Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “We have to get out of here,” Karen said, urgently.

  “I know. But do you think we should leave these weapons lying around?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  “Kill him!” the woman screamed again.

  Dave didn’t know what issues she had with him, and he didn’t want to know.

  “He’s not our problem anymore,” he shouted to her, and then to the kid, “Get on your face and spread your arms out.”

  “You’ll shoot me!” the kid cried.

  “Not if you do what I tell you.” He spoke to Karen. “Can you grab that shotgun from the guy behind us?”

  “It’s a rifle. And I’m not sure I can.”

  “Do it if you can.” The screaming from behind him had stopped, and as soon as the guy in front of him had stretched out on the pavement, spread-eagled, he risked a quick glance back there. Karen was off her scooter and slowly approaching the man she had shot, keeping her gun aimed at him. Karen’s blast had hit him around the hips. Blood was pumping from an artery, and he was moving feebly, trying to get up and crawl away.

  Dave hurried over to the uninjured kid, who twisted his head in panic, trying to see Dave, but he kept his hands pressed flat to the ground.

  “Don’t look at me,” Dave told him, and as soon as the kid turned to face the ground again, Dave hit him on the back of the head with his shotgun butt. He hit him harder than he had ever hit anyone in his life, thinking, You didn’t think this nice white couple would shoot, did you, you cocksucker. The kid stopped moving. Dave picked up the shotgun the kid had been too shocked to fire.

  “Kill him!” the woman shouted again. “That bastard—”

  “He’s not my problem, ma’am.” He moved to the man he had shot. He was dead. Dave picked up his pistol. He looked up at the woman on the balcony, then threw the pistol toward the door to her apartment building.

  “Do what you want, but wait till we’re gone, or I’ll shoot you, too.”

  The woman said nothing, and Dave hurried back to the scooters. Karen had the rifle. She was looking pale and sick.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she said.

  They hurried down the street and around the corner, looking up at all the balconies around them. It was dusk now, and what Dave feared the most was that the three Koreans had friends in the area who might have heard the shotgun blasts.

  They were in luck this time with the streets. They were able to make five blocks to the west without hindrance, then turned north and went another three blocks before a destroyed apartment building blocked their path.

  “I need to pull over,” Karen said.

  They drove to the curb and stopped their engines. Karen staggered a few steps to the sidewalk, and threw up.

  “His leg, his hip…just sort of exploded.”

  They were motoring along in the gathering dusk, seldom going more than fifteen miles per hour.

  They had run into two more guard posts. Each time they had held their breaths, putting their shotguns in nonthreatening positions and slowing down to let the men see how harmless they were. Each time Dave had worried that someone had called ahead on a radio. Be on the lookout for a man and a woman on white and pink Vespas. It was possible they had just killed the son of one of these men. It was also possible the men would be as happy to see the end of the gangbangers as the woman in the apartment building had been, but you couldn’t count on that. At each checkpoint they had been waved on.

  “Dave, we have to talk.”

  “It’s getting late, hon.”

  “I know, but we have to take a minute.”

  They were getting close to Sunset Boulevard and he wanted nothing more than to be putt-putting up Doheny, but he pulled over and shut off his engine.

  “Addison doesn’t need to hear about this,” she said. “Ever.”

  “I’d already figured that out.”

  “I know. But what about this shotgun, and the rifle? How do we explain them? She’s not stupid, she’ll know something happened.”

  “You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I say we get rid of the rifle. We don’t have any bullets for it anyway.”

  “I hate to. It’s worth a lot now. We might need to barter it for something. And I really hate to part with the extra shotgun, which we do have ammunition for.”

  “I don’t feel good about taking things off dead men.”

  “I don’t either. But they were threatening us.”

  “Threatening to rob us.”

  “You point a gun at me, as far as I’m concerned, you’re trying to kill me.”

  “You’re right. I’m just still trying to get my mind around the idea that we just killed two people.”

  Two kids, Dave was thinking. Did it matter that they might have been anywhere from sixteen to twenty? Before all this, sure it did, in a court of law. If any courts of law were still functioning, he hadn’t heard of them.

  “Dave, do you think we might be in trouble here?” Karen asked, reading his mind.

  “Well, we just committed two felonies, and then we drove away, and that’s probably a half dozen other felonies right there.”

  “We’d be pretty easy to identify. Pink Vespa?”

  “Let’s think about that later. My gut feeling is that girl would never identify us.”

  “If she was the only one who saw us.”

  “There’s that.” He knew there were people up there in those apartments, hunkering down for another night without electricity. He thought most of them wouldn’t go to the windows when they heard gunfire, but you never knew. And one of those observers might have been the mother of one of the boys.

  It was all too much to consider at the moment. He shook off his worries and came back to the issue of the guns.

  “How about this? We leave the rifle with somebody at the barricade, somebody who can keep his mouth shut, somebody who wouldn’t let it get to Addison. I know at least two people I’d trust with that.”

  “The rifle and the shotgun.”

