by Tom Abrahams
Wherever they were, he knew he couldn’t stay in their home long. Maggie sat at his side. She was panting and shifting her weight from one paw to the other.
Danny walked back to the sofa, reached into his backpack, and withdrew the tumbler of water. Before he opened it, he had a second thought.
He worked his way through the furniture, much as he had done amongst the stalled traffic on the streets, and found the kitchen. He opened the cabinet next to the sink and found a large bowl. He put the bowl in the stainless, double-sided sink and pushed up on the faucet handle. The stream of water poured into the bowl. Danny ran his finger through it. It was room temperature. He filled the bowl and set it on the floor for Maggie.
She wagged her tail and dipped her muzzle into the water, lapping at it greedily with her long tongue. Danny turned back to the sink and inserted a stopper into the drain. He turned on the water, let it run until the sink was full, then worked his way to the home’s lone bathroom.
He filled the sink there, as well as the cast-iron claw-foot tub perched on the slate flooring. He knew water would become scarce, as valuable as gold, in the coming days and weeks. The more water he could save for himself, or the couple should they come home, the better.
When he went back into the living room, he could hear the splash and slap of Maggie’s thirst. She was still drinking from the bowl. He leaned against the fluted column that separated the kitchen from the living room and looked out the window. The ash was falling now.
For some time, Danny had kept himself isolated from the world. That isolation, for the most part, was intentional and figurative. This was involuntary and literal.
CHAPTER 5
Saturday, June 21, 2025
DAY ZERO
Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California
Clint Anthony could barely breathe. His lungs burned; his muscles weakened. He stumbled and caught himself before he fell. He was running as fast as he could, but he could not outrun the debris, the fallout, the heat.
The outer fringes of the blast wave caught him as it dissipated. It was enough to give him first-degree burns on his neck, the backs of his legs, and his hand. It was enough to bump him to the asphalt, where he hit his head and, for a brief moment, lost consciousness.
When he awoke moments later, he was certain he had died and gone to Hell. Behind him, stretching for miles, were the remains of buildings, cars, and people.
Screams and groans, flames and smoke, they all melted into a single visceral cacophony of pain.
Clint pressed his fists against the hot asphalt and pushed himself to his feet. He stood upright and then bent over at his waist to vomit. He was dizzy, and his vision blurred, yet despite the confusion swirling around his head, he knew what had happened. His home was under attack. His city was toast.
He raised one hand to his cheek and wiped away what he thought was sweat. When he pulled his fingers away, they were bloodied. His neck stung, as did his leg. It felt as if his cotton shirt was stuck to his back. His socks, which covered his ankles to the bottoms of his calves, felt as if they were part of his skin.
It was difficult to distinguish one searing pain from the other, but he did his best to ignore them and looked back at the black swell that spread outward like a canopy from a single thick column of smoke.
Debris rained from the sky. Bits of singed paper floated, parachuting to the ground. Soot poured from the sky in a constant blizzard of swirling ash. It was like he was caught in the middle of a nuclear snow globe and someone was shaking it violently.
Clint wiped his nose with the back of his hand and sucked in a choking breath of spoiled air. He coughed and then spat the phlegm onto the thickening layer of ash on the ground.
A gargling groan behind him caught his attention and he turned to face it. The noise leaked from a newly one-armed man sitting cross-legged at the curb. Blood leaked from his nose, his clothes were torn, a large gash cut across his bald head, and his eyes were fixed to his missing arm. He was mumbling about his arm.
“I need to find my arm,” he repeated again and again.
He had to find his arm.
Not far from the amputee was a pair of bodies. They were burned such that Clint couldn’t tell if they were men or women or one of each. He thought one of them might be alive. Outstretched fingers, dripping a gray liquid, twitched as if playing an invisible piano.
Beyond the bodies were the walking wounded. One was virtually indistinguishable from the next, all of them charred Angelenos stunned, irradiated, and struggling to survive.
Clint stumbled forward and caught his stride. He walked away from the carnage, the ash falling on him. His eyes scanned from one side of the street to the other as he walked, and he was struck by the relative silence.
There were no emergency sirens, no whirring helicopters overhead. All the cars, in fact, were stopped. They were stalled in the street. Some of them had collided. Some of them blocked his path, and he had to pick his way through the snarl on his way to nowhere.
Clint tried clearing his throbbing head to formulate a plan, but all he could think about was how clouded his mind was. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, trying to clear away the ash. As soon as he cleared it, more ash replaced it.
A young woman, her face streaked with mascara and her white, formfitting dress stained with filth, stood on a curb to Clint’s left. She held a broken, red-soled heel in one hand and her phone in the other. She was preoccupied with the phone. Her face was crinkled with frustration as she tapped at it and held it skyward.
She looked like Southern California. She was blonde, her skin sun kissed. The bag on her arm was saddle-colored calfskin. It probably cost more than six months of his rent. He was sure she was part of the SoCal elite that was all about money, status, and appearance. She likely spent her days in Brentwood or Beverly Hills and partied at One Oak and took free drinks for granted.
A familiar gut-grinding ache coursed through his body and he clenched his fists. It took every bit of restraint to ignore her and keep moving. He’d known women like her. He’d gone to jail over women like her.
