The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  “He jes’ arrived,” explained Alphonso with his thumb. “They found him in Riverside this morning.”

  The guard smiled and shook my hand.

  “Glad to meet you, sir. We just have some paperwork to fill out and we’ll get you into an apartment for the week. This way.”

  I said goodbye to Alphonso and thanked him. He smiled and I hoped I might meet him again, if just to buy him dinner, but more because I liked his quiet company.

  So here I am, in my “apartment”. I have a sleeping bag, toiletries in a plastic sack, some snack bars, and an appointment for the showers in the morning. The guard walked me down through eight brightly illuminated levels and back into the depths of the garage. Finally, he found my “apartment” and unlocked the sliding door to a sixties-era apple-red Volkswagen van.

  “It’s quiet time right now, so if you have any music, headphones please. Enjoy your stay,” said the guard. Or the property manager.

  So, I have one week, courtesy of the New California Republic, to stay here in the van-partment. After that, I have to show work and residence or be listed as a vagrant, in which case I’ll be assigned to a work camp or a mental health facility. At least that’s what the paperwork said. Once I was in my sleeping bag and staring at the roof, I thought I’d fall right to sleep. But I didn’t. Now after writing all this, I’m starting to feel like I could sleep.

  It’s nice here.

  November 22nd

  Who am I kidding?

  There’re not that many people left.

  In the showers the attendants were talking to me, glibly, about how many people had survived.

  It’s not a very high number.

  After the showers, I was so depressed I came back here to my van-partment and crawled into my sleeping bag. I slept badly for an hour.

  Who am I kidding? The odds of Alex being alive are thin.

  And yet, I am alive.

  November 23rd

  I am cold and tired. I’ve been sitting up in the plaza above my van-partment, talking with this kid for hours. Listening, really. I don’t know what to think, so I’m going to write down my whole day and read it tomorrow. Maybe I’m just tired and not crazy.

  Here goes.

  I slept through yesterday. I woke up at night and ate a snack bar and drank some water. Then I just lay on my sleeping bag and watched the roof of the van. I think I drifted off sometime after two.

  This morning when I woke up, I went up to the garage entrance and walked out into a bright blue Southern California morning. There were people on the streets. Not a lot, but some.

  The same smiling guard came up to me.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Honestly?” I said, and he nodded.

  “I don’t know. I don’t feel.”

  He took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “Downhill from here, off in that direction,” He pointed. “you’ll find most people. There are some job boards at the major intersection if you’re interested.” Then he smiled again.

  I headed off toward the action.

  If I was worried that somehow civilization had failed, I didn’t need to. In the space of four blocks by four blocks, past barriers erected at the entrances to the major streets, I found civilization again.

  Heavily armed guards watched from corner windows as people thronged in and out of open doors, carrying and pushing all kinds of junk.

  I passed a van parked on a side street with white lettering written on the side. “Get a Massage from a TV Star”. There was a picture of some actress, a headshot, taped to the side of the van. I recognized the picture, but couldn’t remember what show she’d been in. When I passed the passenger door of the van, I could see the woman who had once looked like the girl in the headshot. Her face was drawn and tight, her mean mouth turned hard as she dragged on a cigarette angrily. When she saw me, she turned and smiled, showing me the black eye on the other side of her face.

  I don’t know if I smiled back.

  I walked on as people pushed past me with their handfuls and shopping carts full of junk. I smelled cooked meat coming from somewhere, but I never found it. In the windows of the stores, I could see piles of random articles with hand printed signs that gave an amount, always followed by the symbol for CalDollars.

  “That’s a nice diamond bracelet,” said a voice at my shoulder as I stared into one window. I hadn’t seen the bracelet, and in truth I hadn’t been looking at any one item in particular. I was just trying to wrap my MBA brain around the local economy.

  I turned to a portly Middle Eastern man in a loose cotton shirt and dark slacks, his hair trimmed on the sides and bald on top.

  “Yeah,” I said, locking in on the price. “And twenty-five CalDollars seems... reasonable?”

  “Probably,” he said without any conviction. “To be honest, I have no idea. What’s a CalDollar worth? It’s worth what it buys, my friend. It is worth what it buys.”

  I looked at him.

  “I don’t mean to be vague,” he apologized. “I’m saying that a dollar, any dollar, is worth what it will buy. You don’t understand?” He looked at me for a long moment to see if I understood.

  “To put it another way, CalDollars are worth far more today than they might be tomorrow. But who knows? Neither I, nor you. But I can tell you this,” he raised one long finger. “They are worth far more than a real diamond bracelet today. Walk with me. I know where we can get some excellent coffee. Do you like coffee?”

  We began to walk.

  “You see my new friend, what does one do with a real diamond bracelet when the world, or what has become of the world, comes banging on the plywood you have tacked up over your windows and doors to protect your loved ones?”

  We passed into an old shopping arcade complete with overhanging gargoyles and scrollwork running up the sides of the building. The kind of building where some old time Hollywood private eye would have had his detective agency.

  The Hanson Building.

