He had to leave tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MASON rolled onto his side and winced at the stabbing ache in his back. He forced an eyelid open and saw dim light slipping in around the edges of the heavy curtain covering the bedroom window. Beth was already up. He didn’t have to look over to verify her absence. If she was still in bed, her warm body would be glued to his backside. He cracked open the other eye and stared at the ceiling. He’d had better mornings. His body complained from a hundred places at once. He pinched his eyes shut and rubbed life into the puffy lids. How long had he been asleep?
Not long enough.
He glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table. It hadn’t had power in days but the habit of checking it yet remained. He checked his watch.
Half past six in the morning.
He pivoted around and dropped his feet to the floor. Feeling more like rising from the dead than getting out of bed, Mason levered himself up to a standing position.
Clyde broke into a hacking, coughing fit from somewhere in the house. The little Bili chimp sounded almost human. Beth was supposed to have slept last night while Mason took the first, and longest, watch but she was awake fussing over Clyde every time he came in and checked.
Mason slowly rotated each arm, feeling out the various aches to see if any required immediate attention. He did the same with his legs and torso. There was plenty of hurt, but nothing torn or broken.
The faint smell of roasted coffee tickled his nose. His body demanded he either fall back into bed and pass out or go investigate the scent. He lumbered into the kitchen and found Beth seated at the breakfast table holding Clyde in her arms. The cute, little ball of black fur snuggled deeper into her arms. He glanced over at Mason with large, brown eyes, and then broke into a silly, toothless grin.
“He likes you,” Beth said.
Clyde reached out with tiny, slender fingers and then drew back quickly as another coughing spell hit him.
Beth turned to Mason with a worried look on her face. “Coffee should still be hot.”
A camp stove hooked up to a five gallon propane tank was one of their emergency cooking methods. The other was the solar oven but it didn’t work until the sun climbed high into the sky.
It was an old survival maxim. Two was one and one was none. And the important part of that credo was that the two duplicated capability, not SKU codes, meaning they had two different methods to achieve the same result.
He poured himself a steaming cup and took a slow, deep breath. The aroma alone reminded him the world wasn’t a complete disaster. He took a sip and liquid heat poured into his belly. Yes, maybe today wouldn’t be such a terrible day after all. “Did you sleep?”
Beth twisted her mouth up. “Not really.”
“How’s the little guy?”
“Worse.” Her bottom lip trembled and she turned back to her week-old patient. She was a fierce mama bear. And, being the Chief Veterinarian at the LA Zoo, she was that way with every animal in her care. Mason wondered at the seemingly endless wellspring of love in her heart. She always had more to give. More care. More compassion. More space to love.
He wasn’t the typical fifties father—the type that bottled up his feelings and then keeled over a week after a retirement party that earned him a gold-plated Timex. His emotional intelligence was more modern than that. Heck, he’d even read a book on how to raise a happy toddler way back to give him insight for Theresa.
That said, he wasn’t on the same level as his wife.
“Mason, he needs antibiotics. The respiratory infection has progressed. His lungs are bubbling with fluid.”
“We checked three different places and there was next to nothing. Totally cleaned out. Actually, we found something at Fernando’s. Let me get it.”
Mason retrieved the brown prescription bottle from his backpack and read the label. “Sildenafil citrate. That something that might help?”
Beth laughed. It was short and tight, and contained only shadows of the usual mirth. “To help you maintain an erection? Yes. To clear up an acute respiratory infection? No.”
“It’s Viagra?”
Iridia stumbled into the kitchen looking like this might’ve been the earliest she’d ever risen in her entire life. “Viagra? My old boyfriend took stuff to get bigger muscles but it did a number on his Johnson. Total wet noodle. He got on Viagra and whoa! Let me tell you.”
She raised her arm straight into the air. “I’m talking Man of Steel. Hours and hours of pleasure. A real human dildo.”
Beth’s jaw dropped open.
“Good to know,” Mason said. “Thanks for the personal history.”
Iridia looked between him and Beth. She frowned. “Oh no! Are you two having a problem with Little Willy?”
Mason nearly blushed. “His name is not Little Willy.”
“Little Jimmy?”
“He’s not little! Why Little? He’s not little.”
“I saw you naked.”
“What?” Beth said.
“After finding the neighbors.” She trailed off and a distant look crept across her face.
“Oh, right,” Beth said.
“You can’t count that,” Mason said. “That water was freezing cold!”
Iridia seemed to accept the excuse.
Not that it was an excuse. It was a reason. A biologically proven one. Why did he have to explain it?
“So what’s the problem down there?” Iridia asked.
“There’s no problem down there!” Mason replied.
“Oh, why are you taking Viagra then?”
Mason flung the bottle to the kitchen counter like it was a venomous snake. “I’m not taking Viagra. And can we please stop talking—“
“I’m not the one that brought it up,” Iridia said.
Clyde broke into a desperate coughing spell and the topic thankfully died. Beth wiped the snot and saliva dripping from his nose and mouth. She turned back to Mason when the spell subsided. “We have to get antibiotics today. Today.”
