Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “Don’t shoot me, I’m just the bearer of bad tidings, but I’m afraid the answer is no. So far I’ve cut down our land options to just two, as far as I can see. Everyone agrees that west toward Palm Springs and Arizona—desert, any way you look at it—is not on the table. We either go west to the I-15 and cross the mountains there, and from there up to the Central Valley and Oregon. Or, we go south, which as most of you know, is the option I’ve been in favor of from the start.”

  “You said ‘land options,’ ” Dave said.

  “Yeah. As in, should we try to go overland at all?”

  He looked around at his family and Dave’s family. Dave knew where he stood on joining the mass exodus—or maybe it was better to think of it as a deportation—being carried out by the nuclear navy and the Marines. He and Karen had talked about it. They didn’t want to get aboard an aircraft carrier and be shipped out to parts unknown. But if the Winston family decided that was the best idea, then they would tag along.

  But now, with Jenna badly wounded, the equation had changed. Maybe it would be better to turn themselves in to the navy. Wouldn’t they have medics, and possibly medical supplies?

  He knew that there were partisans for both the land and sea options, but he wasn’t always sure who they were. He guessed Lisa and her children would opt for the carrier, because it would have at least the basics for medical care. Then she was the first to speak up, and she surprised him.

  “I was leaning toward going on the boat,” she said. “Until today. There was no question we were being forced out, staying behind wasn’t an option. They had trucks for the stretcher cases, but they wedged them in like sardines in a can. There was a lot of shouting and tempers lost, and I saw several people who didn’t want to leave clubbed to the ground and thrown in trucks with bars on the windows. If not for our police friends, me and my kids might have been on those trucks.”

  She paused a moment to let them all think that over.

  “The vibe was very bad,” her son Nigel agreed.

  “Well, I’ll chip in again,” Teddy said. “I think it’s even worse than my sister knows about.”

  That brought the few murmured conversations to a halt. Teddy took another deep swallow of Gatorade and went on.

  “I went to the coast, of course. I could see the aircraft carrier from the hills in the Palisades, then I went down into Santa Monica. I climbed up onto the sixth floor of a building and I could see them on the highway and on the beach, thousands and thousands of them, as far as I could see. They were surrounded by barbed wire. With my binoculars I could see the Marines guarding them. I could see the boats being rowed back and forth from the Santa Monica Pier—most of it is still standing, if you can believe that—to the carrier. All kinds of boats. Most were being rowed by crews, like old whaleboats.

  “I wanted to know more but I was afraid of getting roped into that situation down there, so I started back, taking the back streets. A couple of guys came out of a house and hailed me. They were in civilian clothes, but they claimed they were sailors and they had slipped away at night and jumped ship.”

  “Did you believe them?” Addison asked.

  “I didn’t know what to think, at first. Tell you the truth, I kind of liked them, they didn’t seem like mental giants but they were fed up, pissed off, outraged by what they had seen and done. Something made me think they might be lovers running away together. Maybe I’m just a romantic. Anyway, they hadn’t been ashore farther than a block away from the beach until today, and they wanted to know what conditions were like farther inland. Were there any communities who might take them in? Were we all really starving to death down here? Because they sure as hell were starving where the government was taking them.”

  Once more there was a solemn silence.

  “They were off the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the two carriers that are being used to transport refugees from Los Angeles to the north. They’ve made two trips, one to somewhere in Puget Sound—they weren’t very clear on just where, but it was an island—and the other to Alameda. Alameda is an island in San Francisco Bay with only half a dozen ways on and off. At the east end of the island is the old Alameda Naval Air Station. That’s where they took the refugees. ‘Dumped’ them, according to my sailor friends.

  “I have to say that these guys looked haunted. They said it was pretty bad here, on the beach in Santa Monica, but it was just as bad and maybe worse at Alameda and Puget Sound. They never got ashore in those places, but they heard stories from sailors who had, and they were horrific. There was cholera, not enough clean drinking water, not much medical care, and a severe shortage of food. Obviously no food is being brought in here to Los Angeles, but it’s apparently not a whole lot better in the rest of the country.”

