Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  At last, the caravan was moving. If only they knew their destination.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  They made it easily to the edge of the burn area. Teddy knew all the streets in the area, which were passable and which were blocked. He stayed out ahead about a hundred yards, sometimes turning around to ride beside Dave for a moment and update him on which direction they would be taking, then pressing on ahead.

  The fire seemed to have died out around San Vicente Boulevard. Here was where the wind had shifted. To the west of San Vicente they encountered mostly earthquake damage. To the east, almost everything had burned.

  There were exceptions. The old Hollywood Farmer’s Market was undamaged. But just beyond it, the newer, upscale shopping center, The Grove, had been devastated. The diamond-patterned streets of the old Park La Brea housing had not burned. They moved down Third, around the bulging hill where the tar pits had been and the art museum had stood. It was just beyond this, at La Brea Avenue, that they reached the area of total devastation. Everything to the north, south, and east had been completely involved, every last building and every single tree. It was a hellish landscape, all black and shades of gray.

  They paused here to test the ground. They would not stop long. The problem with a wood-burning engine was that it couldn’t be shut off. The fire would continue to burn, wasting precious fuel, until it went out. Then it had to be reignited. Because of that they had agreed that all stops except for emergencies would be as brief as possible.

  People tested the ground with their feet. It was bare concrete, except at the edges where what looked like melted asphalt had run toward the gutters. Marian poked at the stuff with a stick, got some of the goo on the end of it, and gingerly touched it.

  “Warm, but it won’t burn you,” she announced.

  They approached some of the brick walls, which were the only things standing. Even some of those had collapsed. They could feel heat still radiating from the bricks, and from the concrete, but nothing seemed too hot to touch.

  “Looks like it’s okay to go on,” Teddy said.

  “I agree,” said Bob. “So let’s do it.”

  Everyone hurried back to their vehicles and Dave started his engine. He pulled forward and entered the ruined city.

  It made the earthquake damage seem minor. As far as they could see, nothing was intact. Whole blocks were nothing but piles of ashes. Sometimes they could see metal objects in the ash heaps, which were probably the twisted and half-melted remains of major appliances. Of the brick buildings only the shells remained. It reminded Dave of pictures of German cities after firebombing, except that few of these buildings were that tall, most only one or two stories.

  It was a wasteland that stretched as far as the eye could see. Nothing was familiar. The iron posts holding the street signs had been twisted by the heat of the fire. They would soon have been lost except for something Dave thought was ironic. The network of GPS satellites in orbit was still functioning, and could pinpoint their location to within about ten yards. One was built into the Escalade, and there was a detachable unit they had installed in the bus. But it was surreal, looking at the bright network of streets on the small screen, with parks and landmarks, stores and gas stations neatly marked, and then to look up and see the reality.

  Every now and then, through a caprice of the wind or some other unknown factor, they would pass a block or two that had not burned. There were mostly houses, and the paint had been scorched off them, the wood baked brown. Dave wondered if so much oxygen had been sucked from the surrounding air that they had been unable to ignite. The houses looked like they had been sitting in the desert, desiccating, for a thousand years.

  Progress was very slow. Dave had thought he was moving slowly at five miles per hour, but he quickly saw that he would seldom be traveling any faster than that, and sometimes considerably slower. Teddy was clever at finding routes around the many obstacles in their path, but they had to take long detours, and sometimes stop completely to attach a chain to a tree so that the bus could pull it out of the way. Sometimes a block and tackle was needed.

  By late afternoon they had only gone as far as Rosewood Cemetery at Venice and Normandie. And here was another quirk of the fire. The trees inside the fence were widely spaced. The fire seemed to have danced along the tops of the trees without ever getting down to the ground. The brown grass had not caught fire. Again, Dave figured it was something to do with lack of oxygen.

  Mark decreed that they call a halt, which everyone was happy to do. It was hard work, just driving, or even sitting on the alert for trouble. The heat was almost unbearable. They were drinking water faster than they wanted to, but they had no choice. They could not risk dehydration.

  The reason Mark stopped them was that he needed to replenish their supply of wood chips, and he needed to see how the chipper functioned in the field. As with so many other things they had brought along, the failure of the chipper would be disastrous, leaving them no hope of getting very far.

  The gates were open. Dave pulled in, followed by the other vehicles. Addison was out quickly, lowering the tailgate of the trailer and bringing out her thirsty and hungry horse. They had brought a basin for Ranger to drink from. This worried Dave, since water was such a problem, but no one was showing any reluctance to fill it and let the animal drink his fill. He sincerely hoped that situation continued, and that they came across another source of water soon.

  Mark, in charge of the engines and their fuel, was out and about immediately, trying to do everything at once. He handed out the chain saws and hurried around, picking the trees he felt were the best sizes for feeding into the wood chipper. Soon the silence was broken by the purr of the chain-saw motors and the louder screech of the chains cutting into wood. When the trees were down and being dismembered, a sort of bucket brigade was formed to carry lengths of wood to the chipper. Mark started it up and began feeding in the branches and smaller pieces while Marian and Gordon swung axes to split the larger pieces of trunk into smaller bits the chipper could handle. The chipper was very loud. All the sounds of activity were very strange to hear amid the stark, leafless trees with their burned tops, and the thousands and thousands of tombstones. Dave remembered that Hattie McDaniel, the first black American to win an Oscar, for her role in Gone With the Wind, had been buried here after she was refused interment at Hollywood Memorial Park. He wondered where she was.

