by Jeff Carlson
“Where… ?” someone said.
They came from every walk of life. One man wore rough jeans and a work shirt—maybe a landscaper. Another wore gym clothes. The other two wore business shirts and slacks, no jackets. Emily and another woman fit the same white-collar description.
They were hiding from a second plane crash. As the wind opened a pocket in the haze, Emily saw a huge tailfin jutting through the demolished ruins of several buildings down the street, fires licking at the debris.
How many planes had been above LAX and Burbank when the sky lit up? Dozens? More?
What if they’d all gone down?
“Let me go!” one of the women screamed, reacting even more strongly than Emily. This woman’s blouse was open, the shoulder yanked off. Was that why she panicked?
The woman fought out of the group as two men pulled back, bewildered and chagrined. Emily believed they had good intentions.
“We’ve got to get off the street!” Emily yelled.
“My family—” a man said as the other woman shouted, “Josh! Josh!” She ran into the sea of cars, recognizing someone. The man also sprinted away and Emily was left with three survivors.
Some aspects of the street looked completely normal—the Taco Bell beside an auto shop, a UPS store, more office buildings—but the fires and the standstill traffic had turned the city into another world. The screaming was the worst. The human sounds of despair rose and fell but never ended.
There was another body sprawled in the street. The man wasn’t visibly hurt. He wasn’t bloody or burned, but he lay with his arm hooked beneath him in an unnatural position, and his eyes looked like empty white glass.
Something was killing people besides car crashes and fires.
My head, Emily thought. What if some of them were hemorrhaging or experiencing fatal seizures?
She wasn’t going to wait to find out. “I work down the street!” she yelled. “It’s a new building. Earthquake proof. I can get us inside.”
“Where are we?” the landscaper asked.
“The corner of West 6th and Valencia. I work here.”
They responded to her certainty. “Show us,” a businessmen said.
Laura’s house was only a few miles past DNAllied, but it might as well have been a hundred. Emily couldn’t imagine wading through forty blocks of smoke and cars, and Laura’s house was a two-story ranch home made of wood. It wasn’t anyplace to take shelter.
“This way,” Emily said.
Two of the survivors went with her, not the third. Emily looked back.
“This way!” she shouted.
A pistol shot cracked somewhere in the smoke. Then the buildings echoed with the chatter of an automatic weapon.
“Oh shit!” The landscaper fled into vehicles, leaving Emily and the businessman.
Three young black men burst from the haze. They wore red bandannas on their arms or foreheads. Gangbangers. One of them swung a boxy little gun. Another carried a revolver.
Emily had no time to hide. Two of the gangbangers ran past, but the one who’d zigzagged closest to her slowed down and lingered, grinning even as his friends yelled at him. “Forget it, Trey!”
He was in his twenties. He had great teeth, straight and bright. Striding toward her, he said, “Hey there, swee—”
Emily rammed her bare foot into his groin and dropped him. Karate lessons. As he slumped to his knees, fighting to stay up, Emily wrapped her small hands into a single fist and threw her weight into his jaw, snapping it. She felt his bones crack as pain lanced through her forearm.
He let go of his revolver. He flopped down as the weapon clattered on the asphalt. Emily hesitated, eyeing it, but she’d have to get too close to grab it.
He pushed himself up, groaning through a bloody drool of spit.
Emily turned and ran.
She was alone.
In the smoke, Emily passed two cops warily chasing the gangbangers. One policeman had his arm in a combat sling.
Why were they fighting? There was nothing to loot from the business district except computers and a little money. The young men hadn’t carried anything except their weapons. Emily supposed they’d been driving through, then left their car with their guns and ran into the policemen.
Should I go with the cops? she thought. She’d taken first aid classes at Chase’s insistence, but the cops probably had better training. And she was afraid.
At the intersection of West 6th and Union Drive, she turned north. DNAllied was set back from the street by twenty feet of grass, and, in front, by its fenced parking lot. Emily had once described the architecture to a friend as post-post-post-postmodern. It didn’t fit with the four-story office buildings on either side. It wouldn’t fit anywhere. Faced with concrete ribs and black glass, DNAllied was a single-story structure arranged like a hexagon around a central courtyard.
Emily hurried to a side door and saw people inside the tinted glass. She wasn’t sure who. Then she reached the door. It was locked. She didn’t have her pass card. Her purse must have been in her car, so she punched her code into the electronic lock instead. It didn’t work. She pounded on the glass.
The noise drew attention from inside, where her boss, Ray, was shouting at two men. They turned and walked to the door.
All three of them were wearing shoes.
Are they arguing about whether or not to help me? Emily thought as Ray grabbed one man’s arm. The guy shrugged him off. Emily recognized him as Dale Upton from IT, someone she knew and liked, but Dale wasn’t fighting with Ray about who to let in. Ray was trying to stop him from leaving.
Dale opened the door and ran out, barely glancing at Emily.
“Wait!” she yelled, but she couldn’t bring herself to go after him. She pushed inside as Dale’s friend ran, too.
