Mattison shrugs. He is a huge man, six feet five, plenty of width between his shoulders, and a shrug is a big, elaborate project for him. “Shit, Nicky, this isn't anything, yet. Go have yourself some breakfast.”
“A bunch of blues, a green, and a red, and that ain't anything, you say?”
“Nothing that concerns us, man.” Mattison taps the screen where the red is flashing. “Pomona's ancient history. It isn't none of our business, what goes on in Pomona, not any more. Whatever's happening where you see that red, all the harm's already been done, can't do no more, not now. And those blues—shit, it's just some smoke. Let 'em put on gas masks. As for that green in Temple City, well—” He shakes his head. “Nah. They'll take care of that out of local resources. Go get yourself some breakfast, Nicky.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Scrambled eggs and snake meat.”
Herzog slithers away. He's sort of like a snake himself, Mattison thinks: a narrow little guy, no width to him at all, moves in a funny head-first way as though he's cutting a path through the air for himself with his nose. He used to be something in Hollywood, a screen-writer or a story editor or something, a successful one, too, Mattison has heard, before he blitzed out on Quaaludes and Darvon and coke and God knows what-all else and wound up in Silver Lake Citizens Service House with the rest of this bunch of casualties.
Mattison is a former casualty himself, who once had carried a very serious boozing jones on his back that had a heavy negative impact on his professional performance as a studio carpenter and extremely debilitating effects on his driving skills. His drinking also led him to be overly free with his fists, not a wise idea for a man of his size and strength, because he tended to inflict a lot of damage and that ultimately involved an unfortunate amount of legal expense, not to mention frequent and troublesome judicial chastisement. But all of that is behind him now. Mattison, who is twenty-eight years old, single, good-natured, and reasonably intelligent, is well along in recovery. For the past eighteen months he has been not just an inmate but also a staffer here at Silver Lake, gradually making the transition from victim of his own lousy impulse control to guardian of the less fortunate, an inspiration to those who seek to pull themselves up out of the mud as he has done.
Various of the less fortunate are trickling into the room right now. Official wake-up time at Silver Lake Citizens Service House is half past six, and you are expected to be down for breakfast by seven, a rule that nearly everybody observes, since breakfast ceases to be available beyond 7:30, no exceptions made. Mattison himself is up at five every morning because getting up unnaturally early is a self-inflicted part of his recovery regime, and Nicky Herzog is usually out of his room well before the required wake-up hour because perpetual insomnia has turned out to be an accidental facet of his recovery program, but most of the others are reluctant awakeners at best. Some would probably never get out of bed at all, except for the buddy-point system in effect at the house, where you get little bonus goodies for seeing to it that your roommate who likes to sleep in doesn't get the chance to do it.
Mary Maude Gulliver is the first one in, followed by her sullen-faced roommate Annette Lopez, and after them, a bunch of rough beasts slouching toward breakfast, come Paul Foust, Herb Evans, Lenny Prochaska, Nadine Doheny, Marty Cobos, and Marcus Hawks. That's most of them, and the others will be along in two or three minutes. And, sure enough, here they come. That muscle-bound bozo Blazes McFlynn is the next one down—Mattison can hear him in the breakfast room razzing Herzog, who for some reason he likes to goof around with. “Good morning, you miserable little faggot,” McFlynn says. “You fucking creep,” Herzog sputters back, an angry, wildly obscene and flamboyant response. He's good with words, if nothing else. McFlynn drives Herzog nuts; he has been reprimanded a couple of times for the way he acts up when Herzog's around. Herzog is an edgy, unlikable man, but as far as Mattison knows he isn't any faggot. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Buck Randegger, slow and slouching and affable, appears next, and then voluminous Melissa Hornack, she of the six chins and hippopotamoid rump. Just two or three missing, now, and Mattison can hear them on the stairs. The current population of Silver Lake Citizens Service House is fourteen inmates and four full-time live-in staff. They occupy a spacious and comfortable old three-story sixteen-room house that supposedly was, once upon a time back around 1920 or 1930, the mansion of some important star of silent movies. The place was an even bigger wreck, up until five or six years ago, than its current inhabitants were themselves, but it has been nicely rehabilitated by its occupants since then as part of their Citizens Service obligation.
Mattison has long since had breakfast, but he usually goes into the dining room to sit with the inmates while they eat, just in case someone has awakened in a testy mood and needs to be taken down a notch or two. Since everybody here is suffering to a greater or lesser degree from withdrawal symptoms of some sort all the time, and even those who are mostly beyond the withdrawal stage are not beyond the nightmare-having stage, people can get disagreeably prickly, which is where Mattison's size is a considerable occupational asset.
