The gunshot had sent others into hiding. Other people — more dangerous ones — would regroup and emerge again. It was time to get moving.
All was silent once again.
The city had been a warzone for ten months. After the collapse — after the world ended — they came: Omega. The shadow army. The invasion force. They were everywhere and nowhere all at once. An eye in the sky. A patrol on the street. Where did they come from? Nobody knew. What did they want? Us.
They wanted all of us.
They used chemical weapons against us. They destroyed millions of the civilian population of Los Angeles. Omega moved their center of operations to the Port of Los Angeles and downtown L.A., leaving Hollywood and Santa Monica mostly abandoned.
Those places belonged to the dead now.
Well. The dead and people like Elle: foragers and survivors.
The rest of the state was squashed under the Omega invasion. Concentration camps corralled citizens into forced slave labor. Omega ruled with an iron fist, and anyone who dared challenge them died.
But not all hope was lost. Grassroots militia groups sprung up in the areas controlled by Omega, and the people resisted the takeover. In the Central Valley, Omega had been pushed back, had suffered heavy casualties.
Few civilians remained in Los Angeles after the chemical attacks. Those that did were usually looking for food, medical supplies or lost family members. The chances of finding either of those things were slim to none. Yet some people returned, and many formed the street gangs of Los Angeles. It was a place dictated by the brutality of an invading army and the savagery of desperate survivors.
It was a deadly game; the survival of the fittest. Only the smartest — or the most ruthless — survived. The rest fell by the wayside, either starving to death or falling prey to Omega or the street gangs. Those who managed to avoid death by starvation or murder clung to the hope that order and peace would somehow be restored.
There was no more order, no more security. No more civility between average citizens. It was kill or be killed. Common trust was gone. The rules had changed.
No one knew that better than Elle.
When the electromagnetic pulse hit Los Angeles, she had been fourteen years old, a student at Beverly Hills High School, and the daughter of wealthy Hollywood socialites. Raised in a house where strict discipline and work ethic were encouraged, she pursued her passion of martial arts and gymnastics. Elle, her parents, and her brother lived in an apartment in Westwood, just a few miles from Hollywood Boulevard.
Her first semester as a freshman at Beverly Hills High School came to an abrupt end when the electromagnetic pulse hit. Her world changed in an instant.
Everything fell apart.
Elle turned and ran. Her best defense was her speed and agility. The sun was setting, and she knew what that meant. Before long, street predators would be roving the city. She needed to get back to her hiding place.
The shot that she had just fired still rang in her head. She hated having to defend herself from people like that, from desperate, starving killers. Elle’s guess was that the man she had killed had been a member of the Klan, the city’s most organized gang. They were powerful.
They were deadly.
Santa Monica itself was a beautiful city, once. The apartment complexes rose like sharp bits of broken teeth into the sky. Vegetation wound its way through apartment balconies and around dead car frames. Elle kept running, breathing hard, sweat running down her forehead, the back of her neck. She had blood on her cheek — she’d caught a spray of it when she had shot the gang member at Millions of Milkshakes.
She hooked a left and dropped prone behind an overturned trashcan. She could smell the ocean, fresh and salty and cold. Across the street, there was a beautiful, unattended park, wet with rain. It looked like nature was taking over, taking back everything it had owned before the rise of modern civilization. And beyond that, Highway 1 — The Pacific Coast Highway — paralleled the beach below the cliff. The shoreline extended as far as the eye could see, dotted with empty beach houses. In fact, you could even see the blackened remains of the cliff-side mansions of Malibu if you looked hard enough.
But Elle had already seen all that.
To her back was a white apartment building, long ago abandoned by the residents before the chemical weapons. A stairway led to the front entrance. Elle checked left, checked right. She stood and sprinted up the stairs, pushing the door open. She slammed it shut behind her, lowering the lock — a heavy piece of wood, serving both as a crossbar and an intruder alarm. It was dark inside.
This was her safe zone, her hideaway.
She felt her way up a dark hallway, trotting up steps. She could barely see anything besides the general shape of the railing and the steps. She reached the fourth floor and counted her steps.
Seven, eight, nine, ten… here we are.
She felt for the door handle. There it was, just like she had practiced.She turned the handle and the door opened. A slit of late sunlight fell across her face. She stepped inside and closed the door, locked it. She breathed a sigh of relief.
Safe. For now.
The apartment was a modern loft. One bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen. Whoever lived here had been some kind of a poet. Poetry books were everywhere — along with CDs and DVDs of poetry reading. Some of it was weird, some of it was pretty. Elle was never into poetry, but reading it sometimes helped to pass the long, lonely hours of the day.
She hated those hours.
She dropped her backpack on the carpet and walked to the window. She pulled back the curtain enough so that she could watch the street below. She was on the corner, so she could see Santa Monica Boulevard and Ocean Boulevard at the same time.
Her only blind spot was the alley behind the apartment building, but she had no way to get a good view of that. She’d been living here for three weeks, and so far she hadn’t had any trouble. She hoped it stayed that way.
From her spot at the window, Elle could see the Santa Monica Pier. The brightly colored rollercoaster wound around the Ferris wheel. It looked lonely. Empty. It had been a long time since the pier had glowed with lights and echoed with the laughter of fun-seeking crowds.
Tomorrow, she would visit the pier.
Chapter Two
Elle had been looking at the Santa Monica Pier for nine months. Every evening, every day. She would look for any sign of movement, of habitation. But there was never anything, other than the occasional nomadic fisherman.It made Elle curious. It made her brave.
It made her stupid, too, sometimes. Reckless.
She sat on the floor of the apartment, legs propped up on the couch, head on the floor. The window was open just a crack, enough to let the cool sea breeze inside the stuffy room. Elle closed her eyes and pretended that she was home, watching television while she waited for her mom to come back from the grocery store.
She sat up abruptly.
Mom was never coming back from the grocery store.
Elle was alone.
She rolled to her knees and stood up, walking into the kitchen. She didn’t have a lot of supplies here. A few canned goods — carrots, peas and creamed corn — and two tins of tuna. Elle hated tuna, but she’d eat it anyway if it were all she had. She’d eaten worse in the last year. A lot worse.
The sour candy that she’d found at Millions of Milkshakes hadn’t filled the hole in her stomach. Sooner or later she’d have to face reality: Santa Monica and Hollywood was running out of food. She was going to have to move on.