He walked another half block and stopped, looking over his shoulder at the woman. She was still there.
Clint eyed the large bag, its sloppy handle draped across the crook of her elbow. He bit his lower lip and inhaled a sting of air through his nostrils, exhaled, and scanned his surroundings, his eyes searching for the nonexistent police. For a moment, he contemplated taking that bag, grabbing whatever was in it and leaving the woman empty-handed. He could get away with it. He’d gotten away with it before. He’d also been caught before.
But this was chaos. People were consumed with their own survival, and nobody would be able to distinguish her screams for help from those of the dying or badly injured. Clint took another breath and coughed it out.
Now wasn’t the time. There would be plenty of opportunity in this unsurvivable apocalypse to prey on those too weak to stop him.
The woman glanced his way and he averted his eyes. He lowered his head and forced his body to walk more quickly toward wherever it was he was going.
He wandered the streets, taking measure of the fear on people’s faces. They weren’t prepared to live in a world like the one he imagined was evolving before them. It was evident in their sallow skin, the gape of their mouths, the wide black pupils that occupied their eyes.
Clint had seen that look before. He’d seen it on the grim, frightened faces of new inmates, of the young men with freshly shorn heads and V-neck smocks too big for their spindly frames. They were the ones who wouldn’t last long. They were the ones who would ball up in the fetal position on the shower floor or the corner of the yard.
This new world, only minutes old and still ripe with the smell of burning flesh and hair, was far more familiar to someone like Clint than the one that preceded it; the one with rules, where birthright and privilege took precedence over those who started the game with nothing in their pockets and no one to show them h
ow it was played. This newly chaotic world was, like prison, Darwinian in its purest form. It was primal and raw.
He glanced up at a singed billboard pronouncing the Southland’s number one news anchor was some glue-haired Barbizon model named Lane Turner. The man’s arms were folded across his chest in a “trust me, I’m smart” kind of way. His cheeky smile stretched across his tanned face. But in the center of billboard, right between his twinkling eyes was a gaping hole, its edges black and smoking. Something had shot through it, ruining Lane Turner and the ad which hoped to attract Angelinos to his nightly news program.
Though wounded and woozy, thinking about the coming possibilities, Clint began to stride through the crowded streets with confidence. He pulled his shoulders back and raised his chin. The end was a new beginning for him. He held the cards because the rules no longer applied.
A smile crept across his face, and when a tendril of blood from his forehead reached his lips, he licked it into his mouth. This was a good day. All he needed now were people who could help him make it better.
CHAPTER 6
Saturday, July 5, 2025
DAY FOURTEEN
Westwood, California
Dub bit into the last of the chicken nuggets. He’d overcooked it and it was rubbery. If he dropped it on the floor, it might have bounced back up into his hand. He didn’t say anything to his friends, hoping they wouldn’t notice. It didn’t matter.
“I can’t believe the last chicken nugget I’m ever going to eat tastes like complete and total crap,” said Barker. He was chewing wildly with his mouth open. “I didn’t know you could screw up chicken nuggets. That’s like making a bad pizza. It’s virtually impossible.”
“Yeah,” said Michael Turner. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Dub, you managed to ruin chicken nuggets. I mean, that’s pretty impressive.”
“These aren’t nearly as bad as the pot stickers though,” said Barker. “Those might have glued my jaw shut if I’d let them set up in my mouth.”
Everyone at the table but Dub laughed. Keri nudged him with her shoulder, and a smile leaked onto his face. They had not left the dorm much in the previous two weeks. They’d spent most of it hoarding what supplies they could and securing them in places they thought might be safe from intruders.
There were forty people living in their building. They figured there were no more than a couple of hundred on campus. In addition to its being summer when the bombs dropped, it was a weekend, and a lot of kids had gone home. That left the out-of-state kids and a few employees who, for some reason, had nowhere else to go and felt obligated to stay.
They had raided several of the dining halls nearest their dorm building. In the first couple of days, they managed to eat the vast majority of the fresh fruits and vegetables on hand, then started eating the frozen protein. There was fish, chicken breasts, short ribs, hamburgers and hot dogs, and the chicken nuggets.
While the ovens and refrigerators no longer worked, the walk-in freezers managed to keep much of the food cold for ten days. The gas cooktops in the dining hall kitchens still worked with the help of a lighter or match, and there were enough jugs of cooking oil and distilled water to last six months at least.
They were careful with the water, reusing it for several meals. It made the pasta taste like the pot stickers and the pot stickers taste like boiled hot dogs. The oil they drained and recycled, pouring it back into a single jug.
Food consumed much of their daily lives. When they weren’t sleeping, playing cards, or debating the merits of staying versus leaving, they were either thinking about eating, talking about it, or doing it.
They took turns cooking and cleaning. Nobody complained about the work. Sleep, however, was different.
Sleeping wasn’t as easy. Despite a scheduled rotation to ensure someone was always watching the first-floor entrance to the dorm, nobody ever got more than a couple of hours at a time.
