by Tom Abrahams
He buttoned the coat, which he’d stolen from the same man who’d previously owned his tent, laced up his boots, and grabbed a forty-caliber HK pistol he’d looted from a pawnshop two days after the attack. While others were taking televisions they couldn’t use, jewelry that had virtually no value, and rifles they couldn’t easily conceal, he’d gone straight for the small weapons. He’d taken the HK, a couple of boxes of ammunition for its ten-round magazine, and a couple of folding knives that might come in handy. He’d tried to snag another handgun, but a much larger man had beaten him to it. Still, he was happy with his haul, and he’d left the pawnshop through the shattered plate-glass picture window unafraid of being stopped by police.
Law enforcement of any kind was essentially nonexistent. They probably knew better than to try to demand order in the chaos and anarchy of a post-nuclear Los Angeles.
Clint unzipped the tent again and climbed through the opening. He set his boots into the shifting, ashy sand that surrounded his homestead and closed the tent behind him. He blew ash from his nose and pulled the coat’s hood over his head.
He stuffed his hands into the coat pockets, keeping one hand on the HK’s molded grip and the other around a small brown bag he’d secured the day before, and trudged toward the boardwalk and its row of end-to-end businesses. When his boots hit the cement boardwalk, he pivoted his body back toward his tent. It was among a sea of them that stretched for what looked to Clint like a quarter mile. Some of the tents, like his, were enclosed nylon structures. Others were blue tarps pitched on scraps of wood or metal. Still, many were little more than duct-taped cardboard boxes fashioned into structures large enough to accommodate however many people called them home.
Clint didn’t worry about someone breaking into his tent or stealing it. It would be within sight the length of his short trip. He spun on his heel, twisting a pattern in the flaky accumulation on the cement, and ambled to the shop he’d visited every day since arriving at the beach.
None of the shops, such as they were, sold anything anymore. Money was useless. And most of the T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other touristy swag had been stolen within the first week. The pharmacies still operated, though their supplies of medicinal herb were dwindling.
Only the fortune-teller was still at work. She had hours-long lines of people who wanted her insight into what their lives held in the near and distant future. They paid her with whatever they could. The fortune-teller was well-fed and high most of the time. Clint walked right past her as he wove his way into an electronics stall absent electronics. In the back of the shop, which the owner now used as a one-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot home, was a man named Filter.
That wasn’t his real name. It was a prison moniker that stuck because he was one who always had the latest information from the outside world. Everything, from sports to news to whose appeals were getting denied, was filtered through him.
Clint liked Filter. The two of them became friends and had stayed in touch after getting out. When the attacks happened, the only place Clint thought to go was Filter’s shop in Venice.
He knocked on the thin door that separated the front of the shop from the back. From behind it he heard a grumble, a couple of deadbolts click and slide, and then Filter’s scraggly, ghostlike face appeared in the thin opening between the door and its frame. His voice sounded like he’d been gargling with fallout.
“What?” he asked. He was wearing a faded T-shirt that bore the words, “Sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come”.
“You got it?” asked Clint. “It’s been three days.”
Filter cracked the door wide enough for Clint and his oversized coat to squeeze through. “What’s your hurry?” he asked and closed the door.
Clint stood inside the space, which was illuminated with organic beeswax candles that smelled like eucalyptus. He pulled one hand from his coat pocket and held out the small brown package.
Filter tugged on the bottom of the T-shirt, which covered the frayed waistband of drawstring sweatpants. He didn’t see the offering until he’d plopped back down into a weathered leather easy chair. He hung one of his legs over the side of it and crossed his hands at his chest. His eyes were cracked open only slightly more than the door had been when he’d first opened it.
“What’s that?” Filter asked.
“It’s what the doctor ordered,” said Clint, shoving the package toward his friend. “I managed to secure a little bit of it at a very reasonable price.”
Filter chuckled. “I bet you did.”
Clint held out the package, and Filter made a halfhearted effort to lean forward and take it from him. Clint cursed at him for his lack of effort and tossed the package onto his lap.
Filter caught the bag and held it at his chest. “I’m exhausted, man. I can’t get any sleep. People croaking and hollering all night. It’s worse than doing time at the Q.”
Clint leaned on the rickety card table across from the easy chair. “You think so? I don’t think it’s that bad.”
“That’s because you live in a tent on the beach,” said Filter. “I have an actual roof and walls. People are banging on my door all night looking for a place to crash. All night.”
“I’ll trade you,” said Clint. “You can have my tent. I’ll take this place.”
“I’m good, thanks. I can sleep during the day when people are out scavenging for food.”
He unwrapped the package, revealing a trio of neatly rolled joints. He pinched one of them between his fingers and drew it to his nose, running it along his upper lip like a fine Cohiba. “Nice,” he said through his raspy voice. “Thanks.”
“So?”
“Oh,” said Filter. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s over there on the counter next to the sink.”
Clint quickly crossed the room to the wall opposite the easy chair. There was a cabinet sink with a mirrored medicine cabinet above it. A long crack ran diagonally across the mirror’s face, and the magnet on the door was missing, so it hung open permanently.
