Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  Next in the parade of Winstons was Marian, the younger daughter, in her early thirties, average height with an athletic body and hair cut short. She was carrying her four-year-old son, Taylor, on her hip. Dave remembered Bob’s worry when she had joined the army and been deployed to Afghanistan. Her parents didn’t approve but they weren’t the sort to stand in the way of their children. She had returned unharmed, physically. If she had other issues, Bob had never talked about them, but after leaving the military she had separated from her husband, Gordon, and moved back in with her parents, where she had been living for at least the last two years. Dave’s impression was that she hadn’t decided what to do with her life yet, though there had been talk of the Police Academy.

  “Her husband’s the one you probably noticed upstairs,” Bob said. “We’re standing twenty-four-hour watches these days. There’s been some trouble.”

  Dave didn’t ask about the state of their marriage. He assumed that things might look a lot different to a couple in light of recent events, that previous troubles might seem a lot less significant. It had certainly been that way between Karen and himself.

  “So. You’ve met Teddy, I assume.”

  “Yes, he’s the one who told us to come over here.”

  Bob looked pained.

  “His lover, Manuel, is among the missing. It’s so easy to lose contact now. They were both planning to come up here, but Manuel had to go check on his own family in Tijuana. Even though they’ve disowned him. He had to sneak back into Mexico, how’s that for irony? So we don’t know where Manny is, but we hope he’s safe.

  “Peter is in England. It’s been months since we talked to him. He said it was just as bad over there as it was here. That was before the quake, naturally. He was looking into finding a sailing ship that might take other Americans across the Atlantic, but even if he made it, there would still be the whole continent to cross. And George is still in New York, as far as we know. At least he was the last time we talked to him. He and his family had no plans to join us out here.”

  “Except when winter arrives,” Emily said, darkly.

  “Yes, there’s that. Last time we spoke he said he had some friends upstate, around Woodstock. They might be up there.”

  Dave had been doing a head count. Peter and George were impossibly far away, and of the others he had seen two of Bob and Emily’s six children, and one spouse, Rachel. Gordon was upstairs, and there were four grandchildren, ages fifteen to four. Teddy was accounted for, somewhere in the area searching for Dennis and Roger and their families. That made eleven, counting Bob and Emily, and fifteen people counting Dave, his wife and daughter, and Jenna. That left the oldest child, Lisa, and her husband, Charles, both doctors, and their two children of high-school age…Elyse and Nigel, if he was remembering correctly. He was about to ask about them when they were interrupted by a sound he hadn’t heard in a while: a police siren coming up the street.

  A white Hummer with a red cross on the door turned the corner and stopped twenty feet away. Two uniformed LAPD officers, a man and a woman, got out of the front doors and held the rear doors open. A tall woman with graying hair tied up in back got out, followed by two teenagers. All three were dressed in green surgical scrubs.

  “Here they are, Mr. Winston,” the female officer said, with a hint of pride in her voice. “Safe and sound, like we promised you.”

  “Thank you, Janet. We appreciate it.” Bob glanced at Dave. His eyes were full of anguish. “No questions just yet, my friend,” he whispered, and got up. He walked toward Lisa, his daughter, holding out his arms. She collapsed and fell into his arms, sobbing aloud. Bob embraced her. The two children stood a little apart from them.

  “Charlie was killed in the quake,” Emily said, quietly. Karen gasped, and Addison looked agonized.

  “Lisa was working at the UCLA hospital, where she’d been putting in sixteen, eighteen hours a day for weeks. Now everything’s been moved to Cedars-Sinai. The patient load was overwhelming, with a lot of gunshot wounds and medical emergencies that they were running out of medicine to treat. On top of that, they were understaffed. By and large, everybody who could report to work did report to work.” Her face darkened. “Though there were a few who simply stopped coming in. I’d never seen Lisa so angry as when she told me about those people, a few doctors and nurses who lived within a reasonable distance and just never showed up when things started getting really bad. A lot of high-tech doctors found themselves practicing medicine on the level of poor, third-world nations.”

