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all but empty. The bars and restaurants that had been outposts of East Side gentrification were gated, boarded up, or burned out. A few sleepless walking aimlessly, scratching their heads, rubbing their eyes, talking to themselves. Some Griffith Park refugees had managed to cross the I-5 and the river below the checkpoint and were scavenging in the abandoned storefronts. Not that there was much left. But once the boulevard dipped under the railroad just past Seneca, the blocks started to repopulate.
    Heavily armed vatos, favoring AR15s and Tec 9s, were on every street corner. Sandbags lined the edges of rooftops, gun barrels peeking out from behind. Taco trucks and tamale carts were at the curbs, vendors sporting holstered sidearms. Kids played in the street, running in and out of the night traffic, young mothers calling to them in Chicano Spanish. Older men sat at tables on the sidewalks, playing cards or dominoes.
    Hounds pulled his Glock from its holster and tucked it between his thighs.
    "I find out who fingered us for this fucking detail, I'm gonna get his home address, come back here, and pay one of these vatos twenty bucks to go burn his house down with him and his family inside. I mean, look at this shit. Like another fucking country. What the fuck."
    Kleiner stuck one of Park's Demerols between his lips.
    "Be like this in the Fairfax pretty soon. The Jews, they're starting to put up sawhorses at the ends of their blocks. Yarmulkes and Uzis. Gonna change the name to Little Israel any day now."
    They drove past a dropped 1980 Chevy Stepside, a man perched on the fender, leather holsters crossed over his chest Pancho Villa style, mad dogging them.
    Hounds gritted his teeth.
    "Give me the eye. Find your ass west of the Five, break your ass down you look at me like that. Fucking savages over here. Goddamn jungle. Show me now, show me the guy who thinks building a border fence would have been a bad idea, and let me make that asshole run naked through this shit."
    Down San Fernando, just before Treadwell, they came to the concrete anti-car bomb barriers that closed the street around Silverlake Station. Freshly spray-painted across one of the barriers, over the tangle of tags, a new graffito:
    The retrofitted minigun on a Stryker infantry fighting vehicle turned and trained its cluster of barrels on the Crown Vic, an amplified voice blaring.
    "Welcome to Silverlake Station. Get out of the fucking car with your hands in view and get your fucking face on the pavement."
    Hounds killed the engine.
    "Fucking jungle."
    DRIVING DOWN SKID Row had always been a prospect not unlike visiting the set of a George Romero movie. But with the advent of the sleepless prion, that effect had started to envelop the entire city. The sidewalks, malls, movie theaters, tourist attractions, beaches, and restaurants becoming populated with stiff-necked, shuffling sleepless.
    Zombie jokes were common. Gallows humor being about all the situation made room for.
    Movies themselves had not stopped shooting. Certainly production had been scaled back, and more than one studio had gone under or, more accurately, been consumed whole by somewhat heartier competitors, but even as energy costs spiked, even as all cities, most suburbs, and many rural areas, experienced outbreaks of organized violence, even as the standing army was deployed with obvious permanence to the oil fields in Alaska, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil, even as the draft was reinstated and the gears of the economy audibly snapped their teeth and ground to a squealing halt, even as the drought extended and crops withered, even as the ice caps melted and coastal waters rose, people still liked a good picture.
    The fact of millions of sleepless wandering about trying to fill the dark hours meant an expansion of one market, even as it contracted in other areas.
    Sleepless provided other new opportunities as well.
    I'd been told by a client about an independent horror movie he was helping to