I held my damaged left arm with my right hand; slick red blood poured through my fingers. It was no use. I was going cold with shock and blood loss. I had trouble focusing my eyes. I could feel the start of a migraine coming on. Brian was curled up in a ball at my feet. His body was wracked with violent seizures and white foam drooled out of his mouth. In the chaos he'd lost his left ear. Blood drooled down from the side of his head and onto his torn shirt. His eyes glowed a menacing red.
He stood up and growled at me like a hungry wolf left to scavenge in an icy wasteland. There was no trace left of the brilliant, magical man I'd been falling in love with. He unexpectedly lunged toward me and drove his hand into my stomach, piercing the skin and forcing his way into the soft mess of my intestines.
The pain was intensely overwhelming and I cried out in shock. I put both hands on his shoulders and tried to drive him back, but it was no use. I could feel the strength seeping out of me as he rooted around in my guts, searching for something. An unbearable pain tore through my chest as he grabbed a fistful of my insides and yanked them out. He held them up triumphantly in front of my face and licked at the bloody entrails like they were a delicacy. The last thing I saw of the world as I collapsed onto the dirty, cigarette strewn asphalt of downtown Los Angeles was Brian taking a bite out of my still beating heart.
I'm coming Abuelita, I thought as the light left my eyes and the pain left my body. Tell the others I'm almost home.
*** *** ***
They came to drink in the year round sunshine,
each hoping to get their small taste of the elusive California Dream
once popularized by the entertainment industry
and the corporate media conglomerates.
Many of them lost their lives
within the first 24 hours. The few remaining survivors,
consisting of less than 5% of the original population, largely came
together to form groups capable of defending themselves
and engaging in guerrilla warfare
in an attempt to lock down the rapidly dwindling
essential resources and restore social order.
***
Dogtown Locals Union
The windows were thin as rice paper in the apartment on Clubhouse Avenue. We were two blocks from the boardwalk and the glistening waters of the Pacific. The frigid ocean wind easily pushed its way in, bringing winter chill with it like a cold breath moving over my exposed skin. The windows would rattle when motorcycles ripped up Pacific toward the Circle, which happened every ten to fifteen minutes like clockwork. The narrow streets made the sound rumble like unholy thunder, setting off car alarms for blocks, sending echoes through the hauntingly desolate alleys.
There were always loud noises in our neighborhood. You learned to block most of it out. Homeless people threw their heads back and wailed in anguish at the moon in the dead of the night. Helicopters tore past overhead without warning, flying low and fast, setting the hairs on my arm on edge and violently shaking the windows. Drunk couples wandering back after Townhouse or Nikki's or Hama Sushi had closed often stopped next to my bedroom window to argue at the top of their lungs. If they lit a cigarette in between hurling insults and accusations I was able to smell it with the windows shut, like they'd gone ahead and sat at the foot of my bed and fired up their cancer stick. It was just a part of life living in Dogtown. Things had always been like that, one way or another.
At sixteen I was basically an emancipated minor living with my half brother, Caesar, who at twenty-two was just a few years older than me. He'd picked the place because it was as close to Breakwater as we could get, where a two-bedroom apartment still cost nine hundred bucks a month. We'd grown up just blocks from here in the hood, the gang zone of Venice, where every available surface bore the famed moniker V13. It was spray painted on walls and bus benches, etched into glass, and even knifed into the rows of lollipop palm trees up and down the blocks, proclaiming their absolute rule.
Caesar taught me to surf, taking me to the Venice Pier and Rat Rocks and eventually Breakwater where it was always crowded. We didn't look that much alike but we had the same exact 'fuck you' attitude and people quickly learned not to pick on me for fear of earning Caesar's wrath. We shared a mom but had different and equally absent fathers. That's why we took to relying on each other.