  It was hot, sweaty work, and they all had to take a break every half hour or so. When Dave took a break he joined Bob and followed Addison as she led Ranger from one promising patch of grass to the next one. She was determined to get as much free forage into him as she could before they moved on, which Mark said should be in about an hour.

  Addison got ahead of him, and then he saw her stop. She turned around and came toward him, walking fast, leading the horse behind her. Her face was white. Dave hurried over to her.

  “What’s the matter, Addie?”

  For a moment she couldn’t get any words out. Tears began running down her cheeks.

  “Don’t…don’t go over there, Daddy.”

  “Honey, what it is?”

  “You shouldn’t go over there.”

  “You go back to the group, Addison. We’ll join you later.” He gave her a gentle push, and she didn’t resist. She was walking stiffly, like a robot.

  Dave and Bob hurried in the other direction, toward a tall monument that was circled by a road. As soon as they reached the road they knew what had so horrified Addison. There were five shapes huddled together on the ground. Three were adults, the other two were children. Next to them was a dog.

  “They don’t look badly burned,” Bob whispered.

  He was right. Their clothes looked charred and browned in places, but their faces hadn’t blackened. They had more of a reddish color. Dave smelled something, and realized it was cooked meat. He turned aside and vomited.

  Bob didn’t look good, but he managed to keep his food down.

  “
They were dead before they were exposed to the heat,” Dave choked out. “That’s why no blistering. They just started to…to cook a little, and the fire moved on.”

  “But what killed them?”

  “No oxygen. They suffocated. Oh…my God.” Dave had looked farther, and now he spotted dozens more corpses, possibly as many as a hundred, just from where he was standing. He saw that people had thought they might seek refuge here, in the open space. But the fire had stolen all their air. They had died in family groups or alone. Some were in the fetal position, some were stretched out on their backs.

  “It doesn’t look like they suffered too much,” Bob said, hopefully.

  “I think you just get short of breath, gasp for a while, and then sort of go to sleep. At least I hope so.” Dave looked at the children again. “This is the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Please, let it remain so.”

  “Oh, Bob, what am I going to do about Addison?”

  “All I know is to offer comfort and love.”

  They found Addison with her mother. They were embracing and rocking slowly back and forth. Others were watching, probably wondering what had happened to make her feel so terrible, but they all kept their distance. Karen looked up and frowned at Dave, as if she blamed him for it. Well, maybe he should have kept her closer. He shrugged, helplessly, and she relented.

  “Everyone, please pause for a moment,” Bob called out. The chain saws and the chipper fell silent. They gathered around.

  “You have all stayed close to the vehicles. Addison went farther afield to find forage for her horse, and she has made a gruesome discovery. There are many dead people up in that direction. Dave and I saw about a hundred. I have no idea how many there might be elsewhere. People tried to ride out the fire here, and they seem to have been asphyxiated.

  “Every instinct I have tells me we should give them a decent burial, but there are simply too many of them. It would take a bulldozer to dig a mass grave. We just don’t have the time or the resources. I want to do something, and all I can think of is a moment of silence. Those of you who pray, please do. If you don’t pray, please do whatever it is you do to honor the dead. Thank you all.” He stopped speaking and bowed his head.

  Dave saw Lisa get on her knees and put her hands together. Her daughter, Elyse, knelt beside her. Nigel remained standing, looking at the ground. Marian stood at attention, crying silently. Gordon crossed himself, and put his arm around her. Solomon looked confused, but got on his knees as well. He laced his fingers together and looked at his mother, who knelt beside him and embraced him. Mark looked uncomfortable, but knelt beside his wife and child.

  “I must add,” Bob said, after what he judged a suitable interval, “that Addison has just had a very bad emotional shock. Please, all of you, give her all the support you can. She needs us all now.”

  That brought a swift reaction. Everyone headed for Karen and Addison. Some of them were crying, and Addison began to sob loudly. He knew it was better if she got it out as quickly as she could. Once more he felt helpless, and knew there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t join the group. He would talk to her later.

  Work had to resume quickly, and in another half hour they had taken on all the chipped wood they could. Ranger was loaded back into the trailer, presumably with a stomach that, if not full, was at least not as empty as it had been. The wood burners were stoked with new fuel, Dave started his engine and pulled out of the cemetery behind Teddy on his bike, and they headed south and east again.

  They were able to get on the I-10 and follow it for a while, and they made good progress. But they soon came to a section that had formerly been elevated, and now was just a long pile of rubble. There was no place to get off, and they had to backtrack. Teddy swore that it had been possible to get as far as the 110 Harbor Freeway before the fire. They assumed that the heat had weakened the already damaged structures and they had fallen down because of it. In the end they had to go all the way back to Normandie before they could find an undamaged exit. Then it was down to Adams, and east again.

