The End of the World as We Knew It

by Nick Cole

  So...

  The morning mist and overcast was nice, and my fears from inside the Stockade had vanished. It felt good to be alone again in the thick silence of the drizzle and general isolation. To be moving again at a good pace, and on my own. Maybe headed toward Alex.

  I turned left down a street that ran south and listened as the rain pattered quietly against the wet, empty street. Eventually its tempo picked up, and I waited in a darkened auto parts store where the windows had been smashed. I smelled a dead body, and as I looked through the aisles, I came upon a large lug wrench lying in a pool of dried blood. The back of the store was even darker and smelled of new tires and must.

  I picked up the lug wrench.

  I left, happy to be back out in the rain again.

  Ahead, the road dipped into a ravine lined with towering eucalyptus trees. Their wet bark revealed beautiful whorls and stripes. The smell of the leaves was exotic and familiar all at once.

  Later, at an intersection labeled Bristol and Adams, I saw the remains of two twisted cars scattered in pieces across the intersection. The bloated and swollen corpse of the driver lay pinned behind the wheel of a smashed Ferrari. The other vehicle, an SUV, high end, lay on its side. I covered my face with my arm and approached the Ferrari. The driver’s face was ripped to pieces. What little remained of the top of his skull was like the caldera of a volcano. In his hand lay a pistol. I looked around and saw empty brass shell casings on the street and in the wreckage.

  They had come for him. After the wreck. Pinned and still alive. He was driving fast to get somewhere quickly on that day everything went wrong for the world. Home maybe? Away, most likely. And then the accident. And then they’d come for him after the jarring crash, which had sent both vehicles spinning off in opposite, unplanned directions. As the sound of crunching metal and breaking plastic fades, as the chalk from the airbags blossoms in a dusty “smaff” across that last hot day of August three months ago, as the car alarms and horns begin their endless cries for rescue, the dead come. They come out of the gas station and the furniture store and the yogurt shop and the Chinese restaurant and the sports bar.

  They come and Ferrari Man fires at them, even though his legs are crushed. He’s not getting out of here alive and he knows it. He fires until there is just one bullet left.

  And then he fires again.

  I thought about taking the gun. I’d need to clean it. I’m sure there wasn’t any ammo left, otherwise... the guy would have kept shooting.

  I walked to the overturned black SUV. There was a pinned corpse stuck halfway under the vehicle.

  Someone didn’t have a gun to fight the dead off.

  There’s no head.

  Someone else has already claimed their fifty CalDollars.

  I wondered how long the SUV driver had lain there, perpetually tormented, unendingly pinned.

  I checked my map. Down the street, I could see the small freeway that passed by the airport and led right down into Newport Beach.

  I went back to the crumpled Ferrari and took the gun. It was the kind that didn’t have a cylinder where the bullets waited. It didn’t have a hammer either. It was matte black.

  Walking away from the wreck, I wondered how long they would lay there. In the rain. In the spring to come. In the summer that followed. Someday, someone would come and sweep up the wreck down to the broken glass, and no one would know what had happened there on that long-lost day when everything went so wrong.

  And was there someone waiting for each of those intersected lives? Waiting in a refugee camp, or behind stockade walls, or buried in the red dirt underneath City Center?

  Waiting to be found whether probably dead or almost impossibly alive.

  They would never know what had happened at the intersection.

  I walked faster as I walked away from that place.

  The sky began to clear into blue patches, as white clouds moved briskly in the autumn breeze.

  I climbed the freeway off-ramp and found a wide, clean, spacious curving road that wound its way up onto the coast.

  I could see the small range of hills off to the south that Chris had shown me on the map.

  I could live in those green hills on rainy days like today.

  I thought about steak.

  Another mile along the highway, and I saw large white tents set up across the road. The road descended into a large cut in the earth and the tents, several of them, lay flapping in the grass of a wide median.

  I saw the bodies when I got close. They rested inside black plastic body bags in stacks five high. The road was littered with the remains of burnt out flares.

  I pulled back the flap on the largest tent. Inside, I found what was to be expected. Dull metal tables and trays. IV stands. Bodies not in bags.

  I closed the flap and circled around the shuddering tents that stuttered and snapped in the afternoon breeze. White clouds raced inland, filled with the smell of the ocean. The patches of blue sky above seemed clean, and the antithesis of the body bags and what must be in them.

  I followed the highway beyond the tents and soon came to the off-ramp that would lead me to Jamboree Boulevard and then to the hotel. I checked the map. I estimated another two miles. I drank some of the bottled water I’d taken from the Stockade and adjusted my ruck sack. I wanted to be somewhere before nightfall. Before it rained again. The hotel seemed like it might be the place.

  That is, as I’m writing this, if the hotel I’m looking at, the one with the sign reading The Pacific, looked anything like a hotel anymore.

  I’m writing this from the campfire at the Reconstruction basecamp. It’s just past dusk. Out to sea, it is still daylight in a milky, almost forlorn way. The wind is racing in off the coast. A cold front is moving in from Alaska. Cold wind and rain are ahead for the next few days.

