Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “Like I was saying, Chris, first we got a shower of what was mostly dirt mixed in with something that looked like chunks of asphalt. Then we got this goo falling, like hot tar on the road. It sticks to everything. I don’t know how we’re going to clean this shit up…Sorry about the language.”

  There was more, but Dave turned it down as he arrived at the Beverly Center.

  He pulled off to the right and looked up along the opening of the second-floor parking lot, and there was Addison. She was waving to him. He gestured for her to come down, and she nodded. He got out of the car and looked south again. It was terrifying, it looked like the end of the world. The sun had just set but there was plenty of light yet to see just how large the smoke cloud had grown. As he stood there yet another explosion flared bright orange, the sound arriving a few seconds later.

  Addison came spiraling down the ramp and onto the sidewalk, braked, looked both ways, and crossed over to him as he opened the back of the Escalade. He could see she had been crying.

  “I’m scared, Daddy.”

  “I know, Addie. It’s scary.” He gave her a big hug, and they both jumped as they heard another explosion. He put her bike in the back, got into the driver’s seat, and waited a moment until she was buckled in. Then he made a U-turn and started back up San Vicente.

  Addison called her mother to tell her she was okay, then she turned up the radio volume.

  “This just in. The Los Angeles and Culver City fire departments have issued a mandatory evacuation order for a wide area. This is because of the danger of the many fires spreading, and also the smoke. Currently the wind is blowing to the southwest between five and ten miles per hour. The smoke is not known to be toxic. Let me repeat that, so far as is known now, the smoke is not toxic, but it is not healthy. Those with respiratory problems are in immediate danger, and even healthy people should avoid breathing it, especially the ash and fine particles of what seems to be tar that are in the smoke. Face masks are recommended. You can improvise a mask from a piece of cloth. Winds are expected to shift, so the evacuation area extends to the east and south as well as to the southwest. Here are the boundaries of the mandatory—let me say it again—mandatory evacuation area.”

  It was a huge area, a monstrous area. There had to be half a million people within it. It was bounded by Venice Boulevard to the west and north, Jefferson Boulevard to the north, Crenshaw to the east, and Century to the south. It included parts of Venice, all of Marina del Rey and Culver City, Baldwin Hills, Windsor Hills, and most of Inglewood. Loyola Marymount University was within that area.

  “We don’t know where to tell you to go at this point, friends,” the disk jockey was saying. “I assume somebody’s setting up temporary shelters, but for now, the best advice is simply to get out. Drive to the east, if you can. If you have friends outside the area, try to get to them. If not, just drive out of the area and park somewhere and keep listening. I’ll fill you in on all the latest information as soon as I know it myself.”

  “Do we know anybody in that area, Daddy?”

  “I’m trying to think. Nobody’s coming to mind.”

  He turned on Sunset, then on Doheny, and started up the hill. Addison was looking back, and he could see the orange light on her face.

  “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, people,” the disk jockey was saying. He choked up, and couldn’t go on for a moment. “I’m watching it on television, and it looks like the world is coming to an end. I’ve had no reports on deaths or injuries, but it seems certain that there’s going to be a lot of them. As Mayor Giuliani said after 9/11, probably more than we can bear. If it was terrorists who did this…well, we’ll just have to wait and see. How somebody could do this is beyond me. It looks like an atomic bomb.” He paused, and Dave could faintly hear somebody shouting.

  “I’m sorry about that, listeners. Let me be clear here. We have no information that it was a nuclear explosion. The LAPD is not reporting any radiation. I repeat, there is no indication that this was an atomic bomb. At this point, we don’t know what caused this terrible thing, but what we do know is what I said before. Get out, my friends, just get out. Don’t bother to load anything into the car but your family and your pets, and drive as far as you can, as quickly as you can. And stay tuned for further information.”

  Dave turned down Nightingale and pressed the remote for the gate, swung into the driveway, and put the Escalade in the garage. They got out, walked around the garage, and stood looking at the spectacle. He felt Addison put her hand in his and squeeze. He put his arm around her.

