In an instant, I raised the machete and brought it down as hard and fast as I could toward the undead creature. The blade felt like it hummed as it came down and connected with the back of the zombie’s neck. His head rolled clean off and onto the floor. His body stayed on top of the injured guy, hands still pinning him down, locked into place. It reminded me of a praying mantis for some reason, holding on to its victim even after they'd eaten off their head. I looked down to see the decapitated skull make a lazy turn and come face up next to my feet, the mouth still chewing. I heard once that a person's brain could live like up to six minutes if they got their head cut off. I didn't know about this walking nightmare, but I didn't plan on taking any chances. I drove the point of the blade directly between the thing’s eyes. It went still almost instantly, like a loud kids toy after the batteries have been pulled out.
The man on the sofa began to sit up and growl. Blood now poured from his eyes and his hair was falling out in clumps. He was turning into whatever these fucking things were. I knew I didn't have long. I grabbed a pair of flip-flops from the shoe bin and unlocked the front door, cautiously swinging it open. There was movement out in the darkness beneath the trees in the park, but the street looked empty at first glance. I heard my bedroom door give way as several more monsters came crashing in from the living room. I shut and locked the door behind me, despite the smashed window, hoping it would slow them down. With my machete in my right hand I ran down Pacific toward Westminster, turning right and bolting as fast as I could for the coffee shop on Speedway where Shiloh worked. At the time it seemed like the smartest thing to do, but once I was outside I realized I’d made a huge mistake. The creatures were everywhere, trying to get into the apartments and cars with frightened people in them. The only reason I'm alive right now is because there was so much chaos going on that they didn't have time to single me out. I was a blur moving past them in the night and cutting off anything that reached for me. By the time I'd made it one short block I'd seen a burning car with people trapped inside, three people being eaten alive in the middle of the street by ghouls with bloody grins, and a guy in a Venice Originals sweatshirt with a sledgehammer knocking fiends over and bashing their brains out like that old comedian on YouTube who used to shower his audiences with watermelon. I'd also taken off three hands and someone’s head with the eyes already torn out.
As I reached the corner of Speedway I got a good look at the boardwalk. Zedheads were locked in an epic battle with the local crusty punks and hippie burnouts who slept under the palm trees on the grass mounds near the sand. Turning to look behind me I saw I had one of the creepy fuckers following me. He looked about twenty-five, but his skin was all covered in puss and boils and his left eye was hanging slightly out of the socket, looking like a Jack In The Box. He sniffed the air, then roared and started running at me on disjointed-looking limbs. I could tell right away that he had a broken leg. The bone was popping out of his jeans. It also looked like he was missing part of his left foot, which slowed him down some. Still he was making good time in my direction, hobbling along like he couldn't feel any pain.
I knew if I could make it to Travis's place on the corner of Speedway and Horizon, a few blocks up and behind the Sidewalk Cafe, that I would be fine. There was a high fence surrounding his front yard and it had a gated entry. Normally, I'd meet him at the coffee shop and we'd walk back past his place, past the new skate park and zip line, and out to the big metal V sculpture that overlooked Breakwater so we could check the surf. We'd timed it to take about fifteen minutes. That night I tore through Speedway and up to his gate in less than three, the breath burning in my lungs as I entered the gate and shut it behind me. Not a second later I heard the monster that was chasing me let out a desperate howl of anguish as it threw its body at the boards in frustration. If that thing had been fully functional instead of running with a broken leg I might not have made it. I was shaking all over from the adrenaline rush. I felt like I was going to piss myself as I leaned over and looked back out onto the street through a small hole in the fence. I could see others being drawn by all the noise this one was making, and knew if I stayed put on the patio it would only be a matter of time before they tore down the fence one plank at a time.
I turned and dug the hidden spare key out of the planter bed, then ran up the stairs toward the landing taking the stairs two at a time. I didn't bother to look back. I'd seen enough at that point to know I needed to get as far away from whatever was going on as possible. I slid the key into the lock and opened the door. Once you’re inside Travis’s apartment, there is a huge set of wooden stairs that leads up to a spacious entertainment area. Travis's room is in the back and his mom's room is up by the front when you first come in. Just like my mom, Janice wasn't really around all that often. I stepped in and shut the door behind me, locking it again and fixing the chain in place as well. Unlike our place on Clubhouse the house on Horizon is super secure, with a heavy wooden door that bolts shut. The boards creaked and groaned as I thumped upstairs with my machete in hand. When I reached the top I saw Travis rigidly standing there, looking white as a ghost. He had a sawed-off shotgun in his hands that he was pointing at me like he didn't know who I was. I looked down and saw that I was covered in blood. I hadn't even realized what I must have looked like.
“You better say something fast bro, before I paint your fucking infected brains all over the walls. You hurt? They get you? Speak up, Yermo.”
“Dude? Where'd you get the gun?” I laughed.
Travis lowered it.
“You fucking asshole,” he said. “I thought you were one of them.”
“One of what?”
