A free chapter from the first Earth’s Survivors book…

Apocalypse

Copyright 2022 Dell Sweet – Geo
Dell all rights reserved.

Cover Art © Copyright 2022 A L
Sweet

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ZERO

High summer: Plague year one

Base Ostega

Northern Canada

1:00 am

The first quake had been minor, the
last few had not. The big one was coming. The satellite links were
down, but Doctor Alan Weber didn’t need to have a satellite link up
to know that. He touched one hand to his head, the fingertips came
away bloody. In any other circumstances he would be hurrying to get
his head wound taken care of, but these were not just any
circumstances. The entire world was ending and it was a miracle to
him that he had made it through the complex above and down into the
control room of the facility before it had been supposed to
automatically lock down. His office was a shamble, but his secretary
had met him in the hallway having ridden out the quakes in the supply
room, between the tall rows of steel cabinets: Together they had made
their way to the office.

All main-line Comm links were down,
probably because of the loss of the satellite systems. Underground
back-up cable Comm: Down. The facility was in bad shape, and he was
not kidding himself, there was no help on the way: No hope of
reaching the surface and the worst was not yet here. He was probably
lucky to have made it down the six floors to his office from where he
had been. There was an automatic lock-down program that would shut
down the entire facility within seconds of an attack or catastrophic
event, it had failed somehow.

He laughed to himself, he had, had
to lock it down manually once he had made his way in or else it would
still be open to the world. He had blown up the two main entrances to
the facility, sealing his own fate as he sealed it off from the world
above.

He had spent the last several years
here in the Canadian wilderness running the chemical countermeasure
unit at the base. He had worked on a top secret virus designed to
prolong human life in cases of extreme deprivation: Nuclear attack,
war and other unlikely scenarios. He had spent the last two weeks
working up to this event from his subterranean office complex: All
wreckage now. Still, he had sent operatives out from here three days
ago to do what they could to seed the virus: Following his final
orders sent down through some now probably non-existent chain of
command. He had heard absolutely nothing since, and believed that was
because there was no one left in command any longer.

The virus was so secretive that no
one beyond the base knew the true nature of it. Even the politicians
that passed bills for funding while looking the other way had not
truly known what they were funding. A couple of well-placed dollars
in the pocket could buy a great deal of silence.

Several Army bases had secretly been
infected and studied. The commanders of the armed forces had, had no
idea that anything was being tested on their men. The troops had done
well, surviving their training with little food and water much better
than they usually did, but over the next week nearly every bird in
the area had died. Some side effect they had not been able to ferret
out.

That virus build had also been
crippled. It had a built in self-destruct mechanism to kill the virus
after a short amount of time. In fact that same version had been kept
as an antidote for the newest version which had no such mechanism and
would go on reinfecting indefinitely.

The entire virus design and its
capabilities were top secret. Top secret, and usually Top Secret
meant dozens of people knew, but this time it had meant that it
really had been Top Secret. Withheld from the public, and even those
in charge for years had known nothing of the true nature of the
virus.

Last week had changed it all. Last
week the news had come down from the finest scientific minds that an
extinction event was about to take place. Up to ninety percent of the
world population would likely be killed off as events unfolded. It
was not a maybe, it was an absolute.

The public knew that there was a
meteor on a near collision course with the Earth. They had paid off
the best scientists to assure the public it would miss by several
thousand miles. A lie, but they had found that even scientists were
willing to look past facts if their own personal spin put a better
story in the mix. A survivable story, and so some had spun their own
stories without prodding. From there the internet had picked it up
and run with it. From there the conspiracy theorists, and by the end
of the week the meteor was survivable. The story that the meteor
would destroy the planet was now a lie made up by commanders of the
rebel alliance in the Middle East to take the focus off their
actions, the public believed what it wanted to believe.

The truth was that the meteor might
miss, barely, a near miss, but it wouldn’t matter because it would
contribute to a natural chain of events that would make a meteor
impact look like small change.

