by Ben Tripp
“What’s the story?” Officer Park asked, his voice raised. The three boys were talking among themselves behind the tree, possibly getting their story straight. Danny wished her colleague would keep a closer watch over them, but it was too late now.
“Male, deceased. COD not apparent.” It was nobody she knew. Danny reached out and laid the backs of her fingers against the cheek of the dead man. She felt razor stubble there. The skin was still warm, as if alive. But he was certainly a corpse, his open eyes as lifeless as boiled eggs. “Not dead long,” she added.
“We saw him fall down,” Mike Bixby said, his voice hitching. He was almost done crying—his curiosity had largely overcome the shock.
“How so?” Danny asked. She wanted to sound casual, like they were discussing a television show. Keep him talking. Cub Maas spoke up next, excited by the chance to be part of a police investigation.
“He was running right at us and yelling,” Cub said. “We thought he was chasing us.”
“Chasing you why?” Danny asked, casually.
“Just because,” Carl Bixby said, evasively, by way of warning to his cousin.
“We were running,” Cub said, and knew that wouldn’t be the end of it.
Danny wanted him to keep talking, however, so she relented: “Okay, he was chasing you along here and what happened? He fell and hit his head?”
“He fell over,” Cub said, at a loss for words.
Carl pitched in now, apparently the ringleader of the boys, looking more confident since the dangerous part of the story had been gotten past. “I saw when he fell, Cub didn’t. Cub was too busy running away like a girl. That dude was motoring, and like screaming as well, like this, with his hands on his head. Screaming. I thought he seen a bear or something. Then he like went down, right?”
“He fell right here, he didn’t roll down the hill?” Danny said, indicating the corpse.
“Yeah, I seen him go like—” here, Carl grabbed his own head at the temples, then jerked and pitched forward, catching himself on one leg before he fell all the way, hands still on his head. “Like that, you know?”
“So he tripped on something,” Park said.
“No,” Carl said. “I can’t explain it. He just fell, boom, like he got cold-cocked.”
Danny studied the dead face resting against the rock. Certainly there were no major injuries on the part of the face she could see. He was missing one shoe, though, and his white sock was filthy, tattered, and dappled with blood. So he hadn’t lost the shoe at the moment he fell. He’d been running through the trees like that for some time.
“Did he throw his hands out in front of him?” she asked.
“No. That’s exactly why it looked weird.” Carl was relieved somebody figured it out—he hadn’t articulated it clearly to himself.
“He fell with his hands still on his head,” Danny said. “Huh.”
It didn’t make sense. Maybe he’d been drunk and his reflexes were shut off. Or he could have been on amphetamines or something like that—somebody was dealing in the local area, but Danny hadn’t figured out who—which would also make his reflexes go haywire, and would explain why he hadn’t stopped to retrieve his shoe. It was probably good old-fashioned death by misadventure. Danny very much doubted the man was chasing these boys, in any case.
Whatever the circumstances that led to this, she was going to have to spend the rest of an already busy day dealing with a dead person, and that meant whatever else went down, her deputies would be dealing with it. The thought made her despair. She wanted a drink now, more than ever.
Her radio clicked and deputy Ted’s voice came over the speaker: “Sheriff, come in? We got a report from down to the Chevron station.”
“Shoot,” Danny said. “Kids present here, FYI,” she added, in case there was anything unsavory to report, like the time a man was gassing up his car and set his pants on fire. That made the papers, all the way down in the flatlands.
Ted had to think about it—he wasn’t fluent with the 10-signals, and Danny hadn’t demanded he learn them as they were becoming obsolete. “10–53,” he said at last.
Drunk and disorderly, Danny thought. It was hardly past noon and the drunks were already on the move.
“You’re going to have to deal with it,” she replied. “I got a 10–105 here. Misadventure.”
Danny was entirely sober for once, so this was her chance to feel superior. Her radio came back to life.