  Dave remembered that Lisa’s husband had been an orthopedic surgeon with a large sports-medicine practice of his own. Charlie had treated several Lakers and Dodgers for knee injuries.

  Across the way, as the police escort turned around and headed out, Lisa and her children were still talking to Bob. Emily filled them in on some of the rest of the story.

  The only thing that saved Lisa was that she had stayed late at the hospital. She had been due home before dark that evening—as a doctor, she still was able to get gas for her car, and the commute to Sherman Oaks that sometimes could take two hours on the nightmare 405 freeway now could be done in ten minutes at any time of the day. Charlie had been working at a hospital in Reseda, a little closer to their home, and was in their bedroom, sleeping the four hours he was allowing himself before heading out at sunrise to face the new day and the new patient load. The quake had destroyed the bedroom and pinned him beneath a roof beam.

  Their children had worked for two hours to get him out. Fighting through a daze and in terrible pain, he self-diagnosed a punctured lung, two broken legs, and a probable concussion before he became irrational, then unresponsive.

  They got him into the car and Elyse headed toward Valley Presbyterian Hospital through a city changed in an instant to a place they hardly recognized. Everywhere it was pitch-dark, except where buildings were burning. There were people in all the streets. Dodging around them, she didn’t see the three-foot gap in Van Nuys Boulevard until too late. She slammed on the brakes, but her front wheels dropped into it. The car was just hanging there, in no danger of falling in but unable to back up.

  Eventually they persuaded a few people to help rock the car until the front wheels could gain traction. They set off again, one wheel so far out of alignment it threatened to shake the car apart.

  As the sun was rising they checked their father again, and could find no pulse.

  The journey took them all day, and could have been an epic story in itself. The left-front wheel fell off somewhere on Sunset Boulevard. They continued driving. The cooling system failed shortly after that.

  They covered their father with a blanket and set out on foot.

  They found their mother in the parking lot beside a hospital, up to her elbows in blood. They drove together back to the abandoned car, loaded Charlie’s body into her car, and took him to her father’s house.

  “That’s his grave over there,” Emily said, quietly. Dave saw a mound of earth with a wooden plaque stuck into the ground. The name Charles Tomasino, and the dates of his birth and death had been carved on it. Wilting flowers stood in some of the vases that had survived the quake.

  Bob, Lisa, Elyse, and Nigel were walking slowly toward the rest of them sitting around the table under the tree. Lisa was leaning her head on her father’s shoulder. She was six feet tall, just an inch less than Bob. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Lisa, my darling, you’ve done all you possibly can,” Bob said. “They’re saying the evacuation is really picking up steam now. Soon your patients will all be headed north, where there’s sure to be a lot more doctors and intact hospitals.”

  “But we don’t know that. How do we know they’re going to a better place?”

  “I’m pretty confident of it for a simple reason,” Bob said. “I can’t imagine there’s anyplace on the Pacific Coast that’s worse than this.”

  “I feel strongly that my place is with my family,” Lisa moaned. “I failed my children w
hen the quake hit, and I—”

  “Mom, there was nothing you could have done by coming home,” Elyse said, with a touch of anger. “We’ve been all through this. We agreed that nothing could have saved Dad but a medevac helicopter.”

  “I know that, but…”

  “But you feel guilty. So do I. If I hadn’t driven into that hole…”

  “It was already too late, Elle.”

  “I’ll second that,” Nigel said. “Why don’t you both just shut up about it? It’s so over. You got a decision to make, Mother. What are you going to do with us?”

  Nigel was sixteen, a year younger than his sister, a beanpole even taller than his mother and grandfather. His hair was jet-black and straight and hung to his shoulders, and he had multiple piercings of his ears and nose. He wore black jeans and heavy boots, but on top he wore the same surgical scrubs as his sister and mother.

