Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  Dave took her hand and squeezed it, while at the same time Addison reached for his other hand. He knew even more strongly that he would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep this family safe.

  “I’ll bring it up the next time I see Ferguson.”

  “I think we should reach out to those people on the Valley side,” Addison said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we all had some idea of what everyone else is doing?”

  “I agree.” And so now would the Doheny Militia be formulating a foreign policy, and alliances with its neighbors? It was like medieval city-states banding together, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

  “For now, let’s go to bed,” he said. And they once more retreated to their cots in the tent. Before he could get to sleep, Dave felt another aftershock, and heard Karen cry out. It wasn’t a big one, but probably meant they would be spending at least another night without a roof over their heads.

  They spent the next day as they had the day before, putting the finishing touches on their new and smaller residence. They managed to complete the plywood work, walling off the entire first floor. There was a single door hung on heavy hinges that swung outwards. Not that it swung well, or fit perfectly, but it was stout, made from two pieces of plywood screwed together. Inside, a two-by-four could be set into brackets on either side of the door. It would take a lot of battering to bring it down.

  They had made openings in several places from which they could watch the patio and the gate. From the second-floor north wall they knocked out one of the small slit windows, which now gave a view over the northern wall and into the street beyond.

  Dave didn’t want them to have only one way in or out of the house if they had to hole up in it, but he didn’t want two doors to defend, either. So in the very southwest corner of the first floor, down at floor level, they made a three-foot-square escape hatch that could be kicked out. It would be used only in desperation, because it opened on the very lip of the cliff, and if they used it they would have to walk—or more likely, roll—down the steep hillside to the street below.

  They concealed the escape hatch from the outside by arranging some empty ceramic pots against the wall and putting dead plants in them. They could be easily shoved aside and, with any luck, the family could be on their way down the hillside before anyone breaking in the front door was any the wiser.

  The next-to-last task of the day was to go back into the main house and clear a path to the northwest corner, which was in Addison’s room. There were two floor-to-ceiling windows there, one facing west and the other north. They were wider than the arrow slits in a medieval castle, but narrow enough that Dave could have just squeezed through them. They knocked out the glass, then cut two sheets of plywood into four pieces. They screwed one piece over the west window at floor level, and another higher up, flush with the ceiling. They left a foot-high gap between them, at shoulder height.

  Getting one of the shotguns, Dave climbed the stairs again and stood at the window. He brought the gun up and poked the barrel through the gap, swinging it back and forth. He could cover a lot of the street from there, about five feet above the level of the security wall. It looked good to him, so they did the same with the north window, and then they could cover almost all the rest of the street.

  The last thing they did that day was go to the room in the northeast, which was smaller than Addison’s but had the same corner arrangement of windows. Both of them had broken, and they knocked out the rest of the glass.

  Karen had talked him into the house, even though he thought it was ugly. Too modern, too boxy, he felt. “Very L.A.,” she had said, and so they bought it.

  Now he was grateful to the unknown architect for building a home that might have been designed with self-defense in mind. It had proved easier to seal away from the outside than most houses, because it was already sealed off except for the open south face. When they had prepared the two windows in the storage room in the same way they had done in Addison’s room, it commanded a view of all the street. They could move quickly from one gun port to another, one room to another, or Dave could station himself in one room and have Karen look out from the other.

  They ate a dinner that left Dave still hungry, but he said nothing about that. He probably ought to lose a few pounds, anyway.

  Dave fell into his cot ten minutes after eating, setting the alarm for eleven thirty. At least battery-powered clocks still worked.

  He slept right through it, but Addison woke him and he downed a glass of orange juice, stumbled out onto the street, and painfully lifted his leg over the bicycle. It seemed that every muscle in his body was stiff and sore as he coasted down the hill for his shift on guard duty.

  Dave surprised himself by pedaling almost halfway up the hill before his legs gave out. He had made it from the bottom to the top before, but that was not after a day and a half of hard physical labor that had left him drained and hurting.

  Walking the bike uphill was a little easier, but not much. About the only thing he could console himself with was knowing that there was not a great deal left to do in getting moved into the guesthouse and fortifying his land.

  He was almost to the intersection of Doheny and Mockingbird when he looked up the steep hillside to his right and saw a woman stepping over the metal guardrail.

  That was Sunset Plaza Drive, and even though the person up there was only about four hundred feet from where Dave stood with his bicycle, the only way to get there on streets was a torturous route that would take her almost all the way down to Sunset before doubling back on Rising Glen Road.

  The woman seemed to have other ideas. She was in a big hurry. She hesitated only a moment before stepping over, her heel hitting loose dirt and skidding several feet before her other foot hit the ground. She fell back on her behind and spread her arms out, trying to hug the ground, splayed out like a starfish, looking terrified. It was only then that Dave realized it was Jenna.

  She was dressed in jeans, one red tennis shoe, and a torn and filthy T-shirt. She had a backpack over one arm, but that quickly slipped off and rolled down the hill ahead of her.

  Her shoe and one bare foot dug into the soil, but it was too loose. She was skidding, a shower of dry dirt going down before her.