The big deal, the bigger
than a meteor deal, was
the earthquakes that had already started and would probably continue
until most of the civilized world was dead or dying: Crumbled into
ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic activity that had never been
seen by modern civilization. And it had been predicted several times
over by more than one group and hushed up quickly when it was
uncovered. The governments had known. The conspiracy theorists had
known. The public should have known, but they were too caught up in
world events that seemed to be dragging them ever closer to a third
world war to pay attention to a few voices crying in the wilderness.
The public was happier watching television series about conspiracies
rather than looking at the day to day truths about real conspiracies.
The fact was that this was a natural course of events. It had
happened before and it would happen again in some distant future.

In the end it hadn’t mattered. In
the end the factual side of the event had begun to happen. The
reality, Alan Weber liked to think of it. And fact was fact. You
couldn’t dispute fact. You could spin it, and that was the way of the
old world, spinning it, but the bare facts were just that: The bare
facts.

The bare facts were that the
Yellowstone Caldera had erupted just a few hours before. The bare
facts were that the earth quakes had begun all around the world, and
although they were not so bad here at the northern tip of Canada, in
other areas of the world, in the lower states, in foreign countries,
third world countries, the bare facts of what was occurring were
devastating: Millions dead, millions more would die before it was
over, and this was nothing new. The government had evidence that this
same event had happened many times in Earth’s history. This was
nothing new at all, not even new to the human race. A similar event
had killed off most of the human race some seventy-five thousand
years before. The space race had been all about this knowledge: A
rush to get off the planet and settle elsewhere on an older, more
sedate planet before something that had already happened time and
again happened once more.

The virus was an answer, help,
solution,
but Alan Weber was unsure how well the solution would work. It was,
like everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too little too
late. And it was definitely flawed, but he had temporarily pushed
that knowledge away in his mind. Even now as he sat and waited for
the end, which would surely come, out in the world operatives were
disbursing the virus that could save humanity.

He thought for a moment, “Or
destroy humanity,” he added aloud.

There were no guarantees, and there
was strong evidence to suggest the designer virus did its job a
little too well. Designed to help prolong life, there were rumors
that it could raise the dead. Some scientists who had worked with the
virus in the now destroyed facility had nicknamed it Lazarus.

Alan had seen evidence to support
the rumors that it could raise the dead, or the near dead for that
matter. He had been present when a test subject that had been
pronounced dead had come back: Weak, half crazy, but alive again.

As the hours and then days passed
the subject had become stronger, seemed to be learning from the
situation it was in. The decision had been made to kill it: Even that
had been difficult to do. Even so, he knew that it was the only hope
for society. There was nothing else. The military machine was dead.
The American government was dead. The president, from reports he had
read, assassinated by her own guards.

While most of America had tracked
the meteorite that was supposed to miss earth from their living
rooms, and had been side tracked by all the trouble in the Middle
East, he had kept track of the real events that had even then been
building beneath the Yellowstone caldera and many other places
worldwide.

Yesterday the end had begun, and the
end had come quickly: Satellites off line. Phone networks down. Power
grids failed: Governments incommunicado or just gone. The Internet
down; the Meteorite had not missed Earth by much after all, and the
gravitational pull from its mass had simply accelerated an already
bad situation.

Dams burst. River flows reversed:
Waters rising or dropping suddenly in many places. Huge tidal waves.
Fires out of control. Whole cities suddenly gone. A river of lava
flowing from Yellowstone: Civilization was not dead; not yet wiped
out, but her back was broken.

In the small military base of Ostega
that had rested above the defense facility near the shore of a former
lake, the river waters that fed it had begun to rise: The chemical
countermeasure unit, several levels below the base in the limestone
cave structures that honeycombed the entire area, had begun to
succumb to the rising river waters. By the time the surviving
soldiers from above had splashed through the tunnels and into the
underground facility, they had been walking through better than two
feet of cold and muddy water. Shortly after that the pressure from
the water had begun to collapse small sections of caves and tunnels
below the base that fed the unit: That damage had been helped along
by small after-shocks.

