Tails of the Apocalypse (6 page)

She snuck up the back stairs and poked her head around the corner. Her mom was behind the front desk talking about cats to a rich lady. Raina waited for her mom to disappear into the filing racks behind the desk, then scooted across the lobby to the door to the back.

There, men were hosing down small dogs in countertop tubs. The dogs didn’t look happy, but their baths would be done soon and then they’d be fine. But the ones in the cages would still be locked up with their sadness. Raina went to them, closing the door behind her. It smelled like dog fur and kibbles. The big dogs were in big kennels on the ground, while the small ones were shut up in two rows of cages stacked on top of each other. Half of them were barking at her. Others wiggled at the front of their cages, asking to be let out.

They had names clipped to their cages: Betsy. Mango. Chief. But those names were stupid, so Raina gave them names to suit them: Bellow, Snaps, Wasp. She let them lick her hand. A woman in scrubs entered and gazed at Raina but said nothing.

The door opened again. Her mom stopped in her tracks. “Raina?” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Because I hate it,” Raina said.

“You still have to go.”

“No, I don’t. I’m here, aren’t I?”

Her mom pressed her lips tight. “How
did
you get here?”

“At recess, the other girls were making fun of me. So I left. I walked here.”

“Raina, that’s like five miles! You can’t walk that far on your own.”

“Why not?”

“Nobody knew where you were. You could have been hurt. You’re too young to be running around on your own.”

“I’m ten years old,” Raina said. “I can take care of myself.”

“Oh really? Then maybe it’s time for you to start buying your own food. And clothes. And games.” Her mom sighed. “I can’t take you home right now. Your dad’s at work, too. So I guess you get to stay here until I’m done.”

That was fine with Raina. She sat in the room with the dogs, scratching their ears and asking them questions. She knew their owners would be back for them soon, but there in their cages, they acted like the kids whose parents were late picking them up from school. Some sat still like the saddest things, while others paced like their stomachs hurt.

After a few hours, her mom came into the back to get her. As they headed for the front doors, Marisa walked in, dressed in her scrubs. She stopped, swung her mouth into the crook of her elbow, and coughed hard, shoulders jumping.

“That sounds terrible,” Mom said. “Why didn’t you call in?”

Marisa shook her head, voice strained. “Lydia told me if I don’t make it in and I’m not dying, I’m fired.”

“So next week, instead of one sick person up front, she’ll have three.”

“I tried. You know how she is.”

“A load of shit from above?” Her mom spun toward Raina. “You didn’t hear that.”

They didn’t talk much on the ride to their home in Gardena. Raina’s dad was still at work, so her mom started preparing chicken thighs for dinner. Raina cut the peppers and onions.

Her dad got home. They ate. After, her mom pulled her dad to their room and shut the door. A few minutes later, he came to Raina’s room and knocked on the door frame.

“Hey, killer.” He walked in and sat on the bed. “Hear you want to be a ten-year-old dropout.”

She looked him in the eye. “School’s stupid. It doesn’t teach you what you need.”

“But you need it if you want a job. Or to go to college.”

“I don’t like being told what to do.”

“No one does. I go to work every day, and every day, someone tells me what to do. Same goes for your mom. That’s life.”

“Why do people put up with that?”

He laughed, rubbing his forehead with his palm. “Most of us don’t got a choice. Bills to pay. Mouths to feed. But you know what? If you don’t want that to be you, you
better
do good in school. Or else you’ll have someone telling you what to do until the day you retire.”

Raina watched a singing contest on TV with her parents, then went to bed. She could hear the cars outside. She thought about walking away, following PCH until there was no city around her at all. Until the only voice she had to listen to was the wind in the grass.

Her mother’s coughing woke Raina the next morning. It was a Wednesday and Raina got ready for the bus as usual. At school, the other children sat quietly as the teachers taught them things about the division of numbers and books of made-up stories. At recess, the kids split into packs, seeking out those who didn’t have groups and teasing them. They coughed as they ran, eyes watering.