“You still there?” Ted asked, and continued without waiting for a reply. “The thing is, he was running and screaming like crazy, he got away from me, and I don’t think I can get to him in time. He’s headed northwest.”
Same direction as this one, Danny thought. “Nick, do you copy?” she said.
“Ten-four,” Nick promptly replied, caught up in the radio game himself.
“Intercept this one for me, will you? I can’t leave the body unattended.”
Nick, in the station, was at the correct end of Main Street. But it would leave the station itself unattended.
“Sheriff?” Officer Park came downhill a few feet, and said, confidentially, “I can stay here if you need to get back.” Danny was grateful. She flicked a salute off the edge of her hat and started up the mountainside.
“You gentlemen come with me,” she said to the boys. They fell into line behind her. Halfway back to Main Street, Danny looked over her shoulder and saw Park speaking into his radio mic, probably reporting the situation to the brass back at his home base. Whatever was going on, it had gotten Danny what amounted to an extra deputy, and that was a big advantage. The way things were going, she thought she would need it.
What worried her most about the 10–53, as described by Ted, was the running and screaming. Second case of running and screaming that day, if the boys were to be believed.
He was inside the Forest Peak patrol car, a Crown Victoria that should have been auctioned off to a taxi company long ago. He had shoulder-length brown hair and no shirt, his skin covered in abrasions and cuts. The backseat of the Vic, like that of the Explorer, was a seamless plastic form, similar to the benches in a fast-food restaurant. It was spattered with blood. The man was completely out of control, shrieking and flailing his limbs—it looked as if he was trying to keep on running, even inside the vehicle. His wrists were cut through the skin from the zip-tie handcuffs that bound them together.
Danny was sweating profusely and so out of breath she could hardly see through the dark purple fireworks behind her eyes. She could smell herself: the sweet, yeasty stink of an alcohol binge.
“…Three times before he stopped swinging long enough to get the cuffs on him,” Nick was saying. He had an ice pack pressed to his cheekbone.
Danny had arrived after a brisk ten-minute slog along the mountainside to the Chevron station, and she was still doubled up with her hands on her knees, trying to get her wind back. The police car was parked around behind the gas station, next to the LP tank for filling barbecue cylinders. The deputies had shown some good sense, getting the perp out of sight of the general public before a crowd gathered. Highway Patrolman Park was posted by the corpse. The Bixby twins and their cousin Cub were in the hands of a neighbor. The situation was stabilized, Danny estimated. Now she had to figure out what to do with this maniac who was beating himself to a pulp in the back of the cruiser.
“You tasered him three times?” Danny said, because she hadn’t been listening.
“I had to,” Nick said, defensive. In fact, Danny didn’t care if he’d beaten the man senseless with a shovel. Not today. But Nick was conditioned to expect disapproval if any situation escalated out of his control, as this one certainly had. “What are we gonna do?” he added, when Danny failed to reprimand him.
“I don’t know,” she said, and this was such a rare admission that both Nick and Ted were startled into looking closely at Danny’s blotchy, sweating face. “Quit staring at me,” she said. “Think of something yourselves.”
All three of them
stood there and pretended to think. The manager of the Chevron station, Artie Moys, was leaning against his old Toyota by the trash cans, waiting for them to get the nutcase off his property; until then, it didn’t seem decent somehow to leave the police standing around alone. A couple of tourists were peeking around the hurricane fence, but from their perspective there wasn’t much to see: Through the back window of the cruiser, the perp looked more like laundry bouncing around in a commercial dryer than anything else. But everybody within thirty meters could hear his discordant screams, muffled by the glass but still excruciatingly sharp.
Danny drew a normal breath for the first time since she’d left the corpse on the hill. She could think. She’d have the deputies hogtie this individual in the free cell back at the Sheriff’s Station, then get the paramedics to have a look at him when they were done fucking around with the dead man in the woods. Maybe they could take the wild man away with them alongside the corpse, or Patrolman Park could drive him down the mountain after them in his slick late-model vehicle. Then somebody was going to have to clean the back of the Crown Victoria with bleach and paper towels. She wiped the sweat off her face with her hands and stood upright, ignoring the pain in her side. Time to make a statement to her minions, outlining the plan. She drew another breath to speak.
