Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “Or you could not scout at all,” Bob pointed out.

  “Then I think you’re throwing away a big advantage,” Teddy said, rather forcefully.

  There was a brief silence, then Marian spoke up.

  “I have to agree with my little brother,” she said. “Intelligence is critical in a situation like this. Teddy can range farther than any of us. We need to know what’s ahead of us before we walk into it. After that, communication is critical, and we have to deal with the limitations we have. Our only means of talking at a distance are those pitiful little radios. When he goes farther than a few miles he has to know where he’s coming back to. You can no longer say ‘Meet me at such-and-such a place at noon.’ If one party can’t make it…you might never see him again.”

  She paused to let everyone think that over.

  “I agree with Dad that after we get moving, Teddy should range ahead only a short distance, but this one time, he can save us literally days of travel if the route to the east is impossible. You can no longer drive to San Bernardino in a couple hours from here. It will take us at least a few days, I’m sure.”

  “And I can get there by midnight, I’m sure of it.”

  “What? Midnight?” That was Emily, clearly terrified at the prospect. “When would you leave?”

  “In about ten minutes,” Teddy said.

  There was more consternation, most of it from Emily, with Bob stone-faced beside her. At last he held up his hand.

  “I can see you’re determined to do this, son. And I can certainly see the advantages to us all…if you come back.”

  “I have every time so far, Dad.” He held up his hand, stopping his father. “No, sorry, I shouldn’t kid about it. I know it’s dangerous, but in some ways I don’t think it’s as dangerous as what we all will be doing, either tomorrow morning or the next day. If you insist on going tomorrow, I’ll stay here and go with you, mostly because I believe if we split while we’re both moving, there’s a good chance we won’t meet again.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes. And think about this. You all will be traveling with a lot of stuff people will want to take from you. All I’ll have is my bike and a sack lunch. I’m highly maneuverable and I’m good at hiding. You will be slow, with limited options as to where you can go, and there’s no way you’re going to hide a school bus on the road. Dad, we need for me to do this. Say the word, and I’ll be off. And I promise to return by sundown tomorrow.”

  Teddy packed some high-energy food and a canteen, kissed and hugged everybody, and accepted their good wishes. He took off fifteen minutes later under the light of an almost full moon, and quickly vanished into the darkness.

  The next day was bad for everyone, excruciating for Bob and Emily. Not much work got done for the simple reason that there wasn’t anything significant left to do.

  The sea breeze died down to nothing and no other wind came up. To the east the smoke could still be seen rising, but it no longer completely obscured the sky. Everyone hoped it was because it was dying out, but feared it was just growing more distant. With the calm, the brief respite of lower temperatures was over, and the thick, dirty air closed in around them and soon had everyone coughing. The thermometer never climbed into the hundred-degree range that they had been experiencing, but the higher humidity made it feel worse. Dave looked at it and marveled that, in the days before the fire, the air had been clearer than he had ever seen it. His family had been granted a brief glimpse of what Los Angeles air had been like around the time when the crazy nickelodeon people had arrived from the East Coast with their movie cameras. It was easy to see why people would have wanted to come there to live. The views from his backyard had been stunning, all the way to the blue Pacific.

  Around noon Marian got the idea to organize what she called “fire drills.” First she gathered all the weapons they had and made sure they were unloaded. In addition to the three shotguns and two revolvers the Marshalls had brought, the Winston family had an arsenal of their own. Bob had some rifles, a few shotguns, and two pistols. Lisa and her husband had been opposed to guns, but Mark had several, and Marian and Gordon had some serious firepower between them. Teddy had a Glock.

  There was the problem of ammunition for the various firearms, with quite a bit available for some, very little for others. Marian had taken inventory early in the packing and made sure it would all be handy in an emergency. Now she passed around the weaponry, each to the one she felt best able to handle it.