  The “hotel” looms above us. It’s a blackened spire with chunks of concrete torn out of every available space of wall. Almost like polka-dots. The entire place looks like a warzone, more than anyplace I’ve ever seen, even New York. It looks like artillery hit this place. It looks like every machinegun in the world was fired at random in every direction. There is not one place where there is not churned, bullet-ridden earth, pockmarked walls, sprays of concrete, shattered glass, chunks of broken rocks, and half-demolished buildings. Not one place. And there are bodies. Lots of bodies.

  A sea of bodies.

  When I entered the mall complex earlier, I could see the crews placing yellow markers near the bodies. There are tents at the base camp.

  The workers stopped as I approached.

  I met Karen. She is a short, stocky, red-haired woman.

  She’s the leader of the Reconstruction Team.

  She listened to my story.

  She said they would try to help me find Alex if they could.

  I tried not to look at all the bodies in the parking lot between the mall and the hotel.

  November 31st

  December 1st

  I never thought about the fact that there aren’t 31 days in November. I know you just looked at your cell phone or the calendar, or whatever there is left to remind us of the numbering of our days. Now, I am forced to write my own dates, like some savage. Just kidding. It occurs to me that my dates might be all wrong. I know there’s an October 31st. But is there a September 31st?

  Karen, the crew leader for the Reconstruction team, won’t let me enter the hotel.

  She’s probably right. In the light of day, the hotel looks like a block of Swiss cheese. It looks like something you would see in TIME. Something out of a battlefield reporter’s notebook. There are corpses everywhere. You can’t tell whether they were infected or not. Every one of them has been out here for over three months.

  Three months as of yesterday.

  The talk, my Reconstruction buddy Ramos tells me, is that this is where the outbreak inside the U.S. initially went down.

  If that’s the case, then what are my chances of finding Alex? Could she have sur
vived ground zero?

  Is she the Lady?

  Staring at all these dead bodies reminds me that a living Alex is almost too much to hope for.

  I’m getting my hopes down.

  Up would be good right about now.

  I’m convinced they’re going to find her out in that body-swollen parking lot between the mall and the hotel.

  But when I think about that possibility, might that not be better than some of the other outcomes I’ve witnessed?

  Ragged and mangled, chasing a train through a dirty and tangled forest.

  Swinging from a light post, the plaything of Low Men.

  Alone and crawling across a child’s playground in the middle of the night.

  We go out in pairs, Ramos and me, all the others like us. We find the marker we’ve been assigned to. We lay the body out. I do the writing. I enter the data on the form, writing on a clipboard. Ramos tells me what to write.

  Position of Body?

  “Supine. Means on her stomach, man,” he says in his vato-homeboy Mexican accent.

  Obvious wounds?

  “Soccer ball-sized wound to the stomach, oh, and a bullet wound to the head, man.”

  Obvious signs of infection?

  “Umm, hard to tell, man. No wait, she’s got black crud under her fingernails.”

  So what do I write?

  “Write that, Homes! Black crud under fingernails.”

  Okay. Personal effects?

  “She’s got a bracelet. Let’s see, and a ring. Earrings too.”

  Identification?

  “Nothing in her pockets. You rarely find anything on the women. Cause they usually had like purses. It’s a sure sign they’re infected if they don’t have a purse on ‘em, Homes.”

  Then we bag her.

  We have gloves and face masks. But you can feel everything through the thin medical gloves. And the mask doesn’t block out the smell.

  She was once a living, breathing girl, I think, as we place her in the bag.

  We carry her back and check her in. She’s un-bagged, photographed, re-bagged, and then we stack her with the rest of... the dead, that are waiting to be burned in an open pit currently being dug in a vacant lot down by the coast road.

  We get another marker number and we go find...

  Unknown Female.

  David Chang.

  Unknown Female.

  Unknown Female.

  Unknown Male.

  Tom Watson.

  And ...

  At the end of the day, I asked Karen how long it might be until I can get into the hotel and look for Alex, or find clues that lead to where she might have gone.

  Karen said she was making a priority out of my request, and as soon as the structure engineer cleared the Reconstruction crews to enter the lobby, they would try to get the hotel computer up and running.

  She asked that I be patient.

  It’s night now. Ramos and I share a tent with another team. There are showers set up and a field kitchen. I didn’t think I’d be hungry this evening, but I was. We had spaghetti and garlic bread. Still no fresh produce.

  I am dying for a salad.

  December 2nd

  Kevin White.

  Unknown Male.

  Unknown Male.

  Unknown Female.

  Unknown Male.

  Unknown Female.

  Ramon Gutierrez.

  We had showers. We had mystery meat cheeseburgers and fries. We also got two beers each.

  December 3rd

  After working all day, the rain came up off the sea and battered the Reconstruction site. We’ve almost cleared the entire parking lot. Tomorrow we’ll be moving into the mall.

  When I got back to base camp, Karen walked me over to the hotel. It must have been really nice, once. Giant palm-filled urns, teak furniture, open and airy on sunny, Southern California days. Now it was dark. Fallen leaves had been swept in from the outside by the wind and the rain. The once luxurious lobby furniture was torn to pieces.

  “Be careful,” Karen said as we stepped over gritty, shattered glass. “There are splinters everywhere.”