On Friday, both her parents called in sick. Even though
they
were staying home, they still made Raina go to school. As the bus groaned down the street, Raina hid behind the neighbor’s agaves until it was gone. As the diesel fumes faded, she smiled.

She walked west, all the way to the ocean, where the houses were made of glass and light. People sat in the sand or beneath restaurant umbrellas.
They
didn’t have to be at school or work, but when Raina asked one woman why, the woman gave her a funny look.

When afternoon came, she walked to the school, waited for the final bell to go off, and got on the bus home. She’d been on her own all day and nothing had happened. Her mom would be mad at her for leaving school again if she found out, but Raina didn’t care. Her mom had to learn that she was wrong.

Back home, both her parents were in bed. Their breathing was heavy and sounded like something wet dragging itself up the shore. Raina looked in on them, but they were asleep. She was hungry after the day of walking, and she went to the fridge to warm up last night’s rice and beans. Sirens whined outside, but there were always sirens.

Her parents stayed in bed the next day, too. Raina brought them water and broth. They were pale and the room smelled wrong. The Kleenex in the trash beside the bed were spotted with blood.

That evening, her parents argued. Blankets rustled. Drawers scraped. Her dad walked out. He was dressed, but his brown face was waxy. Sweat dewed his temples.

“Get your shoes.” His voice was thick. “We’re going to the hospital. Can’t leave you alone.”

On the drive, the only sound was their wet coughing.

Cars jammed the hospital parking lot. Sirens spun. Lights painted the crowds red and blue. There were tents in the lot like they were selling the cars parked there. Her dad had to park three blocks away. Hundreds of people stood back from the front doors, where uniformed men in bug-like masks held long guns. People shouted and pressed forward. The men lifted their guns and yelled, and the crowds fell back.

“Martin.” Her mom grabbed her dad’s arm. “They’ll never let us in there.”

“They have to. We’re sick.”

“Look around.
Everyone’s
sick. And if we stay, Raina will be, too.”

He blinked, skin pulled tight over his face. “Come on.”

As they walked away, a gun went off. Men and women screamed. The three of them ran to the car and drove home.

Her mom trudged back to bed, shoulders jerking as she coughed into her fist. Raina’s dad bent down in front of her. The heat from his face was like afternoon sand.

“What’s going on?” Raina asked.

“We don’t feel good. But we’ll get better soon. Can you make yourself dinner?”

“Do you want some?”

“Not now.” He reached out to touch her arm, then stopped. A bead of sweat slipped down his nose. “Keep the front door locked, okay?”

“Okay.”

He turned, then stopped and looked back, a vein pulsing in his brow. “If something … happens. Wait for help. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He went to his room and shut the door. Raina turned off the lights and sat beside the window blinds, where one of the slats was broken. She peered through it to the intersection down the street. Normally, headlights streamed through the break in the blinds long after dark. That night, seconds passed between each car. Sirens whooped past every few minutes.

Raina only left her post to get food, use the bathroom, or bring her parents water. A day and a half into her vigil, her head snapped up from a doze. It took her a minute to understand what had woken her.

They’d stopped coughing.

Raina shot to her feet, heart heavy with dread. She took two steps toward their door and stopped. What if it would only be true if she opened the door and looked in? What if they’d needed her but she’d been asleep and they’d been too weak to get up and wake her? She sank to the stained, threadbare carpet. She knew what waited on the other side of the door. The worst thing in the world.

And that was why she had to stand up and make herself see.

The door creaked. The room smelled like blood and waste. Raina watched them for several minutes, then closed the door again. She went to her bed and lay down and wept. When she was done, she went back to the broken slat to watch the street.

Like one of the windup toys she’d had when she was little, the city seemed to stall, shudder forward, and stop. No more sirens. No more little planes burbling through the sky all afternoon. No more men walking their pit bulls. No more older kids hanging outside the Wendy’s and laughing too loud.

But her dad had told her what she needed to do. So Raina stayed at the window and waited.

Three days after she’d opened the door to the bedroom—three days alone in the silence waiting for help—the phone rang. Raina snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Hi there,” a man said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “And who’s this?”

