The Alt Apocalypse: Books 1-3 Read online

  She threw off her mask and slid onto her knees, nudging Maggie aside. She yanked off Danny’s mask and cradled his face with her trembling hands.

  Dub took a step back as Ritz rushed past him carrying a first aid kit. It was then Dub noticed the blood leaking from everywhere, spreading outward from beneath Danny’s body.

  Gilda was speaking to Danny, trying to hold his attention. His eyes were unfocused, trying to hold Gilda’s intense gaze but unable to.

  Tears streaked down her face. Her tight bun had come undone when she’d ripped off her mask. Her long white-blond hair draped across her shoulders and in a thin veil across her face. She brushed it away aggressively with her fingers, leaving a powder of ash on her cheeks and brow.

  Ritz ripped open Danny’s torn jacket and shirt. He uncapped a bottle of water he’d pulled from his pack and squeezed it over the wounds. Then he took another bottle and did the same along the side of Danny’s neck where Dub now saw a wide gash that ran from behind his ear to his collarbone.

  After irrigating the wounds, Ritz slammed a needle into Danny’s thigh and pushed the plunger with his thumb. He yanked out the needle, tossing it behind him to the ground.

  “I can’t do anything else for the punctures,” Ritz said hurriedly to nobody in particular. “But these tears, these, uh, gashes, I’ve got to get them closed. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

  “What can I do?” asked Dub.

  “There’s a staple gun in there,” Ritz said, pouring more water on the wound at Danny’s neck. “It’s white.”

  Dub reached into the pack to fish for a white stapler. He found it, shiny plastic with a flat nose and a wide pull trigger along its base. He handed it to Ritz and slid back on the ground.

  “While I work on this one,” he said to Dub, “apply pressure to that one.”

  He pointed to some parallel gashes on Danny’s side near his navel. They weren’t long, but they looked deep. To Dub they resembled fish gills.

  Dub swallowed hard, his throat dry, blinking away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes, and trying to focus through the haze of fog developing at the edges of his goggles’ lenses. He took part of Danny’s torn shirt and pressed it against the wound.

  Ritz pinched the folds of skin together at Danny’s neck and pressed the stapler’s nose perpendicular to the wound. Then he pulled the trigger and a staple thumped into his neck.

  Danny winced, his eyes wildly searching the space above him. The faintest groan oozed from his mouth.

  Gilda was talking to him as the next staple snapped into his neck. She was speaking softly, repositioning herself to maintain eye contact. Snot dripped from her ash-caked face. Tears streaked clean lines along her face.

  Maggie walked around in circles at Danny’s head. She was whimpering and restless, as if the commotion had called her attention to the gravity of her master’s health. She tried nuzzling toward him, sniffing at his head. But each thump of the stapler caused her to jump back and tuck her tail.

  “Look at me,” Gilda implored. “Stay with me.”

  Dub could see on Gilda’s face, in her crinkled, trembling chin, what all of them knew. Danny was dying. The wounds from the cat or his own dog were too much. He didn’t have enough blood.

  He held the pressure at the wound in Danny’s side, his own emotions welling inside his chest despite having known the man for less than a day. Ritz told him to move so that he could close the wounds. Ritz pulled back the shred of shirt. More blood, as if held at bay by a dam, leaked from the gashes and leached together to form a single pool of seeping blood.

  Ritz pressed the stapler against the top of two of the tears and squeezed. The thwack of the device drove a sterile piece of steel into his skin at two points, joining the torn pieces of flesh.

  But as he set to apply a second staple, Danny’s body shuddered. His legs shook. His arms flapped to the ground. His lower back arched, and his chest rattled.

  Gilda let go of his head and hovered over him. Her eyes jittered.

  “What’s happening?” she cried.

  “He’s seizing,” Ritz snapped.

  By the time he’d finished answering, the seizure was over. Danny exhaled one final time, his chest and abdomen collapsing like a balloon losing air.

  Gilda grabbed for his slack-jawed face. Her long strands of hair draped across him as she lowered herself to him and sobbed. His eyes stared back at her, vacant and distant.

