Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

He pulled over and shut off the engine. The bus and truck pulled in behind him, and Mark and Bob got out and hurried to the Escalade.

  “What’s the problem?” Mark called out.

  “We have to have a meeting,” Dave said.

  “Right now? What do we need to talk about?”

  “Just get everybody out, would you? I’ll tell it to everyone at once.”

  “We’re at the end of our rope,” Dave began.

  “In what way?” Lisa asked.

  “I want to cut my rations in half,” Addison said.

  Emily looked shocked.

  “There’s no need for that.”

  “I want to give what I don’t eat to that child back there.” She jerked her head toward the family under the bridge.

  “Dave and I, and Addison, we just can’t stomach it anymore,” Karen said. “I think a little part of me dies every time we pass a child like that. A child whose parents seem to have given up. A child who is obviously starving.”

  “So you want us to cut our rations?” Marian said.

  “I don’t know what I want.” Suddenly Karen was crying. Dave put his arm around her. “I want this to be over with. I want to never see another starving child.”

  “I can’t stand it,” Addison said, quietly.

  For a while no one had anything to say. Then Nigel spoke up.

  “I feel the same way. My food doesn’t taste good anymore, even though I’m hungry all the time. I have to choke down every mouthful.”

  “Me, too,” Elyse said.

  “Okay,” Bob said. “I’m sure we all feel the same way. But what do we do? Do we cut down to half of what we’ve been eating?”

  “If we do that, we’ll get weak pretty fast,” Lisa said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I’m just saying.”

  “All right,” Mark said. “I’ll play devil’s advocate here, if no one else will. We’ve got one proposal to go on half rations.”

  “I didn’t propose that. I just said it for me,” Addison said.

  “All right, honey.”

  “Don’t call me honey.”

  “I’m sorry. But others sounded like they’d do it, too. Now, you all understand that if we start feeding everybody, our food will be gone in days.”

  “I think that’s clear,” Gordon said.

  “So I assume that’s out.”

  No one disagreed with him.

  “But we’re all suffering from…what can I call it? Guilt, I guess, and a lack of self-worth. I know I feel it in my guts every time I have to pass people like those back there. It tears me up, because I want to provide for all of us, too. I think our morale has never been lower. So, is there some middle ground? Without putting ourselves in too much jeopardy, without threatening our own survival, is there anything we can do?”

  “I just wanted to feed that little girl back there,” Addison said, dejectedly. Dave was so proud of her he felt tears starting in his eyes.

  “Then that’s what we should do, Addison,” Emily said.

  “But what after that?” Mark insisted.

  “Well, there’s triage,” Elyse said.

  “What do you mean?” her mother asked.

  “Maybe that’s not the right word. In an emergency, we treat the ones we can save. We leave the strongest for later, and we don’t treat the hopeless cases.”

  They thought about that.

  “That’s not quite how it goes,” Lisa said. “But I see your point. Do we diagnose people, feed the ones who are failing but not hopeless?”

  “I didn’t mean anything so formal,” Elyse came back. “What I meant…like that little girl back there. I don’t know if she’s dying. I know she’s hungry. Her parents look like they’ve given up. How about we just do it on a case-by-case basis?”

  “What basis?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know. But I’m with Addison. I want to give her something to eat. I know we can’t feed the world, but I hardly feel like feeding myself.” Elyse began to cry, and buried her face in Lisa’s shoulder.

  In the end they didn’t make a policy, as such. They decided to play it by ear.

  First Addison put a loaf of home-baked bread, a can of corned beef, one of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, a two-liter bottle of water, and a packet of Tang into a brown paper sack and walked back to the family beneath the overpass. She went alone.

  Everyone watched as she squatted down and spoke to the people. She handed over the sack, talked some more, then looked at Dave’s watch. He had set a five-minute time limit, and she obeyed it. The woman stood and hugged her, and Addison came back, wiping away tears. At first she couldn’t talk about it. But she recovered eventually.

  “They haven’t had any food for three days. A few passersby have given them water, but that’s all. They have nothing. The father has pretty much given up. They’ve been sitting there all morning. They have no idea where they are. I told them they could follow this freeway to Capistrano and the sea. That’s right, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  “Yes, you got it.”

  “I think the mother will get them on their feet again. I told them there are bound to be refugee centers somewhere, and told them of the evacuations we’d seen. I don’t know if any of that is true.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Karen said, hugging her daughter. “If they stay there, they’re dead. They have to keep moving. At least they have a chance if they keep moving.”

  From then on they helped out the people who looked the most desperate. It might not have been logical—some of those people were probably going to die anyway—but it was very human.

  It was the ones sitting by the side of the road with their children that they favored. They reasoned that if you were still moving, it wasn’t all that far to Capistrano. They had no more idea what to expect there than the walking refugees did, but it was clearly the only possibility of finding something to eat.

  They did take one precaution. They made sure that no one else saw them handing out food. Gordon and Marian had been in some of the poorest places of the world, and knew how it could be if you gave money to beggars there. You could quickly be swamped by indigent and desperate people. So when they decided on a particular family, they stopped the bus such that it blocked the view of the occasional walker, gave away the food quickly, and moved on at once. They didn’t stay around for thanks.

