Day Zero (The Zero Trilogy Book 1)

  Day Zero

  The Zero Trilogy

  Book #1

  A Short Collapse Series Companion Adventure

  Summer Lane

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Summer Lane

  Copyright 2014

  WB Publishing

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except to quote in reviews or interviews, without the express permission of the author. Any unauthorized distribution of this body of work is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Any parallel to persons alive or dead is purely coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  For you, readers.

  Thank you for everything.

  Prologue

  Hollywood was dark. That was the first thing Elle noticed when she stood on the ridgeline, just behind the Hollywood sign. She had never seen it like this before. The city had always been brimming with life, with activity. Even after Day Zero, when the lights went out, there were fires and riots. Noise.

  Now there was nothing.

  Elle pulled her jacket tighter, trying to stop herself from shuddering. If the stories were true…if Uncle was right…then there would be nothing left for Elle here. The silence was telling – no noise meant no people.

  Of course, she couldn’t be entirely sure.

  There might be people somewhere.

  She started climbing down the ridgeline, onto the dirt trail. The hill was dry. Dead grass snapped under her shoes. She had never felt so alone or cold in her life.

  Later, as she hit the streets of Hollywood, the utter silence overwhelmed her. It was thick, like a curtain. The darkness, the quietness. The deadness. She knew she had made a mistake coming back here. She needed to go back to the ranch, back to Aunt and Uncle. They would understand why she left, and they would welcome her home.

  She didn’t get the chance.

  A man came around the corner, thickset and heavily tattooed.

  Elle stared at him.

  She shouldn’t have come back.

  Chapter One

  West Hollywood, California

  Elle sat cross-legged on the edge of the roof, watching the empty street. She’d been up here for a while. This was the first time in a week it had stopped raining long enough to sit outside.

  She brushed her black hair out of her blue eyes. The bank across the street was quiet. So was the bus stop, the pizza restaurant next door and the clothing shop catty corner to the streetlights. Elle swung her legs over the top of the roof, climbing back down to the street. She rounded the front of the building and peeked through the broken windows. The menu above the counter said Millions of Milkshakes in bright letters. It had been a prominent place, once. A milkshake bar known for hosting celebrities and athletes in the heart of the most famous city on earth.

  Everything had changed since the electromagnetic pulse.

  Planes had fallen from the sky and technology had failed, leaving Hollywood and all of its glamour in the dark. The power was out for good. The world was a different place.

  The world was dangerous.

  The front counter was dusty. Most of the restaurant was dirty and looted. Elle wondered if there was any food left. An ice cream parlor wouldn’t be the first place people would look for food. After all, ice cream melts.

  She checked over her shoulder and slid a small knife from her shoe.She angled her thin, short frame under the slivers of broken window glass and slipped inside, feet crunching against plastic wrappers and dirt.

  She didn’t like being this exposed.

  The building was cold. It smelled fetid. Something was rotting. A dead animal? Putrid food? She didn’t really want to know.

  Elle walked behind the counter. The back of the kitchen was dark. Elle wasn’t crazy about searching it, but she pressed ahead anyway, the possibility of finding something to eat overcoming her anxiety.

  She slid into the kitchen, squinting to make out the shape of the counter and the fridges. There was just enough light coming in from the front windows to see the cupboards. She yanked them open. There were several containers of sprinkles inside, a package of paper cups and a stack of napkins. Elle sighed, disappointed, and removed her backpack from her shoulders. She stuffed the cups and napkins inside. She could use them later.

  She searched the other cupboards. There was an expired bottle of chocolate sauce, a box of toothpicks and a sealed box of sour candy. Elle tossed the candy and toothpicks into her backpack, searched the place one more time, and zipped it back up.

  Her heart sank. She was hungry, and a box of candy wasn’t going to fill her empty stomach. She strapped the backpack on again and headed toward the front of the building, pausing at the window, scanning the street.

  There. At the east end of the boulevard.Someone was watching. A man.

  She dropped into a crouch, heart pounding against her ribcage.

  Elle didn’t dare move. She knew how this game worked. The American Apparel building next to the crosswalk was where she had seen the flicker of movement.

  She kept looking, searching. There it was again.

  A black flash, a tiny streak. Another one by the bus stop. Two people? Three?

  Great. I’m surrounded.

  She looked up and down the street. Counted the dead cars sitting at the curb, estimating the amount of cover she would have on her way from Point A to Point B. It would be close, but she could do it if she moved fast.