Next to the sink was a rough-hewn cedar plank potting bench that Filter called the counter. Clint bellied up to it and picked up what he’d come for. He held it in his hand and turned it on. A faint hiss crackled through the speaker, and he held it up to his ear. He looked over at Filter, who had one of the blunts dangling from his lips.
“Does it work?” asked Clint with a suspicious tone. “You told me you could get it to work.”
Filter lit a match he’d seemingly produced from thin air and held it to the end of the joint. The paper glowed orange, and Filter sucked in a healthy toke, holding it in his lungs for a few seconds before exhaling. He sank more comfortably, if that was possible, into the chair.
Clint took a couple of steps toward Filter and the dissipating sweet smoke of the marijuana cigarette. He shook the blue handheld radio in his hand, repeating his question about its functionality. Filter held out the blunt, offering it to him.
“No, thanks,” said Clint. “The radio, though. It’s static.”
“You’ve got to tune it,” said Filter. “I fixed the antenna. That was the problem. There was a loose wire. It works.”
Clint turned the radio over, looking at the quartet of buttons on its face. Above the buttons was an LCD screen. On its right side were a couple of dials. Stretching from its top was a telescoping antenna.
Filter pointed the blunt at the radio. “It’s got FM, AM, and world band. You can listen to some cool dudes from all over the place. I heard some radio geeks talking about New York City. It’s toast. Brooklyn Bridge is gone. Statue of Liberty is gone.”
Clint changed the frequency to FM and scanned the dial. He got nothing but static.
Filter drew in another drag, holding it in his cheeks while Clint fumbled with the AM frequencies. He blew it out and coughed. “Whew,” he said. “That’s stronger than usual.”
Clint narrowed his eyes, frustrated with the lack of reception and his friend’s inability to postpone getting high until he’d left. He took anoth
er step closer and snatched the blunt from Filter’s hand and tossed the radio in his lap.
“It’s still not working.”
A Cheshire cat smile filled Filter’s otherwise revenant face, and he plucked the radio from his lap. He fiddled with it for a minute and then tossed it back to Clint, who caught it against his chest.
“AM and FM don’t work,” he said. “The frequencies work, but nobody’s broadcasting. All the stations are gone, man. You gotta use the world band. Shortwave. That’s the only way you’re going to hear something. And it’s only going to be if someone is on the air when you happen to be listening.”
Clint felt heat in his cheeks. “Oh,” he said. “Got it.”
“Now give me back my weed,” said Filter. “Gotta get the buzz going.”
Clint handed back the joint, thanked Filter, arranged to see him later, and showed himself out of the room. The cool air hit him again as he exited the shop and stepped onto the boardwalk. He looked in both directions, noting the crowds were building as the encampment came to life. People were getting up and moving about. He imagined most of them were on their daily hunting and gathering expeditions. Clint turned off the radio and slipped it into his pocket. He put the hood over his head and weaved his way back toward his tent. As he approached, he checked to make sure it was still zipped shut, which it was, and he kept walking.
He swallowed hard against the bitter, acidic taste of bile on his tongue. He’d found it harder to keep down what little food he’d had over the past few days. He shrugged it off as a bug, even though his intuitive gut told him it was something more.
He moved beyond the dozen rows of tents and their close facsimiles and stood at the edge of the tide. A line of ash, thicker than the rest of the accumulation covering the beach, looked like a wiggly line of wet lint that stretched endlessly up and down the beach. He turned to the right, toward Santa Monica, and beyond the gauzy haze of the ash stood the iconic Ferris wheel. It wasn’t moving, aside from its carriages swaying in the breeze. He couldn’t see the rising peaks of Topanga State Park or even the coast at Malibu. The gray that limited his sight was almost overwhelming. He looked left toward the long fishing pier that jutted out into the colorless Pacific. While there were a few people who’d cast their lines into the surf, there wasn’t much to catch, unless one wanted to pick up the dead ocean life that washed ashore with each high tide.
Clint wiped his eyelids clean of fresh ash and thought about the radio in his pocket. He’d traded valuable Kush, the stuff that came from overseas and wasn’t easy to procure, for a radio that had somehow survived the attack but might not be of any use. He let a wave of self-pity wash over him as the crash of the ocean lulled him into a self-reflective trance.
It had been more than a month since the attacks, since he’d barely escaped ground zero downtown, and none of his plans had materialized. He’d thought in those early hours, once he knew he wasn’t going to die immediately from radiation poisoning, that with his skill set and absent moral compass he’d be ruling the world by now.
He’d seen himself with ample food and water, squatting in some Hollywood hotshot’s Bel Air mansion, surrounded by men and women ready to do his bidding. Instead he was camping on a beach with countless other homeless transients, scrounging for morsels and droplets, lamenting his inability to conquer.
Clint was a natural leader. Despite a few disciplinary issues here and there, he’d been a good kid to a single mother, captain of his high school football team, senior class president, and had graduated with honors from Sacramento State with a degree in business administration.
There’d been a few run-ins with Sac State Police for minor altercations and drug possession, but with the help of a decent lawyer, they hadn’t derailed what was an otherwise successful college career. He’d focused on general management, and despite a tight job market, had been hired straight out of school by a large international energy management company in Fresno.
