by Alan Janney
Pride. That’s part of the void I felt. People at night were usually proud. Proud of their car. Proud of their loud music. Proud of their girlfriend or boyfriend. Proud of their social life. Proud of their youth. Of their income. Of whatever. Nights in Los Angeles were vibrant and electric and unquiet.
Or at least they used to be. Another victim of the Chemist. It’s hard to be proud and terrified at the same time.
Lee texted me. >> BRO! Ya boy PuckDaddy just told me what you and the Shooter are doing, dude!!
>> I’m still on the George Washington
>> Dating a serious hottie. She’s an ensign!!
>> Kinda dating. She wants me.
>> We have a few prototypes ready for you to test
>> So
>> Don’t die, dude
>> Say Hi to Samantha for me
>> Tell her I’m still single
“I miss sitting at a lunch table with Lee,” I sighed.
“Me too. That little punk grew on me.”
Lee and I texted a few minutes more until Samantha took a deep breath. She let it out in a long whoop, turning in circles, arms spinning wide. “Oh MAN it feels good to be away from her!”
“From Minnie?”
“From Pacific. Yes. Minnie is a name ill-suited for that vicious killer.”
“Vicious killer?!”
“Everything about her grated on me. Bleech.” She shook her entire frame like a dog shaking off snow. “Being around other Infected is the worst.”
“But not me.”
She nodded. “But not you. Like she said, that’s your greatest gift. You have a natural gravity. I need to be near you. Pacific is already missing you, going through withdraw symptoms, I bet. When you’re around, everything makes more sense.”
“That’s so weird.”
She shrugged. “But it’s true.” When she shrugged, her hands automatically went to her weapons. A habitual, subconscious reassurance.
“When Carter visited us, he grated against me. You phrased it well. He grated. Did you feel that?”
She cackled and whacked me in the shoulder. “Yes. I wondered if you felt that. He was flexing.”
“He tried to grate against me?”
“Yeah, kinda. He controls how much of his power he secretes. I call it flexing. I can’t do it.”
“Can Minnie flex? A couple times I felt her strength and it nearly knocked me over.”
“Yes. Pacific is very precise and disciplined. She unleashed her…let’s call it an aura. She unleashes her aura only occasionally and only to make an impression. God I hate her.”
I laughed, a muffled sound in the city’s oppressive silence. “You’re being a little catty about Minnie.”
“I don’t care. She and I are not compatible. I can be around Carter for weeks before he repels me.”
“How does the aura work?”
“No idea. But think of it like sweat. When someone is sweaty, they have a thick scent. You can smell and feel that person. The disease works similarly. Newbies only detect it in their subconscious. Takes a while to develop the sensitivity. You learned more quickly than usual. Sometimes I forget how green you are. You’re still a baby.”
“Shut up.”
“You shut up.”
I said, “Tank’s aura was like a fog.”
“Yeah that kid is rank. Especially when he’s in a state of stress. It’s gotten worse since the football championship, too. That’s how we know he’s so powerful.”
“Do Chosen always tend to obey the powerful?”
“No idea. Chosen are brand new, remember? Infected don’t.”
Our cells vibrated. Puck messaged us both.
>> looking good
>> puck monitoring u from satellite
>> lots going on
>> captain FBI freaked when he found out ur plan
>> so did Carter
>> ROCK -> PUCK <-HARDPLACE
>> captain Travis facing court martial mb 4 losing u
>> tank still missing
>> chemist emailed u back
>> says u didn’t reply fast enough 2 save Andy
>> probably a lie
>> ur 2 SEAL bodyguards request permission 2 rejoin
>> hannah walker sighting
>> between korea town and hollywood
>> that whole neighborhood evacuated!
>> ppl scared of her!
>> walter back in l.a. NSA got photo
>> so that sucks
>> blue eye bitch has gov’t calling 4 ur arrest
>> but not official yet
>> okay
>> thats it
>> puck is tired needs nap soon
We scanned through the updates. Samantha replied, Nice work, PuckDaddy. You kick ass.
>> Yeah i do
I grabbed Samantha’s arm, stopping her. “You feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“There.” I pointed into the darkness beyond a grove of palm trees near the Virginia Country Club. Hairs on my arms and neck stood up and the disease dumped adrenaline into my bloodstream. She stowed her phone and rested a hand on her pistol. I kept staring. “Someone’s over there.”
“How many?”
“Dunno. I hear them. I smell them. I feel them.”
Her pistol came out. She thumbed the hammer back. “Chosen. Let’s check it out.”
“Don’t shoot. I want to talk.”
“Oh hell. Hell and death and ugh,” she growled.
They found us. Two Chosen. They fell on us from the trees. One boy and one girl, a little younger than me. Emaciated. Hungry. Wearing tattered rags. They were both Asian.
I pointed at the ground and growled, “Sit down.”
They howled like I’d scalded them. These two constituted no serious threat. Had I been alone they’d still be unable to muster strength enough to tackle me. Their bodies were new. Relatively weak.
“Disgusting,” Samantha sneered, keeping her gun trained. “Like wild dogs.”