  Addison, Sandra, and Olivia became the informal rescue committee. Jenna had been moved into the bus, and the twins joined Addison in the Escalade. They had made up half a dozen CARE packages at a time, all of them similar to the first one, and they studied each prospective recipient and talked it over. It was an emotional process, nothing with any rules. They tended toward the people with the youngest children. They didn’t try to justify who they fed and who they passed. There was no way to do that, just as there was no way to feed them all.

  Dave had been worried that his daughter would want to give away the whole store, in which case he would have to say something, as he was sure someone else would if he didn’t.

  But she was careful, and so were the twins, treading a difficult line between stinginess and largesse. Dave could see it was taking a toll on her, and was proud that she had taken the burden on herself. He would not have wanted it. He felt the burden might be just a little bit easier to bear than the one where they had been passing by everyone. By the end of the first day of their new charity, they had given away seven sacks.

  That day also brought them to the end of the line.

  The town of San Juan Capistrano proved to be just like all the other towns they had passed through since leaving the burn area. All the exits from the freeway were guarded. Someone had set up a soup kitchen that was actually serving more than soup, with some distressed apples and oranges and refried beans on tortillas. There was a small stretch of freeway that had been set aside for transient camping. But no one was being allowed to stay.

  “You can pitch a tent for the night, or you can continue on your way,” a cop told them. “Or, about
a mile from here you can join the refugee camp set up by the navy at Dana Cove. There’s some food. They say an aircraft carrier will pick them all up one day soon. That’s all I can tell you.”

  When they asked, the cop reluctantly wrote them a pass for one of their party to go down Harbor Drive to check out the camp.

  Since it was Dave’s turn to scout, he was about to take down the scooter when Addison spoke up.

  “Let me take Ranger,” she said. “He needs the exercise.”

  “Addie…”

  “Dad, it’s time I took some adult responsibility, don’t you think? It’s not like I’ll be heading into the unknown. This looks safe. Isn’t it, Officer?”

  “I’d say so, ma’am.” He looked at Dave. “She was my kid, I wouldn’t let her go alone at night. But I’ve got a daughter about her age, and she’s volunteering at the camp. She’ll be okay.”

  “Let her go, Dave,” Karen said.

  So he gave in. She quickly got the horse from the trailer, saddled up, and took off at a trot down the street, waving to the party as she left them.

  “It’s pretty grim,” she said, an hour later. Ranger was grazing in a patch of grass by the freeway, and everyone had gathered to hear her report.

  “The stink, well, it’s awful. There’s blue plastic toilets, and they’re all overflowing. It’s a big marina, looks like it was fancy once. It looks pretty run-down now. Most of the boats are gone. There’s this road that goes out to a long island.”

  “Landfill,” Bob said. “As I recall, there’s a breakwater and a man-made island.”

  “Anyway, that’s where the people are. Out on the island. That road is the only way off, unless you swim. There was a tank on the road, with a big gun. The gun was facing out to sea, to the island. Where the refugees are.”

  “Prisoners, more like it,” Gordon said.

  “I wouldn’t argue with that,” Addison said. “There were some Coast Guard boats moving around. I found one girl from the town and I talked to her for a while. She was angry at all the people who had come there. I think she thought I was from town, too. She thought…” Addison paused, and made a face. “She thought they all ought to be pushed into the ocean. She said her family’s boat was out there, and they couldn’t get to it. She said they had looked at it with a telescope and there are people living on it. She wanted to go out there and evict them. I wanted to bitch-slap her so bad.”

  “Best you didn’t,” Dave told her.

  “People get insensitive,” Emily said. “They are so worried about their own situation, they—”

  “You’re too kind, Mother,” Lisa broke in. “Yes, we’ve hoarded our food. But to worry about a goddam boat at a time like this? That girl didn’t get that way after the disaster. She’s been that way for a long time.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Addison said. “Anyway, I didn’t tell her I was from out of town. I think she might have spit on me.”

  “You did good, Addison,” Dave said. “And I’m assuming we don’t want to join the party out on the island?”

  Nobody disagreed with that, and once more they were on the road.

  Dave scouted ahead again on his scooter.

  San Clemente was another closed community. He drove by the guarded exit ramps without speaking to anyone. He made good time through the San Onofre State Beach and then, to his surprise, crossed under intact power lines and saw, off to his right, the twin domes of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. There were a dozen tanks parked on the side road, Old Highway 101, and at least a hundred troops. They watched him go by, but made no move to stop him. Could the plant still be in operation? He wanted to ask them, but they didn’t look very friendly.

  There had been almost no traffic on the road since he left Capistrano. He wondered if the lack of people meant someone knew something he didn’t know.

  He soon found out. A little over a mile from the power plant, at what had been a truck weighing station made of glass and steel and looking a bit like a spaceship that had just landed, a solid line of tanks were spread out across the road. Twenty or so foot soldiers—probably Marines, since beyond them was Camp Pendleton—were spread out in front of the armor in attitudes of parade rest.