  And she was good at that.

  She focused on her breathing as the adrenaline surged. She could hear the blood rushing in her ears. This was a bad situation. They were always out there, looking for victims.

  She shuddered and refocused her mind.

  Stay focused. Don’t let them trap you!

  Elle checked the back door in the building, but it was locked tight, rusted shut. She returned to the front, kneeling near the broken windows. She leaned forward on her fingers, like a runner preparing for a sprint. She ran fast and smooth on the wet sidewalk, straining to keep her footsteps silent. She huddled behind the first car that was parked on the curb, breathing hard.

  Elle dared a glance behind her. Nobody. Yet.

  She ran again, to the next car. Cover to cover. They could be anywhere, and staying behind something big was the only way to make sure that she would be safe. She made it all the way down the block.

  I’m almost there.

  She stopped behind the last car on the block, her fingers pressed against the cold asphalt. Someone jumped onto the hood of the car, making a heavy thud. Elle jerked backward and stood, holding her arms up defensively.

  He was tall, dressed in black. Snakelike dreadlocks hung down his back. His dark eyes looked dead. He was holding a sword, a Japanese Katana. He leaped forward and charged at Elle.

  Elle didn’t scream. She reached inside her jacket and drew her handgun. The words Smith and Wesson were engraved on the side of the barrel. Elle pointed the weapon at the center of his chest and fired. The shot was piercing. It echoed down the street, shattering the unearthly silence of the city. He jerked backward, hitting the car. He landed on his knees, staring at Elle as blood seeped through the material of his shirt. She stepped forward and ki
cked him in the chest, knocking him flat on his back. Elle never took her eyes from his as the life left his body. A red ribbon of blood streamed from the side of his mouth, his eyes fixed on the sky.

  Elle scanned the area. She saw no other threats, so she holstered the handgun and stepped forward, kneeling next to his body. She searched his jacket and pants, finding a handful of bullets and a package of gum. She took the goods and picked up the sword, testing its weight in her hands. She took the scabbard and stood, overlooking the street.

  The gunshot had sent others into hiding. Other people – more dangerous ones – would regroup and emerge again. It was time to get moving.

  All was silent once again.

  ______________________________________

  The city had been a warzone for ten months. After the collapse – after the world ended – they came: Omega. The shadow army. The invasion force. They were everywhere and nowhere all at once. An eye in the sky. A patrol on the street. Where did they come from? Nobody knew. What did they want? Us.

  They wanted all of us.

  They used chemical weapons against us. They destroyed millions of the civilian population of Los Angeles. Omega moved their center of operations to the Port of Los Angeles and downtown L.A., leaving Hollywood and Santa Monica mostly abandoned.

  Those places belonged to the dead now.

  Well. The dead and people like Elle: foragers and survivors.

  The rest of the state was squashed under the Omega invasion. Concentration camps corralled citizens into forced slave labor. Omega ruled with an iron fist, and anyone who dared challenge them died.

  But not all hope was lost. Grassroots militia groups sprung up in the areas controlled by Omega, and the people resisted the takeover. In the Central Valley, Omega had been pushed back, had suffered heavy casualties.

  Few civilians remained in Los Angeles after the chemical attacks. Those that did were usually looking for food, medical supplies or lost family members. The chances of finding either of those things were slim to none. Yet some people returned, and many formed the street gangs of Los Angeles. It was a place dictated by the brutality of an invading army and the savagery of desperate survivors.

  It was a deadly game; the survival of the fittest. Only the smartest – or the most ruthless – survived. The rest fell by the wayside, either starving to death or falling prey to Omega or the street gangs. Those who managed to avoid death by starvation or murder clung to the hope that order and peace would somehow be restored.

  There was no more order, no more security. No more civility between average citizens. It was kill or be killed. Common trust was gone. The rules had changed.

  No one knew that better than Elle.

  When the electromagnetic pulse hit Los Angeles, she had been fourteen years old, a student at Beverly Hills High School, and the daughter of wealthy Hollywood socialites. Raised in a house where strict discipline and work ethic were encouraged, she pursued her passion of martial arts and gymnastics. Elle, her parents, and her brother lived in an apartment in Westwood, just a few miles from Hollywood Boulevard.

  Her first semester as a freshman at Beverly Hills High School came to an abrupt end when the electromagnetic pulse hit. Her world changed in an instant.

