Lippe Simone

BLANK

Ray

Ray chapter 1

Before he knew who he was he knew that he had blood on his hands. The inevitable “who am I” and “where am I” had yet to form but he was already sure that these were his hands and that this was probably not his blood. Then he knew that he was in a dark room and then, somehow, that he wasn’t alone.

He also knew that he was posed, probably awkwardly, on the floor of a clinical examination room. He had no recollection of ever before being in a clinical examination room but he innately recognized the reflective white tiles, examination table, hand sink and blade disposal as standard features of the venue, although there should probably have been less shattered glass and scattered instruments and splashed blood. The bewildered bear of an orderly standing over him with a generously endowed hypodermic in his hand didn’t look at all out of place.

The orderly was Leonard, if his name tag was to be believed, and the hypodermic in his hand was actually in his hand and coming out the other side just enough to look like it might hurt. But Leonard didn’t notice the needle or the man on the floor or much of anything, it seemed.

The man on the floor looked where his own name tag should be and found only torn hospital scrubs. The bloody tag was in his bloodier hand, as if he’d known that he was going to need to refer to it and, as it turned out, he did. Beneath the congealing blood his name was Ray. Ray Something, because this friendly, family environment apparently didn’t put last names on their tags. It was a start.

“Leonard? Did you do this?” He asked and then, looking at the orderly’s wounded paw, “Did I do that?”

Leonard looked at him now with a face that could never be imitated by a mind distracted by a single, solitary fact. Then he noticed his hand as though he’d forgotten he had one and presented it to Ray.

“You know what, Leonard? So far as I know right now that might be perfectly normal, so why don’t you just hang onto that.” Perhaps he and Leonard had fought and, unlikely as it seemed in light of Leonard’s circus-side-show size, he had won and had stuck him with a hypodermic that was even now responsible for the giant’s panda-bear docility.

But there was no blood on Leonard and Ray was in no position to start being exclusive about his circle of friends, so he climbed to his feet now quite certain that he’d been in a fight or, possibly, hit by a car, and examined the puncture.

“Now, just look at me.” said Ray and slid the needle out while Leonard was duly distracted. Leonard looked at the hypodermic and his hand as if unsure that they were meant to be parted. “Quid pro quo, Leonard. Now you do something for me and tell me who I am and where we are and, if you’re up to it, what the hell is going on.”

Leonard wasn’t up to it. He blinked with some limited expertise and looked carefully about without turning his head.

“Oh good.” said Ray, “You’re a turnip.” He dropped the hypodermic into the sink and began washing the blood off his hands but stopped when he noticed that he was at risk of smudging a note written in ballpoint on his left wrist “12-22-14”. A date, possibly. Possibly even today’s date and it may as well have been for all the answers it provided. He knew it wasn’t a phone number and he found himself wondering briefly how he knew even that much. He noticed that Leonard was now carefully examining his own arm for clues.

But neither Leonard’s arm nor anything else in the room yielded anything other than evidence of a scattered and clumsy battle which smashed vials and spilled tongue depressors and syringes and cost someone about two pints of blood. The door was partially open and providing the only light in the form of a yellow stripe dividing the room in half and making Leonard appear even larger and more ominous than he already was.

“Goodbye Leonard.” Ray said and pushed through the door with the sort of hopeful optimism attendant with knowing that things couldn’t get much worse.

He was in a hospital in still life. In an ill-green hallway nurses and orderlies and civilian visitors with flowers and magazines stood where the moment found them, doing whatever they’d been doing and going wherever they needed to go when they appeared to have simultaneously forgotten what and where. They shared the same blank, vaguely startled stare that Ray had most recently seen on Leonard. The semblance of perfect normalcy just slightly off-kilter was as dramatic as it would have been if the staff and visitors had all been doing a synchronized song and dance number.

Ray tried to cast his mind back to the last nightmare he’d had, by way of comparison, but the only solid memory he could form was of waking up to the sight of Leonard with a hypodermic needle through his hand. He was a full-on amnesiac with no idea who he was or where he was or how he got there and he was the most plugged-in person within screaming distance. But he had to try.

He chose a hefty older nurse with “Nancy” on her nametag and a selection of little cups on a tray for no better reason than that she was older and heftier and the little cups made her look responsible. Ray took her by both shoulders and looked her in the eyes.

“Nancy? You really need to snap out of it Nancy. If anyone needs a nurse right now it’s me.” Nothing. Nancy looked through him at some unseen horizon and he knew that there was absolutely nothing behind her big brown eyes. She held her tray of little cups because that’s all she’d ever done and it was as natural to her as horseback riding was to a statue of General Washington.

He interrogated other bystanders. “Tracy?” “Jeff?” “Toupée man?” More nothing. They looked at him with the same vacant respect you get when you raise string theory with a cocker spaniel.

Ray worked his way down the hall, judging the relative engagement of its population “turnip, turnip, potato, pumpkin, baked potato”. At the end of the hall Ray turned a corner to the relatively encouraging sight of a common area with large windows bathing an ugly open-concept lounge in natural light. The area was delineated by a drab carpet and a cement column in the center was festooned with the hand-made posters for reading circles and used children’s clothing that are taped to the walls of all institutions everywhere. The eclectic furnishings of plastic chairs and swivel chairs and deep armchairs had all been turned toward a large-screen television and every seat was occupied.

It was hard to distinguish between patients and orderlies because they all had the same hospital gear and name tags and sported some combination of Los Angeles Dodgers paraphernalia. There were Dodgers shirts and caps and some of the audience of about twenty, all men, were holding pennants. Bowls of baseball snacks of peanuts and chips and popcorn remained untouched. All eyes were glued to the TV, which was showing a test pattern.

Ray knew then that he was going to have to take his business elsewhere. He moved past the lounge because the only other direction led back to the ill-green corridor. The windows continued down one side of another hallway of treatment rooms, not unlike the examination room in which Ray had most recently been reborn but larger and with more light and less blood. He checked the rooms as he passed them and found no further cause for hope.

In one room two men in emergency response uniforms were standing over a bony young man on a stretcher. One of the men was repeatedly and automatically defibulating the obviously dead body. He wasn’t looking for signs of life or even looking, he was just pressing the paddles against the naked ribby chest long enough for the body to leap from the gurney like popped corn, and then doing it again, with the same devotion to duty that Nancy brought to her tray of little cups.

In the next room a technician stood blinking at an X-ray machine as it buzzed and pumped radiation into the eyes of an oblivious old man in a leather apron and corduroy slippers. Directly across the hall, on the other side of the glass, a window washer looked blankly in from his suspended platform with a squeegee in his hand. Ray looked back at him and wondered what floor he was on.

Past the treatment rooms a yellow arrow on the green wall pointed finally toward “Reception” and Ray quickened his pace. He passed the solid glass wall of an observation room with a population of what would be most efficiently generalized as junkies. There were a dozen of them on display, mostly men and a few women and all skinny and pale and exhibiting varying severities of homelessness. The observation room was enclosed behind thick glass and had no television, just a worn carpet and abused living room furniture that looked like it had been donated with no regrets by the seventies. With no baseball or test patterns to keep them occupied the indigenous of the region had turned to the matter of self-preservation and were trying to eat plastic plants and wax fruit. Ray noticed with some irony that the observation room was next to the cafeteria.

Ray was struck by what appeared to be a disturbing degree of purpose among the junkies. Whatever they’d been doing whenever everyone else on the floor had gone blank in a docile state had left them in what amounted to a slow-motion frenzy. They ambled about like chickens in a wartime barnyard picking at anything that resembled food before letting the plastic grapes and cotton leaves fall from their mouths and moving on. Ray tapped on the glass with a clinical curiosity to test the consciousness of the junkies and they stopped their foraging and looked at him as a group. Then they attacked with the full force of a mindless juggernaut unaware of the principal properties of two-inch glass.

Anemic blood popped in little explosions on the glass as the junkies broke their noses and cheeks and fingers before bouncing to the floor with a new hard-earned awareness of their surroundings. Some of them armed themselves and began hacking at the window with artificial bananas and grapefruit. Given a few weeks of bloody trial and error, Ray reasoned, they might get through that glass. He decided not to wait.

After the cafeteria the corridor widened to a minimalist reception area with a nurses’ station that had lost all its nurses. The reception seemed to span the entire floor with a bank of plastic chairs on one end and a green, under-maintained fish tank with two slimy goldfish at the other. Ray remembered, or at any rate knew, that they somehow managed to live rich and full lives hampered by a memory span of three seconds but he couldn’t bring himself to find any solace in the point.

Behind the fish tank was a floor-to-ceiling mirror with a mottled effect to make it look as much like marble as a mirror can, which isn’t very much. Ray saw himself for the first time and hoped that he at least had a nice personality.

He was average build and height and in only that regard unremarkable. Gaunt, possibly about thirty-five years old and perhaps good looking in his high school graduation picture, now his eyes were tiny bloodshot marbles at the bottom of inky wells of subcutaneous bleeding, like a meth-addict aggressively dedicated to his calling. His skin was the bloodless pallor of an arctic recluse and his lips were a worryingly natural shade of blue. In addition to the mysterious note from beyond memory on his left arm, the three main veins of both forearms were emphatically punctuated with needle marks. His brown hair looked as though he’d cut it himself with pliers and a carpet knife and where it wasn’t short it was missing altogether to accommodate circular bruises or burns above his temples and on top of his head. He searched his face for some reference to normal and found only the certainty that this wasn’t it, like the goldfish in the moldy tank who recognize food and their goldfish friends when and only when they see them.

Beyond the nurses’ station and next to the waiting area was another ill-green hallway but that held no interest for Ray. He wanted to leave. Facing the nurses’ station were double doors of reinforced glass and beyond the doors were elevators and a stairway and freedom. And the doors were firmly locked from the outside.

There’d be a key in the nurses’ station. He’d find the key and let himself out and be sure to lock up afterward. The station was a tidy surface of clipboards and newspapers, someone’s lunch and a computer with a spreadsheet of patients’ names and room numbers and attending physicians. He was tempted to look for his own name, hoping that it might appear in the doctor column, but instead he concentrated on the hundred drawers and the abandoned purse and pigeon holes full of every manner of hospital ephemera with the exception of keys.

Frustrated in his search, Ray finally turned his attention to the spreadsheet open on the computer but saw only the little blue property sticker on top of the screen which said “psychiatric ward”. Then the screen went blank, the air conditioning sighed to an expansive silence, and the lights went out.

Ray chapter 2

He was an amnesiac locked in a darkened mental ward with two inches of glass separating him from an increasingly organized tribe of mindless junkies who’d already proven that they’d at least try to eat just about anything but, Ray reasoned, things could be worse.

Psychiatric wards are typically on the top floor of general care facilities, at least those general care facilities that have psychiatric wards. And those that do are in large cities equipped with emergency services and nice men in white coats who explain things in calm voices. All he had to do was wait. And for that purpose he had the goldfish and someone’s ample lunch (probably Nancy’s), a newspaper and, handily enough, a waiting area.

Ray installed himself on a plastic chair by the window with his newspaper and spread the sandwiches and bananas and thermos of coffee among the magazines on a low glass table. He poured out a cup of milky coffee, still lightly steaming, and bit into a ham sandwich before noticing the tabloid headline: “Memory Panic”.

LOS ANGELES — Experts are in agreement that the source of the global heat wave and mass amnesia which has struck entire communities around the globe is the unprecedented solar activity seen in the past month.

A panel of leading neuroscientists and meteorologists announced the consensus today at a news conference capping a marathon two-day emergency seminar at the Los Angeles Mental Health Authority.

Massive and increasingly violent solar flares, recently visible with the naked eye, have burnt cloud cover from seemingly random areas around the world. These same areas often experience an extreme form of mass amnesia which leaves victims with no capacity for speech or long-term memory.

Dr. Tom Spivic of the LA Mental Health Authority says “(the solar flares) essentially amount to massive doses of radiation causing instant necrosis to targeted portions of the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex (responsible for long-term memory) and the temporal lobe (responsible for speech and vision)”.

Dr. Spivic is a recognized expert in human cognitive neuroscience and the pioneer of a process popular science journals have called a “memorectomy” which employs barium charged “friendly neurotoxins” to selectively delete traumatic memories, used in the treatment of extreme cases of psychotics previously deemed incurable.

The panel was unable to comment on the likelihood of future incidents except to warn that the intensity and frequency of the solar flares appears to be increasing. The most recent occurrence on Sunday was also the most extreme, causing total amnesia among hundreds of residents and vacationers on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. While the radiation appears to penetrate all manner of shelter a party of scuba divers in the affected area remained unharmed.

The best hope was offered by Dr. Spivic who claims that the possibility of a vaccine may have presented itself as a side-effect of his work with the clinically insane. If such a vaccine can be developed then predicting the location and breadth of the next incident will be key.

Key. Ray really needed to find that key now. And then he needed to learn to scuba dive, assuming that he didn’t already know how. The nice men with the calm voices wouldn’t be coming for a while, if they were coming at all and not at that very moment trying to figure out how to open an ambulance from the inside.

For all he knew the hospital might be at the epicenter of a radiation burst that’s wiped the minds and memories of people for miles. But if that was the case then why was Ray merely amnesiac while so far everyone he’d encountered displayed all the symptoms of Dr. Spivic’s cortex killing solar spasms? Why was he left knowing that locked doors need keys and that dates and phone numbers are different things? Was he underwater when the sun lashed out? Was he somewhere else altogether and brought to this place and locked in as a sort of exile while thinking society worked out how to study them or cure them or give them meaningful employment licking stamps? Or worse, was this a degenerative condition and was Ray only a few popped fuses away from joining the Dodgers fans in rooting for their favorite color on the test pattern?

Whether or not he was meant to be sharing a mental ward with a loose society of adult early learners Ray determined that he wasn’t going to. He was going to find Nurse Nancy or whoever the key nurse was or a fire escape or jump out of a window if necessary, but he wasn’t staying. Ray armed himself with a banana and headed back toward the ill-green corridor.

And so Ray was eating a banana when he passed the observation room full of starving junkies, who had all turned a jolly blue under the emergency lighting. They had entirely abandoned their artificial fruit harvest and were concentrating their efforts on the magic invisible wall, unaware that the door on the other side of the room probably wasn’t locked and in any case would be easier to penetrate. When they saw Ray or, more specifically, when they saw Ray successfully consuming fruit, they froze for a moment, mesmerized and hungry, before redoubling their assault on the glass with cushions and a broken lamp.

“You know,” Ray said to the captive audience, “I’m normally a hard fruit man. Apples and pears and the like. But this banana, I tell you. This has got to be the finest banana I have ever tasted in my life.” He enjoyed a bite of the banana and made an elaborate show of savoring it before walking on down the hall.

The radiologist had lost interest in the X-ray machine which had ceased to buzz in its efforts to blind the old man in the lead apron. He seemed very vaguely interested in Ray or at least in the notion that there was another place in the world and he began to approach the door. The emergency response officers were similarly inspired and Ray dropped the banana skin to allow them to make of it what they would.

The Dodgers fans, deprived of TV, had reorganized themselves in concentric circles on the floor around the snacks with the three largest men, probably orderlies and nearly as big as Leonard, monopolizing them in the center. They looked worryingly like a primitive society already ordered by dominance and access to food. But they were calm and quiet and preoccupied with their snacks and Ray was hunting nurses.

The gentle wilderness scene was interrupted by a brisk crack, high-pitched and urgent, like a shotgun trying to sing soprano. Ray didn’t initially know which way to look when an awful instinct drew his attention in the direction of the observation room in time to see an ugly orange lounge chair settling in a shower of tiny glass cubes. It was immediately and inevitably followed by a scrambling stream of skinny, bleeding, greasy-haired escapologists who lost no time in organizing themselves into Ray’s worst enemy.

Whatever humanity the haggard mob may have been developing was certainly lost by the time they poured like a wave over the first of the emergency responders who had picked up the banana peel and was calmly considering its potential applications. He probably would have surrendered the peel willingly but the junkies were in a rage. They tore the peel to all but unserviceable shreds fighting over it before swarming the emergency responders and the radiologist like piranha, tearing at their throats and eyes with rotted teeth and broken fingers.

Ray ran the other way.

The junkies were hampered somewhat by broken glass and broken limbs and Ray had a good lead by the time he made it back to the ill-green corridor. Nancy and the other nurses and visitors were still there but they’d formed their own little society now, far more benign than the Dodgers fans or junkies. Sitting on the floor beneath an emergency light sharing pills from Nancy’s little cups, they seemed quite content and docile and certainly unsuitable allies in a battle against starving addicts who can break bullet-proof glass.

At the end of the hall was another hall, doubtless leading back to reception and Ray considered very briefly the strategy of running the junkies around in circles until they got tired or starved to death. But in the corner where the halls joined a different and far more appealing option presented itself in the form of a small red light above a door: “FIRE EXIT”. The door not just to safety but liberty. Ray sprinted toward it with a few of the fitter junkies only steps behind him.

Had the fire exit been locked Ray would have been disappointed but unsurprised. But it wasn’t locked and Ray pushed through and ran directly into a wire gate. The gate blocked the stairs leading down and it, of course, was locked. A strange and probably illegal measure which Ray would have appreciated enormously had he been on the other side. As it was the only options were to bar the door and live out his life in a stairwell or go up.

Ray looked for something to block the door. There was nothing on the landing but the gate, a big red “4” on the wall, and a fire extinguisher. While it wouldn’t serve to block much of anything for very long the fire extinguisher was of the heavy industrial sort and it might make a passable bludgeon. Ray hoisted the extinguisher to his shoulder just as the first blank-faced target presented itself.

The first swing exceeded all expectations and the decisive crack told Ray that he’d just killed a man. The junky’s head pursued a perfectly horizontal path into the wall and his body followed it like a plume of listless smoke behind a cannonball.

Unfortunately the first swing was also the last and Ray was unable to reposition the fire extinguisher before the landing was overwhelmed. The stairs leading upward were unlit by emergency lighting but there was sufficient natural light coming from an ominous source at the top for Ray to not miss a crucial step while the junkies found stairs a new and intimidating experience.

And then he was on the roof. Even before he was through the door Ray was conscious of intense heat beyond it and he wondered if the roof was on fire. The roof was not, technically, on fire but the atmosphere was hazy and hot and the sun had apparently come in for a closer view of the action. The top of the building was perhaps the size of the parking lot of the only bowling alley in a small midwestern town and like a parking lot it was covered in tar. Thick, oily tar that had turned into a determined glue in the sun. Ray couldn’t run, even if there had been anywhere to go.

The roof was barren but for some pulleys and cables on tracks within thin aluminum housings and a low-profile HVAC unit the approximate size and shape and defensive properties of an elevated dance floor. Only five or six junkies had made it this far but it was enough. Ray couldn’t run and he couldn’t breathe in the heat and he knew that he was in no position to fight. So he struggled across the flypaper surface and the junkies struggled after him in an absurd slow-motion chase, pulling a foot free and clomping it down again with each step, like a toddler in his first deep snowfall.

Ray’s experience advantage was fading as the junkies organized themselves to surround him against the edge of the roof. Any hope he had of an end run back to the stairs was gone as Ray was herded between the aluminum pulley casings which the junkies mounted, freeing themselves from the ooze and affording a decided speed advantage. They were preparing to charge and now they could.

Ray stepped up onto the metal flashing bordering certain death and certain death. “Go fuck yourselves” he said and as the junkies rushed Ray stepped off the roof.