Our mom wasn't around much either, to be honest. She was my age when she had Caesar and less than his age when she had me. She was never really cut out to be a mother if you know what I mean. She was always working or dating some new guy, trying to get him to marry her and take her away from her shitty life. Eventually the guy would bolt and she'd blame us for it, going between bouts of depression and drunken binges where she'd tell us that this wasn't the life she was meant to live. Yeah tell me about it, right? Mom was pretty dramatic. I should be mad at her, but I'm not. It's hard to explain why; you just had to know her. She was really like a big kid at heart. Caesar took everything she did personally, but I grew up knowing better than to rely on her. You can only be forgotten after school so many times before you stop believing the excuses. By the time I was ten I'd stopped even caring. I spent most of my free time surfing or getting online to memorize girls Facebook pages. I didn't need her, or anyone else, for either of those things.
Caesar, on the other hand – he was all twisted up inside over her. He would try everything to get her to spend more time with us. When begging and guilt didn't work he switched to stealing from parked cars and skipping school to get high. The guys he hung out with were borderline sketchy to say the least. I wouldn't say they were gang members, but they were definitely some kind of crew. Most of them were in and out of jail for small stuff, doing a few weeks at a time and coming back to get in more trouble. Caesar was constantly up to his neck in shit too, but I'm still convinced that was just because he was trying to get our mom to act like she gave a fuck. He even picked a fight with one of the old dudes mom brought home one night, hiding behind the front door and punching him in the back of the head when they came in.
The guy went fucking ape shit! He picked Caesar up by the throat and started shaking him around, hollering about being some kind of cop and did he want to get shot. It was pretty terrible. I can still see the way Caesar's black low top Converse shoes wagged back and forth like he was already dead, and I feel the chill of fear it sent through me. Mom eventually managed to get the guy to put Caesar down and just leave. When she asked if he was all right, Caesar exploded in a fit of angry tears.
“What do you care? You're out whoring around with dirty cops while we're all alone, as if you could give a shit! I wish that pig had killed me! Then maybe you'd give a fuck!”
Mom lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke right in his face, cold as ice.
“Life's unfair. I get it,” she droned on, sounding more annoyed than ever. “How do you think I feel? That guy was one of the few good ones and you just scared him off. Thanks.”
“One of the good ones? Tell that to my throat!”
“Listen, we can go round and round with this bullshit but I'd rather not. Instead of constantly blaming me for all your problems you ought to be thanking me. My parents smothered the shit out of us. They never let me do shit. You have all the freedom in the world, but you're just dead set on acting like a little cunt about it. When I was your age I'd have killed to have what you have.”
She stood up and grabbed her purse, moving toward the front door. Caesar looked outraged that she was taking off again.
“Where are you going now?”
“Out,” she said, digging for her keys. “Don't wait up. If I find what I'm looking for, I won't be bringing him back here – not after the little stunt you pulled.”
She turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her. Caesar picked up the lamp and hurled it against the wall. I cringed as it broke into a million tiny pieces, knowing I'd be the one to vacuum them up later. It was textbook abandonment shit, the way Caesar was acting out, but it didn't
even make a dent in her attitude. Shit. She barely tried to hide the fact that she didn't want us around, or conceal her feelings that we were holding her back in life and slowing her down.
By the time I was a freshman in high school, she'd stopped coming home for stretches that lasted anywhere from a night to a week. Caesar dropped out of school and started surfing full time. He slept in the afternoons and was gone late at night, coming home when the sun rose with groceries and breakfast. Eventually the sheriff put a notice on the door evicting us for not paying rent. Mom's phone was shut off when we called. That's when we knew she'd bailed on us for good.
I was freaking out at the time, thinking we were gonna have to sleep on the streets. I was worried about where I was gonna keep my board and what people at school were going to say. You know, shit like that. But Caesar came through. He got us set up on Clubhouse in a no-questions-asked sublet. The place had a full front lawn that was fenced in. It was a house that had been cut into quarters and turned into apartments. All our neighbors worked in production and were never home; except for Jen, our upstairs neighbor who rented us the crash pad for two months cash up front, with utilities and wireless internet included.
