Apocalypse- Year Zero

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  D-Girl stepped out of her doorway and walked carefully to the gap where the Hummer had turned. She paused at the corner to look down the alley. There was no sign of the Hummer but she could see that the alley turned again at the end of the building and she suspected the car was parked out of sight just around the corner. She started silently down the alley. She was all in black and this time in aerobics shoes, much easier to creep in than on vintage Chanel pumps.

  She reached the end of the alley and hovered, peering warily around the corner of the building. As she’d suspected, the Hummer was parked in the cross-alley, next to the concrete stairs leading up to a double metal door of a building on the next street over. A worn painted sign on the brick wall read DANCING GIRLS and D-Girl suddenly recognized the stage entrance of a grand old theater that she’d seen in location books. A few years ago, before the war and the stock market collapse, when real estate prices were still soaring and everyone thought there would be a downtown renaissance, a developer had bought several old theaters and began a painstaking process of historical renovation. All restoral had halted years ago, of course, and now the theater was probably condemned. But apparently someone was taking advantage of that.

  D-Girl looked up at the DANCING GIRLS sign, took hold of the metal handrail and climbed the stairs.

  The stage door looked locked but when she pulled on it, it opened for her. She took a breath and stepped inside.

  It was pitch black and she had to stand still for a good minute before her eyes adjusted enough to see anything at all. The smell, though, was overpowering – rank with piss and shit and something burning and something metallic and something like ammonia.

  There were whispered voices nearby but not, she could tell, in the same room that she was in, whatever that was; there was some kind of wall between her and whoever else was there. Finally her eyes focused and she realized she was in a passageway behind the stage… there was a huge scrim to one side of her, behind which the stage must be, with tall and musty teaser and tormentor curtains hung to the sides, and ropes and pulleys against the three-story backstage walls. There was a doorway to the left, leading down to dressing rooms, which she knew from a white sign with an arrow pointing down saying Dressing Rooms.

  The voices were coming from behind a massive warehouse-sized set of sliding doors – two stories high: the scene shop, she guessed. The smell was stronger toward the gap in the doors, a thick wall of fumes. D-Girl inched down the dark passageway and stopped beside the gap and pressed herself against the wall to look in.

  It was pitch black inside, too, even darker than in the stage passageway, but she saw little blue flares here and there in the dark, which she realized was flame from butane torches. It was a shooting gallery, and there were dozens of people inside, on the floor, in the stalls that used to hold props and scene flats. She caught glimpses of shadowy faces illuminated by the blue flares, junkies holding spoons or makeshift aluminum foil bowls in the flame.

  A deep, male voice was speaking, with cold finality. “No pay, no play.”

  A woman’s voice, shrill and jittery, pleaded, “I’ll suck you off. I’ll suck you real nice.”

  The man laughed, a flat, ugly sound. “What I want with yo’ skank ass?”

  D-Girl strained to locate the voices in the darkness. All she could see of the woman was her eyes, and the outline of her lank and bony shape, but she looked seventy when D-Girl was sure she was more like twenty-five. The bony woman’s voice turned crafty. “I know what you want. I know. Here. Have him.” She pushed forward a small shape, and D-Girl was horrified to make out a child, no more than five, with nothing on but underpants.

  “You take him.”

  The boy tried to hold on to his – mother was not the word – but she slapped his hands away. The boy started to cry, but it was completely silent, just flowing tears from huge, wide eyes and a stretched-open mouth.

  “Set her up,” the dealer ordered his minion flatly, from deep in the dark, and reached for the boy.

  D-Girl felt the shaking begin – and she had just time to whisper, “In Patmos we speak the Patois…” before the shaking came up through the earth, through the stage flooring, up through the soles of her feet, up, up, up, until it blasted through the top of her head.

  Chapter 10

  The heat in the rocks burned on her skin and there was sand under her bare feet as she ran through the tunnels, further and further into the soul of the earth, her breath hot and rasping in her throat. She rounded the same rock corner… and came out in the antechamber. The winged bronze figures sat tall and regal in their thrones beside the double door.

  D-Girl walked forward across the star chart. The statues turned their heads to watch her pass.

  She was in the pyramid. Four of the caves on the far wall were already broken, and the sight made her heart stop in her chest.

  Inside the first she saw fire, a blazing inferno of light, with two tall dark towers falling inward in slow motion.

  Inside the second was water, a vast wall of it, tidal, swirling bodies and boats and houses indiscriminately in its watery rush.

  Inside the third was a dark storm of wet wind, bending trees and hurling debris.

  Inside the fourth, sickeningly familiar, was the collapsed mountain she had climbed out of on the day of the earthquake.

  D-Girl turned away, breathless….

  Further down the wall, the scarred girl was working on the seal of a fifth cave. Behind her glasses, her dark face was intense in concentration as she picked at the seal of the cave. Three quarters of it was already gone. Red covered her thin hands and ragged fingernails. Beyond the cave was the vast blue river, the immense wall of white.

  The girl looked back over her shoulder, and cried in an ancient and sibilant language that D-Girl had never heard, but somehow understood:

  “It’s time! It’s TIME!”

