The Living Dead Series (Book 3): Dead Coast (13 page)

I
n the 1930’s, the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, California was one of the few places in the country where an enterprising entrepreneur could make a fortune. Everyone who could afford it went to movies or “pictures” as they were called then, to escape the hopelessness of life during the Great Depression. Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, and of course the delightful Shirley Temple, all cavorted on the silver screen and helped audiences forget their troubles, if only for a little while.

Vic Capra, an Italian-born film director, made his fortune with a series of noir thrillers. With that fortune he built his dream house high in the hills, secluded and secure. Elaborate wrought-iron fences surrounded the stucco house and small guest cottages that sprawled luxuriously across the rocky hillside. He and a successive string of wives gave lavish and scandalous parties that were legendary even in this land of excess.

Thick stucco walls kept the indoor temperature pleasant now and before the days of air conditioning. A cool stream from a spring on the property ran straight into and through a stream bed flowing through the large atrium before it exited into a rock pool outside. Rare plants from around the world were incorporated into the splendid gardens. Various magazines ran feature stories on the estate and its illustrious owners. That was before society fell. Before the property assumed its new function.

Refugee camps are seldom a pretty sight and the new western command center of the United States of America, which now doubled as a camp, was no exception. Makeshift tents and lines of laundry flapping in the shore breeze obscured the ocean view. Small campfires dotted the twelve acres of gardens. Full-sized marble statues of Mars, Neptune, Jove, and the lovely Venus, were set into a thick hedge of myrtle that surrounded the rock pool. The Roman emperors Augustus and Hadrian were represented as well but all the statues looked less than dignified draped as they were with drying shirts, pants, and various types of undergarments. Small children, watched by parents, splashed in the rock pool. Primitive latrines, stinking in the hot afternoon, dotted the edges of the property.

Mounted at intervals on hastily constructed turrets, machine guns overlooked the receding hills as well as the vast throngs of teeming dead below. They shuffled and jostled but paid no real attention to each other. Many lay on the ground, some barely moving, some not moving at all. The offshore wind blew their decaying odor inland and up to the estate.

Two boys, one plump with dark hair almost the blue-black of a crow’s plumage, the other thin with thick, blond hair in desperate need of a trim, ran along the wall’s perimeter. Their feet kicked up dust as they pounded along the trail worn into the lawn by countless patrols. Just behind a barrier of orange cones encircling a cleared, level area of ground, they stopped. Both boys wore expressions of wariness and tiredness that looked out of place on faces so young. Rifles hung from straps across their narrow shoulders.

The sound of beating rotor blades, distant at first then growing louder as the shiny chopper came into view, drowned out all the other noises of the camp and most of the refugees looked up. The pilot deftly maneuvered the craft onto the area designated as a landing pad.

As the motor powered down another sound rose to take its place. The dead at the bottom of the hillside, excited by the noise the helicopter made, started up a moaning, cacophonous chorus, chilling to everyone in the camp. All the refugees had nightmares that included that sound. Nightmares that often made them wake screaming in the night.

Two men ran up the hillside and eased a stretcher out of the chopper, carefully carrying the unmoving occupant down and through large doors into the main building. Two more figures emerged, one, a woman in a Superman tee shirt. The blond boy shouted, ran to her, and burst into tears. She scooped him up, crying and laughing at the same time. Putting him down she wrapped her arm around his shoulders and together they walked into the main house.

~

“So did you get my text when we picked up that guy in Wrigley Field? You should have seen it, Bea! The whole city was full of dead people. They were all jammed up around the stadium. You would have thrown up, the smell was so bad.”

They were sitting on the floor outside a curtained-off passageway that had been dubbed the infirmary. Apparently the camp didn’t have any doctors but did have several R.N.s and David had immediately been taken to them. That was late yesterday and so far she had heard nothing other than that he was in “stable” condition.

After everyone exited the helicopter they went through a checkpoint where a nurse examined them and they were thoroughly sniffed by two dogs. Bea’s cut in her forearm was cleaned and bandaged and she spent the night in what amounted to quarantine, watched over by armed guards. She was examined again this morning and given a bill of health by the nurses.

The camp seemed to be preparing for an assault. Boards were being nailed to windows and some doors. Everything that could serve as a weapon, screwdrivers, utensils, iron skillets, and chainsaws was arranged for ease of access. Everyone, except for very young children, carried some form of self-defense.

Electricity came and went randomly. No one in the camp really knew why but Brian thought it was due to some sort of automatic brown-out system set up to deal with power blips.

Brian’s new friend, Moshe, was with them, listening to Brian’s story as if he hadn’t heard it a hundred times already. Everyone here had a story of how they survived and what they had seen and often what they had lost but Moshe wasn’t eager to share his, whatever it was. Telling their survival story was almost
de rigueur
for new arrivals and everyone regarded it as a form of therapy and a bonding experience but Moshe remained silent. She noticed that he watched everyone warily and once flinched visibly when a patient in the infirmary moaned aloud.

“We’ve been drilling with weapons every day but not with bullets. I mean, we know how to put them in but we can’t waste them on target practice. Ian said it might be more useful to train with swords and I think that would be cool except we don’t have enough of those either. They haven’t let us go on any foraging raids yet but that’s what we want to do, right, Moshe?”

Moshe nodded enthusiastically and added, “Ian says we should start going soon so we’ll know our way around in case the ‘regulars’ don’t come back. They don’t always all make it back.”

A slender woman wearing blue jeans, a red tee shirt, and tall, scuffed leather boots entered the hallway, holding a sleeping baby over one shoulder. Seeing them sitting on the floor, she hurried over.