At that moment, the man in the back of the patrol car went limp and collapsed.
“What the fuck,” Danny said, instead of her prepared statement. She strode over to the car, her legs sore from the hike, and examined the now-still man through the window. He was dead. He had to be. His naked ribcage wasn’t moving. Nobody could scream for half an hour and flail around like he did without gasping for air.
Danny waited. If the captive was somehow holding his breath as a ruse, she wasn’t going to let what was left of her humane impulses put her in harm’s way. The deputies were exclaiming loudly to her left and right.
“Shut up,” she barked, and popped the door latch. They all stood well back, and the weight of the man’s legs was enough to push the door open a few inches. One of his sneakered feet fell through the gap. Danny saw the shoes were chewed up—he must have run a long way over some pretty rough terrain. She remembered the shoeless foot of the corpse in the woods, bloody and matted with dirt. Danny swung the door all the way open and stepped back again. If he was going to try to kick somebody, she didn’t want to make it easy.
But he didn’t kick. He didn’t breathe. He lay there on the hard plastic seat, unmistakably dead.
“Ted, put on some gloves and check his vitals, but I think he’s gone,” Danny said. “Artie, you got a tarp or a sheet or something we can put over him for the drive down Main Street? I don’t want any lookie-loos. They’ll think we beat him to death.”
“Rabies,” said Artie.
Nick drove the body back toward the Sheriff’s Station. It was concealed beneath a vinyl advertising banner that proclaimed Cleanest Gas in Town, a gift from the Chevron corporation. “Only Gas in Town” would have sufficed. Danny rode shotgun; Ted could walk back once he was done taking statements. Do him some good. They were halfway there, along where the first houses sprouted up to signal a human settlement was ahead, when the radio went crazy. Park had patched through the transmissions coming from the flatlands so he could explain what they were hearing.
“This is happening everywhere,” the highway patrolman said, his voice cutting in over the rest. “People are running around and falling down dead, like up here. But a lot more of them.”
Beneath Park’s words, a continuous din of voices crossed and recrossed as law and order attempted to get a handle on the situation. At first it was confusion, the formless back-and-forth of a vast network of individual radios and incidents that could only be followed once you could separate one conversation from the rest. It took Danny twenty seconds before she could sort out any of it.
“We got ten or more down here on Crenshaw,” someone said.
“More like fifty,” the same voice amended a few seconds later.
Then another voice:
“They’re running straight up Highland, must be a thousand. Lot of them falling. Something’s in pursuit—can’t see what. We’re driving by.”
“The Costco parking lot looks like a battlefield, there’s hundreds,” said another.
And then:
“Jesus, it’s coming this way.”
Officer Park interjected: “This situation is happening from L.A. to at least Claremont. I should get back down there, please advise, over.”
Danny was about to reply, the handset at her lips, when a woman in bra and panties ran past the police car, screaming.
A lanky man with a beard, dressed as if for a hike, charged after the woman. He was also screaming.
“Hit the gas,” Danny said. They had to cut these people off before they got to the crowded part of Main Street, or there could be a panic.
Patrick and Weaver were about ready to give up pretending to look at the crafts booths. The atmosphere had gotten very weird—the most distinct case of “bad vibes” Patrick had ever experienced, with the exception of one evening at a nightclub in Idaho. The phone calls had continued, and then people bundling their families into cars and driving away too fast through the one lane open along Main Street.
Two-thirds of the crowd was oblivious to this undercurrent of alarm, but more people were figuring out something was wrong by the second. And the number was expanding exponentially because now people were honking their horns and cutting each other off with their vehicles.