  “All right. For now. Later, I can take some stuff down the hill and ‘trade’ for it. Come back with a plausible story, and another shotgun. I want that shotgun, Karen, for Addison. I’ve been kicking myself that I didn’t buy three when I had the chance.”

  She thought about it for a moment. Seeing Addison in trouble with a shotgun, and without a shotgun. A no-brainer.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Then let’s get going.”

  Addison was inconsolable.

  She was also angrier than Dave had seen her since she was two.

  She was a remarkably mature young girl, sensitive and smart and well behaved, having dealt with her parents’ growing estrangement a lot better than he felt he would have at her age. But she was also at that age where it was possible to shed that new, uncomfortable adult skin at a moment’s notice and revert to a child’s view of the world, and a child’s reactions.

  “You said you’d be back before dark!”

  “There’s still a little bit of light,” Karen pointed out. Dave thought that was the wrong tack to take, and he was right.

  “Oh, so now I need to get out my damn almanac? You promised!”

  “Addie, using bad language won’t—”

  “Oh, screw you!”

  Her eyes were red, her cheeks were wet, her nose was running. It was a full-scale tantrum, and she had been crying for hours. Jenna was standing off to the side, knowing better than to get involved in this, but she caught Dave’s eye for a moment and there was a lot of things in that look. Anger, relief, accusation. Of course she had been terrified that she would be left to raise the child on her own. Which she had vowed she would do to the best of her ability.

  “Addie,” Dave said quietly. His daughter wouldn’t look at him. “Addie, I’m sorry. Please forgive us. We never should have left you here.”

  “Daddy, you promised…” Then she collapsed into his arms. He held her tightly, vowing on
ce more that no matter what it took, nothing was going to happen to this girl. He held his arm out and Karen joined them. After a brief hesitation, Addison put her arm around her mother, too. Dave gestured to Jenna, who looked as if she was thinking about making herself scarce.

  “What I said was true, Jenna,” Dave told her. “You’re family, too.” Which broke her up, and she stumbled over and joined the group hug.

  “Addie, I’m going to make you another promise. This one will be easy to keep. From now on, this family sticks together. Always. We won’t go anywhere without you. If it’s too dangerous for you, it’s too dangerous for us. How is that?”

  “Okay, if you promise.”

  “We both promise,” Karen said.

  “Daddy, all my friends, I don’t know where they are, I don’t know if they’re safe or dead, or what. I miss them so much.”

  Dave felt stupid. Of course she worried about her friends. He had been so concentrated on family, nothing but family, and those few close friends in the posse that he had warned and thus felt a certain responsibility for. He had many other friends, but they were just people he knew, mostly professionally. None so close that he had spent a lot of time worrying about them. His parents were dead, Karen’s parents were far away and emotionally remote; they spoke to them by phone on Christmas and birthdays, and it was always a relief to get it over with. He had no siblings, no aunts or uncles he was close to. To Dave, family had always meant the two women in his life, and now Jenna.

  It all descended on him now. How were Bob and his family? How were Dennis and Roger? He was appalled by how small his world had become. It made him weak in the knees, thinking about how much now depended on him. Addison was just a child, Karen had abdicated to him, Jenna was uncertain of her role. It was too damn much.

  Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He was a storyteller, that was all he had ever wanted to be. He was a man who had tried to be a good father but now saw he had spent too much of his time chasing after things that didn’t matter. He had a huge, all-but-worthless home, he was surrounded by former millionaires whose homes were now all but worthless, too. He had almost been a millionaire himself. When all the material things had been stripped away, he saw how useless his life had been, all his striving, all his sacrifices of the things that really mattered.

  It was too much. He needed help.

  That night Dave and Karen lay in each other’s arms in the darkness. Dave wondered if he would ever get to sleep. He kept seeing that kid knocked over by the blast from his shotgun.

  Karen seemed to read his thoughts.

  “Do you think we’re going to be in trouble?” she asked.

  “You mean for killing two people?”

  “It was self-defense. They were threatening us.”

  “They never got off a shot,” Dave pointed out.

  “But that guy I shot, he was coming up behind us. It was a trap.”

  “Maybe all they wanted to do was rob us. Take our scooters and our guns.”

  “Which could have been a death sentence, leaving us alone, miles from home, with night coming on.”

  “I’m not arguing with you, Karen. I’m just thinking how a prosecutor might argue the case before a jury.”

  “Do you think there are any juries operating out there? Or prosecutors, for that matter.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. The police are still functioning, some of them, anyway, and the National Guard. I’ll bet there’s a jail, or some kind of compound.”

  “But you don’t think anybody will be coming after us?”

  “I guess I doubt it. Everybody wants law and order, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the police have their hands full just trying to maintain order. In a near anarchy, the only law is to maintain order. My guess is that they’re concentrating only on the most violent crime, committed by violent people, people who were bad guys before all this.

