Slow Apocalypse (51 page)

“Not on your life, Mother,” Elyse said. “We might have started out in that direction, but I know we could have slipped away and come home, when it got dark.”

“Anyway, we didn’t have to. We’ve made friends with those members of the LAPD who are still on the job. One of their priorities is getting doctors to and from hospitals if they live close by, you saw them bringing us home the other day. Sergeant Gomez and Officer Murkowski told the Marines they’d take us a ways down the evacuation route, and as soon as we were out of sight they brought us here.”

“I’ve become a big fan of the LAPD,” Bob said, with a smile.

“So…I don’t know the guy you met, but he probably saved Jenna’s life.”

She suddenly cried out. “I hate this! Hate it, hate it,
hate it
! We ran out of almost everything at the hospital. I brought some things home with me, in case we’re really going to make this crazy trip—scalpels, needles, surgical thread, a lot of things that we used to use once and then discard—but I felt like a thief bringing home so much as a Band-Aid. We lost patients we could easily have saved, from infections after surgery. We amputated arms and legs that could have been saved with proper care. It’s like we’ve been thrown back to the Stone Age.”

“Actually, more like the turn of the twentieth century,” Bob said, gently. “Lisa, you did the best you could, I’m sure of it.”

She sighed.

“It’s just so frustrating that the reason I couldn’t do any better is that we just didn’t have a tenth of the things we needed. We kept waiting for help to arrive. I know what you said, you and Dave and Mark, that help was never going to arrive, but in my heart I didn’t believe it. I mean, this is the United States of America! We’ve never let anyone down like this, not even if the disaster was on the other side of the world. We’re always there as soon as the dust settles.”

The group stood silently for a while, watching the progress of the flames.

“I was afraid it would burn right up to the edge of the golf course,” Bob said. “Then I was hoping it might act as a firebreak. Not many trees out there.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Dave said. “If it burned those houses over there, and if the wind was blowing right, it would send a lot of firebrands into the air. There’s no telling where they would come down.”

“What would you suggest?”

“Post somebody up on the roof on this side of the house, if you can. If we see it come within a few blocks and it looks like it’s still headed this way, I say we need to get out, even if we’re not ready.”

“There’s still some packing to do, and Mark is still working on the vehicles, but we could go if we had to. We were waiting on you, and on Teddy to report back. You know, we still haven’t made a final decision on which way to go.”

“Can Teddy find you, if you have to abandon the house?”

“We set up a rendezvous point. If he comes back and sees the house is burned, we’ll meet him there. If we can.”

Teddy arrived on his bike and the whole house turned out to hear his report, except Jenna and those on lookout duty.

“First, I have some bad news. I was able to swing by Dennis Rossi’s house in Glendale. Well, I mean where his house used to be. The whole neighborhood is gone. Burned to the ground. I found the lot; the number was painted on the curb. I was hoping for a note or something, but I couldn’t find anything.”

After a long pause, Bob spoke up.

“And Roger?”

“Like I told you, I probably wouldn’t have time to get all that far out where he lives. It just wasn’t possible.”

Bob nodded, slowly.

“Then I guess he’s on his own. Go on, son.”

“The coast route north is definitely out. The Pacific Coast Highway is blocked by landslides. The one I saw, close to Topanga Canyon, took most of the road into the Pacific, and I could see one beyond that one where half a mountainside came down and buried the road. The 405 is impassable at the Getty Center. I tried to get around it on the west side of the freeway, but a lot of Saint Mary’s College up on that hill over there looks like it’s just gone, and the roads with it. There are some fire roads up there, but I didn’t think it was worth my time to look at them, since they’re even more fragile than the road I saw that caved in.”

“No point in it,” Bob agreed.

Teddy paused to take another drink from a bottle of warm Gatorade. He had run out of bottled water during his long scouting expedition. Now he was carefully rehydrating, a few sips at a time.

“I didn’t bother with Roscomare Road,” Teddy went on. “Beverly Glen, Benedict Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon, all impassable. That just leaves the 101 freeway through the Cahuenga Pass, which could get us to the I-5. It’s been bulldozed clear. I made it as far as Universal City, and on to the interchange with the 170 and the 134, and I’m sure our vehicles could make it, too.”

