The Last War Series Box Set [Books 1-7]

by Schow, Ryan

Lost in my own thoughts, I didn’t realize she’d opened her eyes and is now looking at me.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “All kinds of terrible thoughts,” I say. “You?”

  By the look of it, fun and flirty is gone. Her real emotions are emerging. “I’m scared, Nick.”

  She looks scared.

  “Maybe you should stay with the boat,” I suggest. “I can give you the shotgun, just in case.”

  “I don’t want to be alone,” she says.

  “It might be better than what’s out there,” I say. “Speaking of ‘out there’ we should probably get topside. Don’t want Quentin thinking we’re down here making babies.”

  She laughs, but it’s a hollow, joyless sound.

  Grabbing the shotgun, I toss it at her, then say, “If people try to take the boat, can you shoot them?”

  “I told you,” she says, tossing it back at me, “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

  “They will be people like us, people trying to survive, but if push comes to shove, when you have one of these of your own, can you aim it at someone’s chest and squeeze the trigger?”

  “Are you not hearing me?” she says.

  “Answer the question.”

  “No!” she says. “I don’t just kill people.”

  Looking at the shotgun, turning it in my hands, I say, “Yeah, me neither.”

  “So you’re saying we’re screwed?” she asks, uncertainty drifting through her eyes, a sort of pleading with no hope of staying her more troubling thoughts.

  “Only if people try to harm us.”

  “You think they will?”

  I stop and think about this for a second, then: “What will a beaten down, cornered dog do if it’s attacked?”

  “Fight back?”

  “We just have to fight back before we’re beaten down, cornered and worrying about our life,” I tell her, trying to muster up my courage.

  “I’m already worried.”

  “I know,” I say, choosing a moment of honesty over the chance for bravado. Standing up, I say, “Me too.”

  She stands, pauses, then pulls me into a hug, holding me tight, her body against mine so much that I can feel all her subtle curves. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this close to a woman. At first I’m repelled. I just want to pull away from her, but I don’t. There’s a part of me that misses this sort of intimacy, even if it’s with a stranger, even if it leads to nothing.

  “I never thanked you for saving my life back at the convention center,” she says, her chin on my shoulder, her cheek pressed to mine. “And at the hotel.”

  I slowly hug her back. I’m feeling her body against mine, but I can’t help thinking of Margot. This is how we first met, how we first fell in love. I was a pro-skater back then, fresh on the circuit. She was a groupie and was on the top of a half pipe when one of the skaters went down, his board launching out from under him. It flew up the ramp, launched about fifteen feet in the air and started coming down right at her.

  I pulled her out of the way and the board torpedoed into the deck where she was standing. Gasping, rattled, Margot looked up at me with such wonder in her eyes.

  “That would have hit me in the head,” she said, breathless.

  “That’s why I pulled you out of the way,” I replied. “You okay?”

  “I am, thanks to you.”

  She gave me a hug, then I asked her out for coffee and she said yes. Nine months later, Indigo was born. With Bailey, though, I won’t be asking her to coffee. And I won’t be making any babies. More than anything, I’ll be hoping that if push comes to shove, she won’t get us all killed.

  Bailey pulls back, lets go of me and looks right up into my eyes. “You have a thing or something?”

  “A thing?” I ask, still holding myself back.

  “Yeah. A thing. Like a condition or something.”

  “No,” I say.

  “You gay? I mean, after having your daughter?”

  “No, I didn’t turn gay after having my daughter. It’s just, I was thinking about my ex-wife, about how we met—”

  “Why were you thinking that?”

  A knock on the door startles us and we’re able to step away from each other quickly as Quentin opens the door, but not quick enough.

  He looks at me, then at Bailey, then back at me.

  “I interrupt something?”

  “No,” we both say at the same time.

  “Two no’s make a yes, lovers,” he teases. “Marcus says we’re about here, that you guys should get ready.” He looks at me, in my boat shorts and polo shirt and now I’m really beginning to regret wearing these stupid clothes. “You look like a fruit loop,” he says.