Ray chapter 3

From the safety of the window washer’s platform Ray counted the junkies as they passed rapidly and soundlessly until making a narrow variety of short and diabolical snaps as they hit the cars and concrete of the parking lot four stories below.

The window washer was still dutifully in position but he had passed out from the heat. Ray knew that he was in grave danger of doing the same if he didn’t climb back out of the fire and into the relative comfort of the frying pan. As a point of order he tried the platform controls but of course without power they didn’t work and he prepared to climb the cables when he realized that he was uniquely positioned to do a short reconnoiter of the mental ward.

Pressing his face against the glass and blocking the reflection of the ball of death in the sky, he could see most of the common area. The Dodgers fans hadn’t changed position appreciably but they’d evolved considerably. The three massive orderlies still held sway in the middle but now the lesser members of the tribe were moving about them, some doing guard duty and others making sneaky, obsequious little grabs for food only to be rebuffed with a swat from an open hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.

A wiry kid with a number 22 jersey loped warily into the circle and proffered his Dodgers pennant. One of the giants appraised it skeptically before taking and holding it without waving or looking at it or doing anything at all, which number 22 took as tacit permission. He reached a modest fistful of peanuts and scampered away to a tight cove between a couch and the wall, pursued by enthusiastic new friends. Ray was watching primitive society remake itself on a tiny scale on a worn carpet in the common area of a mental ward. It looked peaceful and doubtless would remain so as long as there were peanuts and popcorn and potato chips.

Or until the junkies got involved. Those that remained, about ten of them, were returning from their failed murder attempt, possibly feeling it was a raging success upon which they were anxious to build. They spotted the snacks and it must have blinded them to the impossible odds because they began positioning themselves around the Dodgers fans like jackals who’ve found themselves quite unexpectedly in a meadow full of bunny rabbits. The Dodgers fans ignored them entirely.

The boldest of the scrawny jackals crept toward the center of the circle looking exactly as if he thought he was invisible. There was no reaction from the inner circle but a few members of the civilian class were clearly getting skittish. The invisible man reached for the peanuts and remained invisible until a moment before his goal when the giant with the pennant leapt to his full height. His ascent was slowed in no way by the acquisition of the junky’s neck which he shook, Ray thought, not unlike a pennant. The giant rattled his prize for the moment that it took to snap the life out of it and then he rattled it some more before throwing it to the floor with an effect similar to that of falling four floors to a concrete parking lot.

This should have been a sign for the junkies to scatter and hide and rethink their loyalties so naturally they attacked in a disorganized and hopelessly under-manned frenzy. The one-sided battle was short and bloody and for the most part indiscriminate but the Dodgers fans were merely brutal with the women while the men were killed with a terrifying ferocity. The lesser classes ganged up on the men and gouged at their eyes and tore at their throats while the orderlies observed no such battlefield niceties, preferring to address the enemy as just a head that needed to be smashed against the floor or wall or cement column.

And then it was over and as soon as it was life returned to normal in the tribe. Parliament resumed in the center of the floor and remaining society cowered around them, but now there were women among them and they instinctively took positions of privilege behind the leaders. All was peaceful again, but the snacks had been scattered and trampled and now there were more mouths to feed.

Overall, Ray thought, a satisfactory result. The immediate threat had been dispatched and he knew exactly what part of the ward to avoid in his search for the keys. He only needed to get back inside before bursting into flame.

The roof was only three feet out of reach but it might as well have been three hundred for all the strength Ray had remaining. He placed a foot on the guardrail next to the window washer who had by then, it seemed, stopped breathing. The effect was to put the platform into a gentle swing that felt to Ray like the dangerous part of the sort of carnival ride that’s forbidden to children or pregnant women or people with sense. He moved to the other side of the platform and tried again. There was less motion and he was able to grasp a cable which turned out to be a sort of chain with a rubber jacket. Ideal for climbing under normal circumstances but in the clammy heat it felt like trying to shimmy up a raw bacon rind.

Ray pulled until he had both feet on the guardrail and his heart in his mouth. In this position he was mostly outside of the safety of the platform and hovering over the parking lot. He knew he shouldn’t look down so he did and saw the broken body and exposed bones of a junky draped over an ambulance about a thousand stories below. But he was within reach of the top now and he could put his hand on the searing branding iron that had become of the roof’s metal flashing. In a single movement he released the cable and put both hands on the flashing and held himself in that position long enough for his life until that moment to flash before his eyes, which wasn’t very long at all.

His hands were burning and the flesh melting into the metal may have helped his grip enough that he was able to pull his center of gravity over the flashing and roll over into the stinking and sticky and entirely welcome pitch of the rooftop.

Ray scrambled instinctively away from the edge and took a moment to appreciate solid ground and try to figure out where he was. Beyond what he took to be the back of the building was open water. That would be the Pacific Ocean, of course, because the rest of the landscape was recognizable as the sprawling, low-density urban blight that is Los Angeles. He could see the walled gardens and flat-topped mansionettes growing more successfully ugly as they climbed Beverly Hills almost directly to the East and the bobbing ambitions moored in Marina Del Rey to the south, placing the hospital and Ray somewhere in Santa Monica, although he still had no idea how he knew all that.

Never-the-less Ray recognized the cookie-cutter subdivisions and ersatz downtown of Culver City with its half-realized office buildings determinedly reflecting the sun back on itself. Beyond that the elusive motif of downtown LA clustered together like buildings bullied and eventually kicked out of better skylines and still too shy to face each other. And then the hills and houses and apartment blocks and parks of the world’s largest failure to plan stretching to the horizon and beyond. And none of it was moving.

There were cars everywhere as there always is in LA but none of them were going anywhere. Santa Monica Blvd and the freeway were crammed with vehicles but they’d all run into guardrails or buildings or each other or just stopped. Some people were milling about but most were still in their cars, unable to get out or unaware that they could. Fires were burning here and there, some of them quite large and all of them out of control but there were no sirens and no fire trucks and no one seemed to notice. The only sound was the ocean, gently delivering the bodies of a few scattered swimmers and surfers who’d of an instant forgotten how to do either.

And then Ray heard a sound that he knew as hope before consciously recognizing it as an airplane. Then it came into view from the south in the unbroken blue of the otherwise blank, hazy sky  — a passenger jet. At the very moment that Ray had become sure that he was entirely alone in a world he didn’t understand there was proof that somewhere, even if it was well beyond the city, there was still intelligent life. He needed to get to it. He still needed the key and then a car and a full tank of gas but he’d get out of Los Angeles and back to normalcy. The jet passed over him and in that instant the engines stopped and he watched the plane dive slowly and gracefully into the Pacific ocean.

Ray watched the plane shatter like it was made of glass and the water of stone and he continued watching as the wreckage spread and sank and his long range plans were rendered obsolete. He looked back at Los Angeles and searched the streets and windows and hills for some reason to go back inside and find that key. Finding none, he did it anyway.

Nancy was gone. In fact the entire ill-green hall was empty now. Ray checked the patient and examination rooms and they were all empty too. He peered around the corner and saw that the nurses and visitors had formed a third tier to the rudimentary society building in the common area. They sat or squatted in the periphery of the concentric circles, all but the nurses who had joined the privileged women taken in the Great Junky Conquest. Nancy sat next to the biggest leader. She no longer had her little cups but now Ray saw that hooked on her uniform at her waist was a bulky collection of keys.

Remembering the fate of those who just try to take things from Dodgers fans Ray knew that he’d need to approach with a more deft strategy than a presumption of invisibility. He abandoned his position and headed toward the so far unexplored hall which would lead back to the reception area and then back to the cafeteria. And there he would find bait.

This last hall was unlike the others. Where the opposing hall had windows and a common area this one had the escape-proof fire escape and a dark room with purple curtains over the door and a modest sign which made the room a chapel. The rest of the hall was behind double swinging doors. Past the doors the hall may well have been ill-green like the others but it was closed at both ends by hospital doors and the only light was from the fading blue emergency units. Two doors on either wall were closed and the high portal window on each glowed more static blue. There were no people nor any sign that people had ever been there. Not on this side of the doors, at least, and Ray was in no mood for a surprise. He rushed along the hall as quickly as he safely could and found no difficulty in resisting the urge to look behind him.

Ray was through the doors just slightly short of the end of the hall and the relative cheer of the reception area. He could see light from the windows around the corner and the forlorn goldfish waiting to be reminded what food looked like. On the right was the only door that looked anything like an office that Ray had so far seen. It was big and oak and had a smoked glass portal behind which natural light glowed from an external window. Beneath the portal was a small brass plaque with just a name: Dr. Thomas Spivic.

Ray chapter 4

Ray’s life was revolving increasingly around keys. The doors to freedom were all securely locked and now the door to Dr. Spivic’s office full of answers was locked. Ray’s hand shook on the handle with anger and frustration and fear that shaking the handle would attract attention, so he settled for giving it a good hard impotent squeeze.

So it was back to plan A, which had the mutual and complementary goals of acquiring the keys from Nancy and not being beaten to a pinkish pulp by the new world order. Ray followed the hall in a U-turn around the nurses’ station and his abandoned picnic until he found himself once again outside the cafeteria and just out of sight of the common area.

The cafeteria was small and dark, lit only by a red exit sign above the door, and there were no obvious threats. Most of the room was occupied by three long tables with chairs stacked neatly on them as janitors will do between meal shifts. The remaining side of the room was a predictable stainless steel serving area with trays and cutlery stacked at one end of a long browsing shelf on the other side of which were removable presentation trays, all empty. Behind that was the door to a walk-in refrigerator which at this point Ray assumed was welded shut.

It wasn’t and in fact Ray found the cold room door opened freely to a gold mine. He filled one of the stainless-steel presentation trays with apples and pears and bananas and decided for the moment against oranges, which risked injecting unnecessary complexity into his plan. There were about twenty now in the Dodgers community and he made sure that he had more than one piece of fruit for each. Two each for the leaders.

Holding the tray in front of him like a peanut vendor at a ball game, Ray walked as casually as he could manage into view of the common area and stood looking about, waiting to be noticed, which took seconds. Then he approached the very edge of the carpet marking Dodgers territory, placed the tray on the ground, and sat behind it, facing the tribe. All eyes were on Ray, then the fruit, then the leaders, and then the fruit again, as though following a lively debate.

A few forward infantry made tentative moves toward Ray but were stopped by the single most terrifying sound that Ray could recall ever hearing. A simple grunt from the biggest orderly. It was little more than the sort of harrumph a curmudgeon makes to indicate that he’s thoroughly unimpressed by the soup of the day but it was the first exercise in verbal communication that Ray had encountered in his short period of human consciousness and it meant that he was facing a terrifyingly unpredictable degree of sophistication. The confidence he had in his plan, which was already a frail and withered thing, ebbed.

The tribe cleared a path between Ray and the grunting leader. The massive orderly stood with an ape-like stoop that made him look a little ridiculous and a lot battle-ready. Ray held out a banana. The orderly approached sidelong, one hand outstretched, like he was angling to pull an important document from a blazing fire. When he was within reach the chief hovered his massive hand above Ray’s offering, bypassed it and quickly selected a pear, never taking his eyes off Ray’s. He put the pear in his mouth, took another one, and returned to his position in the center of the tribe.

A peace accord had been reached. The other members of the tribe slowly approached and Ray gently limited them to one piece of fruit each. The women, in some primitive patriarchal instinct, waited until the men all had and were thoroughly distracted by their apples and pears and bananas, which were proving to be a puzzle. Ray caught Nancy’s eye, held up an apple and moved slightly away from the carpet, tempting her away from the garden of Eden.

Nancy approached and when she reached for the apple Ray put it back in the tray. She seemed to get the message and she sat next to him to eat her fill. The plan was working worryingly well. He was a tolerated member of the group but not so integral that they’d mind or even notice when he left, particularly if he left the fruit behind. He’d even made a friend, and it was the only friend he was interested in making. He touched Nancy lightly on the shoulder as he imagined a naturalist would do to habituate apes to human contact. Then he reached for the keys on her waist. Then the plan fell to pieces.

The biggest orderly with the two pears and, apparently, a claim on Nancy leapt once again to his feet with a brief but surprisingly expressive snort. He faced Ray with his legs spread and arms wide as though he judged Ray the type to opt for a touchdown. Then he bounded across the distance between them and made a very telegraphed reach for Ray’s head. Ray didn’t have time to get to his feet or even think but some instinct drew the metal tray between them in time for the massive open hands to smack into it. The giant shook the sting off his fingertips and lunged again at the empty space that Ray had vacated like a startled cricket.

Ray’s strategy confused the competition, who grunted a challenge that he clearly expected Ray to take up. Ray demurred and instead backed slowly down the hall, peering over the tray. The incumbent repeated his challenge and approached Ray with open and swaying arms, offering him every chance to earn a claim on Nancy or a position of leadership or a smashed head. Ray back-pedaled down the hall and turned to a full sprint when all three tribal leaders, aghast that Ray wasn’t going to do the honorable thing, broke into a loping pursuit.

Once again Ray was being chased by a blood-thirsty mob through the halls of a mental ward but this time he had the singular advantage of knowing the lay of the land. Scanning the terrain for sanctuary as he passed he rejected the patient rooms and examination rooms and particularly the fire escape as hopeless dead ends. He turned the corner to the final hall, passed the chapel and burst through the swinging doors before stopping to still them, hoping that his rivals for tribal leadership would assume he’d gone to church. He pressed himself into the doorway of one of the mysterious darkened rooms with the portal windows. The hall doors swung open.

Ray pulled silently on the handle behind him and the door opened with a clack that drew the attention of the orderlies, who stumbled into a clumsy gallop and made it to the door just as Ray pulled it closed behind him with another even more decisive clack. There was no handle on the inside.

There was no other door. Nor was there a window or furniture or blunt object. There was just a thin carpet and walls of linoleum, some of which had been torn away to reveal thick foam rubber. In the corner sat an emaciated old man with scars on his face and on his scalp where his hair had been pulled out in clumps. He was wearing a straight-jacket. Ray was in a padded holding cell. A rubber room. And once again the door was locked.

The orderlies competed for a view through the portal window but otherwise seemed satisfied to leave Ray where he was. Even had they felt otherwise they probably couldn’t have figured out how to open the door. Eventually they left and Ray realized that as much danger as he’d been in until this very moment, things had taken a far worse turn. The room was designed to contain dangerous psychopaths. There was no way he could ever open that door and there was no one to let him out. Doubtless oxygen could get in so it was to be starvation, assuming he could resist eating the emaciated man in the straight-jacket.

The emergency lighting was almost gone and was little more than the residual glow from the phosphorous face of a very old and very cheap watch. Ray pressed his face to the portal window and saw nothing in the blue gloom but blue gloom. He only then noticed what he held in his hand — he’d managed to get the keys from Nancy, and now he was locked behind probably the only door they wouldn’t open.

The uninterrupted string of threats on his life that Ray had faced until that moment had been just that — uninterrupted and hence, while terrifying, offering the dubious advantage of providing Ray little time to be properly horrified. Now he was in total and darkening silence and, apart from the unwelcome company of a mindless and unpredictable lunatic in a straight-jacket, he was alone. Now with the leisure to fully appreciate the gravity of his situation, the stone-cold fear penetrated Ray like an arctic wind. He finally shook in anticipation of a slow death, without the means to even take his own life.

Ray tried to pierce the darkness with a gaze of concentrated and undiluted desperation until, with a suddenness that gave the impression that he’d somehow provoked it, the blue gloom brightened almost imperceptibly. Someone had opened the doors again at the end of the hall. As one of the massive orderlies took form in the darkness Ray strained to develop a plan to tempt him to open the door and nearly had something when it became irrelevant — the massive orderly in the hall was Leonard.

“Leonard. Leonard. Lenny.” he yelled, slapping his hand on the glass. Leonard saw him and recognized him and, possibly, smiled. The big bear of an orderly had to crouch slightly to look through the portal window at Ray and he appeared almost happy to see the man who had pulled the thorn from his paw.

“Leonard, you have to open the door. You have to open the door and do it now and not think of anything but opening the door.” Ray said, trying to combine urgency with calm authority.

“Just pull the lever up. That one there, on the door. Pull it up.” He pointed out the window and down and Leonard strained his faculties and entirely missed the point. He looked around and behind him and then, apparently satisfied that he understood, crossed the hall and opened the door to the opposing room, looked back at Ray, and locked himself in.

“No, no, Leonard, not that door. This door. You were supposed to open this door you great hulking lump of dumb. This fucking door.” Leonard looked at him through the window of his own room, only slightly less sure now that he’d done the right thing.

Ray ran from wall to wall tearing at the linoleum. At the spot where it had already been torn he pulled it back further to see solid concrete. He slumped into the wall and considered smashing his head against it until hope returned.

A slight darkening at the window drew his attention to the orderlies, who had returned and were once again looking in, this time eating the remaining fruit.

Possibly they’d come to taunt him or make sure he was still there. More likely they were exploring, having been introduced to the concept of broader horizons and alternative sources of food. Ray looked down at the foam rubber in his hands. He tore off a piece, put it in his mouth, and chewed.

“Mmmm-mm.” he said, savoring the moisture absorbing qualities of dry, dusty foam rubber. “Delicious.” He swallowed, rubbed his stomach, and took another bite. “And there’s enough delicious foam rubber in here to last me forever.” He tore another long strip from the wall to illustrate the point, and ate it.

The orderlies hammered at the door and the glass with their open hands. It was an admirable opening result for a spontaneous plan but it wouldn’t be a success until Ray was once again under immediate threat of death by direct violence. The orderlies had to be taught to open the door. Ray put his hands up like a mime behind an invisible door and mimicked the efforts of the orderlies. Then, still miming, he noticed an imaginary door handle, pulled it up and walked through to imaginary freedom. The orderlies learned the lesson with a quickness that made Ray deeply regret not performing the same pantomime for Leonard, because now they were in the padded cell and tearing at the walls, except for the biggest of them who blocked the exit, still determined to have his showdown.

Ray dove between the giant’s legs and slid into the hall only to be pinned to the ground by an adversary no longer so easily fooled. Ray felt his head clamped on either side by enormous, fat hands and as he was lifted from the floor he knew what was coming and in that instant it came. His face was propelled against the floor with sufficient force to pass through it and Ray felt his nose shatter and his teeth cut through his lips. He went automatically limp as he’d seen the junkies do so convincingly, but then in a moment of theatrical spontaneity Ray rolled over to face his opponent.

“That all you got? Pussy?” he said, or might have were it not for the blood and swollen lips. The attitude was clear, though, and the effect was immediate and the giant again took hold of Ray’s head and lifted him entirely off the ground in preparation for a spectacular touchdown. Ray had not a single spark more strength than he needed on the way up to hook his hand around the lever of the opposing door and pop it open with that same decisive clack.

Leonard burst through the door as though he’d had a running head start down a steep hill. Ray slumped to the floor as Leonard bounded over him and caught up the shrinking orderly with a hand around his neck and another on his thigh and tried to fit him horizontally through the door of Ray’s former cell. The orderly didn’t fit through the door in this manner but the effort had the happy side-effects of slamming the door shut, locking his lieutenants in with the man in the straight-jacket, and knocking the orderly into, at the very least, a long-term state of unconsciousness.

Ray crawled in the darkness until he found the keys and then he climbed up Leonard.

“Thank you Leonard. You’re not quick but when you put your mind to shit, shit gets done. Now, you wait right here, Leonard, okay?”

