Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  Addison and Karen were out of the car before it stopped rocking from the sudden stop. Another woman from the crowd reached the fallen mother before Addison and Karen could get around the car, and a third gently took the baby from Dave. He sat for just a moment, his heart hammering at how close it had been, then carefully eased out of the driver’s seat, careful not to step on the fallen woman.

  “Get her in the shade!” someone said. Dave got her under one arm and one of the other women got the other. They lifted her and carried her to the meager shade of one of the ornamental trees that had not been buried under rubble. Addison had the baby, and was following right behind him. They set the mother down on the ground. Dave wasn’t sure she had ever completely passed out, but she was woozy.

  “Where’s my baby?”

  Addison handed the child to her mother.

  Dave caught Karen’s eye and gestured to her. He leaned close to her ear and whispered.

  “Get back to the car and close the doors.”

  She nodded, and took Addison’s arm.

  Dave watched the two women tending to the mother. From the corner of his eye he watched his wife and daughter.

  Dave had thought it was a sweatbox inside the Escalade, but somehow it was even worse outside. The thermometer in the car had been reading 98 when he got out.

  He walked slowly back to his family.

  “Is there any water we can get to easily?” he said, quietly.

  Karen opened the back door, took two bottles of water, and grabbed a washcloth. She twisted the cap off one bottle and soaked the cloth. She handed the wet cloth to one of the attending women, who began dabbing it on the flushed and sweaty face of the mother. Dave was desperate to move on, but he knew he couldn’t at the moment. And it didn’t surprise him when Addison had an idea.

  “Daddy, I want to let them ride in my place. I can walk along beside the car. We’re going in the same direction, aren’t we?”

  “Not very far, Addie.”

  “Well, every little bit helps.”

  He knew that she was right. What would it cost them to take her a mile down the road? He consulted his mental map of the area and knew he could get the mother and child to Century City, where he hoped there might be an aid station, possibly even one with some baby formula. Then he could head north for Bob’s house.

  When he turned onto Santa Monica a few minutes later, he had finally found a use for the steel rails that jutted out on each side of the Escalade beneath the doors.

  They had always struck him as purely ornamental, features added to this theoretically “off-road” vehicle to make it look brawnier, more heavy-duty. In reality, just one more chrome-plated decoration for an auto detailer to polish. But in a pinch—and was there ever more of a pinch than this?—they could function like an old-fashioned running board, though they weren’t nearly as broad.

  So now Addison and Karen were walking along beside the SUV. In the front seat was the young woman and her baby. Their names were Melanie and Missy. Dave wasn’t clear which was which, and it hardly mattered.

  In the backseat was an elderly gentleman who had been sitting by the side of the road with his crutches. The man’s wife had her feet on the running bar on Dave’s left, along with another young mother whose three-year-old boy was sleeping in the lap of the old man. On the other side were two more people who, for whatever reason, had been unable to go on but were able to cling to the side of the Escalade. Another elderly couple were sitting on the hood, on a blanket Karen had provided because the metal was too hot to touch. Dave was proceeding at just about a walking pace. Other people kept looking at him as he passed, obviously badly in need of a ride, and he had to ignore them. This was as far as he was willing to go in the passenger department.

  So he puttered along, knowing he must look like a San Francisco cable car.

  He hadn’t been sure how long he would have to drive like that, but it turned out to be a little less than a mile, as he had hoped.

  As they approached the Avenue of the Stars, which cut through the heart of Century City, it was clear that it was a center of activity. There were National Guard and LAPD and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department vehicles parked on the street, as well as trucks from the Red Cross. A large tent had been set up and was functioning as a hospital.

  Some of his passengers had told him they hadn’t seen any signs of authority in weeks, other than a few bicycle cops who were usually too busy to do much other than answer a few questions. That was how many of them had learned of this exodus.

  There was no soup line in Century City, but police were urging people on, telling them the next feeding station was two miles down the road, under the 405 freeway.