  And then a voice of immeasurable power boomed through the caves:

  !!!!COME!!!!!

  Chapter 11

  !!!COME!!!

  The word from her dream faded and she was awake.

  There was a noise, a knocking from somewhere, steady knocking, insistent. She was not going to be able to sleep through it, and it wasn’t going to go away.

  As she threw the covers back to get out of bed, she saw that the thin black shirt she was wearing was covered in blood. She knew it was blood on the black because there was blood on her white sheets, too, and on her underpants and thighs; she was soaked in it. She remembered more blood in the dark, oceans of blood.

  She remembered also a hospital, Queen of Angels, the children’s hospital in Hollywood, so she must have dropped the little boy off. She had to marvel at her own clear thinking, considering the circumstances, but now, because of the knocking, she wondered if someone had see her, bloody as she had been, and called the authorities.

  She hastily pulled the sheets off the bed, pulled her shirt and underwear off and rolled them and the running pants she had discarded on the floor the night before or this morning up in the sheets and shoved them into the back of her closet.

  She grabbed a summer dress hanging on the hook on the door and pulled it over her head.

  The knocking came again. And when she navigated down the long hall and looked through the peephole it was Detective Mackey standing on her doorstep, as somehow she had known it would be.

  She checked herself in the entry hall mirror, more to make sure that there was no blood in her hair than for vanity, although there was a little of that, too, and opened the door.

  And when he turned to her, again she saw that flicker of attraction in his eyes, and understood why she had opened the door, against all reason.

  “Ms. Lerner.”

  “Detective.”

  She pushed the door open wider and let him in.

  Again he refused coffee and again he sat in her living room, too big for the red couch, and they looked at each other. This time there was a quizzical, searching, guarded expression in h
is eyes, and she knew that he knew more this time.

  Had he been following her, then? Did he know what she’d done last night?

  He opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, opened it again. “This case - bothers me,” he said finally.

  She could understand that.

  “What bothers you about it?” she asked obediently, half of her wanting to help, the other half wondering if she was going to have to kill him.

  She could kill him, she knew; this time she would be able to lift the refrigerator and toss it onto him, crushing most of the bones in his body. She could feel that strength in her, feel it flowing up through the ground, a subtle and constant magnetic buzz. It wasn’t that she wanted to kill him, particularly, but she had a mission, now, and it was more important than an outdated sense of justice that really belonged to another world entirely, a pre-quake world, a pre-Apocalypse world. There were so many people who needed killing, who deserved killing. She understood that, finally. It was no wonder at all that there had been all these floods and fires and hurricanes and tsunamis. She didn’t exactly believe in God, yet, but she was beginning to believe in retribution. And why else would she have this power, if not to help? She understood much more, now.

  And he would never suspect if she went to the kitchen for water – would never expect her to pick up the refrigerator and hurl it…

  She kept her expression serious and interested, waiting for a response to her question.

  Detective Mackey stood, as if he could no longer contain his agitation. “Birnbaum’s DNA was found at another crime scene,” he said. This threw D-Girl somewhat, because she thought he was talking about the shooting gallery and she couldn’t imagine how that could have occurred. Consequently her face was genuinely puzzled.

  “I don’t think I understand,” she said truthfully.

  “Three men were killed in a warehouse on Hollywood Boulevard on the day of the quake. It was a violent scene. One’s head was smashed in, one was impaled with a metal pole, the other’s chest was crushed and he was stabbed with some object, not a knife.”

  D-Girl flinched at the details, even though she’d been there. It seemed like quite a while ago. “I don’t understand,” she repeated, only this time she was lying. “You think Birnbaum was there?”

  Detective Mackey turned and looked her in the eyes. “No. His DNA was there. It came up on the computer when we ran the DNA of the blood at the warehouse scene. We got a match because Birnbaum’s DNA was in the computer as a recent victim. His blood was on the metal pole that was used to batter victim number one and victim number two and impale victim number three, and was on whatever sharp object was used to stab victim number two.”

  D-Girl frowned and thought about this. It made sense, though – she’d probably had Birnbaum’s blood on her hands and it came off on the metal piece of shelving she’d used as a club and a javelin. The stabbing with an unknown object took her a beat longer, until she realized that he was talking about the heel of her shoe, which she’d stomped down on would-be-rapist number two. So Birnbaum’s blood had been on that as well. There was a lot of blood that day.

  Detective Mackey was watching her, and she thought she could read his thoughts. He didn’t see how she could have done it, a slip of a girl like her, and besides which women didn’t do this kind of thing – it was something completely beyond his experience, beyond comprehension. At the same time he suspected her, that’s why he was here. And he didn’t want her to have done it, because of what that would do to his sense of reality, and also because he liked her. All in all, a very confused man, she could tell. She felt for him. It was confusing to her, too.

  She had not spoken for a very long time and that was probably not good. But she had no idea what to say.

  He had not for a second stopped watching her, and now he spoke softly. “Now, these were bad guys. Two of them died with their pants down and there was a ripped woman’s blouse and brassiere not seven feet from their bodies. Doesn’t take a genius to figure what they were up to. And you might say these three guys deserved what they got. All of them.” He hesitated, and shrugged. “Maybe even Birnbaum.” Then his face hardened, and so did his eyes. “But it’s not my job to make judgments like that. It’s my job to find killers and arrest them – you feel me?”