  “Do you think a lot of people are dead, Daddy?”

  “I’m afraid so, honey. Let’s hope it’s not too many.”

  She nodded, then headed for the garage. Ranger needed tending every day, even if the world seemed to be falling apart. It was now dark enough for the patio lights and the lights in the pool to come on. Dave looked up at the second floor of the main house, and saw that Karen’s lights were on but the drapes were closed.

  Dave had a six-inch Meade refracting telescope. He went inside and rescued it from its corner, took it out, and set it up on the concrete at the edge of the pool. He got it focused on the conflagration and panned across it. He could see houses burning, and columns of fire and smoke rising into the night. All around it were the flashing red lights of fire trucks and ambulances and the blue lights of police. When he aimed at north–south streets he saw no taillights at all, only headlights coming his way, in all lanes. They didn’t seem to be moving much. The I-10 freeway was a parking lot. He hoped the DJ was telling the truth about the smoke’s not being toxic.

  He went inside. As he switched on the television his phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked the number, saw it was Dennis Rossi.

  “You missed the chance for some serious money,” Dennis said, when Dave answered. “I was ready to bet you $1000 that your little story was bullshit.”

  “Believe me, I’d have been happy to lose that grand.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He sighed. “I didn’t bother to tell Ellen about this when you laid it all out. Didn’t take it that seriously. But I’ve been telling her now, and she wants to hear more. Plus, you must have quite the view of what’s going down. Are you up for some company? I’ll bring the beer.”

  “Sure, come on over.”

  As he hung up he saw Addison standing on the patio looking south, outlined by the towering orange flames. He felt a deep ache inside. He wanted more than anything in the world to protect her from all this. But all he could do was watch, and await developments.

  He knew the families of Bob and Dennis, though not well. They had all spent so much time together under the pressure of writing that they didn’t feel the need to see each other outside of work. Every year when the series was renewed for another season they would all gather at Bob’s Holmby Hills estate for a barbecue, and that was about it. Jenna was not married but usually brought a boyfriend. Roger was divorced and Dave didn’t know his ex-wife at all. He knew Roger had two children and that the ex had custody.

  Dennis arrived a half hour later with his wife, Ellen, and son, Dylan, who was eight. Addison was there to greet them in Karen’s absence. They pulled up into the driveway and she shut the gate behind them. The three got out of their Explorer and walked slowly to the edge of the yard.

  “We got glimpses of it coming off the Cahuenga Pass,” Dennis said, softly. “But we couldn’t see just how…huge it is.”

  There was another bright flash of light, and a few seconds later the thunderclap of a new explosion. Dave heard Ellen gasp.

  “It’s so awful,” she said. “It’s so awful.”

  Dylan was tugging at Dave’s pant leg.

  “Could I swim in your pool, Mr. Marshall?”

  So much for the end of the world as we know it. Dave had to remind himself that Dylan was only eight. He might not have understood the gravity of the situation himself, at that age. Also, looking a little closer, he could see that the child was scared.
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  He had put the cover over the pool weeks ago, to keep it from evaporating in the summer heat. He planned to use it for drinking water if things got bad, and it looked like they were going to.

  “Sorry, Dylan,” he said. “The pool-cover motor is broken.” Addison started to say something, then caught his gesture and kept mum. Dylan shrugged, and devoted himself to his iPod, where an action movie was playing on the two-inch screen.

  “You think it’s growing?” Dennis wanted to know.

  “It’s grown to the west since I started looking,” Addison said.

  “You can see several fires to the east,” Dave said. “I figure those were started by burning debris from the first explosions.”

  “Those would be houses, right? In…”

  “Baldwin Village. Windsor Hills. Maybe Crenshaw.”

  “I don’t know those places very well.”

  “Mostly middle-class homes.”

  They couldn’t see how far the fire had spread to the south, but Dave knew debris must have landed there, too. The flames coming from the center of the oil field seemed maybe a little less intense.

