by Ben Tripp
It was now three in the afternoon, but it felt like ten days later as Danny reached the roadblock manned by her deputies. They were scared nearly witless; there were now at least two hundred people shouting at them from across the hoods of the foremost cars in both directions and some hot-bloods were racing their engines as if to charge. Beyond this locus of the standstill, the traffic stretched out of sight, uphill and down. A cloud of exhaust fumes was boiling up out of the legion of vehicles.
Danny couldn’t hear the distant screams in the woods anymore, but she didn’t know if it was because they were drowned out by the revving motors and horns and angry voices, or because the scattering of wild people had passed this location by. She hoped they were gone. Or they might all be dead now. Once the rest of this was dealt with, they might still be finding corpses in the woods for the next ten years.
More and more of the refugees from the flatlands were abandoning their rides and walking up the slopes past the barricade, and now a few of the cars that had been heading downhill were trying to reverse course and head back up to Forest Peak. But anything with an engine, including the motorcycles, was stuck in gridlock.
Danny whistled under her breath. Time to come up with a new plan, even if it was meaningless. Otherwise there would be violence.
She dropped the Explorer into low gear and rolled it up to her deputies, the roof lights flashing. She stepped out and handed the rifle to Dave, but kept the shotgun for herself.
“Is the bullhorn in the Crown Vic?” she asked.
Ted pulled the horn from the police sedan’s trunk and handed it to Danny. His thick face was pale and wet. She worried he was going to have a stroke. Maybe say something reassuring? Nothing came to mind. Danny stepped up on the fender of the Explorer and from there onto the hood and the roof, placing her high enough to get a long descending view of the file of traffic twisting down the mountainside. It extended as far as she could see. Being exposed in a high place like this was something she would never, ever have done in Iraq. Even here she could feel the snipers watching. But high visibility was part of this. She raised the bullhorn in one hand and cradled the shotgun in the other, and knew what to say.
“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. We are going to open up a lane of traffic and I want two vehicles at a time to come forward real slow, and we will give you instructions on where to go. Two vehicles at a time. Anybody who does not comply will be stopped. We will begin with the southbound vehicles and proceed with the northbound.”
In a few minutes, the nearest cars had been organized until a narrow escape lane had been established, leading to the logging road. Deputy Dave was walking back down the deeply rutted path to establish a waiting area: They could hold a couple dozen vehicles along the logging road and then walk them back into town in an orderly fashion, meanwhile staging the next group. It was probably pointless, as there had to be several thousand cars on the road, but unless people saw something being done, there would soon be chaos.
Danny knelt on the roof of the Explorer, keeping her presence felt with the shotgun propped up against her hip, watching the more aggressive personalities on the downhill side of the situation.
Refugees, Danny thought. These people are refugees.
The thought hit her with palpable force. These people were basically fleeing something, driven from the course of their lives. Refugees in California. A cascade of facts fell into place. Danny knew how crazy refugees could get in other parts of the world. These were Americans, who had never experienced refugee status before, unless they were from New Orleans. Things could get a lot uglier.
The motorists who had been in Forest Peak earlier and were attempting to leave had begun to realize that rushing down into what could be a fatal situation wasn’t going to help their loved ones, alive or dead, so the traffic pointed downhill remained orderly. Deputy Ted was letting some of them go first, to be followed by a group of the northbound refugees. Danny stood tall and tried to look like a show of force. Amy called in every few minutes and kept Danny posted with results from her efforts on the station’s radio:
“…No word from L.A. Pomona PD says the traffic on the 210 is at a standstill and there are thousands of cars with dead folks in them, dead all over the road. There are fires in El Monte and Riverside and nobody can put them out because they can’t even get close except on foot but nobody wants to go near the bodies. Nobody knows what’s happening but it sounds like this dying thing has run itself out on the West Side and it’s moving this way.”
“Amy? Let’s not speculate on the open radio.”
“Am I a deputy, by the way?”
“Yes. Deputy Cutter.”
“Cool. Okay, I’m going to keep looking for news.”
Danny never ceased to wonder at Amy’s ability to find irrelevant things interesting—like being deputized—even as their world was turned upside down. She started her next transmission: “Come in, Nick. What’s your situation? Over.”
“Uh, lot of 11–24s—that’s abandoned vehicles, right?—on Main Street. People on foot are uh gathered around the TVs at the Wooden Spoon and the Quik-Mart, they’re crowding into lanes. But nothing’s moving. It’s a standstill. Over.”
“Anything on the news?” Danny asked.
“Worse than useless, Sheriff. Crying relatives and car accidents. A bunch of talking heads in Washington blaming the Muslims. Lots of detail stuff but no big picture. It’s happening all over the place, is all I know.”
Nick explained he had three of Greer’s firemen in full firefighting regalia to help him organize things, so Danny felt Main Street was reasonably secure. “Hey, Danny,” Amy said. “Come in, I mean. I found out some stuff. On your computer. I checked all the twits and status updates and whatnot—people are going crazy. But nobody knows what’s going on.”