“That’s exactly what they look like,” I agreed. “Wild dogs.” The boy charged. Dirty hair covered his eyes. I threw him back. “Sit down!”
They did.
Samantha said under her breath, “You’re flexing. It’s gorgeous.”
“Can you two speak?”
No response. They twisted uncomfortably, head in their hands, not looking at me. He had shoes. She didn’t. She wore diamond stud earrings and a necklace. Their remnants of clothing would have once been fashionable. A lifetime ago in a happier universe, this pair had been trendy, self-possessed, well-kept. Now their hollow stomaches pressed out and sucked in, deep breaths.
“You’re grating on them,” Samantha observed. “Being near you is unbearable. Because of the DNA.”
“Why don’t you two eat?” I asked, shouting like they were deaf. They flinched.
“We eat,” the girl said. Her voice scraped, a sad lonely sound. “Never enough.”
“You still have headaches?”
They both nodded.
I looked at Samantha. Her mouth pressed into a grim line. I spit, “This is his legacy. The Chemist creates and releases the Chosen but doesn’t provide for them. They’re broken. Like scared animals.”
“These two are in worse shape than most,” Samantha agreed in a resigned sigh. “Probably couldn’t function in his hierarchy. So they fled.”
“Have you killed anyone?” I asked them.
No response. Their heads hung lower. The boy tried covering his ears.
Samantha said, “They’re fast. They’re strong. They’re aggressive. And they can’t control themselves. Kinda like you during the Spring of your junior year.”
“How long have you been sick?” No response. “What will you do next?” No response. “Have you fought the police? Or the army?”
The girl started to cry.
“This is horrible.”
Samantha shook her head. “This is typical. Most people with the disease look like this before they die. Remem
ber. The fatality rate is near a hundred percent. The Chemist found a way to lower the rate, but it’s still awful.”
“Do you want to kill me?”
“Yes,” they both said.
“Why? Why do you hate me?”
No response.
I threw up my hands. They flinched again. “What the heck do we do with them?”
BOOM BOOM.
Two gun blasts. So loud and sudden and bright I jumped. The boy and the girl both jerked backwards, head first. They slumped into a pile and moved no more. A chorus of dogs began howling, startled and angered by the sudden crash.
“Samantha!” I cried. “NO!” I snatched her pistol and crushed it in my fist. The warm metal bent and warped and melted. I dropped it at her feet. She calmly arched a brow and prodded the ruined weapon with her boot. “What the heck!”
“Chase,” she said quietly. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten what I did for a living before you showed up.”
“You just murdered two innocent people! They weren’t attacking you.”
“Odd use of the word innocent, especially since they admitted to fighting the police and killing people.”
“Yeah, but they’re sick, Samantha.”
“Wrong, Outlaw. They’re very sick. And they would die soon anyway. And most likely hurt a lot more people before they did.”
“They need to be incarcerated. They need treatment.”
“There is no treatment.” She spat the word. “Grow up, Chase.”
“What about you?”
She blinked, thrown for a loop. “Huh?”
“What about you? You just executed two individuals.”
“So?”
“So violence damages us too. It hurts them. And it hurts us. Executioners used to get drunk so they could perform their duty. It harms our soul.”
She crossed her arms and gave me a sideways glance. “Where’s this coming from? My soul is long gone.”
“No. It’s not. I saw it come alive on the boat, in the wind, on top of waves. Your soul is important.”
“You gonna become a vegan, too? Perhaps you need to get off your high horse, princess. I saw you behead someone on the gas tower. De-cap-i-tate.”
“Yeah but-”
“Yeah but what? You did it to save lives?”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
She jammed a finger at the two dead Chosen. “Me too.”
I laced fingers into my hair and paced, nearly tripping on the girl’s dead leg. “This is different. This wasn’t in self-defense.”
“I executed them in defense of others. They would kill again.”
“We had time to use non-lethal methods. We could have called…” I searched in vain for solutions.
“Called who? You and I are the answer. And what time do you think we have? You saw Puck’s messages. The whole damn world is blowing up.”
I sat criss-cross beside the dead girl and held her hand and tried not to cry. Samantha, unnerved, fidgeted and kicked at stones. After a minute she said, “Sorry I called you a princess.”
“I just don’t want to be this way,” I whispered. The girl’s hand felt so small. Cold. Brittle, even though I knew it wasn’t. “I don’t want us to kill. Not when there might be another way.”
“You’re so different from the rest of us, it’s shocking.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re drawn to me.”
Samantha had no rebuttal. She kept kicking rocks down the dark street.
Chapter Eighteen
Thursday, February 8. 2019
Camino College was being rebuilt. We reached the campus at nine in the morning and watched.
Last August, an American Apache attack helicopter had emptied its arsenal of Hellfire missiles into the belly of the college. At the time, the campus had been serving as a base of operations for the terrorists. The salvo saved my life and nearly killed the Chemist, but the extensive restoration process would last another year. At minimum.
We stood on Cummings Avenue sidewalk. Workers in blaze orange hats and vests hefted detritus onto waiting truck beds. Loads of bricks, wooden beams, ruined masonry and plumbing rumbled away every few minutes. New steel beams arrived to take their place.