  Dave and Karen had nothing to contribute to the Winston family discussion about what Lisa and her children should do when everyone pulled out, headed for Oregon. It was a terrible situation for her, already saddled with guilt over the death of her husband, to have to decide to abandon the sick and injured of Los Angeles.

  “You don’t have to decide until tomorrow,” Emily finally told her. “We need you, but you know that. But I have to put it to you in the strongest possible terms, Lisa. Whatever you decide to do yourself, letting your children stay here is wrong. They have to go with us, it’s the only right thing to do.”

  “I won’t leave without Mother,” Elyse said, firmly. Nigel said nothing.

  “We’ll decide tomorrow,” Bob finally said.

  Most of Bob’s workshop was filled by a big school bus that looked like it had been worked over by the production designers from The Road Warrior.

  After a long talk with Bob, Mark had concluded the same thing that his father had. Maybe Dave’s story of a crude-eating bacteria was wrong, but what if it was right? What was the harm in stocking up on survival supplies, and boning up on alternative sources of energy?

  In fact, as a problem-solver by nature, he had spent more hours than Dave had researching and speculating about what the situation would soon be like if Dave’s story was true. He hadn’t liked like the results he got any more than Dave had.

  Even before gas rationing began, he had built one of the first wood-burning vehicles in the area, converting an old junker he bought for a few hundred dollars just to see how it worked. To his surprise, it didn’t perform all that badly. The chief problem was the bulk of the fuel.

  “The other problem with burning wood to power your vehicle,” Mark said, “is that you can’t just feed logs into a stove. It has to be chopped finely. So I bought the biggest wood chipper I could afford.”

  He was showing them around the workshop and garage, where he had stowed everything they planned to take with them on the journey north. The chipper looked hard-used. It had wheels and a trailer hitch.

  “I rebuilt the engine, sharpened the blades, and bought replacements. It will take twelve-inch logs. Better to split them into smaller chunks; got axes for that. But you toss branches in there, it will eat them and spit out chips in a second. Got a couple of chain saws over here. Palm trees will be the easiest, I think. Up in Oregon, there should be plenty of pine, if they haven’t cut all of it down already.”

  They moved on to the school bus.

  All the glass had been removed from the side windows and replaced with metal plates, which also covered the body of the bus. There were two gun ports on each side. The armoring was quick and sloppy. A parapet had been built on top of the bus, made of wood, about four feet high. It ran all around the top of the bus. The whole thing looked quite heavy, and Mark confirmed he had beefed up the springs and shocks.

  Inside, there were fold-up bunks along each side and the back was packed with supplies and luggage. A hole had been cut in the roof near the front, and a wooden ladder was bolted to the roof and the floor. Mark climbed up and Dave followed him.

  He had thought the platform on top would be a defensive position, but he was wrong. The back end was half-full of wood chips. There was a blue tarp that could be fastened over the top. Mark showed them how one could gain access to the burner from up there, open it up, and shovel chips into it.

  After that there was just the other truck. It still had the orange-and-white colors of U-Haul on the cab. The box in back had been painted black.

  “I bought this one,” Mark said. “Cheap. This was long after the rationing started, and the guy was amazed to get a buyer at all.”

  Dave stood with Karen and Addison and they all looked at what the Winston family had accomplished. Dave closed his eyes for a moment. Then he turned to Karen.

  “We’re going with them,” he said.

  “I know.”

  She put her arm around his waist and hugged him.

  They spent the next hour discussing which route they should take. There were only a few options, but each had its advantages and drawbacks, and each had its proponents. The arguments got heated at times, but never angry. Dave got the feeling that this large family was used to hashing things out vigorously without coming to blows or harboring resentments.

  In the middle of the discussion Sandra and Olivia left them and went upstairs to relieve Gordon from guard duty. The twins had at first been deemed too young, at fifteen, to stand a watch, but had eventually prevailed. They stayed together not just because they were very close, but so they could watch the street and still take care of little brother Solomon. They had been his willing and loving caregivers for a long time.

