The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  Beyond the rail yard is the Southern Wall.

  That’s what everybody calls it. The Southern Wall. Supposedly, I can slip through and move into the abandoned neighborhoods beyond. From what I understand, those neighborhoods have been cleared, but are not yet open to salvage. Meaning, no one can go in and loot them. The main looting activity is concerned with the West Side of Los Angeles. The Board of Directors, the local governing authority, wants a clear path of retreat to the ocean in case anything comes out of the desert.

  It’s almost dusk and soon it will be winter, but the days are still warm and even hot at times. It seems like it hasn’t rained in forever. Everything is covered in ash and fine dust. The sky is a hazy orange.

  November 25th

  I spent the night at a freeway guard post south of Los Angeles. I tried to slip through the wall and into the neighborhoods yesterday evening, but it’s pretty heavily guarded with lots of people walking a makeshift wall of stacked and smashed cars topped with plywood walkways and search lights.

  When I told them I needed to get down to Newport Beach, they told me the only way to get there was by the Five freeway in one of the twice-daily buses that’s allowed to use the recently cleared highway.

  I walked east along the rail yard toward the freeway. The rail yard is brightly lit and there’s lots of activity as bulk goods are being moved in and offloaded from large trucks. The local militia seems to be setting up some kind of fort here, and I was asked repeatedly if I was looking for a specific unit to join. I said little and kept moving. I reached the highway in the evening.

  A heavily armed sniper team led by a woman named Marie told me I couldn’t get onto the freeway until 6 a.m. the next morning. They let me sleep in a circle of light outside their post. They said little and kept the radio low throughout the night. Several times I awoke to whispering talk. I wondered what time it was and every time I checked, it wasn’t even close to six. It was cold and I slept badly.

  In the foggy morning light, I smelled burnt ash, and one of the guards talked about a fire he’d seen in the night out beyond the Southern Wall, somewhere in the seemingly endless sprawl of neighborhoods. It’d burned for a few hours, then gone out.

  “Probably just another burn pile down in Compton,” said Marie.

  I asked where I could catch the bus and they said usually right there. But the bus was cancelled for the day. After a few calls on a landline, they opened up the gate leading down onto the freeway and told us, me and the others who had arrived, that we could walk the freeway to the next checkpoint today. No one else wanted to go even though they told us not to worry; apparently there were sniper teams on every overpass.

  And there were. Every overpass had a small team of militia. The streets leading onto the overpasses were blocked off with cars and big rigs, and the bridges themselves were fortified with barbed wire and large guns. Machine guns I guess. On every bridge, I saw two people with telescopes or binoculars scanning down into the urban sprawls off to the sides of the freeway.

  Around ten, a man on a horse passed by at a trot. He nodded, touching his cowboy hat, then kicked his horse into a slow gallop, and I lost sight of him as the road curved ahead.

  At three, I came upon a crew clearing the side of the road of overgrown grass and trees. They burned great piles of brown palm fronds and dry grass, vegetation that had grown unchecked for the last three months. I asked if they had any water, and they gave me a small bottle and returned to their work. I drained the bottle and wondered if I actually might die of thirst.

  It was stupid of me to have traded the canteen.

  I’ve got to realize the world has changed.

  It’s night now, and I’m sleeping beneath a guarded overpass. The soldiers lit two fire barrels off to each side, but they won’t let me come up onto the bridge. So I’m sleeping in the median below the bridge near the barrels.

  I need stuff if I’m going to find Alex.

  November 26th

  I couldn’t take it a minute longer. The guys on top of the bridge were obnoxious. For the first half of the night, it sounded like they were getting drunk. They were playing cards, and every time someone won a hand, they would yell or curse. One guy in particular would slap his hand on the plywood boards they were playing on and yell, “That’s how it’s done!” Every time. He won a lot and never changed up his catch phrase. Later, two of them began to take pot shots into the surrounding neighborhood, cackling each time they hit something.

  Their leader, a whiny-voiced man, finally shut them up and sent them to bed.

  I picked up my stuff quietly and climbed the side of the hill under the bridge. I found a hole in the fence and crawled through it. It was time to get off the beaten path. Maybe I could find some stuff, or at least some water.

  Now I was in the neighborhoods.

  I inched along a wall covered in graffiti near the main road that led away from the bridge, and climbed over it once I got near the road. I was in someone’s backyard again staring at the back of a house.

  The house looked decrepit and overrun. I had to find something to use. I had to find tools I would need to survive. Tools I would use to find Alex.

  I entered through an open screen door on the porch. Inside, mattresses were thrown across what had once been a family room. I could see empty bottles on the floor in the pale light coming from the guard towers on the overpass. There was little left in the house except a painting someone had slashed to pieces. The upstairs was a pile of scattered clothing thrown onto the floor. Drawers were flung open, and whatever useful thing had been found and taken. I went downstairs and into the garage. I found nothing more than rusting garden tools.

  For a moment, I stood in the musty smelling garage feeling completely frustrated.

