Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  Addison joined him. He put an arm over her shoulder. He thought she might cry—he would have, if it had happened to him at her age—but she didn’t. He thought that, of the three of them, she might have been the strongest.

  Addison answered the phone. She listened a moment, and then handed it to her father.

  “It’s Mom,” she whispered. “She’s crying.”

  He couldn’t immediately make out what she was saying; it was an incoherent mixture of words and sobs. But she finally pulled herself together.

  “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” she said. “I went to the hotel and gave them my credit card…and it was refused! What have you done to us, Dave? That desk clerk, the way she looked at me…and they kept the card, David! As if I had stolen it!”

  “I’m so sorry, Karen. I have some cash, if you want it. You can go somewhere else. Where did you try to check in?”

  “The Beverly-Wilshire.” He knew the Beverly-Wilshire’s rooms went for around $600 per night. “I suppose you want me to live at the Motel 6.”

  “No, but there are good accommodations that are cheaper than the Beverly-Wilshire. Just come back here and I’ll give you the money. We’ll work something out.”

  “I can’t. I wrecked the car.”

  “Karen, are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m not all right. But I’m not injured. I was so upset…”

  “Tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you.”

  The car was at the curb on Santa Monica Boulevard, on the edge of Beverly Hills. Karen was sitting in the backseat on the left, and at first he couldn’t see anything wrong with the car. He parked behind her and got out onto the sidewalk, leaving Addison inside. Then he could see that the right front fender was crumpled and a lot of paint had been scratched off on that side. The doors on the right side were also caved in. Karen got out of the car and stood looking at it.

  “What happened?” he asked her.

  “I was crying, and reached for my purse. I hit a parked car.”

  “Where’s the car?”

  “Gone. He came out of that shop there. He was angry. It was a silver Porsche. We exchanged insurance information and he drove off.”

  Dave squatted down and took a closer look at the fender.

  “My beautiful Mercedes,” she said, and started crying again. Addison appeared at her side and put her arm around her mother.

  “Karen, it’s no big deal. I don’t think those doors will open, but the fender’s not touching the tire. We can drive it home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t see why not. We’ll start her up and drive it a few blocks and see how that goes. Okay? Do you want me to take you to another hotel?”

  She didn’t answer at once. He didn’t know if she realized she had been overdramatizing, but he found himself wondering, with a bit of hope, if she had used the excuse of the “totaled” car to backtrack on her announced intentions.

  “And pay with cash?”

  “They do still take it, you know. They might want a deposit for phone calls and other room charges.”

  Still she said nothing.

  “I think there’s a hotel a couple blocks south of here. The Carlyle, something like that.” He happened to know the room rates were more like $150 per night. He had Googled it. She looked like she was thinking it over.

  “It’s a Best Western, isn’t it?” she finally said. It broke his heart, the hopelessness in her voice when she said it, as if he were recommending a flophouse.

  “Nothing wrong with that. Or, I could take you back home. I’ll move into the guesthouse, you’ll hardly have to deal with me. It’ll be better all around. You can still call a lawyer in the morning.”

  She looked around her, as if she’d never seen Santa Monica Boulevard before.

  “Come on, Mom,” Addison said.

  Karen sighed, and he held the door of the Mercedes open for her.

  “I’m not driving that car again,” she said.

  “Fine. I’ll drive it. You take the Escalade.”

  They saw very little of each other during the following weeks, though every time they did run into each other in the course of the day, her expression was a little more smug than it had been the last time, and he was sure he looked like the nervous wreck he was becoming as the days went by and things settled into the new normal.

  The school year ended. Aside from feeding Ranger, and cleaning up after him, Addison spent as little time as possible at the house. Dave could hardly blame her. He had bought her a new bicycle. She and her friends were getting used to cycling to places their parents used to take them in their soccer-mom SUVs. At first, Addison would arrive home in the evening exhausted from the hard climb up Doheny, but after a week she was doing a lot better. Even some of her friends from the flatlands came by to do whatever it is fourteen-year-old girls do, giggling behind closed doors with their iPods and their cell phones. They took turns riding Ranger on the steep streets, so the big horse got enough exercise to stay in shape.

  Dave suspected boys were discussed, now and then.

  He had made one last trip in the Escalade, stocking up on staples like flour and rice and cornmeal and sugar. He was now leaving the house only every third day, puttering along on his little scooter, shopping for items he had forgotten and taking the pulse of the city.

  What he saw, though far from apocalyptic, was alarming enough. Grocery-store shelves were looking barren. Staple foods were sold out, and when a new shipment arrived at Ralphs or Vons, lines formed outside to get the one twenty-pound bag of rice or flour allowed to each customer.

  The army surplus stores on Hollywood Boulevard and on Vine were shuttered, sold out to the bare walls. There were no more guns to be had, except on the street, at ruinous prices.

  He spent some of his time cobbling together a scooter trailer from plywood and the wheels off an old wagon he had bought at a garage sale, using plans he found on the Internet. It wasn’t a pretty thing, but it would do to carry home any treasures he managed to snap up in his prowls of the supermarkets, Costco, and Home Depot.

