Cascade, p.67
Cascade, page 67
“Well, that went just about as well as could be expected,” Disco said. “And now they’re not going to rob anybody else.” He turned and raised his voice, looking at Matt. “Now they won’t be able to rob anybody else.” Matt was still facing the trees, and didn’t turn around.
“No service. None,” Leslie said, holding her phone up in the air.
“Like I said, they picked a great spot.”
“So now what do we do?” Jack said. He winced, and dug a thumb into his temple. Even with his whole body vibrating with adrenaline, his head hurt.
“Law-abiding citizens, behaving in a civilized manner, would send somebody out in one of these vehicles until they got cell service to call nine-one-one, while the rest waited here for the cops to show. Then we’d spend a day or a month in jail while it all got sorted out. Or we could go the other way, police our brass, move one of those trucks, get the fuck out of here, and hope nobody connects us to this.” He raised his eyebrows, looked at Jack, and then the two of them looked at Leslie.
“Fuuuck,” she said, shaking her head.
“I just want to get home!” Matt shouted in frustration. They looked over, and saw he’d shouted it toward the long valley.
Back in the truck, everyone but Disco seemed stunned and a bit in shock. Leslie felt a little sick, and her hands kept shaking and clenching. Matt didn’t even want to touch the shotgun.
Jack huffed, lowered his head, and worked his neck. He raised a hand, and pressed a palm to his forehead. Did he have a fever? He felt hot, but maybe that was just a reaction to the adrenaline dump. But he still had the damn headache, and after the gunfire it was three times as bad. A piercing pain, making him wince. What he imagined a migraine headache felt like, although he’d never had one.
“Jack?” Matt asked him. “You okay?” Leslie looked over.
“Yeah, I don’t…I don’t feel so good.”
Chances are, you’re already surrounded by mindless, bloodthirsty, half-alive subhuman wretches. An actual zombie outbreak would just give you an excuse to do something constructive.
Unknown
Chapter Fifty-Five: Keith
Keith Kim jerked awake, his hand reflexively going toward the pistol sitting on the rickety table a few feet away. But it wasn’t a threat that had awakened him, he realized almost instantly, it was one of the coolers in the back of the store kicking on. So they had power, at least for the moment. In the past few days they’d had three power blackouts, two which had only lasted a few minutes and another which had lasted eight hours, and two brownouts. The brownouts seemed to be worse, as they often damaged appliances and electronics. He ran around unplugging certain things during the brownouts.
He laid his head back down, heart pounding, grumbled, then checked the time on the luminous hands of his watch. Two minutes before six. Still early. Still time to get some sleep, before—and then he thought to look over at the other cot. Which was empty. Of course it was.
With a groan he threw off the thin blanket and sat up. The cot was older than he was, likely left over from the seventies, and left him feeling like a senior citizen every morning. Or maybe it wasn’t the cot, or wasn’t just the cot—the stress and the worry surely had something to do with it. He could barely get to sleep, no matter how tired he was, and every night was filled with nightmares.
He pulled his socks on, simply because he didn’t want to go wandering around the place in bare feet, and stood up. He found his father in the middle of the store, sweeping down an aisle, one small light providing illumination. “Abeoji, you should be sleeping. The sun’s not even up,” he said, gesturing at the front windows. Past the aluminum security gates, which were built like wide metal roll-down ladders which unspooled inside the big sheets of plate glass and locked in place, the windows showed them a dark parking lot, empty but for a few vehicles the President’s kill switch order had disabled. Both his father’s Hyundai and his mother’s Kia were new enough that they’d been affected; luckily both his parents had been home, so the vehicles were parked in their driveway, not the parking lot of the strip mall. Every vehicle in the lot, or left on the streets, had been vandalized, some or all of the windows smashed. Keith’s Mazda still worked, but he didn’t want to leave it parked in the open lot any more than necessary. If you had a working car, it was a target. Lots of cars were getting stolen. There were huge numbers of carjackings, far more than the media was reporting. Then again, the local news media wasn’t reporting most of what he knew was going on in L.A. Most of the time he kept his car in his apartment building’s parking garage, and walked over to the store. All the public charging stations for electric vehicles had been shut down, but considering all the EVs were just a few years old they’d all been disabled by the kill switch anyway.
At least at night you could pretend that everything was normal. Most of the time. But he could feel the breeze coming in through the missing window, smashed two days earlier by a group of drunk guys. Keith wasn’t sure if they were just drunk assholes or criminals looking for a place to loot. Maybe both. Maybe even they weren’t sure. But him standing just inside the windows, in the middle of the aisle, staring them down, pistol in hand but not pointed at anything in particular, had been enough to get them to leave. His heart had been pounding so hard it felt like it would fly out of his chest. He occasionally caught a whiff of smoke, even if he didn’t see any flames. And nothing could hide how bare the shelves were in the store. They weren’t sleeping in the store to protect the few items they still had for sale, they were there to protect the store itself. Arsonists seemed to be as plentiful as carjackers. Keith glanced at the shelves, then his father. “What would you like me to do?”
