by John Varley
“Are you saying they were forced to leave?”
“Shit, I don’t know. All’s I know is the soldiers came, navy soldiers.”
“Sailors.”
“And Marines. Looking for a few good men.” He leaned forward with comic intensity, put his hand close to his mouth as though imparting a confidence, and stage-whispered, “I have it on good authority they’re taking them all on that big-ass aircraft carrier, that nuke-u-lar carrier, as a former president used to say, and dumping ’em. Feeding them to the sharks. No place to put ’em, no food to feed ’em. Make ’em walk the fucking plank, man. Yo-ho-ho.”
“…hurts…”
“What was that? What did you say, Jenna?”
“She said she hurts, Daddy.”
Dave looked at Jenna, rolling her head slowly from side to side. It looked like her bandages were wet again.
“Hey, man, you got a casualty in there? Somebody hurt?” He straightened up a little and mooched over to the car, leaned in and looked at Jenna. Dave heard the burned Toyota accelerating away in a clatter and a shower of sparks, but didn’t pay much attention to it. He was debating if he should let this man examine Jenna or if they’d be better off just heading to the Winston house as fast as possible. Was he really a nurse? Was he insane, or just stoned? Both?
Before he could decide the man held his hand out behind him, and called out.
“Flashlight!”
It was a sad parody of a surgeon, but after a small hesitation Karen slapped the Maglite into his hand. He leaned into the car and shined the light into Jenna’s face. He reached out and, with surprising tenderness, peeled back one of her eyelids and studied her pupil. Then he put the light on Jenna’s bandaged leg and poked gently at it. Jenna had no reaction.
“She’s passed out. Which is probably good. That’s gotta hurt like hell. And the blood keeps oozing out of there. If you don’t tie it off, she could bleed out pretty soon. You have something I can use for a tourniquet?”
They opened the door and improvised a tourniquet out of a torn blanket and a wooden spoon, which the man tightened and then fastened in place with duct tape. The ooze of blood stopped.
“You can’t leave that on, like, forever, dude. Loosen it a little every ten minutes or so, let blood get to the leg. See if it’s still bleeding. You have to get her to a doctor who can take a look in there and see what’s going down, sew her up. Otherwise, she’s gonna lose the leg. Might lose it anyway. I’ve seen a lot who did. I’ve done all I can do.”
“Thank you for that,” Karen said.
“Hey, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He paused, swayed on his feet, caught himself before he fell. “Say, dude, have you got any weed back there?”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Half the people in California have a medical condition that feels better with weed. Just thought I’d ask.”
“Here,” Addison said. She hadn’t gotten out of the car when Dave did, but had watched the treatment from the backseat. She had apparently been busy. Tears were running down her face as she thrust a plastic bag out the window. The bag rattled with the sound of cans.
The nurse took it and looked down into it, then reached in and pulled out a can.
“Peaches, man! Haven’t had any of those for a long time. In heavy syrup, the best kind for when the world ends. I’m gonna have such a sugar rush! Muchas gracias, sweetheart!”
“Hasta la vista,” Karen said, getting back into the car. Dave got in, too, and started it and put it in gear. As they drove off Dave saw the man scuffing through the parking lot, where he sat down on a bed facing the approaching fire. He felt guilty about not offering the man a ride, but he had shown no signs of wanting to leave. He didn’t think the fire posed much of a threat to him, with all the concrete parking structures in the hospital complex to take refuge in.
He realized he had never asked the man’s name.
The next morning never dawned. As they got closer to the Winston house a sick, grayish light gradually worked its way into the landscape, not much better than the night. The glow of the fire, though it was increasingly distant as they worked their way west, still overpowered what sunlight worked its way around the cloud of black smoke that obscured the horizon to the north and east and south. Dave once caught a glimpse of a band of blue to the west, but it was a pitiful thing.
The wind was still blowing powerfully, shifting from time to time, and each time it blew from the northeast they were showered with a thick fall of ash. No embers, no firebrands, just gray, powdery ash that swirled like a terrible snowstorm and came in the windows and soon coated them all.
By the time they got to the Winstons the wind had veered and was coming from the northwest, but it brought little relief, as everything was obscured by ash swirled into devils by the relentless wind. Dave honked the horn as they pulled into the driveway. Karen hit the ground running, going around the back of the house as Dave eased the SUV and trailer after her.
Bob Winston was standing near the rear border of his property, hands on his hips, looking east at the conflagration that seemed destined to eat the entire city. He turned when Karen came up to him, listened to her, and hurried back toward the house.
Dave got out at the same time as Addison.
“What can I do, Daddy?”
“There’s nothing you can do for Jenna. Either Lisa is here, or she isn’t. You better take care of your horse.”
Addison looked dubiously at Dave, then at Jenna, unconscious in the front passenger seat. He knew she was desperate to tend to Ranger, but was glad to see she had her priorities straight.
“Go on, sweetheart. There’s really nothing we can do.”
With one more agonized look, she went around to the back of the trailer.
Karen joined him and they waited, impatiently. There was nothing to do but watch the fire, and from Bob’s backyard they had an excellent view of it, out over the relatively clear grounds of the country club.