Ray backed slowly and clumsily down the hall, subtly entreating Leonard not to follow. He backed through the swinging doors and may have detected a confused sadness on Leonard’s face as he let them close behind him.

Once through the doors Ray saw that night was falling. As unwelcoming as Los Angeles was certain to be with its population of millions of primitive beings, it would only be worse after dark. He determined to escape the hospital and the city before then.

As he sifted through the keys Ray looked back to make sure that Leonard wasn’t following. Doubtless he’d assume leadership of the tribe and impose a benign rule and eventually find the cafeteria. As he looked Ray’s eyes settled momentarily on the door to the office of Dr. Spivic.

Ray chapter 5

The office of Dr. Spivic was large and luxurious and in the main a model of an organized mind. It had windows to the exterior on the wall facing the door and a trim carpet and the few surfaces that could be seen behind hundreds of books were a refreshing, plain white. On the wall to Ray’s right was a single swinging door with another portal window and to his left was a busy desk scattered with what looked like furiously competing works in progress.

Ray took a seat in the modest swivel chair behind the desk and pushed the papers about idly. Exhaustion and agony competing with curiosity, he hoped that something obvious would appear with a title like “The Cure” or “The Last Eight Hours Helpfully Explained, With Illustrations”.

And it did. Ray shifted some clinical forms with dosages and frequencies to reveal an open file folder with notes in a trained, scholarly hand in which he saw his own name.

“…sometimes difficult to keep in mind Ray’s extraordinary capacity for spontaneous invention. The patient claims to no longer recognize the step-father’s photograph or those of any other victims but Ray has made similar claims in the past in an effort to shorten the treatment.

However the current scans of this and other patients indicate that the progressively increased dosage is simultaneously effective and necessary. Speculation is that a form of scar tissue on the cortex is building as a natural response to the neurotoxins, resulting in an effective immunity to the radiation and requiring stronger doses with each treatment.

It’s worth noting a possible correlation between this unexpected side-effect and the mass memory-loss phenomena accompanying the solar flares. Radiated neurotoxins could theoretically act as a functional vaccine against the sun’s radiation with a limited but unpredictable effect on long-term memory. There’s little time for further study but even if this is so it would mean that as long as the solar flares last communities at risk will have to receive continuously increasing doses. The logistics for an area even the size of the Oahu Beach site are mind-boggling.

I’ve raised this issue with the symposium and the consensus is that the situation is dire enough to try at least a focused trial but the challenge at the moment is determining the location of the next flares. The best analysis at the moment suggests that the flares have settled into a 24 hour cycle and that the next large area to be affected would be affected again within the day but by then, of course, it would be too late.

Our best lead at the moment is Ray, who’s scheduled to return to the federal penitentiary to continue serving the initial sentence now that the treatment trial period has officially ended, but I’ve no doubt I’ll be allowed time for further study in light of the public health emergency.”

Ray was unsurprised to discover that he was a mental patient but he was a little shaken by the news that he was at one point a homicidal maniac. He genuinely had no memory of a stepfather or “other victims” and he resented slightly being cured of an illness that might have been of tremendous use when his face was being pounded against a tile floor.

But if Dr. Spivic’s speculation was close to correct then the treatment that expunged whatever traumatic memories had turned Ray into a killer had also hardened his brain against the effects of the solar radiation. He’d lost his worst long-term memories to save the rest and that would be a fair deal were it not for the total breakdown of society. At least he wouldn’t be going back to prison.

And now it was all going to happen again in, possibly, a few hours when the sun came up. The entirety of Los Angeles had been affected, possibly the entire state of California and, for all Ray knew, the entire planet was at that moment remaking scattered caveman societies only to have them all wiped blank again the next day. Worse again, from Ray’s perspective at least and he had a hard time caring about any other, was this indefinitely increasing dosage that had been necessary to make Ray receptive enough to finally put his rocky past behind him.

Ray needed another dose. A stronger one, apparently, whatever that might mean, and he didn’t even know what a dose looked like. He pulled the laboratory documents back into view and was disheartened by a complete lack of context. Radiated benign neurotoxins, it turns out, are complex, unstable and hard to come by even with all the advantages of a functioning society.

The only hope was a prepared dosage. If such a thing existed Ray could last another day, possibly long enough to get to safety or obtain a degree in advanced pharmaceutical chemistry. There were no medicines of any kind in the office. Ray looked then to the remaining door and saw in the window another a face looking back at him.

The door pushed open and a middle-aged man stepped into the office and stood looking at Ray in a manner that suggested that introductions would be unnecessary. Beneath his otherwise pristine white lab coat the man’s shoulder had been bleeding much as it would had he barely escaped a fight with a homicidal maniac. He looked directly in Ray’s eyes as no one had done in his short memory.

“Dr. Spivic? Are you in there?” Ray said. “I’m guessing that I did that to you and I think you know that I’m very sorry if I did. That was before I was cured, you see. I know that I apparently lie about these things but I swear I have no memory of whatever happened between us.”

Dr. Spivic didn’t answer. He held his hands to his sides like a gunfighter and Ray saw then in each he had a long hypodermic like the one last seen in Leonard. And neatly threaded into the front of his coat were a dozen more hypodermics, like the bullet-belt of a Mexican revolutionary. He began to approach Ray.

“I don’t suppose that’s the next dose is it?” Ray asked. He eyed the door and considered making a run for it but was unwilling to abandon the promise behind the very last door. Dr. Spivic seemed to understand Ray’s dilemma and he may have betrayed the slightest smile.

The doctor had lost some blood but so had Ray and Ray was suffering a broken nose, fat lips, a general beating and he was covered in tar. Also the doctor was armed. Ray weighed the odds, gathered his remaining strength, and ran out the door.

Ray waited at the double swinging doors back into the now pitch-black hall of rubber rooms. The doctor exited the office in his gunfighter stance and moved with the slow confidence of a hunter who believes that he has all the time he needs to track a single wounded target. Ray disappeared into the hall where he hoped his loyal bodyguard was still waiting.

The emergency lighting was completely gone now and the hall could have been filled with Leonards for all Ray could see. He moved to the next doors and waited until he saw the doctor follow him into the darkness.

Outside the doors there was just enough ambient light to show no sign of Leonard. Doubtless he was with his new friends. Ray stepped into the first treatment room and stood in the shadows and waited. He heard Doctor Spivic leave the dark hall and walk in what seemed like a direct line to Ray’s hiding place. Ray took a deep breath and held it in an effort to slow down his heart to roughly the rate of some furniture. The steps continued to approach and Ray could see the edge of a shadow outside the door.

At that moment a grunt of contentment issued from the common area. It was the happy sound of a tribe of hungry amnesiacs who’ve discovered a cafeteria full of food and it was just enough to attract Dr. Spivic, who moved away from Ray’s door and down the hall. Ray allowed himself a single breath. As the steps faded to silence he returned to breathing almost normally but still didn’t move, preferring to give Leonard whatever time he needed to deal with the enemy.

Minutes passed with no sound and Ray relaxed just enough to take a small step onto broken glass. Ray was in the same room in which he’d discovered consciousness and he’d stepped on the shards with a crackle that sounded in Ray’s state like a crystal decanter thrown against a marble wall. The steps started coming back.

But there was more than one set of steps. Leonard had killed or possibly befriended Dr. Spivic and they were coming back to offer him some of the bounty from the cafeteria. And sure enough Ray’s massive silhouette appeared at the door.

“Leonard” Ray whispered, but only because he was hoarse from holding his breath. Leonard looked at him but didn’t see him because where his eyes had been were the hubs of two massive hypodermic needles. Leonard reached out for Ray or for comfort or support but found none before crashing to the floor at Ray’s feet. Behind him was Dr. Spivic, re-armed and smiling that evasive, unreadable smile. He stepped over Leonard and into the darkness.

Ray covered his face in time to sacrifice his forearm for his eyes as two needles plunged into him. He pulled his arm away before the needles could be removed for reuse and felt them break off under his skin. He put the other arm up but this time the needles sank into his stomach, were pulled out again and stabbed into his thighs. Ray thrashed like a blind man fighting off a swarm of bees.

When his left hand found the sink Ray held out his right arm as bait and it was quickly accepted. Needles sunk into his arm and he found the doctor’s neck with his hand. Thus guided in the darkness Ray positioned the needle he’d pulled from Leonard’s hand on Dr. Spivic’s neck and pushed, changed direction enough to pin the trachea to the esophagus, and threaded the needle through so that it came out into his hand.

The assault stopped immediately. Ray held the hypodermic in place, anchored in his own hand, and waited while the doctor drowned. It took a nauseatingly long time.

Ray chapter 6

The room was indeed a clinical laboratory. There Ray found disinfectants and bandages and tiny pliers that seemed disturbingly well-suited to the task of removing hypodermic needles broken off under the skin. He cleaned off as much blood as would come off and changed into hospital scrubs and a laboratory coat and began investigating his new working environment.

The room was lit by exterior windows and the fading evening sun. There were storage cabinets built onto the walls above a neatly organized countertop of beakers and boxes and medical instruments. The remaining wall at the far end had only an open and empty safe built into it. In the middle of the room was a working surface with sinks and nothing else but a single sheet of paper with a note written in the same clean academic hand in which Ray had learned of his criminal past.

I am Doctor Thomas Spivic, head of neuropsychology at this hospital. It’s likely that I’ve isolated a vaccine to the solar flare radiation that’s wiping the memories of entire populations.

I’ve only been able to prepare a very small amount and I’m going to have to administer it to myself. I regret what appears to be an act of wholesale ego but if there’s going to be a broader vaccine then I’m the only one who can produce it. I don’t know what my mental state will be so I’ve prepared a limited number of doses with written instructions on their application. To prevent their use by anyone but myself I’ve locked them in the safe in this laboratory and written the combination on my arm.

Honor

Honor chapter 1

At first there was nothing but road and only time and space for the road rushing forward like a slamming door. And then in the same instant there were cars and trucks and lamp posts and people and noise and no more space for road in the dense obstacle course and the realization that she was part of the chaos with her foot flat on the accelerator and hand on the steering wheel and less than no time at all to react.

She geared straight from fourth to first and swerved onto the sidewalk around a growing wall of wreckage pulling cars to it like a magnet. Then she was back on the road and accelerating through the impossibly thin slice of space and time between an oncoming tour bus and the wreckage before threading through out-of-control cars in the wrong lane.

Then her feet were on the clutch and the brakes and she was turning hard into a tight spin and abrupt stop neatly tucked into the jackknife of an articulated semi-trailer. And then all was silence and settling dust and bewilderment. She had been newly born behind the wheel of a fast car at the center of an enormous traffic accident and she didn’t know who she was or how she got there or how she’d survived.

Her harbor of refuge in the angle of the transport trailers was entirely surrounded by a doomscape skyline of wrecked cars piled two and three high with spinning tires and knocking engines. The little red sports car to whom she owed her life, and vice-versa, was entombed. She turned off the ignition and looked for clues to any of the countless mysteries.

On the passenger seat was a lacquered wicker hand bag and in it she found a phone. She dialed 911 to hear a recording telling her that she needed to wait and that her emergency was very important and would be dealt with shortly. She didn’t believe that so she hung up and scrolled through the contacts, recognizing no one until she found “Dad” to whom, she reasoned, she was related. But Dad wasn’t available and she felt unqualified to leave a message. There was a wallet in the purse with a California driver’s license. She was Honor Lee, she was 28 years old and pretty with black hair and sharp oriental eyes, she lived in Beverly Hills, and she was legally entitled to drive a car.

Doubtless someone else will have called emergency services and there’d be sirens soon and when the more dire physical injuries and death had been addressed she could ask someone to take her to a hospital. Then she’d have to convince a doctor that her amnesia was unrelated to the traffic accident, that she was aware of everything seconds before it happened and nothing else at all, everything else was a complete blank. Honor left the security of the car.

As she opened the door the heat poured in like liquid and she knew that the wreckage must be on fire. There was no safe path between the cars so she climbed onto the hood of a sport utility vehicle. A man behind the wheel appeared to be either in shock or irrationally absorbed by whatever was on the radio. She stepped up onto the roof and saw that she was at an intersection of two downtown city streets which she recognized as somewhere in Hollywood. In four directions for as far as she could see — which is a long way in the flat, low-rise expanse of downtown Los Angeles — was calm and quiet chaos. It was the biggest pile-up she could remember but, of course, it was also the smallest.

There was no fire. The oppressive heat was in the air and it was coming from everywhere and it lay like a resin over the city. It only added to the desert, frontier-town atmosphere, soundless and immobile and indifferent, as though Honor was entirely alone in a city of 13 million people. There were no sirens. There was little sound at all apart from idling engines and dripping fuel and the occasional clunk of vehicles settling into their correct level between wreckage and road. The people in cars remained in their cars and those on the sidewalk stood still and silent and stupefied, uninterested in the spectacular city-wide collision that had just transformed their streets.

Honor slid down the side of the jeep and onto the bed of a pickup truck and then hopped onto the sidewalk. She looked into the eyes of the bystanders and none of them looked back. They looked simultaneously disengaged and distressed, like they’d been asked to explain an impenetrable piece of abstract art.

She looked for anyone who might still be plugged in and chose a man with a briefcase in his hand and a phone to his ear and said “Are you talking to someone? Are you calling 911?” He didn’t look at her or react in any way so she took the phone from him.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she said to no reply. She dropped the phone in her purse and tested the man’s resolution to remain dumb by reaching into his inside jacket pocket and taking his wallet. She was momentarily but thoroughly terrified when he looked her square in the eye but his expression didn’t change and he continued holding his hand to his face and struggling with the puzzle of the unseen artwork. The moment passed and Honor took what cash there was in the wallet and put it back where she found it.

“Thanks” she said. “I’ll pay you back when I see you. Promise”. He didn’t appear to mind. Nor did the dozens of witnesses and Honor looked around at them and involuntarily giggled something between anxiety and elation. She was in a crowd of people but it was as though she was invisible. She was the only conscious person on the street, in the city, maybe even on the planet, and she was seized by a deep and broadening craving to take advantage of the situation.

She took an apple from the shopping bag of a woman in line at a bus stop and a watch off the wrist of a tourist with suitcases in his hands. She continued along the sidewalk in this fashion, helping herself to a sun hat and a pair of sunglasses and so much cash that she stopped counting and then found her attention seized by much greater opportunity. She was standing at the entrance to a luxury car rental dealership.

Honor recognized the cars only and intimately the moment she saw them as she staggered through the lot like an Idaho tourist on Fifth Avenue. She settled immediately on a green convertible Jaguar XK but then rejected it because it was green and next to a white 1969 Mustang fastback with chrome trim and hood-mounted air intake. Then she knew she had to have the new model matte black Corvette with racing options but it turned out to have an automatic transmission so she moved on to the orange Maserati Gran Turismo before spotting her new ride, a red Ferrari 458 with a seven-speed gearbox and rear-mounted V8 engine and a top speed of over 200 mph. She went into the rental office to make arrangements.

For a dealer in luxury automobiles the office was distinctly modest and would have been if it traded in used gardening tools. It was a single-story concrete-block garage with a plate-glass office added during an economic downturn. Inside the office the one wall which wasn’t window was asymmetrically decorated with posters of fast cars on mountain roads. There was a single filing cabinet and a desk behind which sat a tanned, chisel-faced mannequin of a man in an Armani suit and a state of complete detachment. His finger was coiled into the handle of a chipped coffee mug and he watched the smoke rise from a cigar in an ashtray set in the center of a little tire on his desk.

“Hi.” Honor said. “I’ll take the red one, please.”

The mannequin just watched the smoke as though it really needed watching and Honor looked about for car keys. There was nothing on the desk but the ashtray and a stack of rental contracts bound with over-used paper clips. The filing cabinet was locked so she slipped a paper clip off one of the contracts and straightened it out and fit it gently into the keyhole, angled it down, then up again and then down and to the right and the lock popped out of the drawer. Inside were plastic folders with owner’s manuals, trinkets, maps and keys and each had a little tab indicating the car to which it belonged.

The Ferrari fit like it had been built around her, as would be expected of a car that costs roughly the same as a nice house near good schools. The engine growled like a grizzly bear announcing happy news over a megaphone and grew exponentially louder with the slightest touch of the accelerator and Honor trilled an anticipatory giggle. She tapped into second gear, brought the bear up to a modest 3000 of the available 9000 RPMs, and released the clutch. The car slithered out of the parking lot and onto the sidewalk of Santa Monica Boulevard.

Honor turned north at the first opportunity, drawn by what she assumed would be less cluttered plains upon which to set the Ferrari free. She turned again when the sidewalk disappeared and found herself having to slow to slip between the tourists stood like chess pieces on the slippery tiles of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. When the crowd thinned she brought the car very near its top speed before power sliding onto the ample middle turning lane of North Highland in time to avoid the palm trees that seemed to grow in an instant out of the sidewalk.

The middle lane was relatively clear and she raced up the slight incline in fifth gear. The carnage was less dense and dramatic here and most cars had merely bumped into one another and were waiting to run out of gas while their occupants waited for nothing at all.

Honor continued to climb the hill and select more and more secluded roads until she found herself on a perfect country surface with no cars or pedestrians and thick forest on either side. She was finally going 200 mph and only slowing slightly to take the sharp turns as though on a tether. Then she knew where she was. With no memory of having been there, Honor recognized this ideal countryside road as the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens and the high wire fence as the back of the North America reserve.

The crossroads at the top of the hill was blocked by a 60 ton bulldozer with a deep concave universal blade and ripper attachment on the back, so new that the tracks still reflected the sun. Thirteen feet high and banana yellow and wrapped around at least 450 horsepower, it made a Ferrari feel fragile and frail and wholly inadequate, like an origami tiger. Whatever its other strengths, no Ferrari was going to knock a hole in the elephant enclosure.

Starting a newer model bulldozer is much like starting a new car or a truck, if you have the keys, and even more so if you don’t. Honor prised loose the dashboard with the Ferrari key and stripped the ignition wires with a pair of nail clippers. On the first touch the machine barked once before settling into a solid rumble like it was chuckling in anticipation of what it and Honor were about to do together.

The main path split into a service road at the crossroads and the road was closed by a chain-link gate and a sign, “zoo staff only”. Honor raised the shovel and released the clutch and dragged the fence down the service road until the exterior wall of the gorilla enclosure was in view. At that point the rock and adobe wall is perhaps twenty feet high so she knew to raise the blade as high as it would go and approach only as fast as first gear would allow, which is roughly the walking speed of an old man looking for an address.

The bulldozer was stopped by a brief test of strength between machine and wall which machine soon won. The top half of the wall tumbled into the shovel and the bulldozer climbed over the remaining rubble and into the gorilla reserve. The gorillas seemed surprised to see her and responded as gorillas always will when confronted with a bulldozer, which is largely indistinguishable from their response to the sudden appearance of any heavy construction machinery. She waved them an emotional goodbye as she flattened the gate to the public area of the zoo.

Honor pulled the front off the orangutan's tree house pavilion and drove through the front and out the back of the elephant enclosure. The lion watched his front doors bend in with a lethargic confidence, as though it was an expected development of passing interest, which he would address later. In fact few of the animals took immediate advantage of their freedom as Honor pushed in the bars of the leopard cage and tipped a palm tree into the tiger’s deep pen, forming a convenient gangway.