  As soon as he stopped, Addison was out and pulling Melanie and Missy toward a Red Cross station. Dave had no choice but to wait, as Karen hurried after her.

  “Don’t let her out of your sight!” Dave yelled. “And don’t get out of my sight!”

  “I won’t. I’ll get her back. Damn her!”

  Dave saw Addison find a man in green surgical scrubs who at least looked like a doctor. He relaxed a little and took the chance to look around him.

  The first thing he noticed was a line of four big bright red double-decker buses, painted with American and British flags, reproductions of the famous Hollywood sign, and come-ons like SEE THE HOMES OF THE STARS. You used to see these buses parked at the curb in front of Grauman’s Chinese and the Hollywood & Highland Center as sweaty, sunburned tourists got on and off and gawked and took millions of pictures in the vain hope of seeing somebody famous. The buses had been altered with the now-familiar stacks of wood-burning generators, and they emitted clouds of thick smoke.

  He turned to one of the men who had been clinging to the side of his car, but had now stepped off and was sitting in the street.

  “Why don’t you go over there and see what’s happening?” he said. “I suspect they’re giving rides to seniors and disabled.”

  The man looked suspicious, and Dave realized he thought he was being ditched.

  “I’m not going any farther down this road anyway,” he told the guy. “So you have nothing to lose.”

  After one more sideways look, the old gentleman heaved himself to his feet and stumped toward the buses on his crutches.

  Addison caught his eye and held up a can of baby formula. The mother was holding another. Addison hugged the mother, then Karen did, too, and they helped her board the bus, then came hurrying back and took their seats.

  “She was lactose intolerant,” Addison said. “They have a special formula for that, but not much of it. The doctor said their best bet was to get her down to the boat at Santa Monica, where they had a better hospital. I…Daddy, I—”

  “It’s okay, Addison.”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy. I know we’re not supposed to split up. I wasn’t thinking. But it’s the only thing I’ve done in a long time that’s made me feel good.”

  “I feel good, too. Just don’t do it again, okay?”

  Before they could get going again Karen had to get out and explain to their passengers that this was the end of the line for the Marshall Transit System. Response wasn’t instantaneous. Two of the people Dave had begun to think of as barnacles seemed to think they had signed on for a ride to the beach. Karen explained that the red tour buses would take them there, in much more comfort. Dave was about to get out and physically remove them, if he had to, but they finally gave up.

  Feeling virtuous about what help they had rendered, but most of all feeling relief at no longer being surrounded by tired, hungry, sweltering, and possibly angry people, he made the first right turn he could, and drove down the silent Club View Drive.

  They made it to Wilshire easily enough. Twice they passed neighborhood militia posts, told them they were heading to Holmby Hills, and were waved on through.

  The Los Angeles Country Club was off to their right, and for the first few blocks they could see the golf course through some cuts the residents had
made in the big hedge that surrounded it. The hedge itself was dry and brittle, and the grass on the course was dead or dying.

  At the junction with Ashton they were confronted with the worst damage they had seen yet. They were by then almost inured to seeing collapsed buildings. There were literally thousands of them. But here Dave had to stop and they all got out to take a look.

  They had seen too many cracks in the earth to count, starting with the big one that had opened just east of their house. This one dwarfed the others. It ran north to south, and was thirty to forty feet wide. The far side of it was twenty feet lower than the edge they stood on. It went down until it was too dark to see well, and it looked like it had swallowed a dozen houses. It was just a jumble of wood, brick, and vehicles, all crushed.

  They looked at it for a while, then silently climbed back into the Escalade.

  A few side-street detours finally brought them out onto Wilshire, where the chasm had crossed the road directly beneath a skyscraper.

  No earthquake code ever written could create a building that would stand when the ground opens beneath it. There was little left of the twenty-some stories but unidentifiable wreckage that lay in a heap across Wilshire Boulevard. It had crushed the Department of Water and Power Building on the far side of the street and badly damaged the tall condo building across Comstock.

