state of emergency.
“My daughter says there would be more than a million already if it weren’t for the Seelie Court’s heroism,” Aunt Daisy said.
The ticker kept scrolling. TERROR LEVEL RAISED TO RED…WATER SUPPLY
SUSPECTED.
“This can still work,” Adan said.
“How? There are maybe a hundred Xolos, Adan. They can move fast through the Between, sure, but they’re not going to clean up a hundred thousand zombies anytime soon. In the meantime, the ones they don’t get are going to be making more zombies. I kept telling people, this isn’t a fucking plague and we haven’t found a cure. There are already too many zombies. We’re done.”
“It’s not just the Xolos. We also have the Seelie Court and the other outfits you called in. They’ve done a good job, Domino. It’s been, what, five days since Terrence’s nephews crawled out of their graves? Daisy is right- there could be a million zombies by now. If that had happened, we’d be a couple days away from losing the whole Southland. We still have time to contain it.”
“It’s on the fucking news,” I said. “The Stag guys were supposed to keep it quiet.”
“Five days, Domino. They weren’t going to be able to suppress it forever. Not with a hundred thousand zombies running around eating people. And the news thinks it’s a terrorist attack. This can be contained.”
I leaned over and put my head in my hands. “I should have moved faster. Oh, fuck me, I went to a fucking party.”
“If you hadn’t gone to that party, Oberon might be sitting this one out. And then it really would be game over.”
“A hundred thousand, Adan. And who knows how many before we get ahead of this thing-if we get ahead of it.
A hundred thousand people. How am I supposed to wrap my head around that?” I looked up and nodded at the TV screen. “They’ve turned Victoria Park into a fucking all you-can-eat buffet.”
“There are more than seventeen million in the South land,” Adan said. “If you hadn’t taken the actions you did, they’d all be gone in a couple days. Try to wrap your head around that, instead.”
“What do we do now?” I said, staring at the images of carnage and destruction that played across the screen. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be responsible for this.”
Adan sat down on the couch beside me. Honey and Jack alighted on my shoulders. “We’re already responsible for it, Domino,” he said. “There’s no one else. With the Seelie Court, the outfits and the Xolos on the case, we can roll it back.”
I got up and walked to the French doors, threw them open and went out on the balcony. All up and down my street, families were packing up their cars and preparing to flee the city. I wondered what the streets and freeways looked like, and if any of them would make it out. Some of the houses and apartment buildings were boarded up. Were there people holed up inside or had they already left?
I suddenly understood why Chavez always had two or three cell phones within reach-I needed to talk to everybody and I didn’t have much time. My first call went to Agent Lowell. I heard a series of clicks and beeps before the connection went through. I didn’t know if that meant we had a secure line or if it was just the recording and monitoring equipment switching on.
“Lowell,” said Lowell.
“You need to evacuate the city. You know as well as I do this isn’t a fucking plague. It’s the best way to slow the spread.”
There was silence on the line for a moment. “We don’t have any evacuation plans for something like this. There are plans for evacuation in the event of earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis, but they’re inadequate for this event. Successful evacuations depend on process, and the process doesn’t fit.”
“I don’t buy that. You get the people out of town. It doesn’t seem that difficult.”
“Which areas are evacuated first? Not the coast and the areas most in danger of flooding, because that’s irrelevant. So no one knows where to start. The plan doesn’t apply. Where do you relocate people to? Not the safe zones designated in the plans, because they’re irrelevant. So no one knows where to put the people they evacuate. The plan doesn’t apply. What do you do when the rescue personnel get eaten? What do you do when you load up a bus or a helicopter and a zombie gets onboard? No one knows, because there is no fucking plan for that. So instead of everyone following a plan, you need top-down command and control and that’s how evacuations turn into clusterfucks. On top of all that, the plans weren’t developed for something on this scale. We need one hundred percent regional evacuation. We don’t have anything close. We don’t have the resources for it. And even if we did it would take weeks. We have days, maybe.”
“So you’re not even going to try? Even if you only move out a few hundred thousand people, it makes a big difference in the math. That’s a few hundred thousand who won’t die, and who won’t be killing a handful of other people tomorrow, and the day after that. A few hundred thousand today, a million tomorrow, pretty soon you’re talking real numbers.”
“I know, Domino. But even though we know it’s not a plague, the decision-makers are worried about controlling panic and disruption in other cities. A half-assed evacuation would be bad optics at a national level.”
“Fucking optics? What the hell does that mean, Lowell? You convince everyone it’s just a Los Angeles problem, the rest of the country can still go shopping?”
“Something like that,” Lowell said. “I didn’t make the decision, Domino. And the few of us who know what’s really going on, we can’t prove this thing won’t spread. We can’t even fully disclose what’s causing it-not outside our little community of freaks. We’d be discredited and lose what little influence we have now.”
“So the people calling the shots don’t even really know what’s happening?”
“That’s right, Domino, they aren’t aware Los Angeles is being overrun by zombies because some ghost abducted all the psychopomps so a creep called La Calavera could run a supernatural dogfighting ring in the spirit world. Maybe you’d like to come to D.C. and testify before a Congressional hearing. Just don’t mention my name.”
“How much of it do the networks have?”
“Not much. Stag has put some juice into it. There have been urban legends about LSD in the water supply since the fifties, so we have plenty to work with. Speculation is more unconventional on the internet and blogosphere, of course. There are real zombies giving a play-by-play on Twitter.”
“Jesus Christ, okay, I’m hearing a hundred thousand. Does that match what you’ve got?”
“It’s a little more…it’s moving fast, Domino. That’s up from maybe thirty-five thousand twenty-four hours ago. Vigilantism and riots are a big multiplier now. People aren’t sure who’s a zombie and who isn’t.”
“Damn it, anyone who walks with a limp is probably getting gunned down. We haven’t been able to contain it at all?”
“Your people are doing a good job, but it’s getting away from them.”
“King Oberon can bring in a lot more…he’s got a nation on the other side. But he needs territory to support them. If I keep giving him L.A. real estate, all the outfits will end up working for the fairies.”
“I’ll run it up the chain of command, Domino, but I don’t think I can sell parceling out the sovereign territory of the United States to some fairy king. If it came to that, I think the decision-makers would rather give up L.A. They do still have the unconventional protocols.”
“Fire-bombing the city.”
“Yeah, but as unthinkable as that is for us, Domino, it’s a scenario with a manageable end-state. L.A. is destroyed, it’s the worst tragedy in our history, it’s crippling to the country…but it’s over. Oberon is a whole new open-ended crisis that no one knows how to manage. They’re not going down that road when there’s a clean way out.”
“You’re talking about murdering millions of people and calling it a clean way out.”
“They wouldn’t have to murder anyone,” Lowell said. “In a few days, there won’t be anyone left alive in
