Apocalypse- Year Zero

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  The detective stared at her. “I think it’s from the Bible,” she volunteered.

  “It is.” He looked nonplussed. “The Book of Revelation.”

  D-Girl studied the detective, intrigued. That sounded right… not only right, but significant in some way. She felt a shiver. She had to find that script.

  “But what did he mean by it?” Detective Mackey was asking.

  “I don’t know,” D-Girl said, but she was going to find out. “I kind of thought it was about the script. Screenwriters don’t like to be rewritten,” she offered, which was true, but also an evasion.

  Detective Mackey looked at her for a long moment without speaking. “Did you notice anything else about him?” he asked, finally.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Anything unusual?”

  “I thought he was going to throw up.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly unusual, but that seemed to be the kind of thing the detective was fishing for.

  Detective Mackey wrote that down as well. “So he was agitated.”

  “Yes. He was agitated.”

  “And then he left the building?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long before the quake was that?”

  D-Girl thought. She was only in the office with Birnbaum for maybe ten minutes before she killed him, and the quake had been simultaneous with the killing.

  “Ten or fifteen minutes, I think. Not long.”

  Detective Mackey sat forward in his chair. “Ms. Lerner, we’re trying to locate John Nunn. Apparently he’s completely vanished. Do you have contact information for him?”

  D-Girl stood and went to the kitchen counter, where she’d left her purse with her Blackberry. She scrolled through her contact list to find John Nunn’s numbers. “He’s repped by CAA – I can give you his agent’s number and a home phone –”

  “Would that be…” Detective Mackey recited a number from memory.

  “Yes, that’s what I have for him.”

  “That number is disconnected, with no forwarding number.” D-Girl knew that, of course; she’d tried herself. “You don’t have an address?”

  “No… no, I don’t. Just CAA.”

  “If he contacts you, will you let me know right away?”

  “Of course,” she said sincerely. And then finally she asked the obvious. “What is this about?”

  “Did you get along with your boss, Ms. Lerner?” The detective asked her suddenly.

  She looked at him. “No.” Some things were too plain to lie about.

  Detective Mackey sighed. “Apparently no one else did either, but I suppose I don’t have to tell you that. Joel Birnbaum was murdered, Ms. Lerner. His skull was smashed by a blunt object before the building collapsed on him. His assistants, Rob Breslow and Elias Kutner, both reported that in the meeting John Nunn threatened to kill Birnbaum. They both claim to have left shortly after.”

  “Oh,” said D-Girl. She felt queasy. And then she realized. “You think the screenwriter killed Birnbaum?”

  He looked at her straight on. “I know someone killed him.”

  “Oh,” she said again, faintly.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” Detective Mackey said.

  “It all seems sort of unreal,” she said.

  “I think that just about every day,” he confessed, and they looked at each other for a moment. D-Girl felt warm inside.

  “Do you like your job?” he asked, surprising her again.

  “No,” she said honestly. “Do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “Very much.” He stood. “Please let me know if you hear anything from John Nunn.” He handed her a card.

  “I will,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  She closed the door on him in mild disappointment that he had not asked her out, and extreme shock that she was not going to jail. He had said Birnbaum was killed by “a blunt object,” so they must not have found the Golden Globe, which surely had her fingerprints on it. As long as they were looking for John Nunn, it seemed she would be safe. And John Nunn might after all be dead; so many people were, so she couldn’t feel that guilty that the police were looking for him. If they arrested him, she would come forward; she wasn’t going to let someone else go to prison for what she’d done, of course she wasn’t. But for the moment, no action was required.

  No action, but the detective’s visit had made her realize that she hadn’t been thinking much at all about the day of the earthquake. Shock will do that to you, she knew. Everyone was processing the quake in a different way. Everyone had had tragedies, bizarre experiences, miraculous survivals. The weird stories were so ubiquitous that D-Girl hadn’t really taken a lot of time to process that her own weird story might have been just a little bit – weirder – than some of the others. After all, if she were completely honest about it, honest in the way Detective Mackey might inspire someone to be honest, possibly to her peril, she had killed four men that day, lifted a car off a woman and her child, and all of that after having been buried alive and having been – possibly – rescued by three other women who, first of all, weren’t real, and second, seemed to have some kind of relationship with her. Air, Water, Fire, Earth, she thought again.

  Actually, the killing of Birnbaum had come first, before the burial and all the other. That was significant enough to make a note of it, she felt. That had happened before whatever change happened to her in the earth. Because there had been a change in the earth, she realized, she had changed, during however long a time she was down there - and that part she was unclear about; she really had no idea if she’d been in the ground for several hours or two days. Looting and burning and general chaos had gone on for a week after the initial quake, and the National Guard had arrived in parts of the city on the very first afternoon, but not until the day after in many other parts of L.A, so the fact that D-Girl had not run into any National Guard in her trek down Hollywood Boulevard did not necessarily mean that she had been out on the day of the quake. She hadn’t seriously tried to reconstruct it before.

