Slow Apocalypse (43 page)

“But we don’t know that. How do we know they’re going to a better place?”

“I’m pretty confident of it for a simple reason,” Bob said. “I can’t imagine there’s anyplace on the Pacific Coast that’s worse than this.”

“I feel strongly that my place is with my family,” Lisa moaned. “I failed my children when the quake hit, and I—”

“Mom, there was nothing you could have done by coming home,” Elyse said, with a touch of anger. “We’ve been all through this. We agreed that nothing could have saved Dad but a medevac helicopter.”

“I know that, but…”

“But you feel guilty. So do I. If I hadn’t driven into that hole…”

“It was already too late, Elle.”

“I’ll second that,” Nigel said. “Why don’t you both just shut up about it? It’s so over. You got a decision to make, Mother. What are you going to do with us?”

Nigel was sixteen, a year younger than his sister, a beanpole even taller than his mother and grandfather. His hair was jet-black and straight and hung to his shoulders, and he had multiple piercings of his ears and nose. He wore black jeans and heavy boots, but on top he wore the same surgical scrubs as his sister and mother.

Dave and Karen had nothing to contribute to the Winston family discussion about what Lisa and her children should do when everyone pulled out, headed for Oregon. It was a terrible situation for her, already saddled with guilt over the death of her husband, to have to decide to abandon the sick and injured of Los Angeles.

“You don’t have to decide until tomorrow,” Emily finally told her. “We need you, but you know that. But I have to put it to you in the strongest possible terms, Lisa. Whatever you decide to do yourself, letting your children stay here is wrong. They have to go with us, it’s the only right thing to do.”

“I won’t leave without Mother,” Elyse said, firmly. Nigel said nothing.

“We’ll decide tomorrow,” Bob finally said.

Most of Bob’s workshop was filled by a big school bus that looked like it had been worked over by the production designers from
The Road Warrior
.

After a long talk with Bob, Mark had concluded the same thing that his
father had. Maybe Dave’s story of a crude-eating bacteria was wrong, but what if it was right? What was the harm in stocking up on survival supplies, and boning up on alternative sources of energy?

In fact, as a problem-solver by nature, he had spent more hours than Dave had researching and speculating about what the situation would soon be like if Dave’s story was true. He hadn’t liked like the results he got any more than Dave had.

Even before gas rationing began, he had built one of the first wood-burning vehicles in the area, converting an old junker he bought for a few hundred dollars just to see how it worked. To his surprise, it didn’t perform all that badly. The chief problem was the bulk of the fuel.

“The other problem with burning wood to power your vehicle,” Mark said, “is that you can’t just feed logs into a stove. It has to be chopped finely. So I bought the biggest wood chipper I could afford.”

He was showing them around the workshop and garage, where he had stowed everything they planned to take with them on the journey north. The chipper looked hard-used. It had wheels and a trailer hitch.

“I rebuilt the engine, sharpened the blades, and bought replacements. It will take twelve-inch logs. Better to split them into smaller chunks; got axes for that. But you toss branches in there, it will eat them and spit out chips in a second. Got a couple of chain saws over here. Palm trees will be the easiest, I think. Up in Oregon, there should be plenty of pine, if they haven’t cut all of it down already.”

They moved on to the school bus.

All the glass had been removed from the side windows and replaced with metal plates, which also covered the body of the bus. There were two gun ports on each side. The armoring was quick and sloppy. A parapet had been built on top of the bus, made of wood, about four feet high. It ran all around the top of the bus. The whole thing looked quite heavy, and Mark confirmed he had beefed up the springs and shocks.

Inside, there were fold-up bunks along each side and the back was packed with supplies and luggage. A hole had been cut in the roof near the front, and a wooden ladder was bolted to the roof and the floor. Mark climbed up and Dave followed him.