  Suddenly, at the rail a few feet above her, two men appeared. Both of them wore what looked like black leather pants. One of them had a matching leather vest, the other was shirtless. Both were large men, heavily tattooed, and they looked angry. One of them shouted something Dave didn’t get.

  Jenna didn’t hesitate. She pulled up her feet and started to slide. She quickly lost what little stability she had, and did a somersault. Once, then twice she rolled over, scrabbling, finally getting herself turned sideways.

  Dave heard a gunshot, looked back up at the railing, and was shocked to see that the shirtless one had a gun in his hand and was shooting at Jenna. She was only thirty yards away from him. The other man whooped, and the shooter slapped his friend on the shoulder. Dave knew handguns were not very accurate—this guy was holding his sideways, like he must have seen in the movies. But any idiot can get lucky.

  He didn’t think about it. He jumped off the bike, racked a round into the shotgun, put it to his shoulder, and fired. He knew there was no chance of doing any damage from this far away, but he wanted to get their attention.

  He did. The shooter had been about to squeeze off another round, but he jerked and then ducked with his partner standing there, staring at Dave, who was already running up the street as fast as he could. Dave saw the man in the leather vest point a gun in his direction. He heard the gunshot. There was no telling where the round went. He had never been shot at in his life, and he was amazed at how much energy just the sound of the gunshot had injected into his tired leg muscles. He was almost sprinting before he stopped and put a tree between himself and the gunmen.

  It had been only seconds since the first shot was fired. Jenna was still rolling down the hillside, trying to slow herself by grab
bing at scrub as she hurtled by. Dave wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but maybe she felt it was better to break an arm or a leg than to be shot. He raised the shotgun again and fired at the men. The one who had crouched behind the iron railing was tugging at his friend’s vest, trying to get him to take cover. The vest shrugged him off and aimed again at Dave.

  Dave left the tree in time to see Jenna slide from sight behind one of the houses on Doheny. He looked up and saw the shirtless one aim in her general direction.

  There was the sharp crack of a rifle and then a clank as a bullet hit the guardrail a few feet from where the men were crouching. Dave could see the dust fly off the rail, but he couldn’t be sure where the shot came from.

  The men on the hill apparently saw the shooter, and they didn’t stick around for him to take a second shot. They vanished quickly. Dave stopped, jacked another round into his gun, and aimed at the guardrail, but no one appeared. He heard the sound of two motorcycle engines start up, and dwindle away. He thought he heard at least two more rifle shots, but they didn’t come from where the first one had. It sounded like someone up on Sunset Plaza was shooting at the bikers. At least he hoped so.

  He sat down on the curb and breathed heavily for a while, then forced himself to his feet and hurried as quickly as he could up the street.

  He reached the place where he thought Jenna would have come to rest. It was behind a series of three gated homes. A warning had been spray-painted on the wall: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

  He put his shotgun on the pavement and shouted.

  “Hello in there! This is Dave Marshall. I’m a member of the Doheny Militia. I need to talk to you.”

  A woman peeked through a trapdoor in the solid steel driveway gate.

  “I saw a woman falling down the hill. She’s a friend of mine. I fired at those guys up on the hill.”

  “With that shotgun?”

  “It was all I had. I wanted to distract them. How is my friend?”

  “I don’t know. My husband is back there taking care of her.” She sighed, and pushed her hair back out of her eyes. “Go over to the gate and I’ll let you in.”

  The door in the gate opened, and he stepped through.

  The front yard had been extensively landscaped with things like banana trees, elephant ears, and other tropical plants. All that had now been cut back away from the house, much of it heaped into a big pile against the concrete block wall. It was drying and turning brown. The woman looked to be in her forties, with blonde hair, a little overweight, though her face was gaunt.

  “Around here,” she said. Dave followed her into a narrow space between the house, which seemed not badly damaged by the quake, and a privacy hedge separating the house from its neighbor downhill.

  There was a patio in back, with a kidney-shaped pool. He saw a man kneeling beside Jenna, who was sitting up. He hurried over to them. Jenna’s clothes were torn. She was covered in dirt, dripping with sweat. Her hair was a tangled mess, full of twigs and dead leaves. There was dried blood all down the front of her shirt, and fresh blood flowing from her nose. One eye was swollen shut, surrounded by dark purple skin. She was cradling her left hand against her body.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she was saying. “I think I sprained my wrist and broke my nose again. I don’t want to stay here, those guys might come back. There are more of them…” She looked up. “Dave! It’s you. God, am I glad to see you.”

  She was trying to get to her feet and the man was trying to calm her down.

  “It’s okay,” Dave said, taking her good hand and pulling her up. “I know her. She’s a friend of mine.”

  The man stepped back and picked up a rifle, looking up the hill. There was no one up there that they could see. The property was protected at its boundary, maybe ten feet up the hillside, by a high chain-link fence with a gate that was standing open.

  Dave felt vulnerable. He put Jenna’s good arm over his shoulder and his own arm around her waist and half carried her toward the house. The woman was holding a back door open and she and her husband followed Dave inside.