  I was heading off the beaten path now. I needed to find things I could use, and in the first house I’d searched, there had been nothing worth taking. Still, I felt I had to take something. But I’m not kidding, everything I looked at felt totally useless to me in regards to any obstacle I could conceive of facing in the near-term future.

  I left the house feeling dejected as I cut across the unkempt dead lawn. I could go back and stick to the freeway, but that felt hopeless. What would I find along its sides that could help me? The truth was, I was hungry and needed water.

  The searchlight from the bridge lazily swept over the neighborhoods on the other side of the freeway.

  I cut diagonally away from the bridge, passing through a neighborhood of single-story ranchero-style houses. All of them had once been painted different colors, but now in the pale light of night, they seemed a single disheartening gray. Every window was smashed, doors had been torn from their hinges, clothing and kitchen utensils lay scattered from front doorways across short lawns, ending their trails in the leaf-glutted gutters. The few cars that remained were missing tires. In their smashed windows, I saw an abundance of wires and missing radios.

  I felt like I’d gone about a mile more when I found the business avenue heading west. Here I found more stores smashed and looted. There had been no defense. No boarded windows or burn piles in the streets. None of those things. Here, there had just been looting and chaos. And now it was all gone and I wondered what had become of the looters, who in those first days of lawlessness and disorder had found some kind of unlimited shopping paradise. I eventually had to walk in the street to avoid all the broken glass that lay in thick piles across the sidewalk.

  Then the neighborhood changed. The businesses here had long ceased holding forth. Long before the outbreak. Here, were large corporate “for sale” signs smashed to pieces behind chain link fences, and gas stations where the pumps had disappeared long ago. Vacant car lots that hadn’t see a new model in years, remained long after the fluttering multicolored flags and EZ Credit signs had disappeared. All that remained were the faded whitewashed words “Out of Business”.

  For some, the apocalypse had taken place long before that hot day back in August.

 
; In the hours before dawn, as I walked and talked myself out of searching buildings that looked dark and friendless, I thought about what I had done and aspired to be before the end of the world. I had worked on Wall Street. I’d been a broker. I wasn’t about to get all sappy and wonder how many of my decisions had influenced these streets. But still, I wondered about these streets where my decisions had come to rest, and what they looked like now as opposed to then, on those optimistic days of the past when all these vacant lots and boarded up buildings had offered “EZ Credit”. Did all the streets of the world somehow bear the weight of my decisions and resemble this present wasteland?

  Was this my hell?

  Was this my punishment?

  At dawn, lost in thought, I barely heard the scraping sound that had been following me for some time.

  He was black. The only part of his body that moved like a human was the right leg that seemed to jut out in front of his body. The rest followed the leg, as if tethered to it. His head was cranked to the side and his mouth, a red gash that contrasted his ashy blackness, hung agape as if on the verge of objecting to my presence.

  I watched him come for me.

  The streets were turning morning blue, and by the time he was within ten feet of me, the tops of the buildings had turned to gold. I could hear birds.

  I was done with running.

  I was done with climbing further and further up the Tower.

  I was done living in fear.

  I was hungry.

  I was tired.

  I was thirsty.

  I was done.

  I hit him with the Big Bertha.

  In the second before I struck him, I felt all the rage of the past three months boil up within me. But that wasn’t enough to hit him in the head, the place where Carmichael used to crush them with his Derek Jeter Monday Morning Meeting Bat.

  Signed and everything.

  It wasn’t enough.

  I hesitated as I raised the Big Bertha over my shoulder.

  I knew what it would sound like, and I felt the power the fancy club would transfer directly into the side of his head.

  And it wasn’t enough to do it.

  In some way, he was still like me.

  And in some way, he and those like him, through no fault of their own, had killed everyone I’d ever loved.

  I thought about Alex.

  That was enough to do it.

  Except the Big Bertha wasn’t up to it.

  It shattered, breaking into fiberglass shards as it dislocated the dead-thing’s jaw crookedly to one side.

  He reached necrotic arms out for me as I stumbled backward from the impact.

  I truly hadn’t expected that.

  I thought I’d be dealing with the effects of what I had done to the corpse. Dealing with the anger and guilt and yes, even shame, as I considered the now permanently dead thing lying at my feet.

  But it was not lying dead at my feet.

  Instead, it lunged forward, snarling through its broken jaw while milky eyes rolled upward in their sockets.

  I ran.

  I could hear it galloping after me saying, “Go to your left, go to your left.”

  I stumbled, feeling the energy drain from my legs all at once.

  I heard a single gunshot as I weaved to my left, running back onto the sidewalk, tripping and then slamming into a morning-shadowed wall that still held the cold of night as my hands pushed off it. I could hear my ragged breathing against the face of the wall in the moment I connected with it.

  “Stop! I got ‘em.”

  When I turned, the cowboy from yesterday was dismounting his horse with his rifle in hand. He walked forward toward the fallen corpse of the black man. He stood over the body for a moment. Then he walked, business-like, back to the horse and dropped his rifle into a holster hanging from the side of the saddle. He returned with a small hatchet and bent down over the corpse.

  I watched in horror as he pulled a neckerchief up around his nose and mouth.

  “Close your mouth and eyes and don’t breathe for a second.”