  “That crack is pointed right at Bob’s house,” Dave said.

  “Teddy didn’t mention it.” Karen pointed out. “It must not have reached them.”

  “You have to figure they had quite a shake.”

  “We all did, Daddy.”

  Dave drove to Beverly Glen and turned north.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Bob Winston’s part of Holmby Hills was on the edge of the informal line that marked the boundary between midrange mansions and truly huge estates. He was quite close to the sprawling grounds of the Playboy Mansion and the mansion built by Aaron Spelling in 1988. People who had once lived in the neighborhood were Jayne Mansfield, the Bloomingdales, Bogart and Bacall, and Gary Cooper.

  This was the lifestyle that Karen had recently aspired to, and that Dave had come close to being able to afford. If he had had one more hit show, they might have made it, though part of Bob’s good fortune had been to come into serious Hollywood money at a time when buying a medium-sized mansion in Los Angeles was still within the reach of the medium-sized wealthy. He had also invested well. Holmby Hills had been about as exclusive as it got in Los Angeles. Now it was a disaster area.

  Judging from the filth on the houses he could see, the wave of water coming from the broken Stone Canyon dam had averaged five or six feet high when it came churning down the streets. The terrain was hilly, but not excessively so. It was enough that buildings on high ground had escaped damage, while ones in hollows had been submerged up to the rooflines. When the waters receded they left behind a foot-thick layer of muck, mixed in with a great many uprooted plants and trees, half-buried vehicles, debris freshly shaken off homes by the quake, household furnishings, and even pieces of houses.

  And bodies, of course. They passed several lumps where bodies, already half-buried, had been covered over with earth and marked with crosses.

  The streets gave the Escalade its first real test as an off-road vehicle. In places it was fairly smooth, running over mud that had long since hardened in the summer sun. In other places a bulldozer had shoved up an earthen berm. It was clear that the berm was a palisade that could be used to defend the houses that lay hidden behind it.

  In places the dirt of the road was deeply rutted, right down to the cracked asphalt, which was broken into chunks. The big SUV squeaked and bounced as Dave slowly drove along, trying not to get stuck high-centered on a hump in the middle of the street.

  “There’s somebody behind that wall over there,” Karen said.

  “I see it. Try to look harmless.”

  They bounced on until they were close to where he thought Bob’s house was. Somebody stepped into the road. Dave recognized Mark, one of Bob and Emily’s sons. Mark was on the tall side, like all of the Winston family, with a receding hairline, blue eyes, and a strong chin. He looked to be nearing forty. He was dressed in khaki work clothes and thick boots and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He gestured to them, waving his free hand toward a break in the otherwise impenetrable high hedge, his other hand holding a firearm that looked like an M-16. Dave turned right and bumped over the ruts in the road. He ended up on what must have been Bob’s driveway, though it was now covered with a layer of dried mud. In fact, the whole yard was now a dusty desert with a few half-buried, dead shrubs surrounding the four tall palm trees still standing. He could no longer see the cobbles that had made up the circular driveway and small parking area.

  The house was in a shocking state.

  It was a sprawling two-story brick structure, almost eight thousand square feet not counting the detached four-car garage and separate workshop. Bob had told him it had nine bedrooms and seven baths, all but a few of them closed up as his children had moved away to their own lives. Dave could see the dozens of diamond-shaped steel plates with bolts protruding, all painted to match the color of the brickwork. You could see plates like that all over Los Angeles. The bolts were screwed onto long metal rods that went all through the structure and tied it together much more tightly than the original builders. It was earthquake retrofitting, and the work on Bob’s house dated back to shortly after the Northridge quake of 1994, when suddenly engineers had more jobs than they could handle reinforcing older structures.