  “Why would the government move people from here to a place where things are worse?” Emily wanted to know.

  “I wondered that, too. The sailors just laughed when I asked them. One of them said ‘Orders is orders.’ My guess is that an order came down to do something about the disaster in Los Angeles, and the only thing anyone could think of was to move the people somewhere else. Since shipping food and water down here for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people was not an option—you can’t ship what you don’t have—getting people out of the disaster area seemed like the next best thing. The orders came down, and the captain is determined to carry them out, whether they make sense or not. Whether or not they’re doing any good or just moving the problem around. This whole evacuation thing strikes me as rearranging the deck chairs while the Titanic is going down. It’s the military mind, I guess. I don’t know much about it.”

  “I do, and I understand it perfectly,” said Marian. She was sitting on the ground with Gordon, who had his arm draped over her shoulder. She was small, compact, but had a fierceness about her that made it easy for Dave to see her as a soldier.

  “I don’t know what sort of command structure still exists,” she went on. “I’d expect the military to be in better shape than civilian governments, they run disaster scenarios all the time, and I’ll bet they had a fuel reserve better than civilians have access to. But their conventional fuel is probably running out, which leaves them with just the power to run their nuclear ships. Those babies can go for twenty years without refueling. Anyway, bottom line, I agree with Teddy. Orders came down; orders will be carried out. Maybe they’re even doing some good. Those sailors didn’t see everything.”

  “You’re right, and even their shipmates who went ashore didn’t see everything. But most of it sounded plausible. They said the people who live in the Bay Area are not happy with this relocation. The navy is keeping them penned up on Alameda, but they say the locals aren’t taking any chances, they dynamited the bridges and the tunnel. They’re patrolling the mainland shore, and they’re shooting to kill. They have enough problems as it is, just as everybody else in the country does, and they’re terrified of these people. Our friends and neighbors, people from down south. Hungry and desperate people, thousands of them.”

  “We might get that reaction anywhere we go, too,” Lisa said.

  “We could. But…well, I hope the people wherever we end up can see us as an asset. We have food. We have vehicles that run. We have a wood chipper. We have you, Lisa, an M.D. We have bicycles. We even have a horse.”

  “All things people could take away from us.”

  “My hope,” Bob said, “is solely that we be allowed to become a part of a community. I would be prepared to donate everything we’ve got to a communal pool of resources, share and share alike, privation as well as wealth.” He looked at Dave, who looked at Karen. She nodded.

  “We have no problem with that.”

  Bob looked slowly from Lisa to Mark and Rachel, then to Marian and Gordon, then to his wife. Each in turn gave some form of silent assent. So the broad goal was agreed to by acclamation.

  “I don’t think at this point there’s any need for a show of hands,” he said. “My sense of the meeting is that
no one is supporting the option of going to Santa Monica and getting on the boat, if any of you ever did. If I’m wrong, speak up now, tell us your arguments, and we will throw it open to discussion.”

  “No way,” Mark said.

  “I didn’t like them, even before Teddy’s story,” said Lisa.

  There were other murmurs and headshakes, and no opposing opinion was expressed. Bob looked at his watch.

  “All right. It’s almost ten. If we see the sun at all today, it’s probably going to be when it sets. There is still a lot to do. Marian, you’ve been doing such a good job of organizing things, I’m going to leave that in your hands. You have that list we made of things that still need to be done?”

  “I have it. People pretty much know what they need to do, but I’ll keep track of progress and pitch in when I can.”

  “Me and Addison and Dave are available for anything you need done,” Karen said.

  “That’s right. What Mom said.”