Alan Weber watched his monitor as a
wall gave way and the main tunnel began to flood. It was only a
matter of an hour at the most before the water found its way to him.
He sighed and then relaxed back into his chair, reached down and
pulled the lower file drawer open, and lifted out a partial bottle of
scotch. He leaned forward and Amber Trevers cleared her throat in the
silent observation room. Weber smiled and turned toward her.

“I suppose you have been watching,
Amber?”

She only nodded.

He nodded back. “Share a drink
with me?” He turned away, not waiting for her words of agreement.
He heard her settle into a chair next to him as he pulled two plastic
cups from the sleeve in the bottom drawer, left over from the
Christmas party last year, and began to pour.

“I don’t usually agree to drink on
the job, but this is a different set of circumstances, isn’t it?”
His eyes met her own as she nodded weakly.

“It’s almost over, isn’t it Doctor
Weber?”

“I’m afraid so… Call me Alan,
Amber… Is it okay that I call you Amber?” He finished pouring the
scotch into the plastic cup. He had stopped at just an inch in the
bottom, wondered why and then filled the cup half way instead.

North America

Far above the Earth, satellites
continued to orbit importantly.

The North American continent lay
sleeping far below. A wide inland sea had formed in the middle, fed
by a huge river that stretched from the former Hudson Bay to the
middle of the continent. Small in places and easily crossed, no more
than a river: Wide in other places as if it truly were a sea.

The state of Alabama had been
divided in two along with most of the lower half of the former state
of Florida. What resulted was the loss of the lower, southern half of
the state. What remained now sat nearly forty miles out in a shallow
bay that was quickly turning to sea: An island, the water surrounding
it growing deeper as time moved on and the gulf reclaimed the land.

The upper north eastern section of
the continent had already pulled apart and begun to drift. Although
it was imperceptible, the two land masses were inching away from one
another, and ultimately would be separated by a new ocean. And become
separate, smaller continents.

The eastern end of the former United
States was also drifting away from the northern section of Canada.
The massive earthquakes had also severed the state of Michigan,
turning it into a virtual island.

Toward what had been the north, the
St. Lawrence river basin had widened, pushing the land masses further
apart. The Thousand Islands bridge spans had toppled, and slipped
into the cold waters. The other bridges that had once spanned the
mighty river had also succumbed as the river basin had split and
pulled apart.

The new continent had severed her
ties from Nova Scotia, as she had been pulled south and slightly
east, to begin her journey. Only the province of New Brunswick and a
small portion of Quebec remained with the continent. The rest of
Canada was severed from them by the wide and deep river, more like a
huge lake in places that surged from ocean to ocean.

Most of the North American continent
was now in a sub-tropical climate as well. The poles had been
displaced by the huge force of the multiple earthquakes and volcanic
blasts which were still ongoing. The old polar caps were melting, and
it would be thousands of years before they would once again re-form
in their new locations.

The run-off from the melting ice
would eventually reach the oceans and even more land mass would be
sacrificed to the waves before the polar caps would be re-formed.

There were only thirteen full states
left on the small continent: The two former provinces of Canada, one
of which was only a small fragment; and parts of five former states,
the largest being Florida.

Before the dawn, fires could be seen
burning unchecked in many major cities, pushed with the help of freak
winds the flames continued in all directions, occasionally fueled by
chemical, and oil facilities, as well as numerous other flammable
sources they encountered. The world began its fall.

ONE

New York

Johnny: October 29th

I am here in this farm house that
Lana and I found a few weeks back. By myself. Lana is gone. I sat
down here to write this story out before I am gone too. Maybe that
sounds melodramatic, but it isn’t. I know exactly what my situation
is.

