Filter’s vision began to focus as it adjusted to the light. She was definitely a woman. Her delicate features appeared to glow behind the mask. There was another hazmat suit behind her, on the ramp and over her left shoulder.
“What’s their point of origin?” asked the man.
“West Carson,” she said, as if none of them could hear her. “Homeless camp.”
“Figures,” said the man dismissively, as if none of them could hear him. “That accounts for the…”
“The what?” The woman shifted awkwardly in the suit, trying to face the man.
He gestured with his suited arm, waving it across the truck like a game-show model introducing a prize.
“The…this,” he said.
The woman looked down and used a stylus to tap the tablet. She swiped up and then tapped the screen before lifting her eyes and scanning the truck’s occupants again. “Let’s get this started. Anyone who’s unconscious, pull them to the left and get them checked for vitals. If they’re not breathing and/or don’t have a pulse, deliver them to the pile.”
The man looked away and motioned to someone Filter couldn’t see. He turned back and put his hands on his hips. “And the ones who are awake?”
“We’ll move them to the field,” the woman said, “but I don’t think we’ll have many of those.”
She stepped farther into the truck, moving methodically along the length of the narrow bed floor that separated the two exterior walls. She shuffled her boots, careful to avoid stepping on the forty feet she passed on her way toward Filter and the woman across from him. She looked at every person in the truck, staring at them for a moment. Then she tapped her stylus on the tablet and shuffled again.
“This one’s gone,” she said. “Pretty sure. Check him.”
She tapped the screen again and shuffled.
“This one too.”
Shuffle.
“Maybe this one.”
Shuffle.
She stopped in front of Filter, her back to him. The plastic chemical odor of the yellow hazmat suit masked every other scent in the truck. Filter breathed it in as best he could. It was welcome relief.
“Definitely this one,” she said and turned one hundred eighty degrees to face Filter.
He looked her in the eyes and her gaze moved from the tablet to his face. He made sure she could see he wasn’t dead. Not yet. The pile could wait. He didn’t know for certain what the pile was, but given what he’d seen at the camp, he could imagine.
The woman’s eyes were green. Or they could have been hazel. Filter held onto them. She stared back, searched his face, but she remained silent. There was no empathy, no warmth, and no compassion. He was a medical subject. That was all. Nothing more, nothing less.
“All right,” she said, still looking at Filter but speaking to someone else, “I’ve got six who are conscious. Five are deceased. The rest are undetermined. Let’s get this done. There’s another load pulling up now.”
The woman spun on her boot heel and marched from the truck, no longer careful to avoid feet as she moved. Filter saw her crunch four or five under her boots as she stomped from the cargo hold and down the ramp.
One by one, suited soldiers or sanitation workers unstrapped, picked up, and removed people from the hold. They’re people! Filter wanted to shout. They were every bit as human as the alien-looking grunts tasked with sorting them.
Filter wanted to argue they were more human than the aliens. They were survivors, at least the ones who were still breathing. They’d forged ahead, day after day, without roofs over their heads, without careers, without mental stability, and they’d lived.
What had these hazmat-suit-wearing drones done with their lives? Had they truly lived? Had their character been tested day in, day out?
Maybe it had. The soldiers among the suited sorters had likely lived. Filter knew a lot of veterans. They were good people. They were human.
Maybe it hadn’t. So many of the sorters looked detached. They carried one after another from the truck as if this were Sunday chores and they were taking out the trash or hauling bags of grass clippings.
One after another of his fellow meat-wagon passengers were pulled from the truck and carried down the ramp and into the sunlight. Some were moved to the left and out of sight. Some were taken to the right. Filter’s pulse, as weak as it was, accelerated. For the first time in hours it thumped against his temples with enough strength that he felt it. It reminded him he was still alive, that something in his body was still working as it should.
With renewed energy, as slight as it was, Filter pressed his shoulders back against the thin padding. He clenched his fists and released them, flexing his fingers in and out, in and out.
He wanted to be sure that the men coming for him knew he was alive and conscious. They were only two people away from him at this point.
Filter lifted his head, the muscles in the back of his neck straining, and he tried breathing through his nose. He took a sip of air through his mouth, trying to avoid a catch in his chest. It didn’t work. His breath caught, trapped in the thick sputum built up in his lungs and in his throat.
The first cough was painful. Sharp needles of pain poked his chest. He tried sucking in a compensating breath and that only made it worse. The pain exploded outward from his lungs, and a second, more violent cough gave way to a third and a fourth.
His body strained against the straps, the nylon fabric digging into his shoulders and pressing hard against his waist. Filter tried sucking in air. It wouldn’t come. He was out of air, yet his body kept expelling the thick bloody fluid trapped in his airway.
His stomach cramped and Filter grunted against the fit. His eyes watered. He twisted against the straps, his arms flailing at his sides. He wanted to find the latches to the straps and free himself. He needed to move. He had to find air. He gasped. Another burst of intense, searing pain punched his chest. He couldn’t stop coughing.
His vision weakened behind the sheen of welling tears and then faded to black. Out of air, he slipped into unconsciousness.