  “I was thinking the same thing about you,” I say, not crass, but not filled with humor either. He was also in boat shoes, shorts and a polo.

  “All we need is a couple of cocktails and we can start the end-of-the-world party now,” he says with a laugh that’s not contagious.

  Bailey and I exchange looks. Neither of us can believe the things he’s saying. “This isn’t a party, Quentin,” Bailey says.

  “Not yet,” he replies.

  “Not at all,” I say. “This is the end of an era and you’re cracking jokes, which is worse than inappropriate. It’s just a bit…tactless.”

  “Whatever snowflake, I’ll see you and your unborn babies up top.”

  When he’s gone, I look at Bailey and she looks at me and I say, “If the situation warrants it, shoot him first.”

  “He did save us,” she says, although now she isn’t looking so happy about it.

  “Okay, pause first, then shoot.”

  Chapter One Hundred

  Marcus eases the yacht toward the shoreline, a nightmarish scene that’s endemic destruction. Bailey’s eyes are wrapped in unshed tears as we clear the jetty and enter the channel leading into the Newport Harbor. Even Quentin falls still. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  A city in ruin.

  Damn.

  Where we’re able to clear the San Diego Bay without incident, it appears dozens of other boats weren’t so lucky. Some are intact, some are burning and it’s pretty clear others have been sunk.

  The docks were hit, too.

  A long stretch of shoreline condos have been reduced to piles of rubble, and many of the homes we’re seeing are nothing but smoking ash and the most resilient parts of the framing.

  I can’t breathe.

  Seeing this devastation in broad daylight, knowing this was one of California’s most sought after communities, makes me physically sick.

  “It’s all gone,” Bailey says in a dreamy, wounded voice.

  “Not all of it,” Marcus says, his voice distant. We round the Corona Del Mar Bend, cruise deeper into the harbor. There are places to dock, but the homes are uninhabitable, not places that look fit for robbery.

  The harbor opens to a graveyard of overturned sailboats and burning yachts. We all fall silent. Marcus cuts our speed in half. The waters are littered with the detritus of a wealthy world fallen. We troll beneath a low hanging smog that’s floating over the water, hazy with a burnt taste to it.

  “Get to the front of the bow,” Marcus suddenly calls out, seeing something that causes him to cut the engines to a near crawl.

  Bailey looks up at him, startled, then she sees him waving his hands, telling her to get to the front of the yacht so she can see what’s ahead.

  She hurries to the front of the boat, then turns and starts pointing left really fast. Marcus reverses the engines, kicking the stern around, then eases forward like an expert. We still bump into something big, just below the water’s surface. The yacht leans hard, the hull scraping over whatever half sunken boat we’re riding on, everything tilting sideways.

  I’m grabbing on to the nearest thing for purchase, the floor beneath me tilting, rattling, jarring me about. Inside, things are crashing around in the cabinets, but the boat levels out and we find an opening in t
he waterway.

  I head out with Bailey and we stand vigil, Marcus following her directions going just about as slow as he can without slipping into an aimless drift.

  We make our way to what Marcus says is Balboa Island. He navigates us in between two rows of small yacht moorings where several of the boats have sunken or are pulling under. In the water, two bodies are floating. A man and a woman. Bailey turns away; I can’t stop staring. After that, as Marcus pulls to shore, we don’t see anymore bodies or bump into any more boats.

  “Everyone hang on to something!” he yells and a few seconds later we gently run to shore, driving the keel up into the sand.

  Turning the wheel, Marcus delicately reverses the engine and I know what’s coming next. I run to the back of the boat just in time for him to swing the stern toward the dock. When it’s close enough, I jump. Successfully making the leap, I grab the nearest cleated dock line expecting the stern to slam into the dock. When it hits, I jump back on board, wrap and secure the dock line on the boat and pull it tight. Disembarking once more, hustling up the dock, I watch as Bailey moves to the rail. I toss her the bow line, which she catches and looks at as if to say, what do I do with this?

