Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “Don’t go too close to it,” she said. “It might collapse under you.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he said, and moved toward the brink in small steps. He edged around the huge hole and stepped up onto a broken piece of sidewalk. From that vantage he could look down, and it was only then that it hit him that a house had been where this chunk had been taken out of the hillside.

  “Addison, don’t go there!”

  “I’ll just stand beside Daddy.”

  She took his hand and they both looked over the new cliff. The house had slid a long way, and was nothing but matchsticks now. It might have landed on another house down below, but he couldn’t be sure about that. Daylight would reveal the extent of the damage, as it would certainly reveal so many other things.

  “Did you know these people?” he asked his daughter.

  “Just by name. The Solomons,” she said. “Remember Judy Grainger? She lived next door to them, but she moved away a few years ago. Mrs. Solomon gave us cookies when she was baking. They’re in their sixties or seventies. He worked at Paramount doing something in the art department, Judy said. I hope they weren’t at home.”

  “Me, too.”

  There was nothing for them to do, and he could see flashlight beams in the canyon. People down there were looking for survivors. They hurried on up the street.

  At the very top there was a small traffic circle. There were houses to the east and the west, and a third one up against the hillside to the north. Behind it was scrubland much like the area must have been before the developers came. No houses loomed up there, and part of the hillside had been planted in ground cover intended to keep the hillside in place. But they were recent plantings, and they hadn’t spread very far. The house was an ultramodern box, put up only a few years ago. Dave remembered it, as all the Mockingbird Lane residents did, because of the constant truck traffic back and forth during the year and a half it took to build the place.

  He assumed it had been built to earthquake code and probably would have still been standing, but a big part of the hillside had shaken down onto the flat roof, and crushed it like a wooden matchbox.

  There were four people near the wreckage. He didn’t know any of them. One man was down on his hands and knees in front of a gap where the roof had not quite touched the sidewalk when the building collapsed. He was shining a flashlight into the gap, which just might be high enough for a man to wriggle through.

  A woman in a torn nightgown saw them and zeroed in on him. She looked to be in her forties. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward her ruined home.

  “My husband is in there,” she cried. “Please, please, help him get him out.”

  He looked around at the two other people, a man and a woman who stood close together, probably a man and wife. The man shrugged helplessly. Dave reluctantly got down beside the other man. He looked through the gap, and saw that it ended maybe ten feet farther in. It was possible that the gap continued to the left or right, but there would be no way to tell unless you crawled in there.

  “I haven’t heard a sound,” the man said, quietly. “What’s your husband’s name?”

  “Phil. I was downstairs watching television, I couldn’t sleep, that’s all that saved me. I ran outside and the whole hill came down…” She lapsed into tears again.

  “Phil!” the other man shouted. “Phil, can you hear me?”

  There was no reply. They got up and went around the house to the west. One window had survived almost intact, and Dave shined his light in there. He realized it had been a second-floor window, and it was now almost on the ground.

  “I can see part of a room in there,” he said.

  Karen had climbed up to join them. She tugged on his arm.

  “Dave, you aren’t going in there, are you?”

  “Not unless I hear somebody,” he admitted. If he heard someone crying out for help, he would have to do whatever he could to get him out. But he wouldn’t risk his neck crawling through a place like that, with aftershocks sure to come, without a damn good reason.

  “My name’s Joe Crawford, by the way.”

  “Dave Marshall. This is my wife, Karen.”

  They returned to the street and gave the woman the bad news. She glared at them, then headed up the hill herself, still calling her husband’s name.

  “I hope she doesn’t go in there,” Joe said. “Should we stop her?”

  “It’s her right, I guess. But nobody could be alive in there.”

  “I agree. How did your house hold up?”

  “Pretty good,” Dave said. “There’s cracks here and there, and some ceiling fell down. But it’s habitable.”

  “Sounds like my house,” Crawford said. “Not that I plan to sleep in it tonight.”

  “Daddy,” Addison said. “I think we ought to go house to house and see if anyone needs help.”

  He looked down at her and smiled, thinking he should have been the one to come up with that.

  “Good idea, Addie. Let’s start at the top here and work our way down.”

  They spent the next few hours knocking on doors. Many of the residents were already outside, all of them showing one degree or another of shock and disorientation. Dazed and confused, some just sat down on the street to await the coming of daylight.

  Most of the rest of the people answered their doors promptly enough. Some of the houses were known to their neighbors to be empty, their occupants having fled in the last weeks to anyplace they thought might be safer than the big city.

  None of the houses were as badly damaged as the one at the top of the hill, but many had shifted off their foundations. These tended to be the older homes, built to different earthquake standards.

  Dave estimated that, in normal times, at least half of the houses they visited would have been deemed total write-offs. Just bring in the bulldozers and finish what Mother Nature had begun. Now, of course, they would remain standing. Even in normal times, this was the sort of event that bankrupted insurance companies, the sort of event that would have soon brought government intervention. Today, he wondered if the government would show up at all.

