Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “That feels better, though I think I’d prefer the spa down at the Beverly Hilton.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Addison went first,” she said, gesturing to the gray, soapy water in the large galvanized tub. “Do you want a fresh tub, or will you make do with thirds?”

  “If you can handle seconds, I can do thirds,” he said.

  “I left some clean clothes on the little table in there. Throw me those you’ve got on when you start.”

  He went under the rope and pulled the blanket across, shucked off the filthy clothes he had slept in, and threw them to Karen. She had put a canvas camp stool there beside the tub.

  “There are so many things I have to rethink,” she said. “We’re so used to automatic washers and dryers.”

  “Drying should be easy.”

  “Yeah, I can string a clothesline. But washing…Women used to use washboards, and hand wringers, didn’t they? Did you get a washboard?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t think of that. Tell the truth, I wouldn’t have known where to look for one.”

  “Same here.”

  “I’m sure I could make one in the workshop out of corrugated sheet metal—”

  “That would be good.”

  “—if I had any corrugated sheet metal.”

  They both laughed. Dave wondered once more what all he had forgotten, and if any of it was more critical than a washboard.

  It felt good to scrub the grit off himself. He felt layers of sweat and ash and plaster dust flowing off his skin. He was amazed at how black the water had turned. He used a dab of shampoo on his hair. Then, once he had soaped up, there was the problem of how to wash the soap off himself. Well, he figured the water Karen had used hadn’t been much less soapy, so he splashed himself until he felt a little less slippery, then toweled dry and put on the clean clothes. He found he felt 100 percent better.

  Karen had put all their dirty clothes in a laundry basket. Addison went to the tub and looked down at the water, made a face.

  “You want to dump this, Daddy?”

  “No, no, no. That’s what RV people call gray water. You can’t drink it, but it’s not sewage. I want you to pour it into buckets and take in into the downstairs bathroom. I’m hoping the toilets still work. What you do is, after you’ve done your business—and I don’t mean taking…”

  “Taking a pee?”

  “Urinating. Don’t flush after that. But after…”

  “Number two?” She was laughing.

  “Yes. Dump some of this gray water in. It should flush. At least for now. The longer we can do that, the less we have to worry about disposing of poop.”

  “Poop, Daddy?”

  “Don’t you laugh at me. Anyway, limit your use of toilet paper, too. We’ve got a stockpile, but don’t expect we’ll have any more.”

  Addison frowned. “What do you use when we run out?”

  “Well, honey,” Karen said, “back on the farm in Iowa, we used corncobs.”

  “Corncobs? Eeew!” It took her a few seconds to see her leg was being pulled, and all three of them laughed. Karen had grown up in Iowa, but she’d never been on a farm.

  “So what do we use?” Addison persisted.

  “People did use corncobs,” Dave said. “Or the Sears, Roebuck catalog.”

  “You think the Neiman-Marcus catalog would work?” Karen asked.

  “Don’t see why not. They probably use a better grade of paper.”

  “And that’s about all it’s good for, now,” said Addison.

  Addison wanted to go down the hill to the meeting, but Karen vetoed the idea, saying there was still too much to do to get their new home ready for occupancy. None of them was delighted with the idea of sleeping indoors again anytime soon, and with the tent and the unlikelihood of rain that time of year in Los Angeles, they wouldn’t have to. But things had to be stored away, including most of the things still packed in the Escalade, and Karen refused to think of the guesthouse as her home until the clutter was cleared away entirely and at least some cleaning had been done.

  Dave got his bicycle out of the garage and headed down the hill as slowly as possible. Soon he came to the big double hairpin turn. He was pleased to see that the terracing designed to prevent mudslides in the rainy season had held up. He didn’t see any sections that had collapsed.

