by John Varley
Again there was silence, both on the radio and at the tennis court.
“Patty, take over, okay? I can’t go on here.”
The new police chief was heard next. She introduced herself as Patricia Noori.
“Until this morning I held the rank of captain in the LAPD. I have been asked to take over command. I intend to do so to the best of my ability.
“The mayor has approved some emergency measures. I am announcing a dusk-to-dawn curfew for all residents of Los Angeles. Rioters and looters will be shot on sight.
“I believe that we will pull through this. Recovery will take a long time, certainly many years, but I don’t believe in giving up, and neither should you. May God see us through these coming, difficult days of trial. Thank you.”
The laptop was shut off, and everyone looked at each other.
“Nobody likes to hear that the police will shoot on sight,” Ferguson said. “Nobody likes it that we’ve come to this point. But we’re not going to get through it by being polite, and the police aren’t going to have time for Miranda warnings. They’re going to be too busy trying to survive. I’ve had the advantage of hearing this twice before, and having a little time to think about it.
“I think this Chief Noori is a much better leader than our mayor. But I also think it’s clear that the LAPD is completely inadequate to deal with the situation we have on the ground. Do you agree?”
No one said otherwise.
“As for the National Guard…well, their strength and deployment is something I hope we can find out in the days to come. But I, myself, don’t feel any more inclined to rely on them than I do on the LAPD.
“I think we are on our own. Our neighborhood. We must band together as strongly as we can, with as much organization as we can muster, because in unity there is strength. I weep for Los Angeles, for California, for the nation, and for the world. But right now what I am most concerned about are these blocks around us, in the general area of Doheny Drive, this little valley, from the flats to the crest of the hills. I think it is a defensible area, and I think we should start thinking about defending it. And I propose that we start in on that right now.”
Within an hour, with very few dissenting voices, the Doheny Militia was formed, with Richard Ferguson, former CEO of an aeronautics firm, as acting chief.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dave’s first turn at manning the ramparts of Doheny Drive came on the night after the neighborhood meeting, the third night after the quake.
It had been decided that intelligence would be gathered at first by monitoring what electronic media were still in operation. Then, if they decided they needed to know more, small parties might venture beyond Sunset to get the lay of the land.
Ferguson had not been elected, and so far no one had called for elections. Everybody seemed content to let him take over, since he seemed to have the best information, had been thinking about it longer than anyone but Dave, and was willing to take the job.
Dave had not revealed his own prior knowledge. He didn’t intend to enlighten anyone, either. He felt nervous about his stockpiles of food and other supplies, and not only against a perceived threat from outsiders. He worried that his own neighbors might be just as big a threat to his family, when they got hungry enough.
That first day groups had been organized by street, and those groups had caucused briefly to select one person to be in charge of each group. Those group leaders were to receive new information from Ferguson and three other men who had volunteered to be his lieutenants. Bulletins would be issued as Patel found out more from the radio networks being established, and relayed verbally up the hill. Printed notices were to be kept to a minimum, to save paper.
So already a small bureaucracy had been established. Mankind was the political animal, no doubt about it.
The last order of business had been for volunteers to draw numbers from a silver punch bowl. A duty roster was to be drawn, and when one’s number came up he or she was to report to the bottom of the hill—armed, if possible—to stand a watch. Dave had volunteered, along with more than half the attendees. Later that day a messenger came to his gate with the news that he was to present himself between midnight and 6 A.M. the following evening.
When he arrived on his bicycle, carrying his shotgun, he was surprised at how much had been done.
A barricade had been built right across Doheny by rolling useless cars with empty gas tanks down the hill. Some of them had been turned on their sides, providing good cover for the militia to hide behind. Dave could see a Hummer with a chain attached to it that had been used to upend the cars, and a block and tackle.
The reason he could see any of it on that night without streetlights or light coming from any of the houses was two battery-powered security spots on metal poles, facing down the street.
He was greeted by a man he recognized from the meeting two days before, who introduced himself as Art Bertelstein. He was tall and thin, in his forties, with a shock of curly yellow hair held down by a yarmulke. He was carrying a rifle, and had a revolver tucked into his waistband.
“What’s my job here?”
“We’re still feeling our way. Personally, I think this is all overreaction.”
“Is that why you’re carrying two guns?”
Art laughed.
“Better safe than sorry. I think that if we get attacked, it’s most likely to be under cover of darkness. What do you think?”
“I don’t know whether to expect organized attacks, or just desperate individuals. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I won’t shoot unless somebody is shooting at me.”
“I’m with you there. What do you think about this Ferguson?”
“What do you mean?”
Art looked down at the ground, then back at Dave.
“He’s sort of taken over. I don’t know much about him.”
“I’m willing to follow his lead for now.”
Art nodded, but he didn’t seem happy.
“Okay. I was never in the army. How about you?”