  Maggie vacillated between standing and sitting. She whimpered. She licked her bloody chops. She began pacing in a narrow path behind her owner. Then she hesitantly approached and sniffed him. She nudged the back of his head with her nose and licked it. She moved closer and licked his eyes and his nose.

  Gilda lifted her head and reached for the dog. She gently put her hand on the animal’s head and rubbed with the grain of its fur. Maggie stopped licking Danny’s face and raised her head. She stared at Gilda for a moment, sniffed the air, and then lay down next to Danny’s body, resting her head against his. A whimper came with every soft exhale. It was the only sound in the suddenly suffocating air.

  Ritz watched the dog mourning, its sudden realization that her companion wasn’t breathing, wasn’t moving. Gilda sat on her heels, her hands drawn to her face and covering it like the mask she’d tossed to the ground.

  Ritz had one hand on Danny’s still chest. His other gripped the stapler, its white plastic now smudged and smeared with streaks of blood. He was muttering something quietly to himself. Dub imagined it was a prayer.

  Behind him, Dub felt the presence of his friends and Victor before he felt a familiar touch on his shoulder. Still, he flinched when Keri gently slid her fingers across his jacket and squeezed.

  Gilda broke the silence. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “This isn’t real.”

  It was getting colder now, and her breath puffed with each word she muttered. She shook her head, her eyebrows knitted in disbelief. “I did this,” she said. “I killed him.”

  “You didn’t kill him,” said Ritz. “This was an accident.”

  She shook her head and pressed her hands flat against her thighs. She was squeezing her own legs, digging her fingers into the fabric of her pants. “I chose the route,” she said, her words running together as she staved off what sounded like hyperventilation. “I should have known better. We should have taken San Vicente.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” said Ritz.

  “I told him to shoot,” she said. “I told him to fire the warning shot. That’s what did it.”

  Victor stepped to Gilda and crouched beside her. He placed an arm around her back and pulled her off balance and into his body. She leaned into him.

  “You didn’t make him run to the animals,” he said. “He did that.”

  Dub pushed himself to his feet and draped one arm over Keri’s shoulders. The mountain lion lay beyond Victor and Gilda, its tongue hanging from its mouth. Its eyes were open. It looked oddly as if it were licking the ash from the road.

  Its coat was dingy, and the outline of its ribs rippled across its side. Its big paws were twisted awkwardly.

  The scene was surreal. Despite all that Dub had witnessed since the attacks, no matter how close he’d been to death, what lay before him on Sunset and Bundy was a memory he knew he’d never shake. It was a collection of images that seemed disconnected yet told a story already emblazoned in his mind: a large cat, dead because of its confusion and desire to protect its food, a whimpering dog, bleeding but unaffected by its injuries while it nuzzled its owner and best friend, that friend, dead like the cat, a mix of blood and bones on the street, and grief. Immeasurable grief.

  It was one thing, Dub considered there in that moment, to imagine tens or hundreds of thousands of people being dead, vaporized, burned, murdered. That was vague enough, in numbers too large to really comprehend on a rational level, that he could talk about it without it wrenching at his gut.

  But standing in the street with a single man dead in front
of him and the cause of it laid out like a crime scene, it was easily recognizable for what it was. Dub leaned his head against Keri’s, and he was suddenly aware of her shuddering body. She was crying.

  “I’m the one who didn’t want the mountain lion dead,” she whispered through her mask. The words were nearly inaudible, but Dub understood them. “He’s dead because of me.”

  They looked at each other through their goggles, and he lowered his itchy burlap mask below his chin. He blew ash away from his lips and shook his head.

  “Not your fault,” he said, holding her foggy gaze. “You didn’t do this either. Nobody did this. Not even Danny. This is just what the world is about now. It’s about surviving or not. That’s all.”