Honor was on top of the world. No one tried to stop her, no one seemed to see her or the massive bulldozer she was riding as she released or tried to release the giraffes, the rhinoceros and the chimpanzees, who provided the greatest satisfaction as they immediately seized the opportunity to mingle with the tourists and occupy the food concessions.

A large-scale zoo escape is hot, heavy work on the best of days and today was hotter and heavier than most. So after collapsing the wall of the aviary to release a squawking cloud of exotic birds Honor turned off the engine and listened to the jungle cacophony she’d created. Tired and dusty and thirsty but filled with the elation of a job well done, she hopped off the bulldozer and took a bottle of water from a peanut vendor who seemed to be just at that moment becoming distantly aware that he was covered in monkeys.

Honor drank deeply and when she lowered the bottle she was looking upon the rule of unintended consequences. An elegant Sumatran Tiger was stalking a motionless herd of Japanese tourists with soft and silent and wholly unnecessary stealth. Honor scouted the exits, spotted the parking lot, and escaped the zoo. She had no memory of having had to deal with consequences but she felt certain that she didn’t like them, and in any case she was bored now and anxious to find another way to profit from her position as the only conscious person alive.

The parking lot was remarkably undersubscribed for a major tourist attraction but of greater disappointment to Honor was the uninterrupted collection of mini-vans and people carriers and station wagons with artificial wood panels that people bring to the zoo. Conscious of the urgency building and roaring and screeching behind her she was about to settle on a yellow Range Rover for no better reason than a parrot had perched on it when she spotted the ideal ride to navigate a city-wide car accident — a black and candy-apple red Harley Davidson Electra Glide stood alone and illegal in the shade of the picnic area.

She was stripping a wire from the brake light of the bike to use as a jumper when a distinctively human scream punctuated a sudden and total end to the entire orchestra from within the zoo and all was silence. Honor froze by instinct or because a lioness was walking from the zoo exit with the leisurely confidence that often accompanies four inch fangs and five inch claws.

Honor continued her work crouched behind the motorcycle while the lioness sniffed the air and twitched her ears. Drawn by the shade or the scent of prey or an interest in motorcycles, the massive cat approached. Honor was the picture of still waters, utterly motionless on top while her hands worked frantically and blindly to bridge the ignition wire. She couldn’t bring herself to look down to verify her work and she knew that there was an exactly fifty percent chance that she’d bridged the wrong circuit or, put another way, the odds were two to one that she was about to be eaten.

Good odds and time was up anyway. Honor stood and faced the lion and pressed the ignition button and nothing happened. Or any rate, the motorcycle didn’t respond. The lioness did. She stopped and gave Honor the sort of quizzical look that a heavy-weight boxer might give when called a sissy by an old man on crutches. Then she braced her shoulders and bared her teeth and coiled her muscles for a decisive leap.

Honor chapter 2

With the rapidity of a flip book Honor visualized her options and all of them concluded with her being eaten by a lion. There was no shelter nor distraction nor weapon. There was just the motorcycle. She smiled at the lioness in a manner that she hoped would convey that it was she who was responsible for the freedom the animal now enjoyed. The lion appeared unappreciative but still didn’t leap. Only her ears moved. Something had distracted her in Honor’s final seconds on earth.

Then Honor heard it too. A growing mechanical wheeze like the sound of steam escaping was coming from all directions. It was a jet, flying very low and apparently evocative of some dark memory of lions in captivity. The jet burst into view and, with a parting glance that suggested that Honor was guilty of unsportsmanlike behavior, the lioness shot away across the parking lot.

Honor was grateful for the intrusion but peripherally aware that it brought different consequences. A jet meant people. Conscious people who doubtless have firm views on the proper use of rental Ferraris and bulldozers. Honor set about correctly hotwiring the motorcycle and placing herself in a position from which she could reasonably claim ignorance of anything untoward that might have happened at the Los Angeles Zoo that afternoon.

But then the sound stopped. Honor looked up to watch the passenger jet enter a powerless glide and dive out of view toward the ocean. She was once again the only conscious person on earth.

Riding a motorcycle is its own sort of freedom. Riding a Harley Davidson at top speed on the sidewalks of downtown Los Angeles without a helmet moments after narrowly escaping death by lion is a sense of liberty very nearly approaching flight. Honor flew now toward the coast, guided vaguely by a need to drive a train or steal a yacht or eat caviar with her hands.

The city was different from Honor’s short memory of it. It was still gridlocked and silent but there was movement now among the people on the streets. Tentative groups were loosely forming and some even gave the appearance of a wary sentience. Mostly, though, if they had any interest at all it was in raiding the fruit and vegetable stalls on the sidewalks of Chinatown or the scattered and sparse and understocked grocery stores Honor passed along Broadway as she entered the theater district.

This wasn’t looting, though. It was more like grazing on fruits and flowers and unwrapped bubblegum and cigars and whatever else might confused for food by the debutant consumer. The citizenry was docile and unthreatening and gave the impression of a Disney movie placed in a Los Angeles populated entirely by orphaned baby deer. If there was any sign of menace it was in the subtle sameness of the little herds — some tall blond men in golfware or, quite possibly, clown costumes had assumed control of a delicatessen next door to a café under the administration of a dozen hare krishnas. Across the street four or five motorcycle cops had been joined by two security guards to occupy a candy store. The effect was subtly disturbing and suggestive of some developing peril but the only explicit effect was to make Honor realize that she was hungry.

Honor found herself in the drunkenly ill-focused former downtown Los Angeles which looked like the genteel founding quarter of a much nicer metropolis that had lost most of its treasures in a rigged game of chance. The proudly patchwork gothic/deco/Spanish-residential Los Angeles City Hall and the comic-book detail of the Hall Of Justice seemed to be justifiably embarrassed to share their neighborhood with the obstinately dull Civic Center and aggressively ugly police services building. But the courts and the county jail and sheriff’s office and LA Detention Center gave Honor a subversive thrill that she only partially understood, and she decided to play out her next adventure here.

She rolled to a stop outside the Regent Hotel because it looked old and expensive and the sort of place that would have an absurdly over-priced wine list and just enough caviar on hand.

The hotel was an immaculate relic of an age when what things looked like mattered. Honor entered through a revolving door of wood and brass and beveled glass into an age when it made sense for a hotel to have a two-story, rosewood paneled lobby overlooked by an expansive mezzanine accessible by twin staircases, all resting on a tiled mosaic of Poseidon rising from the surf accompanied by a dolphin. The maritime theme was repeated on the walls by commissioned floor-to-ceiling paintings of ships in peril and bustling seaports. Poseidon's realm was scattered with deep velvet armchairs meticulously disordered so guests could read their newspapers and plan their trysts and doze in peace in what would normally be a crowded LA hotel lobby. The only light was from enormous leaded glass windows facing the street and the suspended dust particles gave the abandoned foyer the character of something frozen in aspic and undisturbed for generations.

Honor was alone in the lobby. To the left was a bank of house phones and to the right the curtained entrance to a darkened restaurant with a brass sign on a pole “Welcome to Milo’s. Please wait to be seated.” Beneath the mezzanine was a marble-topped reception with cash registers and a brass desk bell. Behind that was a swing door and a key rack with old-school metal keys. On a whim which seemed ill-advised the moment she pursued it Honor struck the desk bell and was astonished by the sharpness of the peel such a little bell could produce in the awesome quiet. The door behind the reception desk pushed slowly open.

A gangly young man in an ill-fitting brown plastic tuxedo moved tentatively into the narrow corridor behind the reception desk, his eyes fixed intently on the bell. His name-tag said “Darryl” and beneath that were little American and Spanish flags denoting the languages he spoke fluently yesterday, when he knew what languages were.

Darryl took in the reception area as though seeing it for the first time and indeed he probably was. He’d only become aware of existence this morning and since that time doubtless assumed that the staff office with its seemingly unlimited supply of crackers and chocolate-covered mints and bottled water and monogrammed hotel pens represented the generous limits of the known world. The ringing of the desk bell gave him cause to doubt a lifetime of assumptions.

Honor stepped back from the desk, unwilling to break Darryl’s trance. The clerk tentatively approached the bell, raised his hand, and struck it. He showed no change in expression but Darryl was clearly pleased with the effect and he repeated it, again and again, until the overlapping, high-pitched frequencies became in that space and time the most annoying thing the world.

The curtains to the entrance of Milo’s parted and produced a large sphere of a man in pristine kitchen whites and his own nametag, “Milo”. He also had a butcher’s knife and the universal empty stare but his version was humanized slightly by the permanently furrowed brow unique to heads of state and accomplished chefs.

Now Milo was newly born, seeing the world a few hours ago for the first time standing upright in a kitchen with a cleaver in his hand. He’d always had that knife in his hand. It was part of him, and quite possibly the most important part. It was certainly the only way he knew how to communicate. And there was something that he wanted to say.

Milo walked slowly but deliberately to the reception desk, across from Darryl, who continued to entertain himself with his new form of self-expression. Milo seemed to see only the bell until he looked Darryl in the eyes and calmly chopped off his hand.

The clerk managed to fuse shock and fear and pain and a soupçon of genuine curiosity into one extended and unidentified vowel as he picked up his right hand with his left and tried to put it back on. The chef observed the carnage he’d unleashed with the blank detachment of a lab technician noting the result of a satisfactory but largely predictable experiment. The clerk’s labors grew more desperate and unfocused and, in addition to describing a graceful arc of blood across the key rack, he knocked the desk bell to the floor where it bounced twice on its side and rolled to Honor before having a little wobbly spin and settling at her feet, dinging merrily all the way.

After a brief internal struggle the chef formed another isolated thought — the immutable conviction that Honor and the bell were conspiring against him. He began maneuvers against them both. Honor backed toward the door, leaving the bell to fend for itself and very deliberately moving slowly and, even more deliberately, quietly. She waved a hand blindly behind to sense for unexpected chairs or the door. This was somewhat liberally interpreted by the chef as an act of aggression and he lunged, leading with his cleaver.

Honor dodged and danced and behaved as randomly as she could muster, hoping to leverage her steep experience advantage against Milo’s decided lead in the sharp object category. She jumped from chair to chair and kicked over tables and tested the weight of an indoor palm before abandoning it as a potential weapon, all while offering what she hoped would be interpreted by a mindless chef as encouragements to return to his kitchen and see to his soufflé.

“Milo? Is it?” said Honor when she’d put a divan between them. “Milo I need you to know, whatever happens between us, that as God is my witness I did not touch that bell.”

If the chef was moved by this or disappointed in the small fib he showed no sign of it. He received it all as though it was perfectly normal and indeed from his perspective it might well have been — he was, in this regard, entirely non-judgmental. He wanted simply and exclusively to cut something off Honor, something that would give the same type and degree of satisfaction as that provided by the clerk’s right hand, and he redoubled his efforts. He also learned quickly and soon he stopped following Honor the long way around chairs and being startled by the mirror behind the counter of house phones.

Honor’s advantage was rapidly fading so when she found herself with her back to the door it was an effort to resist the urge to dash through it. Instead she stopped and faced Milo and raised her hands in surrender. Milo raised his knife.

Honor chapter 3

“Okay Milo, that’s it. Let’s take this outside.” Honor turned and pushed through the revolving door in an easily duplicated maneuver that the chef didn’t hesitate to follow.

And Honor was back in the lobby, having exercised her advanced understanding of revolving door technology to leave the chef blinking on the sidewalk at the sorcery that caused his adversary to literally and completely disappear. He looked back on the enchanted door with a melancholy nostalgia for the good times he’d had within, judged the past as lost forever, and turned to face an uncertain future for man and cleaver.

Darryl was no longer struggling. He sat on the floor behind the reception desk and looked longingly at his severed hand while he rapidly bled to death. The spectacle served to remind Honor of the fleeting nature of life and that she was by now ravenously hungry. She pushed through the heavy purple curtains of the domain of Milo’s former glory and onto the threshold of yet another subtle and striking aberration from the instinctively normal.

Milo’s restaurant was resolutely posh in that way that invariably misses the mark. The tables were small and never-the-less inches apart and uniformly ugly with yellow napkins clashing with royal blue table-cloths and carefully mismatched silverware. Each table had an almost exhausted candle and the room was otherwise lit only by the daylight that fought past the thick castle curtains over two floor-to-ceiling windows. It was cool and quiet and empty of customers but the service staff had occupied the booth in the corner and were squatting like pigeons on the bench and on the table itself and they had gathered between them all the bread-baskets in the building. It was this that Honor, in spite of a lack of experience of the hospitality industry, felt might be out of the ordinary.

Light from the foyer announced Honor’s entrance and the waiters stopped nibbling on sections of stale baguette to look up at her as one mind, causing them to resemble a startled extended family of meerkats dressed adorably in identical royal blue tuxedos. Honor was immediately charmed. So were the service meerkats who until that moment had been unaware that anything more interesting than bread existed anywhere in the world and now in their midst was a female of the species.

The silent stillness lingered for a moment like an awkward encounter at a funeral until the alpha waiter hopped to the floor and loped over to Honor and offered her a basket of butter rolls that were almost entirely free of spit. Honor received the basket as though graciously accepting a lesser entertainment award and took a seat at the centermost table. The maitre d’ crouched on the floor and peered at her over the flower arrangement. More servers approached and one-by-one and eventually simultaneously placed their offerings of baskets of bread, many of them empty, on the table. Honor took it all in with good grace but found herself wishing she’d selected an establishment with a less gimmicky menu.

An expectant hush fell over the service staff as Honor selected from the baskets and the decision itself launched a pushing match the gravity of which was difficult to read. The maitre d’ objected to a basket of sliced pumpernickel placed directly over his butter rolls and he seized the offending waiter’s toupée and flung it across the room. The two busboys struggled without the benefit of language to highlight the advantages of their respective offerings of breadsticks and petits viennoiseries and the grunting grew worryingly unfriendly. Honor endeavored to cast oil on the troubled waters, selecting something from every basket, even the empty ones.

And so the party proceeded largely peacefully until a noise or a movement or a communal sixth sense drew the attention of the wait staff and Honor to an almost invisible door next to the bar and partially concealed by another curtain of royal blue iron. Like the walls the door was a stained oak blackness but it housed a portal window through which shone the shiny, curious faces of the kitchen staff. Slowly the door pushed open and the sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers crept into the dining room. At any rate they may have sauciers and sous-chefs and dishwashers but Honor didn’t know what sauciers and sous-chefs were. To her they were men in white outfits not unlike that of the formidable Milo, with the important distinction that where Milo had been armed with a cleaver these men had fruit, an enormous stainless steel bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers, a bag of flour and an entire cooked leg of lamb, carried like a baseball bat.

The objective of the kitchen staff was identical to that of the wait staff, although they were appreciably better prepared for the task of impressing a date. They pushed the waiters aside and their bread-baskets from her table and lay their treasures before her. In addition to a greater quality and variety of wares the kitchen staff, possibly from careful observation of the failure of the wait staff to secure Honor’s favor, appeared to have a greater facility for hospitality. The sous-chef tore strips from his leg of lamb and demonstrated eating it before offering a generous handful to Honor. The salad chef gingerly placed tomatoes in Honor’s lap and the bag-of-flour chef entertained her by creating clouds of white dust.

“Any chance of a glance at the wine list?” asked Honor as she assembled a sloppy and unwieldy sandwich from a bit of just about everything on the table. They understood only that she wanted something else and as Honor dined the staff rallied around the restaurant and into the kitchen and behind the bar returning with all manner of thing that they thought she might like to eat, including flowers and candles and a fur stole from the cloak room. None of them seemed to be exactly what this beautiful and desirable and clearly finicky creature needed next. Finally a busboy presented her with a bottle of mineral water and the staff froze into a concrete trance as she accepted it, opened it, and drank deeply, igniting a run on the bar.

It was then that the factions formed into militant groups delimited by shared interests and similar clothes. The sous-chef or, at any rate, biggest chef, took a leadership role in assaulting the bar which had been occupied by the floor staff, led by the maitre d’. The wait staff, doubtless selected from the more presentable and lithe struggling actors who offered themselves for employment at Milo’s restaurant, were little match for the kitchen staff, all of whom appeared to have learned their trade in the nation’s prisons.

The battle grew violent and then fierce and finally bloody and very soon ceased altogether to be entertaining. The kitchen staff overwhelmed the bar and either developed or remembered an uncanny natural capacity for tenderizing meat. The waiters that didn’t abandon their station and run off in all directions were beaten against the bar’s floor of polished California granite. This left five stout and tattooed kitchen workers bloody and victorious and newly confident of their claim on Honor so when they rose from behind the bar they were varying degrees of enraged to discover that she had left during an entertainment that had been largely for her benefit.

At that moment Honor was touring the back halls of the hotel. The only light was standard blue emergency lighting and the halls and walls and floor had a cloned character to them that gave the staff area of the hotel a labyrinthine quality. She was lost. But she had her sandwich and sense of adventure and there were treasures, it seemed, behind every door. An oversized linen closet — more of a linen hall — yielded a plush robe with the insignia of the hotel over the left breast. Another equally cavernous room appeared to be the liquor store and was lined with shelves of every variation on the theme of hard liquor, from Bourbon and Scotch to grappa and rice wine. The treasures were stacked to the ceiling — about the height of two average sized Honors — and the only uncovered spot was a high window leading to the outside and secured with two-inch bars of exactly the sort, in Honor’s expert opinion, used in zoo enclosures.

The next room was actually two rooms and had two doors and no theme to speak of — it was stacks and shelves and boxes and baggage of everything that the most twisted and imaginative guest can ever contrive to forget in a hotel. It was a predictable lost-and-found of clothes and jewellery and junk but it was also an Aladdin’s cave of fishing rods and bicycles and punching bags and an astonishingly large number of stuffed and mounted domestic animals, accepting that anything more than one taxidermied Dachshund is astonishing.

Honor was browsing this storeroom of wonder when the kitchen staff caught up with her. They were tired and snorting from their battle and from running the length and breadth of the labyrinth looking for the guest who in their primitive view had run out without paying for her meal. Once the entire complement of kitchen workers were in the storage room Honor put down the remains of her sandwich and open her arms and smiled “come on over here, you”. The sous-chef cautiously but confidently approached his prize and as he entered her swing zone Honor selected from behind her back a 1-wood from a bag of golf clubs and pitched a perfect drive into the left side of his head. The club bent and the sous-chef stared immobile and disappointed at Honor, who dropped the club and dashed out the remaining door.

The pursuit that followed had something of the air of a French farce as Honor took a series of deliberately random turns through thickening clouds of flour dust only to come face-to-face with a dishwasher. She evaded capture by blocking the hall with the door to the pump room, turned, and found herself looking into the ghostly white face of the flour chef. Honor reluctantly but quickly threw her terry cloth robe over his head and again got lost in the maze of hallways somewhere between the restaurant and the hotel foyer. When she finally found herself briefly alone she took the opportunity to hide behind one of the seemingly countless identical doors. She was trapped in the liquor closet.

She heard the entire kitchen staff grunting and regrouping in the hall and was adjusting to the prospect of a long and well-stocked silence when she saw with a sort of resigned horror that she’d tracked clearly defined floury footsteps into the room. The door swung wildly open.

The massive sous-chef seemed somewhat bigger now and infinitely less romantic, having lost any inclination of mating with Honor and wishing now only to reassert his authority. In a moment he was on her like an angry chef on a weedy maitre d’.

