Dodger

The marina wasn’t quite what Dodger had expected for some reason. It was a long hike from the pier, made even longer by having to constantly stop to make sure the next 20 meters were safe to travel. They probably could have travelled along the beach and been there in about an hour, but the beach offered no cover from prowling monsters and bandits.

Not that they’d seen any bandits lately. Dodger hadn’t even been completely positive there were any people left in the city until she ran into Mark and Dave. But that didn’t make her feel any safer about it. If Mark and Dave had been hiding out without being seen for so long, then other people must have been doing the same.

The sun was high in the sky when they finally left the divided road that gave all the old high rise hotels an excellent view of the boats in the marina. Dodger hadn’t quite realised that they weren’t going to stay in one of those, high above the city, until they started heading into the marina itself. And suddenly, she was glad they weren’t staying in one of the hotels. Climbing up to the 20th floor without a working elevator, and each with their full packs would not have been fun.

Along the water, Dodger’s pace slowed to look at the boats. This had been here her entire life, and the first time she was seeing it was now. Most of the boats were still floating, but some had definitely seen better days. Some of the lighter ones had been smashed against their moorings during rare storms, and were little more than wreckage at this point, half-submerged in the water. She thought that’s where the guys were leading her. Maybe they’d each get their own sailboat or something.

But that wasn’t the plan. They weren’t going to get their own sailboats, and Dodger knew this as soon as she saw the towering monstrosity at the end of the basin.

“What in the heck is that?” Dodger asked, not quite sure if she fully understood what she was looking at. Three decks, dozens of portholes, and only a little worse for wear after all the abuse and neglect it had suffered since all the people taking care of it died.

“That is the Sea Floozy,” Dave said, picking up his pace toward the massively large boat. Mark trotted after him, leaving Dodger momentarily stunned at what they were showing her. Finally, she realised she’d stopped completely and jogged to catch up. The boat was so big that Dodger couldn’t see a way onto until they got right behind it. There were stairs at the back, but they’d been blocked off with a bunch of corrugated tin. From the looks of it, the wall wasn’t meant so much to keep people off, but to make it easier to tell if someone had got on. But it was too difficult to get to from the dock. They’d managed to get the boat far enough away from it that even without their impromptu wall, you’d have to really jump to make it. Instead, they’d rigged an aluminium fire ladder to the side - the sort people used to keep in their bedrooms on upper floors. It was still several feet out from the dock, but Mark and Dave had been here and done this many times before. They both put their bags on the ground and Mark took his machete off his belt, handing it over. Then he grabbed onto the back of Dave’s belt, and Dave - being smaller and lighter - leaned out over the water, using the machete to coax the ladder toward his fingers. As soon as he grabbed it, Mark pulled him back so they were both on steady footing.

“I’ll go check it out,” he said, hooking the machete to his own belt and put his pack back on before climbing up the ladder. Mark kept a hold on the bottom so they didn’t lose it, and watched Dave quickly climb up and over the side, and quickly out of view.

Dodger didn’t say a word the entire time. She listened for any sound she could hear that would suggest Dave had found something he didn’t want to find. He was up there for what seemed like hours, completely silent and totally out of their sight while he swept every deck and cabin to make sure there were no nasty surprises. Finally, he appeared on one of the upper decks and waved his hand to beckon the other two up.

“Here,” Mark said, stepping aside to let Dodger go first. She looked up at the ladder and took a deep breath. She’d never climbed anything like this, so she made sure her bag was snug around her and wouldn’t swing out and get in the way or anything before she stepped up to the ladder. The metal was surprisingly cool for having been outside all day. But the boat cast an enormous shadow, and the spray from the main channel probably kept everything a little cooler.

“Just… climb up?” she asked, unsure of this whole thing.

“Yeah. Have you done something like this before?” Mark asked, suddenly sounding cautious.

Dodger shook her head. “Nope,” she said. It was terrifying. A huge climb that seemed a hundred miles tall.

“It’s going to wiggle a little, so hold on. Don’t reach for the next rung until you know where your feet are,” Mark explained, trying to hold the ladder as slack as possible without losing it or making it impossible for Dodger to get onto the terrifying thing.

With another deep breath, she grabbed onto a rung right around face-level, and found a place for her feet. The ladder did wiggle a little, but not as much as she expected it to. The chain links were encased in aluminium pipes, making it stiff and rigid so it didn’t flop about, and the rungs were flat and heavily textured, so even with the spray from the channel, she didn’t feel like she was likely to slip off. The only challenge was going to be to actually convince her body to climb up the ladder. She stepped up first, getting one foot up, and then reaching up with one of her hands. It was less like climbing one of those awful rope ladders in school, and more like getting up to see what had been accumulating at the top of the fridge this way. Her legs did all of the work, while her arms just kept her balanced. Below, she could feel Mark trying to keep the ladder steady for her, and before she realised it, she was at the hard part: getting off the ladder, and onto the deck. She looked up to figure it out, and was almost startled to see Dave waiting for her.

“Almost there,” he said encouragingly. Without warning, he grabbed her by the arm to pull her up. That did startle her, but she choked it down, knowing that if she jumped even a little bit, she’d fall into the water. Or worse, she’d fall onto the dock.