  He looked at each house as he went by them. Somebody seemed to have organized a more thorough rescue operation than he and his neighbors up the hill. They had come through with a can of spray paint and marked each house. Some had big Xs on the front, and some had an S. There were other letters also. He tentatively decided that the S stood for “searched.” He assumed somebody could explain the other letters to him, probably at the meeting.

  Once he passed a burned-out home. He could see where the fire had continued on up the hill, moving from dry tree to dry tree, until it reached the top of the ridge. At least two more houses that he could see had burned, too. Maybe more.

  Several times he came to trees that had fallen across the road. At the first one he had to get off his bike and carry it up into a yard. It was a big deciduous tree, branching off in all directions. He could see where someone had made a start at cutting off branches, but it was going to be quite a job. He had to go behind the big ball of dirt and twisted wood that was the root structure.

  There were a few palm trees that had fallen, but considering how many palms lined Doheny Drive, it was a surprisingly small number. They were supple, evolved to bend before high winds, but they were not deeply rooted.

  The next blockage, about halfway down the hill, was a landslide. Tons of earth had come crashing down, taking a house with it. The house now stood partly in the road and it was leaning at a thirty-degree angle. Half a dozen men were at work shoveling away dirt on the west side of the street, and would soon have a path cleared that might be just wide enough for a car, assuming the house didn’t move any more with the aftershocks. Dave had no trouble getting around it on his bike. He talked with the men for a while, and learned they were from some of the side streets he hadn’t explored: Oriole, Thrasher, and Skylark. There were larger obstructions up there, they said, but they were beginning at the bottom and working their way up. Many of them intended to leave, as soon as they could get their cars out.

  After that it was almost a straight, unimpeded shot to the meeting place.

  There was a high wall with a gate that was standing open. Just inside the gate a few dozen bicycles, two motor scooters, and one full-sized off-road motorcycle were parked. He chained his bike to an iron fence and started up the long, asphalt driveway. There was a wide crack in it.

  Around a bend he saw the house, which easily qualified as a mansion. It was two stories high, and vaguely resembled the White House, though the extravagant tropical plantings of queen palm, coconut palm, date palm, and giant bird-of-paradise trees instantly gave away that this wasn’t Washington. There was a broad porch with a roof held up by pillars in the Greek style. One of them on a corner had cracked and toppled. He could see a lot of broken windows, and someone had carried a lot of debris out of the house and piled it off to one side. The pile looked very much like his own pile of new junk, with lots of glass, ceramics, and plaster. The driveway ran in front of the house and then around the side to a separate building in the back.

  There was a tennis court on the other side of the building, where people were congregating. A few dozen stackable plastic chairs had been set up but few people were in them. Most were standing around two folding tables where a large coffee machine had been set up.

  It was an odd crowd. There were clumps of people, three and four and five, but very little mixing. Dave thought it was probably like his own neighborhood, where people knew some of their immediate neighbors but few people more than three or four houses beyond their own. The men outnumbered the women three to one, and there were only a few children. The kids were very quiet, clinging closely to adults. Dave imagined they had rebelled at
the idea of being left behind with one parent. It would be a long time before they felt secure again.

  The meeting—rally, planning session, war council, whatever it was supposed to be—was supposed to start at noon, but few things had ever started on time in Hollywood except the Oscars, and an earthquake wasn’t going to change that. At last a man hurried out of the house to the tennis court. He was a small man, partially bald, in his late fifties or early sixties, and he had the look and manner and walk of a man who was used to getting things done. He was carrying a battery-powered bullhorn, which Dave thought was a little excessive. Apparently the man did, too, as he raised it to his mouth, then thought better of it, and handed it to another man, Indian or Pakistani. This second man had unfolded a card table and set up a laptop computer and some speakers. He powered up the laptop and plugged in the speakers.

  “I’d like to thank you all for coming today,” the first man said. “For those who don’t know me, my name is Richard Ferguson. This is my house. Or what’s left of it.”

  There were a few polite, rueful chuckles.