  They had intended to get on the 110 from there, but they could see that the overpass a block to the south was down, blocking it. Teddy returned at that point and said that he had been to Exposition Park, and there were wide, unburned, open spaces there where it might be good to make camp. There was a hurried discussion and it was decided, though there were still some hours of daylight left, that they should stop for the night. Everyone agreed that they would need extra time to get the things done that were necessary before darkness fell, and they needed some leeway to find out just how long all those things would take. So they turned south on Figueroa.

  The campus of the University of Southern California began at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard. The grounds were much more crowded than its crosstown rival, UCLA.

  Everything had burned thoroughly, trees and buildings, and more than a few people. It was there that they saw their first burned corpses.

  It looked to Dave like there had been a substantial population still residing on campus. It seemed that at least some of them had decided to try to weather the oncoming firestorm in the brick buildings rather than flee to the south.

  The dead people they saw must have been the ones who had seen their folly too late, and tried to cross Exposition Boulevard, because there they lay, unrecognizable except for being vaguely shaped like human beings. It was a sight that firefighters must be familiar with. The corpses looked shrunken, lying on their sides, arms and legs drawn up into a not-quite-fetal position. All clothes were burned away, and the skin, too. What remained was blackened. It was impossible to tell age, race, or sex.

  They saw five of these horrific remains on the street. How many might be on the campus itself was anybody’s guess, and not one that anyone wanted to learn more about.

  The destruction of the campus looked total. Yet across the street the fire seemed to have jumped along the treetops again, leaving the ground untouched. Teddy said the Natural History Museum farther to the west was a burned-out shell, but the Museum of Science and Industry on Figueroa was almost intact. An old airliner—Dave thought it was a DC-8—had been knocked off its supports and was nose down on the ground, but it was not burned.

  When they came to the entrance to Exposition Park that led to the Memorial Coliseum they saw that the grassy area leading up to it was undamaged, so they pulled over there and parked. They formed the vehicles into a triangle and made the gaps between them as narrow as possible. They had not seen a living person all day, but they weren’t going to start out being incautious.

  Dinner that evening was Spam stew with canned vegetables, surprisingly good with the spices the cooks added to it. Or maybe it was just because he was ravenous, Dave thought.

  There was debate as to whether or not they should have a fire. Some felt it was better just to burn enough wood to heat the food, that a larger fire might attract unwanted attention…which was any attention at all, whether from people seeking to do them harm or from possibly starving people who they could hardly refuse to serve with a bowl of Spam stew. A slight majority favored cutting some of the trees in the area and making a small fire to huddle around in the forbidding night. That notion carried the day.

  Dave and Karen put up their tent with no trouble. Addison elected to sleep in the Escalade, where she could keep an eye on Jenna, who still had not regained consciousness, though at least her condition didn’t seem any worse.

  Teddy set off a little before sundown, and everyone assumed he would be ranging to the south, scouting their route. But he returned a few minutes later from the direction of the Coliseum, looking pale and sick. He beckoned to his father.

  Dave watched the two talking, and saw that Mark was doing the same. He wondered if he should join them and find out what was going on, and when Mark started over there he followed. Bob was looking grim.

  “Teddy says the Coliseum is full of bodies.”

  “By full…”

&nbs
p; “Thousands, he says. Most of them on the field.”

  The Coliseum had been built in 1923, and had later hosted both the 1932 and the 1984 Olympics. It was a huge concrete bowl, and Dave could understand why people might have seen it as a refuge from the fire. What he couldn’t understand was why they were all dead.

  “Were they burned?”

  “They didn’t look like it.” And suddenly he was crying with great, wracking sobs. Teddy had always seemed pretty stoic, but when the dam burst it let go with a torrent. Bob put his arms around his youngest son and hugged him tight. Dave turned away, not sure if his witness was welcome. The first thing he saw was most of the rest of the Winston family on their way toward Bob and Teddy.

  “Teddy found something awful in the Coliseum,” Bob told them.

  “What?” Addison asked, fearfully.

  “A lot of dead people” was all Teddy would say at first.

  “I thought I understood how those people died in the cemetery,” Dave said. “But this just seems like too big a space to me, I mean for all the oxygen to be sucked out. I can’t see that it would have reached a killing heat in there, there’s too much concrete around them, and it doesn’t seem to have been scorched.”

  “What about chemicals?” Marian wanted to know.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Dave said.

  “Just beyond the Coliseum is the swim stadium. Wouldn’t they have a lot of chlorine stored there?”

  “I would think so. Do you think the fire burned around the pool?”

  “I’m not going to go look,” Teddy said.

  “No, of course not,” Bob agreed. “And if it wasn’t chlorine from the pool, it could have been any number of things around here. Who really knows what’s in all these thousands and thousands of warehouses?”

  “It’s mostly residential around here, but within a few miles there are plenty of industrial areas. The wind could have carried just about anything here.”