“Thanks,” she said stiffly as Dave helped pull her to her feet. As soon as she was off, she heard the ladder jingle and jangle roughly. She looked down to see Mark managing to put his pack back on without losing the ladder, and then jump onto the thing like he’d done this a hundred times before.

Which he probably had. Dodger quickly got out of the way so he’d be able to step off the ladder without having to fight for space. Once he was up, he pulled the ladder with him, piling it onto the faded and peeling deck.

“You’re not afraid this thing’s gonna sink?” she asked, looking around the monster of a boat.

Dave shook his head confidently. “Nah. It seemed pretty new when we came here the first time. And how often do these things leave the water, really?”

Dodger shrugged. She genuinely didn’t know. “Well, show me around!” she said, eager to see what obscenely rich people used to do with their money.

They all left their bags near the ladder in the shade as Dave led the party inside to some sort of lounge. Even now, after being abandoned for years, it looked nicer than some of the houses she’d been squatting in. Soft carpets and rich woodwork, with several massive flat screen TVs hanging from the walls. The boat had a big, spiral staircase, fancy LED lighting, and more technology than a gaming convention crammed into it.

“Did people live on this, or what?” she asked as Dave showed her the (mostly useless) galley.

“It might have been for charter. We’re not sure,” he said. “There are like, six cabins on this thing.”

“Holy crap.” Dodger couldn’t even imagine what something like this would cost to even rent. “Why don’t you guys stay here all the time? I would.”

“You’ll get sick of it. Trust me.” Dave showed her a few of the cabins, with their enormous beds and big TVs. Dodger hadn’t been so sad for a lack of power in a very long time.

“But it does have one perk. We’ll show you that tonight though,” he said with a sly smile. Dodger wasn’t sure how she felt about that look on his face.

“Okay…”

“You gonna be okay here on your own?” Dave asked as they walked out to rejoin Mark in the lounge. “If you can get some of the stuff we stored below out and set up, we can go see what we can find around the harbour.”

Dodger nodded. She hadn’t been away from men in far too long, and a little time away from them sounded kind of like the best. “Yeah, sure. Go for it.”

They found Mark stretched out on one of the sofas, playing with a nail puzzle that had been left on one of the tables.

“Find your room yet?” he asked, barely looking up.

“Yeah, I like that blue one,” Dodger said, taking the opportunity to sit down for a moment.

Mark gave her a thumbs up and went back to fiddling with his puzzle for a few moments longer before he got back to his feet. “Ready to go?” he asked, reaching out for his machete again. Dave handed it over.

“Yep. Get your stuff.”

Dodger watched as they both headed outside to dig through their bags. She hadn’t seen them pack when they were getting ready to leave, so she wasn’t really sure what they needed. Dave took his bow and his quiver of arrows off his bag, which she expected. Mark grabbed a can of spray paint and stuffed it into a smaller bag, which she didn’t expect. Then they kicked the ladder back down the side of the boat, and were gone.

She spent the first ten minutes just being alone and listening to the silence. She missed the silence. She didn’t miss the danger of being alone. But this wasn’t quite alone. Mark and Dave were there, even if they were off scavenging for supplies they couldn’t carry with them. They were just… somewhere else.

When Dodger got up, she thought about pulling the ladder up, but decided they would have told her to do so if that’s what they wanted. So instead, she headed down below decks to find the stuff Dave was talking about. She wasn’t quite sure what he’d meant, until she saw it. She wasn’t sure where Dave wanted it, so she brought it all to the main deck, out of the way but easily accessible. They had their own distillery system that looked a lot like the one they used on the beach, except smaller. The scorched bottom of the stock pot suggested they used a fire somewhere to make it work. Logically, she assumed the fire probably came from one of several grills they’d collected and managed to get up here somehow, so she arranged the set up next to them. She wasn’t sure what they burned to make fire, but assumed they knew what they were doing. For a moment, she thought about getting some water out of the marina somehow, but with the amount of decaying boats sitting there, salt probably wasn’t the only danger.

They also had some fishing rods big enough to go with their enormous boat, and a few tackle boxes. Dodger brought those up as well, and having no idea how to begin to set them up, set them carefully aside behind one of the sofas inside, not wanting to risk breaking them. They were probably stronger than they looked, since she’d seen Mark reel in actual sharks with the rods they kept at the pier, but they only had three, and she wasn’t sure if they’d find others in working order if they needed to. After doing some digging, she found several dozen bags of charcoal, and some stacks of wood that probably served the same purpose. She brought up one of the bags, and enough firewood to get by for a few days before they needed more. By the time she was done, she decided to go exploring the yacht some more. She made her way to the back, where the stairs were, and took a look at the system the boys had rigged up. Their wall was mostly held together with bungee cords, and on the ground along the wall they had a long piece of heavy plywood that probably served as a gangplank for getting supplies onto the boat easier. Deciding to leave that up to the boys, she headed back in to peek into all of the rooms. One of them had a shelf full of books - something Dodger hadn’t been able to enjoy in years. She carefully read over all of the titles, eventually settling on something short and seemingly easy to follow. Though most of the books on the shelf fit into that category, which made sense if the boat were chartering rich tourists to Mexico.