  Then she assigned duties and positions for several scenarios she had devised. There was some grumbling, if no outright opposition, at first, but as soon as they saw the chaos that resulted the first time she blew her whistle and everyone ran around like headless chickens, bumping into each other and failing to find their posts or their weapons, people buckled down and got serious about it.

  She had them disperse over the area, and drilled them on returning to what she designated as their campground in a hurry. Most of them got into the bus, which she felt was the most defensible vehicle, and took up firing positions. After three or four repeats of that exercise she made some adjustments until she felt her forces were optimized.

  Then she had them all board the various vehicles and, at a signal, get out and find cover to protect themselves from attacks from various directions.

  “Remember, people, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. We’ve drilled in ideal situations here; what we encounter in the field will never be ideal. You’ll have to think, and you’ll have to adapt, and do so in a chaotic, frightening situation. You will be probably be scared to death under fire. You’ll have to deal with it.”

  She let them think that over for a while, and then she started all over on the drilling. By late afternoon she had them responding to every command in a reasonably coherent order. She pronounced them as ready as they would ever be.

  As the afternoon wore on into evening, Bob grew pricklier than Dave had ever seen him. Usually the mildest, most fair, slowest to anger of men, he spent much of the day hobbling around on his cane, his eye patch making him look like a bad-tempered pirate, growling at anyone who got in his way. He found fault with the smallest of things, and actually shouted at some of his children.

  As the sun neared the western horizon just about everybody but Solomon was worried, and even that young man clearly picked up that everyone else was on edge. He jumped at every noise, and twice he forgot to announce the time, temperature, and wind speed and direction, a job he was so proud of that he cried when he realized he had neglected it.

  People spoke to each other warily, with one eye always on the driveway where Teddy would appear, when he came back. If he didn’t get back by dark, there was no question in Dave’s mind what the decision about leaving would be. It would take more than one day missing, and possibly more than one week, before the families would set out on the long trek without Teddy.

  At one point Nigel and Mark got into a shouting match and for a terrible moment it looked like they were about to come to blows. Luckily, Gordon was nearby and stepped between them, speaking calmly and slowly. The two shook hands and apologized to each other, and even embraced. Dave saw that Mark was crying.

  When the sun was almost at the horizon, the sound of Teddy’s old-fashioned squeeze-bulb bicycle horn electrified everyone. A great cheer went up when he wheeled around the side of the house, waving his fist over his head as if he had just won the Tour de France. He was grinning, but Dave saw that his right leg from the knee down was streaked with blood.

  “Just a fall,” he shouted as he got off his bike, wincing as he put his weight on the injured leg. “Not more than a mile from here. Stupid rookie mistake, too. Looking up at some wild parakeets in a palm tree. I need some ice water! But I’ll take just the water.”

  He sat down on the aluminum chair Elyse brought over for him, and gingerly poked at the bad scrape on his knee.

  “Looks worse than it is,” he said, as Lisa started to wash the blood away. He
took a bottle of Costco water from Gordon, twisted off the top, and chugged about half of it. Solomon came up lugging a bucket, which Teddy thanked him for and then splashed over his head, which caused Solomon to laugh wildly. Teddy poured the rest of the bucket over the child’s head, which made him laugh even more.

  “I was looking up at the parakeets, listening to them chatter, and the next thing I knew I was skidding along the road, first on my knee, then on my shoulder.” He twisted a little and showed everyone where his jersey was ripped, with another scrape there, not nearly as bad as the knee. “How about it, Sis? Will I ever walk again?”

  “I’ll tell you later. I probably won’t have to amputate. Your head, that is.”

  “That’s a relief. I think I pulled a hamstring, too. Damn good luck it was so close to home. That would have really slowed me down. Made me late.”

  Dave noticed Bob off to one side, grinning broadly and wiping away a tear. His bad mood was forgotten.

  They brought Teddy food and more drink. It was almost dark before Mark finally lost patience and demanded he report what he’d seen.

  “I can summarize it in three words,” Teddy said. “We’re going south.”