When he woke minutes later, he couldn’t be sure how long he’d been out or if, in fact, he was awake again. He wondered if he was dead.
“Am I alive?” he croaked before realizing he was lying on his back on a canvas gurney.
His body swayed gently as two hazmat-suited soldiers carried him somewhere. Neither of them answered him.
“Am I alive?” he asked again, not realizing his voice wasn’t much more than a raspy whisper.
He opened his eyes slowly and saw the blue sky above him. The sun had shifted. It was descending now. It had to be late afternoon. What day was it? Did it matter?
A helicopter buzzed low overhead, the thwap of its rotors beating against the air and momentarily drowning out the rumble of large trucks that dominated the sounds around this camp.
That was where he was, right? A camp? He was alive but not really? Did they know he wasn’t ready for the pile? Did they know?
Panic swelled in Filter’s mind and his pulse quickened again. He worked to calm himself. They had to know he was alive. They had to know he hadn’t died. Not yet. Not quite yet.
It crossed Filter’s mind for a split second as the now-familiar whoosh of a blowtorch roared somewhere to his right that he was tripping. The Kush he’d been smoking was laced. Sometimes the high was too good. He’d come down and get the jitters, become super paranoid. He’d swear off the stuff only to hit it a day later.
Was this a trip? Was he so high he’d created a new world in which everyone was exploding into bloody, fecal-soaked blobs ready for the incinerator?
The idea, for that instant, was comforting. Then it wasn’t.
Filter knew this wasn’t some drug-induced fantasy. This was the real thing. And he was being carted somewhere against his will. He couldn’t fight. He was too weak, too disoriented.
He rolled his head to one side and caught a glimpse of a familiar building. He narrowed his eyes to focus. The b
uilding bounced and swayed, and his vision was blurred, but he was sure he recognized where he was now.
Stretching out beyond an open parking lot, across which he now moved, was the western edge of the Los Angeles Coliseum. It wasn’t the iconic entrance on the east side. He’d have immediately recognized that. This was the lesser known exterior view, the one from Vermont Avenue.
He’d spent some time shacked up with a woman on Wisconsin and Thirty-Ninth. It was a block from here. He’d seen this side of the coliseum too many times to count. They were taking him to the coliseum? Was that where the camp was?
Filter moved his head and tried getting a better sense of his surroundings. It was daunting, even for a man who couldn’t fully appreciate the scale of it. He was in parking lot two, between Vermont and Bill Robertson Lane, one of six staging areas around the coliseum. The southern edge, where the trucks were arriving, was also the morgue. Lot six, which ran along MLK, was a depository for the dead. They were catalogued, their blood was drawn and stored, and they were dumped into large piles for incineration. He couldn’t know the procedural bureaucracy, of course, nor could he see the bodies in various states of decomposition and the workers picking through them like shoppers at a produce stand.
Men, women, and children, or what was left of them, created rounded pyramids of flesh, bone, muscle, and disease. Large birds circled above them, some flapping their wings and others using the currents to glide above the piles.
The piles.
Despite not seeing the piles, had Filter better been able to smell, he’d have noted the strong, distinctive odor of burning human flesh. It permeated everything within a square mile of the coliseum. Smoke drifted with the intermittent breeze that blew from the southeast. It blanketed the coliseum itself and then dissipated across the Natural History Museum and Jesse Brewer Park. It was as if the wall that edged the University of Southern California along Exposition Boulevard was a barrier to the smoke. It wasn’t visible by the time it crossed the barrier that separated the private school from the surrounding, less pristine neighborhoods.
Filter’s handlers took him from the parking lot to a sidewalk that ran along a mural-painted wall separating the stadium from parking lot two. On his side so as not to choke, Filter noticed two of the images on the wall. The first was Martin Luther King Junior, his hands clasped in prayer at his chin. He was looking down reflectively. Next to MLK was a profile of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was looking to the left and smiling.
Filter’s eyes dragged across the two faces. It wasn’t lost on him that both men had been assassinated. Both died violently. He’d read about them when he was younger. When he was in prison at San Quentin, Filter had read Profiles in Courage, the award-winning book Kennedy had written when he was in the Senate.
Courage was something Filter knew he’d need in his final hours. He figured that was how long he had to live. It couldn’t be more than that.
Once his handlers had passed the wall, they turned right into a gated entrance at the coliseum. It was gate sixteen, Filter noted, an entrance for deliveries.
He was a delivery. There was a barricade at the end of the short drive leading to the wide asphalt path that encircled the stadium. As they approached it, a guard lowered the barrier. It hissed until the metal plank clanged against the ground. The handlers stepped over the lowered barrier and hastened their pace.
There were other handlers with canvas stretchers moving along the pathway. They walked in all directions and Filter couldn’t make sense of the organization. Where were they headed? Was he still going to the pile?
His handlers turned into one of the tunnels that led directly toward the field. It was darker and cooler. The clap and stick of their rubber boots against the concrete echoed against the walls.
As they worked their way through the crowded tunnel, his stretcher bumped into others. Coughs and moans, croaks and wheezes drowned out the boot echoes the deeper they traveled into the passageway.