She took her book, and after fetching her bag back up from outside, headed to the room she’d claimed for herself. The bed was unbelievably soft, and the light coming in was perfect to read by. She was pretty sure she actually dozed off at one point, and was startled awake at the sound of something slamming against the side of the boat. She was about to grab her bat and get up, but was stopped when Mark shouted their presence. It took her a while to calm down again while the boys banged on all sorts of stuff and made an endless amount of noise. She wondered what they could possibly be up to out there, but the bed was far too comfortable for her to want to get up. Finally, it stopped, and she returned her attention to her book. The light was starting to fade, but as long as it was bright enough to see the words, she was going to keep going.

Dodger could hear the boys come back inside, talking loudly, though she couldn’t understand what they were saying. With them inside and moving around, it seemed like the boat was almost vibrating all of a sudden, but she pushed that aside, convincing herself it was normal, and that the boat wasn’t about to suddenly sink into the bottom of the marina.

And then the lights out in the hall came on. It was the very last thing in the world she’d expected and it made her jump and yelp from the suddenness of it. She could hear Dave laughing somewhere, and a few moments later, saw his stupid, curly hair outlined against the bright light out in the hall.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine!” Dodger said, not really feeling fine. She wasn’t even sure this was real. “Warn me next time. Oh my god.”

Dave laughed some more and nodded out toward the lounge. “Come on. We’ve got dinner.”

Dodger cautiously got up to follow him out to the deck where she’d got everything set up. Mark was down on the dock, stripping and gutting a seagull under the warm lights, and Dave quickly got to work setting up one of the grills so they could cook it. All Dodger could do was stand in disbelief.

“You turned the lights on,” she said, still struggling to catch up to that fact.

“One night only,” Mark said while he worked. “First night, we turn on the lights and watch a movie.”

“The TV doesn’t work?” Dodger said, trying her best to keep up.

“No, but there’s like, a thousand DVDs on a shelf behind the TV.”

Dodger blinked, slowly getting there. Then she turned around to go back into the lounge to see what Mark was even talking about. She looked at the TV, and the wall it was mounted on, and after a bit of poking and prodding, she found that the entire wall was on a sort of hinge. The wall folded out, revealing a hidden closet that was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling full of DVDs.

“Technically it’s my turn to pick,” Dave said, suddenly behind her. “But you can have this one.”

“Thanks,” Dodger said slowly, having to remember what this sort of situation even meant.

They were on a boat. With electricity. And they were about to have seagull for dinner and watch a movie together.

“How’d you turn the lights on?” she asked, turning around just in time to catch Dave before he left again.

He pointed out toward all the other boats. “Four thousand other boats, most of them with fuel in their tanks.”

“Oh.” It sounded obvious when he said it like that. She followed him back outside and only then saw what was in the bag Mark took with him. They had some sort of hand pump on a hose and two five-gallon water bottles. She didn’t think that was enough to fill the tank on a monster like this one, but if they only ran the lights one night, and made a habit of filling up the bottles during the rest of their stay, they probably kept a decent amount of fuel in the tank.

There were two ways to survive in the wild: the sheer, dumb luck she tended to rely on, and strict routine and planning. She was really starting to like the strict routine over the dumb luck. She needed to start to learn some of this stuff, instead of relying on scavenging alone to pull her weight.

“Do you guys need any help?” she asked.

Dave grilled up the bird, and dished it up on actual plates from the galley while Mark helped Dodger find a movie and get it working. With dinner in front of them and the DVD ready to go, the boys both got comfortable on the sofa. But it seemed a little too comfortable and familiar, so Dodger distanced herself from both of them and sat down in a chair instead. The movie they watched was something foul and funny, where despite all his character flaws, the guy still got the girl at the end. It had been a long time since anything had felt this normal. Dodger still wasn’t sure it was real.

By the time the movie was over, Mark had fallen asleep, and Dodger felt like she was getting there. While Dave collected everyone’s dishes, she got up and headed back to her room, unapologetically closing and locking the door between her and the boys. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them now. She’d been with them for long enough to know that she could trust them. But having that barrier between her and them just gave her one less thing to worry and stress out about, whether consciously or subconsciously. Even now, when things felt too close, Dodger was acutely aware of how easily either of them could overpower her. It wasn’t an easy fact to forget.

She’d done laundry a week before, and pulled a clean set of clothes out of her bag. By now, even though they’d feel clean, everything would smell enough like something else to hopefully mask her smell. And being locked up on an actual fricking boat seemed like it would be safe to change before she went to bed. It seemed like an awfully big shame to climb into bed in grimy, nasty clothes. It was a luxury she was rarely afforded, and as soon as she was between the sheets, she fell asleep.

---

Sunlight through the windows woke her up bright and early. For the first time in months, she felt like she actually slept with both eyes, and took only a few minutes to get out of bed.