We have been to Manhattan, outside
of it, you can’t go in any longer, and we came from Los Angeles, so
we know: It’s all gone, destroyed, there’s nothing left: Time to hold
on to what is left for you. I had Lana… That was my something that
was still left to me, but she’s gone now…

Lana… I knew they’d find out,
Hell, they probably knew immediately in that slow purposeful way that
things come to them. I can hear them out there ripping and tearing…
They know. Yeah, they know, I know it as well as I know my name,
John, Johnny
Mother used to say. I… I get so goddamned distracted…. It’s
working at me…

Bastards! If, only I could have…
But it’s no good crying about it or wishing I had done this thing or
that thing. I didn’t. I didn’t and I can’t go back and undo any of
this, let alone the parts I did.

In August when the sun was so hot
and the birds suddenly disappeared, and Lana came around for what was
nearly the last time I hadn’t known a thing about this. Nothing. It’s
late fall now and I know too much. Enough to wish it were August once
again and I was living in ignorant bliss once more.

Lana: I didn’t want to do it. I told
myself I would not do it and then I did it. Not bury her, which had
to be done; I mean kill her. I told myself I wouldn’t kill her, and
that’s a joke really. Really it is, because how do you kill something
that is already dead?  No, I told myself that I wouldn’t cut her
head off, put her in the ground upside down, and drive a stake
through her dead heart. Those are the things I told myself I wouldn’t
do, couldn’t do, but I did them as best I could. I pushed the other
things I thought; felt compelled
to do, aside and did what I could for her.

The trouble is, did I do it right?
It’s not like I have a goddamn manual to tell me how to do it. Does
anybody? I doubt it, but I would say that it’s a safe bet that there
are dozens of people in the world right now, people who have managed
to stay alive, that could write that manual. I just don’t know
them… I wish I did. And it won’t matter to me anyway. It’s a little
too late, but I’ll write this anyway and maybe it can be a manual for
someone else… You…

So the books say take their heads
off. The books also say, for Vampires, put a stake in their heart,
and older legends say turn them around, upside down in the grave.
Isn’t a vampire a kind of Zombie? Isn’t it? Probably not exactly,
precisely,
but could it hurt to have done the stake thing just in case? To be
sure? To put her at rest? I don’t think so.

They can come out during the
daylight, you know. I thought they wouldn’t be able to. Every goddamn
movie I ever saw, starting with the Night
of the Living Dead said
they couldn’t. You could get some relief. You could get some shit
done. And you could if it were true, but it’s not. They rarely
come out in the daylight, that’s the truth. It’s hard for them, tough
somehow, but they can. It won’t kill them. They aren’t weaker than
they are at night. They just don’t like the daylight. They don’t like
it. And don’t you think writing that made me a little paranoid?
Thinking it over once more? It did. I got up and checked the windows.
Nothing I can see, but they’re out there. They’re right out there in
the barn: Sleeping in the sweet hay up in the haymow. I know it, so
it doesn’t matter whether I can see them. I can hear them and I know
where the rest of them are. And I know they know what I did and
they’ll come tonight. They’ll come tonight because I’m afraid of the
night. Not them, me. 
And they goddamn well know it! They know it! They think. They see.
Did you think they were stupid? Blind? Running on empty? Well you’re
the fool then. Listen to me, they’re not. They’re not and thinking
they are will get you dead quick. And what about me? How will I feel
tonight? What will I think about it then?

Zombies: I thought Haiti, horror
flicks…? What else is there? Dead people come back to life, or
raised from the dead to be made into slaves. Those are the two things
I knew and nothing else. Well, it’s wrong, completely wrong. No, I
can’t tell you how they come to be Zombies initially, but I can tell
you that the bite of a Zombie will make you a Zombie. The movies got
that much right.

I can’t tell you why they haunt the
fields across from this house. Why they have taken up residence in
the old barn, but I can tell you that it might be you they come for
next and if they do you goddamn well better realize that everything
you thought you knew is bullshit. See, Lana didn’t believe it and
look what happened to her! Lana…
Lana: I know, I know I didn’t tell you about her, but I will. That’s
the whole point of writing this down before they get me too.

