Last Days — the beginning
I first started on this project over sixteen years ago.
It started when I woke up from a crazy dream in one of my first nights in that gorgeous 1920s building I lived in in Koreatown, LA.
The huge Equitable building right outside my window was almost the star of the dream, and as I developed the story over the next couple of years into an outline for a series of novels — even though I’d never written anything but scripts & screenplays at the time — the Equitable building remained a significant part of the LA storyline.
When I was finally satisfied with the outline, I tried to write the actual novel and found pretty quickly that scripts and screenplays are NOTHING like novels. After multiple nights sitting and staring at an empty screen, I ended up throwing in the towel and decided to turn it into a TV series instead. For a while back in 2007 & 2008 my manager back then was getting the pilot looked at by a bunch of different production companies, but the second The Walking Dead got greenlit by AMC, nobody wanted to take on another zombie TV show until they saw how Darabont & Kirkman’s did.
Years went by and I got more into producing than writing and directing, but did continue writing on the side, and eventually I started writing with Jared Boghosian. Over the course of writing our pilot “Yoyo”, Jared and I developed a pretty great rapport. One of the main things Kendall and I knew we’d be leaving behind when we decided to leave the US for New Zealand, was all of our filmmaking contacts. So earlier this year, Jared and I started talking about working together remotely to bring Last Days back as a novel after all.
So here’s the very first bit of this new endeavor. Jared and I hope you enjoy it.
01 — ALLAN
Ocean waves crashed against the low rock wall, witnessed by a dense line of swaying trees in the distance. This field of undulating lava frozen in time is King’s Landing, and it’s famous for catching the foot of Hawaii’s greatest king at the end of the eighteenth century. The mercy of the fishermen who faced Kamehameha all that time ago, inspired the Law of the Splintered Paddle, wherein the great Hawaiian king abolished human sacrifice and enshrined the safety of all his innocent subjects into law.
Allan, a descendant of those subjects with gray starting to sprout through his sparse beard, stood alone at the edge of the low rock cliff bundled up in a thick down jacket with a faux fur hood lining, wearing a filled, oversized, heavy backpack. He looked down to find a thick weathered walking stick — like the kind a storybook wizard might wield — in one hand and a large, ragged recurve bow in his other, a quiver full of arrows hanging from his hip.
A quiet whimper drew Allan’s attention to a black dog sitting obediently at his heels, as if appearing from nowhere. Blinking and confused, Allan slowly laid the walking stick down to pet the anxious canine’s head.
“What’s wrong, boy?” Allan heard himself say, but the dog whined again, glancing anxiously at the treeline towards the mountain, or mauka.
Allan stood up straight, faced the treeline, and heard the hint of a distant moan wafting faintly through the swaying trees a quarter mile away. A soft sound made him look down to see that he’d instinctively pulled an arrow from his quiver and nocked it. A freezing gust of wind blew by, Allan shivered. “Why is it so cold? It’s never that cold here,” he thought. The faint sounds inshore grew to a chorus of moaning voices further mauka, as if coming from the entire island all at once.
Something up the coast drew the dog’s attention and Allan followed its look, to see standing right next to them an ancient, wrinkled figure, wearing only a simple ancient malo, or loincloth. “Grandpa,” Allan thought, and a decades old memory of this same man on his deathbed flashed through Allan’s mind. It was a memory of pain, but also of deep love and adoration. Here, bare to the elements, Tutu seemed completely oblivious of the cold, and Allan realized with a soporific certainty that the cold was somehow only affecting him and the dog. The rest of this familiar Hawaiian coastline was bathed in a bright, warm moonlight, but filled with a growing sense of dread as well.
The chorus of moans grew ever louder, drawing Allan’s attention back toward the trees briefly, but he felt his Tutu stepping closer, and turned to lock eyes with him.
His Tutu’s lips didn’t move, but Allan clearly heard his deep baritone voice say “Run. Hide,” and King’s Landing was gone.
Moans.
A vivid orange and red sunrise over a cold mountain pass.
A hand descending into shadow — cement and metal rungs leading down.
More moans.
An abandoned campsite, the campfire still smoldering.
The smoking ruin of a city sliced down the middle by a river.
The moans, getting louder.
A shadow climbing the wall of a hundred year old apartment building in the dessert.
Firelight glowing from within the walls of an ivy-covered, blood-spattered stadium.
A stampede of trampling feet. Loud whispers, and the moans, a cacophonous sonic tsunami of moans.
And then nothing. No wind, no crashing waves, no swaying trees. No moans.
Nothing. Until again, out of the silent darkness: “Run. Hide.”
*****
Allan shot up from his bed, instantly awake and dripping sweat. He looked down at his hands to find them trembling. Taking a few slow breaths, he calmed himself and sighed. What the fuck was that?
After a quick shower, he put on his work uniform and opened the sliding glass door to the balcony for some fresh air.
Allan never tired of this view from his uncle’s apartment. From those huge picture windows six floors up, one of the tallest buildings in Eugene. The sea of tree tops under the eternally clear, blue sky never failed to put him at ease, no matter how unsettled or out of place he felt. Still never felt quite like home — like he belonged, but as close as anything else … so far.
Out of place was Allan’s default. He never felt at home anywhere, not in Hawaii, not anywhere he’d ever been, and he never understood why. He often wondered if there was something wrong with him, if the contentment of feeling at home, like he belonged anywhere, was an emotion he was simply incapable of experiencing for more than a brief moment or two.
A memory from his childhood suddenly came back to him. He saw the light blue water lapping over a shallow shelf of reef at King’s Landing on a rare sunny Hilo day. Something about the combination of the bright sun, the soft breeze, the solitude, the light calming sounds of waves slapping against the rocks, and all those tiny fish living their bright lives in that shallow pool of life. For a brief moment, it had given Allan his very first glimpse of that feeling, that sensation of being where he belonged, doing what he was meant to be doing. It was such an unfamiliar sensation that in that moment, he’d realized for the first time that he’d never before felt at home, felt like he’d belonged.
It was an odd sensation to have at such a young age he thought to himself while looking over the ocean of green tree tops from his uncle’s balcony. He thought of it again because this view right here, thousands of miles away from King’s Landing would now and then give Allan a hint of that feeling — like the scent of bread being baked somewhere upwind — just a whiff of that feeling, but then in a moment it was gone.
The dream had also been in King’s Landing, he remembered, and a shiver of fear went up his spine. Oh, right. The dream. “I have to remember everything,” he said out loud.
“Remember what?”
Allan spun around startled. Uncle Moke, still in his ragged old-school PJs, was chuckling and rubbing his eyes, “Sorry, brah. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“A’ole pilikia, uncle, I just …” Allan stopped. What should he say? No sense avoiding it. “Grampa came to me last night.”
As he told him about the dream — he was surprised he could remember every detail, and he shared them with his uncle. Uncle Moke listened soberly without uttering a single word, and after Allan was done, they sat together in silence, staring at nothing for who knows how long.
Finally, with a sigh, Allan asked, “Where’s your boat?”
Uncle Moke nodded, and answered, “At the pier,” even though he knew Allan wasn’t really asking, so much as suggesting.
Tutu’s words rung in both their ears.
Run. Hide.
And that’s what they’d both do.
