Day Zero (The Zero Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Nobody was going to miss her. There was nobody left.

  Elle finished restocking her backpack. She kept her pack with her at all times, always filled with a little bit of food and medicine. The possibility that she might not make it back to the apartment at the end of the day was very real. She’d found that out months ago, shivering and starving for three days in the basement of a sushi house, waiting for Klan gang members to move on. She’d wished that she’d had food in her pack then.

  She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

  As a general rule, Elle wouldn’t eat anything in the city that wasn’t sealed in an airtight container like a plastic bag or a can. She didn’t know what kinds of chemical weapons had been released on the city, but it would be stupid to eat food that might be soaked in the stuff. She’d seen seagulls fly in off the coastline, eat garbage from the overflowing trash containers, and drop dead.

  She was living in a biological waste zone, and she knew it.

  Yeah, I should definitely move on, she thought. But what if what’s out there is worse than what’s in Los Angeles?

  The fear of the unknown is what kept Elle in the city.

  Omega had power. So much power that they had destroyed the technological infrastructure of the most powerful nation on earth. For all Elle knew, they might have taken over the entire world by now.

  There might not be a safe place anymore.

  Chapter Three

  Zero.

  There it was, spray-painted across the first board on the Santa Monica Pier. Elle stared at it, swallowing a nervous lump in her throat. The pier was creaking in the wind. Every time a wave hit the support beams below, the boardwalk shuddered in the early morning light. It was foggy, wet and cold.

  Elle hauled a fishing pole over her shoulder, one of the most valuable items she had foraged from the city. She had bait in her backpack, a can full of worms she had dug up from the muddy soil in the park above the beach. Coming to the pier to fish was something she had been trying to work up the courage to do for a long time. She’d heard that people used to fish from the pier in the past. Elle was starving, and she would do anything for food.

  Zero.

  It had been painted across the railings, on the back of buildings, on cars parked in the parking lot next to the pier. Elle knew what it meant. It meant the world was over. The modern world, anyway. It meant back to the drawing board.

  The boardwalk stretched far into the water. Abandoned amusement attractions paralleled the pier – a merry-go-round, a bicycle shop. The once-famous Muscle Beach stretched out on the left, below the pier.

  Elle remembered seeing this place at night as a little girl. Before the Collapse. It was lit up like a Christmas tree, rainbow colored and glowing.

  She started walking. She was aware of how exposed she was. Anybody could be watching her. Anybody.

  Her hunger drove her onward.

  She kept walking down the boardwalk, moving from cover to cover, staying in the shadows, watching for danger. The sound of the waves and seagulls on the railing were the only things she could hear. It was so silent. So sad. She continued, reaching a sign that saidPacific Park.

  The letters stretched across the entrance, colorful but faded. Elle stood and looked at it. A rollercoaster and other amusement rides were clustered around the pier. Elle walked under the lettered archway. Every building here was a faded neon color. Green, blue, red, and yellow. It was cheery, but in this atmosphere, little more than a sick joke.

  Nothing was fun anymore. Even this was just an empty husk.

  There was a rollercoaster, an elevator launch, an octopus spin, a Ferris wheel. There were kiddie rides and carnival games. She searched the rest of the park, pawing through a restaurant calledThe Harbor Grill. There was nothing edible left. It had been too long. Anything here had either been looted or exposed to the poison of the chemical weapons. There was no food.

  Elle sat near the railing at the end of the pier, beyond the attractions, near an empty souvenir shop. She checked her line, baited and weighted the hook, and casted it into the water below. She had brought a plastic bag in her backpack, in case she caught a fish. She stared at the water below as she sat, cross-legged, trying to keep her mind off the pain in her stomach.

  She was just so hungry.

  Elle thought about Los Angeles, and how impossible it was to find food anymore. But leaving the city frightened Elle. What if the world outside Los Angeles was worse? What if Omega had really destroyed everything?

  She shuddered.