“I understand. But how? I don’t think we’re going to find a pharmacy that isn’t cleaned out.”
A muscle in Beth’s jaw rippled. “I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That wasn’t the most reassuring way to pitch an idea. Mason didn’t know whether to stop listening now or wait for her to actually say it and then stop listening.
“What?” he asked.
“The zoo,” Beth replied.
“The Los Angeles Zoo?”
“No, the San Diego Zoo. Of course, the Los Angeles Zoo.”
Iridia poured herself a cup of coffee. “I love the San Diego Zoo. We did a shoot there once. Have you ever had a fourteen foot snake wrapped around your shoulders?”
Mason and Beth ignored her hoping she might take the hint and enjoy her morning joe somewhere else.
She wasn’t good with hints.
“No? Well, it’s scary as shit. My nipples were rock hard the entire time!” She took a sip of coffee and stared off into a past that only she cared anything about.
“Why the zoo?” Mason asked.
Iridia’s brows knotted together in confusion. “Well, where else are you going to find a gigantic snake?”
Mason squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m talking to Beth.”
“My lab,” Beth said. “The medical wing is behind locked metal doors that only a few people have the keys for. And the medicine itself is locked in a security cabinet that only I have the key for. It’s the one place that’s guaranteed to still be stocked.”
From the sound of it, she was probably right. There probably were antibiotics right where she said they’d be.
“Absolutely not,” Mason said.
“Don’t ‘absolutely not’ me,” Beth said.
“It’s too far. Too dangerous. No.”
Beth raised an eyebrow at him. She wasn’t the type that surrendered a position by force. It just made her dig in harder, ev
en if she wouldn’t have otherwise cared. He loved that about her, but it was also exasperating at times.
Mason held up a hand for parley. “Look, think about what you’re saying. Theresa and I went less than two miles last night and ran into serious trouble. You’re talking going all the way over to the east side. That’s twenty miles!”
“Twenty-five miles. I rode it every day, each way.”
“That’s insane.”
Iridia waved her hand in the air as she parted the space between them and headed for the dining room. “Your vibes are killing my morning cup. And it’s bad enough already.” She swept out of the room with vague annoyance, like royalty leaving behind squabbling commoners.
“Listen to me, Mason.” Beth’s tone softened. “I know it’s dangerous. I know. But Clyde is going to die without antibiotics.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I can’t let that happen. I promised Jane I’d protect him. Keep him safe.”
Mason didn’t want him to die either. And he knew how much Jane, Clyde’s mother, had meant to both Beth and Theresa. But knowing that didn’t equate to him agreeing with her ridiculous plan. Before he could reply, she continued.
“And it’s not just about Clyde. It’s about our family too. All of us. Elio will take the last of his round today. That’s it. What happens the next time one of us gets an infected cut or scrape?”
Mason didn’t know how to respond.
“We’ve done our best, but general hygiene is slipping. And that’s saying nothing about the contaminants in the outside world. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, one of us is going to need them too.”
Mason remembered the conditions he’d endured in Fallujah. Where the environment was so filled with poison that every single nick got infected in no time. The only reason any of them didn’t instantly succumb was because they each took a massive daily dose of antibiotics as a matter of course. Even with the chemical assistance, some sores took weeks to heal.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“You can’t go,” she said. “I’m not being a martyr here. You’re beat up. You limped in here this morning.”
“I did?”
“Yes. Your calf is still healing. And after last night, you’ve got new bruises on top of old bruises.”
She wasn’t wrong about that.
“I can still do it,” he said.
“I have no doubt you could, but you already have an urgent job to do.”
He knew what she was going to say before the words came out.
“Like you said, we can’t stay in this house. It’s only a matter of time before looters or whatever attacked you comes after us. Whether it’s next door or somewhere else, we need to make that move today.”
Dammit. She wasn’t wrong about that either.
“I can’t lose you, Beth.”
“You won’t.”
“How can you know that?”
“How did you know that you’d return to me after your deployment?”
The truth was that he didn’t. He assured her, of course, that it was some unwritten guarantee. But he knew better.
“I just knew that I’d do whatever it took to get back home to you and Theresa.”
She nodded.
Mason sat in the chair next to her. “If you’re going to do this, I need to have an open communication channel with you at all times.”
“Mobile phones haven’t worked for days. Our walkie-talkies are lucky to work more than a mile in the city. I don’t know how we could do that.”
A possibility flickered in Mason’s mind. An old jarhead buddy. He wasn’t a part of The Thundering Third, but Mason didn’t hold it against him. He hadn’t seen him in too long. Before the outbreak, life was too busy. After the outbreak, social calls weren’t high on anybody’s priorities.
But if anyone could help, Corporal Francis Knipplemier could. Juice as he preferred to be called. As much fun as it was to yank his chain about his given name, every knuckle dragger Mason had ever met called him Juice because the guy could perform miracles with anything that had electricity coursing through its veins.
Juice could figure it out. If he was still alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Mason pedaled the cargo bike south on Pacific Avenue letting the electric assist do most of the work. He’d opted for a slower, but near-silent mode of transportation. This wasn’t a supply run and the Bronco’s engine was like an air siren in the unsettling quiet that blanketed the new world.