Caesar got an old beater of a car, a ‘74 Oldsmobile; it had primer instead of paint and sported white wall tires. It was a loud beast of a machine that stank and ate up gas. When you were riding in it you couldn't hear yourself think. Fucker loved that car too. He kept saying he wanted to restore it, maybe make flames shoot out the tail pipe, but it never happened. He parked it right next to my window too. That was usually how I knew he was home from wherever he'd been all night. I never asked him where he went. The truth is I didn't want to know. In no time at all we were doing better than we ever had. The fridge was stocked with food and beer. We had a new television with all the channels that we used to have to pirate. I had a new laptop. Caesar told me we were golden no matter what happened, that he had enough to make sure I could finish school, enough to last well past my eighteenth birthday. It was important to him that I did well, because he didn't get the chance to even try. That's why he flipped out whenever I'd ditch and get high. He was worried I'd go down the wrong path. I used to give him shit about riding me and all but the truth is it meant a lot to me, more than I ever told him. In a lot of ways he was my fucking hero, man. For real.
The new place had some security issues. I'd measured and cut a round wooden stick I picked up at the Playa Vista Home Depot, slotting it into the rusty metal window track. It was a neat trick I'd learned from my buddy Travis that allowed me to get some air into the room when I needed it, without letting in sex offenders, thieves, and junkies. Apartments that close to the water didn’t have AC. Most of those shit boxes were built back in the 50's or earlier. That meant I had to put a fan in the window to catch a breeze during the day. I'd also cut a white sheet of foam insulation that custom fit the window dimensions in the hopes that it would dampen the sound, then covered it with a black-out blind that laid flush with the wall, completely obscuring all light. I'm not gonna say it worked perfectly, but it was close enough. The only downside was I couldn't see shit going on outside unless I pulled the whole thing down.
It was late at night when the first Romero's started showing up in Venice, well past 2 a.m. My guess is that people mistook them for our run of the mill homeless, who we were used to walking past and stepping over anyway. The city had been busing them into our area for a while, gathering up tons of them from downtown and dropping them at the dog park directly across from our place. Some would wander off but most just milled around, waiting for the bus to come back later that night and pick them up again. In no time at all dealers were in the park moving product in plain sight, cars were being broken into, and a white girl from Missouri got raped and stabbed to death right out on the sidewalk. The city canceled the program, but the damage was done. We had dozens of violent new predators roaming the streets by then, nearly all of them mentally ill. Schizo's having heated arguments with invisible enemies or punching themselves in the head were a common sight. They picked up cigarette butts off the street and smoked them, rummaged through unlocked trash cans, and passed out right on the sidewalk during the midday heat, lost in a dope fix.
Every other week there was a new incident involving a transient who had escaped a mental hospital in Washington State or sexually assaulted a jogger in Santa Monica or used a chainsaw to cut off their landlord’s head in Florida before moving into their new cardboard condos outside our little beach paradise crash pad. You never knew if the crazy guy you saw on your walk to Campos to get a carne asada burrito was a garden variety nut job or a remorseless serial killer just waiting for you to say something to him so he could cut out your eyes and show them to you. And they were everywhere you needed to be, from the Sugar Rush truck illegally parked behind the Nile pot dispensary to Windward Farms Market across the street or the Subway or the old post office before they sold it off to some Hollywood hacks. You learned after a while just to ignore them, not to look them in the eyes when they approached you, to just keep walking. It became second nature to pretend that they weren't even there. I'm thinking people probably didn't realize what was happening in those first attacks until it was too late. All I am saying is that it wasn't uncommon to see some homeless war veteran dressed in tattered rags roaming the streets covered in filth and blood, moaning and growling and acting threatening toward random people, especially late at night.