But just as he rises now from the screen to follow the others in, a series of pings comes from it like church bells announcing Sunday morning services, and a little line of green dots spaced maybe six blocks apart springs up out in Arcadia, a few blocks east of Santa Anita Avenue from Duarte Road to Foothill Boulevard, and then curving northwestward, actually reaching beyond the 210 Freeway a little way in the direction of Pasadena. This is new. By and large the Zone's northwestern boundary has remained well south of Huntington Drive, with most of the thrust going down into the lower San Gabriel Valley, places like Monterey Park and Rosemead and South El Monte, but here it is suddenly jumping a couple of miles on the diagonal up the other way with lava popping up on the far side of Huntington, practically to the edge of the racetrack and the Arboretum and quite possibly cutting the 210 in half.
It's very bad news. Mattison doesn't need to wait for alarm bells to go off to know that. Everybody wants to believe that the Zone is going to remain confined to the hapless group of communities way out there at the eastern end of the Los Angeles Basin where the trouble started, but what everybody fears is that in fact it's going to keep right on marching unstoppably westward until it gets to the ocean, like a bad case of acne that starts on a teenager's left cheek and continues all the way to the ankles. They are doing a pretty good job of controlling the surface flows, but nobody is really sure about what's going on deep underground, and at this very minute it might be the case that angry rivers of magma are rolling toward Beverly Hills and Trousdale Estates and Pacific Palisades, and heading on out Malibu way to give the film stars one more lovely surprise when the fabulous new Pacific Coast Highway Volcano abruptly begins to poke its head up out of the surf. Of course, it's a long way from Arcadia to Malibu. But any new westward extension of the Zone, even just a couple of blocks, is a chilling indication that the process is far from over, indeed may only just have really begun.
Mattison turns toward the dining room and calls out, “You better eat fast, guys, because I think they're going to want us to suit up and get—”
And then the green dots on the screen sprout fluorescent yellow borders and the alarm bell at the Silver Lake Citizens Service House starts going off.
What the alarm means is that whatever is happening out in Arcadia has proven to be a little too much for the local lava-control teams, and so they are beginning to call in the Citizens Service people as well. The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service eve
n while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course. And so it was just a matter of two or three weeks after the Pomona eruption before the County Supervisors asked the Legislature to extend the Citizens Service Act to include lava control, and the bill passed both houses the next day. Whereupon the miscellaneous boozers, druggies, trank-gobblers, and other sad substance-muddled fuckupniks who inhabit the Citizens Service Houses now find themselves obliged to go out on the front lines at least three or four times a month, and sometimes more often than that, to toil alongside more respectable folk in the effort to keep the rampaging magmatic flow from extending the grip that it already holds over a significant chunk of the Southland.
It is up to the dispatchers at Volcano Central in Pasadena to decide when to call in the Citizens Service people. Volcano Central, which is an arm of the Cal Tech Seismological Laboratory with its headquarters on the grounds of Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the hills north of town, monitors the whole Tectonic Zone with a broad array of ground-based sensors and satellite-mounted scanners, trying to keep track of events as the magma outcropping wanders around beneath the San Gabriel Valley, and if possible even to get a little ahead of things.
Every new outbreak, be it simply a puff of smoke rising from a new little fumarole or a full-scale barrage of tephra and volcanic bombs and red-hot lava pouring from some new mouth of Hell, is duly noted by JPL computers, which constantly update the myriad of data screens that have been set up all over town, like the one above Cal Mattison's desk in the community room of the Silver Lake Citizens Service House. It is also Volcano Central's responsibility, as master planners of the counteroffensive, to summon the appropriate kind of help. The Fire Department first, of course: that has by now been greatly expanded and reorganized on a region-wide basis (not without a lot of political in-fighting and general grief) and firefighters are called in according to a concentric-circles system that widens from the Zone itself out to, eventually, Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach. Their job, as usual, is to prevent destruction of property through the spreading of fires from impacted areas to surrounding neighborhoods. Volcano Central will next alert the National Guard divisions that have been put on permanent activation in the region; and when even the Guard has been stretched too thin by the emergency, the Citizens Service Houses people will be called out, along with other assorted civilian volunteer groups that have been trained in lava-containment techniques.
Mattison has no real way of finding out whether it's true, but he believes that the Silver Lake house gets called out at least twice as often as any of the other Citizens Service Houses he knows of. He may actually be right. The Silver Lake house is located in an opportune spot, practically in the shadow of the Golden State Freeway: it is an easy matter for its inhabitants, when summoned, to take that freeway to one interchange or another and zoom out via the Ventura Freeway to the top end of the Zone or the San Bernardino Freeway to the southern end, whereas anybody coming from the Mar Vista house or the one in West Hollywood or the Gardena place would have a much more extensive journey to make.
But it isn't just the proximity factor. Mattison likes to think that his particular bunch of rehabs are notably more effective on the lava line than the bozos from the other houses. They have their problems, sure, big problems; but somehow they pull themselves together when their asses are on the line out there, and Mattison is terrifically proud of them for that. It might also be that he himself is considered an asset by Volcano Central—his size, his air of authority, his achievement in having pulled himself up out of very deep shit indeed into his present quasi-respectability. But Mattison doesn't let himself dwell on that angle very much. He knows all too well that what you usually get from patting yourself on your own back is a dislocated shoulder.