  I’ve got to make a decision.

  And that’s when she heard it.

  Human voices.

  ______________________________

  Elle slid into the shadows. She hid beneath a plastic picnic table and looked up the pier, back toward the mainland. There were people. Several of them. At least eight – maybe more. She couldn’t tell from here.

  Elle’s chest constricted.

  Someone had seen her. Klan members, by the looks of it. Had to be. Omega didn’t come to the beach unless they had a very good reason.

  Elleslowly crawled backward. She knew the Klan well, better than most.

  The Klan members were sauntering up the pier, making no attempt to hide their presence. They knew that Elle had nowhere to run. She gritted her teeth.

  I never should have come out here.

  Now she would be forced out of the city. Or worse, killed.

  She turned and sprinted to the back of Pacific Park. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. She looked at her fishing pole, wedged between the railing, the line moving in the waves.

  She flinched as she turned her back on the fishing pole – such a valuable item.

  Don’t think about that now.

  The buildings were small and packed together. The Klan members would spread out and pin her down. She couldn’t hide here. Not for very long, anyway. She ran to the railing, peeked over the edge. The waves were deep and unforgiving.

  She licked the salty spray of the sea off her lips and swung her legs over the side. “Please, God,” she whispered. “Let me survive this.”

  She lowered herself below the boards of the pier, hanging by her hands. Her legs dangled over the water – a long drop if she fell. Mazes of wooden support beams crisscrossed beneath the pier like stiff webbing. Elle curled her fingers around the first one parallel to the underside of the pier. She swung her body back and forth, gaining enough momentum to latch the heel of her shoe onto a beam. Now she was balancing horizontally between two beams. She moved one hand forward, then the other. She pushed herself up and sat on top of the first beam.

  It’s not so different from gymnastics class, she told herself.

  She pulled her legs under her and crouched like a cat, studying the maze of wooden poles under the pier. They stretched from here to the shore. She could very, very carefully crawl back…if the Klan didn’t figure out where she was by then.

  She moved with caution, slipping from beam to beam. The crash and bubble of the tide swirling below the boardwalk drowned out the sound of her movements.

  The pier shuddered slightly and Elle stopped. She held her breath. They were walking right above her head. They were shouting, but she couldn’t make out their words. What were they saying? Probably something about killing Elle. That was the Klan way, after all.

  Their boots made the pier shake, and Elle found herself sweating. But they couldn’t see her down here.

  Come on, keep going. You’re almost there.

  Almost being a relative term.

  The pier was over a thousand feet long – and that didn’t count the boardwalk bridge. Elle had to crawl almost a fourth of a mile to get back to the mainland. And once she did, she would have to run.

  She focused her mind on moving from one beam to another. Since the Collapse, she had learned to be patient. To think ahead, but to live in the moment. Panicking in a time of crisis didn’t do any good. She’d seen that.

  Staying calm was what had saved her f
rom the Klan in the past.

  Focus, focus!

  Hours seemed to pass. She stretched from beam to beam, until her hands were blistered from gripping the wood. Splinters bit into her palms. She was only thirty or so yards away from the beach. Once she reached the mainland, she would be able to drop onto the beach. And then she would run. She climbed, and as the pier jutted into the beach, she got about ten feet above the sand. Elle dropped. The tide swirled around her worn tennis shoes, cold and crisp.

  She peeked around the corner, above her head. No sign of the enemy. If she stayed left, behind the shelter of the buildings on the pier, she might be able to avoid being seen.

  She kept her head down and crawled along the side of the pier, out of sight. It was slow going. When she finally got even with the pier, she got down on her knees and crawled.

  Think like a turtle, she told herself, smiling wryly. Slow and steady wins the race…

  That’s what her mother used to tell her, anyway.

  My dead mother.

