Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

“I think it’s one of those things we’re never going to know, unless somebody from the government comes in and does an investigation.”

  “That could happen. Not soon, I guess, but somebody will come back here, someday. Don’t you think?”

  It was Teddy asking, but no one wanted to venture an answer.

  When it got dark everyone gathered around the fire in the oil drum. There was a tribal feeling to it, and Dave could easily imagine the comfort such a fire must have provided to the humans who first tamed it. Sometimes emotional comfort had to take precedence over tactical considerations. Marian had been the one who argued longest for a dark camp, a camp that wasn’t as easy to spot. But once it was dark and the fire was going, she settled easily in with the rest of them and seemed to enjoy it.

  She had, however, changed the arrangements for standing guard. Now there were to be two people posted at all times concealed somewhere out there in the dark, watching and listening for anyone approaching. The people standing guard would be able to send any of half a dozen coded clicks on a walkie-talkie to people inside, without revealing their position. Marian pointed out that, in the event of an attack, it would be useful to have someone behind the attackers to give them something extra to think about. She had advised all the guards that, if they had to shoot, shoot the attackers in the back if possible. There were no gentlemanly rules in combat.

  Dave was allowed to choose his own position when it came time for him to stand a watch, the only conditions being that it needed to provide some concealment, be east of and at least fifty yards from the encampment. He selected a tree and shinnied up into one of the lower branches. Now all he had to do was stay quiet, and not fall asleep.

  Which was why he had chosen to be in the tree. If he fell asleep, he would fall out. He felt it must have worked, because though he had been very tired, he was still awake and alert when he was relieved after two hours without incident.

  The night passed quietly.

  According to the GPS, the fastest route from the Winston house to the Coliseum was a bit over eleven miles. According to Dave’s odometer, they had driven nineteen miles, and they had done it in about twelve hours, including the fueling stop at the cemetery. That was a bit over one and a half miles per hour. From where they were, it was about 135 miles to San Diego. That was traveling by freeway, with no obstructions. If eleven miles turned out to be more like nineteen, it would be more like 230 miles they had to cover. At eleven miles per day, that was twenty-one days on the road.

  Three weeks.

  He showed his figures to Bob and Mark, and they agreed that was a good rough estimate. Some days they might do better, some days worse. There was simply no way to predict what they might encounter, including obstacles so imposing that they might have to retrace their route for many miles.

  The trip could take more than a month.

  Dave had pitched their tent close to the Escalade and helped Addison make a comfortable bed in the back of the vehicle. Jenna had still not regained consciousness, but Lisa said her vital signs were promising, prognosis “guarded.” Addison had managed to get some water into her by carefully spooning it to her lips. Lisa said they would soon try some warm chicken broth.

  The next morning Addison reported that Jenna had mumbled and at one point cried out, but had never seemed aware of her surroundings.

  Breakfast was corned beef wrapped in freshly baked tortillas. Dave longed for some real leavened bread, but in one more parallel to the Children of Israel who left Egypt in such a hurry they didn’t have time to let the bread rise, he understood that tortillas were quick and easy to make.

  But he had had so many of them by now that he would have preferred matzo.

  They broke camp quickly and were on the road again by eight.

  They had intended to cut over to the I-5, but street after street was blocked, and they found themselves moving due south either on the 110 Harbor Freeway or on the roads close to it. But the 110 had elevated sections most of the way down to Florence Avenue and most of those were collapsed. They stayed mostly on Figueroa all morning, a broad street that had had no buildings tall enough to block the road when they fell down. The obstructions were all in the form of cracks and gaps in the road, and those sometimes went on in both directions for a mile or more. There seemed to be something in the geology down in this part of Los Angeles that had lent itself to fractures and slippage, so that an area they had thought might be easy to traverse turned out to be harder than anything they had yet encountered.