  “You know, the people who did things during the Rodney King riots, I don’t think they ever did anything about most of them. Not just looters, there were way too many of those, but people who killed other people. When conditions are like that, most people who commit crimes get away with them. And this situation is ten thousand times worse than the King riots. A million times worse.”

  “So that’s the good news? For us, I mean? They’re too busy trying to keep things calm, so they probably don’t have time to look very hard at killings? And probably don’t have the legal staff to deal with it, anyway?”

  “Well, we could use some good news, couldn’t we? It’s also the bad news, too, of course. If things have reached the point where there’s no law, it’s people like us who will suffer for it. We’re not used to violence. The whole population of the state prison system might be out there, roaming around, as hungry as everybody else but maybe more prepared to do something about it. What I’m thinking is, we got lucky. If they had been just a little bit smarter, it might have gone badly for us.”

  They thought that over for a while.

  “I just don’t understand those boys.” Her voice caught in her throat, and he felt her tears on his shoulder. He hugged her tighter. “We had our guns in our hands! We weren’t exactly pointing them at them, not right at them, but any idiot could see it wouldn’t take us a second to fire.”

  “That’s what I said. That was our luck. We were dealing with idiots.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Only in a certain sense. They might have been bright enough in some ways, but they were slaves to their macho image of themselves. Did you notice the way that guy with the pistol was pointing it? Holding it sideways like they do in the movies? The stupidest way to aim a pistol? That’s cool. It’s so cool that gangbangers picked it up from the movies, like the Mafia picked up stuff from The Godfather.”

  “That’s so awful. If they’d had any sense…”

  “They’d still be alive. But they couldn’t let us go. They had this image of themselves as the big bad gangsters, and their image of us as weak, people who would barf at the idea of shooting somebody.”

  “I did barf.”

  “Afterward, and that’s the important thing.”

  There was another brief silence.

  “What do you feel about it?” she asked.

  “Feel? Not good. But I’ll tell you the truth, if I had it to do over again, I can’t think of what I’d do differently. We gave them every chance.”

  “Maybe a warning shot?”

  “I don’t think you even believe that yourself. He pointed a gun at us, Karen! What was I supposed to do? Ask him to put it down? I had to assume he was about to shoot, that was the only way to deal with it. And that other guy, the one coming up behind you. You think he was going to shout boo? They were playing for keeps, honey, and the only way to deal with that is to play harder and faster and meaner than them.” He paused, and heard her sigh.

  “So how do you feel about it?”

  “I killed someone. I’ll deal with it.”

  He thought she might be done, but there was one more subject to bring up, and it was an important one.

  “Dave, I’m sticking to what I said. The decision is yours. But I told you I’d give you my opinion, and I have to say I’m not sure that leaving here is the right idea.”

  “Big surprise,” he said, and instantly regretted the way that sounded. “No, I mean, of course you have doubts. After what happened? I do, too.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “I’ll tell you what we aren’t going to do. We aren’t leaving tomorrow. I need some time to think about it some more. And I want to see what Addison and Jenna think. Do you think we should tell Jenna?”

  Karen thought about it.

  “Maybe we should think about that a little longer, too.”

  “Fair enough. Honey, this is probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Getting it wrong scares me more than anything I’ve ever faced. Getting it wrong is just not an option. And I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
r />   Karen embraced him.

  “You’ve guided us well so far. I’m willing to rely on you again.”

  “I appreciate that, and at the same time I have to say I kind of resent it. I hope that isn’t too harsh.”

  “I think I deserve worse than that, so I take no offense.”

  “What I want most of all is for us to be a team again. I know you’re strong enough; you were so strong when we had nothing.”

  “I may be ready to be part of the team again soon. But not yet.” She sighed. “That was my downfall, wasn’t it? Going from having nothing, struggling, counting the money, and suddenly we had it all. I couldn’t handle it.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. It was my downfall, too. We both misplaced our values. The miracle, to me, is that Addison has turned out so levelheaded. With precious little help from me. She doesn’t even remember the hard times, she was too young.”

  “She remembers.”

  “You think so?”

  “She’s told me she had more fun ‘back when we were poor.’ Isn’t that sad?”

  “If I’d known that, maybe…no, by then, by the time we moved into this monster of a house, I was blind to everything but getting ahead, being a big success.”

  “I loved you for it. The thing I did wrong was to stop loving you when times got hard again. What was I thinking?”

  They were silent for a while.

  “If you love me again, then everything’s all right.”

  “I do. I always did. I just got angry and couldn’t show it.”

  They both jumped when they heard a noise from the doorway. Dave was groping in the dark for his pistol when Addison spoke.

  “Mommy, can I come in?”

  Dave quickly found the electric lantern and switched it on. He had forgotten to recharge it and the light it cast was dim, but enough to see Addison standing in the doorway to their bedroom, her pillow and a blanket in her arms.

  Karen got out of bed and went to her daughter. She hugged her.

  “I can’t get to sleep. I feel like a baby, but I’m scared.”

  “We’re all scared, Addie.”

  “Can I sleep in here? I can curl up on the floor.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”