  “I had already been as far east as Pomona,” Teddy started out. “I was able to retrace the route easily in the dark. I saw no one. I saw very few lights. It wasn’t too hard to cross the trail of the fire. It burned toward the south a little west of Echo Park. That’s still intact. It didn’t reach downtown. After that, it was just quake damage. I suppose when we start out we’ll find out just how far south it burned.”

  “That’s good news,” Mark said. “About crossing the fire zone. How hot was it?”

  “Pretty damn hot. There were places where there was sticky asphalt, and some places where it must have burned away completely and there was just hot concrete that was beneath it. But it didn’t hurt my tires. I didn’t like walking on it, but you could touch the ground with your hand, it wouldn’t burn you. You wouldn’t want to hold it there long, though. I assume it’s cooler by now.

  “The worst thing was the air. A hundred different stinks, none of them pleasant. It felt like a sauna. I sweated a lot, and I drank a lot. I used up the gallon of water I took. Lord, I don’t think I’ve ever been that thirsty. Not even dirty water anywhere on the ground, not that I would have drunk it.”

  From his previous trip, Teddy had known that the quake damage to the 10 freeway had been a bit less severe the farther west he went, though it was still substantial, with many freeway overpasses fallen onto the roadway.

  He had started seeing signs of life around Covina, a little west of Pomona, getting near the San Bernardino County line. Every few miles there were checkpoints, manned around the clock. Usually they consisted of a row of cars or trucks, sometimes city buses across the highway, or they had been set up behind piles of concrete that were the remains of overpasses. They all had fifty-five-gallon drums with fires at night, burning scrap lumber. None of them gave him much trouble, just asked him a few questions and let him pass through. They weren’t worried about lone men on bicycles. Like the associations in the Hollywood Hills, they were there to prevent the passage of outlaw gangs. They also intended to prevent any mass exodus into their communities, and told him they had already turned back large numbers of refugees.

  “I got the impression that the people they turned back were arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Starving, many of them. I don’t know how they’d react to a group like us, with vehicles and all our other resources. Possibly if we could convince them of our usefulness, we would be allowed through.”

  “But we don’t want to settle in east county,” Rachel said.

  “You misunderstand me. I don’t think they’d want us. I’m not sure if they would even allow us to pass through. Maybe, maybe not. These are hard people now, Rachel. I feel sure that, at first, it was tough for them to turn away women and children who were in bad shape. But as time goes by, it gets easier. I didn’t see a lot of sympathy in their faces. They may be sick about it, but they’re doing it every day, turning away people. They’re doing what they think they have to do, protecting what they have.”

  All the checkpoints were slowing him down, so Teddy decided to try farther north. Up there just below the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains was the I-210, aptly named the Foothill Freeway. It joined the I-15, the route north to the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas. Teddy hoped there might be fewer roadblocks up there.

  “No such luck. As soon as I headed north I ran into National Guard troops. They were allowing no one through. They were guarding the water. There’s some sort of lake in the park by the freeway.”

  “That’s Puddingstone Reservoir,” Rachel said. “There’s a water park up there, Raging Waters. We used to take the kids there.”

  “Raging Waters!” Solomon said, with excitement in his eyes.

  “Probably not raging at the moment,” Teddy said, ruffling Solomon’s hair.

  “We had the same problem a while ago, when me and Addison went exploring,” Dave said. “There were troops around the Hollywood Reservoir.”

  “Makes sense, I guess, to guard the water supply. God knows Los Angeles doesn’t have enough of it. Anyway, I tried half a dozen ways to get around it, but it was no go. They’ve blockaded a large area around the lake. So I kept heading west on the 10.”

  Progress was slow, and by noon he had made it only as far as Rancho Cucamonga, where he was finally able to head northeast on the 15. At first he was optimistic, as most of the bridges were intact, though there were many cracks. And soon he was on the fifteen-mile climb up the Ontario and Barstow Freeways.