  We entered a long shadowy arcade of kiosks and shouting. He stopped speaking until we emerged into a courtyard speckled with oddly mismatched tables and chairs. I could hear the quick peeps and chirps of birds bouncing off the high walls above. He held up a long finger plus another, and waved them at a man in a white apron standing behind a coffee cart. When we were seated at a wrought iron table, he continued.

  “Today, the diamond bracelet is worth very little. Far less than the twenty-five my friend in the store was trying to gouge you for. But tomorrow when the world is a different place, it may be worth much more. No, today’s diamond bracelet is a forty-four magnum. Now, if that had been in the window, the price would have been almost beyond asking. Today’s diamonds are guns. And after that comes medicine, and then food. Clothing even, is expensive. Imagine the mark-up now. There are no mills churning out next year’s jacket, so what will we wear when winter begins again? Maybe not the most important question here in Southern California, but what about the rest of the country? No one knows. Who has been there? Have you? No my friend, no one knows what tomorrow will bring. So, today you can get a diamond bracelet for just that much or possibly cheaper, but only if you have money, and I’m not saying you don’t, but if you do, you could have a very nice twenty-two target pistol. I know the place and the man. Ammunition not included. Is that what you’re looking for?”

  The coffee arrived and I drank.

  I said, “I have been there.”

  “Excuse me, my friend?” he said, after sipping his coffee.

  “I know what’s there. Out there, in the world. I’ve just come from there.”

  He paused mid sip, and after a long moment of just holding the cup, finally put down his coffee.

  “That is very interesting, my friend. Information is worth much more than a diamond bracelet. You see, the government, this New California, as they call it, they don’t know, or they do know and they aren’t saying. So what is out there and how do you know?”

&
nbsp; I sipped my small coffee. Trading and negotiating. Finally, a skill I knew, and could use.

  “I’ll tell you what. Teach me what’s going on here. Tell me how this economy works and I’ll tell you what’s going on out there. Deal?”

  He thought about my offer.

  “How do you know?”

  “I left New York ten days ago. I travelled by train through Atlanta, New Orleans, San Antonio, and Tucson.”

  “Where is the train then, if you came by this manner?”

  “Derailed in Riverside.”

  “Alright then, if you are lying, what was the cost to me? A coffee, not so much. Perhaps another coffee, still not so much. The cost is very little if you are lying.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Alright, my friend. It was wrong of me to put it in such a blunt manner. Hwang!” He raised two more fingers to the man with the apron. “And a pastry for my friend.”

  “Alright,” he began. “It’s very simple. The government, the council that is, has only reclaimed certain portions of the city. Those portions must first undergo Reconstruction. Then we, all these people with their armloads of treasure, can enter and salvage the areas that are open. But not until Reconstruction is complete. All these goods, these diamond bracelets and forty-four magnums, and even a grenade I’ve heard of, they come here to be exchanged and sold. There are many angles to this business. But I am only concerned with one. Do you know what the one angle I am concerned with is?”

  The pastry and coffees arrived.

  I shook my head indicating I did not.

  “Gold.”

  We sipped our coffee.

  “Makes sense,” I said. “Gold is a good bet and has been for most of history. You’re betting gold will come back once civilization restarts. Right now everyone wants guns and ammo, and I’m sure there’s a certain segment that still thinks big-screen TVs are valuable. But you know once the danger passes, gold will be back. I’m guessing right now it’s very cheap.”

  “Very cheap,” he broke in, raising a thick finger. “What can you do with it at night? Can you eat it? Will it keep you warm? It’s heavy and you can’t carry it around. You can’t start your car with it, and that doesn’t matter because no one is allowed to drive unless they work for the government. Also, only one freeway is open and that, not so much, and if rumors are to be believed, not all the time. So today, what good is gold, and if you happen to have some I would be very happy to purchase it from you. Right now, everyone is afraid of the dead. But how many of them are left? I’m saying, not many. Once they’re all gone, diamond bracelets and gold will be very valuable again, my friend. Very shortly, things are going to change back to the way they once were.”

  I drained my coffee and stood up.

  He shot me a sudden, angry look.

  “So, what have I purchased?” he said.

  I noticed the “my friend” was gone.

  “You know that forty-four magnum?”

  He said nothing.

  “I’d buy it if I were you.” Then I turned and walked back through the shopping arcade.

  I heard his chair scrape behind me.

  “You mean to say it’s still that bad out there?”

  I turned.

  I nodded.

  I left.

  In the shopping arcade among the crowd, I turned to look at him once more. He was sitting again, his large hands hanging loosely between his knees. He looked sadder than anyone I’d ever seen.

  It was late afternoon by the time I made it back up the hill. A nice breeze was blowing, so I took the marble steps up to the top of the plaza. The steps were spattered with rust-colored stains. One man, really a teenager, sat at the top, smoking. I climbed the steps and felt tired. As I neared the top, the kid looked at me and then flicked his cigarette ash onto the step below.

  “You wanna smoke?” he asked.

  I accepted and sat next to him. Across the street, an avenue of fresh, brown earth led off down the hill. Government buildings, long and squat, were the side-walls of a gash in the earth. The buildings were riddled with bullet holes and shell craters.

  “Must have been some fight,” I said, dragging on the cigarette.