  It seemed a bit excessive, given that Dave was almost the only person on the road. But as he got closer he saw a group of people sitting beside the road in the shade of the only tree close to the freeway. He slowed, stopped, and cut the motor.

  “They’re not letting anyone through?” he asked to group in general. No one answered for a while. All of them had the ragged, defeated look he had seen so much of lately. Hungry people, people without much hope left. Finally one man spoke up.

  “Nobody while I been here. I tried to ask ’em for food, and they shot at me.”

  “Shot at you?”

  “They shot in the air, Tony,” one woman said.

  “I wasn’t paying no attention to where the bullet went. Like to pissed my pants. Would have, but I’m too dry to piss. You got any water?”

  “Not enough for all of you. I’m sorry.”

  The man eyed the gun in Dave’s belt. He looked far too weak and tired to make a play for it. And once again there was that horrible choice. What was in his canteen was barely enough for even a swallow for all the people there. Still…

  He tossed his canteen to the man.

  “Give it to the children first,” Dave said.

  “Naturally.” There were only three small children, and their mothers held the canteen for them, careful not to spill a drop. One of them cried when the water was taken away. The other two just sat back on the ground.

  It was accomplished peacefully, no fighting for the scarce water. When they were all done, Tony tossed the canteen back to Dave, obviously not wanting to alarm him by getting too close.

  “Sorry about draining you dry,” he said.

  “That’s okay. I had some an hour ago.”

  “You gonna go talk to those soldier boys?”

  “I’m going to try. Good luck to you.”

  He had gone no more than half the distance to the line of soldiers and tanks before a man in uniform stepped forward with a rifle and a bullhorn. The rifle was pointed in the air, which was a good thing, because he fired it, once. Dave stopped immediately, almost falling off the scooter.

  “That’s far enough, sir,” he said through the bullhorn. “No one is allowed into this interdiction zone.”

  “Listen, please,” Dave shouted. He was just close enough to make out the man’s face. “All I want to do is pass through the camp. I’m with a—”

  “Absolutely no admittance, sir.”

  “I’m telling you, I’m with a group, we have our own food and water, we’re not destitute. We just need to get to San Diego. There are women and children with us.”

  “No admittance, sir.” There was no emotion in the man’s voice.

  “Please…Can I come closer and talk? We just need to get through. If I could speak to your commanding officer…”

  “These orders come from the commanding officer, sir. No one is allowed through.”

  “But…why? We’re not spies, we will only take an hour to get through the camp, we can’t possibly—”

  The man fired another shot into the air.

  “Sir, I have been patient with you. I am instructed to fire one warning shot if someone approaches to the point where you are standing. I have just fired two. My third round will be into your body if you come any closer. Do we understand each other?”

  Dave could think of nothing to say. He stared across the unbridgeable gap, a gap that was not only physical but was somehow moral, ethical, a gap between power and helplessness. The might arrayed against him was ludicrous, more appropriate for repelling an invasion than stopping a single man on a Vespa.

  And it was such a short distance. Twenty miles to Oceanside. From there it was only fifty miles to San Diego.

  Something inside him snapped. He raised his fist and screamed.

  �
�Tell your fucking commanding fascist officer that David Marshall was here, why don’t you, you Nazi fuck! Tell him that if I survive this, if anyone in my family doesn’t survive this, I will find him, and I will tear off his head and shit down his fucking neck. I pay your salary, you prick. I paid for your training, I paid for your weapons, for your fucking tanks. I am a United States citizen, and you work for me, shithead. Your men work for me. They are supposed to protect me, and my daughter, and my wife, and my friends. And now you threaten to shoot me? Well fuck you and the tank you rode in on!”

  Part of him knew this was possibly the stupidest thing he had ever done, and yet it was impossible for him to stop. The rage, the bile, poured out of him. It wasn’t for himself, and it wasn’t just for the family. It was for the people he had just shared his water with. It was for the seven families his daughter had decided to feed…and for the thousands they had been unable to feed. It was for every hungry person they had passed on their journey, and every person they had turned away from Doheny Drive. It was for all the sad and sick plodders on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the people in camps he had never even seen, in Santa Monica and Dana Point. It was even for the people who had turned them away from their communities, people who were basically good but had little or nothing to share…and for those who shared anyway.

  The sane part of him noticed the men in the ranks behind the officer stirring restlessly as the curses came screaming from his mouth. Angry at him, or just possibly angry at their officers? Either way, he knew he was in danger. The man with the bullhorn had put it down and his rifle was no longer aimed into the air.

  Struggling back to something approaching calm was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Finally, still boiling, still shaking with rage, he shut up, spit on the ground in the general direction of the soldiers, and turned his scooter around.

  For the first quarter mile he felt a target on his back, felt it in the form of an itch he couldn’t scratch even if he had reached behind him. But no shot came. When finally he dared look back he could no longer see the men and tanks.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “We’ve come all this way. For what?”