She decided right then and there that she was going to ask Dave to teach her how to fish. Or Mark. Whichever one she found first. She was surprised when neither of them were out in the lounge, or outside, or down in the galley. As she wandered through the halls, she realised that the boat wasn’t vibrating like it had been the night before when she went to bed. Whatever made the electricity work was apparently off again. She was going to ask about that as well.

Dodger opened the door to one of the cabins and found it empty. The next one she opened was empty as well, which meant she was bound to find one of them pretty soon. Unless they’d both left the boat and didn’t wake her up in the process. But everything out on the deck had been pulled up and secured, and they couldn’t have done that if they’d left.

She opened the next door just a crack, and peered inside. Mark was sprawled out on his stomach, still asleep, snoring loudly.

Except, Mark didn’t usually snore. Before she could stop herself, Dodger pushed the door open just enough to see both of them tangled up under a single blanket. It took her a few embarrassing moments before she shut the door as quietly as she could and took a big step back. They often slept crowded together at the lifeguard shack, but there wasn’t much space there. She’d never once thought about it. But there were five cabins, after Dodger had picked hers. Mark and Dave didn’t have a reason to share—

Oh. Oh.

Somewhat panicked, and not sure what to do, Dodger quickly and quietly went outside. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to have seen that, or if she was supposed to have assumed already. She waited until she was out on the deck, and had the door closed behind her before laughing to herself and the awkwardness of the whole thing.

Awkwardness was another one of those things she’d thought had gone away forever. Apparently not, because she’d somehow managed to make everything as awkward as humanly possible without even trying. She got as much of it out of her system as she could, and then realised that now she really had no idea what she was supposed to do. But she still wanted to learn how to fish, and it couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Mark managed to do it, and he still put his shoes on the wrong feet sometimes. She went back inside and grabbed all of the gear she’d brought up the night before, and took it all back outside with her. How hard could it be to put a hook on the line and make a fish try to eat it?

Very hard, it turned out. Twice, she got the hook caught in her hair when she tried to throw it out to the water. Once she caught another boat. Now she had the hook in the water, but it wasn’t doing anything. Usually when the boys did their fishing, they’d have all of their rods cast out at the same time, but Dodger didn’t feel confident enough to do that without getting them all tangled up, but she thought for sure something should have happened by now.

“What are you doing?”

Dodger jumped at the sudden voice behind her, and turned to see Mark staring at the fishing pole like he was trying to solve a math equation. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which wasn’t unusual, but suddenly Dodger wasn’t really sure where to look for some reason.

“I’m fishing,” Dodger said.

“Can I?” Mark asked, pointing at the pole.

Dodger shrugged. “Yeah, I think I’m doing something wrong,” she said, handing the pole over.

Mark slowly reeled it in, looking even more concerned. If he could tell just by doing that that she’d done something wrong, she must have found some brand new way to mess up. When he pulled the hook out of the water, he nodded and reached for it. Dodger had picked one that looked like a small, silver fish. It had several joints, and big plastic fins, which made it look fairly realistic, if you ignored the massive three-pronged hooks coming off it in several places.

“Ah. That’s a trolling lure,” Mark said, crouching down at the tackle box and pulling out a little pair of cutters. He snipped the lure off and tossed it back into the box, right where Dodger had originally found it, and slid the shelves in the box around until he found something else. “You use that when you’re pulling it behind your boat. But we’re not going anywhere.”

“Oh.” Dodger wasn’t sure why she felt dumb for not knowing that. It wasn’t like she had any reason to have that information. It’s why she wanted help.

“Normally, we’d want bait. But we don’t have any of that.” He looked out at the calm harbour water, and pulled something out of the tackle box. “Let’s try a spinner today.”

He sat down so she could see what he was doing, and she leaned in to watch. He tied a complicated-looking knot to get the lure on the end of the line, where Dodger had just tied as many knots as possible when she’d tried it.

“We’re gonna add a little bit of weight to it,” he said, taking a little, round ball of metal and clamping it onto the line about six feet above the lure.”

“Is that so it sinks?” Dodger asked.

“Yeah, but we don’t want it to. We just want it to be easier to cast out.” So he picked up a red and white plastic ball, and clamped that onto the line about a foot above the metal ball he’d clamped on. “The current will make this thing spin and look like food, and that’ll keep it close to the surface,” Mark said, pointing at the lure and the bobber respectively.

He stood up and pointed out toward the main channel. “We want it to land out there, so we don’t get tangled on the boats,” he said. And then he effortlessly cast the lure off toward the main channel, landing it about 50 feet away from them. There were these things that Dodger had thought were cupholders along the wall, but Mark dropped the rod into one of them and sat down in one of the chairs. Suddenly, he looked like the sort of person who took four cups of coffee to get out of bed, before everything changed.

“What are you waiting for?” he said suddenly, pointing at the other rods on the floor. “Get the next one going.”

Dodger jumped, realising that they didn’t really have time to do this one line at a time, since the seagull had been completely eaten the night before. She grabbed another rod and started digging through the tackle box for another lure that looked like the one Mark had used.