Had the building protected them? The structure was made of concrete and its windows were energy-efficient, double-pane, UV-proof glass. With the lights out, even this entry hall was gloomy despite the beige tile floor.
Ray pulled the door shut behind her and locked it. “Was there a bomb?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Emily said, her voice accelerating. “It happened at least twice and there were planes falling down and the sky—The sky is red—”
They hugged each other, the middle-aged man and the young woman who’d never been anything more to each other than coworkers. Worse, they’d been adversaries, but now Emily was glad for Ray’s girth. He was solid and reassuring. She breathed in his deodorant with her cheek pressed against his chest.
Outside, someone thudded into a car with a hollow bang. Emily and Ray jumped.
It was happening again. Emily could see at least twenty people in the street, maybe thirty as the smoke shifted. All of them staggered drunkenly. No matter whether they’d been running or limping or carrying an injured friend, everyone seemed like they’d been hammered by an invisible force.
It only lasted a second. Then the people outside changed again. They looked up, regaining their equilibrium, beginning to move once more, but now there was a distinct change in their actions.
“Look,” Emily said. “Ray? Look.”
“I—I don’t…” he stammered.
Her skin crawled with revulsion and stress. “Move away from the window,” she said, leading him back a few steps. Every muscle in her body had tightened, ready to run, and yet she felt hypnotized by the street outside. Unable to look away, Emily and Ray bumped against a potted plant and stopped, clutching each other. Fortunately, they were concealed by the dark glass.
The people outside lacked focus. Before, everyone had moved with urgency. Now Emily was reminded of a school of fish or the agitated birds she’d seen. Walking slowly at first, then gathering momentum, the people outside banded together into knots of four or five, gazing inward at each other. They seemed more interested in following each other than in looking around.
Some of them dropped the objects they were holding—a briefcase, a jacket, a fabric
med kit from a car.
They congregated in groups strictly divided along racial lines, whites with whites, Hispanics with Hispanics, a black woman alone. There was no mixing. Everyone was shoeless, but that didn’t appear to be a common denominator. They discriminated against each other by the tones of each other’s skin, the most basic visual cue available.
I was one of them, Emily realized. Her group had done the same. All of those people had been white, although she hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.
Now she felt like she didn’t even know herself, and she might have screamed except for the memory of the woman who’d panicked. Where was that woman now? Outside? Somehow the realization helped Emily control herself.
“I need to find my sister,” she said, her thoughts bubbling with horror for Laura and P.J. and Chase and their friends and parents and—
“Stay inside,” Ray said. “Emily. Listen to me. We need to stay inside.”
“We can’t just stand here. Did you try the phone?” She separated herself from Ray and stepped deeper into the building.
Shadows filled every corner. Several computers were on, fed by batteries. The silent gleam of their monitors added to the surreal, lonely feeling that these offices were a place she’d never been before. Over and over, the computers’ emergency systems went beep beep beep from every side.
Her skin prickled with grime, and her bangs were loose, the blond strands dark with soot. The heat had left her thirsty. Her arm ached from hitting the gangbanger. Bruises throbbed in her shins and knees. But the physical pain was good. It felt better than her yammering fear.
The phones were out.
So was the Internet.
Ray’s cell phone got nothing.
Emily found a battery-powered desk radio, but it squealed with static.
“Maybe, um, maybe we can…” Ray said.
Emily lowered the radio’s volume, then left it dialed to the local news station. Would they hear something soon? Anything?
A windstorm rumbled through the street, blowing the haze away in curtains. The wind peppered the glass with grit and trash. A fist-sized object smacked one window and disappeared again. Krakrak! The noise was like something outside trying to get in. Every muscle in her body was clenched in terror.
Then the wind stopped. Rain splattered down.
Just as quickly, the rain quit and a thick fog blew in. It swirled and moaned against the building, speckling the glass with moisture.
Ocean fog in June? Emily wondered.
Another flock of birds darted past. Two or three hit the glass and fell dead as the rest swished and spun and were gone.
Despite the overcast, despite DNAllied’s insulated glass, the air grew warmer. Emily raked her fingers through her filthy hair and damp scalp. How much hotter must it be outside? Ray’s pink face was dotted with sweat.
“The break room,” she said. “It has a TV. We—”
Four ghosts appeared in the fog.
“Oh God.” Emily ducked behind a desk, waving frantically at Ray. Had the people outside seen them? Her eyes felt as wide as lightbulbs as she peeked around a filing cabinet, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking. What if they’d walked right up to the glass?
The foursome moved abnormally as they went by, taking short, erratic steps more like animals than human beings. Then they were gone.
Emily stood up, wondering how long she and Ray could stay inside by themselves.
In the break room, the TV screen was broadcasting snow. She left it on as they examined the cupboards and the refrigerator for food. Chips. A banana. Two take-out boxes of Italian. The vending machines were loaded with snack bags and Pepsi, but the machines were dead without electricity.
Emily went to the sink and lifted the faucet handle. The water was running. Emily drank until she was nauseous and gestured for Ray to drink, too. “We should fill everything we can find,” she said.
He nodded, but he made no effort to locate a janitor’s bucket or other containers.