“Raina.” Too late, she knew this was the wrong thing to say. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend. Of your parents. Are you alone?”

Raina went still. “No.”

“Who’s there?” the man said. “Your parents?”

“That’s right. They’re in the other room.”

“Are they sick?”

“They’re fine.”

“Is that so. Then can I speak to them, Raina?”

She stared across the kitchen. “Hang on.”

Raina set the phone on the counter. As the man waited, she got the backpack she’d used for school. She got toilet paper and her toothbrush and the Tupperware of rice and beans she’d boiled. She emptied out the tail of a Pepsi two-liter and filled it with water. She got socks and underwear and a bag of the Bugles her dad liked.

Had liked.

Raina went to the front door, the man’s voice squawking from the phone back in the kitchen. He sounded angry, now. Like a man who
wanted
her parents to be dead. She went back to the kitchen and got the long, thin knife from the block. The same one she’d used to cut peppers and onions for dinner just a few days earlier.

Outside, crows scolded from the tile roofs. There was no sound of traffic. She didn’t know where she was going but she knew she needed to get away from the house and the lying, angry man on the phone. It was spring and the streets were wet from rain. Cars were parked at odd angles in the middle of the street. Others were crashed together and left behind. Sometimes she heard an engine far away, but that only made the silences in-between all the louder.

Shards of glass glittered on the sidewalk where shop windows had been punched out. At the corner, the Walgreens was torn apart, deodorant and shampoo bottles littering the entrance. Raina wandered down a side street. The front doors hung open like dark mouths at some houses. The people who owned them had abandoned them. If she wanted, she could walk in and make them her own.

But she doubted they were truly empty. She thought they had rooms like her parents’, where people slept forever in their bloody beds.

Los Angeles was gone. But what if the sickness hadn’t gotten to other places? She could go north. Santa Barbara. Her parents had taken her there when she was younger. It was pretty there. Maybe it wasn’t so silent and still. Maybe she could find help.

An hour later, with the clouds drizzling rain onto the apartments and strip malls, something growled at her from beneath a shrub. Raina stopped. A stout, black Chihuahua trotted out, hackles raised.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you scared?”

She crouched and held out her hand. The dog leaned warily forward, sniffing. It backed up a step, then leaned in and sniffed her again, its nose catching a whiff from her pack.

“I’ve got food.” She glanced down the street and shrugged out of her backpack. “Are you hungry?”

She opened the container of rice and beans and scooped a few bites out with her fingers. The Chihuahua edged closer, nostrils whuffing. He licked her hand, spilling grains of spicy rice to the sidewalk. He gobbled these up, so Raina dropped more to the ground. When the dog finished that too, she dug another scoop from the Tupperware, and he ate it from her hand.

“Hey!” A man’s voice echoed down the street. “Hey, you!”

He was two blocks away. A grown-up. The man leaned forward, breaking into a jog. Something about the way he moved felt wrong. He looked like a dog going after a squirrel. She shoved the food into her backpack and ran the other way.

“
Hey!
”

His shoes pounded the wet sidewalk. Raina darted down an alley that cut between two rows of houses. At the first open door, she ran inside. It smelled like her parents’ room. She found an empty bedroom and scampered under the bed.

Outside, the man’s shouts grew wrathful. That was the way of things now: with everything else taken, the only thing people had left was their anger.

Raina’s heart beat hard against her chest. Footsteps smacked outside the house, then faded, leaving nothing behind but the patter of the rain. After a few minutes, she got out her two-liter and drank some water. She waited half an hour before sliding from beneath the bed to check the windows. The alley was clear.

She couldn’t go north for help after all. Because she’d forgotten all about the dogs in the cages at her mom’s hospital. And if she’d forgotten them, then maybe everyone else had, too. She walked west toward the ocean she couldn’t see. It had stopped raining, but the streets smelled good for the first time since the sickness.

Something scraped behind her. She turned, tensing to run. The black dog stood on the cracked concrete, head tilted to the side.