  So now she sat down on the red leather couch, which was still warm from where Detective Mackey had been sitting, and faintly redolent of his cologne, and sipped her Special Blend and tried to remember.

  She’d left the studio lot, walked down the Boulevard, had seen a white horse and the little girl with the black glasses and the jigsaw scar, lifted the car off the woman and baby, then followed the scarred girl into the warehouse where she killed three of the four men who were about to rape that young Asian woman. And then she’d walked home, she assumed, because she woke up in her own bed about a day later.

  So somehow she’d gotten herself home, and she’d also cleaned up, somehow – even though there was no running water in her house for a week because of the general plumbing meltdown.

  Actually now that she was thinking, she remembered standing in the shower of a hydrant. She didn’t remember where, exactly, but she had been so hot and dirty and bloody that she had stepped into the geysering water of a hydrant. And she’d also at some point stripped off her suit coat and silk blouse, and tossed them into one of the ubiquitous burning buildings. In fact when she’d finally awakened in bed, she was in an XXL gangsta T-shirt and athletic shorts that she must have scavenged during her walk on Hollywood Boulevard, and instead of her Chanel pumps beside the bed, there were new Nikes. So either from heat or self-preservation, she’d ditched all her bloody clothes. She had to admire her own foresightedness… although she had no idea where it was coming from.

  None of this was precisely the point, though, because, well, it wasn’t, was it? The point was something about a stupefying power that she had somehow acquired while buried in the ground. What was that about?

  All of this was feeling vaguely familiar, though. Naggingly familiar.

  She stood from the couch and walked down the hall.

  In her closet of a home office, she surveyed her bookcases. The quake had dumped all the shelves out onto the floor, but D-Girl was
fairly anal about her shelves; there was no superfluous crap, and her script library was clearly marked on spines with titles and dates of drafts, so restoring her library had been one of her first projects during the long lost week after the quake. She now was able to go straight to the shelf and pick out the script of Apocalypse, unfortunately not the first, original script, but the stupid Birnbaum-dictated revisions. Still, it was a place to start. She settled in her one big office chair to read.

  Rereading the script was a pleasure and a shock. The writing was as excellent as she had remembered. What she hadn’t remembered, after all the mindbendingly inane notes sessions and insultingly ridiculous changes, was the content.

  A little girl opening sealed caves, only the girl in the rewritten script was blonde and non-scarred. Four men associated with the elements, and with horses – only in the original script the four had been women, she was sure of it. That had been the first thing Birnbaum had wanted changed. Too many women, he’d said. Any more than one woman with actual lines per film was pushing it, in the Birnbaum universe.

  And there were the warning knells of 9/11, the tsunamis, Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, the Big One in Los Angeles.

  So many disasters.

  It was all there, on the page. The screenwriter had been writing her story, their story.

  D-Girl put the script down, marveling.

  The premise of the script was that the world would end as the ancient Mayan “Long Count” calendar had predicted, on December 21, 2012. The development process had slogged on, and December 21 had come and gone, but the tragedies had if anything escalated. More daily evidence of global warming, more school shootings, another war on the horizon... and of course, the recent earthquake, which had plunged the world economy into new turbulence.

  D-Girl found that interesting and ominous, as it meant they really didn’t have a lot of time.

  And who were “they”, exactly?

  But she meant the women, of course. Three plus one made four and four was THE NUMBER.

  That was her dream in the earth, and they had been there with her. They had saved her.

  And we don’t have a lot of time.

  She felt hot and chilled at the same time. There’s something going on here. Huge.

  She stared down at the script, then stood abruptly and went to her computer. She opened an e mail screen and typed in the e mail address she had withheld from Detective Mackey, the one that she’d tried before, several times, but had gotten no response.

  From: Valerie Lerner

  To: John Nunn

  Subject: Apocalypse

  Need to talk to you ASAP re: Apocalypse.

  She sat back in her chair and looked at the screen. After a moment she sat forward and added:

  You’re not fired.

  Because after all, she was the decider now.

  She hit “Send,” and then remained in her chair, waiting. After a minute or so, she got back a MAILER-DAEMON message: Returned mail: see transcript for details. When she clicked on it, it read: Address does not exist.

  She was disappointed but not surprised. The screenwriter clearly had his own agenda. She would find him. For now she would stick to the script, as far as she could recall it, which meant (she thought) finding the women first.

  And we don’t have a lot of time, her mind added again.

  Time - for what?

  That part she didn’t know.

  Well, what did she know?

  She’d survived a pretty much impossible collapse of a building on top of her. That was pretty weird, just right there. She’s been buried in earth for who knows how long, and didn’t die from that, either. And then she’d been – rescued? Yes, she thought that was right – by three women who were clearly not bound by the normal laws of physics. And neither, for that matter, was she, as she had been able to lift an SUV and, well, let’s face it – kill three people with a piece of shelving.