“Bea! You made it! I knew they had located you guys but I didn’t know exactly when you would get here.” Virginia leaned over and ruffled Brian’s and then Moshe’s hair. The baby swayed down with her and didn’t wake up but tightened his grip on his mother’s hair. Wincing, she tried to disengage his fingers but the plump little fist was thoroughly entwined with the strands. She sighed and shifted her son higher on her shoulder.

“Have they told you how David is yet?”

“No. I’m still waiting for someone to come out and talk to us. He had a really bad cut on one leg and several blows to the head so- I just don’t know.”

Virginia was reassuring. “Barry, Pam, and Mei-Mei are really good. We’re lucky to have them. Even with limited supplies they’ve practically performed miracles. Don’t worry. By the way, Ian can’t wait to talk to David about-well, a few things. Did you see much on the trip here?” Her tone was pointedly casual.

Bea stood and the two women walked down the hall, a little way from the boys. “We flew above clouds until Texas. After that, yes, I saw a lot.”

“Tell me.” Virginia’s voice was low and urgent.

Bea swallowed and her voice shook a little as she said, “There were a lot of fires burning so even without cloud cover visibility wasn’t that great but everywhere, as far as you could see, there were infected. I wouldn’t have even thought there were that many people in the entire country. We stayed pretty high up. The pilot said some of the areas are still radioactive and will be for a long time. I didn’t actually see the blast crater; the pilot said that was too hot even to fly over at this point. But I still saw more than I wanted to.”

She continued, “They were fast; I had no idea they could move like that. Some were burned to the bone, no features left but they were more coordinated and faster than any I’ve seen before. There were herds of them, thousands, maybe millions.”

“I guess you know about the bombing missions that didn’t happen,” said Virginia.

“No. I’m assuming they got D.C. I know it was scheduled.”

“It was but they’re pretty sure it didn’t happen. Apparently it was a bitterly contested plan. I hate to say it but our president and his cronies- not the brightest bulbs in the lamp. They understood politics perfectly though, and couldn’t break out of that mind-set. They had to be seen as strong and decisive leaders who aren’t afraid to make the tough calls, even if those calls were pointless and/or stupid.”

“What about Atlanta?”

“That one didn’t happen. We’re really relieved. The CDC is gone of course but a few of them managed to get out and are supposed to be coming here. We need medical personnel desperately. They definitely bombed Dallas/Ft. Worth but New York may not have gone off either. The fear now is that the radiation is going to preserve the infected and that could be a huge problem for us.”

Bea reflected on the scenes she had witnessed from the sky. “I can understand why. How did you wind up out here? I thought you were going back down south.”

“We thought so, too. Two of the airfields where we planned to refuel were overrun and heavily infested. The pilot wouldn’t land. Fuel was pretty low when we got a call advising us we needed to head to Chicago for a pick-up. We were the only ones in the area and if we didn’t pick him up, he wasn’t going to get out. We finally did refuel at a little field west of Quincy and after that we were too far west to backtrack safely. So here we are.”

“Thanks for looking out for Brian.”

“He was no trouble at all. He’s trained really hard with weapons and he’s comfortable with a rifle now.”

Virginia left and Bea walked back to the boys who were flicking a smooth pebble back and forth, trying to score points by sliding it past an imaginary goal. The game was childish but she noticed they carefully placed their rifles within easy reach and kept a more or less constant watch on the windows and anyone who walked by.

Footsteps approached behind the privacy curtains and pulled them aside. A heavily-muscled man who introduced himself as Barry told them one person could come in to talk to the patient.

“Five minutes, that’s it.”

Bea lifted the curtain and went inside. Four beds were occupied, three by barely conscious patients writhing in pain. She was shocked. There were tied to their beds with knotted sheets. The nurse, sensing her surprise, explained.

“They’re not actually infected with the virus. They have bubos.” She must have looked confused because he added, “Growths, boils. It’s from the bacteria that result from the infection. If the boils burst or if we can lance them in time, the patients have a pretty good shot at getting better. If not, we have to deal with that, too.”

“Like the bubonic plague?”

“Yeah, a lot like that.”

She nodded and he left.

David occupied a bed nestled under a gothic, mullioned window. A petite woman with dark, shoulder-length hair and wearing scrubs sat casually on the edge of the bed, talking to him in a low voice.

Bea hesitated. The two seemed to know each other very well. David laughed then grimaced and put his hand to his forehead. The woman frowned slightly and put her hand over his. She looked up and saw Bea. She had exquisite, almond-shaped eyes that twinkled when she smiled.

“You must be Beatrice. I’m Mei. David and I are just catching up. We went to school together years ago.”

“Hi. Nice to meet you.”

She looked down at David. The bandage on his ear was very white in contrast to his hair. “How are you?”

“They tell me I’ll mend. Your brother, is he here?”

“Yes, he made it.”

“What about Carl?”

She shook her head then said, “Brian will want to come see you later when you’re feeling up to it.”

“Tell him I said to take care of his sister.” He closed his eyes and Mei released his hand, put a finger to her lips and ushered Bea out.

“We stitched up that leg after we cleaned it out but it was a nice, straight cut and it should heal just fine. A good night’s sleep and he’ll be a new man tomorrow,” Mei said. “Have they told you where you’ll be bunking yet?”

“Not yet. We’ve been waiting to check on David. Is there someone in charge of newcomers?”

“I’m off duty in five minutes. If you can wait I’ll walk you over to see the
concierge
.”

“You have a
concierge
?”

Mei laughed and disappeared behind the curtain. In a few minutes she re-emerged and Bea, Brian, and Moshe all followed her out through a metal, scroll-work door and up a series of shallow, stone steps. They were now at almost the highest point on the property and Mei stopped and turned west toward the ocean, lifting a pair of mini-binoculars to her eyes.