Dodger was actually kind of angry. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was. Getting out to the beach had been a nerve-wracking nightmare, and now that she’d finally made it, someone else had immediately moved in and chased her out. She didn’t have the time or the supplies or the intel to figure out where else she could go. She hadn’t been able to gather up enough of a surplus to just start wandering and count on finding her next meal. She hadn’t been able to sit down and objectively consider her next options. She’d been run out, with nowhere to go, and no plan for what came next.

As soon as the door opened back to the lifeguard station, Dodger grabbed up her things and ran for the door as fast as she could. She didn’t want to wait around to see what would come next. She had her bag, and her baseball bat, and could only hope it would be enough. But the more time Dodger spent on trying to find any supplies, the more clear it became that her new competition hadn’t just moved in. They’d always been there. Everything was picked completely clean. There wasn’t anything useful left, forcing her further and further out. But further and further out from the beach was just going further into the city, and the city wasn’t a safe place to be. Too many places to hide, both for people and monsters. And mostly cleared out, because this is where all the people were, when people were still a thing. She got by on next to nothing - a bag of stale dog food to nibble on, and what little fresh water she could collect. But her water collectors seemed reluctant to gather too much moisture from the air, which she chalked up to being surrounded by hot concrete that kept the air around it too hot for moisture to condense properly.

She was going to die a slow and painful death if she stayed in the city. If she went back to the hills, it would be a quick and messy death. With not many other options, Dodger admitted that she had to go back to the beach and figure out something there. For a few seconds, she convinced herself that those guys only hung out at the lifeguard shack, but she knew that wasn’t right. They’d been gone for too long during the time she’d been staying there. Either they were out gathering supplies, or they had several bases. Where the other bases were was anybody’s guess. But if they had other bases, it meant that there was a chance they’d be gone again. This time, she might be able to grab a few supplies to get her stocked up, and then…

And then north, probably. The weather would probably be a little more hospitable if she managed to just get closer to the bay. She couldn’t imagine that San Francisco would be any better off than LA, but at least she might not be struggling for water.

Dodger made her way slowly back toward the pier, not sure if she was more afraid of what she might come across before she got there, or what she might find when she arrived. She didn’t want to get there all at once, because if she had to leave in a hurry, she wanted to have some supplies on her, to take as she fled north. She stopped in every building, checking every cupboard and closet that looked like it might have been overlooked, and found nothing. She was so busy with trying to find something more than Kibbles n Bits that she didn’t notice the sky getting darker, or the wind picking up until she felt the first drop of rain on her face. There was a brief moment of panic when she realised what it meant, followed by an immediate scramble to find something she could put out on the sidewalk while she hid inside. Inside what looked like some sort of small office building, Dodger found some old paint cans that had been left out from a halted renovation. She had enough desire to not die from some stupid paint poisoning to peel the thick layer of latex paint out from the inside of the can before leaving it out to fill up. It probably still wouldn’t be safe to drink, but she’d at least have water that she could boil later, once she was out of the city. Water in a paint can would be heavy and cumbersome, but she didn’t know when the next time she’d find water would be.

The storm came in off the ocean, blowing rain in almost sideways. It didn’t take long before the paint can was blown away as well, taking off down the street before Dodger could even get up from where she was resting in the corner. So much for that idea. Maybe those guys at the beach would have had the same idea. And maybe she could catch them off-guard, and introduce them to her baseball bat before they knew she was there. Two against one wasn’t exactly a fight she was looking forward to, but it was an option to consider.

By the time the wind started to die down again, night was falling, so Dodger stayed where she was. What was one more night in Santa Monica, when she didn’t even have a plan formed? Really, it was one more night to try to form a plan. But by the time she woke up the next morning, she was no closer to that goal than she’d been the day before. Her only idea was still to go try to raid the guys at the beach, and take off before they could catch her. This time, she didn’t waste precious minutes checking out buildings she knew would be empty. She made her way straight to the beach, stopping only to collect little bits of water where it had caught in convenient puddles in awnings and debris on the street. She made good time getting there, but she wasn’t at all surprised by the sight that greeted her. She couldn’t see one of the guys from the street, but there was someone out on the pier, moving in and out of view behind the rides and buildings. From the distance, she couldn’t tell what he was doing, except that he looked busy doing it.

She considered running away right then; damning any potential supplies and making her way north on what she already had. She knew she could probably find a little more up in the hills, as she passed over them. But curiosity got the better of her, and she moved closer instead. The guys had done a good job at clearing out a solid line of sight from the edge of the pier, making it difficult to find a good place to hide as she inched slowly closer and closer. It soon became clear that even with the open line of sight, the guy up on the pier was too busy doing whatever he was doing to bother keeping watch. He probably thought they had the whole area to themselves, and they probably did until Dodger moved in. She’d been in their shack, and it was too well-stocked and put together to be a contested spot.

Dodger still couldn’t see where the other guy was, so she decided to make her move. If the guy on the pier was busy doing something, then he was probably doing something useful, with something of value. If he didn’t have his buddy with him, she could probably take him out and steal whatever he had, and be gone before his friend noticed. She readied her baseball bat and began moving purposefully toward the pier. She made sure her steps fell as quietly as possible, while still moving as quickly as possible. Even as she made it onto the pier, it was clear she hadn’t been spotted. She peeked around one of the small kiosks that dotted the pier, disappointed but not exactly surprised to see the line of fishing rods the guy was working on repairing. Useful, but of no value to her if she was going to be heading north.

