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Much later, his foot kicked aside something that caught the subdued sunlight. It was a shard of reflective red plastic. Kneeling, he wiped away the sand that half buried it. For his efforts he was rewarded with the sight of a highway reflector. Brushing away more sand and grit exposed pavement and a yellow dividing line. Incongruous though it might be in the complete absence of any vehicles, it did provide him with something he had so far been lacking.

A direction.

More hours of walking found him gaining instead of losing strength. That made no sense, but since nothing else seemed to make any sense he saw no reason to question the contradiction. He accepted it just as he accepted the sight of the nearly obliterated hillside sign that was just intact enough to proclaim “HOLLYWOOD.” From his vantage point he had a good portion of the city spread out before him.

Or rather, what had been the city.

Like the metropolis it had once been, the ruins stretched out as far as he could see, the promontory of the Palos Verdes Peninsula looming like a buff shadow in the distance. Of life there were still no signs. In the entire vast vista of destruction, not even the dust moved.

It took him a while to work his way downtown. There he hoped to find potable water, though so far all he had encountered was wreckage and devastation in close-up, from obliterated storefronts to the dinosaurian hulks of cars and trucks, some of which had crumbling skeletons slumped at the wheels.

Something moved in the distance, walking. Though several hundred yards away, there was no mistaking the human shape of the lone figure. Disbelief gave way to a ray of hope. Cupping one hand to his mouth, he yelled.

“Hey!”

The figure turned toward him. It was humanoid—but not human. No human could have supported the oversized machine gun it started to aim. As a shell-shocked Wright gaped at it dumbly, a grim-faced youth appeared as if from nowhere and slammed into him.

They tumbled together behind a heavy forklift as a hail of heavy-caliber shells tore into the pavement where Wright had been standing a moment earlier. How they missed him he could not understand. Rising to the fore, half-forgotten instincts took over. Rolling deeper into cover, he found himself face to face with the teen. When the boy spoke, he did not sound young.

“Come with me if you want to live.”

More slugs ripped the air around the forklift as the figure that had trained its weapon on Wright started toward them. Red eyes flickered; scanning, seeking, looking to exterminate. The teen led Wright back around the corner of one crumbling structure. They were out of sight of their attacker and out of range. For the moment.

Facing his young companion, Wright jerked his head back in the direction from which they had come.

“What the hell is...?”

Despite the difference in their ages and the disparity in size, the teen did not hesitate. His open hand clamped across Wright’s mouth, shutting off the older man’s query. In an earlier time and place the blatant physical imposition would have caused Wright to rip the youth’s head clean off. Under the present circumstances, however, he was too confused to do more than accept the gesture.

Pointing in the direction of the bipedal creature that had fired at them, the teen then gestured at his own ear. Only when Wright nodded that he understood did the youth lower his hand from the stranger’s mouth.

Time passed: not much of it, and all of it fraught with tension. Advancing toward them, their pursuer was barely visible, and inclined its head in their direction. The muzzle of its rapid-fire weapon rose. That was when the teen slammed his arm down on something metallic protruding from the side of the building against which he and Wright had been pressed.

The wire that looped around the stalker’s right foot was not thick, but it was unbreakable. Machine and machine gun were turned upside-down as the contracting cable yanked it completely off the ground. Frustrated but not disoriented, it struggled violently at this unexpected interruption of its pursuit.

Not