Dave shook his head.
There were four of them on the graveyard shift. The other two were Sam Crowley, a seventy-two-year-old retired cinematographer who lived on Kinglet Drive, and Marie O’Brien, who had run a real-estate agency in Beverly Hills. She appeared to be in her late forties, and was attractive even in rumpled clothing that wasn’t too clean. Crowley was athletic-looking and completely bald. Both of them carried shotguns.
“There’s another guy out there about a hundred yards down the street,” Art said. “He’s hiding behind a wall, beyond the range of the lights, and he’s got a walkie-talkie. He’s supposed to warn us if he sees anybody coming up the road.”
“If he sees somebody and talks, would the people coming up the road be able to hear him?” Dave asked.
“Good question. Damn, I wish we had a soldier here.”
“I have a suggestion. I saw it in a movie. You can just click the button on those radios and it will make a click on your unit. We could work out a code.”
“Good idea.”
“Is he armed? Yes? Then if we get into a firefight, he could surprise them by firing from behind.”
“Unless he runs away. Damn. Firefights, ambushes…I hate this.”
“Don’t we all.”
Art called the man at the forward post and they decided if he saw anyone coming, he would click twice, pause, and then click the number of people he saw. He was dubious about opening fire from behind, unless there was only one or two guys. Dave didn’t blame him. He had been thinking like a scriptwriter. Out in the field, where the bullets would be real, it felt very different.
They stood around and talked quietly, though their eyes kept being drawn out to the street, where the lights faded into a darkness that now looked threatening. Twice they were silenced by the rattle of a distant automatic weapon, and once by a single shotgun blast. Other than that, the first night passed without incident.
Dave had spent the previous d
ay and a half working on the guesthouse with Karen and Addison. They had cleaned out all the things no longer needed to make the guesthouse livable, and when it got dark they moved much of their food from the basement to a locked closet on the first floor.
He had mostly worked on boarding up the first-floor windows. Not just the ones that had broken in the quake, but all of them, sealing off his million-dollar view. Luckily, there weren’t too many of them. On the first floor, the north and west sides were windowless, as their only views would have been of the wall and the gate. On the east side, there were three picture windows facing the patio and pool. That left the south side, which had been all glass. He used the sheets of plywood he had laid in during his shopping spree. He felt sure he could have gotten the job done in a few hours if he had unlimited electricity, and from time to time he would look longingly at his power saw. He could have run it for a short time from his solar batteries, but that would have meant turning off the small refrigerator, and that was one luxury he wasn’t ready to part with. By cooling their leftovers they were able to make sure nothing went to waste.
Best of all, they had ice. The weather continued hot, and a glass of iced tea or lemonade made from powdered mix kept him going when he thought he might collapse.
Using a handsaw instead of a power saw wasn’t exactly a retreat to Stone Age technology, but it felt like it. He would work for five minutes, then rest. Karen gamely offered to spell him while he rested, but she had even less success. Addison gave it a try, but could barely get the saw to move at all. Dave squirted a little oil on the blade and that seemed to help, but he was soon plastered in sawdust and feeling more than a little grumpy. At the end of the first day, he wasn’t halfway through the project. He was getting a blister on his hand, despite the work gloves.
Then Karen and Addison would help hold the finished piece of plywood in place and he would nail it in. When he had the first section in place he felt a sense of accomplishment, as if he had built an entire house, but looking at how much he had left to do was depressing.
He was enormously glad when the sun went down. No question of working after dark anymore.
The three of them gathered around the dinner table for a macaroni and cheese hot dish that was only burned a little bit on the bottom, with canned pears and string beans, and tiny cups of chocolate pudding for dessert. Karen set out a plate of biscuits made from powered mix, but they were soggy when they bit into them.
“I’m still getting the hang of baking on the camp stove,” she said.
“This isn’t so bad,” Dave said, bravely eating a second bite. And in fact, he was so hungry he could have eaten almost anything, including raw biscuit batter. “But I think we maybe should cut back on portions. I hate to say that, because I could eat everything on this table and still want more, but we have to make it last.”
“I wish we knew how long,” Karen said. “How much do you think? Fifteen hundred calories? Twelve hundred?”
“We can figure it out later. Tonight, let’s eat our fill. I know there must be a lot of hungry people out there, who are getting less than twelve hundred calories.”
Addison pushed her plate away.
“I’ve had enough,” she announced. Karen pushed it back at her.
“Clean your plate, dear. My mother used to say, ‘there are people starving in Africa.’ Now there are people starving in Los Angeles, so count your blessings.”
“I wish I could give it to them.”
“And I wished I could feed the starving children in Africa, but we can’t. You’ve just got a few bites there, and I know you’re still hungry. If you want to make a sacrifice, don’t open your pudding.”