  It had been a poor neighborhood, as much of the basin between the I-10 and the I-405 had been. Small businesses, many of them dealing with auto parts and repair, including a lot of large junkyards, had lined Figueroa before the fire. Now only the junk remained, charred free of paint and rubber and anything else that would burn. It smelled bad, sometimes acrid enough to burn their noses, and everyone was worried about toxic gases, but the worst they experienced was a dry, hacking cough as a result of the smoke, ash, and soot.

  When they were forced off the main street they were in neighborhoods that had mostly consisted of single-family houses on small lots, with some two-story apartment buildings here and there. Like most white middle-class Angelenos, Dave had not been down here all that often. He recalled that some of the houses had been ramshackle, poorly kept, with junk in the yards. But many others had been well maintained, painted, with flowers or vegetable gardens. They had been the pride and joy of the owners, who were usually black or Hispanic. It had been no small thing to own even a tiny home in L.A, where a two-bedroom, one-bath, one-thousand-square-foot home in a neighborhood as unglamorous as Watts could still be worth upwards of a hundred grand.

  All of that was gone, all the small dream homes and the ugly stucco apartment houses. They had always been close-packed, and the fire had swept through them completely unhindered. Every block had completely burned to the ground. Very little remained but the concrete foundations. Here and there were the hulks of major appliances, and there were thousands of burned-out cars. Everything in the cars was gone except the metal. Some of the cars and houses were still smoking, and the smells were nauseating. Everyone was hoping they could somehow break out of this area before they had to make camp for the night.

  Time and again they were diverted from their intended course by yawning cracks in the ground, or fifteen-foot drop-offs, or raw, new cliffs. They kept being forced farther and farther to the west, and came upon Jesse Owens Park only by accident. It was at the corner of Century Boulevard and Western Avenue, far to the west of where they had wanted to go. The park was a large L-shaped space with several baseball diamonds, a soccer field, and a nine-hole golf course. Most of the trees were along the south side, which is probably what had saved it from the worst of the fire. Those treetops had burned, but not completely. Once again there was brown grass for Ranger to eat.

  They had not come nearly as far as they had hoped, and much of that had been in the wrong direction. It had taken them nearly all day. They were on the edge of the area that had been affected by the fallout of the Doheny oilfield explosion and fire. They desperately hoped they would not be forced to go farther west. That way lay LAX, and the area they knew to be very bad even before the earthquake. It could only be worse now.

  Once more, it was frustrating to have no news from anywhere in the area, to be going forward essentially blind. As they made camp on the golf course and sat around the fire eating another meager meal, they debated whether or not they should continue to follow the path of the fire, or try to strike out beyond it.

  “I say proceed as we have been,” Bob said. “I know it’s awful, but you realize that for two days now we’ve seen no one. That is all to the good. People we run into will likely be needy or angry or predatory, or all three.”

  “You’re forgetting that we might run into people as well prepared as we are,” Lisa said. “And those are likely to be out of the burn area. Maybe they’re hunkering down, waiting to be rescued. Maybe they could be talked
into joining up with us. Like you say, there’s safety in numbers.”

  “I see your point. But after all that’s gone down lately, I’d have a lot of trouble trusting anyone I don’t know already.”

  “That’s awful,” Addison said, then looked chagrined to have entered the argument, where mostly adults spoke, in spite of their promise that the teenagers would be treated as adults. “Sorry,” she added.

  “No need to be sorry,” Emily said. “It is awful. I don’t like to think that’s the sort of world we’re living in now, but maybe it is.”

  “We should take each case as we come to it,” Marian suggested.

  They tossed it around a little more, and still hadn’t reached a decision when Teddy spoke up.

  “I want to keep following the fire for at least one more day,” he said. “You people think you’ve been up a lot of blind alleys. Done a lot of backtracking. Let me tell you, for every mile you guys have backtracked, I’ve done three. There’s been no point in telling you about the streets that didn’t pan out, but there have been a bunch of them. I just come back and tell you there’s no way through there, I don’t mention I went two miles to find that out. And I take off in a new direction, and come back and tell you we have to go back again, and you think I haven’t been scouting good enough.”

  “I don’t think that,” Bob said.