  Everything fell apart.

  __________________________________

  Elle turned and ran. Her best defense was her speed and agility. The sun was setting, and she knew what that meant. Before long, street predators would be roving the city. She needed to get back to her hiding place.

  The shot that she had just fired still rang in her head. She hated having to defend herself from people like that, from desperate, starving killers. Elle’s guess was that the man she had killed had been a member of the Klan, the city’s most organized gang. They were powerful.

  They were deadly.

  Santa Monica itself was a beautiful city, once. The apartment complexes rose like sharp bits of broken teeth into the sky. Vegetation wound its way through apartment balconies and around dead car frames. Elle kept running, breathing hard, sweat running down her forehead, the back of her neck. She had blood on her cheek – she’d caught a spray of it when she had shot the gang member at Millions of Milkshakes.

  She hooked a left and droppedprone behind an overturned trashcan. She could smell the ocean, fresh and salty and cold. Across the street, there was a beautiful, unattended park, wet with rain. It looked like nature was taking over, taking back everything it had owned before the rise of modern civilization. And beyond that, Highway 1 – The Pacific Coast Highway – paralleled the beach below the cliff. The shoreline extended as far as the eye could see, dotted with empty beach houses. In fact, you could even see the blackened remains of the cliff-side mansions of Malibu if you looked hard enough.

  But Elle had already seen all that.

  To her back was a white apartment building, long ago abandoned by the residents before the chemical weapons. A stairway led to the front entrance. Elle checked left, checked right. She stood and sprinted up the stairs, pushing the door open. She slammed it shut behind her, lowering the lock – a heavy piece of wood, serving both as a crossbar and an intruder alarm. It was dark inside.

  This was her safe zone, her hideaway.

  She felt her way up a dark hallway, trotting up steps. She could barely see anything besides the general shape of the railing and the steps. She reached the fourth floor and counted her steps.

  Seven, eight, nine, ten…here we are.

  She felt for the door handle. There it was, just like she had practiced.She turned the handle and the door opened. A slit of late sunlight fell across her face. She stepped inside and closed the door, locked it. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  Safe. For now.

  The apartment was a modern loft. One bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen. Whoever lived here had been some kind of a poet. Poetry books were everywhere – along with CDs and DVDs of poetry reading. Some of it was weird, some of it was pretty. Elle was never into poetry, but reading it sometimes helped to pass the long, lonely hours of the day.

  She hated those hours.

  She dropped her backpack on the carpet and walked to the window. She pulled back the curtain enough so that she could watch the street below. She was on the corner, so she could see Santa Monica Boulevard and Ocean Boulevard at the same time.

  Her only blind spot was the alley behind the apartment building, but she had no way to get a good view of that. She’d been living here for three weeks, and so far she hadn’t had any trouble. She hoped it stayed that way.

  From her spot at the window, Elle could see the Santa Monica Pier. The brightly colored rollercoaster wound around the Ferris wheel. It looked lonely. Empty. It had been a long time since the pier had glowed with lights and echoed with the laughter of fun-seeking crowds.

  Tomorrow, she would visit the pier.

  Chapter Two

  Elle had been looking at the Santa Monica Pier for nine months. Every evening, every day. She would look for any sign of movement, of habitation. But there was never anything, other than the occasional nomadic fisherman.It made Elle curious. It made her brave.

  It made her stupid, too, sometimes. Reckless.

  She sat on the floor of the apartment, legs propped up on the couch, head on the floor. The window was open just a crack, enough to let the cool sea breeze inside the stuffy room. Elle closed her eyes and pretended that she was home, watching television while she waited for her mom to come back from the grocery store.

  She sat up abruptly.

  Mom was never coming back from the grocery store.

  Elle was alone.

  She rolled to her knees and stood up, walking into the kitchen. She didn’t have a lot of supplies here. A few canned goods – carrots, peas and creamed corn – and two tins of tuna. Elle hated tuna, but she’d eat it anyway if it were all she had. She’d eaten worse in the last year. A lot worse.

  The sour candy that she’d found at Millions of Milkshakes hadn’t filled the
hole in her stomach. Sooner or later she’d have to face reality: Santa Monica and Hollywood was running out of food. She was going to have to move on.

  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 askilled forager, but even she could barely find enough to eat anymore.

  She organized her backpack again. She kept it filled with essentialsupplies: 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.