He had thought the platform on top would be a defensive position, but he was wrong. The back end was half-full of wood chips. There was a blue tarp that could be fastened over the top. Mark showed them how one
could gain access to the burner from up there, open it up, and shovel chips into it.

After that there was just the other truck. It still had the orange-and-white colors of U-Haul on the cab. The box in back had been painted black.

“I bought this one,” Mark said. “Cheap. This was long after the rationing started, and the guy was amazed to get a buyer at all.”

Dave stood with Karen and Addison and they all looked at what the Winston family had accomplished. Dave closed his eyes for a moment. Then he turned to Karen.

“We’re going with them,” he said.

“I know.”

She put her arm around his waist and hugged him.

They spent the next hour discussing which route they should take. There were only a few options, but each had its advantages and drawbacks, and each had its proponents. The arguments got heated at times, but never angry. Dave got the feeling that this large family was used to hashing things out vigorously without coming to blows or harboring resentments.

In the middle of the discussion Sandra and Olivia left them and went upstairs to relieve Gordon from guard duty. The twins had at first been deemed too young, at fifteen, to stand a watch, but had eventually prevailed. They stayed together not just because they were very close, but so they could watch the street and still take care of little brother Solomon. They had been his willing and loving caregivers for a long time.

Gordon came down to join them. He was dark-skinned, originally from Jamaica but a naturalized citizen for half of his forty years. He had met his wife, seven years younger than him, in Afghanistan, where he had worked for the United Nations and she had been a sergeant in the army. He had a wide smile and a face weathered prematurely, was of average height, but looked very strong. He introduced himself as an associate professor of governmental studies at Cal State, Long Beach.

The family eventually agreed on first trying the I-5 through the Grapevine into the Central Valley, as the most likely choice. If that was impassable, they would consider other options. Mark, who Dave was seeing could be a pain in the ass sometimes, continued to lobby for the 101, nearer the coast, as more likely to provide wood for his hungry burners, but he conceded defeat.

But that was not quite the end of it. There was one more option they had to discuss, and it was first voiced by Elyse, with some backup from her brother, Nigel, and her aunt Rachel, Mark’s wife.

“Why not go on the ship?” she said.

The opposition to that idea was immediate and strong, coming mostly from her mother and her uncle Mark, who glared at his wife. Rachel seemed unmoved by it.

“I just don’t trust them,” Lisa said. “I’ve asked and asked around the hospital, where are these people going? Nobody knows, or if they do, they’re not telling.”

“Mom, what do you figure? They’re being dumped in the ocean?”

“That’s silly,” Mark began, but was cut off by Lisa.

“Of course not. But you ask the National Guard where the ship is going, and all they’ll say is ‘North.’ To a refugee camp in the north. San Francisco? Oregon? If it’s Oregon, maybe we
should
go. But there’s just something wrong with getting on a ship whose destination you don’t know.”

“I’d like to know where we’d be going, too,” Mark said. “But one thing I can guarantee you. When we got there we’d have
nothing
. The clothes on our backs, maybe a suitcase. But no vehicles, no tools, no food of our own. They will
not
be loading a school bus onto an aircraft carrier.”

They tossed it around a little more, but soon gave it up, because one of the things Teddy had promised to do before returning—that afternoon with any luck—was to cycle to Santa Monica and see what he could find out on the scene of the evacuation itself.

They unloaded the Escalade. Now that they would be traveling with a school bus and a U-Haul truck, they would be able to take all the food remaining in his basement.

“Bring all the water you have,” Bob said. They were standing at the back of his property, looking out over the golf course. He pointed out to the muddy remains of the floodwater that had inundated the neighborhood.

“See that puddle out there? Used to be a sand trap. Mark has put a water tank in the back of the U-Haul. We drove the truck over there and filled the tank. It’s clean; we treated it with bleach. I worry about water most of all. Whichever route we take, it’s a long ways to a river that flows year-round.
We’ll top off the tank whenever we can, but I want all the bottled water we can carry.”