  Gordon came down to join them. He was dark-skinned, originally from Jamaica but a naturalized citizen for half of his forty years. He had met his wife, seven years younger than him, in Afghanistan, where he had worked for the United Nations and she had been a sergeant in the army. He had a wide smile and a face weathered prematurely, was of average height, but looked very strong. He introduced himself as an associate professor of governmental studies at Cal State, Long Beach.

  The family eventually agreed on first trying the I-5 through the Grapevine into the Central Valley, as the most likely choice. If that was impassable, they would consider other options. Mark, who Dave was seeing could be a pain in the ass sometimes, continued to lobby for the 101, nearer the coast, as more likely to provide wood for his hungry burners, but he conceded defeat.

  But that was not quite the end of it. There was one more option they had to discuss, and it was first voiced by Elyse, with some backup from her brother, Nigel, and her aunt Rachel, Mark’s wife.

  “Why not go on the ship?” she said.

  The opposition to that idea was immediate and strong, coming mostly from her mother and her uncle Mark, who glared at his wife. Rachel seemed unmoved by it.

  “I just don’t trust them,” Lisa said. “I’ve asked and asked around the hospital, where are these people going? Nobody knows, or if they do, they’re not telling.”

  “Mom, what do you figure? They’re being dumped in the ocean?”

  “That’s silly,” Mark began, but was cut off by Lisa.

  “Of course not. But you ask the National Guard where the ship is going, and all they’ll say is ‘North.’ To a refugee camp in the north. San Francisco? Oregon? If it’s Oregon, maybe we should go. But there’s just something wrong with getting on a ship whose destination you don’t know.”

  “I’d like to know where we’d be going, too,” Mark said. “But one thing I can guarantee you. When we got there we’d have nothing. The clothes on our backs, maybe a suitcase. But no vehicles, no tools, no food of our own. They will not be loading a school bus onto an aircraft carrier.”

  They tossed it around a little more, but soon gave it up, because one of the things Teddy had promised to do before returning—that afternoon with any luck—was to cycle to Santa Monica and see what he could find out on the scene of the evacuation itself.

  They unloaded the Escalade. Now that they would be traveling with
a school bus and a U-Haul truck, they would be able to take all the food remaining in his basement.

  “Bring all the water you have,” Bob said. They were standing at the back of his property, looking out over the golf course. He pointed out to the muddy remains of the floodwater that had inundated the neighborhood.

  “See that puddle out there? Used to be a sand trap. Mark has put a water tank in the back of the U-Haul. We drove the truck over there and filled the tank. It’s clean; we treated it with bleach. I worry about water most of all. Whichever route we take, it’s a long ways to a river that flows year-round. We’ll top off the tank whenever we can, but I want all the bottled water we can carry.”

  “You got it,” Dave said. Then he saw something that surprised him. A slightly ragged-looking horse was approaching the little pool. It walked through the mud, lowered its head, and began to drink.

  “Look, Daddy!” Addison had appeared at his elbow, apparently drawn by some special sense horse lovers possessed.

  “There are three horses out there,” Bob told her.

  Addison walked out onto the golf course.

  “The whole golf course is surrounded, so they’ve been allowed to wander.”

  “Daddy, we have to go get Ranger,” she shouted. “He needs to stretch his legs. He needs to eat some grass. It’s not good for him to be cooped up in the garage all the time.”

  Ranger had not been cooped up all the time—Addison had taken him out for a trot every day, going up the hill to the top and then halfway down and back—but Dave knew what she meant. It wasn’t a good life for a horse.

  “We’ll bring him here tomorrow,” he promised her. “And if we’re going to do that, we need to head home.”

  Dave and Karen thanked everyone for everything, and vowed to be back the next day as early as possible. They all knew better than to set a time. There were just too many things that might cause a delay.