  “I was going along pretty good there for a while. I made it to the junction with the I-215, and it looked passable for a school bus. I went another three miles, to the first big turn in the freeway. And that’s where I stopped. This time I saw it with my own eyes. A landslide has completely covered the freeway. I made my way around it, and when the next curve began, back to the west, you can see for several miles there. I counted two more landslides. Nobody was working on them. But not far from me, to the west of the freeway, there were people working to clear some slides over the railroad. There were men laying new track. I went over and talked to them. They claimed to be working for some government program, the state of California. They were being paid in food. They weren’t interested in money.

  “They said their boss told them that clearing the rails is a priority. Nobody had any plans to reopen the freeway. Trains can haul a whole lot more per ton of wood or coal burned. Or so they told me.”

  “They’re right,” Mark said. He looked like he was about to explain the differences in energy use, but Bob waved him to silence. Teddy looked at his father.

  “I really don’t have much more to say, Dad. My trip back was uneventful until I fell off the bike. I confirmed two things. We can’t get out of here by going east, unless we go all the way to Palm Springs. And the ground the fire has burned over is passable, though it’s pretty hot. It will get cooler with every day that passes.”

  There was a long silence. It seemed clear to Dave that their course had now been set, and that it would be to the south. At last Marian spoke.

  “The only question I have,” she said, “is will we have enough wood to fuel our vehicles until we get out of the burned area. I’m assuming there won’t be very much wood left after the fire has passed. Mark?”

  Their chief engineer and tech guy pondered it.

  “Of course it depends on how far we follow it, but I’m pretty sure we’ll make it. I’m assuming that we could always duck out of the burn to one side or the other and find trees or collapsed houses there. Old wood from houses is ideal, actually, because it’s seasoned and very dry. We won’t even have to dry it out by putting it into the jacket around the wood burners.”

  “What jacket are you talking about?” Lisa asked.

  “The wood burners are two cylinders. The burner sits inside a larger cylinder.
While the wood is burning, you shovel wet wood chips into the larger one and the heat bakes out the water. Then you feed those dry chips into the burner. I think we’ll be okay.”

  “So speaks our science guy,” Bob said, solemnly. “And to my mind all other alternatives have been closed off to us. We could skirt the edges of the fire, I suppose, but our route is south. Does anyone object, or have a new idea?”

  No one spoke up.

  “All right. Follow the fire? Or skirt the fire?”

  “Follow,” Teddy said promptly.

  “Follow,” Mark agreed.

  “I agree,” Dave said. “Follow.”

  “Follow,” Karen said.

  “Follow!” Solomon shouted, to cheers and laughter.

  There were no dissenting voices raised.

  “Then south it is, behind the fire. It will be like you said, Olivia, we’ll be like the Children of Israel. A pillar of smoke by day, and a pillar of fire by night. Amen.”

  “And you’re Moses,” Lisa said, seriously.

  “Ohmigod no. I have no idea where the promised land lies.”

  “You’ll find it for us,” Addison told him. “With my dad to help out.”

  “Just don’t expect me to part the Red Sea for you idiots. Or even the Puddingstone Reservoir.”

  The level of excitement was high as the darkness closed in around them. By the light of two Coleman lanterns the two families moved about, many of them remembering last-minute chores. Even the lanterns were turned off two hours after sunset, to conserve fuel. By then everyone was supposed to be in bed, with flashlights beside them for emergencies. They were not to be used frivolously, for though they had a good stock of batteries, there was no telling how long the supply would have to last. They had to be conserved.

  Conserve, conserve, conserve.

  Everyone had spoken that word before the disaster, in terms of recycling, land use, preservation of resources, carbon footprint, and climate change, but Dave had come to realize none of them had had any idea what real conservation meant. They had lived in a throwaway society, where they consumed things like razor blades that could not be resharpened, plastic or paper shopping bags instead of net or canvas bags, ballpoint pens that could not be refilled…all the garbage of plenty. No one repaired small appliances anymore; if your toaster broke, you threw it away and got another.