D-Girl looked around her at the looters, run-walking with their overloaded grocery carts of stolen goods, and felt a flare of anger. Useless, she thought grimly. Pathetic excuses for human beings.
She braced herself on the ground and grabbed the SUV by the bumper and lifted.
It came up easily, like opening the lid of a chest, and she tossed the SUV aside. It rolled and crashed down the street.
A very young Latina clutching a fat and screaming baby looked up from the asphalt in a daze. As D-Girl had thought, there had been a trough in the street, so despite some ugly scrapes, the mother and baby were relatively whole.
“Dios mio, are you all right?” The mother gazed up at D-Girl, wide-eyed. D-Girl was momentarily confused… wasn’t that her line?
Then she looked down at her suit, which the young mother couldn’t take her eyes off, and realized she was covered in blood and dust.
“Oh, it’s not mine,” she said reassuringly, and extended a hand to help the young mother up. When the mother didn’t take her hand, D-Girl leaned over and picked her up by the armpits, baby and all. It was like lifting a feather.
She set the mother and baby down and the young woman stumbled back, hugging the baby and staring at D-Girl, wide-eyed.
“You should get home,” D-Girl said. The young mother nodded mutely.
D-Girl turned away from the mother and child and stood with a disturbed and faintly nauseous feeling she couldn’t quite identify. But before she could analyze it, the drifting blue smoke in front of her parted, and D-Girl saw the girl from her dream standing in the ruined street. This time there was no mistaking her – a thin, dark-skinned, stoop-shouldered girl with thick black glasses and bloody fingers and hands. Now that D-Girl was looking at her face-on, she could see the girl had an ugly jigsaw-puzzle scar on her face and forehead, shiny, long-healed.
Despite the unreality of it all, D-Girl knew a girl of that age alone in these circumstances wasn’t good. Not in this neighborhood – not even on a good day. She started toward the girl. “Come on, um, honey,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me...”
The girl laughed, and turned, and ran.
After a moment, D-Girl ran after her.
The girl was fast, amazingly fast, dashing on coltish legs, darting around fallen pillars and crushed bodies. D-Girl followed, and found she was a lot faster than she’d every remembered being, although of course she’d been working out like a fiend. Still, she had a bit trouble following the girl in her three-inch heels, and she debated taking them off, but she figured running barefoot on this street was an instant invitation to hepatitis, so she kept them on and kept going. She dashed around a corner, narrowly avoiding a lamp post which had crumpled like a paper straw wrapper.
And she stopped on what was left of the sidewalk.
The girl had disappeared, but there was a gaping black mouth of a warehouse loading dock, with its metal door rolled up. Looking at it gave D-Girl an uneasy feeling; she did NOT want to go in there, did not want to be anywhere near it, but it was the only place the girl could possibly have disappeared to, and so she moved forward and inside.
The only light was smoky daylight from the open loading door and D-Girl had to strain to see anything at all inside the dark cave of the warehouse. And this is the place in the movie where the audience is thinking, “What a dipshit female, to go into that warehouse alone, deserves what she gets, stupid bitch, stupid fucking movie, I want my money back…”
D-Girl knew all that, she was a story analyst, it was her job, after all, but she kept going, staring around her through the gloom.
The walls were cracked clear through in places, leaking rays of dim light – it was a miracle the place was still standing. Metal shelves were twisted and hurled all around her; the whole floor was littered with pieces of shelving, and scattered athletic shoes and discarded shoeboxes and tissue paper. Both the earthquake and the looters had hit, apparently.
The girl had disappeared but D-Girl could hear screaming and frantic pleading, a female voice, not a child, but adult:
“Please… No, God, please…”
A man’s voice snarled, “Shut your face, puta,” and there was the sound of a vicious blow, and clothing tearing and more sobbing. “Get her down,” another male voice ordered.
D-Girl recoiled, but something kept her moving. She edged around a shelf.
In the aisle across from her there was a group of men crowded around something on the floor and D-Girl already knew what was going on.
It was the thing on the floor that was pleading, while one man undid his belt, and the other men howled and jeered.
There was another rumble and roll from deep within the earth, but this time the building didn’t shake, the floor didn’t shake – only D-Girl was shaking. She could feel the shudder of the earth all the way up through the soles of her feet, up through her legs, her grin, her spine, up through the top of her head. She had the Glock in her purse but she dropped it and seized the closest thing she saw – a length of hole-punched metal that used to be a pole of a bookshelf - and hoisted it.
She shouted out – “Get away from her,” and advanced on the pack of men, brandishing the pole. They catcalled, seeing her – “Here’s another one. Line ‘em up.” One of them made slurpy kissing sounds, something D-Girl had always hated more than just about anything.
“It’s Wonder Woman,” one of the men whooped, and two of them started toward her. They were greasy and sweating. One had his pants unzipped and hanging down around his thighs. D-Girl found herself whispering, the strange words the Jamaican had spoken to her on the street. “In Patmos we speak the Patois….” She gripped the bar she held in both her hands and swung, and connected with the shorter man’s head with a crunching of bone. She heard someone say “What the fu –” and she spun, swinging the bar again, this time smashing it into the taller man’s chest and feeling the ribs crack. He fell backward to the floor and she strode forward three steps and stomped on his chest, stomped through his chest, buckling the broken ribs and impaling him through the heart with the heel of her Chanel pump.