  There was the expected chaos on the Monday when both gas rationing and mandatory carpooling began. To no one’s surprise, the rationing system was far from ready on the first day. Some ration cards had gone out, but many millions nationwide had not received them, and thus were not able to purchase gasoline. The uproar over that was immense, to the point that the president had to go on television and announce a week’s delay. Until then, everyone could continue to buy all the gas they could afford.

  With prices fluctuating wildly between eight dollars and twelve dollars per gallon, that often meant less than a tankful.

  All the cities and towns along the vast freeway system posted police at each freeway entrance, and simply didn’t let any car enter unless it had a full load of passengers. Commuters arrived and had the option of parking their cars on the city streets or getting in line to take on passengers. The next day the newspapers and blogs were full of stories of how people actually had a good experience with what was, in essence, hitching a ride with total strangers. For once they had people to talk to, and they often found that they enjoyed it.

  Once on the freeways, of course, the real benefit of the gas shortage became obvious. The commute had never gone more smoothly. The parking lots downtown were three-quarters empty.

  Metro riders had the worst of it. The buses and trains were jammed far beyond capacity, running late, and the bus stops and train stations overflowed. Talk radio hummed with outraged callers, and the majority of them were riders on the Metro. The mayor appealed to school-bus companies, and after they did their morning rounds thousands of them roamed the Metro routes, picking up people who were already late for work and not happy about it.

  To the surprise of many people, the city muddled through a hectic week.

  It turned out that 90 percent of public-school students who had been taking buses could reasonably be expected to walk to school, thoug
h that was sometimes as much as three or four miles. Parents objected, overweight students objected, and the school district shrugged. This is how it is, the superintendent said. There will be no buses. Deal with it.

  But the gasoline tankers continued to roll along the interstates and delivered their loads to the neighborhood service stations, defying Dave’s gloomy predictions. Gas could be had, just not as much of it as they were used to.

  People bitched. People moaned. People vowed never to vote for the mayor, the governor, the president, and all the Congress ever again.

  But as the days went by they began to adjust.

  Dave had to admit that he was conflicted. He had invested pretty heavily in a doomsday scenario. Everything he thought he knew had pointed to it. It had all seemed reasonable, it had seemed impossible that things could simply carry on, though at a much reduced level. He had bet the farm—or what pitiful acreage he had left after three lean years—and he was beginning to think that he’d made a terrible mistake. He was feeling like a millennialist end-of-the-world prophet on January 1, 2000. He was besieged by doubts.

  Karen went out frequently, at first. One thing that can be counted on in a rationing regime is that a black market will develop, and that there will be those willing to pay premium prices for somebody else’s gas allotment. Many of Karen’s friends were quite wealthy, and were not about to let a gas crisis crimp their lifestyle. One or another of them would call on her most days, in their BMWs and Mercedes SUVs, and they took off to the Polo Lounge or Spago or Urasawa for lunch. Dave had taken to leaving hundred-dollar bills here and there where she would find them. It was easier than getting into a row by forcing her to ask him for money.

  One day in the middle of the second week of their official estrangement, the ladies stopped dropping by. The phone stopped ringing. Addison, the confirmed supersnoop, informed him that she had listened as his wife made a few calls of her own, and it was clear she was being cut off. Like sharks scenting blood in the water, they had sensed that she could no longer afford to run with them. Karen got the message eventually. She stopped making calls and took to her bed with a massive migraine. She hadn’t had one in years. This one lasted four days.

  It was three weeks into their estrangement that something finally happened that seemed to confirm his worst fears.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dave was sitting in his office contemplating the wreckage of his finances. The bills for his spending spree had come in, and even though they were not yet overdue, he was getting calls from the credit-card companies asking when they could expect payment on the over-limit balances. He was thinking he had made a big mistake.

  He was jolted out of his dismal thoughts by a shock wave that rattled the windows in front of him.

  It was an exceptionally clear day, about an hour from sunset. Beyond his windows, smoke and debris was rising from a wide area just over six miles due south of him. He knew the distance because he had measured it on a map. It was the Doheny oil field, erupting like a volcano.

  The field was one of the reasons people came to Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century. Over the years the city had grown up around it, and now it sat between Culver City and Baldwin Hills. La Cienega Boulevard cut right through the middle of it, and on each side you could see hundreds of pumpjacks, big iron beams on fulcrums that had always reminded Dave of some strange bird pecking slowly and rhythmically at the ground. What they were doing was pumping oil, a hundred years after the original wells had been sunk.

  He watched, awestruck, as large chunks of earth and metal rose slowly into the air, finally reached an apogee, and were relentlessly pulled back to the ground by gravity. He knew they were much larger than they looked, to be visible six miles away. Where they hit, they sent up secondary showers of debris. It took him a moment to realize that beneath some of that falling wreckage were homes. People would be sitting down to dinner, mothers and fathers and children.