  “Okay, family. This is going to be like a wagon train, you know. Anything we leave behind you’ll never see again. Anything we desperately need and forget to take…well, you get the picture. So think! Do we need this? Really need it? Can we do without it? Marian has the lists we’ve made up, she’ll check things off as we load up. If you think of something that isn’t on the list, bring it to this table and we’ll talk it over. Now, those of you who have assignments, get to them. Those who don’t, see Marian. She’ll have some work for you to do, I guarantee it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  As the work proceeded through the late morning and early afternoon everyone kept one eye on the fire. Rest breaks were usually spent standing or sitting on the edge of the golf course, looking east.

  Solomon, Rachel and Mark’s Down Syndrome nine-year-old, was set the task of monitoring the weather vane and anemometer, which had been knocked over in the quake but was undamaged enough that it could be remounted on a pole over the workshop. He sat at a table facing the fire with a clock and called out the wind speed and direction every fifteen minutes. He seemed happy in this work, was totally devoted to it, to the point that he had to be coaxed into taking his afternoon nap. Every time he shouted, the people within earshot would shout back, “Good job, Solomon!”

  They could see that the fire was spreading south and east, having missed Holmby Hills by no more than a mile and a half. Soon the entire eastern horizon was billowing thick black smoke. It was too far away for them to see any actual flames.

  Somewhere around noon the wind veered. It became a brisk breeze from the ocean, bringing the temperature down fifteen degrees to a more tolerable eighty-two. The wind gusted to twenty-five miles per hour, which picked up the soot and ashes that had covered all the land to the west, and blew it in their faces. Everyone tied wet handkerchiefs over nose and mouth, but they couldn’t keep the foul, gritty stuff out of their eyes.

  The westerly winds blew the smoke that had been hovering over them toward the east. The sun came out over a landscape that had not burned, but nonetheless looked blasted, hellish, with the ashes covering everything. Eventually the air cleared and the almost unimaginable extent of the fire could be seen. There were still no visible flames—the fire front had to be ten or fifteen miles away from them by then, eating its way inexorably through the middle of the city—but the smoke rose up to the infinite sky, a boiling black wall that looked like some monstrous wave that was about to crest and crash over them. Like the famous “face of Satan” in the dust cloud raised by the fall of the World Trade Center, you could imagine all sorts of images in that black wall if you were imaginative and superstitious…and Dave thought that in the face of such a thing, we were all superstitious. He had seen a total eclipse once, and had experienced some of that feeling, had understood why the ancients had danced frantically and raised a great racket to scare away the dragon that was eating the sun.

  Dave’s job was to help Mark in the workshop. He didn’t know how he had been elected to the post, but he didn’t mind. He figured it would be good to get a better idea of how everything worked. The job didn’t require a lot of brains, so he had plenty of time to think. He had an idea, so when they took a break he sought out Bob.

  “I presume we won’t be leaving tonight?” he asked.

  “I would certainly be against it. But we’ll talk about it this evening, if we get the needed work done. See what people think.”

  “And it’s pretty certain that we’ll be heading south. Toward San Diego.”

  “I don’t think that’s been established yet.”

  “No, but I don’t have much faith in the I-15 route north. In fact, I don’t think we could get to Oregon, not anymore.”

  “Maybe just Northern California?”

  “Possible, I guess. Anyway, either direction, east and then north, or straight south, there’s the fire to consider.”

  “Yes. I’ve been worried about that. I’m thinking we may have to wait another day. I don’t want to mess with the fire.”

  “That’s wise. But I think I can solve two of our problems at one stroke.”

  “You have a route around the fire?”

  “No. I don’t know where all it’s burned. I think we should go through it.”

  Bob half smiled, as if he thought it was a joke. But then he saw that Dave was serious.

  “Did you enjoy your last trip through fire that much?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice. I guess through the fire isn’t what I meant. I think we should follow the fire. Head for the places where the fire has burned out. Even if we go east, we will be crossing a lot of the areas that the fire has burned out. And when you think about it, those areas should be the safest places in Los Angeles.”