  They came to the crack in the road and all had to peer down toward the bottom. It sobered everyone. Seeing destroyed or badly damaged houses was bad enough. Seeing the very earth cracked open made one feel very small, very vulnerable. If the ground you walked on was no more stable than this, where was there any stability?

  Dave was beginning to think the neighborhood had escaped with only one probable death and two possibles, when someone from the search party thought he heard a cry for help from a house just on the west side of the crack. It was on the north side of the street, a two-story structure built in the traditional mission style, with adobe walls and red barrel tiles on the low, peaked roof. They approached the house, and their flashlights soon revealed that the east end of the roof had collapsed. It was from that part of the house that the cries were coming.

  “That second-floor window,” said one of the men.

  “I guess we go in,” someone else said.

  Nobody looked too eager to do that, but they all knew it had to be done. They were all getting a new appreciation for the many rescuers they had seen on television, braving aftershocks to pull survivors from the rubble in Haiti, in Turkey, in China and Indonesia. He followed Joe Crawford onto the porch and watched as he tried the door handle. It didn’t budge.

  They looked to one side and saw a multipaned window with several panes cracked. Dave used his flashlight to knock one pane out, and cautiously stuck his hand through the gap and sprung the latch. The window eased open on its own, then almost fell onto the porch. There was room for Dave and Joe to squeeze through.

  The living room they entered was a shambles, as they had by now come to expect. The residents had a lot of books, a lot of bric-a-brac, much of it quite fragile. All of it was on the floor in a jumble that made it almost seem a bomb had gone off in the room. Dave moved his flashlight beam around and saw a stairway leading
up to a railed balcony overlooking the large open-plan living room. He gestured toward it. Joe nodded, and they picked their way carefully through the debris.

  At the top of the stairs they heard the cry again. It was actually more of a whimper, and Dave was sure he would not have heard it from outside the house.

  “Over that way,” he said. Joe followed him as he made his way toward the part of the house that had fallen in.

  They swept their flashlights into each of three bedrooms as they passed them, then into the fourth. Dave could see a lot of broken red barrel tiles, and big, splintered ceiling beams. It took him a while to realize that the biggest heap of debris in the room had a king-sized bed beneath it. He continued sweeping his flashlight beam, passed over what looked like a heap of clothes, then brought it back.

  “Oh, man, I think that’s a person, Joe.”

  They picked their way over a few roof beams and then crouched. It was a woman, completely covered in dust. She was only visible from the waist up, clad in a nightgown. Dave gently brushed dust and bits of plaster from her face. Her eyes opened.

  “Can’t move,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out.”

  “Hurts.”

  “We’ll get you out.”

  Joe had been exploring down where her legs should be. He lifted pieces of plaster away one by one, set them aside.

  “My husband,” she said.

  “Shh. We’ll find him. You just hold on.” She squeezed Dave’s hand, but weakly.

  He watched as Joe got down far enough to see what the problem was. Joe gestured, and Dave craned his neck to have a look, not wanting to let go of the woman’s hand. One end of a big, heavy beam had fallen on her leg, just above the knee. A jagged point had driven into the flesh. Joe put his hands under the beam and lifted. It didn’t budge so much as an inch.

  “Should I give you a hand?” Dave asked. Joe slowly shook his head, and leaned over to whisper in Dave’s ear.

  “There’s way too much weight on it. I don’t think we can shift all that stuff. We might be able to cut through the beam.”

  Dave leaned closer to the woman’s ear.

  “Ma’am, do you or your husband have any tools in your garage?”

  “Tons of them,” she whispered. “Whatever you need.”

  “Okay, I’ll go—” The woman squeezed his hand much harder.

  “Please don’t leave me.”

  He glanced at Joe, who nodded.

  “I’ll take a look.” He got up and headed for the door.

  “Joe, wasn’t there a woman down there who said she was a nurse?”

  “Used to be, she said. Name was…Milly.”

  “See if she’s willing to come up here. I’m in over my head.”

  “Got it.”

  Alone with the woman, Dave leaned as far as he could over the pile of debris and aimed his flashlight down at the woman’s leg.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dave. Dave Marshall. I live about—”

  “I think I’ve seen you. You drive an Escalade? You have a little girl, and a pretty wife, she’s usually in a Mercedes?”

  “That’s Karen. Addison is my daughter.”

  “My name is Roberta. Bobbie to my friends.”

  “We’ll have you out of here soon, Bobbie.” He looked at her face, realized that with all the dust and dirt and sweat that was running down it, he couldn’t estimate her age within twenty years. She might be thirty, she might be mid-fifties.

  “Dave, you have to look for my husband.”

  He didn’t know what to tell her. He had finally got a good view of her injured leg, and he didn’t like what he saw. There was no gushing blood that would indicate a severed artery—she would certainly have bled out before they even got there if that was the case—but blood was definitely flowing.

  “My husband,” she said, and then had a coughing fit.

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  “He was in the bed. I was thrown out.”

  Dave explored again with his flashlight. Everything was so chaotic, the flashlight beam throwing such hard-edged shadows, it was hard to tell what anything was. So much debris, absolutely no order to it.