“Inventory what’s behind the counter,” his father told him. Then he nodded at Keith. “But put some pants on first, you look like…” his father waved a hand while he tried to think of a proper description. “Magic Mike,” he said finally.
Keith burst out laughing, and looked down at his silk boxers, which happened to be purple. “Ne, abeoji.”
* * *
The Mega Millions and Powerball drawings had been put on hold, so they weren’t selling any tickets for those games. But customers were still coming in and buying scratch-off lottery tickets, even if they had to walk past burning cars and houses or run from zombies to do it. Still, their rolls of scratch-offs were getting a little thin, just like everything else. Usually, every square inch of space behind the counter, behind the security glass, was occupied with small products—lighters, tobacco products, caffeine pills and herbal enhancements, condoms, lighters, and dozens of other items. Even though sales of most non-groceries had slowed way down, the store wasn’t getting resupplied. They hadn’t had a delivery in at least four days, and that didn’t seem likely to change any time soon. So their inventory of everything was slowly shrinking ever closer to zero.
By the time he was done the sun was up. The parking lot looked like the set of a Halloween horror movie, awash in dirty orange light, long shadows stretching across the pavement. Nearly dark enough for passing cars to need their headlights. The horizon was a brown fingerprint smudge from all the fires, so thick it made L.A.’s famous smog seem like a clear blue sky. From where he was standing he could see the smoke columns of dozens of fires, large and small, stretching miles into the distance and thousands of feet into the sky.
After the horde of homeless zombies had broken through the police blockade—caught on live TV, thanks to the local news helicopters—everything had changed in the city. The police went from patrolling to simply protecting their own—what few were still showing up to work—and occasionally responding to major incidents. The zombies seemed to be everywhere, but they were strangely less of an issue than the rioters and looters who were using the lack of law enforcement to run wild through the city. Criminal gangs were rampant, doing home invasions in the expensive zip codes as the stores were all looted. Private security forces had been in several gun battles with the heavily-armed gangs in more than one gated community. Usually the security guards were outnumbered and outgunned, but many of the L.A. homeowners in those posh neighborhoods didn’t seem willing to give up without a fight, and more than once had provided supporting fire from their houses. And if you could afford a house that cost a million or three, and a private security force, you could afford nice firearms. That perhaps weren’t on the California DOJ’s approved list. Quite often the action was caught on security and doorbell cameras and posted to the web by the survivors, the videos like something out of an apocalyptic Hollywood disaster movie.
Footage of the carjackings and zombie attacks and neighborhood gun battles seemed to be getting scrubbed from the internet. Of course, the local politicians were denying any such anarchy existed, and the local TV news channels seemed to be in league with them, downplaying any and all reports of arson or violent crime. Keith knew this because he’d stayed on the job for two days after the major zombie incident. Longer than most of his coworkers at Prestige. They’d run from call to call to call for eighteen hours. Citizens calling about a family member strapped to a bed or locked in a room after they’d gone full zombie—more of those calls than they could handle even if they’d been fully staffed. Calls about injured people in the street, only to discover they were zombies who’d been hit by passing cars, crawling along with broken arms and legs and fractured spines. Burn victims from fires had learned to call for ambulance rides, as the hospitals weren’t taking any new walk-in patients. And lots of gunshot victims. People were shooting zombies. Assholes were shooting people. It seemed like everyone was shooting everyone…when they weren’t out setting fires.
Their unit had been called out to support the police in the aftermath of some sort of riot. When their ambulance had rolled up there’d been twenty bodies on the ground, most of them shot, half of them beaten as well, or sporting ugly bite wounds. But no police to be seen. A call to dispatch revealed that the police had already left the scene. It was difficult to tell who the people were or what had happened—riot? Zombie attack? Twenty people, victims, in the middle of a street, and beyond them people were nonchalantly looting stores. Or just standing around, smoking weed, and watching the action.
Keith and his partner attempted to begin triage, only to have several of the obviously fatally wounded people try to attack them—zombies, clearly, who couldn’t feel their injuries. One man with his leg bent the wrong way, splintered bone sticking from his pale flesh, grabbed Keith and tried to bite him. Keith had to grab his Microtech switchblade and stab the man in the side of the head, killing him. Before Keith had even had a chance to process what had happened, someone—maybe one of the looters?—started shooting at them and their ambulance. He and his partner had jumped back in the ambulance and gotten the hell out of there. Six bullet holes in the vehicle, they’d found later. That’s when he’d gotten scared, looking at those holes in the sheet metal. He’d kept a close watch on the local news—whatever had happened at that location, it never made the news. Twenty dead or injured, a mass shooting involving the police, widespread looting at the scene, and not a mention on any of the local news channels, or in the L.A. Times—which told him that as bad as the news said it was in the city, the reality was far, far worse.
And that didn’t even count the fires. There seemed to be at least one on every block. In certain areas of the city, entire blocks were ablaze. And only rarely did he see fire department personnel on site, fighting the flames, occasionally with police protection. After that, and his parents talking nervously about the violence in and outside their store, Keith had taken a leave of absence from work to help his family.