  Victor, who must have overheard him, eyed Dub from over his shoulder. He patted Gilda’s back and stood, backing away from the bloody scene. “All right,” he said loudly through the rubber covering his face. His chest swelled with a deep breath of filtered air. “This is bad. We’ve lost a friend. There’s no sugarcoating it. But there’s also no need for blame. It is what it is. We will mourn him. We will remember him. And we will move on.”

  Gilda sobbed. She covered her face with her ash-covered hands. Dub wondered if she was trying to inhale it in some tragic act of Shakespearian guilt.

  Victor was unmoved. “We have a long way to go,” he said. “There is nothing we can do for Danny. We need to bury him and move on.”

  “How do we do that?” asked Barker. “Where do we do that?”

  “He’s gonna be difficult to carry,” said Ritz. “And we don’t have a lot of time until its dark. It’ll take two people to—”

  “Stop,” Gilda interrupted.

  As the others watched silently, reverently, she wiped her face with the backs of her hands. She rose to one knee and then stood up, wavering for a moment before catching her balance.

  “We can’t,” Gilda said. “We have to leave him here.”

  Victor stepped toward her but kept a comfortable distance. “We can bury him, Gilda. It’s inhumane to leave him here with a deer carcass and a dead mountain lion.”

  “It’s his body,” said Gilda. “It’s not him. Ritz is right, it’s a fool’s errand. Nobody would want to see him buried properly and given some sort of eulogy more than me, but it’s stupid. We need to go.”

  Nobody argued. Truth was, as Dub figured it, nobody wanted to bury him. It was hard enough watching him die. They packed up their things, replaced their masks or goggles, and prepared to leave. Gilda took the rifle and shouldered the extra gear. Victor protested, but she insisted. Dub imagined she viewed it as some sort of penance on the march back to wherever it was along the shoreline they were headed. All he knew was that they had miles to go and the plan was to keep marching through the night.

  As they readied themselves to leave, Gilda turned back toward Danny’s body. She stood there, taking one last look at the man with whom she’d thought she might have a future, whatever that word meant now. Then she whistled.

  Maggie picked up her head. Her ears pricked. She blinked but kept her stare fixed to Gilda.

  “C’mon, girl,” Gilda said through her mask. She patted her leg with a free hand. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  Maggie pushed herself up and sat obediently by Danny’s body. She yawned but stayed. Gilda called her again, lifting the mask from her mouth so her voice rang more clearly through the air. Maggie’s eyes darted between her master and Gilda, but she wouldn’t move. She refused to leave Danny’s side no matter how many different ways Gilda tried to coax her.

  “We need to go,” said Victor. “I’m sorry, but we do.”

  Gilda nodded from behind her mask and spun on her heels toward the coast. She shrugged her pack on her back and gripped the rifle with both hands. She motioned west on Sunset, and the others followed her.

  They’d gone fifty yards when the slap and patter of paws against the ashen asphalt caught up with them. Maggie’s tongue was wagging as she slowed next to Gilda. She inched next to her and rubbed her side on Gilda’s leg.

  “Good girl,” said Gilda. “You’re a good girl.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Monday, August 11, 2025

  DAY FIFTY-ONE

  Pacific Palisades, California

  The ocean looked black, like a boiling cauldron whose unseen ingredients were cooking beneath the bubbling surface. Even as the sun peeked high above the sheer faces of rock and dirt to their right, its opaque yellow smudge casting enough light on the water to make it visible beyond the gray shoreline, the Pacific was warning people to stay away. Its water was as uninviting as anything he’d ever seen.

  Dub pulled down his burlap wrap only long enough to steal a quick pull of water before sliding the patchwork protection back up over his nose. He offered the rest of the bottle to Keri, but she declined. She’d already had most of his allotment.

  “You okay?” he asked, taking long strides to stretch his sore thighs and calves. They hadn’t stopped since Danny’s death except to urinate and dig cans of tuna from their packs.

  He could taste his breath under the fabric. It made him gag.

  “I’m fine,” Keri said. “Tired, but fine.”

  Dub and Keri were in the back of the group. Gilda, who seemed indefatigable, led them. She marched with the same pace and intensity as she had the moment they’d left Danny behind. Maggie was either at her side or at her heels, bouncing with a consistent rhythm and occasionally sweeping the ground or the air with her nose.