  The earthquake had changed her, made her stronger, exponentially stronger. To what purpose, though?

  She’d saved people. Yes, she actually had, unless that was all just some post-traumatic shock hallucination, which was also perfectly possible. She’d saved people as the other women had saved her.

  But was any of that power left? In the three and a half weeks since the quake there had been no further – incidents – no impossibly heavy objects being lifted, no little scarred girls or white horses, no killing of producers or rapists.

  So why would she assume that any of that was still possible?

  I’ll have to test it, she decided.

  She walked back to the living room and looked around her for something to lift. The couch was too easy – she’d moved it around so often already, in the cleanup effort. The bookcases were heavy but would make a mess.

  The refrigerator.

  She walked into the open kitchen and studied it. There was actually more in it than usual, as unspoiled food had been hard to get for the first two weeks and everyone sort of adopted a hoarding mentality that had not yet gone away.

  She stepped up to it and put her hands on it. It was not that easy to get a grip on because of the shape – not like an SUV, for example, which had a bumper that you could grip and lift – she thought that’s how she had done it, that day. But the width of the refrigerator made it awkward, impossible to get her arms around. She stooped and curled her fingers underneath it instead…

  … she took a breath and pulled upward.

  Nothing. It didn’t budge. She tugged harder at it, using her lats as her personal trainer would have wanted, but the appliance could have been cemented to the floor, for all it moved. Any more of this and she would be breaking fingernails, and she had a meeting that morning.

  She straightened, huffing a bit.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about this failure. It was disappointing, true, but also a little of a relief, because what was she really supposed to do with extraordinary strength, anyway? It seemed if she had it she would be required to use it, and that didn’t feel all that desirable, necessarily. And yet the need to know was urgent.

  She put her hands flat against the refrigerator and tried pushing.

  Nothing. Not an inch.

  Maybe I have to be angry, she reasoned. Or – upset. Or maybe it only works when there are people involved, like in jeopardy, maybe.

  Or maybe you’ve completely lost your mind.

  It was something she needed to test.

  She would do it tonight.

  Chapter 9

  L.A.’s downtown had never turned into the thriving rejuvenated city center that other major U.S. cities had. Well, there had been the global financial disaster, of course, the lingering recession. But beyond that, perhaps it was not in L.A.’s character to have a single city center.

  There were pockets of culture: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; the sleekly surreal silver curves of the Disney Center; MOCA - the Museum of Contemporary Art - and the much more interesting (to D-Girl’s mind) Temporary Contemporary. A few surrounding restaurants serviced those oases, and there was Japan Town and Olvera Street, mainly for the tourists, but downtown was hardly a social mecca and there was certainly no walking that went on even close to those destinations. Most of downtown turned into a ghost town after 5 p.m., complete with swirling plastic carrier bag tumbleweeds, when the bankers and garment workers scurried home.

  And that was pre-quake.

  Post-quake it was a wasteland. A vast cardboard city of homeless sprung up at sunset. There had always been a huge homeless population, a whopping 73,000 people pre-quake and now, who even knew? If bad things were going to happen, it was a pretty good guess they would be happening there. D-Girl needed somewhere that was fairly private, legally speaking, and where the criminal element was high. And she knew her way around downtown from various faux-edgy industry events and years of clubbing. She was far more familiar with the streets than she was with other high-crime areas, like, say, East LA. There were also just the aesthetics of it all, th
e downtown jungle. And she was not disappointed, there.

  Even with her jaded location-scout eye, D-Girl was impressed by the ruined beauty of it. There were collapsed buildings that had not even begun to be cleared and whole blocks that were barricaded off. It looked like the John Carpenter classic Escape from New York (she had refused to see the sequel, Escape from L.A.). There were even visual echoes of Bladerunner, although of course without the hordes of people and androids.

  She cruised in the Mustang (top up and locked), driving down whichever streets she could actually turn down, jogging and jagging to avoid blocked off streets, and finally parked her car on a side street in the garment district and got out to walk. She was not entirely sure what she was looking for but she felt fairly certain she would find it.

  The metal sliding doors were down over all the shops and graffiti bloomed on the concrete walls. The National Guard was gone now; the downtown stores had long since secured their buildings, boarding or bricking up shattered windows and moving inventory from condemned properties. Restaurants had not re-opened, as the whole downtown was sort of a no-enter zone.

  D-Girl walked, in no particular hurry. She felt as if she were being guided. There were bad guys everywhere, when you really thought about it – it shouldn’t be too hard to find some. And she was right. She felt the ground shaking before she heard it, gangsta music, with bass turned up to supersonic levels. She ducked into a doorway, pressed her back to the wall and watched from the shadows as a black Hummer with completely tinted windows cruised around the corner in front of her, and rolled on down the street.

  Why, there’s a bad guy right now, she thought. Bad guy soundtrack and all.

  The Hummer – bad guy car if ever there was one - turned left ahead of her into the narrow opening of an alley. After a few beats the music cut off abruptly.