Alex fell back against the sofa, bounced off and collapsed across Geoff’s lap like a dying deer. She said, “You’ve ruined my life, you know.”
“No, I didn’t. I just slowed down your evening.”
“I’ve got you covered,” said Geoff. He took a small aspirin tin from his pocket. “My friend Sandra is seeing this Swedish DJ. She said he has a huge cock and great molly. Want one?”
Alex popped upright and opened her mouth like a baby bird waiting to get fed. Geoff took a pill from the case and tossed it onto her tongue. She swallowed and he held the tin out to me. “Paul?” he said.
I shook my head. “I had an accident today. The cops might call me in for a drug test.”
“That’s sad,” he said, swallowing a pill. It broke my heart to not be able to join them. I started to say something when Alex shrieked.
“No! What the fuck is this shit?”
I looked and saw that the local news station had broken into her talk show with a special report. The sound was down on the TV, so all we saw were high helicopter shots looking down on the 405 near the airport. Cars were on fire. Trucks had flipped, spilling their contents all over the road. Stuck in an endless ribbon of burning traffic, people were abandoning their vehicles and running away. By now, the room had gone quiet as everyone stared at the screen.
“Does anyone know what’s going on?” said Frank. He took the remote from Alex’s hand and aimed it at the TV. But when he pushed the volume control, the TV remained muted. He banged the remote against his hand. “Goddamn fucking thing.”
The whole room screamed as something massive crashed through the stalled traffic. The searchlight from the news chopper stayed on it as the thing smashed its way north. When the shot pulled back, it revealed that there were several massive things on the road, all heading toward the city, crushing and absorbing everybody in their path. It was our first glimpse of Rollers.
We watched for a while with the sound off. Frank switched from station to station, looking for different views of the carnage. A few more people screamed when Frank found a shot of Rollers moving down Hollywood Boulevard—all spikes, blood, and blinking eyes. He headed for the front door and I followed him.
His mansion is on a high hill with a view all the way across L.A. to the ocean. We stood on his circular driveway and looked down at Hollywood. The sky buzzed with helicopters, both media and LAPD. I counted six major fires across the city. Frank grabbed my arm.
“Paul, you’re going to help me keep these people under control, right?”
“What does that mean?”
“We can’t let them leave. Look at that shit down there.”
There was a muffled boom in the distance as a gas station or something exploded.
I said, “I take your point, Frank, but you can’t make people stay.” “But you will, right? You and Macy? I can lock this place down like nobody’s business.”
I looked back at the choppers and the fires. “Okay. We’ll stay the night. I’ll help you with crowd control, but you have to let anyone leave who wants to. Otherwise, it’s technically kidnapping.”
“Sure,” he said. “Understood. Come on.”
Frank made his pitch to the crowd and, goddammit, he was a good salesman, even saving the best bit for last. After he got through explaining about how disaster-prepped he was, he took what looked like a garage door opener from his desk and pushed a button. Steel shutters slammed closed over all the outside doors and windows.
“Blast shields,” he said. “You can hit those babies with an RPG and they won’t budge.”
It was a good speech. Still, half the crowd ran for their cars. Frank opened the gates at the end of the driveway just long enough for them to get through.
Then he locked us in.
Like a lot of heavy money types, the L.A. riots in ’92 put the fear of god into Frank. That’s when he started buying guns. But he turned his paranoia into art. Went full survivalist and with the kind of money he had, Frank made himself a bullet-proof Xanadu just thirty minutes from Hollywood. He had enough food, water, and medical gear to supply a small country. The mansion ran mostly on solar power, but he had a gas backup generator too. And because no one likes a boring siege, the mansion was stocked with movies and music, plus enough liquor and drugs to keep his guests high until the second coming.
After a couple of days, it was clear that whatever was happening wasn’t going to end anytime soon. By then, the sky over L.A. was full of Floaters—sort of enormous jellyfish that hovered like hot air balloons and snatched up people with their long, dangling tendrils. It happened so fast you usually didn’t see it, but you knew it was happening because Floaters bay like foghorns every time they snag a tasty morsel. The first Stingers had shown up in the city by then too, but we didn’t know enough about them to be properly scared yet. We were preoccupied with something worse: what the freaks even were.
The first images were so strange it took a while to understand them. A news crew was out getting B-roll of Floaters near the Hollywood sign. One of the cameramen went into convulsions and a couple of his friends rushed over to help him.
That’s when things stopped making sense.
The cameraman screamed as his chest and belly split open and what looked like tentacles coiled out. They latched onto his two friends as a translucent white something unfolded itself out of the guy’s body and dragged his friends into the air.
That’s when we knew we were fucked. The freaks weren’t invaders from another planet. They were us. Maybe that’s what McKee meant when he said his wife tried to eat him.
Anyway, that bit of good news was what probably inspired our first suicides: A record producer and his wife. Macy found them in one of the downstairs bathrooms, ODed on a bottle of Frank’s Oxycontin. I didn’t even know their names. I was just sorry Macy was the one to find them. She was hysterical when she came back upstairs and it took me a long time to calm her down. Frank opened the shields on the back doors long enough for the two of us to haul the couple outside and leave them by the pool.
That left ten people in the house. I knew Alex, Macy, Frank, and Geoff a little. They were my clients now. The rest, well, good luck.
When the world’s burning, you have to make choices.
Over the next three days, I spent as much time with Alex as I could without Macy getting suspicious. By the end of the third day a few of us decided to make a run for it in one of Frank’s armored limos. On TV, they were saying that the freaks were mainly over cities where the hunting was good. We wanted to see if there was a way out of L.A., maybe find somewhere with fewer freaks.
Besides, after a while, even a palace starts to feel like Alcatraz.
We left at high noon when we knew the Rollers would be asleep. That just left the Floaters to worry about, but if we kept moving we figured we could outrun them. In the limo was me, Frank, Mike (a reality TV director), and a kid who called himself Amped (one of the dead record producer’s proteges—a buff Burbank white boy hip-hop kid. Really annoying).
We knew the freeways were clogged with dead cars and the main roads were the Rollers’ and Floaters’ favorite places to hunt, so we stuck to back streets hoping we could weave our way around the danger and out of town.
I should never have let Frank drive.
He was so busy blasting down the empty streets, showing off his shiny armored toy, that he sideswiped a sleeping Roller. Lucky for us, it was big enough and we were small enough that it didn’t seem to notice the hit. But its spikes ripped a nice chunk off the limo’s side and shredded one of the rear tires.