See, in a little while I’m thinking
I might just walk out the kitchen door and right out to the barn.
I’ll leave this here on the kitchen table. For you, whoever you are,
who happened along into this kitchen.

Goddamn Zombies. Ever lovin’
Bastards! …

I am losing control; I know I am,
but…

Anyway, it was August. Hot. Hotter
they said than it had been in recorded time. I was not here in this
kitchen in rural New York someplace; I was in L.A., outside the city
up in the hills, a little farm. There was no wind. No rain. Seemed
like no air to breath. Global Warming they said. Maybe… Changes
coming, they said. Oh yeah, changes were coming. Changes right there
on that wind, probably…

It was on a Tuesday. I went to get
the mail and there were six or seven dead crows by the box. I
thought, those goddamn
Clark boys have been shooting their B.B guns again!
So I resolved to call old man Clark and give him a piece of my mind,
except I forgot. That happens to all of us: It’s not unusual. I
remembered about four o’clock the next morning when I got up. Well,
I told myself, Mail comes at ten, I’ll get that and then I’ll call up
and have that talk.

I make deals like that with myself
all the time. Sometimes it works out fine sometimes it doesn’t. It
didn’t.

Ten came and I forgot to get the
mail. I remembered at eleven thirty, cursed myself and went for my
walk to the box.

I live alone. I have since Jane
died. That was another hot summer when she went. I used to farm back
then. I retired early a few years back. I rent out the fields.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I walked to the mail box cursing
myself as I went. When I got there I realized the Clark boys had
either turned to eating crows or they had nothing to do with the dead
crows in the first place. There were dozens of dead crows, barn
swallows, gulls. The dirt road leading up to my place was scattered
with dead birds, dark sand where the blood had seeped in. Feathers
everywhere, caught in the trees, bushes and the ditches at the side
of the road. There were three fat, black crows sticking out of my
mailbox: Feet first; half eaten.

Some noise in the woods had made me
turn, but I didn’t turn fast enough. Whatever had made the noise was
gone once I got turned in that direction, but there were bare
footprints in the dry roadbed next to the box. They were not clear,
draggy, as though the person had, had a bad leg. He had of course,
but I had yet to meet the owner.

Hold on…

The day’s getting away from me. My
ears are playing tricks on me too. I thought I heard something
upstairs, but there’s nothing. I have the bottom floor boarded up.
Those Zombies may be far from stupid, but it’s goddamn hard to get
dead limbs to help you climb up the side of a house and we took
everything down they could hold onto…

Where was I? The mailbox. The mail
never came that day. In fact the mail never came again. Already Emma
Watson, our local Mail carrier, was a Zombie. I just didn’t know it.

I tried Clark, but I got no answer.
Later that day I heard a few shots, but we’re rural folks. There’s
Deer wandering all over the place: Coy dogs too. Wouldn’t be the
first time one got shot without a tag or a proper season. Lana came
later, upset, her boyfriend had run off somewhere she thought. It’ll
be okay I told her. She did the cleaning, ran some groceries from
town and left. She seemed in better spirits to me.

I seen him almost a week later.

Lana usually came at the end of the
week to help me with shopping, bills, she’s a… She was
a good girl. A good one. A good Zombie fearing girl. She was… She
hadn’t come as July had turned to August and I was sitting by the
stove that night and heard a scrape on the porch.

His leg was bad. Somebody had shot
him, but her fella had worse things going on than that. He was dead.
What was a bum leg when you were dead? Small problem. But it made him
drag that leg. I’m getting ahead of myself again though.

I picked up my old shot gun where it
sat next to the door, eased the door open and flicked on the porch
light. He jumped back into the shadows.

“Step out into the light,” I
tried not to sound as afraid as I was.

“No,” he rasped

“Step out here or I’ll shoot,” I
tried again.

“Lana,” he whispered. His voice
was gravelly.

