Alan: L.A.

March 4th

Alan paced the hallway, trying to think it out, telling himself they had to leave soon. Telling himself it was the right thing to do. The problem was that he was not used to doing the right thing. So unused to it, in fact, that he wasn't sure he wanted to try... should try.

The world had been turned upside down for the last few days. There was no official word that anything was wrong at all, but someone had fucked up. Of that he had no doubt at all.

The police? Gone. Fire department? Ditto. Army? Well, wasn't the National Guard supposed to show up when the shit hit the fan? But so far the army had not raised a finger to do anything for them at all. There was a base right over by the airport near the Los Angeles Freeway, but there had been no sign of them.

He lived on the north side, a high rise that had been new sometime back in the seventies. He had gone up to the roof twice during the day and looked over the city.

It appeared to be dead. There was a precinct only two blocks away, deserted, doors hanging open. Looters were carrying away cheap computer systems and who knew what else, a steady stream in and out of the front doors.

There were fires over past the park. It appeared to be a whole block over by Jordan Downs, but there were other single fires all over the city too. There had been for two days now, and no one had come to put those fires out. And there was more; you could hear gunfire from all over the city all night long. He continued to pace the hall.

He remembered being a kid and going to some Pentecostal church services with his grandmother; the minister had been animated and had gravitated to agitated as he spoke. "The devil was on the way!" God was going to smite the world. The plagues were on the way. It seemed to Alan now like truer words had never been spoken, just a few decades too soon. Maybe to get everyone prepared. He wondered where that minister and his end-times congregation was now….

A few years before, the CDC had issued a warning about zombies, the inevitability of an attack. How it would come. Why it would come. What you should do. How to survive it, and more. Alan and his friends had gotten a good laugh over it. He had been down in Mexico at the time because of some trouble he had gotten into in New York. And he had been living like a king. What sort of trouble could come? What he had listened to on the radio in the last few days had changed his mind completely.

Washington D.C. was completely overrun, the President gone. They weren't even sure he had made it into hiding. New York and Atlanta, overrun with the sickness. Mexico, absolutely silent. Canada, the same. Millions of people absolutely silent. How could that even be? And right here in Los Angeles there was talk on the radio about dead roaming the streets too, and probably every city in between L.A. and New York, because if they had overrun the big cities, what kind of chance did the smaller cities and towns have, he asked himself. The sickness overran the people, killed them, and then something made them rise from that death back into something like life: Only crazy… Rabid… Nuts… Trying to kill any living they could find...

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