  He raced outside, digging in his pocket for his phone. He was punching buttons with his thumb as he entered the main house. Karen was just coming down the stairs, looking confused.

  “Was that an earthquake?” she asked.

  “No. The oil field just exploded.”

  The screen said Dialing…then Addison answered.

  “Daddy? Did you feel that quake?”

  “It wasn’t an earthquake, Addie. It was an explosion. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Beverly Center.”

  That put her two miles closer to the inferno than he was. Karen was watching the huge rising column of smoke and flame, looking stunned.

  “Where is Addison?” she asked.

  “She’s okay. Listen, Addie, I want you to stay on the line.” The Beverly Center was at La Cienega, between Beverly and Third. There were five aboveground levels of parking, and three levels of retail sitting on top of them. Access from the parking levels to the shops was by a series of external escalators.

  “I want you to go to the escalators and take a look outside, and to the south. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.” She sounded a little frightened, and she hadn’t even seen the fire yet. He was worried because some of that debris seemed to have landed a mile or two from the column of flame that was still growing. Could it reach four miles? Should he try to go get her in the Escalade? He suspected her best bet for getting back to him quickly might be on her bike, but he didn’t feel good about that.

  Even as these thoughts were churning through his head, there was another bright explosion, silence for a few seconds, and then a third. He backed away from the windows, which soon rattled from the shock waves. These blasts seemed even more powerful than the first one.

  “Daddy, I’m outside, and I can see a lot of smoke and fire down south. What’s happening? I’m scared!”

  “Just stay calm, Addie. It’s an explosion at the oil field.”

  “Like in Iran and Russia and stuff?”

  “Yes, like that. I didn’t think about all the oil we’re sitting on here in Los Angeles. I mean, it’s nothing like Saudi Arabia…” He shook his head. That was more detail than she needed. He was pacing, mostly looking at the fire. He did notice that Karen was going back upstairs.

  “You’re a long ways from it,” he told her. “Back here at home we’ll be even safer. What I want you to do…Hello? Hello? Addie, stay on the line.”

  But she was gone. The call had been dropped. Cursing, he dialed again, and the call went straight to voice mail. “Addie, come right home!” he said, and dialed again. This time she answered.

  “I lost you, Daddy. You didn’t hang up, did you?”

  “No, honey, and don’t you hang up, either. I think the cell towers are overloaded with people making calls about the explosion. We may get dropped again, so listen. I want you back here.”

  “So do I.”

  “I’m coming for you. I want you to wait for me on the San Vicente side, okay? I’ll be coming that way. I want you to stay up there on the second parking level, and if you hear more explosions, I want you to move to the center of the parking lot. I’m worried that some debris might be falling down there. Can you do that?”

  “Yes. This far away?”

  “I really doubt it, but I don’t want to take the chance. I’ll be there in…fifteen minutes. You stay on the line. If we get cut off again, don’t try to call me. I’ll be calling you.” Something else occurred to him. “Is anybody with you?”

  “Laurie was, but she took off.”

  Good. He wouldn’t have to take any of her friends home. He ran out to the garage, holding the phone to his ear.

  They were cut off again as he backed the Escalade out of the garage. He kept thumbing redial as he barreled down the street, but couldn’t get a connection. He wanted to do eighty, ninety miles per hour but he forced himself to slow down. There are a lot of hairpin curves on Doheny. It wouldn’t do Addison any good if he rolled the car.

  Traffic was still light as he made the left on Sunset. He turne
d on the radio as he crossed and sped down the hill. Incredibly, most of the stations were still playing music or idiotic talk shows. He kept thumbing the dial until he arrived at KPCC, public radio, which had switched to crisis mode. But they didn’t have much to report yet beyond the fact of the explosion itself. In fact, he knew more than they did from having observed it from his backyard. Reporters were on the way.

  He made the right turn on San Vicente and as he was rolling down the hill again he found K-EARTH 101. They had reporters on the way, too, but theirs were closer. They also had people calling in from Culver City and Fox Hills and Ladera Heights, very close to the oil field.

  “A lot of stuff fell out of the sky,” one guy was saying. “Something big landed on my roof, and something landed on my neighbor’s house and it’s on fire. Now this black stuff is coming down, and it sticks to everything. I’m getting my family in the car, and we’re…Come on, Shirley, we’ve got to move! I don’t know…the street is covered in this stuff. My shoes are sticking to the ground.”

  “Sir, you hang up now and take care of your family,” the disk jockey said. “Now we’ve got…Mike in Culver City. Go ahead, Mike.”

  “Chris, the smoke is black as ink, and it’s blotting out half the sky. It looks like it’s blowing south, toward Westchester and LAX. We had a—”

  “Let me interrupt you, Mike. We have confirmed that all flights, that is all flights leaving LAX have been canceled, and all arriving flights have been diverted due to the smoke that has almost completely obscured the airport. Visibility is near zero in that area. So if you have loved ones arriving, call the airport information line and find out where they’re going. Flights are being diverted to Ontario, Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, and John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. Now, go ahead, Mike.”