  “Before all this happened, I was the president of the Lower Doheny Neighborhood Watch. Just to let you know where I’m coming from, and let you know I have some organizational experience. I have also founded and run a medium-sized aeronautical manufacturing company, at least until recently, when demand for my product fell to zero because of the oil shortage and economic dislocation. I had been approaching retirement, had planned to play a lot of golf, and now I’m involuntarily retired, the same as a lot of you. Like you, I’ve seen my investments become worthless and thought I’d seen the worst that could happen. Now we all know that the loss of our money turns out to be the least of our concerns. Now we know that our very physical survival is at stake.”

  He probably wouldn’t have been too good running for office, Dave thought—he was too straight, he didn’t exhibit any of the ease at dispensing comforting bullshit so vital to that undertaking—but a candidate wasn’t what they needed at the moment. Dave knew they needed a leader. Maybe this guy was it. Dave knew he wasn’t. He could run a five-person writing team, and that was about the extent of his organizational skills.

  “Many of you have lost neighbors, some have lost family members. There is no coroner to take the bodies of our loved ones away, no undertaker to prepare them, no funeral director to handle all the arrangements, but they are going to have to be put into the ground soon. What’s the best way to do that? That is just one of the many things we will have to relearn. We will be facing challenges of the sort few in America have had to face since our great-great-grandparents’ generation, or even earlier.

  “But I wonder if we might not be the fortunate ones? A hard thing to say to a man whose house has just collapsed or burned down, I know, a hard thing to say to a family that has lost a loved one, or is reduced to relying on the kindness of neighbors for their shelter.

  “Still, I think it may be worse elsewhere. One of the things I’ve most wanted to know since the quake is simply this: Just how bad is it? We know how bad it is here, in our small neighborhood. What about outside? Things were at a terrible point even before the quake. I don’t think we can count on any outside help. The rest of the state, the country, the world will be grappling with their own problems and will have precious little time for ours.

  “What I’m saying, in the simplest terms, is that I think we’re on our own. Has anyone had any contact with people farther afield than a mile or two? Has anyone had any news of rescue operations? Shelters being set up? Firemen responding to emergencies? Police patrolling? Any signs of government at all? What I’m desperate for, what I think we all need, is information. What is the world like down there? Down below Sunset Boulevard, just half a mile from here.”

  He looked over his audience. No one seemed eager to be the first, or possibly no one had anything useful to say. Dave decided he had better speak up.

  “I got a cell phone call through,” he said, and everyone turned to him. “I was as surprised as anyone. I haven’t tried it again. My friend was down in Holmby Hills, and his house had been flooded.”

  That got everyone’s attention. No one else was aware of the flood.

  “My friend said the Stone Canyon dam broke. Lots of houses washed down the canyon. He had water on his first floor, and he is several miles away from the dam.”

  It took a while for the excited and frightened babble to die down. Ferguson waited it out, and then put up his hands again.

  “I’d heard rumors,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear them confirmed. Thanks for telling us, Mister…”

  “Marshall. Dave Marshall. I live up on Mockingbird Lane.”

  “Thanks, Dave. Okay, does anyone else have any news to share?”

  “I’ve heard gunshots,” a woman said. “They sounded like they were coming from south of Sunset. I live on Wetherly, about a quarter of a mile from here.”

  “My friend has heard gunfire in his neighborhood, too,” Dave said.

  “I think all of us who live down below the hills have heard them,” Ferguson said. “Friends, let me introduce Patel Govinder, a friend of mine from way back. He lives up the hill, on Blue Jay Way. He’s a ham-radio operator. Patel’s rig is run on solar power, so that hasn’t been a problem. He probably knows more about what’s going on around the world than any of us. Would you fill us in, Patel?”

  “Surely. The simplest thing is to say that everywhere there is chaos. I have contacted relatives in Mumbai, and they say there is starvation, rioting, many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead.”