  “I can’t see him from here. I haven’t been able to check the other side of the bed. That’s probably where he is. What’s his name?”

  “Ralph.”

  Dave called his name. There was no response. He tried again, mostly for something to do to take his mind off his helplessness to free Bobbie.

  Joe showed up with Millie behind him. He had a handsaw, and she had a first-aid kit. They made their way over to where Bobbie was pinned. Millie took over the hand-holding duty, while trying to examine her at the same time. Joe was looking over the beam, coated with decades of dust and cobwebs, trying to determine the best place to start cutting.

  The beam pinning Bobbie was resting at a forty-five-degree angle, part of it still in the attic, the other end pressing on her leg. A jumble of stuff that must have been stored in the attic had fallen on the bed. Judging from the boxes that had split open, most of them had contained books. A lot of books, a lot of weight.

  Dave gathered a handful of the spilled books and threw them into a corner, then another, and another. He cleared off most of a sheet of plywood that was lying almost level, pressing down on the fragment of roof beam. And once more it took him a while to realize the dusty, plaster-covered thing he had uncovered was a human head and shoulders. The top of the man’s head was crushed, gray matter leaking out. His eyes were open, but coated with dust.

  Dave hurried back the way he had come and made it almost to the end of the balcony before he leaned over the railing and vomited. He started back toward the bedroom. He was met at the door by Joe, who took his arm and led him a few steps back the way he had come. He spoke quietly.

  “If I cut that beam, the rest of the ceiling will collapse.”

  Millie joined them, looking grave.

  “She’s in and out of consciousness. Even if we can get her out, she’s going to lose that leg. In fact, the best way of getting her out would probably be to amputate it.”

  “Can you do it?” Joe looked at the saw in his hand. Tears were running down Millie’s cheeks, making trails in the dust.

  “I’m sorry, guys, I just don’t think I’m up to that.” When neither man said anything, she got angry. “Look, damn it, I worked in a hospice, I have no experience of trauma care. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Nobody said you should,” Dave said. “We were just asking. So what do you think we can do for her?”

  “Hold her hand, I guess.”

  So they went back into the room and Millie knelt beside her. But she was only down there for a moment, holding Bobbie’s wrist. She stood up.

  “She’s passed,” she said.

  Joe sighed, and threw the saw across the room.

  They crossed the crack in the ground and checked the last few houses. All the residents were okay except for the normal bumps, bruises, and minor cuts, which they had already treated. They came to Doheny Drive and met another party making their way down the hill. Everybody exchanged information. Doheny dead-ended against the hillside about a quarter of a mile up, and there had been a major slide up there, which had buried two houses. Three others had totally collapsed, no sounds coming from any of them. They estimated six or seven dead up there. They also had three bad injuries, including one that was critical. The good news was that two doctors lived up there.

  They met another group coming up the hill.

  “We need to stand together as a neighborhood,” one of them said. His name was Richard, and he said only one room of his house on Doheny was habitable. It was agreed that those who wanted to would meet at an address almost on the flats, a few streets up from Sunset Boulevard, a home that was largely undamaged. Dave thought he knew the place. The time of the meeting would be at noon.

  “What time is it now?” someone asked.

  Several people
got out their cell phones, which were showing no bars but still had working clocks.

  “I have seven thirty.”

  Dave had noticed that it had gotten lighter, that they were no longer groping around in total darkness, though the flashlights were still useful.

  “That can’t be right,” another person said.

  But it was. The sun never really came out that day. They had all gotten used to the amazing crystal blue skies of Los Angeles with hardly any gasoline engines pouring pollution into the air. That day the sky was black.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dave and Karen walked back up the hill and through their open gate and stood on the edge of the hill looking out at a nightmare.

  It looked as if every city block had a fire. That was probably an exaggeration, but there were certainly hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. And the smoke was all black. He knew that when firefighters poured water on a blaze the smoke usually turned white. There was not a single plume of white to be seen. The LAFD was out of commission, out of gas, probably out of water with broken water mains. These fires would have to burn themselves out.

  Which could take a long time if they spread to neighboring houses, and jumped streets. Dave didn’t see any reason why they wouldn’t. The only good news was that there was no wind.

  By far the largest fire was in one of the triangular towers in Century City. It looked like it had started down low, on the third or fourth floor, and had by now engulfed the whole structure. Dave thought it was unlikely that anyone had been in the building, then wondered if cleaning staff had still been working. They might have made it out by the stairway on the side opposite the fire. He hoped so.

  He turned away and looked at his house. With a little light, it all looked even worse. He knew he should be grateful that the house was standing at all, but it was a difficult situation in which to count one’s blessings. He started to go inside.

  He hadn’t gotten far when the ground began to rock again. It was not nearly as strong as the main quake, but that had been a monster, certainly the largest ever felt in Los Angeles. If he had to guess, Dave would have estimated this aftershock was around a 6.0. He set his legs apart and listened to more items falling inside the house. He was surprised there was still anything to fall. It continued to shake for fifteen or twenty seconds.