  “Whatever. I think I’m the only one here who knows just how truly impenetrable this maze of streets has become. And from my travels outside the burn, I can also tell you that it’s much worse out there.”

  “Well, if it comes to a vote, I’m voting with Teddy,” Karen said.

  “I don’t think we really need a vote,” Bob said. “Unless I hear strong objections, we’ll continue to follow the fire tomorrow.”

  There were no voices raised.

  An hour before sunrise Jenna regained consciousness for the first time. Addison was changing the dressing on her wound by the light of a small flashlight when Jenna cried out and tried to grab her hand. She shined the light into Jenna’s haggard face.

  “What’s going on? What are you doing?” Her voice was a breathy rasp.

  “Oh, Jenna, I’m so glad you’re back.”

  “What happened? Where am I?”

  “We’re on the road, trying to get out of Los Angeles. You just stay still here, I have to go get Lisa. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Her head dropped back on the pillow. Before Addison could leave she raised her head again. “I think I wet myself,” she said.

  “Just be still. I’ll take care of that.” Addison had been changing Jenna’s improvised diapers. “I’ll be right back. Please don’t move around. Okay?’

  “’Kay.”

  Dave had been having trouble getting to sleep. He had just begun to doze when he heard his daughter’s voice, and he was out of the tent quickly.

  “She’s awake,” Addison whispered. “I’m going to get Lisa.”

  He took the flashlight from Addison and got in the car behind the driver’s seat. He took her hand and squeezed it. She returned the squeeze, feebly.

  “How are you?”

  “You tell me. What happened?”

  “I’m not sure if—”

  “My leg hurts something awful. Did I break my leg?”

  He wasn’t sure what she should be told and was thinking it over when she closed her eyes again. Her mouth fell open and he was pretty sure she was asleep, but they opened again when Lisa opened the door beside her.

  “How were her vital signs?” Lisa asked.

  “Her temperature was up a degree,” Addison said. “I didn’t take her blood pressure yet.”

  “I feel hot. Real hot. And my leg hurts.”

  “You were shot,” Lisa said, holding Jenna’s eye open and quickly shining a penlight into it. She then pulled away the sheet covering Jenna. Her pants had been cut away and she was wearing nothing but a T-shirt. Dave looked away, not from her nakedness but because the wound was ugly, pinkish around the edges, crusted with blood and something yellowish.

  “I was about to clean it,” Addison said.

  “Jenna, it’s not looking too bad, but it has to be cleaned again or it might get infected. You were asleep the last times we did it. I’m afraid I don’t have any morphine or anything like that. It’s going to hurt.”

  “Do you have to?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t. I’m not brave.”

  “You just holler if you have to.”

  Dave had to hold her arms while Addison threw herself over her legs. She kicked and she struggled, but she had no real strength. After a few minutes she passed out. Dave released her arms and wiped his brow, which was covered with sweat that had little to do with the heat.

  “I wouldn’t want to do that again,” he said.

  “We have to keep it clean. But I don’t have much alcohol left.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “You don’t get used to it, believe me. You just stop showing it.” She looked at Dave, and her face was grim. “Painkillers were the first thing we ran out of. Just pray I don’t have to take off her leg. I’ve amputated a dozen legs and arms in the last week. You just work as quickly as you can. Like battlefield doctors during the Civil War.”

  Dave looked up and saw that almost the whole party was gathered around the Escalade. The first rays of the morning sun were bringing light to the eastern sky, which for the first time in a while didn’t have much smoke in it.

  Lisa faced the assembled group.

  “Jenna’s awake. Or she was. For the first time her condition is a little this side of critical. But there’s something else. Moving her around today could put her right back in danger. I’d like to suggest that we stay here all day.”

  “I’d go for that,” Teddy said, surprising everyone. “I really could use a rest. Maybe just a few little forays to get ready for tomorrow.”

  Mark didn’t seem happy with the idea, but after a little resistance he admitted he could use the time to chip more wood. Others chimed in with tasks they might work at while not traveling, and still others admitted that they were exhausted, hadn’t slept well last night, and would be grateful for a chance to unwind a bit.