She topped off every cup she found in the cupboards, small or big, dirty or clean. Then she pulled the stopper and filled the sink, too.
What if the fires spread?
The rain and the fog could have extinguished the littlest fires started by stovetops or car crashes. The wind would drive the largest burns inland to the east—and so much of the city was concrete and steel. They might be okay.
Emily sat beside Ray and monitored the radio as it squawked and hissed. They couldn’t see the street from the break room, which was a relief at first. It also made her nervous.
What else can we do?
“It’s something in the sky,” she said. “Ray? If it was a biological agent, I’d be infected. It got me while I was outside. Then I would have communicated it to you.”
“Not necessarily,” he said.
“What if we wave and yell at those people? What if they come inside and they’re okay, too?”
“You don’t know what they’ll do.”
“I wasn’t dangerous. You saw them. They’re slow. Confused. I think it’s affecting their ability to think.”
Ray shook his head.
“The building protects us,” she said. “There must be other survivors who are okay, people in other buildings or parking garages. We need to find them.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
She wasn’t going to let him stop her. “It’s something in the sky like from a nuclear bomb! You’ve seen those movies, right? Except the effect is still going on. Cars won’t start. There’s no power.”
“Bombs don’t work like that.”
“It started this morning,” she said. “My laptop was scrambled. Then the lights started flickering. The news said there were sunspots. Maybe we can shield ourselves! We need metal. We could make helmets.” Emily got up and paced away from the table, but stopped to protect her toes. At the very least, she needed to look for Band-Aids and a pair of shoes.
“We should wait,” Ray said.
I can’t, Emily thought. My family’s out there. But she could see in his demeanor that he would resist if she tried to make him go outside. He was too cautious, too good at managing risk. It was how Ray dealt with everything. Maybe she could change his mind if she found something that worked.
“I’m going to look around,” she said.
Walking through the building alone, her pulse felt too loud in her neck, as if her heart were in the wrong place. She took one step and then another, touching the skin beneath the collar of her blouse.
You can do this, she coached herself. You can.
She reached the front entrance and looked out. There was a shoulder bag lying on the steps by the door. Emily thought she recognized it. She leaned forward to see if—
Her vision filled with white pinpoints.
She threw herself backward, cracking her elbow on the tile floor as she scrabbled away.
In the hall, she stopped, grateful for her sanity. She clung to the floor and sobbed. Maybe she should have known better. The lobby was faced entirely with clear glass, not tinted, and the roof lifted to form an arch above the door. The effect was penetrating that wall. If she’d needed more proof, her brush with the outside was enough. Something in the air or the sky was affecting people’s brains.
Emily stood up, wiping her cheeks. She entered another stretch of cubicles and looked at the desktop computers. If she ripped the plastic off one of the towers, she thought she could bend the steel manifold inside to form some kind of headgear. Or she could use the metal shelves in the supply room. But how would she cut them?
By habit, she’d walked toward her own office in the southwest part of the building. Along the same wing were more offices with windows to the outside—double-pane windows protected by the ribbed overhang of the roof.
Emily treaded carefully to the last door.
DNAllied was situated partway up a long, mild slope in the terrain. The last office looked out across several blocks of L.A. and West Hollywood.
Her gaze was drawn to a small group about two blocks away—a group of four people walking with direction and purpose. Their postures were different than the light-footed gaits of everyone else. So was the way they’d formed together like a battle line of soldiers. But they weren’t in uniform. They seemed like another random collection of people, one man in a sports coat, another in a purple-and-yellow Lakers jersey.
They wore shoes.
They were multi-racial—three white, one black—the only mixed group she’d seen, although they were exclusively male.
“Ray!” she shouted. “Ray!”
A fifth man emerged from the standstill traffic and approached them. He was also white. He held a split chunk of wood like a club. Emily thought one of the four called to the fifth man. This person was smaller than the rest, a boy. His head undulated on his neck as he conveyed his message.
The fifth man mimicked the boy’s peculiar head movement as he joined them, perhaps hooting one word.
Emily was struck again by the normality of so much of what she saw—the elevated, colorful signs of a Shell station and a Circle K, a restaurant, an apartment complex—but the glass face of another building had been punched in by a delivery truck, and the other survivors on the street shrank from the organized group.
Everyone moved in that flighty way except these five men, which emphasized the willful, almost predatory manner in which they carried themselves.
Behind her glass, Emily raised one hand reluctantly, caught between hope and dread. Why aren’t they affected, too? she wondered. What’s different?
“Ray!” she hollered. “Ray, my God! Come here! Ray!”
Why didn’t he answer? She almost left the window to check on him. Then with a decisive movement, she banged on the glass. But the men outside were down the block. They couldn’t hear.
Emily turned and rummaged through the two desks in the office, looking for a flashlight. She realized she should check the emergency supplies. They performed earthquake drills twice a year. Emily sprinted down the hall, skipping awkwardly to save her toes. She opened a supply closet and rifled through the printer paper and ink cartridges for an orange duffel bag. Then she ran back to the window with a fat halogen light.
