It’d probably be better that way, she told herself. Right…?
No. Omega was everywhere. Nowhere was safe.
But she didn’t want to leave. She knew these streets, and it was the only thing in her life that was familiar. She had grown up here. She had visited the theater with her father, eaten lunch on Saturday afternoons with her mother at the beach and built sandcastles with her brother. This was her home.
If she left, she would be a nomad. A wanderer.
No one really knew what was beyond the city.
Elle put the cans back on the counter, ignoring her growling stomach. The food was a precious commodity. Flavorful stuff like carrots or green beans was becoming less available. Elle had become a skilled forager, but even she could barely find enough to eat anymore.
She organized her backpack again. She kept it filled with essential supplies: water, food, matches, bandages, iodine, maps, a knife and ammunition for her 1911 Smith and Wesson handgun.They were necessary items, important for survival.
Several times during the night she heard noises coming from somewhere inside the apartment building. Creaks, groans and thumping sounds. She would freeze with every sound, terrified that she would hear a footstep. But no. For the most part, the noises were just from loose boards or windows moving in the September breeze.
Birds had started returning to Los Angeles a few months ago. The chemical weapons — whatever they were, no one could be sure — had wiped out all forms of life. Dogs, cats, birds and bugs. Elle often wondered if a low level of poison was still seeping out of the walls of every building in the city, slowing killing her. It was a terrifying thought, but she didn’t care as much as she should.
If she died, she died.
Nobody was going to miss her. There was nobody left.
Elle finished restocking her backpack. She kept her pack with her at all times, always filled with a little bit of food and medicine. The possibility that she might not make it back to the apartment at the end of the day was very real. She’d found that out months ago, shivering and starving for three days in the basement of a sushi house, waiting for Klan gang members to move on. She’d wished that she’d had food in her pack then.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
As a general rule, Elle wouldn’t eat anything in the city that wasn’t sealed in an airtight container like a plastic bag or a can. She didn’t know what kinds of chemical weapons had been released on the city, but it would be stupid to eat food that might be soaked in the stuff. She’d seen seagulls fly in off the coastline, eat garbage from the overflowing trash containers, and drop dead.
She was living in a biological waste zone, and she knew it.
Yeah, I should definitely move on, she thought. But what if what’s out there is worse than what’s in Los Angeles?
The fear of the unknown is what kept Elle in the city.
Omega had power. So much power that they had destroyed the technological infrastructure of the most powerful nation on earth. For all Elle knew, they might have taken over the entire world by now.
There might not be a safe place anymore.
Chapter Three
Zero.
There it was, spray-painted across the first board on the Santa Monica Pier. Elle stared at it, swallowing a nervous lump in her throat. The pier was creaking in the wind. Every time a wave hit the support beams below, the boardwalk shuddered in the early morning light. It was foggy, wet and cold.
Elle hauled a fishing pole over her shoulder, one of the most valuable items she had foraged from the city. She had bait in her backpack, a can full of worms she had dug up from the muddy soil in the park above the beach. Coming to the pier to fish was something she had been trying to work up the courage to do for a long time. She’d heard that people used to fish from the pier in the past. Elle was starving, and she would do anything for food.
Zero.
It had been painted across the railings, on the back of buildings, on cars parked in the parking lot next to the pier. Elle knew what it meant. It meant the world was over. The modern world, anyway. It meant back to the drawing board.
The boardwalk stretched far into the water. Abandoned amusement attractions paralleled the pier — a merry-go-round, a bicycle shop. The once-famous Muscle Beach stretched out on the left, below the pier.
Elle remembered seeing this place at night as a little girl. Before the Collapse. It was lit up like a Christmas tree, rainbow colored and glowing.
She started walking. She was aware of how exposed she was. Anybody could be watching her. Anybody.
Her hunger drove her onward.
She kept walking down the boardwalk, moving from cover to cover, staying in the shadows, watching for danger. The sound of the waves and seagulls on the railing were the only things she could hear. It was so silent. So sad. She continued, reaching a sign that said Pacific Park.
The letters stretched across the entrance, colorful but faded. Elle stood and looked at it. A rollercoaster and other amusement rides were clustered around the pier. Elle walked under the lettered archway. Every building here was a faded neon color. Green, blue, red, and yellow. It was cheery, but in this atmosphere, little more than a sick joke.
Nothing was fun anymore. Even this was just an empty husk.
There was a rollercoaster, an elevator launch, an octopus spin, a Ferris wheel. There were kiddie rides and carnival games. She searched the rest of the park, pawing through a restaurant called The Harbor Grill. There was nothing edible left. It had been too long. Anything here had either been looted or exposed to the poison of the chemical weapons. There was no food.
Elle sat near the railing at the end of the pier, beyond the attractions, near an empty souvenir shop. She checked her line, baited and weighted the hook, and casted it into the water below. She had brought a plastic bag in her backpack, in case she caught a fish. She stared at the water below as she sat, cross-legged, trying to keep her mind off the pain in her stomach.
She was just so hungry.
Elle thought about Los Angeles, and how impossible it was to find food anymore. But leaving the city frightened Elle. What if the world outside Los Angeles was worse? What if Omega had really destroyed everything?
She shuddered.
I’ve got to make a decision.
And that’s when she heard it.
Human voices.
Elle slid into the shadows. She hid beneath a plastic picnic table and looked up the pier, back toward the mainland. There were people. Several of them. At least eight — maybe more. She couldn’t tell from here.
Elle’s chest constricted.
Someone had seen her. Klan members, by the looks of it. Had to be. Omega didn’t come to the beach unless they had a very good reason.
Elle slowly crawled backward. She knew the Klan well, better than most.
The Klan members were sauntering up the pier, making no attempt to hide their presence. They knew that Elle had nowhere to run. She gritted her teeth.
I never should have come out here.
Now she would be forced out of the city. Or worse, killed.
She turned and sprinted to the back of Pacific Park. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. She looked at her fishing pole, wedged between the railing, the line moving in the waves.
She flinched as she turned her back on the fishing pole — such a valuable item.