“I like this place better during the daytime,” I observed.
“Wuss,” she sniffed.
“You didn’t get chewed on by a tiger.”
“Oh yeah!” She threw back her head and laughed. “I forgot. Oh wow. The past thirteen months have been so much fun.”
“You have issues.”
“YOU have issues.”
“There are too many workers here.”
She squinted at the skeletal remains of structures and the riot of orange hats. “What do you mean?”
“Construction crews aren’t usually this numerous. There are hundreds. Many too young. Many too old. Look over there, little kids distributing water.”
“So?”
“This is a volunteer work force.”
The longer we watched, the more sure I became. The bulk of the cleanup was shouldered by the local community. Not only that, the volunteers appeared eager. Excited. Happy.
We pushed on through Compton and encountered more evidence of the Chemist’s previous occupation. Fortified machine gun nests, partially disassembled. Hollowed out houses. Ruined storefronts. Charred cars pushed to the berm. However, for all the destruction, we saw many more signs of unity and repair. Men swept glass from streets. Children ran with supplies and groceries, and pulled weeds. Women gardened and painted and hammered. Broken windows were patched with plastic sheets. Police helped move furniture. Venders displayed signs offering free food to volunteers.
Samantha her shoved hands into pockets and watched a Buick roll by, windows tinted, music thumping. She turned in a circle on the corner of Poplar and Oleander, peering introspectively at all the activity. “I thought this was supposed to be an unhappy place.”
“Supposedly that’s why the Chemist moved here. The citizens were too divided to resist him.”
“This place feels healthier than the others we walked through. Right? Lakewood practically trembled in fear, tail between their legs.”
We continued, following Puck’s directions, past streets named after trees, past hundreds of one-story, four-room stucco houses with barred windows. Folks nodded or stared behind fences. Not many white people; we stuck out. Samantha observed, “See all the red bandanas?”
“I noticed.”
“Can’t tell if those are gang signals or Outlaw bandanas.”
“Probably some of both. Wanna ask?”
“Want me to shoot your foot?”
Puck guided us to a house on Magnolia, not far from Compton’s small airport. The home was unremarkable from its neighbors except for the high state of tidiness. And the collection of children drawing on the front walk with chalk.
We approached. They regarded us white folk with polite confusion.
“Hi girls! Is Miss Pauline home?”
The four girls shook their heads, white beads clicking in cute dreads. The three boys throwing a football didn’t even glance at me. The youngest girl pointed a finger at me and glared.
“Any idea when she’ll be back?” I asked.
“Who’re you? You the Po?”
I grinned. “No ma’am. I’m just a friend.”
“Nuh uh, no you ain’t, you trouble.”
“I’m the big bad wolf. And you girls look mighty tasty.”
They perked up and smiled and laughed and started running around the yard, screaming. Instant joy.
“Samantha,” I said. “Go play with them.”
“No. Shut up. Kids suck. And you’re weird.”
I called Puck on my cell. “Puck, Miss Pauline isn’t here.”
“…and?”
“Where is she?”
“How the hay-yell should I know that? Puck ain’t omniscient, dummy. Go find her yourse…nevermind, found her. She’s a block away. I kick so much ass.”
Miss Pauline was
visiting with neighbors. She appeared about fifty, though Katie once told me black women stayed prettier and youthful longer than hispanic women, so she could be older. Her curly hair had grey streaks. She wore an orange vest, and reading glasses were perched on her nose.
Miss Pauline served as the mayor of Compton. The previous mayor, a former police sergeant elected two years ago, vanished during the Chemist’s hostile takeover. Presumed dead but no one knew for sure. Miss Pauline stepped into the role to fill the void and was now discussed on the internet with hallowed words usually reserved for the Pope or Mother Teresa.
Making her even more interesting, Miss Pauline had also declared herself the acting Sheriff of Compton. No one objected, not even the police. In a world full of scared people trying to survive, a pure-hearted and sacrificial leader is hard to refuse.
“Well now,” she remarked dryly as we approached. “Who we have here? The Great White Hope? Some do-gooder reporters, I suspect?” Her friends on the fence’s far side made commiserative noises.
Samantha scoffed. “Do I look like a reporter?”
“Kinda. Pretty white girl like you. Here in the war. What then? Suffering from guilt? Come to make reparations?”
I liked Miss Pauline instantly. No-nonsense, sure of herself, too busy to make niceties. I grinned. “No ma’am.”
“Come from World Vision? Red Cross? Got too many of you as it is. What then?”
“You defeated the Chemist. Or at least you threw his militia out of Compton. And you did it without violence. I want you to teach me how.”
She stayed silent a long time, resting her weary head on her fist, elbow propped on the fence. She inspected me with pretty green eyes devoid of emotion. Her friends waited silently for her to speak. Nearby dogs snarled at one another in an aggressive territory dispute.
“Boy got some brains,” she said finally. Her words were elongated and tired, the syllables overly-pronounced. “Good-looking too. Remind me of Anthony.” Her friends nodded.
“Anthony?”
“My boy. Lost him at eighteen. You the government?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