“I don't know, man,” Travis said, scratching the back of his neck and letting out a yawn. “You were out there. Why don't you tell me? There have been people fighting in the streets all night and not one helicopter or cop car in sight. Can you believe that shit? Since when are there no ghetto birds up with the spotlights?”
I walked over and looked out the upstairs windows onto Speedway and into the alleys. The chaos outside hadn't even slowed. There were still people fighting and dying outside, still people calling out for help in between screaming in pain, still monsters attacking and eating people like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“It's not letting up either.”
“It's like the gates of hell burst open and vomited this wretched shit storm out onto the streets.”
“That sounds about right, bro.”
I sat down on the couch and he sat in the chair across from me, putting the shotgun in his lap. We didn't say anything after that. We just listened to the world coming to an end. I fell asleep wondering what had happened to Caesar. I hoped like hell that he was okay.
*** *** ***
I woke up the next day to the sound of low moaning outside. The screaming was now long over. Truth be told it was relatively quiet, especially with no planes overhead anymore. The last time that happened was on 9/11 when I was just a little kid. Travis was still sitting up straight across from me, but he was snoring loudly and his foot was twitching.
I got up and walked over to the window, checking outside. It was hard to believe what my eyes were showing me. There were actual corpses walking the streets of Venice Beach in search of victims, blood staining the front of whatever they were wearing when they'd been turned. I didn't see anyone at first glance that looked remotely human anymore. A big black guy that looked like a former body builder stopped shuffling past the window and began sniffing the air. He had on a Gold's Gym tank top and MC Hammer pants. His arms looked like chewed beef, with open gashes pouring out puss and blood. There was a deep gash in his forehead that looked like it had been put there by someone fighting for his life, someone who most likely hadn't escaped him. He lifted his jaw slightly and sniffed again, and I could see that part of his lip had been chewed off. A snarling mess of yellow, chipped teeth protruded through the gash. He turned to look up for me, having identified that there was a living
breathing human nearby, but I ducked back from the window before he could spot me. I felt my heart thumping in my chest even though I knew he couldn't reach me up at Travis's place. I thought about the dead man's eyes I'd stared into the night before, the one whose head I'd chopped off. It had been like staring into the abyss.
I sat back down and turned on the television, but all I got was static. Slowly Travis began to stir.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to get a signal,” I said, flipping through the channels. “Looks like someone cut your cable last night, man.”
“It's not cable,” he said. “It's satellite, and I'd have heard if someone had gotten up on the roof and tried to steal my dish. I'm pretty sure we both would have heard, bro.”
“That can't be right,” I shot back, still flipping though the static. “It's not like they’re not up there still, floating around. Besides DISH Network has to program this shit far in advance. Even if it is the end of the world, there should still be something on the boob tube.”
“Could be worse,” He mumbled. “Could still have fucking Time Warner Cable.”
“You'd think you'd still get basic channels, like one through thirteen. Channel 5 will definitely have coverage of whatever this is.”
“Who watches local news on television? What are you, 50?”
“I like watching KTLA. The weather guy, Mark Kriski, is fucking funny. Plus cable news never has any local shit on it.”
“I'm pretty sure if the news still exists, they're covering what's happening here.”
“Yeah I guess,” I said, feeling disappointed. “I'd just prefer to hear about it from Sam Rubin. It might be easier to take that way.”
Travis shook his head at me. He got up and wandered to the bathroom. I could hear him relieving himself since he'd left the door wide open. He walked back out.
“Any luck, champ?”
“None at all,” I said, throwing the remote on the floor. “Gimme your iPhone.”
“It's on the counter.”
I picked it up and dialed Caesar, but the phone was dead. It didn't even ring.
“It's not working either?”
“How can you be so fucking calm about this?” I turned on him. “What the fuck, man?”
“Take it easy, Yerm. I just woke up.”
The sounds outside grew louder and through it all, I heard a guy yelling. I leaned back out cautiously and saw all of the Zedheads moving in one direction toward the corner of Horizon and Speedway where a dude in a trucker hat was swinging some kind of homemade weapon at them. It looked like he'd driven a bunch of sharp nails and spikes through a heavy wooden table leg. He was on his own, but he didn't seem to be in a big hurry. He let them approach him and then brought the stick down hard into the zoms heads and faces, giving out a karate scream each time. It almost looked like one of those old-school arcade games.
After a couple of minutes, the guy figured out that he'd drawn in way more heat than he could handle on his own. That's when he ducked around toward the front of the house. I heard him banging on the downstairs door after that.
“Whatever you do, don't fucking let him in,” Travis said, looking freaked out, but I was already on my way down, taking two steps at a time and bracing myself on the walls so I didn't slip. “I'm serious, man…don't fucking open the door. He might be infected.”
“You don't know that, man,” I yelled back up to him. “Besides the longer he's out there the more likely he'll draw them to us. We gotta do something.”
I threw the door open to find him just getting ready to walk away. He turned back to face me, a smile blossoming on his tan, wrinkled face. His eyes twinkled like something out of a fucking Christmas special.
“Thanks, brother!”