She must have made a noise without realising it, because suddenly the guy looked straight at her. Rather than going with her original plan to take him out, she turned and ran instead, now just hoping to put as much distance between them as possible. She got two blocks away before she realised that she wasn’t being chased, but she still didn’t stop. She got two more blocks away when she realised she was being chased, but not by anything human. She heard the growling first, and turned to look back at some malformed hell beast with glowing yellow eyes and too many rows of teeth. A baseball bat would do nothing against it, so she screamed and ran even faster, trying to weave around parked cars and between buildings. She twisted and turned and went in so many circles trying to get away from the creature that soon she forgot which way she was even going. She needed to find some way to put some distance between herself and the creature, so she could lock herself inside a building or a car until it got bored and went away. But it was too fast, and every evasive trick she had up her sleeve fell flat, with the creature being able to match her every move.

Not sure what she was doing, Dodger found herself running back toward the beach. Maybe with two more people to distract it, she could increase her odds of getting away. When the beast snarled and snapped at her, Dodger screamed again and swung her bat blindly. She didn’t dare look behind her, because she knew she’d lose speed, and then it would be game over.

Suddenly, the snarls and growls turned into an unearthly yowl. As Dodger kept running, she realised that the sound was getting further away, and only then did she dare to look back. The beast had an arrow sticking out of its head, though it didn’t seem to have done anything other than piss it off. The beast swung its head and thrashed its front claws to try to remove the arrow, but when that didn’t work, it resumed its chase. Dodger tried to run even faster, but her diet of dog food nibbles and almost no water was starting to take its toll. Everything hurt, and she felt sick, but she couldn’t slow down. When she felt something on her shoulder, she screamed again and tried to pull away to get enough distance to swing her bat again. But it wasn’t another beast. It was the guy who had found her last time – Mark – and now he was pulling her out onto the beach and back toward the lifeguard shack while his buddy fired another arrow from the pier with a scary-looking hunting bow. With that thing behind them, Dodger didn’t argue about where she was being taken. She tried to keep up with Mark as best she could, but her tired muscles and the damp sand had other ideas. Still, they made it inside, and Mark slammed the door shut before pulling his machete off his belt. Dodger watched the machete, not sure if it was meant for her, or for the beast should it make its way in. Just in case, she rushed to the other side of the small shack, putting more than enough distance between them to get a good swing in if he got too close. But he wasn’t watching her. He was looking out the window at what was going on outside, and was quick to step out of the way when his buddy rushed in. After that, they barricaded the door with a heavy board that looked like it was there for exactly that purpose, and both watched out the window while the beast howled and shrieked over its new porcupine look.

“Well, that thing’s not going away any time soon,” Mark declared.

“Nope,” his buddy agreed.

Dodger watched both of them, realising she was now locked inside the shack with two guys that were both quite a bit bigger than she was, with a machete and a freaking bow and arrow. Her baseball bat really was not going to be much help in this situation.

“So. What now?” she asked cautiously, ready to take a swing all the same.

Mark shrugged and put his machete back on his belt. “You hungry? I caught a shark yesterday. It probably won’t keep for very long.” He looked back out the window at the hell beast. “It’s probably what attracted ugly, out there.”

“Uh,” was all Dodger could say. It was the last thing she had expected to hear. “Okay.”

Dodger followed Mulholland Drive as it wound and meandered in a general westerly direction, steep slopes and sheer drops giving way to dark, natural tunnels through overgrown trees, and then back again to the open ridge along the Hollywood Hills. It was quiet up there, giving Dodger a good sense of what dangers were near, and which could be cautiously ignored. It felt safer up here, even knowing there were hellhounds in the area. But she didn’t know what might have been prowling along Santa Monica Boulevard. Or who. Up here, Dodger had the edge, however small it may have been. She knew countless hiding spots along the entire length of Mulholland, and she knew where it would eventually end. More than once, she found herself tempted to take a short-cut as Mulholland Drive twisted toward the north and more easterly than anything, and again as it turned back heading vaguely southeast. Sticking to Mulholland promised a long trek, but venturing off of that path was going into the unknown. Dodger didn’t know every little side street and private road that branched off, and any one of them could have taken her to a dead end, or in the wrong direction entirely.

She counted the No Parking signs, each one acting as a mile marker. They’d all been defaced in one way or another, distinguishing each sign from all the rest along the way - No Hope, No Mercy, No God, No Salvation; just a new way of measuring the distance travelled. Dodger stopped at each one, knowing somewhere nearby she’d find something stored away for the next person who came along. There was rarely anything useful, but there was always something. A road-side lost and found box for the cautious traveller. A bottle opener in one, half a roll of electrical tape in the next, a usable pair of scissors after that – all items that were potentially useful, but took up more room than they were worth when space was at a premium and travelling lightly was a necessity. These cache boxes and the water collectors were the only contact Dodger ever had with other survivors, however indirect it may have been. The less close contact she had with other people, the longer her expected lifespan would be. The cache boxes and shared water may have seemed like gestures of good will on the surface, but they were all about survival. Knowing where to find clean, fresh water was everything. Knowing where you stashed that second pair of shoes was everything else. You stashed them knowing someone else might come along later and take them, but hoped they’d trade out something just as valuable when making room in their pack. But you also stashed them knowing someone might come along and just take everything, whether they needed it or not. Hoping for the former, but counting on the latter was the only way to survive. Treat everybody as if they meant to do you harm, and be prepared to do harm to anyone who might threaten you. There was no more Golden Rule. No more Do Unto Others. Being kind only got you killed.

