by Jake Marley
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Los Angeles
Series 1, Episode 5
by Jake Marley
Kindle Edition
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide Series Copyright © 2017 Stephen Lawson.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Los Angeles Copyright © 2017 Jake Marley.
All rights reserved.
Cover art and logo by Preston Stone Copyright © 2017 Stephen Lawson
All rights reserved.
For series information, author/artist bios, interactive maps, pictures, and upcoming releases, visit tpatg.com
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide: Series 1
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Louisville Copyright © 2017 Stephen Lawson.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to St. Louis Copyright © 2017 David VonAllmen.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to the Utah Deserts Copyright © 2017 Dustin Steinacker.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to the Mojave Desert Copyright © 2017 Sean Hazlett.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Los Angeles Copyright © 2017 Jake Marley.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Seattle Copyright © 2018 Philip Kramer.
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This novella is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons either living or dead is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, without written permission from the author.
Dedication
For my daughter, SpaceCat:
After civilization burns down around us, the world is going to need brave, strong warriors like you to remake it into something better.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Los Angeles
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Big thanks to Stephen Lawson for killing the world, creating Thursday Forrester, and then allowing me to play around in his sandbox. Thanks, too, to David VonAllmen, Dustin Steinacker, and Sean Patrick Hazlett for getting Thursday across America, into my clutches, and then to Philip Kramer for taking the reins and ending Series 1 with a home run. I'd also like to thank the ghosts of Emily Dickenson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Frost for inspiring certain lines or passages in this story. Finally, I need to thank my first reader, editor, and tremendously-talented partner, Jaime Eads Maraia, for the tireless hours she spent helping me bring this story to life.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Los Angeles
Thursday Forrester swayed at the edge of the world and saw an undulating blue horizon that filled him with sudden, irrevocable horror. He ran a sandpaper tongue over his chapped lips and stared out over a loose-sand beach at the great Pacific Ocean.
I’ve run out of West.
In a croaking whisper, he said, “How did it go? Yeah. ‘Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.’”
He laughed to himself. The quote came from one of Grandpa Cornelius’s old books, squirreled away on the other side of a wild and dangerous country that had tried its best to devour him. He had stumbled across the country for more long days and nights than he could remember, all the while with poison in his veins and desperate hope needling at his heart.
Exhaustion hit him, and he sat down hard to watch the boiling sun set over a strange horizon. The colors of the sky were impossible—pinks and oranges and blues, swirling and whirling and bleeding into night. It was achingly beautiful, and made him long for things he might never see again.
A nasty bubble of thought rose up and popped on the surface of his consciousness: If I die here I could say I did my best.
His hands shook at that terrible idea. Dust clung to bloody, sweaty patches on his clothes. His hair was longer than he liked, unwashed, greasy. His fingernails were filthy black crescents, as if he’d just crawled out of a grave. He’d never felt so awful, or so alone, in all his life.
He squinted at the sunset. A sliver of the pink-orange glow being crowded out by purple-gray night. Thursday blinked at it. He tried to swallow, but his throat was raw. It felt skinned from the inside. He couldn’t remember the last drink he’d had, or the last meal. He had a rucksack on his back, the only thing he’d kept on the unforgiving journey west. Everything else he’d lost or traded away.
He was running out of time, and couldn’t lose the guidebook again.
Overhead, the stars came out. Old, familiar friends who looked so different in this strange place. The salt-sea air made his eyes water. Not his mouth, though—his mouth was as dry as the sunbaked sand.
There was a woman beside him. Tight black clothes, crisscrossed with buckled black belts—but undeniably female. She held a pair of claw hammers, the metal dull and dangerous in the dying light. Her dark hair was pulled back into tight braids. Her face was a bright white skull, grinning, with painted flowers on the cheeks and forehead, filigree black ink around the eyes. A mask.
Thursday opened his mouth again. His jaw popped. He quoted: “‘Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me.’“
Death’s grinning skull. The incongruous brightly-colored flowers on her face.
“She kindly stopped for me.”
He hoped that Emily Dickinson wouldn’t mind.
Death tilted her head. In those dark black sockets of that skull face, Thursday saw her eyes. Wide and dark and filled with curiosity.
“I don’t recognize your accent,” Death said.
It hurt his face to smile, but Thursday couldn’t help himself. His cracked lips started to bleed. “I’ve come a long way. See, I’m something of a tourist.”
~~~
Death’s name was Peligra and her hammers were stained with rust and blood. She had loops on her hips, tied onto her crisscrossed belts, and the hammers swung at her sides as she walked.
She took him to a rounded concrete building on the bay, like a fortress on the water. The rooftop looked like waves, and there was a chipped mural along the side of titanic whales underwater. Rusting white letters near the entrance called it the Aquarium of the Pacific. Like everything in his new, strange life of travel, Thursday made a mental note to write it down before he forgot it.