The dead weight on her chest and the powerful hands around her neck competed in a lumbering marathon to compress the life out of Honor. This was just nature unfolding as it will, the strong dominating the weak, the large eating the small, the great and nicotine-stained crushing the life out of the civilized but slightly too adventurous. Honor mused again on this unwelcome concept of consequences and again found them not to her taste.

This unexpected and, in Honor’s view, unwarranted demotion in the food chain grew more real and possible and lucid until it was the only thing in existence and she raised her arms above her head in surrender, stretching until the neck of a bottle nestled firmly in each hand. The smooth angles of Jack Daniels in the right, a classic baseball bat of Wild Turkey in the left. Honor brought them together on each of the chef’s temples with the precision and force of a clash cymbal player in his one solo moment of a Russian symphony with his judgmental mother in the audience.

The Jack Daniels exploded in a cloud of glass and Tennessee cask-ripened sour-mash. The Wild Turkey held strong, still hoping to hit one out of the park. The chef was softened and bewildered and fell away to position himself helpfully on his knees with his head at roughly the level of a tee-ball. Honor couldn’t resist manifesting the metaphor and she treated herself to a brief wind-up before again testing the surprising strength of the bottle of Wild Turkey, which again held as the chef’s head bounced improbably off his shoulder and rebounded in a rubbery wobble like a porcelain bulldog rear dash ornament. The chef stared intently into the middle-field as though he saw there something that had scared him as a child. Then he fell the rest of the way to the floor in the way that only 225 lbs of lifeless meat can fall to a floor.

Honor rewarded herself with a deep intake of air and turned to some crates of Mouton Cadet for richly needed support. She was enjoying the recovered liberty to breath and promising to never again take it for granted when the otherwise jolly tinkling sound of glass addressing glass drew her attention. The remaining kitchen workers were arming themselves with a bottle in each hand.

Honor chapter 4

Facing the four leaderless kitchen staff and their eight bottles of vodka, whiskey and, in one case, Benedictine, Honor had one extraordinarily durable bottle of Wild Turkey. She was most decidedly outgunned and the kitchen staff now knew everything she could teach them about weaponizing liquor bottles. But she hadn’t yet taught them everything she knew about liquor bottles.

With a touch of magician’s flare Honor presented her loyal Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit on the tips of the fingers of her right hand and elaborately and carefully uncapped it with her left. Her audience looked on, duly curious but not yet sufficiently impressed to copy her. Bringing the bottle to her nose, she made a show of appreciating the noxious bouquet of a freshly opened bottle of 101 proof bourbon. She smiled broadly, licked her lips like a pantomime child-snatcher, and drank deeply.

With a few false starts, particularly when confronted with corks, the kitchen staff of Milo’s restaurant took to spontaneous binge drinking with an enthusiasm well beyond anything for which Honor could have hoped. They opened and sampled and in some cases emptied at least one of everything. Soon the atmosphere was a dangerous mix of shared curiosity and aggressive evangelism as the kitchen staff forced new taste sensations on one another but from Honor’s perspective the chief development was an overarching lack of focus. They had completely forgotten about her.

Honor sashéd between the indifferent drinkers like a hostess excusing herself momentarily to see to a doorbell and left Milo’s staff cocktail soirée in the store room. Immediately she found the door she wished she’d found about a quart of bourbon earlier — the door marked “lobby”. In fact the door led to a little office, the very office that had been Darryl’s entire world for most of his short life, and from there Honor found her way back to the foyer. Apart from Darryl who, sadly, no longer registered on the census, the foyer remained empty and that suited Honor to a nicety because she had lost her taste for adventure and, more particularly, for the consequences which seemed so often to fall hard on the heels of adventure. She no longer wanted fast cars or caviar. She wanted to be home and safe and, ideally, armed.

Crossing the lobby Honor was captured by the mirror behind the bank of phones and had in that moment the sort of epiphany that rarely comes in adult life — she realized that she wasn’t Chinese. The photograph on her license had been of a dark and mysterious oriental girl but the face in the mirror was heavily influenced by generations of breeding beneath the sunless skies of Ireland and reflected back mainly inarguably red hair and a round and robust face, generously freckled under a neon sunburn.

It had been Honor’s plan to get back on her Harley and go to the Beverly Hills address that she remembered from her driver’s license. But the license wasn’t hers and the address wasn’t home and, issues of identity aside, the street had become a primitive war zone. In the time that Honor had spent on the worst group date in history the sun had begun to set and the nascent communities of police officers and golfers and religious nuts had become militantly partisan and were beating each other to death.

The policemen, unaware that they were wearing sidearms, were hitting the Hare Krishnas with garbage can lids and newspaper vending machines and the cultists were fighting back with whatever was at hand, mainly tambourines. A substantial platoon of businessmen in shiny suits was trying in vain to force its way into the many occupied cars trapped on the street and a pair of store mascots — a caterpillar and a butterfly — had managed to set themselves on fire. Across the street the cinema and stores and offices had been invaded in spite of the previous impenetrability of picture windows and, most disturbingly, revolving doors.

There were no women among the warriors and so all that remained to fight over was food and anything that resembled food but the fighting was never-the-less fierce and ominously well-organized. Honor mused briefly on the effect of introducing a female into the melée and decided, for the moment, to hold her ground in the hotel. There were cars everywhere and her motorcycle was only yards from the hotel entrance but the frenzy stood between them and Honor like an acid storm. She needed another exit and she needed a vehicle. With these fundamental truths she returned to the labyrinth behind the reception desk.

The kitchen staff had spilled into the hall and begun the vomiting phase of the binge drinking process and posed no serious threat. Honor found what she needed in the lost property room and returned to the restaurant and then the kitchen. The kitchen was windowless and dark and the emergency lighting had burned itself out but Honor could see the only thing she needed to see — the outline of the inevitable receiving door which all professional kitchens use primarily for smoke breaks. She could only guess what lay beyond the door. It sounded like unsuitably skilled workers dismantling a greenhouse but was likely yet more running street battles. But very soon there’d be mindlessly wild and dangerously sober cavemen invading the hotel and in any event Honor had a target and a plan and a BMX bike from the hotel’s lost and found.

Honor and her bike burst from the door not so much prepared for anything but unconcerned what anything might be and so when she found herself jetting off a six-foot concrete loading bay as though off the side of a cliff she maintained control of the bike and hit the ground with the wobbly confidence of a natural cyclist on a pint of bourbon. She quickly recovered her balance and peddled with the strength and speed so often consequential of being instantly pursued by a high-density mob of mindless neanderthals with a paleolithic sense of the romantic.

Just as she’d recognized the zoo and the interior of a Ferrari with no memory of ever having seen either, Honor knew exactly where she was going and what she was going to do when and if she got there. She was going to the police station, and she was going to get a gun.

As keenly as Honor was recollecting the path back to the LAPD headquarters she’d passed on her way onto Broadway, the actual measure in distance was proving elusive. Partially because she was quite drunk but mostly because she was backtracking on a bicycle a route previously charted from the luxury of a Harley Davidson. She could see the revolutionarily ugly glass triangle jutting from its cinder block housing like a gargantuan broken widget and knew that she must be approaching police headquarters from the rear, which was roughly the plan, but it seemed to get no closer.

Of appreciably greater concern was the growing density of the street-fighting which Honor was having more and more difficulty dodging as her lungs and legs began to submit to the stress and heat. So long as she was able to keep to a pace just a notch above a breathless sprint then even those who noticed her and gave chase soon abandoned the pursuit but the factions were sweeping the streets in shoals now.

Suburban dads were the main occupying force, holding store fronts and upper floors and exploring the military applications of fire and throwing heavy things out of windows. A crack team of road workers was maneuvering against the small but select collection of women being archived by the staff of a condominium showroom. A regiment of confederate soldiers — almost certainly movie extras — were entrenching their positions in a pitched battle with a leathery corp of farm workers for control of a truckload of tomatoes.

As she soldiered on Honor noticed the high ratio of policemen among the rioters and reflected on the brutality they’d brought down on the heads of the Hare Krishna. She realized that her plan of riding a bicycle into the city’s highest concentration of policemen was exactly the sort of strategy conceived by people who’d just pounded a pint of Bourbon.

She estimated, probably optimistically, that she could keep her diminished pace for another mile and began to look for shelter. The closest option that didn’t require riding up stairs or through a fountain was an open underground parking garage and she steered toward the ramp and disappeared into the darkness.

She bore deep into the back of the garage. No one followed and as near as could be determined in the darkness she was alone. And there were cars everywhere, she needed only choose one. She cast a discerning eye for something that had the firepower she’d need to get through the immobile traffic and found herself harboring sentimental thoughts of the bulldozer she’d abandoned at the zoo. But all the cars were exactly alike. They were almost all Chevrolet Caprices and they were all black and white. Honor had accidentally broken into the headquarters of the LAPD.

Honor switched on the bike’s light and the beam fell immediately on the door to the stairs. She took that as a sign that she should return to plan A and investigate the availability of weapons. She promised herself that she’d go no further than absolutely necessary to secure a firearm and then return to the garage, hotwire a police car and get as far from LA as it would carry her. She was sober enough now to ask herself if the plan was sound. She answered herself that it was.

And indeed when Honor peered through the thin slice of risk that she allowed through the door of the ground floor stairwell the plan seemed to be unfolding with the machine-precision of a carefully planned and expertly executed museum heist — the entire floor was empty. Certainly that which could be seen of the ground floor was empty but that accounted for a considerable amount of acreage in the open plan, glass-partitioned breadth of the ground floor of the absurdly inappropriate headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. She could see all the way to the front of the building, through at least five layers of conference rooms and briefing rooms and offices and finally the foyer and the outside, which was where all the action was. It appeared that the staff, in search of food or fresh air or broader horizons, had established a beachhead in the park across the street. There the uniformed officers and civilian staff had split into distinct factions and established a brisk arbitrage in women.

Honor sacrificed a shoe to prevent the door closing and locking and stepped into the lair with an unworried gait very much approaching a saunter. She immediately encountered the first obstacle to the plan — as much as the police department resembled the shopping concourse of a busy modern airport there was not, as Honor had vividly imagined, a hall of convenient shops dedicated to the keeping of peace and enforcing of law and she couldn’t immediately see where they kept the guns.

In fact as Honor toured the transparent halls she observed that were it not for the mug shots taped to the glass walls of the briefing rooms the police station would have looked much more like a very peaceable stockbroker’s on a warm Sunday afternoon. And it was precisely while making this observation that Honor had for the first time that she could ever remember a flash of total and certain recognition. From among the scarred and angry and defiant faces on the opposing wall of a long and narrow briefing room Honor’s curious attention was returned by a dead stare from a face that she knew. A face that she’d seen as recently as the Regent Hotel when she caught her reflection in a mirror.

Her name was Gale, also known as Gale Force Winds, Gale Smith, Gale Jones, Gale Lencewicz, Mariantoinette Hapsbourg and “Solenoid”. She was wanted for, among many other things, theft, felony theft, auto theft (43 counts), theft by deception and theft by forced entry, making a false statement to a police officer, assaulting a police officer, impersonating a police officer, criminal nuisance (uttering a bomb threat by telephone) and escape from custody (state mental facility). She was currently at large and presumed to be in Los Angeles and under additional notes someone had added “riot cuffs”.

As she read she became sensitive to a rising feeling of undiluted elation. She was, here in Los Angeles where nobody’s anybody until they’re at least a little bit famous, a star. A giddy smile pulled at the corners of her mouth while a melancholy tear for her lost celebrity formed in her eye. It must have been one long and uninterrupted hoot but now it was gone and nobody knew Honor’s lore, not even Honor. She plucked the little wanted poster from the glass wall of the briefing room to serve as her new ID, her single touchstone to the past and her credentials in the future. And as the still face came away from the window it was replaced by another uglier, hungrier and much more animated face. The face of a police officer with no mind nor memory nor motive apart from eating and mating, and it looked as though he’d already eaten.

Honor assumed that pedigree of startled that can only be bred by a sudden face at a window and uttered a brief and high-frequency yelp. The policeman treated this like a starter’s pistol and immediately mashed his face into the glass and was startled in an altogether different way. Honor turned toward the door to find it blocked by a small coterie of police officers who had come from, by all appearances, nowhere.

The alpha cop was a generously obese desk sergeant and he held back the others with outstretched arms that indicated inarguably that they would have to wait their turn, and he approached Honor. She was trapped in the briefing room and backed quite literally into a corner. The desk sergeant, operating on a millennia’s old instinct and comprehension of sartorial apparatus, fumbled helplessly with his belt. Honor considered her diminished options, including that being so primitively proposed, and she realized to her horror that she had only one left.

Honor chapter 5

Honor smiled at the desk sergeant a smile that she hoped would be interpreted as seductive in Caveman.

“Let me help you with that.” Honor said, and reached gently and maternally for the policeman’s belt. He gratefully held his hands away while Honor slid his gun from its holster, placed it under his chin, and blew the top of his head off. The noise and stench, while spectacular in the enclosed space, were hopelessly inadequate accompaniment to the fountain of blood and brain which painted the previously transparent walls and the remaining police officers. Never-the-less the kickback tore the gun from her hand and the smoke blinded her and she was completely deaf, apart from a persistent ringing the approximate pitch and volume of a steam whistle.

As the whistle subsided and the smoke cleared Honor could see that the policemen, having been introduced to their use, had drawn their weapons. They pointed them at her as though of one mind and pulled the triggers or, rather, tried to pull the triggers, which behaved exactly as triggers should when the safety catch is on. Honor recovered her gun and, holding it tightly with both hands, turned it on the glass wall of the briefing room and spread it like a vapor across the hall.

What should have been a victorious dash down the hall and back to the stairs was stalled before it started as Honor anticipated navigating the shards of glass carpeting the floor with only one shoe. But the policemen were recovering from this unexpected maneuver and there was nothing left to do but hop, so Honor hopped on one foot as fast and as with as much dignity as she could marshal and which the situation allowed, which was quite slow and with no dignity at all.

The policemen moved as a unit to cut off her line of escape, fortunately, because it meant that while they were much faster than Honor they were denied access to her by a limited understanding of the properties of glass and the important distinction between walls and doors. So Honor hopped down the hall and the policeman tracked her from panel to panel and from room to room like fraternal cocker spaniels pursuing a mailman from behind a lengthy picket fence, feet away from their prey but unable to reach her. Honor had to merely maintain the discipline of the hop and not panic and break into a doomed sprint.

A doomed sprint began to grow in appeal as Honor’s hopping leg, having already contributed more than should be expected of any standard leg during the drunken bicycle race, began to markedly lose elasticity. Her right leg would do its part and swing the team forward but with each leap the left knee would bend deeply and return slightly lower and appreciably slower. The policemen, however, showed their training and if anything were growing in enthusiasm for the hunt. They ran along next to her, stopping occasionally to batter at the glass with their guns and grunt romantic overtures.

But the sea of broken glass was thinning and was gone altogether in only a few courageous bounds and just beyond that were the stairs. Similarly, the invisible magic maze keeping the squad out of reach was coming to an end in the form of a bay of tributary halls. The race was absurd and lethargic and it was going to be a photo-finish.

Honor was at the door at the same moment that the policemen discovered themselves at the intersection of glass halls, one of which was a direct and unimpeded path to the woman for whom they harbored such mixed feelings. Honor fell through the door and pulled her shoe with her and kicked at the door which insisted on closing at its own agonizingly slow, spring-loaded pace. It clicked into position just as the policemen piled against it and Honor took a moment to breath, confident that her pursuers wouldn’t associate keys with locks for, conservatively, years.

She sat on the stairs and clutched her gun and her shoe and massaged her tortured leg. The door boomed like a kettle drum as the policemen threw themselves against it in what sounded like evenly distributed turns. And then nothing. A full two minutes of this same nothing passed and then a familiar explosion shook the door and a bullet passed through it and bounced around the stairwell. And after another short pause a cacophony accompanied dozens of bullets piercing the door and clattering about the landing. Honor returned to the parking garage.

The venture had been, in spite of everything, a success. Honor had visited the police station to get a gun and now she had a gun and as a bonus she had a glamorous backstory which almost entirely explained how she came to not be Chinese. All that remained to officially declare the plan a masterstroke was the all-important getaway. Honor used the bike light again to survey the darkened garage. She needed something slim and speedy, like a motorcycle, to zip between the stationary traffic and roving mobs or something that could just go over them, like a tank.

She panned the garage and the beam did a double-take as it nearly skipped past six police motorcycles in a uniform row, their wheels neatly turned to the left, like a chorus line. One of them would do nicely. And then it wouldn’t, because just beyond the motorcycles, parked in a dark corner and cordoned off with incident tape, was a tank.

She reasoned that this was some sort of riot vehicle but it looked like no vehicle that Honor could find in the same nebulous database that told her that she could drive a sports car and a motorcycle and bulldozer. It didn’t look very like a vehicle at all, as much as it did a metal boat with a battering ram on the front, assuming that was the front, and four massive tractor tires which gave the tank a clearance of marginally higher than the roof of a Ferrari. It was the ideal getaway car.

Ray chapter 7

Dr. Tom Spivic looked out the window at the darkening city and reflected on his dismal options. The least appealing was the easiest — he could settle in with the newly formed society of primitive health care workers and patients and wait for the dawn when, in all likelihood, he would cease to be Dr. Tom Spivic.

Or he could tear this laboratory apart in the vanishingly slim hope that some trace of the vaccine or indication where it could be acquired was hidden somewhere among the unreasonably scant paperwork and beakers and bottles.

Finally he could try to make his way in the world. He could return to the original plan and escape the psychiatric ward and chance finding help somewhere in a Los Angeles that was now seething with primitive factional violence. Or he could jump off the roof.

It had been roughly 12 hours since his first memory in the mental ward, a very rough 12 hours. Whatever torments this dystopian world had visited upon him in that time — and it had somewhat overachieved in the area of dystopian torments — and whatever it yet had in store he felt reasonably certain that there was absolutely nothing now that would surprise him. And he was wrong about that. As he sought inspiration out his laboratory window his eye was drawn by three giraffes, two adults and a baby giraffe, travelling north at a leisurely gallop on the otherwise abandoned Pacific Coast Highway. They seemed to have some idea where they were going and from this the scientist deduced that animals were somehow or to some degree immune to the effects of the sun’s radioactive outbursts. Anyway there were giraffes on the freeway.

The former Ray scanned back along the freeway for other surprises and found one. At that distance it was difficult to say with any certainty that what he saw was actually a tank, but what looked very much and behaved even more like a tank was driving over the cars blocking Venice Boulevard, heading toward the ocean.

Clint

Clint chapter 1

Casting his mind back, he found that he couldn’t. He opened his eyes to find that he was looking directly into the sun, which profited from the opportunity to punch him squarely in the back of the brain, so he closed them again. He had a headache. He was a headache. His head ached with a blunt, expansive, exhaustive, prize-fighting and prize-winning ache. He had a headache bigger than his actual head.

Sunlight pressed on his eyelids like deep-sea fishing weights but when he raised an arm to cover them he found that the headache was a distraction, a very potent distraction, from a general malaise throughout his body but with particular emphasis on the joints, which felt as though they’d been packed in ice, ready for shipping. In his stomach something was growing slowly but determinedly larger and it was now ready to leave the nest. His lips and tongue had been, apparently, upholstered.