  In spite of that, there had been damage. There were two cracks in the outer wall, one of them fairly minor, the other reaching from the ground to the eaves, a foot wide in some places where bricks had fallen out. The house had a high, peaked roof that had been covered in terra-cotta barrel tiles. A great many of them were now lying on the ground, baring the wood and tar paper beneath. The house was L-shaped, with the long leg parallel to the street. The northwest corner had caved in, the roof falling to the second floor, the big timbers cracked, and the smaller planks sprung free. All the windows in front had been boarded up. There were slits for guns to shoot from.

  Shortly after the quake the water from the broken dam must have arrived. It would have come from the north. They would have to get the story of that from Bob and Emily. Dave suspected it was a harrowing one. The high-water mark of mud on the house was about three feet.

  Mark came up to Dave and stuck his hand out.

  “We met once, Dave. I’m Mark.”

  “This is my wife, Karen, and my daughter, Addison.”

  “Addison. Nice name. Pleased to meet you, ladies. Dave, drive around the house to the back.” He made a waving gesture toward the house, and Dave saw a hand come through one of the second-floor gun slits and wave back.

  Mark trotted on ahead of them, and rounded the corner into the backyard. Dave drove over what had been the side driveway and was now a dirt lane, and pulled up beside the garage, which looked undamaged. They all got out of the car and stretched. It had been a long, slow drive.

  The first thing they noticed was that the thick trees and shrubs that had completely shielded the grounds from the country club in back had all been cut down. So had the high chain-link fence. The same thing had been done with the houses on both sides of Bob’s place. The view of the golf course was unobstructed.

  Dave was not a golfer, but he had visited the Los Angeles Country Club a few times as a guest for lunch. From the dining room and the grounds out front he remembered the two courses had a lot of tall trees lining the fairways, and naturally the grass was always perfectly cut and a sparkling emerald green. That was all gone. Most of the trees had been cut down, and the fairways were brown. Where there had been sand traps and low places, filthy-looking brown water now stood.

  “We’re boiling and distilling it,” said a voice from behind him. He turned and saw Bob coming toward him. He didn’t look good. He was wearing an improvised eye patch and walking with
a cane, favoring one foot that was tightly wrapped in bandages. One side of his face was a big, yellowish bruise and his cheeks seemed sunken.

  “Fell down the stairs in the dark right after the quake,” he said, shaking Dave’s hand. “Sprained an ankle, cracked a couple of ribs, and something poked me in the eye when I smacked my head on the floor. Lisa says I’ll probably still be able to see out of it. Quite a face, huh? I don’t heal as fast as I used to.”

  He turned to Karen and embraced her, then shook hands with Addison. Dave saw Bob’s wife, Emily, coming up behind him. She smiled at them, and set a pitcher of water on a picnic table beneath the only tree remaining in their backyard.

  “We’re so glad you made it safely,” she said. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble along the way.”

  “Not really,” Karen said.

  Other people were coming out of the house and the workshop. Dave noticed that most of the adults had handguns in holsters, and some carried rifles or shotguns. Bob started making the introductions.

  “This is my oldest son, Mark. He’s an engineer, and the man who is going to get us out of here.”

  “We already met.”

  “Mark’s wife, Rachel.” Rachel was Jewish, and though not Orthodox, was faithful enough that she had insisted Mark convert before she would marry him. She was barely five feet tall, a foot less than her husband, and a little chunky. Her hair was thick and blonde, but black at the roots. The grip of her small hand was almost as firm as her husband’s. She was followed by Sandra and Olivia, identical twins of fifteen with red hair and freckles. They each held one hand of their younger brother, Solomon, nine. He had the close-set features and friendly smile of Down Syndrome.

  They had all been gravitating toward the picnic table. Beyond it was a deep, kidney-shaped hole where the pool had been. The bottom of the pool had cracked, and it was filled with the same dried muck that had covered everything in the flood. The fiberglass waterslide had been knocked over by the wave. Dave gratefully took a glass of instant iced tea from Emily and swallowed half of it at once.