  “Wrap it around the cleat, that metal tie-down, and just hold it tight,” I tell her. “Don’t let the boat drift away from the dock and keep your hands and fingers away from the cleat.”

  “Quentin,” Marcus says, tossing him a strapped carrying case for what looks like field glasses, “get up top, scout out the island!”

  Quentin catches the box, opens it up to see what’s inside, then closes it and makes his way to the aft deck where he removes the binoculars and stands guard.

  Marcus scuttles to the main deck, looking for the yacht’s dock lines which he claims will be more secure. When he finds them, he secures the bow line topside, then tosses me the line, which I tie down. We do the same with the bow spring line, the stern spring line and the stern line.

  When everything is tied off properly and the boat is holding fast, Marcus grabs a few things, including the .357 and a few bottles of water, and says, “It’s go time.”

  He hands each of us a water bottle as he moves forward to take the lead. With the shotgun in hand and me taking up the rear, the four of us—led by Marcus—move at a slow jog up the dock passing a few sunken motorboats and not much else in the still harbor waters.

  When we reach the shoreline, we make our way down the boardwalk, seeing house after giant house stacked nearly side-by-side.

  “It’s so quiet here,” Bailey says.

  “Can’t imagine a whole lot of these people telecommuting,” Quentin jokes, even though it’s not funny. At this point, nothing he says is funny.

  Balboa Island is all million dollar homes on postage stamp lots. The roads are narrow and each home stands only a few feet from its neighbor. It’s hard to imagine a city planner planning this island any tighter, but with the real estate market in Newport Beach being what it is, and home prices always on the rise, it would seem unreasonable to expect anything different.

  “How much do you think these homes are worth?” Bailey asks.

  “Right now,” Marcus says, “a dollar, a life, the lives of many.”

  I get what he’s trying to say. They’re only worth what they can do to save our lives and the lives of others.

  “This island feels like a ghost town,” Bailey says as we move off the shoreline and into the neighborhood. “It’s super creepy.”

  Most of the houses along the bay aren’t damaged, which is promising on one hand and dangerous on the other hand.

  If the drones decide to hit the island while we’re on it, all we can do is hide and hope not to get blown up.

  “How do we know which house to rob?” Quentin asks in low tones.

  “Find the one without people in it,” Marcus says back.

  “What if there are dead people in there?”

  “Why would they be dead?” Marcus hisses over his shoulder.

  Quentin stops asking questions and I follow Marcus’s lead. We head up Amethyst Avenue moving past the nicest homes. Many of them have small, clean yards, stucco and clapboard style exteriors. It’s sort of like the Hamptons, but packed much tighter and with no sand.

  “Can we just squat here for a few years?” I hear myself ask, marveling at how nice the homes are.

  “Where do you live?” Quentin asks.

  “San Francisco.”

  “What part?”

  “My backyard overlooks Dirt Alley, which is a real dirt alley, if you catch my drift.”

  “So you live in a dump,” Bailey says without much humor.

  “Not really,” I say, because my home is nice enough. “But compared to these homes? I’m pretty sure we all live in dumps.”

  Marcus says, “We’re going door to door. Hopefully we won’t run into anyone.”

  The first door we knock on, a woman answers. She’s scared, answering through a cracked open door.

  “I have a gun,” she says.

  “You’d be a fool not to have one,” Marcus says, undeterred.

  “Are you armed?” she asks, looking Marcus over. She sees me in back with the shotgun and her eyes go wide.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Marcus says. “We’re working with Neighborhood Watch to make sure everyone is okay.”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Who else is on the block, ma’am?” Quentin asks, impatient, his tone rather sharp.

  She looks the four of us over with a more discriminating eye.

  “You’re not with the Neighborhood Watch, are you?” she asks. She’s a pair of big, suspicious eyes; she’s a spark of concern, that little niggle of worry just creep, creep, creeping up the hollows of her spine, the one that makes a woman like her take a pack of strangers like us serious.