Danny watched a couple of excited dogs run by, most likely escaped from cars. She watched another group of vehicles file past the roadblock toward the logging road, frightened faces peering up at her from the backseats. She remembered the roadblocks in the Iraq desert, those volatile, beleaguered people huddled in their beat-up cars and pickup trucks for hours in the blazing heat, twice as hot as it was today in the mountains of Southern California. It was another world over there, every face the mask of an enemy. And yet it was exactly the same.
She was the alien, the figure with the gun and the rules that stood unwanted between them and their goals. People in crisis preferred, Danny realized, individual action over imposed order—even if the price was bloodshed and confusion. Maybe that was the primary freedom they were celebrating every Fourth of July: the right to act like fuckups now and then. She hoped there was more to it than that. It was a pity the sheriff’s department of Forest Peak didn’t have a .50 caliber machine gun. Danny remembered those rattling bursts of gunfire that answered a rush on one of their roadblocks in the war zones, the high, thin scream of an engine, the higher screams of those inside the vehicle as the heavy weapons opened fire. She could almost hear the screams now, though distant with time.
She could hear the screams now.
Her mind whipped back to the present and she stood fully upright, leg protesting. Her view included glimpses of almost five miles of road as it curved down the ruffled flank of the mountain, a glittering coil of motionless vehicles. There were tiny figures running among the vehicles almost at the limit of her vision. The screams must have been coming from there, transmitted through all that air across the ravines—they weren’t the ones who had been in the woods before.
Maybe Danny was the only one who could hear them from here, high up on her perch atop the Explorer. Her heart was kicking into high gear.
Until this moment she had hoped the weird disaster that was sweeping the lowland world would mostly pass her small community by, as everything else did. Apparently not. She might have a couple of minutes before the nearby civilians caught on to the screaming, and then there was going to be pandemonium. Unless she was very much mistaken, Forest Pea
k was about to enter a world of shit.
There were demanding voices out in the waiting room of the Sheriff’s Station, but Amy didn’t think she was qualified to address the public. She was still at her post at the communications desk, headphones jauntily set over one ear so she could hear if the phone rang—which it was doing every few seconds. She answered those calls as best she could. Mostly locals were calling. Out-of-towners dialed the 911 system, which put them on hold for a couple of minutes and then hung up.
Forest Peak residents wanted to know what was happening and what was the sheriff doing about it.
“Something is going on down in the flatlands,” Jim Rummint said, his voice shaky on the other end of the line. Amy doctored Jim’s horses. He didn’t worry easily, so that tremble in his voice unnerved her considerably. “Where’s the sheriff? There’s people all over the place and nobody to keep order.”
“The sheriff is taking care of it,” Amy said, keeping her own voice level, if high-pitched. “Like you say, there’s a lot of people out there right now, and not a lot of police. In an hour or two everything will be hunky-dory, okay? No danger here, except people acting like big dopes. So don’t do that.”
“It’s that I’m worried about,” Jim said. “People go crazy. That’s why I live all the hell and gone up here in the mountains. People in large numbers are dangerous.”
“I have a lot more calls to answer,” Amy said. “Hang in there.” She hung up on Jim before he could reply and took the next call.
Meanwhile, over the headphone on her other ear, she was hearing reports that entire police forces were going silent in distant towns. As if they had abandoned their posts. And now Amy was hearing something else, too: Wulf was awake in his cell, and he was making his opinions known.
“I got rights, too, Cutter. I been in here since morning and nobody processed me or nothing. Alls I got to eat today was some egg crap. And what the hell is going on? You ain’t a cop, you’re the vet. They got a sick cat in here? Jesus H. Christ, come on over and let me out, I’m no danger to anybody. I got rights. Come on, lemme out.”
Wulf eventually ran out of things to complain about, although it occurred to him to ask the vet if she knew anything about itchy scalp. His head was raging with worn-out drink, there was a taste in his mouth like vampire piss, and he was confined and bored, the two things he hated most. That big-boots, little-tits sheriff Adelman was a goddamned fool and he’d known her since she was a baby girl and she was a goddamned fool then, too, and so was Amy Cutter, and so was he for getting liquored up so late in the evening that he was still hammered come the morning of the Fourth of July. But of all the holidays, that one left him the most bitter. Adelman would start feeling that way, too, before long. Wulf guessed the sheriff was on the same road to ruin that he’d traveled down. After all, the only difference between the inside and the outside of a drunk tank was an inch of door. Wasn’t that far to go.
The screaming, though still distant, was unmistakable now. Like the sound of an arena rock concert from the far side of the parking lot. Some civilians were getting out of their cars to better hear the noise, and others were getting back into their cars because it was about time to do something drastic, and the people on foot were starting to close in around the roadblock, as if a couple of cops could do anything about the entire population of the San Gabriel Valley running in their direction. Deputy Dave, too, looked up at Danny for orders—and for some kind of information as to what he was hearing. He couldn’t see as Danny could from on top of the Explorer that the running people were no more than a mile away.
Her mind was blank. Their vehicle-organizing plan didn’t really go anywhere in the first place; it was simply a way to clear the road so this immense file of refugees could move on through to Big Bear or wherever. Now they needed to move a lot of people very quickly, and then deal with several thousand more who were in a blind panic, if those oncoming screams meant what she thought they did. There were the dead men, the one in the woods and the one who had died in custody. They’d been screaming, too.