  “Would anybody like something to eat or drink?” That was Addison, valiantly trying to be the hostess during her mother’s indisposition.

  “I couldn’t eat,” Ellen said. “But I’d like a soft drink, if you have one.”

  Dave was grateful for the chance to look away from the fire for a bit as he helped Addison find beverages and put out bowls of peanuts. It seemed to calm her down to have something to do. As she served, he brought the television outside on a rolling cart. The helicopter views of the conflagration told them a lot more than they could see themselves. Dave channel surfed compulsively, and no one objected.

  Bill Danvers, KCAL, channel 9. He was jogging along, his cameraman trying to keep up. It was a chaotic picture that only stabilized when he paused for a moment to let the camera pan over the flames ahead of him:

  “It’s pandemonium here on the east side of the fire. I’m trying to make my way toward it, and every street I’ve tried is filled with cars that are not moving. They have nowhere to go, it’s gridlock. Some have driven up into yards, but they can only get so far, and the yards are now gridlocked, too. Many people have abandoned their vehicles and are walking away from the flames, which I can see towering in front of me. In the last block I saw several elderly people sitting on the curb, unable to go any farther, at least for now, and one man who looked as if he was having a heart attack. There was nothing I could do for him. I had to move on.”

  Melanie Worth, KCBS, channel 2, posed against yellow police tape, flames leaping into the air behind her:

  “The heat here is incredible, I don’t know how much longer we can stay in this position. Just across the street from me there are a dozen structures on fire, and behind that, I’m told, are literally hundreds of homes burning. There is only one fire engine that I can see. I’m told more are on the way, but it won’t be easy to get here. I hear sirens in the distance. I hear a plane approaching…There it is, one of those smoke-jumper planes just dumped a load of orange fire retardant on the edge of the flames. I’m afraid it’s not doing much good. The fire here is just too broad, too intense. The fire chief has just made an announcement with a bullhorn. He said something about a firestorm. Bob, do you know what a firestorm is?”

  Bob, back at the studio, was unsure. Dave switched stations.

  Three men sitting at an anchor desk in a frantic newsroom, KNBC, channel 4. One of them seemed to be a fire expert:

  “Firestorms are most often seen in big forest fires. If there’s enough fuel, and it’s spread over a large enough area, the fire begins to create a wind. It blows in from all directions to the center of the storm. These winds can blow up to sixty or seventy miles per hour, perhaps even more. That’s gale-force winds, all blowing toward the center of the fire. People nearby can have breathing difficulties as the oxygen in the air is used up. Temperatures can get so intense that trees or buildings at a considerable distance from the storm will ignite just from radiant heat. You can suffer severe burns, even if you’re not near the center. Tornadoes of flame can form, called fire whirls, and these are especially dangerous, as they can hop around and spread the fire even farther.”

  “Do we have a firestorm here, Roger?”

  “From what I’m seeing from the helicopter shots, there have been several near the epicenter of the explosion. I’m not sure if they’re likely to form in the residential areas that are burning. Some of it will depend on the type of vegetation in those areas. Eucalyptus trees, for instance, can actually explode when the oil inside them is heated enough, and that spreads the fire.”

  “But you said these storms happen in forest fires.”

  “Not only there. It all depends on how much fuel there is, and how hot it burns. There is a high fuel load in crowded neighborhoods, and the ones that are burning look crowded to me. Firestorms can happen in cities. Dropping a nuclear weapon, as in Hiroshima, creates an instant firestorm.”

  “But this isn’t a nuclear weapon.”

  “So we’ve been told, and I don’t see the characteristics of such a bomb. But urban firestorms predate Hiroshima. The Great Fire of London, the Chicago Fire of 1871, and the fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 are examples. And during World War Two there were a dozen firestorms caused by conventional bombing. Firestorms killed maybe fifty thousand people in Dresden, and over one hundred thousand in Tokyo. The most recent urban firestorm I’m aware of was in Oakland in 1991. Only twenty-five people died there, because there was enough time to evacuate.”

