Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “Get in the fucking car!” the driver yelled at her. Then he turned his attention to the man with the gun. “Push that piece of shit out of my way, or I’ll do it for you.”

  The man with the gun got into his car and released the foot brake and it began to roll down the hill, the man’s left leg still outside the open door. As soon as the right front tire hit the curb the second driver gunned his engine. His front tires smoked as he screeched around the first car, catching the rear bumper and tearing it off, then smashing into the open door. If the man with the gun hadn’t quickly rolled to his right and gotten his leg inside, it would have been crushed. As it was, the door was severed and tossed twenty feet into the shrubs on the right side of the road.

  “Hey, stop, damn it!” the man with the gun yelled, tumbling out of his car and falling into the street. The next car in line almost ran over him, but managed to brake in time. He stood up and aimed at the first car, and then a remnant of sanity seemed to return. He must have realized he had a better chance of hitting the women in the backseat—one about his own age and an elderly one, possibly his wife and mother?—than the angry man who had hit his car. He began to run down the hill after them, still holding the pistol in his hand.

  The man in the next car didn’t take the time to get out and move the bumper out of his way but simply rolled over it. Dave knew he would do the same when it came his turn. But the car in front of him rolled over the piece of metal and it snagged on the undercarriage. The car’s driver ignored it, speeding up with the bumper leaving a bright trail of sparks as it dragged along the pavement.

  Off to his left Dave could see something happening that was what he had most feared. He could only get glimpses of it between houses and the thick plantings, the tall trees, the privacy walls, but when he could see the eastern slope of the canyon it was clear that the fire was leaping from treetop to treetop. It was windy enough down on the street, and he knew it would be blowing even harder up there. And for the first time he felt a backdraft, air being sucked in from the west as the fire consumed the oxygen and shot a great plume of heat and flame and sparks and whole burning branches high into the air. The fire was speeding along up there like a runaway train from hell, consuming the streets up the hill, Oriole Way, Skylark Lane, Thrasher Avenue, Tanager Way, Blue Jay Way, and on across the ridge to the streets over there, the ones that led down to Rising Glen Road. His whole neighborhood, and the one to the east, was going to burn.

  The firebrands were falling thick and fast now, and something crashed down on the roof of the Escalade. It was burning, that was clear.

  “Honey, we need to get that off the roof,” Karen shouted at him.

  “I don’t think we have time, Karen.”

  “The bicycles are up there, Daddy.”

  “Maybe the tires will burn off them,” he said. “We have a few spares in the trailer, don’t we?”

  “Yes, I put them there,” Jenna said.

  “Then I won’t stop until we cross Sunset. I don’t want to lose my place in line here, we might never get back in.”

  The backdraft was blowing harder now, fanning everything, including the burning branch on the roof. He could see sparks flying off to his left, and a few of them swirled in through his open window. It was bringing searing heat with it. He saw Jenna reach up carefully to touch the roof, and quickly draw her hand back.

  “That ceiling liner might catch fire,” she said.

  “Throw some water on it.”

  Somebody in the back started to do that, but it was hard to throw water upwards from a bottle. A lot of it splashed on Dave and Jenna.

  “That’s enough of this shit,” Jenna said. Dave heard her unbuckle her seat belt. She grabbed a bottle of water from Karen. “I don’t like having a fire over my head.” And with that she hoisted her small body up onto the windowsill, hanging on to her seat with one hand while with the other she reached over the roof and poured water onto the burning object up there.

  “It’s a branch,” she shouted. “Not as big as it sounded, but it’s a hell of a thing to be blown into the air by the wind.”

  “Get back in!” Dave told her.

  “Just a minute. Anybody got a cloth they can hand me?”

  Addison quickly pushed the edge of a blanket into Jenna’s free hand. A moment later Jenna had pulled the burning branch off to one side and tossed it into the road. When she slithered back inside she was slapping at her hair.

  “Ouch! An ember fell on me.”