In the flickering torchlight along the roof he saw more skull-faced women, armed with axes, chains, and salvaged posts that once held speed limits and traffic signs sharpened at one end into jagged, wicked spears. Those eyes watching him brought back memories of home, of long hours and cold nights, of his crossbow and the feral, hungry people that had breeched his territory and needed to be sent back.
Across the water Thursday saw the half-sunk wreck of a massive black-and-white ship, its red smokestacks tilted and toppled. Something about it spoke of the desolation of time, and the power of the world to reclaim any mark humanity could make upon it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that if he died here he would’ve already accomplished so much. That he would’ve done his best.
“You’re falling on your feet.” Peligra grabbed him by the strap of his pack and helped keep him upright. The muscles in her arms were solid, and the tendons in her hands were like cables beneath her skin.
The guards at the door wanted to put him in ropes or chains, but Peligra waved them away and hauled him into the building. The ree
k of mildew and mold mixed with a half-familiar chemical odor to form a vile super-smell that made Thursday gag, especially when he felt like it was clinging to the back of his throat. He looked for threats. Saw blue threadbare carpet. Saw grayed white walls, pocked and warped from time. Saw two hundred green canvas cots spread out across the lobby of the aquarium. Above them, hanging from thick cables, was a fiberglass beast larger than any animal Thursday had ever seen before. Blue, wide, aquatic, gargantuan. A memory rose up, brought about partially by the dead ship in the harbor and by the creature hanging from wires above. Moby Dick.
“Is that a whale?”
Peligra nodded. She pushed up her skull mask and looked to the beast with admiration. Her mouth was a riot of twisted scar-tissue, but her eyes were compelling and lovely. “Blue whale. Natives of the Pacific.”
“It’s . . . unbelievable.”
“There are many mysteries in this world.” Peligra gave Thursday a glance before continuing on. “You’re one of them.”
There was a rounded tank in the back of the lobby, three-stories tall, filled with some sort of translucent liquid. Thursday doubled over, clutching a sudden pain in his gut. Again, Peligra hauled him to his feet.
“You’re hurt?”
“I’ll live,” he said, though it felt in that moment like a lie. He reached out for the smooth glass. “What’s this?”
“This is the Blue Cavern tank. Five-hundred-forty thousand liters of water, once filled with life, but without the pumps the animals died. We cleaned out the tank and repurposed it.”
“What’s in there now?”
“Fuel,” she said, and led him through a set of doors.
That half-familiar odor now had a name, and memories crashed over Thursday like a wave. Napalm, flame throwers, gasoline bombs. His brother Filson’s hard eyes in the orange light of fire and death.
~~~
Through another set of doors into a courtyard behind the aquarium. It was an open space lit by flaming torches where dozens of men with sun-browned skin worked on the metal skeletons of cars and shouted to each other in Spanish. Thursday had heard enough of the language in the desert, but he didn’t understand it. The men laughed. Their arms, chests, necks were covered in tattoos. Passing through them, Thursday could almost taste the smells of used oil and unwashed bodies.
“Our mechanics,” Peligra said.
“They look like they’re trying to rebuild cars by hand.”
The tops of the cars had been sawed off of each vehicle, and the back seats were torn out and covered with wooden platforms like the tops of watchtowers, with wooden rails wrapped in braided coils of rope for an easier grip. Many of the cars were chained together, forming vehicle centipedes of metal and rusted chrome.
“The caravan.”
Another concrete outbuilding, another set of doors. In a small, dark room filled with empty glass cabinets and lit by a single candle, Peligra took Thursday’s rucksack and pointed for him to sit on a pile of pillows shaped like colorful fish and sea creatures. Across a small, round table, an old woman sat in a similar pile and smiled a crooked yellow grin at him.
Peligra leaned over the old woman and spoke rapid Spanish until the old woman asked, in English, “He’s a tourist?”
“That’s what he says.”
The old woman was as brown as a walnut, and as shriveled as an old apple. There was something spicy in the air around her, like dried peppers, and it made Thursday’s eyes water. She wore a gown made of bright blues and faded reds, and at first Thursday thought it was an old flag. Then he saw letters on the strips of cloth—Dodgers on the blue strips, Angels on the red.
“Admiring my dress, hmm? They’re the baseball teams from this part of the world. Do you know baseball?”
It hurt to smile, but Thursday managed one. “Yes, ma’am. I am from Louisville, after all.”
Her face split in delight, and she clapped her hands. Long, knobby hands flecked with angry red-and-black spots that seemed concentrated in her fingertips. If it was some kind of nasty plague, Thursday didn’t want any part of it. He was sick enough as it was.
“Louisville sluggers. Yes. Wonderful. I am Queen Mary. Named after the ship. Did you see her across the bay?”
“She’s pretty big, ma’am, she’d be hard to miss. No offense, but what I saw looked to be in pretty bad shape.”
The old woman laughed and nodded. “Yes. No single familia can hold the beaches, so we split things up. I took the boat and her name a long, long time ago. Then, with my Muertas, I acquired the aquarium several years later. I don’t know when, exactly. Who keeps track of time in the end of days?”