  She didn’t stop crawling until she reached the parking lot of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Then she stood up and sprinted to the back of the building, breathing hard. She snuck a glance at the pier. She could see the Klan members, small specks in the distance at the end of the pier. They couldn’t see her. But she could tell by the way they were spread out around Pacific Park that they were searching for her.

  She turned. And she ran. She did not want to be around when they came back this way. Her legs and lungs were strong as she put distance between herself and the enemy. She passed SM Pier Seafood and the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium, with its white paint and domed ceiling. She passed the massive parking lot on the left, full of dead cars and dead bodies. If you caught the wind, it carried the scent of the cadavers up the street.

  The last collection of buildings on the strip was the dully-colored pastel restaurants and seaside souvenir shops. Vines and bushes had covered the exteriors of most of the buildings, but Elle could see that it had once been cute. A little rundown, perhaps, but because it was Santa Monica, it had probably been very pricey.

  Whatever. Money didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did.

  Elle didn’t look over her shoulder to see if the Klan members were coming back down the pier. She didn’t want to scare herself, and besides – there could be danger right in front of her face. The Klan had hundreds of members – if not thousands – that dominated the streets of Los Angeles and the surrounding urban areas.

  Elle paused at a street called Moomat Ahiko Way. It curved left and paralleled the freeway. She stopped dead in her tracks. Following this road would take her all the way back to Ocean Avenue, back to her little apartment, back to what she was familiar with.

  But if she turned left, she would be on her way out of the city for good.

  Turning left would take her to Highway One, the Pacific Coast Highway. She had stared at the freeway from her apartment window for weeks, wondering when she’d be forced to leave.

  In front of her, the city loomed dark and ominous. Huge. The distant rattle and boom of gunfire echoed off the empty buildings. Elle shuddered. The fights between the street gangs and Omega were escalating with each passing day.

  The cold breeze ruffled Elle’s short hair. She looked behind her.

  The Klan members on the pier were moving toward the beach. They had seen her, and they were running at a brisk jog. Elle wasn’t worried – she could outlast them in the end. She was light and she could run many miles before she needed to stop and rest.

  Left? Straight? Do I stay or do I go?

  Elle closed her eyes.

  And she headed back into the city.

  She wasn’t ready to leave yet.

  ____________________

  Elle didn’t dare go home. If the Klan saw where she lived, she’d have to find a new place to hide. It always took time and patience to find a safe zone. Somewhere she could hunker down and relax without wondering if someone was going to slit her throat while she slept.

  She kept moving, checking to see if the Klan remnants from the pier were still pursuing her. They were. At least for now. She would throw them off her trail. Elle knew Hollywood and Santa Monica better than anyone. Every street, every shop, every alleyway.

  She worked her way onto Ocean Boulevard and hung a left, bypassing her apartment building. She ran up the street, diving right, into a small alley that led to the back of another apartment complex. This one had been very upscale. A wrought iron fence surrounded the parking lot. Elle jammed her boots into the small spaces between the vertical bars and swung her body over the top, landing with a soft thud on the other side.

  She sloshed through puddles and hurried to the back of the building, behind rows of parked cars. A lonely wind swept through the alley, and she could hear the voices of the Klan members on the boulevard. They weren’t trying to be stealthy. Not at all. They wanted her to know they were coming.

  To them, fear was part of the fun. It was part of the hunt.

  She opened the back door and stepped inside. This was the rear entrance, and she had been here a few times before. It was her little secret. Her passageway for a quick escape.

  The hallway was long and dark. It smelled of dust and…something else. She had been wandering the city long enough to differentiate between the scents of rotting food and rotting bodies. She shuddered and ran through the hall, locating the stairwell. She climbed to the top level and opened the door that led to the roof. A five-foot space between this building and the next stretched before her. Elle ran and jumped, easily clearing the distance. Yet another skill she could thank martial arts and gymnastics for.

  It was a good thing she’d had hobbies before Day Zero.