The bell is ringing, anyway. So here they go again.
“Can we finish breakfast, at least?” Herzog wants to know.
Mattison glances at the screen. Seven or eight of those green-and-yellow dots are blinking there. He translates the cool abstractions of the screen into the probable inferno that has burst out just now in Arcadia and says, glancing at his watch, “Gulp down as much as you can in the next forty-five seconds. Then get your asses in motion and head toward the suiting room.”
“Jesus Christ,” somebody mutters, maybe Snow. “Forty-five fucking seconds, Matty?” But the others are smart enough to know not to waste any of those seconds bitching, and are shoveling the food down the hatch while Mattison is counting off the time. At the fifty-third second, for he is fundamentally a merciful man, he tells them that breakfast is over and they need to get to work.
The lava suits are stored downstairs, in a room off the main hallway that once might have been an elegant paneled library. The remains of the paneling are still there, rectangles of mahogany or some other fancy wood, but the panels are hard to see any more, because just about every square inch of the room is packed with brightly gleaming lava suits, standing upright elbow to elbow and wall to wall like a silent congregation of robots awaiting activation.
What the suits are, essentially, is one-person body-tanks, solid sturdy shells of highly reflective melnar that are equipped with tractor treads, shovel appendages, laser knives, and all sorts of other auxiliary gadgetry. Factories in Wichita and Atlanta work twenty-four hours a day turning them out, nowadays, with the Federal Government paying the not insignificant expense as part of the whole ongoing disaster relief program that Los Angeles's latest and most spectacular catastrophe has engendered. Mattison sometimes wonders why it was considered worthwhile to keep fifteen or twenty of these extremely costly suits standing around idle much of the time at each of the Citizens Service Houses, when it would be ever so much more efficient for the suits to be stored at some central warehouse at the edge of the Zone, where they could be handed out each day to that day's operating crew. But that is a question he has never bothered to raise with anybody, because he knows that the Federal Government likes to operate in mysterious ways beyond the capacity of mere mortals to comprehend; and, anyway, the suits have been bought and paid for and are here already.
They come in two sizes, bulky and bulkier. Mattison hauls the three nearest suits out into the hallway and hands them to people of the appropriate size, which creates space for the others to go into the storage room and select their own suits for themselves. As usual, there is plenty of jostling and bumping, and some complaining, too. Herb Evans is just barely big enough for the bigger size suit, and might be better off with the smaller one, in which he could move about less awkwardly; but he always wants one of the big ones, and the one he has grabbed right now has also been grabbed from the other side by Marcus Hawks, who is six feet two and has a better claim to it. “I got it first,” Evans is yelling. Hawks, not letting go, says, “You go get one that's the right size for you, you little dumb fucker,” and Mattison sees immediately that they both are prepared to defend their positions with extensive disputatory zeal, perhaps for the next three or four hours. He isn't surprised: the denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive. There's no time to let Evans and Hawkins sort things out; Mattison strides between them, gently but firmly detaches Evans's grip from one arm of the suit and Hawkins's from the other, and sends the two of them in opposite directions to find different suits entirely. He takes the big one for himself and moves out in the hallway with it so that he can get himself into it.
“As soon as you have your suits on,” Mattison be
llows, “head on out into the street and get on board the truck, fast as you can!”
He squeezes into his own with difficulty. In truth he's a little too big even for the big size, about an inch too tall and two or three inches too broad in the shoulders, but by scrunching himself together somewhat he can manage it, more or less. He has to. There's no way he can stay behind when the Silver Lake House gets called out on lava duty, and he doesn't know any tailors who do alterations on lava suits.
The big olive-green military transport truck that is always parked now in readiness outside the house has let its tailgate down, and, one by one, the suited-up lava fighters go rolling up the slope into the truck and take their positions on the open back deck. Mattison waits in the street until everybody is on board who's going on board, twelve of the fourteen residents—Jim Robey, who is coming slowly back from the brink of cirrhosis, is much too freaky-jittery to be sent out onto the lava front, and Melissa Hornack is disqualified by virtue of her extreme obesity—and two of the four staffers, Ned Eisenstein, the house paramedic, and Barry Gibbons, the cook, who does not suit up because he is the one who drives the truck, and you can't drive a truck when you're wearing a thing that's like a small tank. The remaining member of the staff is Donna DiStefano, the actual director of the house, who would love to go along but is required by her official position to remain behind and look after Robey and Hornack.
“We're all set,” Mattison tells Gibbons over his suit radio, and swings himself up onto the truck. And away they go, Zoneward bound.
Early as it is, the day is warming up fast, sixty degrees or so already, a gorgeously spring-like February morning, the air still reasonably clear as a result of the heavy rain a couple of nights before. This has been a particularly rainy winter, and Mattison often likes to play with the idea that one of these days it'll rain hard enough to douse the fucking volcanoes entirely, but he knows that that's impossible; the magma just keeps coming up and up out of the bowels of the earth no matter what the weather is like on top. A volcano isn't like a bonfire, after all.
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