The handlers turned and sunlight hit Filter’s face. It was distant and pale, but it was sunlight. They were closer to the field now. Then they stopped. There was a line of people, like him, awaiting a turn to emerge from the tunnel and exit onto the field.
They were in the southwestern section of the coliseum, underneath the stands. There was a bottleneck at the exit. Filter squinted against the sunlight. His vision was shot anyhow. He couldn’t see more than rough shapes and muted colors now.
His breathing was shallow. He wasn’t even sure he was breathing. If it weren’t for the sounds and smells that threatened to overwhelm him, he’d have thought his heart wasn’t beating anymore either. It was coming anytime now. The reaper was close. Filter wondered if the scythe-wielding undertaker was on one of the stretchers next to him. Maybe one of his handlers wore the dark, hooded cloak under his Tyvek suit.
A resigned smile spread uneasily across his face as the line began to move. The light beyond his closed eyelids grew brighter.
“Onto the field and to the right,” a muffled voice said with authority. “Find an open spot as far down the field as you can. Drop the patient with its head toward the opposite end of the stadium. If you have questions, there are guides out there to make sure you comply with the protocol.”
They began moving again. His handlers said nothing as they moved from the cool of the tunnel to the relative warmth of the grass field. Filter had been here once before.
He’d hooked a ticket broker up with some first-class weed and jailbroke his iPhone to put non-iOS apps on it. The broker got him decent seats to the UCLA versus USC game.
Filter wasn’t much of a sports fan, but it was a big game, and it was free. He’d watched young men bash each other for the better part of three and a half hours. They’d slammed themselves to the turf, driven their shoulders into midsections and ribs, and celebrated the abuse.
The crowd had cheered relentlessly. The more violent the hit, the louder the crack of bodies colliding, the more crazed the throngs in the stands had become. Filter had watched with wonderment, and while he couldn’t remember the outcome of the game, who’d won or lost, he did remember the oddity of it all.
It so reminded him of what he thought it must have been like when Romans threw Christians to the lions, leopards, and boars. Although Filter was no more a religious man than he was a football fan, he couldn’t help but connect the two.
Now, however many years later, he was here again, sacrificed on a bloody field. As the handlers marched toward the center of the field on its southern end, that was what he thought, that this was a just end.
If there were a God, this was punishment. The plague was a cleansing in the City of Angels. It was the deity’s way of resetting the clock, changing possession, and starting over with a fresh set of downs.
Filter’s mind danced and skipped from bizarre thought to random epiphany until the handlers reached their destination. They stopped and adjusted their grips, nearly tilting Filter from the stretcher and onto the worn field bare of grass.
“This is good,” said an authoritarian voice from behind Filter’s head. “Drop it here. Then proceed to the opposite end of the stadium for cleansing and decontamination. You’ll be issued new suits there.”
It.
The voice called him it. That was the second time. It. He wasn’t even a person anymore, he was one of countless men, women, and children lying on the field like hash marks from one end of the stadium to the other.
A helicopter passed overhead. Filter squinted, not able to see much more than a dark blur whipping across the sky above the stadium. Then a second and third blur followed closely behind, the sound of the rotors growing louder and then fading.
Had he seen the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and its grounds from the vantage point of the Cal Guard airmen aboard those choppers, he’d have seen the scope of the effort there. He’d have tried to count the yellow dots that represented the hundreds of Tyvek-wearing Cal Guard volunteers and California Department of Public Health em
ployees working to move, catalog, and destroy the growing number of infected.
He’d have seen the burning pyres, the dark smoke billowing up to the clear sky before trailing into wisps of ash that disappeared above the wash of the rotors. He’d have marveled at the bursts of flames that from above looked like sparks ignited at the end of long handheld lighters. He’d have grown sick at the sight of the bodies catching fire then smoldering as the clothing, hair, skin, and muscle melted away, leaving little more than remnant bone.
Filter would have been awestruck by the long lines of military trucks, all of them hauling the next load of living and dead to their final destination. This was the final resting place for all of them. If they weren’t dead when they arrived, they would be soon.
Filter would have known that too if he’d been aboard one of the choppers. He’d have witnessed the constant checking of the dying on the field. The suited workers moved up and down each column and row. If they spotted an expired patient, they’d raise their hand, and two others would come and haul them away, taking them to the piles.
The piles.
He wasn’t in the air looking down, though. He was on the ground. He was flat on his back. In an hour, he’d be dead. In two he’d be ash.
CHAPTER 9
DAY 13
Westwood, California
Dub stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. His skin was pasty and his eyes were sunken. His sweat-soaked hair was matted to his forehead and the tops of his ears. His cheekbones looked like they were going to poke through his face. But he was feeling better. He was through the worst of it.
His throat hurt and he was congested, but he was alive and his fever was gone. It had been a rough seventy-two hours since his collapse in the plaza outside the Wooden Center near Ashe, but Keri had nursed him through it.
A sophomore biology major, she’d explained to him that his iron deficiency might have helped him fight the disease, whatever it was. While she was guessing, she was so excited about the possibility of being right. Dub had gone along with her.
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