“That sounds like our path north, then,” Rachel said.

“I wouldn’t count on it. I talked to some other riders. There are quite a few of us out there. They’ve been all over the place, and by talking to them I’ve made a pretty good map of what’s open, what’s blocked, where the most dangerous neighborhoods are.”

They were all gathered around or sitting at Bob’s large picnic table in the backyard. Dave had seldom seen such a sweaty, dirty group. The temperature had climbed once again as the unseen sun rose and the hot wind blew from the north, and Bob’s thermometer said it was ninety-eight degrees. The ash was still falling, coating everything and everyone. The group looked like coal miners just emerging from the ground. The soot found every crack and crevice in the skin and worked its way in, and the streams of sweat running down most of their faces didn’t really clean it off so much as smear it around.

“So don’t leave us hanging, Teddy,” Bob urged his son. “What do you know?”

“What I
know
, what I’ve seen with my own eyes, I’ve already told you. And from here on, I’m reporting what other explorers have told me. I have no reason to doubt any of them, and a lot of reason to trust most of them absolutely. So the big news is that I-5 is impassable farther north.”

There was a murmur of concern from the assembled group. Interstate 5 was the Main Street of the West Coast, running all the way from Tijuana to the Canadian border. Many of those present had been pinning a lot of hope on the assumption that it would not be blocked, or if it had been, then some government agency would have bulldozed obstructions out of the way.

“I met a woman coming back down the freeway. I was only as far north as the exchange between the 5 and the 118, in San Fernando. She said that from Santa Clarita on, the road was virtually destroyed.”

“You trust this woman?” Gordon asked.

“She was desperate to get to Bakersfield, she said her children had been up there spending a few weeks with their grandparents and she had planned to join them, but then the quake came. She was crying a lot, and totally exhausted. I couldn’t think of a reason in the world why she would lie to me, just to screw around with me.”

“I can’t see it, either,” Gordon said.

“Okay,” Bob said. “So far you’ve eliminated some of our options. Do you have any good news?”

“Don’t shoot me, I’m just the bearer of bad tidings, but I’m afraid the answer is no. So far I’ve cut down our land options to just two, as far as I can see. Everyone agrees that west toward Palm Springs and Arizona—desert, any way you look at it—is not on the table. We either go west to the I-15 and cross the mountains there, and from there up to the Central Valley and Oregon. Or, we go south, which as most of you know, is the option I’ve been in favor of from the start.”

“You said ‘land options,’ ” Dave said.

“Yeah. As in, should we try to go overland at all?”

He looked around at his family and Dave’s family. Dave knew where he stood on joining the mass exodus—or maybe it was better to think of it as a deportation—being carried out by the nuclear navy and the Marines. He and Karen had talked about it. They didn’t want to get aboard an aircraft carrier and be shipped out to parts unknown. But if the Winston family decided that was the best idea, then they would tag along.

But now, with Jenna badly wounded, the equation had changed. Maybe it would be better to turn themselves in to the navy. Wouldn’t they have medics, and possibly medical supplies?

He knew that there were partisans for both the land and sea options, but he wasn’t always sure who they were. He guessed Lisa and her children would opt for the carrier, because it would have at least the basics for medical care. Then she was the first to speak up, and she surprised him.

“I was leaning toward going on the boat,” she said. “Until today. There was no question we were being forced out, staying behind wasn’t an option. They had trucks for the stretcher cases, but they wedged them in like sardines in a can. There was a lot of shouting and tempers lost, and I saw several people who didn’t want to leave clubbed to the ground and thrown in trucks with bars on the windows. If not for our police friends, me and my kids might have been on those trucks.”

She paused a moment to let them all think that over.

“The vibe was very bad,” her son Nigel agreed.

“Well, I’ll chip in again,” Teddy said. “I think it’s even worse than my sister knows about.”

That brought the few murmured conversations to a halt. Teddy took another deep swallow of Gatorade and went on.

