bending, lifted the body in his arms and carried it to a nearby planter. Having no shovel, he laid the man beneath a leafless tree and stretched him out, folding his arms across his abdomen. He stood there a moment longer, a thin rain spattering his face and then turning, moved down the road.
Inside the
store, hiding behind a fallen display of canned goods where her husband had quietly pointed before deliberately running out into the paths of the soldiers, Constanza Luis, her hand still clasped over her mouth, sobbed.
Chapter Sixteen
P FC Bennett sat on his cot and studied the map stretched across his lap. He chaffed at the idea of going back to paper maps when GPS technology was only days in the past. Tech his father had had a part in perfecting in his early work with satellites and radio. Tech that worked flawlessly, as long as there was power. What had happened to the electricity had been explained to them by the CO, Commanding Officer Owen.
Amongst the nukes that had fallen on the country, at least one of the weapons had been a high altitude explosion, thus the EMP that had shut down the grid nationwide.
It was known that even a low yield nuclear detonation, such as the fifteen kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, exploded at a particular height in the atmosphere above the target, would create something called an EMP, or Electro Magnetic Pulse, a sudden wave of energy powerful enough to blow out critical non-hardened electrical components and wiring, transformers and the like. Since most electrical grids around the world were non-hardened, an EMP or some other event that might create a similarly strong electrical pulse like a solar flare, could instantly throw the affected region into the dark ages by burning out the technological progress of the last 150 years in a matter of seconds.
Thus many of the things that had become a part of everyday life that used those components, like modern cars, planes, computers and phones were, in a flash, rendered useless, their delicate components unable to withstand the sudden electrical overload caused by a high altitude blast. As most modern infrastructure was built on the latest unhardened technology, a nation thus targeted would technologically be pushed into the past by at least a century.
The hit on critical systems would be devastating. What the bombs didn't accomplish would be finished by an EMP. It was estimated that within weeks of such an event, 90% of the population would be dead.
It seemed incredible. People had lived for tens of thousands of years without electricity and had managed just fine, thank you very much. But those things that they did for themselves for so long, they had, in the last one hundred and fifty years, handed over to machines to do for them. And as the decades passed, they forgot how to take care of themselves, their reliance on their machines growing exponentially.
Without electricity, their hospitals would cease to function. Machines used in the production and transportation of food would grind to a halt, air conditioners and heaters become useless junk. Computers that controlled dam spillways and municipal water supplies, just rusting circuits.
What did it matter that people would be unable to watch their favorite episode of yet another crime drama or connect with their hundreds of Facebook 'friends' when their taps ran dry and the grocery store shelves stood empty. It was a trap they had happily laid for themselves. All because of an outsized reliance on electricity.
Of course the military was one step ahead of the game, having long ago secreted away hardened versions of non-hardened electronics for their use should an EMP ever actually occur. Radios, trucks, tanks. But at least for one lowly private, that didn't include a personal handheld GPS device.
"Paper," Bennett growled. He bent over, peering closely at the map, trying to decipher its fine lines, fine print and colorful legends in the flickering light of the candle. There was a generator running outside, but it was dedicated for the Ham radio and lighting for the officers. Lights for the enlisted was deemed wasteful, thus the candles. In their feeble flickering light, faces bent towards one another, talking, gesturing, looking around and nodding, hands emphasizing, mouths frowning or laughing or whispering low.
"Paper," Bennett said again. Not having some app to simply pinpoint the location he was looking for and the direction he should go was an inconvenience he was angry to be faced with. He stared intently at the center of the Los Angeles county map where he knew his unit was based, looking for names he had heard before.
He was from Virginia. The first time he had ever seen the Hollywood Walk of Fame had been with a few other soldiers after coming to LA. That was the first time he had seen the Pacific Ocean as well. He glanced around the broad auditorium where his Company was based. Most of them were locals. They wouldn't need a map. Out of them all, only he and one other man were from the east coast. He grunted to himself.
Come to Virginia, see what you know, he thought.
He could always ask one of the men where they were on the map but then they'd ask questions. Why did he want a map, for one. They didn't need a map, they went where they were told. Planning a little sightseeing, perchance? Already two men were casting sidelong glances in his direction. Bitterly he crushed the map he had found lying in the rubble of a convenience store into a ball and tossed it into a trash can. The men looked back at one another and then turned and walked away.