The other two men had abandoned the young woman, and D-Girl was glad to see she had enough survival instinct to scramble up to her feet and dash for an aisle between shelves.
The stockier of the men was coming toward D-Girl now, his face twisted and mottled with rage. He had something black and heavy and shiny in his hand and D-Girl realized she had about two seconds. She hoisted the bar in her hand like a javelin and hurled it with a power she had never had any idea she had…. it flew through the air as the man was raising the gun and pierced him through the chest, driving him backward and pinning him to the wall behind with a wet and chunking sound. The remaining man gawked at D-Girl as she stood, planted, staring at him, with the bodies of his two dead rape-buddies at her feet. Urine spilled from the man’s bladder, soaking his unbuttoned khakis. He whispered, “Madre de Dios,” and ran, ran away from her, ran from the building.
D-Girl was too shaky to chase him. She turned her head and looked toward the aisle where the young woman had disappeared. She heard harsh breathing, and was somewhat aware that she shouldn’t have been able to hear it, but maybe that was adrenaline, maybe it had all been adrenaline.
She stepped into the dark aisle and saw her cowering back against the wall, an Asian woman of about D-Girl’s age, pulling her ripped blouse across her breasts.
“It’s all right,” D-Girl said. “They’re dead.”
She tasted blood, and realized vaguely that she was covered in it, a second layer now: blood, then dust, now more blood; it was a grisly paste on her skin and clothes. She wiped the newest blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. The young Asian woman was sobbing, great huge heaves of anguish and it slowly dawned on D-Girl that the girl was terrified of her.
She remembered the Glock in her purse. She looked back and saw her bag on the floor beside one of the men’s bodies. She scooped it up and took the gun out. The young woman flinched b
ack.
D-Girl turned her hand over and offered the gun on the palm of her hand. “Take it. It’s not safe out there. You need to get someplace safe.”
The young woman was terrified, but she wasn’t stupid. She inched forward and took the gun with shaking hands… then ran past D-Girl, bare feet slapping on the concrete, and fading.
D-Girl was suddenly very, very tired. She turned and moved slowly out of the aisle into the vast and now empty space of the warehouse. She looked at the three dead would-be rapists on the concrete floor.
Who decides what’s good? I decide what’s good, she thought to herself with detached amusement, and headed for whatever home she had left.
Chapter 7
Three thousand four hundred seventy three people dead. Tens of thousands injured. Two major freeways closed down for the foreseeable future. Billions of dollars worth of damage, and that in an economy that was still recovering from a major bank collapse and global financial fallout.
Aftershocks continued, bigger than most normal quakes, causing more damage and panic. Property values plummeted even lower. Residents fled the state in droves (although D-Girl thought they must be non-natives. Had they even read the papers, recently? Floods, hurricanes, tornados – everyone’s number was up some time…)
D-Girl had woken up in her own bed thirty-six hours after the initial quake with the most massive headache of her life. Her flat was a shambles of cracked plates and glasses and broken mirrors and shattered glass from picture frames and heaps of books and scripts from fallen shelves... but there was no major structural damage; the building was not among the condemned.
D-Girl was also one of the few who still had a job.
In fact she had multiple job offers at the moment, while the rest of the industry was reeling from layoffs and total company shutdowns. She had no boss, but as she was the employee with the most intimate knowledge of Birnbaum’s many projects, World Studios had offered her a job as producer for three times her D-Girl salary, just to ensure she would stay on to help them sort out all their investments. She had no problem with that, except for the fact that she didn’t consider any of Birnbaum’s projects worth saving.
Except Apocalypse.
Birnbaum had not turned in the new script to the studio; he had been waiting to fire the screenwriter and get a quickie rape (after all, why mince words at this point?) of the script by one of his pet stooge writers. Which meant that D-Girl, in her new capacity as keeper of the Birnbaum oeuvre, could submit the original script as if it had had Birnbaum’s imprimateur, and possibly, possibly, make a good movie for once… a movie with epic vision, and action and adventure that never eclipsed thought and emotion and meaning and even myth…
She felt a stirring of excitement for the first time in ages, ages.
Except that she couldn’t find the original script.
The production office had been destroyed, of course, along with all hard copies of any script in the Birnbaum library. The odd thing was that D-Girl should have had the original script in an e-file on her computer, in the office’s remote backup system, even on her Blackberry. But… she vaguely remembered… the screenwriter had been one of those writers who still hand-delivered hard copies of scripts on real paper. She understood the impulse; an electronic file made it that much easier for an executive or producer to alter a script at will. But it was a naïve and useless sort of paranoia. The powers that be were going to alter a script no matter what a screenwriter did, so what was the difference anyway?