That stopped me cold. I squinted,
but it was too dark to make out much: Still I had the idea it might
be her boyfriend. Maybe he’d got himself into something bad. I
couldn’t get the name to come to me. “You Lana’s boyfriend that
went missing…?”

Nothing but silence, and in that
silence I got a bad feeling. Something was wrong. It came to me about
the same time that he stepped into the light. There was no sound of
breathing. It was dead quiet, that was what my panicked mind was
trying to tell me. My own panicked breathing was the only sound until
he stepped into the light dragging his leg.

My heart staggered and nearly
stopped.

“Lana,” he rasped once more. He
cocked his head sideways, the way a dog will when it’s not sure of
something. One eye was bright, but milky white, the other was a gooey
mess hanging from the socket on the left side of his face.

I found my old shot gun rising in my
hands. I saw the alarm jump into his eyes and he was gone just that
fast.

I stood blinking, convinced that I
had somehow dreamed the whole encounter, but I knew I hadn’t. The
smell of rotting flesh still hung heavy in the air. In the distance I
heard the rustle of bushes and then silence. Zombies are not stupid,
and they are not slow.

The next day it seemed ridiculous.
What an old fool, I thought. What had I imagined? But the next few
days told me a different story.

I drove into a nearby town around
the middle of the week. I passed maybe two cars on the way, but
neither driver would meet my eyes. That was wrong. Trash blew through
the streets as I drove. The traffic lights were out on the four
corners and no one was on the streets. I didn’t see a state patrol
car.

The ShopMart strip mall was closed.
The road into it barricaded. I found a little Mom-and-Pop place open
on the way back, but there was next to nothing on the shelves. I got
a jar of peanut butter that I didn’t want, a package of crackers,
there was no bread, and paid with the last of my cash.

The store owner wore deep socketed
eyes in a lined face. His attitude said, I will not speak to you, and
he would not: After a brief attempt I gave up and went home. I never
went back. By that next night I knew what the deal was when Lana
showed up.

She came around noon. I heard the
sound of her engine revving long before she came into sight. She took
out the mailbox and crashed into the porch and that was that. We were
up most of the night talking about how much the world had changed.
She knew more than I did. She knew there were no more police. She
knew there were roving gangs of zombies on the streets of Los
Angeles. She had met a man who had come from there. L.A. was a ruin.
And she had spoken to another, this time a young woman from up toward
Seattle; the same story there. The zombies, it seemed, owned the
world.

We stayed until eight weeks ago. I
wouldn’t have been able to get out my own. That was early, before we
knew they would come out into the sunlight. Andy, that was her
fella’s name, came for her in the daylight when we were leaving the
house. If not for the bad leg he would have got her. If not for the
fact that we were close to the living room door he might have got
her. He might even have got her because we both froze. And when I
realized I had to move she was still frozen, just looking at his
ruined, rotted face.

I got the shot gun up and blew his
head off. I thought she was going to kill me, then I thought he was
going to manage to get back to his feet even without his head and
kill me. He finally stopped and I managed to drag her inside the
house and shut the door.

I had gone back out a short time
later, after I got her laid down and sleeping off the shock in the
back bedroom, to take a closer look at the body. There were five of
them eating him where he lay up beside her car, and two watching the
door: When I got out the two guarding the door were on me nearly that
fast. I shot them both as fast as I could pull the trigger. My shot
gun only holds four shells. Those two were gone and that had slowed
them, but they were not deterred. I made it back inside, locked the
door and began to wonder if my heart was going to explode.

Later, before dusk, I went back
outside. Andy’s body was gone along with the other zombies. I decided
that we had to try to get out, drive out and find help. She was
carrying a child after all, the zombie fella’s baby, I suppose.
Maybe there was a place outside of California where things were
normal, okay, a zombie free zone. The problem was that I was on the
wrong side of L.A., we would have to cut straight through the city to
head east. There was no other way to do it.