  “Do you even have one here?” Quentin says, his head cocked like a jerk, like he doesn’t have time for any of this. “A Neighborhood Watch?”

  “Sanford is in charge of security…”

  “Who else is home on the block?” Bailey asks, her tone tempered, trying to sound more reassuring and harmless than her nerdy predecessor.

  She opens the door a little wider. What she does is open it just enough to show us she’s holding a pistol at her side.

  Apparently we’re not as dangerous as we feel.

  But this lady? Wow. She’s got to be sixty-five. Her body, however, looks Frankensteined back a few decades. Maybe her husband is a cosmetic surgeon and she’s a pro-bono case. But damn. To say she doesn’t match herself is the understatement of the year. Looking her over, honestly—and I’d never say something like this out loud—she’s a Botox nightmare with big fake breasts and spidery fake eyelashes and injected lips and fillers and color contacts.

  “Do you think you’re an accurate representation of the kinds of folks we’ll find here on Balboa Island?” Quentin asks. I take a step forward, give him a nudge. He turns and says, “What?”

  “Slow your roll, man.”

  He sets his jaw, drills me with his eyes. You know how when you look at someone long enough, right in the eyes, and you see beyond their physical appearance? Well I feel Quentin in that moment and the feeling is deeply unsettling.

  “What do you mean by ‘accurate representation?’” the woman asks. “Are you talking about age or the way I look?”

  “Age, ma’am,” Quentin says, his tone somewhat softer on the edges.

  “We’re not a retirement community, if that’s what you’re asking. Even though I don’t work.”

  Marcus finally speaks up. “Who around here does work?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  This is taking too long. Nudged by larger concerns that feel like high anxiety in my chest, I step forward with the shotgun and say, “Because if they’re not home by now they’re probably dead, and if they’re dead, we’re going to take their stuff before it rots or you people rob them yourselves.”

  “Re
al subtle, Nick,” Bailey says.

  All I can think about is those things that destroyed San Diego, about our boat just hanging out there for anyone to steal, and Indigo. God, I can’t stop thinking of Indigo.

  “This is our neighborhood to rob, if we want,” the woman says. Her mouth is moving like a fish out of water, like she’s gulping for something that just isn’t there. Strangely, predictably, nothing else is moving. Not her eyebrows, her cheeks or even her ears.

  I rack the shotgun, jam it in her face. “You think you’re the only one who can rob this little slice of heaven, but my shotgun here says otherwise.”

  Rolling her eyes, shoving the gun out of the way, she says, “Annette and her husband Gary work. They’re three doors down. Two doors after that is a single guy with a Ferrari and too much hair gel. He works. That’s all I know because I’m not nosey like some of the people here.”

  “You’re too kind,” Marcus says, pulling me back.

  “Try not to threaten anyone else,” she calls out after we leave.

  We knock at the next two doors, both older homes that look like they’ve taken the weather for years, but haven’t yet bent to it. We expect guns and threats. More Botox ladies ready to defend their overpriced oceanfront homes and their zero lot lines. Instead the sounds of our unanswered summons ring hollow. One house, with its sloping, Spanish tile roof and its low-rent detective agency looking shingle siding, has all the look of a strip mall standout in a town ravaged by economic disintegration.

  Marcus knocks on the door, but even when the knock goes unrequited by a face, a voice, a warning, we all look at each other as if to say, is this a house you really want to rob?

  It wasn’t.

  We all shake our heads and go to the next home, which has floor-to-ceiling windows and basically looks like a modern box structure with two stories of glass windows and a stylish roof deck.

  “This is the one,” Marcus says, hopeful. “Stay here.”

  The man is all muscle, but he moves light on his feet, fast and agile. He skirts around back, presumably checking the open windows for occupants while leaving the rest of us to a wet, ominous silence.

  A second later, Marcus throws the deadbolt on the other side of the huge glass door and our “friend” ushers us into the vacant home.