Lucid Dreaming (5 page)

Ammo for gun

Rifle (and ammo)

First aid kit

Tent

2 sleeping bags

2 Gas cans

Tubing (for siphoning)

Tools (hammer, screwdriver, axe, saw)

Flashlights, batteries, candles

Road Atlas

There were other things I would've liked to have brought— a portable generator might come in handy, for example, or a dog —but I knew I wouldn't have much more room in the car. I'd gone over the SUV I'd arrived here in, and decided to keep it; it was only a year old, didn't have many miles on it, got pretty decent mileage, and had plenty of room behind the seats.

Then I went through the phone book, and tore out pages with the addresses of nearby sporting goods stores, gun shops, and booksellers.

I strapped Teddy into the passenger seat, and we went shopping.

I hadn't been out of the house for the better part of a week, and the city had changed yet again during that time. Now L.A. was looking more and more like a ghost town. The people that I'd seen everywhere on the streets a week ago were mostly gone now.

A lot of them were dead. I saw corpses in cars, in the streets, sprawled in open doorways.

Garbage was collecting on the streets and in the doorways of buildings. Desperate, hungry cats and dogs fought over the fresher carcasses. Somewhere off to the south a big fire was burning, and the sky was half-gray from it.

Definitely time to ditch this town.

The first stop was Bullets (only in Beverly Hills would a fucking gun store have such a retarded name). I found the shop easily enough, and pulled up before it.

“Stay here,” I told Teddy, although he was probably too out of it to undo his seat harness anyway.

“Dancing in rainbow grass,” he murmured.

Hmm…the shop was closed. And barred.

This would be interesting.

I could probably have gone to another gun shop, but I decided it would be more fun to try to get into this one.

My SUV (for it was
mine
now, damn it) had one of those
tow
things built onto its back bumper, and had probably been designed to drag along a boat or another vehicle. There'd even been a tow cable in the back. I hooked one end of the cable around the bars, and the other end onto the tow bar. I remembered a story I'd once read about some
douchebags
who'd tried to do this to an ATM, but had just succeeded in pulling the bumper off their car. Of course it didn't really matter if I pulled the bumper off the SUV, but I preferred not to.

So I got in, gave the engine a couple of revs, inched forward slowly, giving it a little more power, a little more—

And suddenly there was a huge CLANG! The bars had pulled right out.

Chalk up another point for cheap construction.

I unhooked the tow cable and stashed it back into the SUV, then put on a heavy jacket, wrapped a towel around my head, and got out a baseball bat.

SMASH! The front door glass shattered inward. A few more careful swings, and I was able to step through.

Then I stopped and stared, realizing I had almost no idea what I was looking for.

I was surrounded by pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Boxes of bullets, shells, and little paper targets.

Fuck if I even knew how to load any of these things, let alone shoot them. Not skills they normally taught at the state mental facilities.

I pulled out my own gun, and fiddled with it until the clip suddenly fell out of the bottom. I had no idea what size of bullet it held, so I just compared it to others, opening box after box until I found a match. I took half-a-dozen boxes of the same size, and loaded them into a bag, then took another gun for good measure, this one a revolver that looked like something a cowboy would carry. I was kind of a cowboy, right? About to head into the Wild West. I managed to figure out how to pull the cylinder out, and then I found bullets that fit into the little holes.

By the time I left the gun shop, I had two pistols, a rifle for good measure, over a dozen boxes of bullets, and even a gun belt that I took just because it looked good on me.

A girl has her priorities, you know.

The rest of the shopping was easy.

A tent, sleeping bags, a little propane lantern, flashlights, and some powdered rations from a sporting goods store. An auto supply store yielded gas cans and some tools. Aquarium tubing from a pet store. A road atlas and some more reading material from a bookstore.

It was getting close to sunset by the time I was done. We were used to our mansion, and so I drove us back there. I wouldn't exactly say I drove us “home”, because any place with three corpses in or around it can't really be a home. In fact, it's a place you need to leave behind.

One more night. I'd spend tonight studying the road atlas, making our travel plans, packing the SUV. Tomorrow we'd leave as soon as we got up.

I made some dinner for us (canned peaches, crackers, instant mashed potatoes, vodka), then sat down by the fireplace a last time while Teddy sat next to me, murmuring contentedly.

That was when I heard the dogs.

It was far away at first, but came nearer—dog barks, at least four or five different canine voices. Some were baying excitedly, some yipping, some howling. They approached quickly, until I heard them right outside. I walked up to the window, to a point where I could see past the SUV and the driveway down to the street beyond. As I watched, a large, tan-colored dog ran into view, and then turned to face its pursuers. The other dogs appeared in seconds, and they were a motley conglomeration of former pets—a big shepherd, a poodle whose fluffy fur had grown out of its trim, a little Yorkshire terrier whose matted fur still held the remains of a pink ribbon.

Then I realized the dog they'd cornered was no dog at all, but a coyote.

The dogs, abandoned and neglected by their dreaming human owners, had turned feral and were attacking a coyote. The golden-eyed coyote snarled at them, baring its glistening teeth, and for a moment the domestic animals fell back, uncertainly. In that brief instant the coyote turned and sped off again. After a few seconds the dogs followed, barking and baying again. I listened until the sounds vanished into the north, where the foothills began.

I hoped the coyote got away. Los Angeles had belonged to the wild animals before we got here, and by rights it should be theirs again.

It was definitely time to go.