  We went behind the front desk. A dim blue light came from a working computer. I looked at the screen briefly, hoping it would be Alex’s check-in info.

  “We’re trying to get the server to reboot, but the partition is corrupted. It’s gonna take time,” explained Karen. “We’re hoping we can get into the backup and find a guest list. Maybe. Ronny thinks it’ll be up around midnight. That’s the best I can do for you, Jason. I’m sorry it’s not more.”

  I stared at the slowly advancing bar on the screen.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled to her, watching that bar as though the answer to the meaning of life lay at its completion. “I’ll wait. If that’s okay?”

  She said it was.

  Eventually, Ronny appeared. He’d been down in the room where the hotel kept the server. We sat and had some warm sodas from the hotel bar. We each had one and talked about computers. Or rather, I listened about computers.

  Karen brought us two trays of ChiliMac and we ate. They talked Reconstruction business. The business of putting it all back together again. It seemed overwhelming by the amount of paperwork they were discussing. I didn’t need to ask what the point of it all was. Of Reconstruction. I was the point. As much as was possible, they were to answer one question. Could they find out “who” was “where” on the day everything changed? And more importantly, what had happened to that “who”? It would be recorded on a sheet of paper by people like Ramos and me. It would go into a database. Eventually people would be able to type in the name of the “who” they’d lost. The “who” they’d been searching for.

  And maybe, someone who had not been found, would be.

  Finally.

  Then the searcher might know, and if not, there was the massive photographic database to search. But that seemed impossible.

  At fifteen to one in the morning, Ronny cracked the partition and we got the master guest list. Alex came up as soon as we typed in her name.

  Room 709.

  Karen looked at me. The look said, “I don’t believe it. I didn’t actually believe you, until now.”

  And then there was a look that said something like, “Why you? Why do you get to know?”

  But maybe she was just worried I’d want to do exactly what I wanted to do at that moment.

  “Uh-Uh, Jason. No. The engineer has to clear each floor before we can go up. This building is hanging by a thin thread. Give us some time, Jason. Can you do that?” her voice came from far away. “Can you give us time?”

  I looked at her and did not see her.

  “I’ll put you and Ramos on the building crew if you promise you’ll wait. Promise me you won’t crack room 709 unless I’m there. Promise me, Jason.”

  I promised.

  December 4th

  Building Crew all day.

  We spent the day clearing the lobby. There were bodies hidden in the strangest places. Under tables. Behind the once opulent bar. In the pantry. One crew found a “mover” locked in a meat locker. It was frozen, but still there, if you know what I mean. I think it had been a cook.

  We had ChiliMac again.

  December 5th

  We did the first five floors today. We found one body. It was an easy day. It felt warm outside, and most of the day we just stood around in the stairwell, waiting to be cleared to work on the next floor. Most of the rooms are still in pristine condition, as if they’d been ready for check-in when it all went down. Then there is the shattered glass and large-caliber bullet holes in the pristine bedspreads and along painted and decorated walls.

  Ramos told me his story today.

  So, maybe in California, things are different. I guess people are more open here. They don’t seem to mind sharing how the world ended for them.

  He was in a prison he simply called “Tehachapi” when it all went sideways. The prison was relatively safe. They offered parole to everyone who wa
s willing to help the Army down in Los Angeles. Ramos took the offer. There weren’t too many other takers. Most of the prisoners knew what was going on outside and felt safer behind the walls and the razor wire.

  Anyway, the bus they were being transported down to Los Angeles in stopped for gas at a place called Lancaster out in the high desert. The guard and the driver got off and were met by a dark Mercedes. Each received a briefcase from some La Familia-types and disappeared. Then some homeboys came onto the bus and said they were releasing everyone. They were just after one specific guy who’d volunteered along with the rest back in Tehachapi. They took him off first while Ramos and the others watched through the dirty, shuttered window slats of the prison bus. They shot the guy in the parking lot. After that, they released the rest and drove off. Ramos said at that point everyone just scattered. He and two others formed up, all of them close to a real parole, and decided to continue on as planned and join the Army.

  They made it as far as the San Fernando Valley when one of them got bit. They took him into a pharmacy just as things were really deteriorating. The owner of the pharmacy locked the doors and made everyone stay inside. Except the guy who got bit. For the next three weeks they lived inside the pharmacy. One day this girl, Yessina, opened a side door on her guard shift and snuck out to find her family. She didn’t lock the door, and an hour later, three Infected had wandered in and gotten to a couple of the people. Yessina returned crying about what she’d seen at her family’s house. She said the streets were mostly quiet.

  Now they had a couple of sick people who were getting sicker by the minute, and Yessina had an injury to her arm that looked suspiciously like a bite. She said she’d gotten hurt jumping over the back fence of her family’s house.

  The manager kicked all of them out including Yessina.

  A week later, the infected were hammering at every entrance to the pharmacy, which had steel roll-down doors. Ramos got onto the roof and could see the infected everywhere. They were swarming toward the pharmacy. It was evident that the sheer weight of them would soon crumple the thin, roll-down doors inward. Seams were already starting to appear in the sheet metal.