Again Danny thought how much easier things would be if she had a high-caliber machine gun. Or one of those M1A1 Abrams tanks. Not to shoot anybody, but to reassert authority with a few rounds over the crowd. These thoughts went through Danny’s mind in an instant, and in the next the bullhorn was at her lips:
“Your attention, please! I need you all to get into your vehicles, lock the doors, and roll the windows up. Turn your engines off. Pass the word down the line. I don’t want to see anybody outside a vehicle. We got some people coming, and it is imperative that we separate you from them. That means you inside your vehicles, doors locked, windows up, engines off. Now.”
And God bless them, most people did exactly what Danny said. Even Dave. He headed straight for the Crown Vic.
“Dave, not you. You stand tall.”
He resumed his post at the barricade. At this moment Deputy Ted came trotting up from behind the Chevron station, massaging a stitch in his side. “Sheriff,” he panted, “Zach Greer’s guys in the fire observation post say there’s thousands of people…” Ted had to stop for breath at the side of the Explorer, hands on thighs. Danny discreetly held a finger to her lips: Keep your voice down. Ted continued at a stage whisper:
“…Thousands of people running up Route 144.”
He cocked his head, hearing the approaching screams for the first time. Danny opened the magazine on the shotgun. It was fully loaded.
“Ted, Dave, I want you two up on top of the Crown Vic, don’t worry about the paint job. I want you both up there with long arms in your hands. We need to stop all those people running. The three of us need to make a human firewall and stop this thing in its tracks before it hits town.”
The screams were distinct now, so close Danny had to raise her voice. The deputies looked as if they might lose control of themselves. Danny thought it was time to get serious. She racked a shell into the chamber of the shotgun one-handed and let the barrel swing out over the river of stopped traffic, sweeping across all those terrified faces watching her through windshields. Not everybody had listened to her orders; a steady trickle of people was running along the roadside toward town. It couldn’t be helped. The consensus on the police band was that this thing was some kind of contagion. Danny figured if a person was running, she had to assume he or she was exposed.
And she was about to get exposed herself.
5
The first of the runners came charging between the cars on the left-hand side, a thin woman in a tank top, with dusty colored hair and a face mottled from the exertion of running up the hill. Her mouth was a red O as she ran. There were a few people standing outside their cars to watch the action; they jumped back as she approached, then dived for their vehicles.
Danny knew she was at a turning point. Whatever happened in the next few minutes would determine whether Forest Peak joined the historic disaster that was unfolding down below. There were a dozen runners behind the first, and from the almost continuous screams coming up the road, Danny knew there were hundreds more around the next bend. She discovered the shotgun in her hands was aimed at the woman. Shoot her down, it might stop the rest of them. She tried the bullhorn one more time:
“Stop where you are. This is a police barricade. We will use force.”
The woman kept on running. Now Danny could see her eyes, and there was no recognition behind them, no mind. Time to make an example. Stop one, maybe stop a thousand. But that was crazy—this was an American, not some cipher from another world. Yet no different, not really. Danny ought to be able to kill this woman as easily as she had killed others in that previous lifetime beneath a crueler sun. Or had it ever been easy?
Danny never got to find out whether she could pull the trigger or not. Instead, the woman with the dusty colored hair dropped in her tracks.
One instant she was running full-out between the cars, no more than a hundred feet from Danny’s perch; the next she was tumbling limp against the tr
unk of a maroon Honda Accord. Her face bounced off the sheet metal and she dropped out of sight. There was a girl screaming in the car directly behind the Accord. Then two young men sprinted into range, waving their arms around their heads as if the air were full of bees. The legs of the one in front buckled under him and he fell on his back. The other man kept running. And now more people were coming through the cars, running at full tilt. It was too late to use force.
Deputy Ted hollered: “Sheriff, what do we do!”
Danny figured on Deputy Dave to hold his ground. She was wrong. As the surviving young man ran around the end of the Crown Vic and charged through the roadblock into the south-facing cars, Dave jumped down to the pavement and threw his gun at Ted.
“I’m outta here,” was all he said. And he ran after the young man in the direction of town.
That did the trick. Suddenly everyone was starting their engines, cars were surging forward into the one or two feet of space between them and the car in front, and a human stampede was pouring around the vehicles, screaming and waving their arms and some of them falling, always some of them falling everywhere Danny looked. It was as if a tide of human beings was washing up the mountainside, and now the foamy crest of the wave was swirling past Danny’s position on top of the Explorer.
She saw a late eighties Buick leap forward from its position at the front of the northbound cars, attempting to make it around the barricade. Instead, the long nose of the car pinned a young woman—Kelley’s age, the voice said—against the fender of a pickup truck. Danny heard the long bones crack in the woman’s legs, and her wild screams went up three octaves. The Buick lurched backward and the woman collapsed, both legs shattered, but kept crawling on; then another car smashed into the back of the Buick, and more runners were tumbling over the obstacles. A couple of them stayed where they fell, and the others leaped up and scrambled onward.