He chewed the fingernails on his right hand and frowned.
Chapter Seventeen
U pon exiting the store, Constanza had found no sign of her husband anywhere in the parking lot. Having heard the gunshot, she had feared the worst but finding no trace of her husband's body, she began to hope that the soldiers had only fired a warning shot and we're even now marching him back to their camp, perhaps to stand trial for looting. But they had nothing on him, Miguel hadn't time to gather anything before the soldiers had entered the store, talking loudly, making enough racket she had thought, to wake the dead. One was barking orders while the others moved down the aisles, gathering goods into packs, essentially looting themselves. But that, she knew they would insist, was different .
Miguel was a good man. Fifty-five to her forty-two, they'd met working the fields near Bakersfield back in '96, married and had three children, all sons. Never looked at another woman, or so he said. True or not, he never let the other woman know he was looking, of that she was sure. Nor had he ever mentioned the dole, refused to accept anything resembling public assistance even when times were rough and times were often rough. He was a proud man.
This is not to suggest that he was perfect. He drank too much, smoked too much and when he had a little extra cash in his pocket, had been known to gamble a bit. Then the guys would call Constanza and she would get the boys to drive over in the rusted white '72 Chevy pickup and carry their half drunken father home. She would give him hell the next day while he stood looking at the floor apologetically but then she would let it go until the next time. There was always a next time.
The boys grew strong, all larger than their father by a head and willing to work, deeply protective of their mother, a blessing from the Lord. They were Catholic, but she was the only one between them all who kept the faith in practice. A large family in a modest stick built home, she was happy for the extra hands to help with the money. They lived in one house with Grandma, two cousins and an aunt besides themselves.
Mr. Du Bois was a cheap man. He paid several dollars below minimum wage knowing his employees wouldn't complain. Not when deportation was the only answer they'd receive from the Labor Board. Still, they did have eight hands between them, father and sons. They did well enough. Constanza was content.
Now the boys were gone. She had not seen them in days. If they were alive, they would have found their way back to her. She knew her boys. Nothing could stop them. She wept bitterly with worry after the blast but Miguel told her that they were out there somewhere. Something had simply prevented them from coming home. He knew them, they couldn't be killed. Not that easily. She was being foolish. Be patient, he told her and so she tried.
Now she stood outside the store trying to guess where they had taken her husband, the soldier men. They wouldn't hurt him, she told herself. They were the American army. Not like the Federales back in Mexico. The Americans had rules. And they had nothing on him anyway. She had to find them, tell the soldiers they had made a mistake, Miguel was a good man. They had to let him
go. She turned again and looking down the darkened street, began to run.
Constanza Luis ran due east, through the parking lot of the grocery store, over some rubble and onto 16th Avenue. Where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there hadn't occurred to her. Half out of her mind with fear for her husband, she simply ran. Perhaps the sky was slightly less foreboding in that direction, the temperature vaguely cooler. Perhaps she only imagined they were. Whatever the reason, she ran to the east, towards the Hollywood Hills, determined to confront the men she believed had taken her Miguel.
She crossed to 19th, sprinted past stalled cars and trucks, and skipped around cracks in the pavement like a woman half her age, a third her weight and twice her height. Constanza was short, short but substantial. She had spent a lifetime building on her physique, layer upon layer of fat backed by years of greasy sausages, thick lasagnas and cheesy enchiladas until she found it difficult to move without chaffing somewhere.
Sweat greased her face, ran down her back and trickled between her thighs. Still, though she felt as though she were roasting in an ungodly Catholic purgatory, she stopped two blocks away only long enough to remove a dripping bra, quickly rebuttoning her olive colored blouse modestly closed again in the privacy of a darkened smoke shop doorway.
Setting out again, Constanza easily covered six more blocks with nothing less than focused Olympic determination. She jumped over fallen bodies with barely a notice, her faux leather purse forgotten in the doorway of the smoke shop where she had dropped it. Like her bra, she had never been without it in public. Miguel had once remarked that her purse was nearly the size of a small suitcase before being cut short by a glance that ended the jest in a single icy moment, never again to be repeated. Her purse had become almost as much a part of her body as any other appendage. She couldn't imagine leaving home without it.