“You got it,” Dave said. Then he saw something that surprised him. A slightly ragged-looking horse was approaching the little pool. It walked through the mud, lowered its head, and began to drink.

“Look, Daddy!” Addison had appeared at his elbow, apparently drawn by some special sense horse lovers possessed.

“There are three horses out there,” Bob told her.

Addison walked out onto the golf course.

“The whole golf course is surrounded, so they’ve been allowed to wander.”

“Daddy, we have to go get Ranger,” she shouted. “He needs to stretch his legs. He needs to eat some grass. It’s not good for him to be cooped up in the garage all the time.”

Ranger had not been cooped up all the time—Addison had taken him out for a trot every day, going up the hill to the top and then halfway down and back—but Dave knew what she meant. It wasn’t a good life for a horse.

“We’ll bring him here tomorrow,” he promised her. “And if we’re going to do that, we need to head home.”

Dave and Karen thanked everyone for everything, and vowed to be back the next day as early as possible. They all knew better than to set a time. There were just too many things that might cause a delay.

They made it to the Beverly Hills Hotel and a few blocks beyond before they came on a crack in the ground that couldn’t be driven over. They went south on Rexford and then east again on Elevado, and were about to turn north to regain Sunset when they heard gunshots.

All their windows were down, and it sounded as if the shots were coming from the south, down a street that might have been Hillcrest and might have been Arden; the street sign had been knocked down.

Karen immediately stuck the barrel of her shotgun out the window. In his rearview, Dave could see Addison looking around in all directions. He wanted to find some cover. There were many houses, many driveways, some of which led to garages in back, but he didn’t think he dared drive around behind any of them, as there was no way of telling which were occupied. If he had been in one of them, and had heard the guns, he knew he would have shot at the
intruder. So he waited, putting his own shotgun across his lap but ready to throw the car into reverse and back away as fast as he dared.

It sounded like a major battle. There were no automatic weapons, but the shots kept coming. Whatever was happening was coming at them from the right, from the south. He started to back up.

“Dave, look!” Karen shouted.

Three large dogs had rounded the corner ahead of them. One was a Rottweiler, another a black Lab, and the third some large exotic breed he couldn’t identify.

“Roll up your windows, everybody,” Karen ordered. Dave hit the switch for his window, and saw that Addison was doing the same.

The Rottweiler looked as savage and scary as that breed always did, and he looked well fed. Not so the Lab. The black dog’s ribs were showing, and he didn’t move with the easy self-confidence of the Rottweiler.

Suddenly the Rottweiler turned and snapped savagely at the black Lab, which whined and cringed away. Dave realized the Rottweiler was the pack leader, and that he enforced his position ruthlessly, by dealing out fright and pain to anyone anywhere near his size. He felt sure that Rottweiler had not always been a stray. He could very well have been a pampered and gentle pet. That was all gone now. Dave had only to look at the dog’s eyes to know he was a killer. The veneer of socialization had worn off quickly when the pangs of hunger began to gnaw inside. Beneath the training, under the calm exterior, the heart of a predator still beat, and when push came to shove the Rottweiler knew how to behave, how to hunt, how to assert leadership.

The pack was larger than they had realized. A dozen other canines came tearing around the corner, like some crazily effete, Beverly Hill version of the Hounds of Hell. It was all happening very quickly, but he had time to spot a Labradoodle and a Goldendoodle and a Schnoodle. There was an Afghan hound and a German shepherd, more traditional large dogs. There was even a big standard poodle whose pom-pom clip was looking very ragged. And yapping on the edges of the pack were a few small to medium-sized dogs—a miniature pinscher, a cavalier King Charles spaniel. All of them were dirty, with matted coats and what was probably dried blood around their muzzles. And in the eyes of all of them was something he had never seen in domesticated dogs: a wild, relentless gleam that was a combination of unfamiliar physical hunger and the bloodlust excitement of running with the pack.