Dub and Keri shared his bunk. She didn’t want to be alone in her single, and he was happy to have her with him. Both, however, complained of the other’s restlessness. Dub shuddered and sweated in his sleep. Keri mumbled and spoke gibberish.
Barker complained jokingly about his cell phone’s inability to record them both and post it on the internet. Dub took the joke as a passive-aggressive complaint about Barker’s own inability to sleep because of the noise he and Keri made.
“Stop whining,” Dub had told him. “You’re not paying a dime for tuition right now, and your room and board is free. It’s like you’re on a full scholarship.”
Barker hadn’t laughed. “Prison gives you a free cot and three hots a day too.”
Nobody but Barker had found that funny. Dub already felt like they were incarcerated. For the most part, their movements had been restricted to moving between their high-rise and the dining hall. That, in and of itself, was adventure enough.
The ash, still falling from the darkened sky and accumulating across the entirety of the four-hundred-acre campus, was toxic. They all knew it. Each time they moved from one building to the next, they did what little they could to keep from breathing it, from allowing it into their eyes and nostrils and mouths.
Dub wore a pair of ski goggles he’d brought with him to school. He’d expected weekly trips to Mountain High or Big Bear, but like so many of his initial college plans, those trips never materialized. He’d gone once as a freshman.
He also bundled up with a hoodie and a barn jacket, drawing the hood tight over his head and cinching the drawstrings as far as they would go.
If the wind were particularly strong, as it was frequently now, he’d wear a mask over his face fashioned from strips of burlap he’d found in the room of an art major who’d left before the attack and hadn’t returned.
The goggles were on his head, the burlap pulled low around his neck as he chewed on the final chicken nugget. It was his fourth. It was more than enough.
“So, Chef William,” said Barker, “how are we doing with supplies? Still a lot of food back there?”
Dub frowned. “Don’t call me William. Only my mom calls me that.”
“Sorry,” Barker said. “I was just kidding.”
Keri adjusted a large scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. “We have plenty,” she said. “Several weeks, I bet. If we ration a little more judiciously, we could stretch it even more.”
Michael wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “It’s not enough. No matter how much we have, it’s not enough. Eventually we’ll run out.”
“What do you suppose we do then?” asked Dub. “We can’t leave. We have nowhere to go. And we have no idea what it’s like out there.”
“I heard there’s a gang of cannibals,” said Barker. “They’re going house to house looking for people to eat.”
Keri rolled her eyes. “Where did you hear that?”
Barker shrugged. “A guy on the third floor.”
“Who?” Keri pressed, her brow furrowed.
Barker leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s just what I heard. I heard the whole city is gone. Other cities too.”
“Those are rumors,” said Dub. “There’s no way anybody could know what’s going on. We have no way to communicate.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” said Michael.
“What do you mean?” asked Keri.
“In Boelter Hall there are a bunch of radios,” said Michael. “There’s a ham radio club. They meet there. Met there. I bet there are radios there. I bet if we—”
“How do you know this?” Keri cut in.
“I’m a mechanical engineering major,” he said. “I know a lot of things.”
Keri lowered her chin and narrowed her eyes. “Seriously?”
Michael ran his hands through his thinning, curly red hair. “I’ve got friends in electrical engineering who are in the club. I took Calc 32B with them. I’ve heard them talk about it.”
“You’re suggesting we go find one of these radios?”
; Michael shrugged. “I’m just saying we can’t stay here forever. A month. A couple of months. Even six. But beyond that we’ve got to have a plan. We need to know what’s out there, right?”
“They could be fried,” said Barker. “The EMP. What if they don’t work?”
“It’s worth a shot,” said Michael. “We’ve spent two weeks doing nothing but subsisting. We need more than that. What about our families?”
“What about them?” asked Barker.
Michael shook his head. He spoke louder, more forcefully, with a hint of exasperation. “We have no idea if they’re alive or dead. We don’t know if they’re trying to come get us or not. Don’t you want to know that?”
Barker frowned. “Getting on a radio doesn’t mean we find anyone, let alone our parents. My family’s in DC. Yours is in North Carolina. That’s like a needle in a haystack.”
“You can’t find the needle if you don’t look,” said Michael. “And we can’t do nothing just because we might fail at something.”
“You sound like a philosophy major instead of an engineer,” quipped Barker.
Dub agreed. “He’s right. We’re good for now, but now isn’t forever. Eventually we’ll need to leave. We can’t do that without knowing what’s out there. And we won’t find out anything about our families without trying.”
“Where’s Boelter Hall?” asked Barker.
Kerri looked at him askance. “How can you not know that?”
Barker shrugged. “I’m undeclared. All of my classes are on north campus.”
“Ten-minute walk,” said Michael. “South of Ackerman.”
“Easy enough,” said Dub. “Let’s do it.”
***
A rap at his door caught his attention. “Dub,” said Keri, “you ready?”
Dub glanced over his shoulder at Keri, admiring her slender, sporty physique. “As ready as I’m gonna be,” he said.
Keri moved into the room and glided between the bunks to the window next to Dub. She put a hand on his arm and squeezed. “We don’t have to go,” she said, her New Orleans drawl pinging the words. “We could stay here.”