Why was his father sweeping the aisle? Why was Keith doing inventory on inconsequential items? Because they didn’t know what else to do. They all seemed to be in disbelief at the situation. In a holding pattern, waiting for it to end and for things to go back to normal. Even though that seemed less and less likely as the days went on.
Curtis hadn’t shown up to work at the market for three days. Or maybe it was four. He’d just missed work one day, and calls to his cell had gone straight to voicemail. They didn’t know if he was dead or just staying home, and nobody had the time to check on him. Rosalinda was at home, taking care of her mother—or at least that was her story. Keith suspected she was just too scared to leave the house and head to work. He couldn’t really blame her; he’d stopped going to work to help his family.
The owners of the businesses in the small strip mall had banded together to keep their properties intact. To one side of Kim’s Convenience was a dry cleaner and a Verizon cell phone store, to the other a nail salon and a liquor store. All Korean owned. And Mr. Young, the man who owned the building, whom they all leased from, was Korean as well. If there was one thing Koreans had, it was family, and a sense of community.
His cousins Tim and Tae-hoon showed up just before eight. Tae-hoon was forty, and looked like a TV star, with a craggy, expressive face and a thick mop of wavy black hair. He’d been single for a few years after his wife died in a nasty car wreck. He worked as a mechanic at a Mercedes dealership, which meant every car they sold and serviced had been shut down, putting him out of a job the instant the President flipped the kill switch. But he had access to a working vehicle, the twelve-year-old Dodge Ram pickup he’d been fixing up in his garage. He’d parked it in the handicap spot closest to the front door of the market. He had a cigarette dangling from his lower lip and a non-quite-concealed pistol stuffed into his waistband, and looked around unconcernedly as Keith unlocked the front door.
Tim held a box of travel mugs full of coffee he’d brewed at home, as all the local coffee shops were closed. Tim was an accountant, but the company he worked for had shut their doors not long after the President had announced the bioterror attack. He was a few years older than Keith, with a medium build and a round face that made you think he was chubbier than he was.
“Any problems?” Tim asked him nervously as they came in.
“You mean other than appa waking up in the middle of the night to sweep and rearrange the inventory?”
“At least you’re sleeping behind metal gates and doors,” Tim said. “A Girl Scout could kick in the front door of my apartment.”
Keith snorted and stepped out onto the sidewalk, looking left and right, as his cousins went inside to say hello to his father. He saw Mr. Park, owner of the liquor store, standing outside his door, arms crossed, frowning, talking to his brother. Mr. Park saw Keith, and pointed to the burnt orange sky. “More fires, all night, all day. They want to burn down the whole city. Not my store!” His voice echoed across the parking lot.
Mr. Park’s brother patted him on the shoulder and pointed at Keith, then walked down the sidewalk toward him. Both Park men were in their late fifties, stoop-shouldered, their hair turning gray. They looked enough alike to be twins, but were a few years apart in age. “You’re good? Your parents are good?”
“So far.” Keith’s mother was staying at their house, accompanied by an ever-changing roster of female friends and relatives, some of whom were sleeping over as they didn’t feel safe at their homes.
The older man pointed above them. “He wants us to go up on the roof. In case the mobs come.” Keith gave him a dubious look. The man looked over his shoulder at his brother, then back at Keith. “I know, I know, but if anybody throws a Molotov up there, we might not be able to put it out in time if we’re not already up there.”
“If anybody throws a Molotov anywhere we’re in serious trouble.” They had a few fire extinguishers inside the store, but fire was wicked, deadly, and unpredictable, like a dangerous, trapped animal.
The man shrugged. “Well, I’m going to tell him I mentioned it to you, okay? And talk to your father about it.”
“My father gets nervous on the second rung of a ladder,” Keith told him. “I don’t think he’s ever been up on the roof. But I’ll tell him.”
They looked over at the sound of a racing engine. A Charger roared past on the street. The traffic was sparse, only one car every minute or two. Drivers either went slow, carefully picking their way past the Presidentially-disabled vehicles which littered every street in the city, plus the random debris from looting and rioting, or they drove crazy fast, slaloming around obstacles and ignoring the speed limits, either because they were afraid of carjackers or random gunfire, or because they knew the cops were far too busy to give out speeding tickets, if they were even still on the job at all. Keith couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a police vehicle.
His father was talking to Tim and Tae-hoon in the middle of the store in rapid Korean. “We were supposed to get a delivery yesterday. And the day before. I’m sure one will show up today. You can help stock the shelves.”
His two cousins traded a look, then turned their eyes to Keith. “Have you seen the roads out there?” he asked his father. “I don’t know how many delivery trucks are getting through. Or even interested in trying.”
His father waved that idea away like it was inconsequential. “They’ll come,” he said confidently.
Keith walked into the back room. He folded up his cot and pushed it to the side. As he grabbed the ring hanging from the ceiling by a length of rope Tae-hoon walked in. “What are you doing?”
The ring pulled down a spring-loaded trap door which concealed a set of metal stairs that extended to the floor. “Just checking the roof,” Keith told his cousin.