“And you’re stock-piling fuel. You think you can get your ship out on the ocean?”
She laughed and shook her head. “What for? There is nothing on the other side of the world but more of the same. Dead people. Dead cars. Dead culture. Broken roads. Broken spirits. Broken engines. No, I am happy here . . . but I have promises to keep. A great thing I must do. My brother to the north, he needs what we have. The fuel, and other things.” Then, with barely a pause. “Are you one of the Saint’s spies?”
Thursday thought for a moment. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but that’s one of those questions I can never seem to answer to anyone’s satisfaction. Is there a way you’d believe me if I told you no?”
“You’re really from Kentucky?”
Just hearing the word made him homesick for Churchill Downs.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The old woman scrutinized him. She held her damaged fingertips to her ears, as if listening. Her shriveled face broke into a wide, crazed grin, and she laughed to herself, nodding along. “Yes, yes. It isn’t me who needs to believe you, yeah? Just tell the truth and you’ll live.” She waggled her fingers at him, as if that were answer enough. “Why are you here, Mr. Kentucky?”
Wincing from the pain in his gut, Thursday said, “I wasn’t lying before. I’m something of a tourist. But I’m running out of time.”
Three to four months he’d been given to travel from Louisville to Seattle, to find the cure for the disease coursing through his bloodstream. Then there was the guidebook—the cost of his return home. A tourist’s guide to the end of the world. He told some of it but kept it brief, feeling the weight of time, and how little of it he still had left. “I need to go north as well, ma’am. I’ve got to get to Seattle, and I’ve got my own promises to keep.”
“The Mariners,” Queen Mary said, and when she saw the look on Thursday’s face, she clarified. “More baseball. Seattle. Many teams, many cities.”
“Hard to believe we were all so connected once.”
“Oh, it wasn’t so long ago,” the old woman said. Then she put her fingers to her ears again and grinned widely and seemed lost in her own world. “What will you do to get to Seattle?”
Thoughts rose up inside of him. Cross a continent. Fly through the air. Race through the countryside. Love. Hurt. Kill.
“Whatever I have to,” he said.
Peligra, from off to the side, made a dismissive noise behind her mask. Ffft. She had his guidebook out, roughly pawing through the pages and lingering on certain paragraphs, certain maps. The tips of her gloves had been cut off and she touched everything with her fingertips, as if she could absorb the meaning of the marks through touch alone.
“Do you really have this many words in your head?” She sounded somewhere between incredulous and disgusted.
Thursday started to his feet. “Hey, now. That’s mine.”
He got to one knee when he saw the flash of Peligra’s hammer. Heard a whistle. Saw the stained red head of it only inches away from his face.
Thursday flinched, but wouldn’t back down. “It’s important to me.”
He could smell her: Cinnamon, lavender, and gasoline. Especially that last—everything at the aquarium stank of fuel. The eyes behind her mask were hard and bright and intense.
A muscle jumped in Thursday’s jaw, and he nodded once. “Yeah, I wrote t
he words in there.”
“You drew these pictures as well?”
“My maps? Yes. They’re rough and not to scale. When I get back home to Louisville I’m going to redo them.” He remembered he needed to tell the truth. “If I live that long.”
“We all get our time.” There was no pity in her tone. No sympathy. This was her world, too. Peligra hummed with vitality.
The old woman, Queen Mary, seemed lost and unfocused, but she nodded and repeated the words. “We all get our time.”
Peligra turned pages in his book and seemed to make a decision. “You’ll come with us. Not to Seattle, but to the Castaic Gateway. It’s the farthest north the Muertas can travel safely.”
“How many days will it take? I am in something of a hurry.”
Behind the mask, Peligra’s voice was angry. “This isn’t a free ride. It will cost you something.”
Thursday gestured to his pack. “I have nothing.”
Peligra lifted one of the maps. “You will teach me this. How to do it. How to see the world the way you do. You’ll help me put the world down on paper.”
“I’m not a teacher. My grandfather could teach, but I don’t have the temperament.”
“We’ll both make due. I’m a quick study, and I can read and write in Spanish. But seeing your drawings—it’s like I have all the pieces, but I can’t build the engine without instructions.”
“Engines? Like that machinery out there? Your caravan?”
“A necessary evil for what is coming next.”
Thursday shook his head. “You’ve got fuel, and you’ve got mechanics, but you can’t start the engines. The nanoswarms—”
Peligra silenced him with a gesture, the way she silenced the guards who’d wanted to tie him up. “Don’t change the subject. The maps. Your world. You will teach me?”
“I can’t. I need to leave.”
“But you have no other way to go.” Peligra knelt beside him and lifted her mask so he could see her face. Her voice was low and serious. “Between here and Castaic are scavengers, killers, and cannibals. And Saint de España. No, you’ll only get to Castaic through us. First to the Bone Rails, then to the Stars, then to the Five.”
