Slow Apocalypse (59 page)

Their route took them south on Western or the side streets paralleling it, then onto the Imperial Highway and east until they were blocked again, turning south until they reached the 105 freeway. The exchange was destroyed at Wilmington Avenue and there was no way to get off to the south, so they had to bump over some rubble and head north again for several blocks, and when they reached 110th Street they saw an amazing thing. The Watts Towers were not as tall as some people imagined, and finding them was not always easy. You usually didn’t see them until you were almost on top of them because surrounding buildings and trees got in the way. But all that was gone now, and there were the Towers, still standing. They paused for a moment to get out of the trucks and look at them.

“They stood up to the quake.” Emily laughed in delight.

“No, wait,” Mark said. “There were three main ones. I only see two.”

“I think the one in the middle fell down,” Bob said.

“You’re right. That’s too bad. But the fire didn’t harm them.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” Mark said. “They were in bad shape. I heard they were being restored, but it was tricky. I’ll bet if you got up close, a lot of that concrete and glass has fallen off. They’re held up by the iron framework underneath.”

“Then let’s don’t get up close,” Karen said. “I’d like to remember them like this.”

“Works for me.”

On they went, through Lynwood, Paramount, Bellflower, Artesia, Cerritos, Hawaiian Gardens. Small towns that you would never know you were in except for the city-limits signs, part of the megalopolis of what used to be separate towns with orange groves between them, jostling each other, with little real identity. Towns that, if you lived somewhere else, were only exit signs on the 5, the 405, the 605, or the 91. Towns that you either barreled through at seventy-five
miles per hour or inched past at five miles per hour or less, looking around and thanking your lucky stars that you didn’t live there.

They began to see signs that someone had been at work trying to stop the fire, and in several places they seemed to have succeeded, but at a cost. The fire that followed the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was finally stopped by firemen who blew up buildings in its path, and the same thing seemed to have been done here.

Yet this fire had advanced across such a large front that the dynamiting had been only sporadically effective. They crossed areas where they could see that all the buildings had been deliberately destroyed. No earthquake could have shattered brick and timber as thoroughly as what they were seeing. They found areas where seven or eight or ten blocks of buildings had been blown up, and downwind of these places the buildings hadn’t burned. But the fire had swept around these barriers and, farther downwind, had come together again. Apparently no one had had enough dynamite to create a long enough firebreak to stop the conflagration entirely.

But the thing that had finally stopped the firestorm before it swept all the way to the sea seemed to have been a shift in the wind. When the relentless Santa Ana had finally stopped blowing, the fire could no longer leap over the wide main streets, and they began passing places where the north side of the street was mostly consumed, and the south side was intact, except for the quake damage they had seen everywhere.

And still they saw no people. Everyone had fled, or died. Dave remembered the wall of flames advancing in his rearview mirror, only a block behind him, chasing him down the hill. These people had probably had most of a day to see it coming, and it must have been quite a sight, as if the whole world were on fire.

Near the end of their eighth day on the road Teddy returned with bad news.

“We can’t continue south,” he said. “Not here, anyway. There are refugees, thousands of them, penned up behind chain-link fences all along the 91. They’re being guarded by what look like Anaheim cops and armed civilians. One fence runs along the south side of the freeway, and another one to the north. There’s no shelter that I could see, just bare concrete. I don’t know what they’re doing with those people, but it doesn’t look good. I went ten blocks east and then ten blocks west, and it’s all the same. Anaheim is sealed off, and they’re serious
about it. I tried getting close to get a better look, and a cop pointed his gun at me and ordered me to come to him. I took off. He didn’t shoot, but I wonder if he would have if I got closer. It seems the fire didn’t reach Anaheim, but the tide of refugees did. And they’re not wanted.”

“I wonder if they’re getting any food?” Lisa said.

“I don’t dare get close enough to ask. I don’t want to end up in that enclosure.”

They got out the maps and studied the situation.

“Oh, man,” Mark said. “I didn’t realize Anaheim was so big. It goes all along the 91 to the north, and miles to the east, all the way to Yorba Linda.”