  “Then without further objection…” Bob said, looking around, “I declare this to be a day of rest.” He looked at the chain-link backstop where the vehicles had been parked. “Anyone for baseball?”

  Dave had thought Bob was kidding, and he had been, in a way, but the idea caught on when Gordon produced a couple of bats. He started batting a tennis ball around, and before long Sandra and Olivia were fielding the grounders he hit to them. Others joined in, and eventually two small teams were formed. Bob, still walking with a cane, stood behind the plate umpiring. It was slow-pitch, Gordon or Elyse serving up easy lobs to the plate.

  Dave was vaguely disturbed by it all. It wasn’t that he was against anyone having fun. Or maybe it was. Maybe it seemed wrong to have fun in this ruined city. Maybe it was wrong to ever have fun again.

  And he knew that was ridiculous. Soldiers who faced death every day nevertheless found ways to amuse themselves and each other. Who knew when the next respite might be? Who knew if any of them would be alive tomorrow?

  When he saw that Jenna was awake again and had asked to be taken outside, he cheered up considerably. Her stretcher was in the shade and Addison was cooling her brow by wiping it with a damp cloth. She was propped up on pillows and watching the ball game.

  “Like I told your wonderful daughter, I don’t remember a thing about getting shot. Last thing I remember is you guys coming back and how happy I was to see you. They tell me there was a big fire.”

  “Biggest ever. We barely got out. We might not have made it except for you and your shotgun.”

  “Really? Damn. I wish I could remember.”

  “It’s not one of my most pleasant memories.”

  “Lisa says she might gradually get it back,” Addison said.

  “It would
be a mixed blessing,” Dave told her.

  “Hey, Dave, your turn at bat!” Rachel yelled.

  “My turn? I didn’t even know I was on a team.”

  “You’re giving us credit for too much organization. We just take turns batting and pitching and running after balls. Here, take it.”

  Dave took the bat. Three whiffs and he was out of there, and he found himself laughing. He was amazed at how much better it made him feel. I used to make a living on my sense of humor, he thought. He could tell a pretty good joke. He was a competent singer and a lousy but enthusiastic dancer. He had to make sure he and his family could enjoy things like that again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In the early afternoon the baseball game was over, all the chores that needed doing had been done, and lunch had been eaten. They had a treat with their canned beef stew. Emily had made real bread with yeast and baked it in the makeshift camp oven Mark had built. It came out well, though a bit doughy in the middle. Emily promised that the next time they had a bit of leisure she would do it again and get it right, even though no one was complaining. Dave thought it tasted like pure ambrosia.

  There was a little shade under the trees in the park, so after lunch most of them sat around under them. Some brought out pallets and dozed. Others talked.

  Dave noticed an odd thing. There was discussion about what they would do tomorrow and on the following days. They talked a little about the events of the previous days, of their experiences in the fire. Teddy told of some of his experiences and Addison and Karen talked about what it was like fleeing for their lives, first from the fire and then from the would-be carjackers. But that subject ran out quickly, too.

  What did you talk about after civilization had crumbled? Dave tried to recall what they had talked about before the oil went bad. It was already getting hard to do.

  You talked about what other people you knew were up to. You could call it news or, if it was juicy, you called it gossip. Well, Dave had lost contact with all of his friends. Some of them lived at various places around the country, or in Europe or Australia. Australia might as well be on Neptune now, but you didn’t need to go that far afield to be in a foreign place. Oregon might as well be on the farside of the moon. Without telephones, the only people you would know well were those who lived close to you, and the only way to keep in contact with people at a distance would be by mail. Now the mail hadn’t been delivered for months. In some ways they had reverted to the nineteenth century, when most of the people you knew would be living in the same community. Walking distance, or horse-and-buggy distance. In other ways they had gone even farther back. At least people in farming communities had been able to write distant friends and put a two-cent stamp on it and know it would be delivered in days or weeks.