  Gilda was a strong woman, Dub thought. Then mentally corrected himself. She was just plain strong, no gender qualifier needed. She’d seen Danny die and, aside from allowing herself a few minutes to grieve, stayed the course. He didn’t know their relationship status—married, dating, cousins, friends. But he knew she cared about him. And she was badass enough to compartmentalize her own emotions to get everyone else home safely.

  Behind her was Victor. He’d key the radio every couple of hours and update whoever it was on the other end of the line at the bunker complex. Dub got the sense he was a good man who spoke only when he had something important to say. That made him perfect for his role. He was the kind of person Dub could see himself befriending. There was a kindness to his face, a sympathetic curiosity in his eyes, that put others at ease.

  Ritz was a wild card. He was clearly someone with medical expertise. That meant he was smart and worked well under intense pressure. He was affable enough, from what Dub had seen of him. But given that he hadn’t seen his face, he couldn’t read him. Unlike Victor, whose eyes were visible beneath the mask, Ritz wore one with dark-tinted goggles. Other than his close-cropped hair, deep tan, and a tattoo that crept out from under his shirtsleeve, Dub couldn’t get a handle on him. Ritz and Victor would occasionally march next to one another and talk. They were too far ahead for Dub to hear what they were saying, but their body language told him the two appeared to get along, and given Dub’s assessment of Victor, that did bode well for Ritz.

  The constant slosh and break of waves crashing ashore was still somehow mesmerizing as his mind washed in an out of daydreams about who his new friends were or might have been. His eyes drifted from those ahead of him silently marching along the center line of the PCH to the backlit bluffs. The sunrise was muted but recognizable. The thin haze of yellowish light ebbed like a slow tide above the jagged black outlines of the bluffs.

  He tried to remember what the morning used to look like, when a distinct fiery ball confidently stretched on its broad shoulders higher and higher into a clear blue sky. The images, the memories of vivid colors, were fading already. They’d been replaced with the grays and brown hues that dominated his world now.

  Even the brightly dyed T-shirts or sweats he had in his limited wardrobe appeared duller. Everything was duller now. Bleak was a good word.

  Yet in the distance somewhere close there was hope. The promise of a place where he and the others could live out whatever remaining time they had in relative peace.


  As much as bleak was an operative word, so was relative. There was pre-attack and post-attack. Anything measured post-attack was relative. It couldn’t objectively compare to pre-attack conditions, when the colors were as bright and as warm as the sun.

  There was a soft breeze that blew from the ocean. It was cool but not cold, though it sent an occasional shudder through Dub’s body as it travelled past him and up the bluffs.

  He took note of the houses on either side of him in their various states of disrepair. The salt air had long made maintenance a chore for beachfront homes. The ash, wind, and weeks of neglect had exacerbated the decay. Maybe it was the gray that made the press of homes between the road and the sand appear ghostly. Dub couldn’t be sure. But he didn’t see any people. There wasn’t the faint filter and strobe of candlelight or the sweep of flashlights passing across the windows or glass doors. They were dark, as were the homes and businesses on the eastern side of the highway. They appeared battered, haunted. It was now that he understood the difference between a house and a home. None of these houses, no matter how many millions they were worth before the attack, were homes anymore. They were shells. He considered, as Keri reached for his hand and he lowered his to lace his fingers into hers, whether people were shells now too.

  How much of who they’d been, who they might have become, was vaporized in the attacks? Sure, they’d survived. They’d managed to eat three meals a day and sleep in beds with sheets. That was more than so many others.

  But they’d never see their families again, he was certain. They’d never take another class or flip the tap on a keg and pour sour, cheap beer into a Solo cup. They’d been to their last football game cheering on the Bruins at the Rose Bowl. And he’d likely dunked a basketball for the final time.

  He wondered about Danny. Who was he? How had he ended up in the OASIS? Why did he leave it to come rescue them? What was it about him that had affected Gilda so deeply?