The hills were burning brightly, but maybe not so fiercely as they had been a few hours ago. There wasn’t much left up there to burn.
“Could we see our house from here?” Karen wanted to know.
“I don’t think so. I think there’s a ridge or two in the way.” He put his arm around her waist. “But it’s all gone, Karen. You know that.”
“Of course I know that. I’m wondering why it isn’t affecting me more.”
“It was already in pretty bad shape.”
“Well, for all that, it was a roof over our heads. We’re homeless now.”
“So are a few million Angelenos. And we’re better prepared to handle it than 99 percent of them.”
Lisa and her two children came running out of the house. Dave saw Nigel pause for just a moment and stare to the west at the towering flames, then hurry on with his mother and sister.
Dave and Karen moved out of the way as the three arrived. It was quickly apparent they were used to working as a team. Many days of Elyse and Nigel helping their mother at the hospital had made them all terse and efficient. Only a few words were spoken as they shined a light into the gloom of the front seat, and carefully unwrapped the bandages.
“We need to get her into the house where I have some room to move,” Lisa said. “Elyse, you start some water boiling, sterilize those scalpels, you know the drill. Did you wash those rubber gloves?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She hurried off.
“Do we need to get a board or something to move her?” Karen asked.
“I don’t want to take the time. Let’s just lift her out of there. We need to do it carefully, I don’t want to put too much strain on that wound. Nigel and I will work her out of that seat, and then I need you, Dave and Karen, to move in from either side and support her as we get her out.”
They got Jenna into the house, and Lisa told them to go outside. They rejoined Bob and stood side by side for a while and watched the fire.
“I think the wind has died down a little. Has it?�
� Dave asked.
“Hard to tell. Maybe.”
“It feels like it’s blowing in from the coast now. Unless I’m turned around.”
“You’re right. That’s west, behind us. If it stays that way, the fire might blow away from us.” He stopped, and frowned. “I understand Jenna has a gunshot wound. Were people shooting at each other, trying to get out?”
“It almost came to that. But it was sort of an out-of-the-fire-and-into-the-frying-pan situation. As soon as we crossed Sunset, we ran into an ambush.”
“Oh, my God.”
“That’s what I thought. Bob, the bullet that hit her came through my window, must have missed me by inches.”
For a moment he couldn’t go on.
“They were waiting for us. We must have been some of the last ones through the gauntlet they were building, a jackleg barricade with cars and a bus. We took some fire, and we shot back.”
They were both silent for a moment, watching the fire. It was hard to tell for sure just where it was burning, since Dave was not that familiar with Bob’s neighborhood, but it was clear that it was now far beyond Sunset, eating its way through the more urbanized areas of West Hollywood and the eastern part of Beverly Hills. It might be as far south now as Melrose, maybe even Beverly. He wondered if it was at Cedars, and if their helpful, stoned nurse was in a safe place.
Lisa worked on Jenna for almost an hour, and when she was done she was far from happy with the result.
“The bullet nicked the deep femoral artery,” she said. “Not the main femoral. If it had been an inch to one side, it would have and you would have had no chance to save her. That was good work, by the way, putting on that tourniquet.”
“We didn’t do it,” Dave admitted. “We weren’t sure we were supposed to. I’d heard you could cause more harm than good. Like, she might lose the leg.”
“She might lose it anyway. It will be touch and go. I might as well warn you, too, that there’s a good chance she won’t make it.” She paused, and looked puzzled. “So who did put on the tourniquet?”
“Some guy at the hospital. We went there, hoping to find you or any doctor, but there was no one there but this male nurse.” He told her about their experiences at Cedars. They were standing in Bob’s backyard, with Karen and Addison and Elyse and Bob. Nigel was back in the kitchen tending to Jenna.
“They started moving everyone out yesterday, not long after I came back here. We went back there to work some more, but almost everyone was gone. Soldiers—Marines, I think—were herding everyone out. They wanted us all to join the march down Santa Monica that you told us about, they said Los Angeles was being evacuated, everyone was being loaded onto aircraft carriers and taken away. They wouldn’t tell us where. They wanted me and Elyse and Nigel to go that way, too, and we might have been forced to—”
“Not on your life, Mother,” Elyse said. “We might have started out in that direction, but I know we could have slipped away and come home, when it got dark.”
“Anyway, we didn’t have to. We’ve made friends with those members of the LAPD who are still on the job. One of their priorities is getting doctors to and from hospitals if they live close by, you saw them bringing us home the other day. Sergeant Gomez and Officer Murkowski told the Marines they’d take us a ways down the evacuation route, and as soon as we were out of sight they brought us here.”
“I’ve become a big fan of the LAPD,” Bob said, with a smile.
“So…I don’t know the guy you met, but he probably saved Jenna’s life.”
She suddenly cried out. “I hate this! Hate it, hate it, hate it! We ran out of almost everything at the hospital. I brought some things home with me, in case we’re really going to make this crazy trip—scalpels, needles, surgical thread, a lot of things that we used to use once and then discard—but I felt like a thief bringing home so much as a Band-Aid. We lost patients we could easily have saved, from infections after surgery. We amputated arms and legs that could have been saved with proper care. It’s like we’ve been thrown back to the Stone Age.”