  Dave thumbed the remote. KTLA, channel 5. A helicopter view, with a man and a woman at an anchor desk in a box down in one corner:

  “This story has been developing faster than we can keep up with it. We will continue to do our best. We are now a little over two hours since the first explosion. What you’re seeing from our channel 5 eye in the sky is the Hollywood Park racetrack. That’s about five miles south of the site of the explosion.”

  “Kathy, do we have any information yet on what caused this?”

  “Dale, we’ve got Jackson Morris, our City Hall reporter, standing by downtown for a news conference by the mayor, which has already been postponed twice. He just told us that none of his sources seem to have any solid information. We can only guess at what the mayor will have to say.”

  “Kathy, we’ve just received word that the president of the United States will address the nation in about an hour. We’ve been told that he is on his way to California, and may make his speech from Air Force One. Has that ever been done before?”

  “Not to my knowledge, Dale. But these aren’t normal times.”

  “You said it. First the fuel shortage, and now this.”

  “They have to be related, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I don’t subscribe to any of the wilder conspiracy theories floating around, but yeah, oil wells burning in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, oil wells burning in Los Angeles. But we never had any video on those earlier fires. All those countries were able to keep a pretty tight lid on the news. All we got were some grainy satellite shots, and no reporter ever penetrated the security cordons around the fires. I just hadn’t been aware of how…of how cataclysmic it all was.”

  “None of us were, Dale. There are a lot of things we haven’t been told, and I don’t mind saying, I think we’ve been lied to by our government. I think it’s about time—”

  The little box in the corner disappeared, and the larger helicopter shot turned into a maze of those squares that are what static looks like on digital television. Dave was about to click away when the image stabilized again. This time the helicopter shot was the PIP and the anchor desk filled the screen.

  Kathy and Dale sat perfectly still for a moment. They seemed to have run out of things to say. Then Dale cleared his throat and glanced down at a sheet of paper.

  “Ah…Kathy, we’re getting a live report from Susie Mihashi at H
ollywood Park. Go ahead, Susie.”

  Dennis leaned toward him in his lawn chair.

  “I think Kathy and Dale just got slapped down, big-time.”

  “I think you’re right. You think it was the government or the station management?”

  “You think there’s a difference, now?”

  Susie Mihashi didn’t look so good. She was wearing a pantsuit that had started out the day white, but was now streaked with black soot and what looked like globs of tar. Her hair and face were no better. She was being buffeted by a high wind.

  “Kathy, Dale, it’s getting pretty windy here at Hollywood Park, and the wind is erratic. A fire marshal just told me that there are firestorms to the north of us, and air is being sucked toward them. That’s doing battle with the westerly wind we had before. So we never know just what’s going to be coming down. Several times…Uh-oh, here it comes again.”

  She held a scarf to her face as a cloud of ash blew around her, tugging at her clothes. More black goo landed on her. She was seized by a coughing fit.

  “She should get out of there,” Addison said. Dave looked over at her. Her lower lip was trembling. He got up and put his arm around her and she buried her face in his chest. There wasn’t much he could say to her, but he murmured encouragement.

  “Okay, okay, I’m all right,” Mihashi was saying. “As I said, the wind has been shifting. Authorities have established a command post here at the racetrack. Medical personnel have set up a triage center, and I’ve seen hundreds of people brought in on stretchers. Many more have walked in. I’m told all the hospitals are full. There are a lot of elderly with respiratory problems. They are being given face masks and loaded onto buses, when they are available, and driven away from the fire. Police and rescue are working against great odds, what with the traffic jams and the sheer number of people who are hurt. There have been some severe burns. Doctors have put out emergency calls. If you were a paramedic in the military, they need you down here. I’m told that there are only a few hundred beds in local burn centers. In the past they did drills simulating a nuclear attack, and it was clear even back then that all our facilities would be quickly overwhelmed. And that’s exactly what has happened.”