With no clear memory of a similar sensation he diagnosed with absolute certainty the symptoms of a monstrous hangover. He tried to lay motionless with a very fuzzy plan to remain that way until the sun went down, however long that took, but his body insisted on rocking in gentle, consistent, rhythmic and nauseating waves, as though he were on a boat in the ocean. He could even almost hear the water slapping against the hull and seagulls screeching like poorly aligned disc brakes somewhere overhead.

With a heroic force of will he isolated the sound of the gulls as not a symptom of his condition but as a real external stimulus. It was actually seagulls and he really could hear waves and he was, in fact, on a boat. The rest was still a hangover.

He yawed into a sitting position before risking opening his eyes again but there was little improvement. He was on the top deck of a wide fiberglass yacht of a pure white that faithfully reproduced the sun’s assault on his squinting eyes so that everything glowed like a dream sequence in an Italian art film. He was even dressed from shoulders to feet in pristine white sailor’s cottons and was, until further notice, indistinguishable from the deck. And he had reason to doubt these were his clothes. They had nothing at all in the pockets, which could have borne very little in any case, and they fit his boxer’s frame like a sausage casing.

He stood, finally, with the stability of a Great Dane on a trampoline, and took in the horizon, which required the further effort of turning in a complete circle because the horizon was everywhere. In all directions for as far as he could see there was the ocean’s edge, simmering in the close, cloying heat of the sun so that the edges blurred into the sky. He was alone on a yacht in the middle of the ocean and he hadn’t a fuzzy, achey, throbbing idea how he got there. But was he really alone? Probably not. Probably there was someone else on the boat who knew who he was and how much he’d had to drink, if that was even measurable.

The upper deck where he’d been sleeping was empty but for countless Champagne bottles and from what he could see of the main deck it was deserted too. He eased down the steps to the main deck at the bow and walked with his knees cautiously bent to absorb as much of the motion of the waves as possible. It was a big boat. He had a long walk ahead of him to the aft where, he reasoned, he would find the cabin and the bridge and, of greater importance, some shade.

And his instincts had been exactly right. After a long and not notably scenic tour of the boat’s gleaming white port side, interrupted by a refreshing pause to release some of the overflow of the self-reproducing swill in his stomach, he arrived at the stern with a diving platform and steps up to the bridge and wide and curtained French patio doors leading to the cabin.

The cabin was, if anything, hotter than it was outside. There was no circulating air and the thick atmosphere testified to several hours in this state. This was clearly where most of the celebrating had been done. There were yet more bottles, this time of hard liquor and wine and the sweet liqueurs of unnatural colors which contribute so efficiently to the well-rounded hangover. There was evidence of food, as well, and the smoking of cigars and a total dereliction of duty on the part of the cleaning staff. And finally at a banquette table fixed to the starboard wall was a man and a woman in their late sixties eating jam with their fingers.

They didn’t look like the sort of couple who normally ate jam with their fingers. They looked like the sort of couple who normally told the staff of their yacht how they liked their steaks, although it was always rare because it always is with the very best cuts of meat. They were dressed as though they’d been to a wedding of someone they didn’t know very well. She wore pearls. He wore epaulettes. They both wore a look of total stupefaction. They looked at the intruder with fear and suspicion when he came in through the French doors and turned with their pots of jam toward the wall in a clear gesture that they were unwilling to share.

“Hi.” croaked the hangover, and vainly tried to clear his throat. “Do you know who I am?” Neither of his hosts looked at him, they just accelerated their consumption of jam.

“I’m guessing that’s a no.” he said. “It’s mutual. Do you know where we are? Where the crew is? Where land is? How about aspirin? Do you know where you keep the aspirin?” The couple finished their jam and licked their fingers and scanned the wreckage for more leftovers. Simultaneously zeroing in on a shrimp cocktail ring with a sauce that had grown a thick skin, they raced for it, retrieved it and took it back to their little lair.

“Okay, that’s a little strange. But fine. It’s not a pressing matter. I’ll just call you Marmalade and Apricot. You can call me, say, Clint. Clint Hardcastle. No, Clint Hardcliff. Yes, I like that. Clint Hardcliff.” Marmalade and Apricot made no objection and the formalities were complete.

Beyond the expansive salon was a galley door and the man who called himself, quite recently, Clint, left his new acquaintances to investigate the deeper recesses of a luxury yacht. The door led to a corridor of modern eclectic excess. The deck was polished oak and the walls brushed aluminum with glass wainscoting and mounted photographs of, presumably, celebrity visitors to the boat. Stateroom doors and stained-glass wall-lamps alternated down the hall and everything from the hand-polished floors and beveled glass moldings to the overly composed pictures of movie stars and mobsters was covered with a coating of congealed blood. What forensic examiners lyrically call the splatter pattern suggested a fast-paced sabre battle between unevenly matched opponents or the lively pursuit of a spirited amputee by mountain lions.

One after another Clint quickly opened and looked behind each door and found himself taking a rough accounting of the crew. With at least one in each stateroom and the two in the galley — one with his throat artlessly cut and the other shot through the sternum with a spear gun — there was a crew of eight. Of those, the total that had been killed in what appeared to be a fast-paced and impeccably evenly sided battled, was eight.

The remainder of the main deck was one large stateroom eerily free of blood and bodies and another door with a dark portal window which opened to the stairs down to the even darker lower decks. Clint balanced the evidence so far with the probability that he’d find a friendly and helpful stowaway hiding in the darkness and barred the door with a mop handle. The kitchen had almost no food and in particular the jam supplies were completely exhausted. And to Clint’s immense surprise there remained a great deal to drink. Whatever purpose had brought this boat so mysteriously far out to sea there was strong evidence that it was to allow everyone on board to drink themselves to death.

Most of them had narrowly averted that fate, but were nevertheless now of very little use to Clint. The boat was becalmed, in fact the ocean was particularly gelatinous under the cloudless skies and ruthless sun, and it normally needed a crew of, apparently, eight to go anywhere. Lord and Lady Marmalade Jam had clearly suffered some sort of preserve-related trauma which put them beyond usefulness and in any case looked like the sort who didn’t usually drive their own vehicles.

Clint climbed the stairs to the bridge. It was a mostly enclosed high-technology show-room surrounded by vast windows on three sides and open at the back. He inspected the banks of computer screens and GPS units and keyboards and radar displays with the engaged understanding of a Christmas shopper who’s accidentally walked into a New York Gallery to get out of the rain. None of the machinery meant anything to him and in any case none of it was on, which he received as something of a relief.

But he recognized the moment he saw it the classic shape of a ship’s wheel, the only wooden thing on the deck, with spokes and handles and brass fittings and a salty character that made it look a little intimidated by its state-of-the-art surroundings, like a retired bomber pilot invited to sit in on a moon launch. Next to the wheel was a chrome lever that almost had to be a throttle and next to that was a key in a housing that looked just like a car’s ignition and which Clint concluded was very probably a boat’s ignition. Concentrating on only those three elements and barring disasters it was just possible, Clint thought, that he could make this floating penthouse apartment go where he wanted it to go.

Which might have been true, but he didn’t know where he wanted it to go. He hadn’t the most distant idea which was the direction home except there was only one of those and an almost limitless number of directions toward desolate and empty sea and an eventual death by alcohol poisoning. Clint felt sure that he could point the boat in the rough direction of shore if he had a compass and watch and at least some idea how it is that people navigate with a compass and a watch.

Clint allowed his hands to sweep over the arc of the wheel and smooth ergonomics of the throttle hoping in some way to commune with the machinery in the way he imagined that great navigators of the early days of discovery transcended GPS technology. Stationed thusly, he took in the horizon and it all looked for as far as the eye could see and in a perfect circle exactly the same. The was no wind nor wave to decide direction for him. No other vessels to hail. No sound nor cloud nor friendly dolphin to guide him home.

And then there was something else. Something so indistinctly anything that it had an air of having been there all along but now there was just a bit more of it. It may have been as simple and subtle as a change in the air pressure but whether up or down Clint couldn’t say. It may have been a sound but if it was it shared a frequency with the shy hush of the ocean. And in a moment it was a thing. It was real and solid and big and it was a passenger jet and it was dropping right out of the sky and onto Clint.

He couldn’t, but Clint imagined that he could see the pilots’ calm and cheerless faces, reconciled to their fate, as they hurtled toward the yacht. It would all be over within seconds and Clint found himself wondering if the plane had been coming from land or going toward it when, by all appearances, it ran out of gas. He had little expectation of surviving what was about to happen but meant to profit from the development if he did.

The jet passed over head and the immensity and forced perspective and general oddness of such an occurrence created the illusion that if he’d climbed on top of the bridge and jumped he could have touched the bottom. Certainly the jet was for a moment the entire sky and then it was passed and still whole. And then it hit the water.

The jet had managed to travel possibly another one or two miles in the few seconds between passing over the yacht and becoming one with the ocean in very much the same way that a snowball maintains its identity until colliding with a field of snow. The impact was spectacular and was for a moment the only physical presence of the merging of water and airplane. The ocean was the very concept of impact made physical and the jet was gone altogether. Water rose into the air in the shape and size of a Roman colosseum and then inverted and pursued the plane to the bottom, frozen for a moment in the form of an impossible hole in the sea.

And then came the rebound as the hole filled itself, generating shockwaves that raced away from the point of impact as though the nursemaids of the gods had taken hold of the vast bed sheet on which rested the tiny yacht and given it a sharp snap. A wave like an enraged runt mountain gamboled toward the boat, consuming the horizon and rapidly picking up speed and mass and murderous intent.

Clint chapter 2

Seen from above, the shock wave generated by the impact of a jet plane into the sea is doubtless a thing of scientific and natural beauty, composed of fluent and mathematically precise concentric rings describing a frequency corresponding to the velocity, mass and density of the actors in a uniformly choreographed exhibition of fluid dynamics. Seen from the surface of the water from a distance of a mile it’s an onrushing wall of death.

The wave gathered the yacht to its bosom and ran with it like a wide receiver clutching up a fumble in the dying seconds of a losing game against bitter rivals. If Clint hadn’t been sick before, and he had, then he was now. The sudden gain in altitude was complemented by an impossible angle with the stern facing almost directly down and the bow almost directly up and Clint holding onto the ship’s wheel to keep from falling out the back of the bridge and into open water. Soon enough though the yacht turned so that it was travelling rapidly through the air sideways near the top of the mountainous wave. Clint could see nothing but sky and the ride was an uncannily comprehensive reproduction of the sensation of falling from a great height.

In fact the boat wasn’t falling at all but holding high on the wave like a piece of driftwood. A piece of driftwood that’s about to be dashed to pieces by the fury of the ocean. When the crash and crush and curtains didn’t come, even after what seemed like an hour but was probably less than 15 seconds, Clint realized that the tiny speck of a yacht was in fact surfing in its own clumsy oversized multi-decked oblong way across the water.

The yacht fell horizontally for several minutes, dandled on the lap of the giant wave as it hollered its deafening din of tons of water folding into yet more tons of water. In time the hoarse shouting dimmed and the violent shaking diminished and Clint, clutching the ship’s wheel and clenching his eyes and teeth, began to allow himself the luxury of hope. And in tiny measures hope was made gradually manifest as the wave carried the yacht far from the site of the crash and then slowly and gently died, depositing its charge safely in calm waters, like a leaf that’s found its way against all odds out of a raging river and into a shallow tributary creek. And Clint, still fused to the ship’s wheel and soaked from head to toe by, mostly, sea-water, opened his eyes and saw land.

To Clint’s untrained and inexperienced eye the mainland was somewhere between two and two hundred miles away. He felt sure that he could get there, assuming there was sufficient fuel, in the next ten minutes or before nightfall, whichever came last. He turned the ignition key and the engines whispered a dutiful response from somewhere deep within the boat. The accelerator accelerated and the wheel still steered the yacht and so Clint pointed toward land and waited and eventually got bored and tied off the wheel and went looking for something to drink.

Clint tried the radio and television and found no service on any channel or frequency. He reasoned that he was too far out or that the airplane crash had somehow interfered with reception or that the television and radio and ship’s radio were all broken. Eventually he contented himself with splitting his time between his duties as captain, returning to the bridge intermittently to verify that the boat was still pointed toward shore, and trying to teach Marmalade and Apricot to bring him a glass of champagne when he rang a bell. Both efforts were not entirely without success but he was more evidently effective as a ship’s captain.

And in this manner the yacht steamed quietly and confidently toward land. Clint was relieved to discover that he recognized the San Gabriel Mountains as soon as he saw them and was able to puzzle out from that piece of data that the flat, ugly, sparse spread of disconnected half-considered high-rises scattered listlessly before the mountain range must be Los Angeles. He started to notice a few other vessels on the water, mostly yachts like his own although considerably smaller. There were also sailboats and trawlers and even a sailboard but none of them were manned nor in motion. There were people on most of the boats but none of them appeared to be contributing to the functioning of the vessels which, consequently, were going nowhere.

The becalmed and drifting shipping grew considerably denser as the yacht approached shore and was joined by all manner of flotsam and jetsam and things which were neither flotsam nor jetsam, such as the floating corpses of swimmers and surfers. Clint had no recollection of ever being on the water off the coast of LA but he felt certain that this was far more than the normal number of dead bodies, even for what must be the height of the tourist season.

Clint decelerated to as slow as he could go and still steer the boat between those in the way, a maneuver which mostly amounted to ramming them and relying on the relative enormity of the yacht to tip the balance. And so it was early evening by the time Clint could begin choosing a viable mooring, in aid of which in a locker on the bridge he found binoculars the size of two coffee tins and of the sort of magnification used by professional sailors to read the mail of people several miles inland. He scanned the coast and found nothing but ideal landing points on which he could run the yacht aground and simply walk the rest of the way, an approach which appealed to his pragmatic sense of seamanship.

But as the powerful dual astronomical telescopes rushed the city into sharp focus Clint saw that just to the south, happily the direction in which the boat appeared to be currently drifting of its own accord, was a marina or docks or port or just a place where a lot of other boats felt comfortable among their own kind. He decided to allow the boat to continue pursuing its homing instincts while he did a little sight-seeing.

Sweeping the city again with no more pressing goals Clint noticed this time something amiss, something that looked too much like a postcard of Los Angeles As Seen From The Ocean. And it was just that, a picture. Clint felt sure that an early evening view of a city the size of Los Angeles should feature more traffic and sirens and people frolicking on the beach. There was nothing of the short, with a particular emphasis on the absence of frolicking. There was traffic — a great deal of traffic in fact — but it was all stopped and silent. There were no sirens although there seemed to be ample fires from which they could draw inspiration.

For as far as the powerful binoculars could reveal, which was actually slightly farther than was of any interest, there appeared to be no movement. The cars weren’t going anywhere nor honking any interest in doing so. The boats down in boatville just bobbed according to the whims of the ocean. There were no traffic helicopters or airplanes or kites. The city was clearly not as Clint had left it, although he couldn’t say for certain what it was like when he left it or if indeed it was even from Los Angeles that he’d started his day on the water.

The distance to the canal which lead to the marina was approaching a make-or-break point after which the yacht would have drifted far enough to the south to compel Clint to navigate, so he restarted the engines and very slowly engaged them and pointed toward the approximate middle of the threshold of the community of boats. The closer it was the more defined and intimidating the marina became and the slowest Clint could approach was still a breakneck two miles per hour. Though he saw no movement at all from the other vessels he rang the warning bell several times and Marmalade appeared behind him with an empty glass on a tray and a look of sincere pride of accomplishment.

The yacht slipped neatly into the mouth of the harbor, bouncing off one side of the wide river alley and then the other before swirling into Marina Del Rey. Good fortune reserved a vacant boat slip, opening its wide wooden arms directly before the yacht. Clint carefully adjusted for drift and wind, accelerated only enough to catch the rudder so that he could align the nose perfectly with the moorings, and then he crashed directly into the dock. In spite of the reduced speed the yacht continued shoreward for a good ten feet before dock and boat negotiated a standoff and the yacht was wedged securely into an evenly split boardwalk. Mission accomplished.

From the bridge Clint could see only the famous marina, a geometric and charmless parking lot of bobbing and lifeless middle class angst with names like “Serendipitous” and “Got It Maid”, bounded on three sides by weedy palm trees and stoic glass boxes pretending to be hotels and timeshares and homes for people who couldn’t bear to be too far from their boats. The water reflected the evening sunlight like a tanning mirror up into the face of the buildings and trees and neighboring boats, giving them a distinctly judgmental demeanor which Clint felt was pretty narrow-minded for a marina. None of the other boats appeared to be occupied.

Clint climbed to the front of the boat, now at about a 15° incline from the back, and took in the city from the comfort of a secure mooring. The binoculars were no longer necessary. In fact there was no need to look any further than the remaining length of dock to see that what had appeared to be a quietly comatose city hosting the world’s largest and most placid traffic jam was in fact seething with activity. And by and large it was the same activity, repeated with only variations in the participants and choice of weapons, it was street-fighting of a peculiarly factional nature.

Marina workers in their blue shirts were swinging nets and ropes in defense against an assault by deckhands dressed all in white and armed with mooring pikes and broken bottles and both sides looked equally at risk of breaking into song. Beyond that on Washington Boulevard middle-class neighbors were sacking middle-class houses and dragging one another’s wives across hedges as though lawn boundaries and topiary had lost all meaning. Clint’s guarded relationship with reality, already badly soured by events since this morning, was knocked completely from its foundations by this starkly surreal interpretation of a Los Angeles which was steeped in unfettered violence while no one was using a gun nor giving any thought to their cars. It was like a world gone mad.

Clint snapped the high-powered binoculars from doorway to alley to rooftop to balcony and each was playing out the same scene of feral and furious fighting, as though he was channel-surfing in a mid-range hotel in the Ozarks. And where there were groups there were sides, characterized by something and usually something conspicuous and petty. A softball team was making short work of a group of vendors for control of an organic fruit and vegetable store while a hard-hatted construction crew beat senseless the aproned baristas of a coffee shop for no apparent reason at all. Policemen with batons and the lids of garbage cans chased panicked Hare Krishnas with broken tambourines while something that looked very much like a platoon of confederate soldiers was bayoneting the male members of a tour group armed with only reflex cameras and sensitive skin.

The battle for food and women and terrain was played out all across the flat and faceless landscape of Los Angeles. Clint traced the binoculars along the straight roads in all directions and saw them blocked with abandoned cars and otherwise entirely deserted, with the exception of the small portion of the Pacific Coast Highway that he could see, which staged the stalking of a family of giraffes by a female lion. Clint felt compelled at this point to ring for another drink.

Which is why Clint had looked away from the magnetic spectacle of a city and its people and giraffes and lions turned against one another to acknowledge Marmalade’s presentation of straight rum in a champagne flute, which was so far the closest he’d come to getting it right. So when he returned his attention to the city Clint was caught off-guard by what appeared to be the very sudden appearance of a tank trundling over the uneven surface offered by the roofs of the cars stalled on Venice Boulevard. It turned onto Lincoln, parallel to the water, and then into the courtyard of the marina. With no more obstacles and a smooth terrain the tank immediately picked up speed before driving directly off the dock and into the water.

Honor chapter 6

Honor was delighted with what turned out to be a natural facility for driving tanks. It was in every way that mattered the same as driving a car and if anything it was easier than driving a car, because with cars one so often had to concern oneself with avoiding obstacles and braking. This was not the case with the tank, which offered a very forgiving scope of alternatives to steering and stopping. The vast majority of objects which for, say, a Ferrari 458, would represent impassable obstructions are for a tank more a variation of surface textures offering subtly differing degrees of traction. The brake pedal seemed to be largely ornamental because stopping was a simple matter of decelerating and allowing the tank to wedge its wheels into the hood of a car or bed of a pickup.