  Bob smiled.

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Anybody who was there is either dead, or they fled the area.”

  “But it will stay pretty hot for a while, won’t it?”

  “We’ll have to see. If it’s too hot, we stop. It will cool down, eventually.” Dave looked at his watch. “I’m due back at work. I’ll run all this by Mark. Okay?”

  “By all means. What time is it?”

  “Just after four.”

  “We’ll all be meeting at eight. We’ll talk it over.”

  The fire grew more distant. Every fifteen minutes Solomon called out the wind speed and direction, which stayed from the west and between ten and twenty miles per hour, but the wall of smoke scarcely seemed to diminish at all. It filled the eastern sky, mostly a roiling black. Every once in a while there were traces of other colors of smoke, yellow and red and green. The consensus among the people watching was that it was produced by burning chemicals in refineries or warehouses. Fairly often they heard distant explosions, and one around five o’clock that rattled the windows. There were many things that might blow up as the fire advanced: paint in cans, bottled gases, dynamite and other explosives, and who-knew-what sort of exotic chemicals. Dave worried about that, about entering the fire area where deadly gases might be lingering, but he supposed if the wind changed direction, they could be in danger from that even where they were working. They had a Geiger counter, but no way of detecting traces of airborne chemical poisons.

  The work was essentially done around sundown, and everyone but Mark and Teddy gathered in the backyard to make final plans. Mark was still tinkering with his various constructions, and Dave suspected he could happily keep doing that for several more weeks if left to his own devices. He was the sort of person who had trouble meeting deadlines because nothing was ever quite at the level of perfection he was after. But Rachel had told Dave that when there was no more time, that he must now lay down his tools and accept that what he had was good enough, she could usually drag him away.

  The sense of the meeting was that they would leave as soon as the sun came up in the morning. If there was no sunrise again, then they would leave as soon as it was light enough to see.

  The proposal to follow the fire was a little more controversi
al.

  “I’m afraid it will be too hot,” someone said.

  “Then we’ll detour,” Dave suggested. “I think we could at least go to the western edge of the fire area, which should be the coolest by now. If it’s too hot, then we turn south and try to go around it.”

  “Or east,” said Lisa.

  “Or east,” Dave agreed. “But I’m pretty sure we can’t go east without crossing through the fire area.”

  “It would be like Moses and the Children of Israel,” Sandra said. “Following a pillar of fire.”

  “It was a pillar of fire by night,” her twin sister Olivia pointed out. At least Dave thought it was Olivia. “In the daytime they followed a pillar of smoke.”

  “So will we.” Sandra pointed to the east, where an orange glow lit the horizon.

  “I think Dave’s suggestion is the right way to go,” Bob said, with uncharacteristic bluntness. “We go to the edge of the burn area and see what’s what. Make a decision there. Any objections?”

  There were none.

  Teddy had joined them, washed up and dressed in his cycling clothes. He had slept most of the day and eaten twice. Nobody begrudged it because they all knew he was expending more energy than any three of them put together, and providing the only completely reliable intelligence regarding their surroundings. And, of course, he was laying his life on the line every time he cycled away from them. Bob and Emily always knew that the sight of the bright yellow jersey on his back might be the last they ever saw of him, in life or in death.

  That night he was wearing all-black clothing, and he had a proposal that didn’t make anyone happy.

  “I want to strongly suggest that you folks wait one more day.”

  That was greeted by a buzz of conversation, and a deep frown from his father. Teddy waited it out.

  “I had always planned to be your advance scout,” he finally said. “I could save you a lot of trouble by going ahead and seeing what the best routes were. But the little walkie-talkies we have are pretty short-range. If you’re all on the move, and I get farther away from you than about half a mile, I might never find you again. The only way I can see to avoid that is that when I’m scouting, you have to stay where you are so I can be sure of getting back to you.”