  She ran to the other side of the roof. A telephone pole sat about two feet away from the corner of the building. Elle hopped onto the metal pegs and climbed down, moving fast. She reached the alley.

  “Gotcha!”

  Elle choked on a scream. A Klan member was waiting in the shadows, armed with a wicked-looking knife. She ducked under the vicious slash of the weapon as it sliced through the air. Her attacker was an older man, sparse gray hair hanging in greasy strands to his shoulders.

  She dodged him like a cat and sprinted down the alley. The heavy thud of his footsteps echoed off the buildings as she ran.

  “She’s down here!” the man yelled. “Over here! Come on!”

  Elle didn’t dare look back. She was too busy concentrating on running. She skidded around the corner. This boulevard was a little smaller than the last one. Where was she? She recited the street names in her head. She was nearing Holly’s Books, an abandoned bookstore.

  She saw it, the small shop wedged into the bottom of a hotel.

  She knew exactly where she was now.

  Something whizzed by her left shoulder. She swerved and jerked her head left, straining to see behind her. The old man was chucking broken chunks of concrete at her, a last ditch effort to slow her escape.

  Stupid, Elle thought.

  But he was yelling, making an ungodly amount of noise. She needed to hide before every Klan member on this side of the city came running. Elle came to a corner and turned left, but there were people coming up the street. She went right, and there were more.

  They’re boxing me in, she thought, scared. What do I do? Where do I go?

  A tiny walkway cut between a hotel and a steakhouse. Both buildings were surrounded with tall weeds. She darted into the small path. It was barely wide enough for one person.

  Elle reached the end of the walkway. It stopped inside a courtyard. The shrubbery was out of control, growing through the cracks in the cement and winding around drainpipes.

  She was trapped. The courtyard only had one entrance – and one exit. Her heart slammed against her ribcage. She was going to die this time. The Klan would grab her, drag her into the street, and slit her throat on the asphalt. They’d leave her dead body there as a warning to other foragers…

  “Hey! Psst! Girl
!”

  Elle spun around, searching for the source of the voice. A window was open above her head, one of the many windows overlooking the courtyard. She stared. She saw a flash of blue eyes, frizzy blonde hair and a smattering of freckles. It was a girl, and she wasn’t much older than Elle.

  “Come on!” she hissed. “Climb!!”

  She pointed to the drainpipe crawling up the wall. Elle didn’t hesitate.

  Her life was on the line, and this was a way out.

  She climbed the drainpipe, pulling herself up. Her muscles strained, but Elle was nimble and quick, and she reached the open window in no time. The girl slammed the window shut. Elle sprang to her feet, panting.

  “Follow me,” the girl whispered.

  Elle looked around. The room in which they were standing was abandoned. It had been ransacked. The girl ran and Elle followed. She was taller than Elle by a full head, and she moved soundlessly.

  They entered the hall. It was eerily silent here. The girl zigzagged from room to room, never stopping.

  Elle wondered if this was some sort of a trap.

  Was this girl a Klan member?

  Then she put the thought out of her mind. She didn’t have a choice.

  “Stairs,” the girl said, breathing hard. “Climb. Let’s go.”

  The girl shoved an exit door open and they entered a cold stairwell. It was dark, and Elle had to feel her way up the stairs. She moved as quickly as she could, staying close to the girl, not wanting to get lost in the thick darkness.

  They climbed until Elle’s legs burned with the effort. The girl pushed through a door and sunlight seared Elle’s vision. Her eyes filled with tears as she struggled to adjust to the light. The girl slammed the door shut.

  They were on the roof.

  And they weren’t alone.

  Elle took in her surroundings. The roof was big, overlooking the boulevard and the Santa Monica beach. They were at least twenty-five stories up. Three people were surrounding Elle. A tall, handsome young man with dark skin and glimmering brown eyes, and two Asian kids. A girl and a boy. They looked like twins.

  “The Klan was going to kill her,” the girl stated. She had a distinct southern accent. “I had to do something.”