  After a pause, the kid sighed and said, “Sure was.”

  We smoked in silence.

  The afternoon turned orange. To the south, I could see several small columns of black smoke.

  “You see that step,” he said, pointing to one three below where we sat.

  I said I did.

  “That step there is the high water mark.”

  I took a drag and asked, “How so?”

  “That’s where humanity almost went over the hill and into history. I was a gunner, set up right there in that planter off to the left. We dug it out and made a pit for the gun. I’d been fighting with the National Guard for three weeks when we came into LA. I’m from up around Shasta. Joined the Guard after high school. Anyway, we heard there were still survivors here in these buildings. We set up a heliport on top of that pile of rubble behind us when it was still a building.”

  I turned and looked back across the plaza. Piles of concrete and rebar reached into the orange sky where there must have once stood an office building.

  “We set up a base and started pulling ops into the buildings all over downtown. We heard there was a big group of dead coming up out of Orange County. Anyway, our commander wanted to pull out, but the Lady wouldn’t let him. She told him we could kill all of ‘em right down there in a trap she and her crew were leadin’ ‘em into.” He pointed to the scraped brown earth where a few bulldozers were parked.

  “And we did. We killed ‘em all right there in what used to be a big old park. That step was how far they got. Three more and they would have punched through our line. We’d be finished now. Look! I was forward down there in that pit. They came screaming up through where City Hall used to be, we blew that up, and then we all started shooting from these buildings. Even got an airstrike in on ‘em. In the end, I was firing point blank with a fifty and they still kept coming. My buddy was tossing grenades as fast as he could pull the pin, and they still kept coming. People were startin’ to drop their weapons and run for the heliport. That’s when she blew up the building behind us. She didn’t want us using it to escape. She and her crew found some C-4 and blew it to high heaven. Then we knew we had to fight. Then it was on. Know what I mean?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She was smart. Smarter than our CO who did nothing but get guys killed for three weeks. Then she comes through here like a bat out of hell, and every one of ‘em is chasing her right into our kill zone. Still, it wasn’t easy. For a good hour there, I thought I was a goner. For a good hour, I thought I was next.”

  He lit us each another cigarette.

  “I can’t hardly get over that, you know. I can’t let that day go. And I know I’ve got to. I’ve got to go on living now. Got to, but I can’t.”

  We sat in silence, smoking. He was generous with his cigarettes.

  I knew now what was under all that scraped brown earth.

  The numbers.

  The numbers were under the earth.

  “Debbie Harry with a shotgun,” mumbled the kid, as the last of the day faded into evening dark.

  I almost couldn’t believe what he’d just said.

  “What did you just say?” I asked him.

  He looked at me.

  “Jes’ Debbie Harry. Debbie Harry with a shotgun. I didn’t mean to disrespect her. Really. Do you know her?”

  “Who?”

  “The Lady.”

  “Why’d you call her Debbie Harry with a shotgun?”

  “She carried a big ol’ shotgun. Right here at the top of the steps. She had it slung across her back when she jumped out of that high-end hummer with the machine gun on top. The car’s beat to hell and smoking, and she jumps out and hops the barricade. There were already thousands of ‘em rushing through the kill-zone, and there must have been three-hundred of
us throwing everything we had right at ‘em. She slings that shotgun around and starts pumping blasts into the dead, point-blank. Held ‘em right there at that third step. If they’d crossed those three steps, I’m sure she wouldn’t have moved. She knew it was all or nothing right there. Hell of a lady.”

  “No. Why’d you call her Debbie Harry?”

  “Oh. She looked like the chick from that eighties band. Real cute.”

  And that’s the way it happened.

  I don’t want to think about it.

  I want to sleep.

  It’s almost too much to believe.

  The Lady.

  Debbie Harry.

  Alex.

  November 24th

  I’ve asked around, and no one seems to know where I can find this “Lady”. It’s just after three in the morning.

  I’m leaving. I’ve been lying here awake all night, trying to figure out what to do next. Which is really a lie. I know what to do.

  Go south, find that hotel, and start looking for Alex. If it’s a dead end...

  If I don’t find her there, then I’ll pursue this “Lady”. But first, I’ve got to get clear on what I know. What is known. What can be known? I know Alex was at that hotel the day it all went down.

  I couldn’t stay in my sleeping bag inside the Van-Partment a minute longer. I had to get up. At first it was just to slide open the door of the bus and get some air. Then it was to stand. I smoked and then I started writing. I heard someone snoring a few “apartments” away. I started packing, and just as I was about to leave, I heard someone, a woman I think, start screaming, “Get them off me! Get them off me!” She screamed the same words over and over. Then she was sobbing and I could hear someone comforting her. Murmuring to her.

  I picked up the Big Bertha and laid it across my shoulder.

  I thought, “I’m leaving now.”

  It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. I’ve been walking all day, and I’ve just crossed into some rail yards south of the city.

  I passed a man selling street tacos and asked how much. I didn’t have any money. No CalDollars. The tacos smelled great. I traded my military canteen for two of them and a warm beer. The tacos were spicy and the beer made them even spicier. My mouth was burning. I sat there wondering if it had been a stupid idea to trade my canteen.