It wasn’t that it was silent.
Seagulls screeched and fought with the ravens perched atop bodies in the street picking at decomposing flesh. It struck him in an oddly removed way. The air stank of rotten meat, and then a fresh breeze would sweep through and all he’d smell was the briny scent of the ocean. And then the stink would settle back in and make him regret that last big breath.
The onshore breeze rattled palm tree leaves high above. It caught bits of trash, cartwheeling them across the street to pile up against the curb on the leeward side.
Despite the natural sounds, the sounds of city life were unsettlingly absent. The usual hum of cars driving, people talking, and music drifting from store fronts was missing. Few things felt lonelier than being all alone in the middle of the city.
Juice lived over on the Venice Canals in one of the multimillion dollar homes that lined the waterways. He and Linda shared a sparkling modern construction that they designed themselves. Mason’s old 1960s Craftsmen cost half as much and was a quarter as cool. That was west side real estate, before the outbreak. You could spend a million and a half dollars and live in a crap shack within a mile of the ocean. Or you could spend twice that and end up with something ten times nicer.
It seemed like a weird bifurcation of the market until you thought more about it. Your average, successful double-income Joe and Sally could pull a million dollar loan no problem in the sloshing easy money environment created by the Federal Reserve. That inflated the market and created an artificial floor above the million dark mark. But Joe and Sally really stretched to make it happen. Whereas if you jumped up to two and a half to three million dollars, Joe and Sally were left behind by the truly wealthy.
The people that didn’t need loans to purchase real estate. The competition at that level of the market was much, much lower. And therefore, those less contested square feet had to work much harder to earn a sale.
It was bullshit propagated by an institution that had done as much to harm the economy as to help it.
Maybe the outbreak did have an upside. Not since the days of Manifest Destiny had west side real estate been so cheap.
Mason didn’t encounter any threats on the way over. The exertion of the trip loosened his muscles and took the edge off the innumerable pain signals coursing through his nervous system.
He headed down a concrete ramp to the canal level below. A row of expensive houses occupied each side of the small canal. A wide sidewalk ran along each side. Small docks with canoes and paddle boats dotted the shore. Just over a week ago, this was one of the hottest neighborhoods on the west side. Now, it was a ghost town without all the tumbleweeds.
Juice’s house was two down on the right. He turned off the electric assist and coasted to a stop in front. What used to be large glass windows were now gaping holes edged in razor shards. A blood red triangle was painted on the exterior wall next to the missing front door. The painted delta symbol reminded him of the story of how the Israelites had painted lamb’s blood above their doors so that death would pass them by.
Obviously lamb’s blood and spray paint didn’t offer the same protection.
Mason looked around. All of the surrounding houses were clearly looted. It made sense. When things went to shit, desperate people noticed those with the most. Juice was not the type to go quietly, but maybe the virus had already taken him by the time looters hit his house.
Mason hid the bike behind tall bushes that also artfully hid a water meter. Was probably an HOA regulation in this neighborhood. He drew
his pistol, inched the slide back to verify a round was chambered—it was—and kept it in the low ready position while listening for clues. The small front yard was covered in a thin layer of decomposed granite and dotted with a variety of drought tolerant plants. It was the kind of yard that people who didn’t like to think about yards had.
A flight of ducks glided in from the east. They lined up to the canal and splashed up small wakes skidding to a stop on the surface. He considered taking a shot at one to add to their protein reserves but refrained, knowing the shot would sound like a cannon in the canyon formed by the houses that lined both sides.
A careful step over the lip of a shattered window and he was inside. The place was gutted to the polished concrete floors. The open floor plan design made almost everything on the first floor visible. The expensive stainless steel kitchen appliances were gone.
Really?
Did someone think they needed a fancy dishwasher more than anything else while society fell apart around them?
A large, conspicuous hole showed where the fridge used to be. Even the sinks had been ripped out. Was someone building an HGTV dream home with all their stolen plunder? With no power or water service, those anachronisms of modern convenience were nothing more than shiny doorstops.
An elegant span of clear acrylic stairs led up to the bedrooms on the second floor. Mason went upstairs and cleared them one by one. Thankfully, he didn’t find the bodies of Juice and Linda.
CLANG.
“Shit,” someone whispered.
The hushed voice came from downstairs. Mason crept downstairs looking down through the steps as he went. The faint sound of an intentionally placed footfall to his left made him pause at the bottom of the stairs. He circled around the steel bannister and saw nothing in the living room, foyer, or kitchen. He hugged the wall on his left side with the Glock up and ready for action. With all of his senses switched on, he inched toward the back of the house. The wall ended and he paused at the corner.
What was around the corner? He remembered a dinner party he’d attended over a year ago. He’d gone looking for Beth when the conversation lulled. She’d been in a bathroom at the end of the hall. There were two more doors along the hall. The one on the right led to the garage. The one on the left had been closed and he didn’t recall ever knowing what was behind it.
The Last Peak (Book 2): The Darwin Collapse Page 9