I remember getting up at one point because I heard a siren in the distance that didn't ever seem to arrive. I went to take a piss and when I came back I noticed it sounded like there were people outside milling about in Caesar's parking space. Like I said, that kind of thing happened all the time. I've walked up on people huddled up next to my front door smoking crack at every single apartment I've lived in Venice. Most of them will bolt the minute you call them out, just drop their pipe and run as fast as their legs will carry them. Some will turn on you, like a rabid animal. You gotta watch out for those, man. Never try to get between a junkie and his fix because you're gonna lose. Fuck, I'm sixteen and I know that shit for a fact. It's just not worth it, especially since they know where you live. After a while you learn it's best not to get involved in everything going on around you. If you can just ignore it, eventually it will go away.
“Don't engage, Yermo,” Caesar would tell me all the time, calling me by my nickname instead of the full Guillermo.
I put some earplugs in so I wouldn't have to listen to the assholes making all that noise by my window, and went back to sleep. That's why I didn't hear my bedroom window shatter. One minute I was asleep and the next I was pinned under the foam cut out, fighting to get up. I thought for sure we were being robbed, that we'd been targeted for a home invasion. Caesar told me to keep the blinds shut so people passing by on Pacific wouldn't see our stuff, and to always double check that the door was locked when I went out. He told me not to let my friends from school or anyone else in while he was away. I was pretty good about it too, so I didn't think it was my fault we were being hit. I'd snooped in his room only once when he left it unlocked, right after we'd moved in, and found a box full of hundred dollar bills. I figured someone had found out about the money and was making a move while he was out. I thought maybe that's what the voices had been, people plotting the robbery just outside my window, making sure my brother wasn't coming back.
Everything felt like it was happening really fast. I remember that much. One minute I was pulling my earplugs out and the next I was crawling on my hands and knees over the sandy carpet toward the living room and kitchen, trying not to cut my hands on the glass. Using my foot I hooked the door shut, slamming it in a homeless looking guys face. I knew it was only going to buy me a few seconds. My mind was racing to come up with a real plan. I jumped to my feet and grabbed the machete we kept near the bathroom door; ready to defend our home. The front window looking out over the park was smashed in and there were two guys fighting in front of the new flat screen. One gu
y looked all crazed like he was on PCP. He was shoving the hipster douche bag other guy – the one who looked like he'd just walked back from the Other Room on Abbott Kinney – down onto the sofa while trying to get his face as close to his as possible. Something about him wasn't right, but I couldn't tell what it was. It was just an animal feeling that made my legs tremble. The door behind me shook as the other intruders pounded on it. They should have easily been able to open it by turning the handle, but instead it was like they were trying to shove their way mindlessly through the wooden barrier, using their bodies as dead weight. They wailed like sick animals, but I stood frozen in place watching the two men fighting in front of me. The hipster reeked like cologne and hair gel, despite wearing a beanie. The homeless looking guy naturally just smelled of piss and shit.
Eventually, the guy in the ironic t-shirt looked like he was getting tired of fighting the homeless maniac off. I could see his arms starting to shake, his bulging biceps no use against the relentless force of his opponent. It was over in an instant. The dude's arms went all spaghetti on him and the homeless guy leaned down calmly and bit the guy’s nose off, right down to his waxed mustache. The guy starts screaming at the top of his lungs, but it doesn't last long because the homeless guy bites off his tongue, leaning in like he's gonna make out with the guy and coming up with the wriggling pink flesh between his teeth. Blood is pouring all over the hipsters desecrated face and I can hear him crying like he's underwater as he starts to drown in his own mess. The homeless guy looks up at me with this disinterested look, still chewing on the tongue like it's a wad of bubble gum. That's when I realized what was going on, when I saw those dead eyes for the first time.
There's no other way to describe them. It's like you can tell there is no life in there, no sign of a human being; that whatever has taken over is a totally alien intelligence of some kind. Something inside of me felt this complete revulsion, but not only because of what this thing had just done. I don't know how to describe it. It was like realizing you're in the presence of a dangerous fucking predator. First the overwhelming fear kicks in, unlocking your muscles and making you want to run, but then afterward there was this really pure feeling of anger that came over me. I went from being ready to jump out the shattered front window and run down the street screaming at the top of my lungs, to wanting to cut that fucking monsters head off. So that's exactly what I did.
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