Eve

Chapter 31 (Part 1)

There was no fucking way that that was Staples Center. The big, round, coliseum-like dome that not three months ago had been home to a Lakers vs Bulls game was now but a mesh of rusted, broken down thick metal bars half-naked between whatever few patches of concrete didn't fall off. It looked like the Death Star in construction, the thing, when we spotted it from the elevated vantage of the 110 highway.

"Did you ever go there?" Innara's voice rang to my left, as we kept walking over cinderblocks and burnt down holes in the concrete and dead bodies under the sun.

I didn't answer. I had barely spoken to Innara the whole week, since we left Big Bear and decided to walk back to Los Angeles. Only the essential. Where to get food. Water. What would be do after we got to L.A. Is that a zombie? That kind of stuff.

I thought that maybe if there was some life still in the city when we got here my mood would improve. The military, maybe. Survivor shelters. Anything. But, as the fire and destruction of the barren cityscape around us was letting in, that wasn't the case. So I kept quiet.

"I watched a few games with my dad, he used to know the owners," Innara carried on. "The owner's box was pretty fun."

"Uh-huh."

Look, I wasn't trying to be a bitch, mind you. Innara saved my life, and I was grateful. Sort of. But my mom and aunt had died not full seven days before. I was having a tough time dealing with it. It's not like I was actively trying to shut Innara out, I was just not in chit-chat mood. Plus, Innara managed to look pretty even in torn up clothes and one week with no shampoo, and that just rustled my jimmies a bit.

"Where do we go from here, Eve? What do you think?"

We hadn't seen many zombies so far, which wasn't weird because we'd been walking through woods and open fields mostly, avoiding the cities and highways. But now we had arrived in LA, and made the smart/stupid choice of climbing through a rumble path to the 110, and from there make way inside the city through the elevated highways.

It was smart because we hadn't seen many zombies up here, which confirmed my hunch that zombies are slow climbers and lazy (a hunch that would be later backed up by a second confirmation, when I turned to a zombie and became slow and lazy).

It was also stupid because we were several feet above ground level, which gave us a nice good view of the city, which depressed the living shit out of both of us. Los Angeles was destroyed.

Well, 'destroyed'... destroyed is what happens to a raccoon's head when elephants have sex on top of it. You'd have to come up with a whole new word for what had happened to LA.

Fire, rumble, blood, bodies, smoke, torn apart buildings. Everywhere we looked, at any given time, we seemed to find four or five new smoke streams oozing up from buildings up to the blue sky. Downtown L.A's skyscrapers had been reduced to four or five story buildings sprouting metal bars and concrete from their foundations on top. Houses with no ceilings displayed soot-covered living rooms. Some with rotten bodies inside.

A deafening silence seemed to echo from every direction, and the usually alive and busy cityscape of LA was barren and abandoned everywhere we looked. Sometimes we spotted zombies in the distance, way down on the streets. But so far, none that had spotted us.

"I think we should turn right here, what do you think Eve?"

I looked back. Innara had stopped at an intersection decorated in abandoned cars. To our right, the I-10 extended towards Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Straight ahead where I was going... well, more of broken down L.A, then San Diego, then Mexico, then Central America, then Colombia, then Brazil, then Uruguay, then Argentina, then the Atlantic. I figured if I was gonna drown myself, the Pacific Ocean was closer.

"Sure..." I said, turning back andheading towards Innara. "Let's go to the beach."