“Actually, more like the turn of the twentieth century,” Bob said, gently. “Lisa, you did the best you could, I’m sure of it.”
She sighed.
“It’s just so frustrating that the reason I couldn’t do any better is that we just didn’t have a tenth of the things we needed. We kept waiting for help to arrive. I know what you said, you and Dave and Mark, that help was never going to arrive, but in my heart I didn’t believe it. I mean, this is the United States of America! We’ve never let anyone down like this, not even if the disaster was on the other side of the world. We’re always there as soon as the dust settles.”
The group stood silently for a while, watching the progress of the flames.
“I was afraid it would burn right up to the edge of the golf course,” Bob said. “Then I was hoping it might act as a firebreak. Not many trees out there.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Dave said. “If it burned those houses over there, and if the wind was blowing right, it would send a lot of firebrands into the air. There’s no telling where they would come down.”
“What would you suggest?”
“Post somebody up on the roof on this side of the house, if you can. If we see it come within a few blocks and it looks like it’s still headed this way, I say we need to get out, even if we’re not ready.”
“There’s still some packing to do, and Mark is still working on the vehicles, but we could go if we had to. We were waiting on you, and on Teddy to report back. You know, we still haven’t made a final decision on which way to go.”
“Can Teddy find you, if you have to abandon the house?”
“We set up a rendezvous point. If he comes back and sees the house is burned, we’ll meet him there. If we can.”
Teddy arrived on his bike and the whole house turned out to hear his report, except Jenna and those on lookout duty.
“First, I have some bad news. I was able to swing by Dennis Rossi’s house in Glendale. Well, I mean where his house used to be. The whole neighborhood is gone. Burned to the ground. I found the lot; the number was painted on the curb. I was hoping for a note or something, but I couldn’t find anything.”
After a long pause, Bob spoke up.
“And Roger?”
“Like I told you, I probably wouldn’t have time to get all that far out where he lives. It just wasn’t possible.”
Bob nodded, slowly.
“Then I guess he’s on his own. Go on, son.”
“The coast route north is definitely out. The Pacific Coast Highway is blocked by landslides. The one I saw, close to Topanga Canyon, took most of the road into the Pacific, and I could see one beyond that one where half a mountainside came down and buried the road. The 405 is impassable at the Getty Center. I tried to get around it on the west side of the freeway, but a lot of Saint Mary’s College up on that hill over there looks like it’s just gone, and the roads with it. There are some fire roads up there, but I didn’t think it was worth my time to look at them, since they’re even more fragile than the road I saw that caved in.”
“No point in it,” Bob agreed.
Teddy paused to take another drink from a bottle of warm Gatorade. He had run out of bottled water during his long scouting expedition. Now he was carefully rehydrating, a few sips at a time.
“I didn’t bother with Roscomare Road,” Teddy went on. “Beverly Glen, Benedict Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon, all impassable. That just leaves the 101 freeway through the Cahuenga Pass, which could get us to the I-5. It’s been bulldozed clear. I made it as far as Universal City, and on to the interchange with the 170 and the 134, and I’m sure our vehicles could make it, too.”
“That sounds like our path north, then,” Rachel said.
“I wouldn’t count on it. I talked to some other riders. There are quite a few of us out there. They’ve been all over the place, and by talking to them I’ve made a pretty good map of what’s open, what’s
blocked, where the most dangerous neighborhoods are.”
They were all gathered around or sitting at Bob’s large picnic table in the backyard. Dave had seldom seen such a sweaty, dirty group. The temperature had climbed once again as the unseen sun rose and the hot wind blew from the north, and Bob’s thermometer said it was ninety-eight degrees. The ash was still falling, coating everything and everyone. The group looked like coal miners just emerging from the ground. The soot found every crack and crevice in the skin and worked its way in, and the streams of sweat running down most of their faces didn’t really clean it off so much as smear it around.
“So don’t leave us hanging, Teddy,” Bob urged his son. “What do you know?”
“What I know, what I’ve seen with my own eyes, I’ve already told you. And from here on, I’m reporting what other explorers have told me. I have no reason to doubt any of them, and a lot of reason to trust most of them absolutely. So the big news is that I-5 is impassable farther north.”
There was a murmur of concern from the assembled group. Interstate 5 was the Main Street of the West Coast, running all the way from Tijuana to the Canadian border. Many of those present had been pinning a lot of hope on the assumption that it would not be blocked, or if it had been, then some government agency would have bulldozed obstructions out of the way.
“I met a woman coming back down the freeway. I was only as far north as the exchange between the 5 and the 118, in San Fernando. She said that from Santa Clarita on, the road was virtually destroyed.”
“You trust this woman?” Gordon asked.
“She was desperate to get to Bakersfield, she said her children had been up there spending a few weeks with their grandparents and she had planned to join them, but then the quake came. She was crying a lot, and totally exhausted. I couldn’t think of a reason in the world why she would lie to me, just to screw around with me.”
“I can’t see it, either,” Gordon said.
“Okay,” Bob said. “So far you’ve eliminated some of our options. Do you have any good news?”
