The post office closest to her apartment was a twenty-minute walk on the Pacific Coast Highway, in a small roadside strip mall modeled after a frontier town, with wood facades and old-fashioned lettering. Most of the other storefronts’ windows were broken or partially burned out, but the post office was still in good shape even though the door was unlocked. Most people weren’t looking for anything the post office had to offer—except announcements and notices.
The Daykeeper had come and gone. On the door, Nayima found the newest sign tacked into the wood: the day, date and year stenciled in bright red paint. Someone spent time and care spray-painting each sign and came each morning to post a new one. Beside it, an older paper flyer flapped in the breeze, from weeks or months before: SURVIVORS—REPORT TO SACRAMENTO FOR TESTING & VACCINE above an Eagle crest proclaiming REPUBLIC OF SACRAMENTO AUTHORITY.
Nayima chuckled every time she saw the sign. Traveling four-hundred miles on the Five was easier said than done, even if you had a car and gas. And “Authority” was a stretch. The Daykeeper, whoever they were, had more authority in Malibu.
Also, the sign had implied fine print: if you tested positive for antibodies, you were a carrier. And no carrier in her right mind would report to anyone.
Another older sign read: CERTIFIED VACCINATIONS!!!! At her feet lay the litter of old vaccine needle packs from a long-ago drop or visit from Sacramento. At one time, more survivors had lived here. Like Karen, they had stayed hidden and missed the worst of the plague. Karen had said she’d heard helicopters and megaphones about six months before, but she’d thought she had dreamed them. And she had been afraid to show herself, ready to die.
Nayima didn’t go inside the post office to see the bulletin board, which she already knew was crammed with index cards and paper scraps from long ago, people searching for loved ones or trying to pass on news of the plague. She doubted that there had been many reunions. Instead, Nayima tacked her flyer beside Sacramento’s, struggling to drive the tack into the sturdy wood. She should have brought nails instead, she realized. But four pretty little tacks would hold it in place for a couple of days.
Nayima stepped back and assessed the flyer, only wishing she had included her name. Still, the simple proclamation felt like her finest moment since the flu began. Even Karen exhaled a hnh sound as if to say: OK, I get it now.
One Day Only. Three words evoked excitement. Joy, even. What was the name of that baseball movie with the line If you build it, they will come? And even if they didn’t come, the sign was hopeful. Maybe hope could be contagious.
Karen moved closer as if to hug her, but Nayima pulled away.
“No,” Nayima said. “Someone might see.” She couldn’t help glancing around to see if anyone was nearby. The only movement was from seagulls wheeling toward the surf.
“So what? There’s a vaccine,” Karen said.
“I bet none of these people have seen a vaccine,” Nayima said. “That’s still just a myth until there’s a better supply line. Trust me, they’d just assume we’re carriers who don’t give a damn about getting infected. It’s a quick way to draw a bullet.”
“You have so many reasons,” she murmured.
“Reasons for what?”
“That I should go piss off. I just wanted to celebrate a leaflet.”
Kyle had tried to keep Nayima away from him too; maybe she had learned the habit from him. But if she stayed with Karen, she would get killed or caught one day. Karen wasn’t careful enough. She’d been too spoiled in her Ventura County hideaway, so far from the bigger cities and the roads. Everyone Karen knew was dead too, but she still had no fucking idea.
“Every morning, I half expect you to be gone,” Karen said. “Is that the way it’ll be? You’ll be a phantom in the night? Like I dreamed you?”
Probably, Nayima thought. “I don’t know,” she said instead.
“I would have loved you even in the real world.”
Nayima looked at her, startled. Only Gram had loved her, and her best friend Shanice, and her cousins in Baldwin Hills. No one else. She had dated and fucked, but she had never made love before the flu. Karen looked lovely in that moment, her face framed against a palm tree and the clear morning sky the color of a postcard. Nayima could imagine how she looked to Karen’s eyes: like a future. The beauty in Malibu was a lie.
“This is the real world,” Nayima said. “Get used to that before you start using words like ‘love.’”
The light left Karen’s eyes before Nayima turned away.
Even at the end of the world, everyone wanted to come to Malibu.
The Pacific Coast Highway was still clogged. That was Malibu’s greatest drawback—still. Nayima had visited Malibu with friends on spring break in her senior year of high school, when most of her friends had been white and thought vacations were for skiing and surfing. As novice drivers they had felt they were taking their lives into their hands to try to master the manic traffic on the PCH. No one slowed down for almost any reason, driving as if they would live forever.
Now, cars snaked up and down in both directions as far as the eye could see, bumpers almost locked together. Most of them were coffins with a view, and too many of the windows were open, but the sea air had long ago washed away the odor, accelerating decomposition so that the sight of near-skeletal drivers and passengers was far worse than the smell.
She and Karen grew hushed as they crossed the PCH back toward the pier, past the proud parents of Honor Roll Students and U.S. Marines and those who’d had Babies on Board. The sight of a child’s remains still strapped into a car seat had haunted Nayima’s dreams for two nights, so she never let her eyes wander, focusing on the rusting hoods and bumpers instead. A few of the cars’ windows were spray-painted over, someone’s valiant attempt at neighborhood beautification.
But maybe it was only fitting that they could never escape the dead.
The whitewashed structures lining either side of the Malibu Pier entrance made Nayima think of a Moorish castle, except for a tacky blue sign above that once had glowed in neon.
She surveyed the area, deciding she would do her stand-up act closer to the sidewalk rather than on the pier itself. She would build a stage just far enough away from the road that the corpses in the stalled cars wouldn’t ruin her act, but far enough from the ocean that her voice wouldn’t be washed out in the waves.
So much to think about. So much planning to do.
Working on her own now, Nayima used the sole of her shoe to tack a flyer to a wooden bus bench advertising a law office. She and Karen had found a steady pace together as they walked up and down the highway, so they had posted all but two of the flyers by the time they reached the pier itself. No matter. She would come back and post more flyers the next day.
A sudden motion from the pier shocked her. The Old Man in the Sea was shuffling toward them with a bucket in one knobby hand and a fishing rod over his shoulder. His face was nearly hidden in the tangle of his white hair and wild beard. Nayima wondered if he had any other clothes except his tattered fisherman’s raincoat.
He wasn’t wearing a dust mask, so he slowed when he saw them, changed the angle of his approach through the walkway. Karen followed Nayima’s lead and backed away from him, giving him a wide passage—which turned out to be a good thing, because a mighty stink of unwashed skin and clothes walked with him. He hesitated, as if he wondered if they might try to steal his catch.