Dave mopped his plate with the soggy biscuit, then cleaned out the empty cans and plastic pudding containers in the tub of bathwater they had used earlier in the day and buried them under the pile of debris they had moved out of the guesthouse.
After Karen finished washing their dinnerware in a bucket of clean water, they lit a lantern and sat around the picnic table.
They had one surviving television set, a small one from Addison’s room that had been knocked down but still showed a blue screen when they turned it on. But that was all they got. There was no cable service, and they didn’t have a satellite dish. Dave thumbed through all the channels, and the screen still stayed blue.
“Well, it’s a better light,” Karen said, turning off the lantern, “and it runs off our batteries.” It was true. The flat screen made them look like they were underwater, but it was enough light to see by.
The radio was part of the home theater system. He slowly turned the big black knob, looking for stations, as the three of them clustered together in the blue light.
There wasn’t a lot to hear.
He found a dozen stations, about half of them in Spanish. Many of the stations were broadcasting just music or simple tape loops advising listeners to return on the hour for news updates. Dave thought they probably didn’t have the personnel to keep up the twenty-four/seven yakking everyone was accustomed to. That was confirmed when one station switched to live reports at ten o’clock. The man in the studio gave the call letters and the frequency, then identified himself.
“As we told you at nine, we will keep broadcasting as long as our emergency generator holds out. The engineer tells me he has enough gas for about a week. Write down this frequency, as we have decided to give updates on the hour.
“We are sending out our reporters as often as we can, but not many have shown up since the quake. Most of our news is coming from City Hall. Here’s what they say:
“Exercise caution when leaving your homes. We are hearing a lot about people joining together for neighborhood protection, and that sounds like a good idea to me. Work with your neighbors, my friends. Get to know them.”
Dave was reminded of old movies set during World War II, of London families during the Blitz, gathered around a big console radio to hear the news of the bombings. The darkness pressed in around them.
The silence was almost total between radio broadcasts. Each time a station signed off they would be directed to another frequency. The remaining stations had worked out a schedule of quarter-hour time slots. Karen jotted down the information, so they could listen again on following nights.
None of the news was good. Mostly it consisted of reports of violence, much of it of dubious reliability, as the first radio station had warned. A gun battle had broken out between police and unidentified gangs in the area of the Disney Center and continued on up Bunker Hill. Snipers were known to be in the lower floors of the Library Tower, and higher up in several other skyscrapers. More snipers had been reported from some buildings near the beach in Santa Monica.
Koreatown seemed to have the strongest organization, with armed men guarding all major intersections in the big square between about Olympic and Third, Hoover and Rossmore. Bodies were reported to be hanging from lampposts all along Wilshire Boulevard, and at the major streets entering the area. Some had signs hanging around their necks, identifying them as looters, killers, and “invaders.” The Korean militia had fought several pitched battles with either Mexican and Salvadoran gangs or hordes of hungry Hispanic families, depending on what reporter you believed. Everyone agreed that the Koreans had won. It was said that food and water were still being delivered and distributed to residents of Koreatown, but that could not be confirmed, as no one from that neighborhood was talking about it.
Farther south established black and Hispanic gangs were reported to be rampaging, though some said that was much exaggerated. The one hopeful thing Dave heard was that the elders in both the African-American and Latino communities on the flatlands were trying to work together to battle the lawless youth of both races. But once again, that was not easy to confirm. In the San Fernando Valley the story was similar. They got no news at all from the San Gabriel Valley, or from farther south in Orange County.
And once more, Dave thought, our world contracts. Orange County might as well be on
the farside of the Moon. At ten o’clock they turned the radio off, then the television, and sat silently for a while.
“I wish I could call some of my friends,” Addison finally said.
Dave didn’t know what to tell her. Only two of her friends had lived in their canyon, and both had left with their families a week earlier. The others had lived either in neighboring canyons or down on the flats. Both places were impossibly distant at the moment.
“I’ll bet you miss your cell phone,” Karen said. “I know I do.”
Addison said, “I try it a few times a day. No bars.”
Strange as all this seemed to Dave, he knew it must be even more of a wrench for his daughter, who had never known life without her cell. No Facebook page to update, no Twitter messages to post, no texting, none of the social media that Dave had never used but which were so big a part of the young generation’s lives.
“Tomorrow night you have to stand guard duty,” Karen said.
“That’s what I agreed to.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like the family to be separated, even for a few hours.”
“I don’t like it, either, but I think Ferguson is right, we have to stand together. You heard the reports on the radio. Some very nasty people might figure that there’s more food and loot up here than down there.”
“What’s to prevent them from coming over the hill, behind us?”
“For one thing, they’d have to fight their way uphill from the Valley. We can hope that the people on the north side of the hills are organizing just like we are.”
“But if they do make it, we’re pretty close to the top. Last night I had bad dreams about people coming down the hill, not up.”