D-Girl had so far been unable to reach the screenwriter. It was hard to reach anyone these days. She knew she had the script, though. She knew it. She just hadn’t been able to find it, even though she’d cleaned up the mess the quake had made of her home office and had been through the carnage several times. But she would find it, and him, and with her new power, she could make, finally, a movie that meant something. She felt she had a whole new lease on life.
There was one small catch, of course, and it showed up on her doorstep three and a half weeks after the initial quake.
Recovery, they called it; that grim turn in any search and rescue mission when it turns into a recovery mission, meaning recovery of bodies rather than rescuing of live people.
The teams recovered Birnbaum’s body one day, in the rubble of Birnbaum Productions.
D-Girl was just headed out the door with her Starbucks Special Blend coffee and her laptop and briefcase, headed out to a meeting with the head of production at World. She’d just stopped at the kitchen counter to check that the lid of the coffee mug was on tight... when the doorbell rang.
D-Girl opened the door without thinking, because if she had been thinking she would have been more aware that the city was still itself recovering from chaos and martial law, and that there were other dangers out there to her.
There was a very handsome African-American man in a suit standing on her doorstep. It was not a very good suit, as suits go, but the body underneath it more than made up for it. He looked at D-Girl and she saw a flicker of appreciation in his eyes, the look she got from men who were attracted to her, quickly covered with businesslike politeness.
“Valerie Lerner?” he said, and his voice was pretty fine, too, dark and velvety, but the name confused her; D-Girl had to think to put together who he meant.
“Yes,” she said after a beat. “I’m Valerie Lerner.”
“I’m Detective Mackey, LAPD. I’d like to talk to you about Joel Birnbaum.”
D-Girl suddenly remembered that she had crushed her boss’s skull in with his Best Picture Golden Globe. So apparently the earthquake hadn’t covered it up. She wasn’t going to get away with it after all.
“Of course,” she heard herself saying. “Come in.”
The detective was tall enough and broad enough to make her living room look even smaller than it was. He was wearing some cologne that smelled delicious, earthy and male, or perhaps that was just soap and him. He glanced around the room with eyes that missed nothing. “Nice place. Not much damage?” Post-quake, the extent of damage was always the first topic of conversation, like talking about the weather.
“Pictures, mirrors, glassware, windows,” she recited. “Plumbing was off for a week. No structural damage, though. I was lucky.” Except that I’m about to go to prison for life. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No. Thank you, though.” The detective was still on his feet and she realized he was waiting for her to sit, so she did, and he lowered himself to the edge of the red leather couch that he seemed much too big for and perched awkwardly, with long legs planted apart. Very beautiful thighs, D-Girl thought abstractedly.
“Where were you when it hit?” Detective Mackey said. The second question everyone asked, these days.
“At the studio. In the office,” she said. She wondered if she should just confess. But she’d seen a million of these interviews with the killer in a million movies and the killer never just confessed. Also, it was interesting to be interrogated, so she simply waited for the next question with a pleasant, curious expression on her face.
Detective Mackey had been writing down her answer on a notepad he had pulled from his coat. Now he looked up, intently. “You were inside the production office? It completely collapsed.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m not sure I understand. How did you get out?”
D-Girl thought of the three women in her dream. Air, water, fire. She realized for the first time that that would make her earth. That makes total sense, she thought, with surprise. Earth, earthquake. It was in the script. Three plus one equals four and four is THE NUMBER.
“I have no idea,” she answered him. “I was completely buried. I don’t know why I’m still alive. I guess the first aftershock… rearranged things… and I got free, but I don’t remember. To tell you the truth I’m not sure how I even got home, that day.”
He nodded. “We hear that from almost everyone.” He sounded genuinely sympathetic, not at all as if he were about to
arrest her. “Shock. Were you with Birnbaum?” he asked abruptly.
“No,” she said. “I mean, he was in his office. I was in the outer atrium.”
“So you didn’t see him before the quake hit.”
“I… no, I didn’t,” she said calmly. “I was in the office early but he had a meeting and the ‘Do Not Disturb’ message was on the console.”
The detective wrote again on his pad. “Was anyone else with you in the office that morning?”
She assumed he meant staff, so she answered obediently. “Noah Dobkin, Elias Kutner and Rob Breslow. Mr. Birnbaum’s assistants. That is, they were in the office with Mr. Birnbaum, and they all came out at some point, first Noah, then the other two a few minutes later… that was just a few minutes before the first quake,” she said, and shuddered involuntarily.
Detective Mackey looked up, with eyes like bittersweet chocolate.
“This meeting. Who was it with?”
“The screenwriter of one of Mr. Birnbaum’s projects.” She had to grope for the name – she had been thinking of him just as The Screenwriter. “John Nunn.”
“And Nunn was alone in the office with Birnbaum after the assistants left?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Did you notice anything about him when he came out of the office?”
“He was very pale. Shaking,” she said truthfully.
“Did he say anything to you?” The detective had stopped writing and was watching her intently. D-Girl frowned, thinking. He had said something, hadn’t he?
“He said, ‘I’m fired.’”
“Anything else?”
And suddenly it all came back to her, pretty much verbatim. “He said, ‘For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book: if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things that are written in his book.’”
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