In the morning we had a last meal in the mansion, I took my dose of
Prolixin
, then I loaded Teddy into the SUV, and said goodbye to our shelter. I even made sure the front door was closed as solidly as possible. Silly, I know, but somehow it mattered.

I knew where I wanted to go and, thanks to the road atlas, how to get there, but I had no idea how long it would take. I didn't know how far the SUV would go on a gallon of gas, or how many gallons it held. I'd tested my siphoning abilities on some cars yesterday, and had discovered it wasn't hard at all— one hard suck on the end of the tube, and the gas would flow out of their tank into our can. I figured as long as we found cars along the way that we could siphon gas from, we should be fine. It was late summer, so we shouldn't run into any snow or any of that shit.

Snow. Like I knew anything about snow.

Christ, I'd never been out of Southern California before. Now I was embarking on a cross-country tour.

Yeah, I know—everybody in L.A. is from somewhere else, right? Nope, not me. Born and raised. In fact, second generation—both my folks were natives, too. Of course they'd divorced when I was three, and my dad had moved then, to Atlanta. I hadn't seen him since. Last time I saw my mom, she was just going into rehab for the third time.

They were probably both dead now. Somehow that thought didn't shake me up much.

Between mom's addictions and her minimum-wage job at a convenience store we'd never had enough money to travel. We'd been to Disneyland once. The beach a few times. Mom promised to take me to Vegas once, but then she went with a new boyfriend and left me behind.

So, the mental facility in Oxnard was the farthest from L.A. I'd ever been.

We drove through the early-morning streets of Beverly Hills, heading for the 10 freeway. It was still weird to see L.A. looking like a ghost town. I passed a few dead people on the sidewalks, and I saw exactly three living people in the few miles it took to get to the freeway. One teenage girl was naked and crawling across a lawn. One older woman staggered aimlessly down a sidewalk. One middle-aged guy looked like he was trying to hump a fire hydrant.

I was glad when we finally got to the 10. It was relatively clear of cars and hadn't been covered with sand or trash yet. It was a pleasure to get the SUV up to eighty. Its motor purred, and the air conditioner silently kept us luxuriously cooled. Teddy lolled in his seat with a slight smile on his face, and we headed into the east.

We took the 10 freeway to the 15 heading north, which took us to Barstow, where we caught the 40 heading east again. We were going through desert country, and in some places the road was already partly covered with sand.

If I tried to come back this way later, it might not be passable.

A few hours later, we crossed the border, leaving California and heading into Arizona.

I was out of California for the first time in my life. And you know what was strange? Arizona didn't look much different from California. The same tumbleweeds and trash blowing across the highway. The same cars just sitting in the road, requiring me to swerve around them. The same corpses splayed out across sidewalks. Some more sand and cactus, that was about it.

We stopped in a place called Kingman, to gas up. I spotted a strip mall with a bunch of cars still in the parking lot, and pulled in. Once my engine was shut off and I was out of the truck, it was completely silent, nothing but the sound of wind and blowing papers and something banging against a building somewhere.

I went to the nearest car, used a screwdriver to snap open the little door over the tank opening, unscrewed the lid and shoved my tubing in. I knelt by one of the gas cans, gave the tube a good suck, and was rewarded by the sight of gas flowing down. While I let the can fill, I stood up and looked around.

I laughed when I remembered the line from the old song “Route 66” about “Kingman, Arizona” (Interstate 40 had once been Route 66); gee, it sounded great in the song, exotic and kind of wild. Unfortunately, Kingman now looked pretty desolate, and I thought it probably had even before the dreaming started, nothing but cheap chain restaurants and gas stations and convenience stores and ugly two-bedroom stucco houses. I'll bet the height of culture around here had been
TV Guide
. Made me proud to be a Californian.

While I was thinking that, I heard Teddy whimper in the car.

“Teddy, what—” I started, but broke off at a sound behind me.

A strange sound, like a fast rattling buzz.

Something told me to turn
very
slowly.

There was a goddamn rattlesnake three feet away from me, coiled up and rattling and ready to strike.

Where the fuck had it come from? Must've been under the car. I was probably lucky the goddamn thing hadn't bitten me while I was setting up the siphon. Its ass-ugly head swerved back and forth on its
upstretched
neck; its mouth was open, and I could even see stuff dripping from the fangs.

I was vaguely aware that Teddy was screaming his head off in the SUV. What I was mainly thinking—and it was weird, how time had slowed down to a crawl, how my thinking seemed to move so much faster than everything else—was that I had on my
gunbelt
, and the revolver was loaded and holstered at my right. Could I draw faster than the snake could strike?

It was going to strike anyway, so I had nothing to lose.

I swear, I felt like I was the sheriff in some old cowboy movie, the fearsome gunslinger. My hand slid smooth as could be to that gun, and before I knew what'd happened I'd fired and blown that snake's head clean off.

The rattle kept going for a couple of seconds, then stopped.

I stood there staring, kind of shocked but kind of stoked, too. I'd never done anything like that in my life. I felt powerful and super-talented and pretty fucking invincible.

Then I realized Teddy was still screaming, and it all went away as I holstered the gun and ran to the car.

He was still staring at the snake's headless body, his eyes big watery saucers, his hands clutching at the dashboard, his body trembling all over.

I got it: He had a snake phobia. My past experience had taught me a little about phobias, and Teddy had a bad one.

I jumped into the driver's seat and took hold of his face, trying to get him to look at me, not the snake. “Teddy, Teddy, it's okay, it's dead, it can't hurt you—”

His eyes turned my direction, but he didn't really see me.