He grunted as he passed me, leaving the distinct smell of weed and beer. I tried to examine him for bite marks, but I didn't see any. Taking one last look, I saw that the guy had shut and locked the gate behind him. The patio was still clear for the moment. I shut and locked the door, then hurried upstairs to find Travis pointing the sawed-off at our new guest. The guy smirked, then set to raiding the fridge without invitation, chomping into some deli meat and downing a beer in a single gulp.
“Who the fuck are you? No wait, I don't care. Get the fuck out.”
“Travis, come on man, be cool. We can't send him back out there.”
“I know you,” he said, turning back to me and wiping his mouth with the back of his dirty hand. “You're Caesar's li’l brother, the goofy foot charger with the sick cutback. What's your name again?”
“My friends call me Yermo,” I said, feeling stoked that he'd complimented my surfing.
“My name’s Brody, but my friends call me Bronan.”
Travis lowered the gun and his mouth hung open. Mine did too, as I recognized him. I'd never seen the guy out of the water before.
“You ever heard of me?”
Travis and I both shook our heads in unison, looking like freshly caught fish.
“Cool.”
Bronan was a legend in Venice. At age fourteen he'd been kicked out of his last foster home and had lived on the streets ever since. All he did was surf. By the time he was seventeen he was being called the New Z Boy, a reference to local legend Jeff Ho who created the original Zephyr Team, or Z-Boys. My brother, Caesar, practically worshiped him.
“He's not afraid to take on anything or anybody,” Caesar had once bragged. “Bronan is the real deal.”
I'd seen Bronan shove a guy who tried to drop in on him clean out of a wave earlier, before getting tubed. Caesar took me to Venice for a post-surf-session breakfast so he could flirt with the hot waitresses that worked there. We got to talking about Bronan and then Caesar told me that Jeff Ho, along with his buddy, Skip Engblom, were basically responsible for the skate board revolution, and that it had all started here in Dogtown.
“Skateboarding used to be considered a kids game,” Caesar explained in between shoving bacon and ketchup soaked hash browns into his mouth. Nothing works up your appetite like surfing! “It was a fad, like the Frisbee or the pet rock. It had all but gone out of style until Ho and his buddies started messing with it. They had a surf shop over on Main with a team of guys, but they started a skate team made up of local groms kinda as a gag. Stacy Perralta and Tony Alva and Jay Adams were on the team. They used to live right here, just like us. Shit man, Ho's the reason that guys like Tony Hawk or the fucking X Games even exist today. But Ho didn't get rich and move away. He's still here.”
“So how'd Bronan fit in?”
“I guess some photographer who shoots for Surfer magazine saw Brody riding one day by the pier and snapped a ton of pictures of him. Later the editor got flooded with feedback, so they sent the photog back out in search of more. Soon Brody started getting a following for his big aggressive air tricks.”
“I still don't get it,” I said, fending off another grab for my bacon.
“The guy snapping the pictures writes “New Z Boy” on the twenty sheets before he passes them to his editor, to set them apart from all the other shit he's shot that week. The editor thinks it's cool so he runs them with the title, “New Z Boy: The Next Generation of Dogtown.” Before you know it, everyone is flocking to Venice again to either surf with or take a picture of the young sensation. The name stuck. He brought pride back to us – not just to the sport, but to our city.”
“What happened?”
“Let's just say a lot of people began to notice Bronan's raw talent, and eventually the right guy took him under his wing and brought him into the inner circle of professional surfing. Next thing you know the guy is on the ASP World Tour with sponsors and everything, surfing against guys like Slater and Machado and the Irons brothers. It's like a dream come true, man.”
“So why is he back here if he was on the pro tour? Why surf this short break if you can surf long, easy lefts in Peru and get paid for it?”
“Nothing gets past you,” Caesar said, snatching a piece of my crispy
bacon at last while my guard was down and devouring it before I could stop him.
“Hey fucker!”
“Take it easy. I'm buying breakfast. Bronan ranked as high as 50 at one point but never broke the top 20. Eventually he got tired of being in the traveling circus and kissing sponsors asses and just came home. He's been here ever since, shaping boards part time over by Pinche Tacos on Main and hanging out at Block's spot, Venice Originals, educating the youth on surf history. Our neighbor, Rocky, grew up with him. He introduced me one morning in the break. Guy is totally on his own level, like a Zen warrior.”
I saw Bronan ride a few times after that. It was always amazing. His style was aggressive but fluid. He rode with grace and style, but his days of showing off with flashy tricks and acting cocky were behind him. He was a mix of slacker poet and pit bull. He was also the kind of guy you didn't want to be on the wrong side of in an argument. His nose had been broken so many times in street brawls that it had never healed right and was permanently twisted to the side. He had a knife mark on his right cheek as evidence of his bad-assery, as well as several chipped front teeth.
I just felt honored as fuck that he knew who I was and how I surfed.
“So what's the plan, Bronan?”
“I'm glad you asked, li’l bros,” he said, acting like Travis hadn't been pointing a loaded weapon at him just moments before. “I'm thinking we're gonna have to clean up this mess by ourselves.”
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