  “Put it out with the blanket,” Karen told her. Jenna did that.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No. Just a little singe.”

  “Thanks, Jenna, but please don’t do that again.”

  No one said anything as Dave continued down the hill at about fifteen miles per hour. He was nearing Sunset now, and wondering what he would find when he got there.

  When they reached the choke point between the flatlands and the hills where the car barricade had been, where Dave had spent nights and days sitting in a lawn chair with his shotgun across his lap, he saw that some of the cars had been shoved aside.

  But the area two blocks north of Sunset, where all the streets that branched off Doheny had poured all their traffic, was jammed. Once more Dave was amazed at just how many people still remained holed up in the canyon, in their houses without electricity or running water, behind their privacy walls, hoping to sit it out.

  It hadn’t done them any good. It was all going up in flames now. His decision to move his family had been the correct one, but taken and implemented about twenty-four hours late.

  Horns were honking, fenders were crunching, and voices were being raised as all the vehicles jostled for position toward a gap that, even though part of the barricade had been shoved back, was not quite wide enough for two cars to pass simultaneously.

  “If somebody would just shove that damn Cadillac another three feet to the side, twice as many cars could get through,” Jenna grated.

  “You think I should try that when we get up there?”

  “Can you do it without punching our fender into a tire?” Karen asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “If you don’t know, then don’t do it,” Karen said, with finality.

  “That’s probably what all the others who already went through were thinking.”

  “Then that’s the way we should be thinking, too.”

  “Mom, what about those people behind us? Shouldn’t we try to make it easier for them?”

  “They’ll get through,” Karen said, but her voice lacked conviction. Dave could see Addison looking at her mother with a bit of shock, but she said nothing.

  Dave wasn’t sure the people behind him would have enough time, either. Hell, he wasn’t yet sure he would be able to get through before the fire consumed them and everything around them. He saw that his thermometer was reading 130 degrees, and realized that was as high as it went. It felt hotter than that. It was going to be a close thing. He would have felt better on a bicycle. Several times, while he was stuck there barely moving, cyclists had whizzed by him, weaving in and out of the stalled traffic. In his rearview he saw some people getting into cars, apparently with the consent of the people inside. It was a sight that warmed his heart. It showed that things had not completely degenerated.

  He moved a car length forward, then another, as burning debris continued to shower down all around him.

  What would he do when he got there? Zoom on through, or take a chance on blowing a tire?

  He was still wondering about that when there was the sound of gunfire. The shots sounded like they were coming from behind him. There were four of them, and they sounded like handguns. There were other shots, but they sounded more distant,

  “Get down, Addison!” Karen shouted.

  “Everybody down!” Dave told them.

  The shots galvanized the people in the cars ahead in a way not even the approaching fire had done. Most people had no idea just how fast the fire cou
ld move, was moving, but they had a pretty good idea how fast a bullet traveled.

  With the roar of half a dozen engines, the cars ahead of him began to surge forward, pressing into the gap in the barricade. At the same time Dave felt something shoving at the trailer behind him. He heard the trailer hitch adding its protesting squeal to the cacophony of sounds that was partly the start of a drag race and partly a demolition derby. Ahead of him fenders were crunching together, cars were scraping sides.

  “That’s enough of this shit,” Dave muttered, and stepped on the accelerator. The big vehicle lurched as he steered toward the gap which the car ahead of him—a black Infiniti with Virginia plates, of all things—had not completely passed through. He slammed into it but the impact was lessened because the car was not standing still, it was moving forward, pushing the car ahead just like Dave was pushing the Infiniti. For a moment Dave thought he was going to climb right up onto the Infiniti’s trunk. But instead he ended up smashing both the taillights and popping the trunk open.

  And suddenly he was through, the cars ahead of him were separating, some of them weaving erratically but at least moving, at least getting out of his way.