Enclosed and protected and safe and bouncy, the trip down Venice Boulevard was a leisurely one for Honor and her tank and she was able to observe the early evening military machinations of a lapsed civilization like a tourist in a glass-bottomed boat on the surface of a particularly savage South American swamp. So when she found herself entering the clearing in the jungle of cars on the four sides of the intersection of Venice and Centinela she was almost entirely unprepared to have to swerve into a campervan to avoid hitting a man who was standing directly in her path and trying to sell her a newspaper.

Honor had been driving over the cars in the middle of the boulevard partially, in fact mostly, because it was tremendously amusing but also because it avoided the morally dubious exigency of driving over people, savage or not. But now here was a man presenting the dual challenge of being both a person and, apparently, sane. Or at least he appeared to be a different kind of insane to the universal delirium of the masses tearing one another to bits across Los Angeles. This one was, instead and in the middle of it all, selling newspapers and looking like he’d been in a lengthy and brutal fight to the death, which he lost. He stood in the intersection holding a tabloid over his head with both hands, as though the headline itself might mean something to Honor. And then she realized that of course it did. It meant “Memory Panic”.

In a single motion and looking not unlike a clockwork cuckoo, Honor flung open the manhole sized door on the roof of the riot car and rose from it and pointed her gun at the lunatic paperboy.

“You don’t do maps, do you?” asked Honor from just beyond a police pistol that she had no intention of firing again if it could possibly be avoided.

“Maps?” replied the crazy man with the tabloid newspaper over his head. Then he looked up and took her meaning and smiled a weak smile and said “No. No maps. Just this newspaper. Final edition, I suspect.”

“I suspect you’re right. Who are you, newsie?”

“Ray, er, Tom.”

“Rare Tom? Is that because you, yourself, are rare, or because of the epidemic shortage of Toms? Because both are probably solid explanations. I’m Honor.”

“Hi Honor.” Ray’er Tom lowered his newspaper. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to meet you and I’m looking forward to trying but first can I get in your tank? I’m feeling a little exposed out here.”

“Climb aboard Rare Tom.” said Honor, and dropped down into the tank.

Clint chapter 3

Clint blinked. He’d fought the instinct until now, for fear of missing what was doubtless going to be yet another exponential escalation in the surreal nature of events, but he could resist no longer. And when he opened his eyes the tank was still there, in the water, in the marina, where it had landed after apparently intentionally driving off the dock. Since waking up lost at sea and being saved by a plane crash and witnessing society rebuilding itself into primitive factions and a lioness stalking and killing and eating a giraffe on the freeway and a tank driving into the ocean, he was entirely unsurprised to discover that it floated like a cork. The armored and unwieldy and enormous vehicle was also, evidently, amphibious.

Leaning meditatively on the railing of the yacht, Clint watched the tank drift not unlike a disengaged lily, describing a slow circle along a long arc until it was almost next to the yacht and in fact fitting quite close to correctly into the vacant boat slip. The tank lightly biffed the hull of the yacht like a starlet’s empty kiss and came to an undulating stop. Clint moved closer to the side of the yacht nearest the tank to listen to it emit a tinny clang, then another, followed by an echo which sounded more like an antagonized Scottish Terrier trapped inside an oil drum then it did anything else. Then the turret door jerked slightly ajar and wavered in this position, surveying for danger, then it swiveled wide on its hinge till it clanged all the way open and produced, naturally enough, a pretty redhead.

She locked her elbows on what was now the top deck of the tank and looked up at Clint and proceeded directly to the point: “Are you capable of speech?”

“What?” asked Clint back, “Do you mean like a lengthy political discourse delivered to a cheering throng? Probably not.”

“No,” said the pretty moon-faced tank driver, “I just mean human speech. Talking.”

“Oh, right, then, in that case,” said Clint, “yes.”

“That’s a relief. My name is Honor and this is Rare Tom.” said Honor, followed by a reverberant “It’s just Tom. Hello.” from within the tank-boat.

“Hi Honor.” said Clint. “Hi Rare Tom.” he said, a little louder this time. “I’m Clint. Clint Hardcliff.”

“No you’re not.” said Honor. “Not for a second are you Clint Hardcliff.”

“No, you’re right, I’m not. I made it up. I have others. Do you prefer Rock Power?”

“I do not.” said Honor. “Let’s stick with Clint. I take it you don’t know who you are either?”

“I’m afraid not. Is your name really Honor?”

“Nope. It’s just the latest in a series of aliases.”

“Well I like it. You should keep it. I can’t imagine anyone will argue the point. I like your tank, too. It floats. I didn’t know that tanks could do that.”

“Neither did I.” said Honor, surveying the machine with a degree of reserved pride. “But I didn’t know how to stop it, either.”

“I can sympathize with that. Would you like to come aboard? I was about to ring for cocktails.”

Tom and Honor climbed first onto the dock and then up the fore ladder to the bow of the shipwrecked yacht.

“Sorry about the poor parking job.” said Clint as they slid down the incline toward the stern, “You’ll have to take my word for it that it could have been much worse.”

“On the contrary.” said Tom, “If we hadn’t spotted you deliberately ramming the dock we wouldn’t have thought to come to the marina at all, but in fact this is where we all need to be. Or at any rate we need to be close to water. Is there any scuba gear on board?”

“For the record, it wasn’t deliberate. And I’m not sure that I know what scuba gear looks like, so, maybe. Isn’t that the sort of thing that most yachts have on board? Like life jackets and marlin freezers?” Clint led his guests into the salon and rang the drinks bell.

“You have staff?” asked Tom.

“Hardly. They couldn’t make a Martini to save the life of an infant. But I’ve been on board since this morning with little to do but drive straight and train Marmalade and Apricot. Those too, except in the case of one of man’s greatest coincidences, are not their real names.” Marmalade shuffled through the galley door with a silver tray on which was balanced a shot glass of plain water. “Can I offer anyone else a chance at a drink?” He took the glass with an appreciative nod and rang the bell again and Marmalade turned on his heel and tripped away back to the galley for another try.

“I initially thought that I was having an alcohol induced blackout. There was strong evidence supporting the hypothesis.” said Clint. “But then after several hours and a one-sided conference with the staff and the plane crash…” Clint paused, offering a courteous gap into which any gasps of amazement might be inserted and, encountering none, continued. “…and still no idea who I was or how I ended up lost at sea, I deduced the cause might be something even more insidious than my hangover. Which is saying something, incidentally, because as a hangover it was a thoroughbred, first-place winner by three furlongs. So you say all this has something to do with scuba diving? No offense, but that sounds a bit thin.”

Tom showed Clint the newspaper with the “Memory Panic” headline and story about the suppressive effects of the sun’s radiation bursts on society’s ability to drive cars and not kill each other and the curious protection afforded to a party of divers. Marmalade returned with an empty jam jar filled with dishwashing detergent and offered it to Honor, who took it and the liberty of ringing the bell again.

“Well that’s cheerful.” said Clint, returning the newspaper. “But why should we be concerned about being near water? Even if the sun comes in for another attack we, apparently, are immune.”

“But we’re not, are we?” said Tom. “We’ve all lost at least some memories, in fact we show all the symptoms of classic trauma induced amnesia from the same moment this morning. The moment when everybody else had their memories wiped totally blank. It’s not only possible it’s probable that we’d react to another sun flare in the same way.”

“You mean, we’d get reset again. We’d have forgotten today.” said Clint.

“Exactly.” said Tom, and the grim cocktail party looked gloomily at their drinks while Marmalade presented a cocktail shaker filled to the top with vodka.

“Talking of immunity,” said Tom, after an appropriate period of reflection, “we should try to identify what it is that kept you two from having your minds wiped like the rest of Los Angeles.”

“Clean living?” proposed Clint. “Actually, no, it wouldn’t be that. Could we each have been shielded by a protective marinate of champagne and whiskey?”

“No. And in my case I was at least temporarily vaccinated by radiated neurotoxins that I self-administered.” said Tom. “Could you have been underwater?”

“No. I was behind the wheel of a car, doing about 90.” said Honor.

“Frankly, given my state when I came to there’s very little that I’d rule out, but I don’t think that I’d been swimming.” said Clint.

“Well whatever it was we can’t rely on it working twice.” said Tom.

“Why don’t we just take some more of those neuro-Texans?” asked Clint.

“Neurotoxins. Because there aren’t any more. There were some that I prepared before I lost my memory but they’re gone.”

“So the idea is that we scuba dive during the sun flares?” asked Honor.

“No. Well, yes, as a last resort. There’s nothing evenly remotely scientific about it. Even if the divers in Hawaii were subject to the radiation, we don’t know how close they were to it nor how far underwater nor for how long. What’s more we can’t know when the next event will occur or even if it’ll be here. There may be warning signs but of course no one who’s seen them would remember them. All we have is a very rough guess that it’ll occur, if it occurs at all, at around sunrise tomorrow morning.”

“What then?” asked Clint.“A submarine?”

“No, not a submarine. I suggest — wait, do you know where we could find a submarine?”

“I do not.”

“Right, then I suggest that we equip a boat with supplies, most particularly diving tanks and an air compressor, and head north. We’ll be near water, we’ll be moving away from the nexus and we’ll eventually reach an unaffected part of the country.” Tom took a long draw on his lemon extract and replaced his measuring cup on the table with an authoritative finality.

Tom and Honor searched the yacht from the ominous lower decks to the bridge and found everything three adventurers and their domestic staff could need for a lengthy deep-sea diving holiday or wedding cruise for 120 confirmed alcoholics. They also selected their staterooms and Tom raided the galley where he found only disappointment.

“There’s no food. None.” said Tom, returning to the salon. “There sure is a lot to drink, but there’s no food at all.”

“No, I know. There was some sort of party so everything was either eaten or partially eaten or getting kind of gross in the heat. I threw everything overboard. There are fishing rods.” said Clint, brightening.

Honor slipped through the galley door and closed it behind her like someone furtively avoiding an old flame at a reunion.

“Any luck?” asked Tom.

“In terms of food?” clarified Honor, “Or in terms of dead bodies in my bathroom?”

“The bathrooms. Of course.” said Clint, drawing enquiring glances from his guests.

“How do you mean, of course?” asked Honor.

“I probably should have mentioned it sooner,” said Clint, “but when we first met I didn’t know that the total breakdown of society wasn’t limited to a yacht on which I was the only viable suspect in a mass murder. I was worried how you’d react to knowing that the entire crew had been brutally slaughtered, mostly with sharp things. Was that the case of the body in your bathroom, Honor?”

“Most manifestly so, yes.”

“Anyway I cleaned up and chucked the bodies overboard. All but one, apparently. Actually that may not be exactly right, you might want to check your bathroom too, Tom.”

“What happened?” asked Tom.

“Judging by the artistic composition of the massacre in the kitchen, they killed each other. And I must have slept through the rebooting, rebuilding and ruin of an entire seafaring society. A microcosm of what happens when people are put in a limited space with an even more limited supply of food. Now I think of it, that probably explains why there’s no food left but plenty of liquor.”

“Is there anything else you think we should know Clint?” asked Tom.

“If I mentioned the fishing rods, no.” said Clint, “Oh and below decks. I was afraid to go below decks. I don’t know what’s down there.”

“Not a morsel.” said Honor. “I looked everywhere apart from the engine room, which is locked and it was too dark to pick the lock.”

“Was picking the lock an option?” asked Tom and Honor replied only with a look of slighted professional pride of the sort that Napoleon probably held in reserve for generals who asked him if he knew the way to Prussia.

The sun finally dropped below the indefinite horizon of the ocean leaving a lingering heat and gun-metal blue sky that glowed like something radioactive — the sky, for instance. So the night was lit not unlike a nightmare along the spectrum from black to blue and from the prow of the yacht Honor was able to survey the city like a prison guard in a tower.

The sounds of clumsy violence faded in rhythm with the night and the increase in the volume of screeches and whistles and howls and growls of exotic animals foreign to the California coast making themselves at home in the trees lining the boulevard between the marina and a shopping mall on the other side of Admiralty Way. At the end of the little four-lane access road larger creatures were negotiating an uneasy cohabitation of the undeveloped Ballona Wetlands, next to the marina and extending to the ocean. Doubtless the lions and hyenas and hippopotamus and elephants were lured there by the freshwater creek which drains into the Pacific from the mountains, or perhaps they were drawn by a timeless instinct to complicate Honor’s life.

The unfortunate placement of dangerous animals along the southern flank, the ocean to the West and nothing useful to the North meant that the only viable access due East to the shopping mall with its grocery store and the aerosol cheese and nacho chips and tinned pasta essential to an ocean voyage was a direct frontal assault across a no-man’s land of two uncovered parking lots and a four-lane road.

Nevertheless Honor, Tom and Clint set out with a pistol, spear gun (unloaded, two spears) and a rucksack to do some precision looting. There was exactly enough discussion of endeavoring to get the tank out of the water to discard the idea as a mug's game and they proceeded on foot. Admiralty Way was deserted at ground level. There was only the sharp, blue light of night and the unnerving sounds of strange animals sleeping and moaning and being randomly startled in the trees on either side of the road and in a sort of hedgerow down the middle. Consequently the looters crossed the road and shopping mall parking lot and arrived at the grocery store without incident before encountering their first obstacle.

“It’s locked.” whispered Clint, crouching by the door.

“Good.” said Honor. “It means it’s empty.” and she drew a length of spring steel from her hair and slid it into the lock with the practiced detachment of a senior nurse inserting something embarrassing. And her logic was sound — if the door was even still on its hinges it meant that the grocery store had escaped invasion and they could shoplift at their leisure. So when thirty seconds later Honor popped up the ratchet and slid the doors apart and the three shoppers strode casually in they were disappointed to see that the entire wall perpendicular to the door they’d just meticulously bypassed was gone, assuming it had ever been there. They were looking from the door of the grocery store into the adjacent parking lot, through a wall that had been long ago reduced to little cubes of safety glass, as though the store had experienced a spontaneous and short lived and very localized hail storm.

Further undermining Honor’s premature contention that the store was neutral territory were the dozens of young men and women scattered indiscriminately across the floor of the store, sleeping the sleep of the stuffed to bursting with party snacks and uncooked vegetables and, in the shrouded blue darkness, looking indistinguishable from the morning after a Florida frat party.

Via a complex rotation of frenetic gestures and mimicry, mainly the shush sign and exaggerated strides, Tom and Honor and Clint silently communicated to one another that they should continue with the plan, just very quietly and with their eyebrows raised like surprised team mascots. And they found that if they restricted their shopping to what could be acquired around the edges of the store they could avoid stepping over any sleeping cavemen.

The edges of the store, however, were largely dedicated to accommodations provided to those customers who, by the time they had made their way from the parking lot, found themselves too winded to do any actual shopping without the services of a café, podiatrist, pharmacist or one of the small fleet of mobility scooters lined up from the credit card kiosk to the travel agency. Honor and Clint and Tom were forced to strut on their toes to the back of the store where the more practical suburban family size sacks of cereal-shaped sugar and crispy salt were kept on shelves built like a Tokyo efficiency hotel.

The back of the store was much darker than the front and had the unmatched disadvantage of exactly no exits but it was hidden from sight and, more importantly, vacant. The scavenger hunt proceeded largely as planned until Clint, climbing to the penthouse level of a shelf of breakfast cereal, knocked a bale of crunchy balls of toasted corn tumbling to the floor where it exploded like a piñata at a calorie-camp and spread a thick and unbroken carpet of crispy, honey-flavored marbles from the back wall to the front door. To Honor and Tom and especially Clint the impact sounded like a plate-glass window being struck violently by another plate-glass window but neither the sound nor the balls of partially hydrogenated fats flowing around them like bright orange lava had any noticeable impact on the sleeping fraternity brothers.

An extended silence followed, scored only by the sound of sugary cereal fusing itself to a polished floor. Clint climbed down the shelves and performed an elaborate apology in interpretive dance and Honor and Tom signed back that he was forgiven, particularly in light of the fact that no harm was done, but that he should try to be a little more careful in future and in particular not attempt such heights.

They filled the rucksack with oranges and loaded themselves with the least perishable and hence most artificial food-like products they could reasonably carry. Shopping carts were considered and abandoned in light of the risk of the notoriously squeaky wheels alerting the sleeping sentries. They took only what they could carry stealthily which meant, above all, no crunchy cereals. Firmly balanced and burdened and holding their breath, they peered around the corner of their protective shelf like escaping POWs and determined that the way remained clear and the guards asleep. Then they stepped onto a minefield.

Each crunchy corn ball exploded underfoot like a shotgun and the combined blast was, consequently, very much like a lot of shotguns. The fraternity began to stir and Tom and Honor and Clint, in their haste to maintain their balance promptly lost their balance and began stamping on the fully charged cereal as though they had a vendetta against it. The result was deafening. The fraternity was awake and quick to take up arms against an invasion of their fertile lands. They organized themselves with alarming speed and precision and moved like a crunchy, crispy wall toward the back of the store and as they passed through housewares they armed themselves with knives and rolling pins and bigger knives.

Clint chapter 4

Tom and Honor and Clint quietly set their loot on the floor and receded into the shadows offered by the pharmacy and credit card kiosk. The roused and ready occupying army marched toward them on a field of crispy toasted corn and the cascading crunching came to them like the sound of a thousand soldiers marching only slightly out of time. There may as well have been a thousand because armed with a single sidearm and a spear gun and the wit to hide in the darkness Tom and Honor and Clint were little match for the fraternity party of twenty or thirty prepared to defend their grocery store with the sharpest objects from Kitchen and Bath.

The army approached blindly, unaware of the nature of the threat to their territory and doubly threatening in their own right because they clearly didn’t care. From the darkness Tom and Honor and Clint watched the portion of grocery store that they could call their own grow rapidly smaller and smaller until the wall came to a confused stop. The wall knew that it was under siege, possibly by heavy and flat-footed monsters, but there they all were almost at the back of the store and so far all they’d encountered was a thick, honey-scented, sticky crust. There was clear evidence of an invasion presently underway but no sign of invaders. They looked about, at each other, at the ceiling and the cereal, and decided with a communal nod to attack the darkness.

And at that moment three mobility scooters zipped out of formation and at a dizzying 20 mph skidded out of sight behind the final row of shelves and again fell silent. A long moment of simmering quiet followed before the fraternity fell into a frenzy and broached the final wall only to be thrown into mass confusion by the whirring and whirling of scooters handled with such a complete lack of skill and planning that they seemed to be attacking in their hundreds.

Tom and Honor and Clint drove wildly off in different directions, running interference for one another and pausing just long enough to draw chase before tracing the aisles and standing like circus acrobats on their mounts to scoop fruit and cereal and snacks off the shelves and into the wide wire shopping baskets fixed to the front of their scooters. When her basket was full of oranges and apples and grapefruit Honor began navigating a circuitous route toward the missing wall, honking the rubber bubble of her mobility horn to which Tom and Clint honked a lively reply from the darkness, like mute clowns playing a frantic, life-and-death game of Marco Polo.

But the wall was impassible and in fact it had reformed itself as the backlit silhouette of a mob of groaning, moaning, mouth-breathers who sensed food and had armed themselves with the implements of the urban harvest — crowbars and axes and razor-thin aluminum parking lot signage that could easily function as either. Honor took a sharp right and honked her new intentions to her colleagues as she found herself herded by the crowd and the meat counter into an almost entirely black corridor which echoed her horn such that she couldn’t say for certain whether or not Tom and Clint were behind her.