  He went on about the world situation for a while, confirming things that Dave had suspected. The Third World was faring worst, to no one’s surprise

  “Okay, my friend,” Ferguson said, “but I think most of us are a bit more concerned about what’s happening just down the street than around the world.”

  “Of course. I am sorry to hear of the dam collapse. That probably explains the silence of an operator I used to contact frequently, who lived in Stone Canyon.” He briefly hung his head.

  “To sum up my almost thirty-six hours of communications with people in this area and around California…it is clear that Los Angeles is a special case, with the earthquake. But Richard is correct in thinking that we should expect no outside help. I recorded this message from the mayor of Los Angeles early this morning,” Patel went on. “I found it…disturbing. I don’t know how to—”

  “Just play it, Patel.”

  The small man nodded, and turned to his laptop. He called up an audio file.

  A female operator who sounded like a police dispatcher announced that the mayor would be addressing the city from the emergency center in City Hall. She said the message was going to go out on all available frequencies, but that most commercial radio and television stations had been silenced, so she requested that anyone capable of tuning in record it and rebroadcast it as widely as possible. The operator sounded exhausted.

  There was a pause, then a man’s voice, sounding even more tired than the operator.

  “This is the mayor speaking. First I want to issue an appeal to any authority outside the Los Angeles area.” There was a long pause.

  “We need help. Please come quickly, and help us.”

  The man’s voice broke. There was dead silence on the tennis court. The mayor took a deep breath and went on.

  “Los Angeles has been struck by a catastrophic earthquake. The devastation is…unimaginable. The earthquake has started fires which the fire department was…well, there were too many to respond to…We need firefighters, and quickly! We need air tankers, smoke jumpers, we need rescue crews and dogs, we need any help that anyone can send us.”

  Another long pause.

  “The city is without power. None of the generating stations are operating and a great many power lines are down as well, so even if we get generators back online—and I don’t know what they’re going to burn if we do…there will be no electrical power for the forese
eable future. None. Residents, you must take that into account in your plans.

  “Water mains are broken in so many places that it will take some time to restore water service. The Stone Canyon dam has failed, and we don’t know how many people may have been killed or rendered homeless by that. There is water in Lake Hollywood, apparently that reservoir is intact, and we are attempting to run temporary pipes downhill to a dispensing facility. Keep listening to…to whatever source you are hearing this message on for further…for further developments.”

  The man sounded on the edge of a nervous collapse. He rambled, he lost his train of thought, he paused so long that it seemed he might not go on. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind about what he should he talking about. He alternated between assurances that everything possible was being done, to ever more pitiful pleas for help.

  It was the exact opposite of the leadership that someone needed to show at such a time, and indicated to Dave that there really was no meaningful leadership in this town on this day.

  But there was worse to come.

  “My police chief,” the mayor began, and then laughed. It was a chilling sound.

  “My new police chief,” he amended, “my acting police chief…she tells me she is hardly able to communicate with her remaining officers. We don’t know how many officers that is, but if you are a sworn member of the LAPD, or an auxiliary, or even if you’re retired, for God’s sake, and you can hear my voice, we are pleading with you to muster at City Hall this evening at six o’clock for assignments. Please, don’t desert your posts in the hour of your city’s greatest need. I know your impulse is to stay home and protect and provide for your families, but remember that you took an oath, and we must hold you to it. You are all we have now.”

  There was another long pause.

  “We have been in contact with a seismologist at UCLA, and he tells us this quake registered an estimated 9.5 on the scale. That is equal to the most powerful one ever recorded. There have only been five quakes over 9.0 in the last 150 years. There is a possibility that it was caused by the same thing that caused the Doheny explosion. This man is theorizing that the expanding oil and sludge has worked its way down to the Santa Monica Fault or the Newport-Inglewood Fault, possibly both. It increased pressure and at the same time lubricated the rock faces so they slipped all at once, instead of in smaller increments. Or so they tell me. Who knows if it’s true?”