  He sped down Doheny, mildly surprised to find that the trailer was still behind him, though it was swaying alarmingly. He jounced over Sunset with half a dozen cars in front of him in his headlights. Doheny broadened as he crossed Sunset.

  He heard more gunfire, and brake lights flared red ahead of him. One car quickly showed its white backup lights and began to move in reverse. It got about twenty feet before plowing into the black Infiniti. The tires smoked and shrieked, but it was clear the two cars were now hopelessly tangled.

  The shots seemed to be coming from the single high-rise apartment building on that block, off to the west, his right. Dave could see that a fire had started on the second floor and burned its way up, blackening all the balconies he could see. He spotted two shooters crouching behind the balcony grills on the third floor. They had rifles, and were shooting into the cars that had stopped on the road. So far their fire was concentrated on the cars in front of him.

  Then he saw an extremely odd sight. A city bus had been parked at the curb to his left, on the east side of the street. Now it was moving, but not in a way he had ever seen any bus move before. Its front was swinging out, toward the middle of the road, but its rear end didn’t move away from the curb. Something on the other side was shoving the bus, which sat on six flat tires, out into the street. He could hear an engine laboring on the other side of the bus. A bulldozer or a big truck, he realized.

  And he knew something else. Somebody had set a trap for the people fleeing the fire. They had established a killing zone, with shooters on both sides of the street. He spotted one in the window of a three-story apartment building on the east side, and he felt sure there would be more.

  “It’s a trap, Dave!” Jenna shouted.

  “I know.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here, right now!”

  He didn’t know how many shooters there might be behind him, but he thought it made sense that there wouldn’t be any more beyond the bus, which was resisting whatever was pushing it as its wheel rims plowed into the surface of the street with a terrible racket. The ambushers meant to corral all the cars right here and leave them nowhere to go.

  He turned and looked behind him—noticing that Karen had spread herself over Addison, who was struggling to get her head high enough to look out—and saw men entering the street from both sides. They were ragged, some of them shirtless, all of them dirty. There were six or seven of them, and they all carried rifles or handguns. Biker gangs? Criminals? Hoodlums, former drug dealers or addicts? Or merely hungry, desperate people? Whatever they were, they were survivors, so far, and they expected to extend their survival by taking what belonged to him, and possibly taking his life and those of his family. Dave assumed these guys wouldn’t hesitate to kill them if they resisted, and if they surrendered, who knew what they might do?

  Still looking back, he saw some of the men approach the cars backed up behind him and point weapons. One man smashed a window with his handgun and reached inside, trying to pull someone out. People were getting out of another car with their hands up. They had nowhere to go, not really, and could only hope they would just be robbed, not killed.

  He looked forward again and saw that some of the people ahead of him had stuck rifle or shotgun barrels out their windows. One man was partially out of his car, one foot on the ground, and he was firing up at the men on the high-rise.

  He looked to the side and saw Jenna crouched in her seat, half out the window, aiming up at the high-rise. Her shotgun boomed, and boomed again.

  “Get moving, Dave!” she shouted.

  He gunned the engine, steered around the car in front of him, which chose that time to start forward. The car hit the driver’s side of the Escalade as he passed it, rocking it, but the big SUV shouldered it aside, and then both vehicles were headed for the narrowing gap as the city bus was shoved still farther into the street.

  “I got one!” Jenna shouted, as she slid back in and searched her pockets for more shotgun shells. Several spilled out into the seat and she groped for them.

  There would be room for them both, Dave thought, the Escalade and the Infiniti.

  Then there was gunfire to his left, where the other car was. It suddenly veered off and went up over the curb over there. Dave couldn’t see what happened, but assumed the driver had been shot. He kept steering toward the gap.

  There was another shot and his window shattered and his lap was full of tiny shards of safety glass. His left cheek and forehead stung, and he felt blood leaking into his left eye. How bad am I hit? he wondered. No time for that, worry about that later.