  Inside were cracked walls and shelves that had once held what might have been a nice china collection, now shattered and swept into a heap. Books had been restacked at random. He took Jenna to a French provincial sofa and lowered her gently onto it.

  “I’m Herman Patterson,” the man said. “My wife’s name is Matilda, Mattie for short.” The woman appeared beside Jenna with a bowl of water and some washcloths. She started dabbing at Jenna’s face. Jenna winced, thanked her, and took over the job of cleaning herself. The basin was soon brown with dirt and blood. Jenna probed in her mouth with a finger.

  “I think I loosened a tooth,” she said.

  “It was quite a fall,” Dave told her.

  “Yeah, if I can’t get a job as a writer, maybe I can start a second career as a stuntwoman. You remember Dudley Moore rolling down the hill in 10? Believe it or not, that scene kept playing in my mind as I was sliding. I didn’t want to roll head over heels, so I turned sideways. I’m lucky I didn’t break my neck.”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “It’s just the wrist. It’ll probably swell up pretty soon. You didn’t think I got all this damage from rolling down the hill, did you?”

  “That’s pretty clear.”

  “It’s a goddam jungle out there, Dave.”

  They thanked the Pattersons for their help, and Dave helped Jenna through the gate and onto Doheny Drive.

  “Dave, I don’t want to alarm your daughter. Could we just say that I slipped coming down the hill?”

  “We could do that, but she’s not stupid.”

  “No, I guess not. Do you want to know what happened, before we get to your house?”

  “Only whatever you want to tell.”

  “I guess I had some bad luck. Ran into that gang, it was five guys and three of their girlfriends, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.”

  Jenna had planned to set out early in the morning the day after Dave had offered her the use of his house after his family left. The quake made that impossible.

  “Two buildings in my complex collapsed completely. My building, the west end fell in, and part of my apartment. The wall around my front door was so screwed up I couldn’t get the damn door open, even battering at it with a hammer. So I hollered for help. Some guys came and knocked down the door.

  “I joined the search parties trying to find survivors. I heard…oh, Dave, I heard children in there, crying out for their mothers, most of them in Spanish. And we couldn’t see them, and couldn’t get to them. Some of them are probably still crying. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I bugged out. I’m not proud of it, but I left.”

  “Jenna, there’s only so much—”

  “—one person can do. I know that. I wasn’t doing anyone any good, anyway. We needed heavy equipment, and none showed up. They were trying to move bricks and lumber by hand, and you could see it would take weeks to get to the trapped people, if you could get to them at all. I couldn’t even cry anymore.

  “Which was a good thing, later…” She stopped walking, which almost pulled Dave off balance. She looked up at him.

  “I can see this story is going to take a long time, and I want to tell you…there were five of them, and their women.” She spit out the last word. “I told myself it would go easier if I just…went with it…but I couldn’t do it. So they beat me up some. And then they did me anyway, taking turns or two at a time. And their girls not only watched, they egged them on. I thought I knew evil, Dave, but I didn’t even have a clue. You know what? I hated the women even more than I hated the men, and I hated the men more than I’ve ever hated anything. If only I’d had a gun. They probably would have killed me, but I might have taken a few of them with me.”

  She stopped. Dave waited for her to go on, but it seemed she had no more to say. Dave was just as glad. He was willing to listen to anything at all if it would help, but he had a feeling it was
something she might talk to Karen about more easily. Then he remembered that Jenna and Karen were not the best of friends.

  “Addison is going to know, Jenna.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure she will. But she doesn’t need to know any details. If she asks, I’ll just say yes, it happened, and that’s the end of it. Is that okay? Dave, I don’t want to bring all this into your house. All this ugliness.”

  “Don’t give it another thought. We’re all going to have to get used to it, and that includes my daughter. Who is tougher than you might know.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “So I grabbed two bottles of water and split.”

  Jenna was trying to heed Karen’s warnings not to put too much food on an empty stomach too quickly. Dave could tell she wanted to tilt the pot up to her mouth and shovel the Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs directly into her mouth, but she forced herself to take it a spoonful at a time, talking compulsively about her recent odyssey through the depths of hell, formerly known as the San Fernando Valley.

  “That was the next day, not too long after sunrise, so it was maybe thirty, thirty-two hours after the quake. Next thing you know, I got lost.”

  She blew on another spoonful, chewed it slowly.

  “I know, how do you get lost in the Valley? It’s nothing but a grid between the Ronald Reagan and the Ventura. But I did. I don’t think I was completely in my right mind. I wasn’t processing information right.

  “But it was changed, too. There were places where the streets had buckled, the pavement had been shoved up five or six feet high. There were power lines down all over the place and I was afraid to touch them until it finally sunk in that there wasn’t any power, anywhere. Trees were down everywhere, and some of them had knocked down street signs. Nothing looked all that familiar.”

  She took another bite.

  “Dave, Karen…Addison, I’d say most of the buildings in the Valley are ones that would be red-tagged in the sort of earthquakes we’ve had before. Unsafe to enter, total losses. Just bulldoze them and start over. Maybe 10 percent of the buildings I saw had collapsed completely. Piles of rubble, and some of them were fairly new, probably up to code. And still they fell down.”