We planned it. I got my truck,
drained the gas from her car and my old tractor. That gave us a full
tank in the truck and almost ten gallons in cans strapped into the
back of the cab. There wasn’t much in the way of food, but we took
what we had. We left early morning.

L.A.: August 13th

The trek east out of the city was
harder than we had thought it would be. We had become mired down in
traffic long before we had ever hit the city itself, and had been
forced to give up the truck.

It was close to noon before we
reached Alameda, and decided to try to find some kind of four wheel
drive vehicles, at one of the many car lots that dotted it.

Once we had liberated a truck, it
had still been slow going until we reached El Segundo Boulevard. The
stalled traffic had been much lighter there, and we had been able to
drive part of the way by cutting into the parking lots of fast food
restaurants, that dotted almost the entire length of the highway. We
had followed that to Wilmington, and picked up another truck that had
seen better days. Getting that truck had not been a problem; there
were several used car lots along the road. We had used the parking
lots to swing around the worst of the traffic, and that had worked
well until we had intersected Compton Boulevard. It was hopelessly
packed with stalled traffic. We had left the truck, which had sounded
as if it was close to dying anyway, and struck out on foot again.
Lana led the way as we cut cross lots through Compton Woodley
Airport.

Crossing the dead airfield had been
unnerving for both of us. The runways had cracked, and either lifted
skyward, or tilted down into the ground. Blackened skeletons of large
aircraft dotted the airfield. Most of them were so badly burned that
we had been unable to tell what they had been before. I thought a
couple of them may have been military aircraft, but as badly twisted
as they were it was impossible to be sure.

Luggage, some burned, some
untouched, was scattered across the airfield in every direction, and
many of the suitcases were burst, with papers and clothing scattered
everywhere along with other personal effects. There were bodies there
too.

On our way through the city we had
seen very few bodies. It had been unsettling for both of us. Fewer
bodies meant more un-dead. We had both wondered aloud if the changing
was happening that fast. Raising the dead faster as time slipped by.
The bodies we had seen had not been killed by the Earthquakes. They
bore head wounds, and appeared to have been dead for only a short
period. Possibly only the last two or three days, we decided.

The bodies at the airport were
concentrated around the terminal building. The huge glass windows
were peppered with holes as if a battle had taken place for the
terminal. Most of the bodies inside were concentrated behind the long
rows of seats in the main lobby where they had been trying to use the
seats for cover. It had apparently done no good. We had paused only
briefly, wondering what had occurred before we had moved on. The
overwhelming stench in the shattered terminal building drove us out.
The wrecked planes, where we had expected to see bodies scattered all
around, were empty.

Occasionally we had heard gunfire
around us, and twice explosions from further north, behind us had
startled us. We had hurried along fearing the sounds, but fearing
more the possibility that the owners of the guns might find us. We
walked in silence across the remainder of the shattered airfield, and
we were both glad when we left it behind us and eventually came to
91. 91 was traffic packed and we had abandoned the truck, making our
way across the steel roof tops once more, crossing under 91 on South
Central and making our way along the sides of the road to E Del Amo
Boulevard.

There, like the Martin Luther King
Highway, black topped parking areas fronted all manner of fast food
restaurants, store chains and shops, which bordered both sides of the
strip. It wouldn’t necessarily assure a way around the stalled
traffic, I had realized, but it appeared as though it would give us a
much better chance of getting to 405.

~

I set the pencil aside and listened
to the noises outside the old frame house: Some other farmer’s house,
three thousand miles from my own home. Dark sounds, rustling, had to
be the dead, but there was nothing for it. I picked the pencil up,
flexed my fingers and began to write again…

Yesterday I found an old bottle of
whiskey in a locked cabinet in the living room and resolved to leave
it be. Now I have changed my mind. I have been sipping at it while I
sit here and write. Maybe it will help my resolve with the part I
still have to play after I write this out. Maybe it won’t, I don’t
know. But I do know it is helping my head right now, and that is
enough for me.

So, we had been trying to get to
405… 

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