  While he was still fifty feet from the moving bus, a man stepped out from behind it. He looked determined, and he had a large weapon in his hands. He was fat and shirtless, and his arms were covered with tattoos. The gun was military, and Dave knew it could rip sizeable chunks out of the Escalade and his family.

  The man fired a shot into the air, then pointed the gun directly at Dave. He was shouting something Dave couldn’t hear.

  Suddenly Dave knew why the man wanted him to stop, alive. He wanted prisoners. What the man would do with male prisoners Dave didn’t know, but he knew what the fat fuck would do with women.

  All right, screw it, he thought, and steered directly at the man. Once more the big fellow shouted, and then started to step behind the bus, his weapon still leveled. His chances of blowing Dave’s head off as he passed were excellent. He braced himself for the shot. So he was not entirely surprised when a gun went off practically beside his ear. The windshield shattered, letting in the hot breath of the night, and he was driving almost blind, trying to see through the cracked glass, wondering why he was still alive. Then he realized the shot had come from inside the car, and he saw Karen’s shotgun barrel beside his shoulder. He was almost deaf in that ear, but he could still hear out of his left.

  “Step on it, David, get out of here!”

  The gun barrel pulled back and as he passed the bus he got a quick glimpse of the big man, limping, bleeding from one arm and one leg, struggling to bring his weapon up again. The man saw Karen’s gun barrel poking out of the broken driver’s side window and he hit the ground. Dave winced, waiting for Karen to blow out the eardrum of his other ear, but she apparently couldn’t get a good shot, and Dave swept by, In his rearview he saw a man leap off the tow truck—MIKE’S TOW, AAA APROVED—and scurry for cover. The big man was sitting up, aiming the military rifle again.

  “Karen, get down!”

  He heard the stutter of the rifle and the impact of the slugs. His side mirror was torn off, but most of the bullets were hitting the back of the trailer. The firing stopped, and he was moving into darkness. He stuck his head out the side and saw nothing ahead of him, noting that he had only one headlight left, on the right side of the car.

  “Is anyone hurt?�
�� he called out.

  “We’re okay back here,” Karen said.

  “I think I got some glass from your window,” Jenna said, breathlessly. Dave looked over, and saw her clutching a bloody patch on her leg.

  “We need to get a little farther away from the action,” Dave said.

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “Daddy, you’re bleeding.”

  Dave wanted to touch the side of his head to see how bad the damage was, but didn’t dare let go of the steering wheel.

  “My God.” Karen sighed. “I think we survived it.”

  Gradually the light from the fire behind them diminished, and soon they reached a point where the remaining headlight outshone the firelight.

  He was passing the corner of Elevado when Addison cried out.

  “There’s Ranger! Daddy, it’s Ranger! Please stop, we need to get him!”

  Dave would never know if he would have stopped just for the horse, but he had already been planning to pull over, intending to assess the damage to the Escalade and the trailer. He turned to the right and drove fifty feet or so, and there the horse was, standing in the middle of the road, picked out in the headlight beam. He was breathing heavily, and showed no inclination to run. Perhaps he had heard Addison’s voice, perhaps he was relishing the security of being a good distance from the fire. Maybe he was simply too exhausted to run much farther. He just stood there as Dave pulled over to the curb.

  “Maybe we should turn off the lights, too,” Karen suggested, as she got out of the car and hurried after her daughter.

  “Light.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Light. We only have one headlight.”

  “Whatever. Addison, don’t you dare approach that animal until I get there!” She switched on her flashlight and caught up with Addison, who was standing a few feet away from the horse and speaking to him.

  Dave eased out of the Escalade. He went to the back of the trailer and played his flashlight beam on it. Three rounds had hit it, but the shooter had missed the tires. If Dave had been shooting that’s what he would have aimed for, but he supposed the guy’s aim had been thrown off a bit by soaking up part of Karen’s shotgun blast. He hadn’t been able to see how badly the man had been hit, but he knew it hadn’t been the full force of the shot, or he would have been dead.