They were in Buena Park, just to the northwest of Anaheim and just north of the 91 freeway, near the intersection with the 5.

“Do you think they’re guarding that whole border?”

“I don’t know. But we can’t keep going south here. It’s either east or west if we hope to go around it.”

“If only we knew where the fire went,” Dave said. “I think the majority of the refugees would have headed due south, because that’s the way the fire was going, If they headed east or west, they’d be able to see it was gaining on them. Don’t you think?”

“That would seem the logical move. And that took them to Anaheim, where people saw them coming and decided they couldn’t take them in.”

“I wonder how many more communities did the same?”

“We’ll have to find out, I guess.”

“You know,” Rachel said, “I guess you can understand something and still not like it. I don’t like it at all.”

“I don’t imagine the citizens of Anaheim like it, either,” Karen said. “But we know what it’s like. We turned people away, didn’t we, Dave?”

“We did, and it haunts me. And I find myself thinking, what goes around, comes around. Now we’re the ones looking for a safe haven.”

No one advanced a good reason why they should test the goodwill of the Anaheim city fathers, so it was decided they would stay a safe distance from the stockade and look for a way around it.

Everyone was hoping that the surrounding communities were not as organized, or as forbidding, as Anaheim. They soon found that no one was that organized, but neither were they very welcoming.

Skirting the boundaries of Anaheim to the west, they found themselves going south on Knott Avenue, and after a forced turn to the left, they were
passing Knott’s Berry Farm. At first all they could see of it was part of a wooden roller coaster that had suffered some damage. Just beyond it was a big, triangular parking lot with trees growing from small islands between the long rows of marked spaces. And here was a refugee camp. They were about to drive past the lot when Dave saw a flashing blue light behind them, pulling up fast.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “We’re busted.”

A Buena Park motorcycle cop pulled in front of the caravan as Dave shut off his engine. The policeman got off, carrying a shotgun pointed at the sky, and didn’t approach the caravan.

“Drivers, get out of your vehicles. If you have weapons, leave them inside.”

Dave looked at Karen and Addison, then at Jenna, who was now well enough to sit up, though she was still on her stretcher. He didn’t wear his pistol in his waistband when he was driving, so that wasn’t a problem. He opened the door.

“Be careful, Daddy.”

“I will, sweetheart.” He got out, holding his hands away from his body. He heard the doors of the bus and then the U-Haul open. He heard Mark and Bob come forward to stand beside him.

The cop had them stand a good distance from the Escalade and lean forward with their hands against its sides so they could not make any quick moves, and he patted them down with one hand. He told them to move around to the front of the car, presumably to shield himself from anyone in the bus who might be aiming a weapon at him.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I don’t like scaring your little girl, but we have to be cautious. We get some bad guys coming through here.”

“No problem, Officer,” Dave said.

“Where are you folks from, and where are you headed?”

They had talked it over and decided that they would not mention Holmby Hills or Hollywood. When questioned, they had agreed to simply say they were from Los Angeles, which wasn’t a lie. Bob told the officer that.

“As for where we’re going…the best I can say is that we’re looking for a home. A place to settle down.”

“My own home was destroyed in the first hours of the fire,” Dave told him. “Bob’s wasn’t, but we all had to get out because it was just too unsafe.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Eighteen,” Mark said. “Dave here has his wife and daughter, and a friend who is badly wounded from a gunshot. The rest of us are Bob’s children and grandkids. Five of us are minors.”

The cop sighed.

“Well, it kills me to tell you this, but you can’t stay in Buena Park. We don’t have enough food to feed our own for very much longer. At some point we may all have to evacuate to Seal Beach, where the navy is taking people to San Diego.”

“Are you sure?” Mark asked. “They were doing the same thing in Santa Monica, and what we heard was they were all going north, to Alameda and Puget Sound.”

The cop kicked at the ground with his boot.

“We’ve heard rumors to that effect, too. Tell the truth, most of us don’t know what to do. Everything’s gone to shit. My little boy is hungry all the time.”