“I went to the coast, of course. I could see the aircraft carrier from the hills in the Palisades, then I went down into Santa Monica. I climbed up onto the sixth floor of a building and I could see them on the highway and on the beach, thousands and thousands of them, as far as I could see. They were surrounded by barbed wire. With my binoculars I could see the Marines guarding them. I could see the boats being rowed back and forth from the Santa Monica Pier—most of it is still standing, if you can believe that—to the carrier. All kinds of boats. Most were being rowed by crews, like old whaleboats.

“I wanted to know more but I was afraid of getting roped into that situation down there, so I started back, taking the back streets. A couple of guys came out of a house and hailed me. They were in civilian clothes, but they claimed they were sailors and they had slipped away at night and jumped ship.”

“Did you believe them?” Addison asked.

“I didn’t know what to think, at first. Tell you the truth, I kind of liked them, they didn’t seem like mental giants but they were fed up, pissed off, outraged by what they had seen and done. Something made me think they might be lovers running away together. Maybe I’m just a romantic. Anyway,
they hadn’t been ashore farther than a block away from the beach until today, and they wanted to know what conditions were like farther inland. Were there any communities who might take them in? Were we all really starving to death down here? Because they sure as hell were starving where the government was taking them.”

Once more there was a solemn silence.

“They were off the USS
Ronald Reagan
, one of the two carriers that are being used to transport refugees from Los Angeles to the north. They’ve made two trips, one to somewhere in Puget Sound—they weren’t very clear on just where, but it was an island—and the other to Alameda. Alameda is an island in San Francisco Bay with only half a dozen ways on and off. At the east end of the island is the old Alameda Naval Air Station. That’s where they took the refugees. ‘Dumped’ them, according to my sailor friends.

“I have to say that these guys looked haunted. They said it was pretty bad here, on the beach in Santa Monica, but it was just as bad and maybe worse at Alameda and Puget Sound. They never got ashore in those places, but they heard stories from sailors who had, and they were horrific. There was cholera, not enough clean drinking water, not much medical care, and a severe shortage of food. Obviously no food is being brought in here to Los Angeles, but it’s apparently not a whole lot better in the rest of the country.”

“Why would the government move people from here to a place where things are worse?” Emily wanted to know.

“I wondered that, too. The sailors just laughed when I asked them. One of them said ‘Orders is orders.’ My guess is that an order came down to
do
something about the disaster in Los Angeles, and the only thing anyone could think of was to move the people somewhere else. Since shipping food and water down here for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people was not an option—you can’t ship what you don’t have—getting people out of the disaster area seemed like the next best thing. The orders came down, and the captain is determined to carry them out, whether they make sense or not. Whether or not they’re doing any good or just moving the problem around. This whole evacuation thing strikes me as rearranging the deck chairs while the
Titanic
is going down. It’s the military mind, I guess. I don’t know much about it.”

“I do, and I understand it perfectly,” said Marian. She was sitting on the ground with Gordon, who had his arm draped over her shoulder. She was small, compact, but had a fierceness about her that made it easy for Dave to see her as a soldier.

“I don’t know what sort of command structure still exists,” she went on. “I’d expect the military to be in better shape than civilian governments, they run disaster scenarios all the time, and I’ll bet they had a fuel reserve better than civilians have access to. But their conventional fuel is probably running out, which leaves them with just the power to run their nuclear ships. Those babies can go for twenty years without refueling. Anyway, bottom line, I agree with Teddy. Orders came down; orders will be carried out. Maybe they’re even doing some good. Those sailors didn’t see everything.”

“You’re right, and even their shipmates who went ashore didn’t see everything. But most of it sounded plausible. They said the people who live in the Bay Area are not happy with this relocation. The navy is keeping them penned up on Alameda, but they say the locals aren’t taking any chances, they dynamited the bridges and the tunnel. They’re patrolling the mainland shore, and they’re shooting to kill. They have enough problems as it is, just as everybody else in the country does, and they’re terrified of these people. Our friends and neighbors, people from down south. Hungry and desperate people, thousands of them.”