“It doesn’t matter,” Maxillo said. “We will land soon. You can explain yourself to the Emperor then.”
Outside in the corridor, more doors opened. We were all being taken out to prepare for our landing. For the first time in three days, I would see my friends.
Maxillo nodded his head toward the corridor, indicating that I should exit the cabin. Beyond Maxillo, Ashton walked by, a Praetorian right behind him. The scientist looked in at me, his white hair and beard a wild mess. He gave me a sly wink. As he walked past the door, I went toward the doorway. By the time I reached it, Anna walked by, escorted by her own Praetorian. She cast me a quick glance before she was hidden by the bulwark.
I stepped into the hallway. Maxillo gave me a light push, forcing me toward the wardroom.
We were all made to sit at the table. Maxillo left us with three stone-faced Praetorians and headed for the bridge.
“Stay quiet,” he said. “We will be in the city soon.”
As instructed, none of us spoke. A moment later, the ship changed trajectory, angling downward. I held on to the edge of the table to steady myself.
A few minutes later, we sunk vertically toward the ground. The ship gave a sudden lift before it settled onto the surface outside.
At long last, we had arrived in Los Angeles.
The blast door opened, revealing the sky burning fiery red from the setting sun. Buildings had crumbled onto one another, though most still stood. The decayed skyline, distant, was lost in reddish haze — not from the pollution of the Old World, but from the dust of the new.
We stood on the roof of a large, long building. Orion had perched on a helipad, its three struts barely fitting on the landing site. A cold, dry wind blew. Though cold, the breeze was warmer than I was used to. I had read something about oceans keeping coastal regions warmer than inland areas. Maybe that was why it was warmer.
I didn’t know why I was thinking such things when the situation was so dire. I stared at the decayed cityscape, the twisting towers, the crisscrossing streets clogged with the rusted shells of cars and trucks, low-lying buildings stained with thirty years of dust and debris.
A hand pushed me down the boarding ramp toward the tarmac. Ashton and Anna were right behind. No one spoke.
The Praetorians made us stand at the bottom of the ramp, facing out. As more feet clomped down, I looked at the fallen city. The crimson sky cast bloodlike light on the buildings. To the east, mountains marched north to south, making a natural wall. Far to the north, even more mountains crisscrossed east to west. I even saw buildings in the eastern, lifeless hills, despite how far they were. Trees stood, but most were long dead. Maybe all. In the thirty years since Ragnarok, Los Angeles had been reclaimed by the desert.
A line of rubble rose within the inner city, cutting that section off from its outskirts. This was the wall that Raine built; Makara had told me about it. There were hundreds of buildings — maybe thousands. It was hard to imagine millions of people going in and out of them, hard to imagine that chaotic stream, each person making his or her own choices, millions of them every second. If it were that chaotic, surely everyone would have gotten stuck down there. Maybe they did. I guessed that was why they made traffic lights, highways, lanes on the road. Maybe they had ways to control the chaos, but even all the control in the world couldn’t stop certain things.
Like death from the sky.
There were thousands of buildings, for sure. Some were tall, like the ones in Vegas, but there were more of them here. Blocks of these towers stood to the north, in the center of the city. I thought Vegas had been big, but it didn’t compare to this fallen monstrosity. The buildings, small and large, stretched as far as the eye could see — north, south, and east as far as the mountains. It had been its own form of Blight, maybe. How much larger would Los Angeles be today if Ragnarok hadn’t fallen? Would our cities have consumed the world?
Los Angeles had been one of the biggest, busiest, and richest cities in the world. And, funnily enough, it still was. More people lived here than any other place in the Wasteland. I imagined those early days after Ragnarok, the panicked survivors. There must have been millions, then. Gangs would have formed shortly after, warring for supplies.
I was glad not to have lived here during the Chaos Years. I thought of Char and Marcus. They had lived during those times, but I hadn’t asked about them.
The dim, setting sun was the source of all life. When its light had been obscured by the dust kicked up by Ragnarok, the world entered a darkness from which it hadn’t emerged. Los Angeles’s population had tumbled from the millions to mere thousands. Many had probably fled into the eastern hills, hoping to find salvation there. But they only found a world of death. Only the Bunkers had been safe, for a time, but even they couldn’t escape.
Los Angeles was the hub of the Wasteland. It was where most of the people lived, where fates were determined for the rest of us. Whoever controlled Los Angeles controlled the Wasteland, because whoever controlled Los Angeles ruled the majority of the Wasteland’s people. Most of those people were slaves, and only a few were the gang members who ruled them. The Lost Angels were no more, and it seemed doubtful that they would last much longer.
This massive city would crumble mostly to dust in the coming decades. The towers would fall from the passage of time and the shaking of the earth. When they finally did fall, it was possible no human eye would see them collapse.
Assuming we survived this, we had to rebuild sometime. We couldn’t just leech off the remains of a world fading further and further into time. If we did, we’d be reduced to savages and cavemen centuries from now. Perhaps we already were at that point. One day we would forget what those towers were, thinking they were constructed by gods…
“It’s time to go.”
Maxillo had spoken behind me. Below, on a long, curving drive that disappeared beneath the building, several all-terrain vehicles drove up.
LAX, I realized. We had landed on top of the airport terminal.
The vehicles were all black and had skulls painted on their doors, crisscrossed by scythes. Their engines whined high like a plague of insects. Lean, long-haired men toting rifles poked out from windows.
The Reapers were here.
Next to me, Ashton’s breath caught. But he wasn’t looking ahead at the Reapers. He was looking behind the terminal.
I turned, gazing past the Praetorians, past Augustus, toward the runways of LAX — where I saw thousands upon thousands of Augustus’s legionaries camped. Hundreds of canvas tents had been pitched in perfect lines, and countless fires glowed red in the evening. A tall fence surrounded the army in a perfect square. It was impossible to guess how many were in there.
Augustus stepped forward, face grim. He nodded at Maxillo.
“This way.”
Maxillo headed left, where a stairwell surfaced on the roof. The Reapers’ vehicles pulled to a stop in front of the terminal, idling. Was Carin Black among them?
I guessed I would find out in a few minutes.
Chapter 3
We descended the stairwell. Maxillo led the way with a flashlight, illuminating dusty corners and grimy walls. Violent paintings coated the faded, sickly yellow of walls: fires, guns, blood, stick figures, and falling buildings. And scythes. It was art for a new age.
We rounded the stairs three times before exiting into the airport lobby. I had never been inside anything so large besides Bunker One. The ceiling stretched high above, lost to darkness. The architecture was curved and jarring; it was hard to believe what we had once been capable of building. Soot stained the once glossy white floor, the sites of previous fires. Red light filtered thinly through the entrance, doing little to illuminate the cavernous space.