“Let’s go,” Patrick said. Typically, Weaver would have taken his time to respond, putting on a show of unflappable cool, but this time he simply nodded and set out through the crowd. By the time they were near the motor home, half the crowd was in on the excitement, those who hadn’t gotten phone calls now overhearing what the others were saying, or assuming there was a fire or something like that—otherwise, why were people screaming?
The screams weren’t coming from the crowd on Main Street. They were in the woods, it sounded like. People running and crashing through the undergrowth up behind the buildings. The band had stopped playing, and within a minute, almost the entire crowd had stopped speaking. They were all listening, trying to make sense of the cries off in the distance.
Then people were dropping their beer coolers, their shopping bags, abandoning empty strollers on the curb.
Panic spreads as fast as sound.
The voices of the crowd rose up in a roar of confusion, everyone trying to develop a reaction at the same time. Weaver took Patrick’s hand and towed him straight through the remaining ranks of open-mouthed holiday-goers to the railing around the parking lot, and from there—nearly getting hit by a florid man in a station wagon—they forged on toward the White Whale.
They locked themselves inside and sat up front. The exit to the parking lot was pandemonium. Patrick was all for joining the motorized exodus.
“We don’t know what’s wrong yet,” Weaver said, reasonably.
Patrick folded his arms. “I don’t want to be stuck in this place when we find out.”
“Patrick,” Weaver said, again with that irritating lack of panic, “we’re sitting in a thirty-six-foot rolling hotel room. We don’t have to go anywhere. Unless it’s a forest fire, we’re probably better off sitting still in here than joining rush hour over a cliff.”
“As soon as traffic lets up, though,” Patrick said, going for a threatening tone.
They stayed parked where they were and listened to the talk on the CB radio and sat very still while the smaller vehicles surged and honked all around them.
People were using their cars like rams. A couple of fender-benders happened right in front of the RV. Only the first one excited any interest; the second didn’t even get the drivers out of their vehicles. They just kept on going. Patrick watched a couple shove their screaming kids into a minivan. The kids had balloons tied to their wrists. The back door slammed on a string and the balloon was cut loose to dri
ft into the sky.
“I’m not going to suggest we try to do something about this,” Weaver said. “This isn’t a crowd control situation.” It hadn’t occurred to Patrick to do anything, so this came as a relief. The CB radio seemed to be mostly occupied with truck drivers describing an immense traffic jam to each other, people trying desperately to get into the city in one direction and out of it in the other. The drivers with police scanners reported the authorities were on it, but overwhelmed. It was all happening with bewildering speed. Hundreds of accidents and stalled cars in-lane from Downtown to Santa Monica, and the roads were getting impassable to the east, as well, in the direction of Forest Peak. Then one of the truckers described thousands of people streaming past his rig on the 405 Freeway, on foot, moving through the standstill traffic. He said people were abandoning their vehicles. He said:
“I can see right down the hill at the top of the pass between Hollywood and Studio City, and there are people swarming up the hill here, goddamn, it’s like bugs, the cars can’t do nothing. I ain’t moved ten feet in ten minutes. Folks are going past the truck right now, scared shitless. I dunno what’s going on but it’s bad, I don’t see no smoking gun of a mushroom cloud but it’s bad…
“Christ, they’re running now, people running up this big damn hill through the cars, people getting out of their cars and they’re running, too.”
The squelched sounds of screaming could be heard in the background as the unknown trucker lowered his window.
“I can’t make it out, they’re yelling about something coming but I’m a good nine feet off the ground, I don’t see shit coming. But some folks are falling down. I can see down the hill they’re falling all over the place. Jesus. They’re falling all around—”
That was the last thing the trucker said.
In the silence that followed, Patrick realized he was holding his breath. Weaver was watching the radio as if it had a picture. After a few seconds, the rest of the voices on the CB radio started up again, all going crazy trying to figure out what happened to their good buddy. Someone with an open microphone started to sing loud psalms, and Weaver switched the radio over to FM band, where the Emergency Broadcast System had just kicked in.