So they were all honking emphatically when they escaped the hall into the vast and glimmering gallery of a modern shopping mall and found themselves bombarded with choice, had they been in the market for mobile phones or pressed-tin jewellery or posters or fashions for the dangerously thin or heart-stoppingly fat. Blue light from the gallery skylight made sharp, detective-movie contrasts on the varnished tile mall and its indoor garden and water features and sunglasses kiosks and, above all, the hundreds of shoppers who’d been going about their business when they all forgot everything they ever knew and who were sleeping soundly when three mobility scooters violently woke them with frenzied honking and, in some cases, by driving over their extremities.

Before Tom and Honor and Clint knew where they were or what they were doing, really, they were being pursued through a Del Rey shopping center in the middle of the night by hundreds of starving automatons who suddenly and intractably associated honking and scooters and honking scooters with food, and it was getting away. The mobility scooters offered a top speed of slightly faster than the average person can run and much, much faster than the top speed of the average California mall patron, but were slowed considerably by a retail environment almost wholly unsuited to off-track racing. Consequently the scooters maintained only a thin lead over a snowballing stampede of overweight suburbanites in patterned shirts and Bermuda shorts stumbling over each other in an uncannily accurate impression of a Shriner’s parade that’s spent its entire promotional fund on rum cocktails.

The epicenter of the shopping mall was the junction of four wings of retail and restaurants and beauticians and banks, crowned by a stagnant fountain hosting several people who had managed to drown in it. The scooters approached from the south and circumnavigated the fountain once like a Paris roundabout before selecting the east hall as the least threatening and most likely to provide an exit through the high glass doors swinging freely on their hinges.

And so in a minute they were racing through the hot night air across the obstacle course of a parking lot with the equivalent of the population of a small village for the morbidly obese dogging their wheels. Staying ahead of them, so long as the batteries on the mobility scooters held out, would be exactly as simple as not driving into anything. But Tom and Honor and Clint needed to lose them entirely before trying to return to the boat if they were going to avoid it being overwhelmed and, probably, sunk before they could make way. For the moment, then, they dared not return to the marina but instead followed Honor as she led them to the sidewalk and turned toward the Ballona Wetlands.

And then she stopped. Tom and Clint zipped past before stopping and looking back to see Honor apparently losing her mind. She was throwing her oranges at the crowd or, more precisely, she was lobbing oranges and grapefruit high into the trees, seemingly unaware or unconcerned that the mob was seconds from overtaking her. And then monkeys were dropping from the trees, following the fruit and then joining the pursuit of Honor as she returned to the relatively sober act of driving a mobility scooter into the Ballona Wetlands while throwing oranges and grapefruit over her shoulder. By the time the mad parade turned onto Fiji Way, the border between the marina and the wetlands, it was in chaos. The shoppers were puffing and wheezing and the monkeys were chattering and screeching and the effect was not at all dissimilar to the sound generated in a church basement when a bingo caller announces the same number twice.

It was seconds before Honor’s plan bore its first horrible fruit as a half-dozen hyenas bounded over the shrubbery dividing the road from the wetlands and scurried across the road snatching monkeys up in their jaws like a team of precision-synchronized purse-snatchers. The rest of the parade immediately twigged to the dangers ahead but it was already too late and dangers lay behind them, too. Panthers had invisibly formed in the shadows on either side of the road and were struggling to select the fattest and weakest and slowest in the herd, a challenge the pride of lionesses dispensed with altogether by loitering at the back of the procession.

Even people with no active memories of their own names or loved ones or civic order harbor a hard-coded and healthy feral fear of animals with long teeth and longer claws. And this was the catalyst that effectively disintegrated the already less than streamlined hunting party of monkeys and fraternity siblings and shopping mall parade floats stumbling in pursuit of three mobility scooters through a warm Los Angeles night. Most scampered back to the relative safety of the shopping center and others ran fatally onto the wetlands while those remaining behind occupied themselves with being eaten, and Tom and Honor and Clint whirred alone into the darkness and back toward the marina.

“It was hardly worth it.” said Tom, carefully handing the eclectic haul of puffed rice and powdered chocolate and nacho chips and sun-dried tomatoes and what was now barely a handful of citrus fruits up to Honor on the bow of the yacht.

“You want to go back?” she asked, “I had my eye on an espresso machine.”

The engines started with a burst that drowned out Tom’s considered response and he swung himself up the ladder with a leaking summer camp sized bag of cereal over his shoulder like an emaciated Santa who’d fallen on hard times.

Clint’s nautical expertise had improved to the point that he was able to dislodge the yacht and back it directly into the dock on the other side of the marina. He cut the engines again and relied on what he hoped was a newly acquired power of telekinesis to maneuver the boat into a position from which he could steer more or less directly through the access channel and back to the ocean. Honor and Tom joined him on the bridge.

“Nice work.” said Honor, “You want me to drive for a while?”

“I think I’m getting the hang of it.” said Clint. “Anyhow I’m working on something. Look, we’re turning toward the channel. A little slowly but that’s how I like my yachts to turn.”

“Shouldn’t we refuel?” asked Tom, pointing out that the yacht had just bounced off a fueling station.

“Not an option, I’m afraid.” said Honor, “There’s no power. The pumps won’t work. Anyway there’s an auxiliary fuel tank and enough juice to get us well up the coast before sunrise.”

“In that instance.” said Tom, “I’m going to get some sleep. I’ve had the longest day in memory.”

“Do that.” said Honor, “We’ll wake you well before sun up for our dip in the ocean, if it comes to that. I’m just going to see Captain Columbus into open waters and turn in myself.”

The yacht moved smoothly out of the marina and onto the eerily placid waters of the Pacific Ocean before pursuing a wide arc to the north and an easy course described by the entirely unlit silhouette of the California coast. In a few hours they were clear of Los Angeles and Clint reduced speed to almost nothing before turning soft to starboard and tying off the wheel. He descended to the main deck and stopped briefly at the stern to pull a length of mooring rope from the storage chest by the diving platform. Then he padded softly through the salon and into the corridor where he tightly tied the handle of Tom’s stateroom to his own before continuing to the below-decks hatchway.

Honor had been right, it was far too dark to get through the engine room door, even with a key. So Clint tightened the bulb in the wall lamp and light filled the tiny corridor and he produced the key from his back pocket. Descending the short narrow ladder he pulled the little chain and brought a gently swaying light to the engine room. He sat on the ladder and bent forward almost upside down so he could reach beneath his perch and pull out a white, square plastic box, like a very large lunch pail with a luggage tag on which was written “Dr. Thomas Spivic.”

Clint closed the door to the engine room and turned out the lights and waited in the dark, listening to the churn of the propellers and nothing more. Satisfied, he returned to the corridor of state rooms and knocked lightly on Honor’s door.

“Are you awake Gale?” he said, “It’s me, Ray.”

Clint chapter 5

The pre-sunrise glow had turned the sky a cobalt blue and the tips of the San Gabriel mountains were already burning with the first layer of bright orange when Clint cut the engines and hopped down the ladder to the stern and poked his head into the salon.

“Up already?” he asked Honor, who had installed herself at the banquette table with a bowl of dry cereal. She was dressed in a fuchsia bikini and a sarong and had one naked leg up on the other bench.

“It’s almost showtime.” she said, “I didn’t want to miss it. I also didn’t want to have my memory wiped clean. In fact, on balance, I especially don’t want my memory wiped clean.”

“You won’t miss anything. Nice outfit by the way.”

“I found it in my cabin. I didn’t think you’d mind much.” Honor stood and modeled her bikini in 360°.

“Not much. I’ve seen it all. I’m sorry that you don’t remember what an item we were in the psycho ward. They tried keeping us apart but you seemed to enjoy the challenge.”

“That sounds like me.” said Honor, “Shouldn’t we be getting started?”

“There’s time. The instructions say the closer to the event, the better. Don’t worry Gale, I’ll take care of you.”

“Call me Honor. I’m relaunching my career. Speaking of which I’m curious, how long have you known that you were Ray?”

“I thought that was clear.” he said, “I never stopped knowing I was Ray. When I woke up on the yacht I really had no idea what I was doing there but that was down to drinking a crate of whiskey washed down with a vat of champagne. Initially I made up the name Clint because I couldn’t remember Marmalade and Apricot and I didn’t know that they didn’t know that Ray was a wanted man. When I saw LA in chaos and then that you and Spivic didn’t recognize me I just continued being Clint Hardcastle.”

“Hardcliff.”

“Right. Hardcliff. Well now we can be whoever we want. We can do whatever we want. We can be one-eyed royalty in the land of the blind and we can race Ferraris and hunt mimes and no one will try to cure us with radiated neurotoxins.”

“You’re sure this is going to work, by the way. I’m still more than happy to go for an early morning swim.”

“It’ll work. We’re living proof. We were at least partially immunized by Spivic’s ‘memorectomies’ that were supposed to cure me of wanting to kill everyone who looked even a little bit like my step-father and you, presumably, of wanting to have fun.”

“Which raises the question — why did I forget everything prior to the event and you didn’t?” asked Honor.

“Because I had more treatment?” Clint guessed. “I certainly had more recent treatment. You escaped weeks ago. Or, more precisely, you walked out weeks ago, dressed as a nurse. You stole an ambulance and apparently led a very merry chase across downtown Los Angeles. The last I heard they’d found the ambulance abandoned at the zoo.”

“That explains a lot.”

“It does? Well, anyway it works. By accident maybe, but I’m immune to the sun’s radiation and now we’ve got the final vaccine you will be too.”

“Are you sure? I don’t think I’d enjoy life as a mindless galley slave. Too outdoorsy.”

“I’m sure.” said Clint. “Spivic told me himself that he was working on a vaccine and that he’d finally made it. He was a mess by that point. Not as bad as now, obviously, but he’d been injecting himself everywhere and comparing our test results like a man driven. And anyway by then he trusted me completely. You see, I’d been giving a very convincing impression of a man cured which, I think it’s safe to say, I’m not. I still remember my step-father and everything he did to me and everything I’ve done since.” Clint looked wistfully out the window, as though remembering a bright Christmas morn.

“But why didn’t Tom just take the vaccine himself?” asked Honor.

“He didn’t know that he needed to. Anyway I didn’t give him the chance. When he realized that he’d isolated the vaccine he told me that it was in the nick of time, because he wouldn’t have me for comparison purposes after today in light of the inconvenience of me going back to prison to complete a mandatory life sentence.”

“So you escaped too. What made you think to take the vaccine with you?”

“That was mostly the finer instincts of the scoundrel. He’d written the combination to a safe on his arm and I just memorized it as a matter of course. When he let slip that my psycho-ward vacation was coming to an end and I was going back inside I flipped the switch and let crazy Ray do the heavy lifting. And heavy it was, too. I had to take out the doctor and a giant of an orderly named Leonard. You remember Leonard. Big fellow.”

“No. I do not remember Leonard.”

“Oh, no, of course you don’t. Sorry. Anyway as luck would have it in the close-quarters combat I managed to stab Leonard in the hand with a hypodermic and stun them both and smash an entire rack of blood work over Spivic and myself, particularly myself. So I stopped by the doctor’s office looking for civilian wear and encountered a lab assistant — a deft hand with a hypodermic, incidentally, he nearly stuck me while I was opening the safe. But I got the better of him and took the vaccine and some hospital whites and, as a happy bonus, the keys to the front door and Spivic’s car, which I drove directly to the marina. Then I hijacked this yacht with, I suspect, the intention of sailing to Mexico but, alas, the demon drink must have got its clutches into me.”

“And the crew?”

“I barely remember what happened, frankly, but it stands to reason that I killed them all.”

“Well then why the restraint since? You cleaned up the boat, threw the bodies overboard and you could have easily dispatched Spivic with a spear gun or, doubtless, your bare hands at any point during the night. Instead we went on a shopping spree together.”

“I’ve got a soft spot for the doctor.” said Clint. “Or just for you. I’m not sure. I tried to sabotage last night’s outing with a carefully delivered sack of toasted corn and lose Spivic in the confusion, but you were having none of that, apparently. Whatever happened, though, I wanted to play my advantage until the final moment, meaning now, when you’d kind of have to cooperate no matter how you felt about me or the doctor. And nothing really bad is going to happen to him. We’ll just leave him in his cabin until high noon at which point he’ll merely be reset to the state he was in yesterday morning.”

“Talking of which, the sun’s coming up.” said Honor, “Maybe we’d better get started.”

“I’ll get the stuff. Be right back.” Clint said, ducking out the door of the salon.

“And I’ll ring for drinks.” said Honor.

Clint retrieved the square plastic medicine box from its new hiding place in the storage chest and returned to the salon just as Marmalade entered with two zombie glasses unevenly filled with brown and purple liquids.

“That’s an improvement.” said Clint, sliding into the bench opposite Honor and placing the medicine box on the table between them. “He normally only brings one at a time. We should keep him.”

“Here’s to one-eyed royalty.” said Honor, taking up her glass. Clint did the same. They touched their glasses conspiratorially and drained them.

“Sweet.” said Clint. “I wonder what he put in it this time. Tastes like pancake syrup.”

“Hangover medicine.” said Honor. “I picked it up last night when we were hiding in the pharmacy. It’s called syrup of ipecac.”

“That was thoughtful.” said Clint, holding his glass up to the first rays of sunlight streaming through the windows of the salon. “What’s it do?”

“With a concentrated dose like that you should find out in about fifteen seconds.” said Honor. Clint eyed her suspiciously and put his glass down. His suspicions were confirmed as Tom stepped in through galley door. Then his suspicions were made physical as something very like a partially inflated beach ball came into existence in his stomach. The ball began rapidly inflating in quick, assertive bursts, until there was no place left for it to grow and his insides fluctuated with a violent will to disgorge.

Honor shot out of her seat with the reflexes of a rabbit dodging a fox as Clint spouted pressurized vomit from his mouth and nostrils like a burst dyke. His eyes bulged and streamed tears and his abdominal muscles clenched him shut like a mousetrap, slamming his face into the ooze on the table. There was a brief respite during which he looked at Honor with a strangely complementary combination of admiration and betrayal before the process began anew.

Honor and Tom looked at the spectacle with undiluted disgust.

“Go get the box.” said Honor. “I’ll wait here.”

Tom approached the table but Clint recovered his sea legs sufficiently to gather up the box and run out the door of the salon, spewing a slimy trail which Honor and Tom reluctantly followed.

The sun was now fully over the horizon, or at least it should have been. It was impossible to say for sure where the sun was because it seemed to be everywhere. The entire sky was sun and the air was buzzing with a sound or a vibration or the oscillation of some unseen frequency. Anyway it came to their ears like a buzz and it was growing louder.

The ocean seemed to be steaming and the white deck of the yacht glimmered and with the buzzing and the miasma of everything Clint had ever eaten splashed about the deck all their senses were on a rough par with a drunkard in a hall of mirrors. Clint staggered out onto the diving platform clutching the box of vaccine.

“Ray, just wait.” Tom said, or rather yelled, he couldn’t be sure which. “You’re not immune and that won’t make you immune. It’s not a permanent vaccine and we all need to take it just to make it through today.”

Clint huddled over the box of vaccine like a hobo with a precious hoard of whatever it is that hobos like to hoard. He peered over the box at Tom and Honor and coughed something disgusting onto it.

“Please Ray.” said Honor. “I’m sorry we had to spike you, but we had to spike you. Give me the box.”

Clint looked at her with the eyes of a rejected puppy. Moments passed as he recovered some stability and ceased leaking and slowly relaxed his tight squat until he was sitting on the diving platform with the box in his lap. Then he dropped it over the side.

Clint chapter 6

The frequency of the buzzing hit a peak that cancelled all sound. Simultaneously the sun and sky achieved a perfect absence of color to match the deck of the boat and there was only silence and white.

Tom and Honor ran into the white toward what they hoped was the diving platform and dropped into the bathwater warmth of the Pacific Ocean. Visibility under the water was like a clear summer’s day in the mountains and they could see every fish and fleck for a dozen feet beneath them before the darkness began. Against all instincts they swam toward the darkness.

Ration and reflex fought a spirited battle to keep them in the cool, drowning darkness or return to the surface for a breath of sweet, burning air. Honor stopped fighting first and began to float skyward and Tom grabbed her hair and swam deeper, his eardrums collapsing and a cast iron pressure on his chest. When they could go no deeper they kicked their feet and wrestled their reflexes to just stay in the shadows a little longer, just that single millisecond more that might allow the danger to pass.

But reflex won and ration admitted that plain, mindless survival was probably a better fate than another split second of deliberate drowning. Decision and action were simultaneous and they turned like trout and fought with their remaining strength to get to the surface before reflex could experiment with trying to breath underwater.

The first deep breath was like inhaling escaping steam and they needed two or three more before they could spare the strength to shout a throaty celebration of a world with oxygen in it. And then they shouted and laughed some more because the sky was blue and the sun had returned to its normal duties and they had the faculties to know all these things.

The yacht was only about 20 yards away and they treaded the calm water slowly toward it. When they were at the diving platform they could see that Clint was no longer Clint nor Ray nor anyone else. He sat as and where they’d left him, looking toward the horizon with the familiar expression of absolutely nothing, finally cured of his demons. And in the water where he’d dropped it floated the box of vaccine, completely still in the currentless waters as though resting in soft earth.

They recovered the box and climbed to the bridge and Honor surveyed Los Angeles through the high-powered binoculars. It was dead again. Any people she could see stood just where the sun had found them and left them completely blank.

“North?” asked Honor.

Tom looked at her like he was about to tell her that her dog died. “I’ve been thinking about that. Honor, we need need to go back.”

“Back?” she asked, with the exact tone she’d use if he’d suggested that they sink the boat. “Back to LA? I can only assume you’ve lost your memory of the last 24 hours. We need to go north. To Seattle or Canada. We need to find help.”

“Honor there is no help. There’s no one. Don’t you think the army would be here by now if there was? Don’t you think that someone would have noticed that a city the size of LA had stopped answering the phones? If there’s any hope it’s back in my laboratory.”

“Tom, you don’t remember how you made the vaccine, if it was even you that made it.”

“We can get a generator and get the computers working. We can go through my notes. We’ve got a working lab and a sample of the vaccine. We can do it.”

“I could drop you off.” she offered.

“Honor, I need you. You know that. You can open doors and drive things and make things work.”

Honor looked at the cloudless sky and the mindless city and Clint and one or a combination of these things told her that Tom was right.

“Promise you won’t try to cure me again?” she said.

“Not even if I thought I could.”

Honor turned the key in the ignition and when the propellers caught she steered toward shore.

“Thanks Honor.” said Tom.

“Forget about it.” she said.

Copyright

Copyright © 2014 Indefensible Publishing

Content

Lippe Simone
BLANK

Ray

Ray chapter 1

Ray chapter 2

Ray chapter 3

Ray chapter 4

Ray chapter 5

Ray chapter 6

Honor

Honor chapter 1

Honor chapter 2

Honor chapter 3

Honor chapter 4

Honor chapter 5

Ray chapter 7

Clint

Clint chapter 1

Clint chapter 2

Honor chapter 6

Clint chapter 3

Clint chapter 4

Clint chapter 5

Clint chapter 6

Copyright