The sun was dipping low on the horizon by the time Dodger finally hit the 405. It was time to get out of the open, and into some shelter. Nestled in a shallow bowl between the intersection of the freeway and the winding mountain road, Dodger could see a modest campus of some variety. She quickly ran across the overpass, not wanting to spend a second longer than necessary up there, out in the open for anybody to spot. All she needed was for somebody to follow after her and wait until she settled in for the night to stage their ambush. Once she was on the other side of the freeway, Dodger found the first opening in what was likely once neatly-trimmed landscaping, but was now an overgrown mess of sharp, prickly bushes and out of control trees. She used her baseball bat to push through the thickest parts, before finally stumbling onto cracked pavement once more. A crooked sign at the corner of a parking lot marked the road she stood on. Walt Disney Drive. Dodger wanted to laugh. There were times when she would completely forget not only what things were like before everything ended, but what was still to be found all around her. She never went into Hollywood or Anaheim, or even Los Angeles proper. On the surface, it was because she knew there would be more people there to compete with. But there was also a strong sense of denial that kept her from going into any area that might have a familiar landmark. That anything had ever been familiar in the past was completely unbelievable. She had never been a college student, struggling to decide what on Earth to major in, while riding out a baseball scholarship. She never had a tiny apartment she shared with a friend, or a crappy car that only started about 50% of the time. No hamster that lived in a cage on top of her dresser. There never was a normal. Normal didn’t end with monsters and mayhem, and the words “a gate to hell has been opened.”

But the name Walt Disney, still showing boldly on the aluminum road sign challenged that assertion. It was a stark reminder that all this wasn’t normal, and shouldn’t have been normal. It seemed like the new normal, but it was all just a twisted reality that should never have been.

Pressing on, Dodger looked anywhere but at the road signs and made tracks to the nearest building. There was an empty swimming pool outside the flat-roofed building, with an upside down car at the bottom. Staying in a school gym wasn’t the fanciest place Dodger had ever bedded down for the night, but it wasn’t the worst, either. Breaking in was easy, and barricading the doors again was just as easy. The only problem was there wasn’t a whole lot to loot. Dodger found herself a quiet corner in the huge room and pulled the last tin of Fancy Feast from her bag before settling in for the night.

She was up again with the first hint of light coming through the windows high on the walls. It was time to leave, and start heading south again. Dodger hated following any open road, but the 405 was the most direct way back into the city. Rather than walking along the actual freeway, Dodger took the boulevard that ran parallel to it. She still felt open and exposed, even though the road she was on sat beneath the freeway, with the stone retaining wall and steep slopes towering high above.

Even early in the morning, the air was getting hot, forcing her to stop more than she wanted to for rest and shade. She tried not to drink much of the water she’d collected from the hills, not having any idea what she might find at her next stop. She had to save what little supplies she had, since she was going to be starting all over again. She knew she was in for a lean couple of days to follow, until she could find some good scavenging ground. And that was always the hardest part with moving to a new area. She knew where she’d been, and where there wasn’t much left to be found, but she didn’t know where other people had been. But she’d survived this long without much at all, and had gone without more than a few times already. This wasn’t going to be any different.

Cars were still parked all along the road, left behind from when their owners had bailed out to run on foot. Dodger didn’t bother checking inside any of them, though. They’d been sitting on the road for who knew how long, and anything still inside would have been baked and disgusting by now. Abandoned cars were a good place to spend a night in a pinch, but they weren’t worth much more than that. In the movies, abandoned cars always seemed to be stripped down of anything extra or cosmetic, leaving just the shell or chassis. But that wasn’t what had happened. There was no value in scrap. Nobody needed fancy rims or hubcaps or chrome trim for anything. The gasoline still in the tanks was the only useful thing to be taken from any of the cars, and someone had been down this road doing exactly that. For more than a mile, all of the fuel flaps were open, with the caps dangling down on their chains or sitting somewhere close on the ground. Someone had been shacked up nearby for months, and might have even still been around, enjoying the comforts of a gasoline-powered generator. It was the incentive Dodger needed to keep moving and get to somewhere with a little more cover.

Santa Monica Blvd was exactly the same. Cars everywhere, some broken into in the hopes of finding something useful and most with their fuel tanks standing open. But whoever had been siphoning off the gas didn’t seem to be sticking around. The street was completely deserted and silent, except for the noises from the wildlife that had all moved in and taken over. Birds chirped and whistled, making it sound more like a cheery forest than the middle of LA. Somewhere far in the distance, Dodger could hear a dog barking, again encouraging her to pick up the pace and find a place to settle down before looking for supplies. If she was lucky, whoever or whatever the dog was barking at would stay far away from her.