  I do feel you, she wanted to tell him. And it’s all right. You don’t have to make judgments. You should take a break. I’m making the judgments, now.

  She didn’t say any of that aloud, of course, and she looked at the refrigerator. She didn’t want to kill him. But at the same time she knew she couldn’t let him interfere. This was a whole lot bigger than just a few rotten stinking rapists and child-sellers. It was all in the script.

  Aloud she said, “It sounds complicated,” trying to strike a tone that was halfway between sympathy and detachment, as if it were really not her problem, after all. She was beginning to suspect that it was impossible to convict someone for a crime – or crimes – that defied the laws of physics. And after all, Detective Mackey hadn’t come with a search warrant, or even with a partner, which she seemed to recall from one of Birnbaum’s buddy cop pictures was de rigueur in a police procedural, although of course the magnitude of the quake might have required the suspension of that particular protocol. Mackey was doing this all on his own. It was his own hunch, his own theory he was pursuing.

  But as she looked into Detective Mackey’s face, she realized that he would pursue this beyond the law, and laws of physics be damned. They were alike that way. It was his destiny, just as – whatever her destiny was, was hers.

  “Yeah, it’s complicated,” he said tensely.

  “Well, I really hope you solve it,” she said, and stood, and because he was a gentleman he stood with her.

  “I will,” he said, and he didn’t sound happy about it. But he allowed her to show him out, which was good because she had her own solving to do, and she wasn’t at all as confident about it as he seemed to be.

  Chapter 11

  They ran across the white plane, running, or riding, she wasn’t sure, four women, four horses, hair and manes and hooves and feet flying on desert plains, flying in the wind…

  She stopped to get her bearings, the horse pawing and heaving under her, and she saw that beyond the pure white plain were dunes, sand dunes.

  Something tugged at her hand. She looked down and saw the jigsaw-scarred girl below her. The girl pulled hard on her hand, pulled her down… and the whole earth opened. D-Girl felt herself being pulled into the earth.

  The women were gone, and the horses, and the salt flats, and the dunes. She and the girl were in the crimson-and-gold pyramid again, with the huge red cylindrical drums lining the walls. Bizarrely, a scruffy white cat crouched at the girl’s feet.

  The girl stared up at D-Girl from behind her glasses. “I’ve nearly opened it.” Her voice was thickly Southern. She pointed at the wall of sealed caves with a bloody hand. Four caves gaped open onto their churning elements, fire, water, air, earth. On the fifth cave, the skinlike seal was hanging loose from the top corner.

  The huge crimson drums throbbed with a low, constant humming.

  D-Girl looked out the cave opening onto the red canyon and the sheer concrete wall with its turrets, and the vast blue river beyond.

  “It’s Time,” a voice said behind her.

  D-Girl whirled, startled.

  A man in black jeans and a white round-collared shirt stood behind her. Tall, Amerasian, dreamy but ripped, sensitive and strong…

  The screenwriter.

  For a moment, D-Girl could only stare. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said stupidly.

  “I’m here,” he said, and his voice was so gentle. Behind him, the tall bronze winged figures had left their thrones and paced the floor of the pyramid restlessly.

  “I don’t understand,”D-Girl said, and felt something odd on her face, wet and moving. To her vast surprise, she realized she was crying. She hadn’t cried since… well, she couldn’t
remember, but it had been more than years. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “But you do,” the screenwriter said.

  “I need them,” she said, brushing at her tears. “I need the others,” she said, meaning the women.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “We’re the same,” she understood aloud, and the thought was a warm rush.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are they?”

  “They’re coming.”

  Behind him, the winged figures prowled. D-Girl noticed for the first time that they had breasts.

  Further on, the scarred girl was scraping and scraping at the seal on the fifth cave, her hands completely covered in blood, now. D-Girl was more and more nervous about it. She wanted to tell her to stop, but that was the screenwriter’s place, surely.

  He was speaking, and she had to focus on him again.

  “Do you understand?” he repeated, patiently.

  “It’s Apocalypse,” she said, and her voice was faraway.

  “Yes.”

  “Four of us,” she said slowly, and felt her entire body tingle with a rush of significance. In her mind, she saw four riders.

  “Four horses. Four riders...”

  “Yes.”

  “But… not men….”

  “This isn’t a Birnbaum movie,” he said, with a ghost of a smile.

  “It’s all in the script,” she realized, and the thought was a jolt of excitement. “Where is the script?”

  “You know everything you need to know, Valerie,” he said. “You know –”

  “But what are we supposed to do? How do I –”

  She never finished her sentence because they were interrupted by an insistent voice.

  “Hey. Hey.”

  D-Girl and the screenwriter turned. The girl was standing behind them, her hands dripping with blood.

  “I’ve opened another one!”

  And indeed, the skin of the cave was crumpled in a heap at her feet. The girl laughed in delight. “Come and see! Come and see!” The words echoed in the pyramid.