Shortly after he’d begun work, his mother died from a stroke and his girlfriend dumped him. Clint had taken it hard and began self-medicating to cope with the loss. Predisposed to addiction, as his absent father had died young from a heroin overdose, he quickly spiraled downward.
Within two years he was out of a job, living on the streets, and doing whatever he needed to do to score the next hit. Crime became a natural result of that need. He started by stealing from friends and pawning their belongings for what little cash they would provide. When he was out of friends, he turned to burglary.
He fell deeper into an inescapable hole. His addictions needed more and more to satisfy them. The way he chose to feed them became correspondingly violent.
He hadn’t killed anyone, but he’d come close. That had sent him to prison, where he spent the better part of a decade learning a new way of life. Adjusting to the outside, to the real world, had been close to impossible. Clint was lost.
He bounced from job to job, boardinghouse to boardinghouse, and never found his footing. His various business ventures never found footing. Now, close to forty years old, he was a cautionary tale of addiction and poor self-control.
There were plenty of addicts he’d known who had never intentionally harmed anyone or used their illness as an excuse for bad behavior. He’d met them. He’d stood before them, told them his name, and worked some of the twelve steps with them. Now he stood at the edge of the rolling gray tide awash with ash and barely resembling the Pacific he remembered as a child. He wondered what had become of those people; the ones who’d fought their battles and won, the ones who treasured their anniversary coins and their “One Day At A Time” medallions.
How were they coping with the apocalypse? Were they still clean? He ran his fingers along the molded pistol grip in his pocket and tried to remember names and faces. They didn’t come easily. Nothing did for Clint.
He turned his back on the ocean and surveilled the teeming masses. If he was going to fulfill his promise to himself and find that castle on a hill, he needed help. He needed others who would be willing to take advantage of the power vacuum that now existed.
Somewhere among the thousands of people who camped along the beach, he could find them. From his time in prison, he knew there was only one thing that could keep a man going when the future looked bleak. From behind those black bars and yellow-painted concrete walls of his cell, he’d learned a lot about the human condition.
A man didn’t need oxygen, food, or water to survive. He didn’t need a functioning brain or even a pulse. Sure, they all kept him living, but they didn’t help him survive. Surviving required an existential, elusive gift called hope. Hope was what sustained him during the dark nights and even darker days in that dank cell. Hope was what he clung to now, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of a stolen coat. If he could offer hope to some of the forgotten on the beach, he would earn their loyalty, and their muscle, and their faith.
***
Clint rubbed the space between his nose and his upper lip, trying to lessen the foul chicken-soup-like odor hanging in the air around the large man sitting in front of him. He tried not to be obvious about the nauseating smell, but it was getting more difficult the longer he sat with him in the collection of connected cardboard boxes the man had been using for shelter.
“What do I get out of it?” the man asked for the third time. He was sitting cross-legged in the largest of the boxes.
Clint sighed. He’d explained it already. If the man joined his new venture, he would get housing, food, women, and most importantly, hope. He wanted to tell the man to forget it. But he needed him.
The guy was huge, and he had a tattoo on his neck that told Clint he’d done time. It was an amateurish-looking “13” that was obviously done with a combination of black pen ink and shampoo or melted plastic. The number meant he was the member of a biker gang or one with roots in El Salvador. Clint couldn’t tell which from the man’s skin color. It didn’t matter to him. He repeated his pitch.
“You go wi
th me,” he said, “and we do what needs to be done. There are plenty of big houses on the west side. There are people who have more than they need. We relieve them of it. We live like kings.”
The man tilted his bald head back and scratched his neck. Clint noticed the scabs dotting his scalp. They were in various states of healing, and some looked infected.
The man nodded. “I gotta do what you say? Are you my boss?”
Clint blinked his attention away from one festering scab and shook his head. “I’m not your boss, I’m your leader. I make decisions so you don’t have to do it. I pick the places, the people, the jobs. You help me out. Together we live better than we would on this beach.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Leader sounds like boss to me.”
“A boss can fire you,” said Clint. “I can’t fire you. I lead you as long as you want to be led. You decide you don’t like what I have to say? Leave. Go do your own thing. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
The man scratched his neck again. “What did you say your name was?”
“Clint. What’s yours?”
“Jesse.”
“Where’d you do time?”
Jesse flinched at the question. He shifted his body away from Clint, which let loose a burst of body odor that made Clint want to retch.
“Why you ask that?” Jesse said in a suspicious tone. “You a cop?”
Clint laughed. “Do I look like a cop?” he asked rhetorically. “No. I asked because I did time at the Q. A good stretch.”
“For what?”
“Armed robbery. Aggravated assault. Attempted murder.”
Jesse’s eyes widened with surprise. “You?”
Clint nodded. “Got a monkey,” he said, referring to his addiction. “Had to feed it.”
A thin smile of recognition spread from one corner of Jesse’s mouth. “Lancaster.”
Lancaster was a state prison in Los Angeles County. It housed more than thirty-five hundred inmates, all men.
“You in?” Clint asked.