The sun was high in the sky and burning hot when Dodger finally reached the coast. She walked under the pier to get some shade, and to keep off the hot sand that wanted to burn even through her shoes. She walked straight to the water’s edge, letting it get up to her knees before finally stopping. The temptation to just let herself fall into the water completely was almost overwhelming, but even with the sun as hot as it was, she didn’t want to be walking around with soggy, wet clothes. Soggy wet shoes and jeans was going to be bad enough, especially getting back across the sand. Which it was soon time to do. As much as she wanted to just enjoy the cool water and dark shade, Dodger knew she had to find shelter. Not far down the beach, Dodger could see the lifeguard headquarters building, with its yellow trucks still parked outside on the sand. Curious, she made her way toward it, getting sand stuck to her shoes and jeans with each step. It seemed mostly intact, with no busted out windows or broken doors, but it was also unlocked. Dodger carefully stepped inside, peering around corners to make sure nobody was hiding quietly. It seemed like someone had been there before, but nobody was there now. There were a few large cooking pots with lids and rubber hoses piled up in one of the corners, and some trash kicked up against the walls, but nothing was left behind that was actually useful. A scour of every nook and cranny revealed no hidden food, but that wasn’t exactly unusual. Still, Dodger decided it would do, at least for a few days.

Dodger hadn’t realised how cooped up she’d felt until she survived her first brush with death. Although, it had not been a werewolf that had followed her (though she should have realised that, what with the moon being wrong for it, and all), but things might have gone a bit better if it had been. Because hellhounds didn’t exactly go away once the sun came up.

When she left Milliways, Dodger had expected to step back outside – since she had gone in, she expected that leaving would take her back out. Instead, she stepped out of Milliways and right into the crumbling McMansion she’d been intending to break into in the first place. As she rummaged around the cupboards for anything useful, she could hear the creature outside, trying to find a way in. After spending so much time in a place where food was not only plentiful, but in-date and varied, finding an old can of carrots and some store-brand dog food did not have quite the same feeling of triumph it once had. And worse, that lack of triumph only seemed to point out how far things had fallen that dog food was something she normally looked forward to. But not one to waste resources, she stuffed both cans into her bag and kept searching. There were still things in the fridge, but they were all things that had spawned their own ecosystems by that point, so Dodger let them be, not wanting to disturb what could potentially become the next dominant species on the planet.

Eager to get away from the sounds of the beast outside, Dodger abandoned the kitchen and found the stairs to the second floor. The entire house was coated in a layer of grime and grit, and felt like it wanted to fall apart under the next stiff breeze. But the bedrooms had beds, and doors that locked, so Dodger did what naturally came next: she set up camp and tried to nap through the night.

When Dodger ventured out in the morning, she could still hear the creature growling and snuffling around. Which told her two things. One, it wasn’t a werewolf. And two, it had managed to get inside. Dodger carefully walked toward the door, being as quiet as possible so the creature didn’t hear her. She didn’t dare open the door on it, in case it was too close to be able to close it again. Instead, she tapped lightly on the door, not liking how it sounded cheap and hollow beneath her fingernails. Before she even had a chance to consider what would happen if the beast was close to the bedroom, it slammed itself against the other side of the door, snarling and snapping while claws scraped against the other side of the door. Dodger leapt away quickly, looking around for the best means of escape. But she was on the top floor, and the only other way out of the bedroom was the window.

The beast made up Dodger’s mind for her, as its claws began to splinter the cheap door. Once it was through the first layer, it only had the second, equally-flimsy layer to go, and Dodger could hear it cracking and splintering already. Hooking her baseball bat onto the strap of her bag, Dodger ran toward the window and threw it open. Sparing only a cursory glance outside to make sure there wasn’t something else waiting for her below, Dodger jumped out, hitting the ground hard. A sharp, twisting pain shot through her ankle, but she ignored it. A sprain was inconvenient. Whatever was trying to get to her from the hallway was deadly. As she started to run toward the low fence around the back yard, Dodger could hear the rest of the door splintering, and the beast upstairs snarling its way through to her. She wished she could have closed the window, but there wasn’t exactly an easy way to have done that when she was falling out of it. As she reached the fence, Dodger looked back at the beast as it sprang out of the window after her, landing just as gracelessly as she had, and recovering just as quickly. Dodger looked over the fence at the steep drop down the hillside, and quickly climbed over. She ducked as close to the base of the fence as she could, making herself small and invisible as the beast – a hellhound, now that she’d seen it in the light – raced toward her. It snarled angrily as it jumped over the fence, but the snarl turned to a panicked yelp once it realised there was no ground beneath it to land on. The hellhound cartwheeled and bounced down the steep slope, eventually getting lost and buried in the thorny bushes below. Giving herself only a few moments to catch her breath, Dodger made sure the hellhound wasn’t going to follow her back up before she climbed back over the fence and ran toward the road. If hellhounds had moved in, this neighbourhood was no longer safe. Dodger had to find some new territory before nightfall.