  But I didn’t close my eyes.

  He swung the hatchet down on its neck, severing the head.

  The spray, there was little, went off to one side.

  “They don’t have too much left in ‘em now. Not if they’ve been this way for a while. But it pays to be safe,” said the cowboy.

  He went back to his horse and retrieved a large pair of pliers and a canvas sack. He gripped the head with the pliers and deposited it into the sack.

  “Come help me burn the body, then we’ll have breakfast in a park up the way. Name’s Chris. Yours?”

  He didn’t need my help as I watched him burn the headless corpse.

  I’m writing this now, sitting at a picnic table in a city park.

  Chris is making our breakfast, coffee and oatmeal over a barbecue pit. The horse is grazing in the dead grass.

  November 27th

  We are somewhere east of the 405 freeway.

  We crossed over the 710 freeway on a small bridge. Below the bridge, a sea of cars trailed off in both directions, residents of a never-ending traffic jam. We are heading into northern Long Beach near the old Boeing factory. Apparently there’s a hanger with some of the infected still trapped inside.

  That’s what Chris does. He’s a bounty hunter for the Directorate. He collects infected heads for fifty CalDollars a pop.

  According to Chris, as related at the picnic table in the city park yesterday over oatmeal and pretty good black coffee, most of Southern California’s urban sprawl has been declared safe. That is, clear of the infected. I guess the big battle at City Center the kid on the steps told me about, was the culmination of a plan to draw all of them into one kill zone, and that went a long way toward solving everybody’s walking corpse problem. Kind of like the Holland Tunnel. All that remains now are infected that didn’t take the bait either because they can’t, i.e. they’re stuck in a warehouse, or because they simply didn’t bite the “follow the leader” plan that lead to the burn piles and mass graves at City Center. Now the corpses that remain are more just a nuisance to salvagers once the area has been Reconstructed.

  Some nuisance.

  Bounty hunters, in with the local government, contract to go out and clean up the infected, bringing back their heads as proof. The government does this so groups of salvagers don’t go out, get bit, and turn into a typhoon of infected. It also explains why areas are off limits until they’ve been deemed safe and then undergone the process of Reconstruction, which I’m not sure I wholly understand yet.

  “That’s fifty CalDollars per head. You already got twenty-five from the gentleman in the sack. You want to make a few dollars more?” asked Chris.

  We sat eating steaming oatmeal in the morning sunlight. The picnic table beneath our hands was carved on every available surface with gang affiliations, pledges of love, and other unreadable words.

  “Course I’ll pay you once we reach the Huntington Beach Outpost. But between here and there, I’ve got to check this hanger they say has a few of ‘em still hanging around inside. I guess someone locked ‘em up in it and they can’t get out. If you help me, you’ll have some money when we reach Huntington Beach.”

  I thought about my shattered Big Bertha and wondered how much help I’d actually be.

  “I was just a stockbroker.”

  He took a sip from his coffee and seemed to consider the sky.

  “I’m an actor,” he replied. “I mean, I was an actor before everything went haywire. But I wasn’t always an actor. I have a degree in engineering. I used to work on robots out at JPL.”

  The sun grew warm as we sat there. I felt tired, but in another way, alive, almost electric.

  “I always wanted to be an actor,” Chris continued. “One day I decided I’d lived enough of other people’s dreams, and I might try something else for a space. So, I decided I’d try acting.”

  “You look like a cowboy,” I said.

  �
�I love horses. If that makes me a cowboy, then I guess I am one. I’ve played a lot of them in Japanese beer commercials and a few of the new westerns.”

  When it was time to leave, we walked, him leading the horse, casting a wary eye into the side streets we passed, me trailing alongside, listening for something I now knew to listen for. That sandy shuffle-scrape they make. When Chris talked, which was seldom, it was to let me know what he was doing or what we needed to consider as we crossed the quiet remains of Compton.

  “Watch the windows for movement. They could still be in there.”

  And...

  “The street up ahead is wide. If we see one there, might be more nearby. They’ll all come out at once, so be ready to move.”

  And...

  “When all this started, I saddled Chief and we just rode up into the San Gabriels. Spent three weeks up there, pretty much alone, though not always.”

  And...

  “Chief’s an old movie horse I got for cheap. He’s good, little mean sometimes. He’ll bite ya, so watch out.”

  And...

  “One day it’s gonna rain again and wash all this away.”

  When we crossed over the 710, we entered newer neighborhoods, long stretches of tract housing not so economically blighted before everything happened. The damage here almost seemed worse though. The smell of past fires came long before we entered vast swathes of burned-out buildings. Whole streets had caught fire. Even light posts had burned. In the ruins of a strip mall, near the hollow shell of a supermarket, we found a fluttering yellow marker. We walked Chief across the melted asphalt and onto the burnt sidewalk. Next to the fluttering yellow tape, a piece of cardboard was duct-taped to a heat-twisted metal beam.

  SURVIVORS HERE

  BIGSAV SUPERSTORE

  RADIO CONTACT ON OCT 3RD. 26 MEN, 15 WOMEN. UNKNOWN CHILDREN.