“That’s just what we heard, from some of the sailors on the aircraft carrier. Do you have any news you could pass on to us? Like how are the roads to San Diego?”

“I wish I could. I haven’t left Buena Park since the quake. I heard you guys up north had it worse than we did.”

“Yes, it was.”

“Well, there’s still very little news on the air. Just a few ham-radio stations, none of the big ones. The city council is operating in the dark, like almost everybody, I guess. We hear the roads to San Diego are impassable.” He nodded toward the car park with the vehicles and shanties. “People in there might know more than I do. Some of them have been around, a little.”

“Would it be possible for us to stay an hour or two and talk to them?”

The cop sighed.

“Here’s the deal. The people in the lot are being treated as citizens. They got here quite a while ago. But they’re all we can handle. The council has decided that any new refugees can stay twenty-four hours. Get a meal, some water if they need it. Then they have to be moving on. I’m real sorry, honest.”

“It’s a better deal than your neighbors to the east are offering,” Bob said.

“Don’t be too hard on Anaheim. They’ve had ten, twenty times the refugees we have. They let them in at first. Now, what can they do? They get some kind of soup and a little bread every day, and even that is more than Anaheim can really handle.”

“We’re not condemning,” Dave said. “We turned people away in our neighborhood, too.”

“Ain’t it the shits? Did you ever think you’d see Americans…” He couldn’t go on for a moment. “Sorry. I’ve been on shift twenty-four hours. I’ve seen
things I wouldn’t have believed a year ago. I get the feeling the government has abandoned us.”

“They do seem to be evacuating people,” Mark said. “Maybe they think they’re doing the right thing.”

“Not so’s I can tell. Anyway, what do I know? Are you going to stay the night?

Everybody thought that was a good idea. They might be able to relax their vigilance a bit with other people around.

“Well, you can park any damn place you want. Oh, I meant to ask you, who made those wood burners for you?”

“That would be me,” Mark said, and instantly looked as if he might regret it.

“No kidding? We’ve got a guy tried to build some, but he must be missing something, ’cause he hasn’t been able to get any of them to work. Maybe if I sent him over here, you could take a look at it?”

“Sure, why not?”

They watched the cop motor away, and Mark let out his breath.

“I was real worried there for a minute,” he said. “I thought they might want to requisition our vehicles.”

“It could happen, I guess,” said Bob. “Our best bet would probably be if you show them how to build their own, then they wouldn’t need to steal ours.”

“Or we could just take off now,” Dave suggested. “A few miles down the road and we’d be out of Buena Park, he’d never find us again.”

After a brief discussion it was decided that staying one night with people who had come from elsewhere was too valuable an opportunity to pass up. So they swung into the parking lot and moved slowly down the rows.

There were a few big RVs and a lot of vans and SUVs, but the majority of the vehicles were standard sedans. People were living in all of them, and in rope-and-canvas shelters or wooden lean-tos obviously made from quake wreckage. Some of that wreckage seemed to have come from the buildings of Knott’s Berry Farm across the road. It was brightly colored, even festive, and looked wildly out of place in such depressing surroundings.

They pitched camp in their usual triangular formation, and started making tentative forays among the people already there.

They ended up staying three days.

They were not pressured to stay, but after the first day it was obvious no
one would mind if they stuck around, from the city council to the police to the campers in the parking lot.

Lisa was not the only doctor remaining in Buena Park, but there were not many of them and all were overworked and perhaps a little less likely to visit the refugees than the longtime residents. One more was always welcome. She set up shop with Elyse and Nigel doing the nursing duties. This small town had not yet run out of things like morphine and sterile bandages.

While Lisa helped out with the community’s medical needs, Mark attended to its mechanical ones. He was gone for most of the first day, visiting the city workshops where people were trying to convert vehicles to burning wood.

“I was incredulous at first, that no one knew how to do it,” he said when he returned. “I mean, it may not be intuitive, but it’s not, as they say, rocket science. Then I remembered that I downloaded the plans from the Internet, and the only reason I did was that you warned my father what was coming, Dave, and he warned me. I only looked into it because…well, what if? So thanks again for the heads-up, Dave.”