Three To Get Deadly (74 page)

Marty smiled to let her know he was joking, or at least being delightfully self-deprecating.

"You dropped something," she motioned to the floor with a slight nod of her head.

It was a tiny vial. He picked it up. Pergonal. It had expired months ago. He was about to throw it out when he saw her staring at him. So instead Marty hastily put the vial back in the refrigerator and slammed the door, as if the vial might fight its way out again. The last thing he wanted to do was resurrect The Discussion.

When Marty turned around, he was relieved to see she was reading her paper again. He popped the top on the Coke and took a big gulp, studying her over the top of the can as he swallowed. She was especially lovely in the morning, hair tussled, face still flushed with the warmth of sleep.

Beth seemed to sense his eyes on her and the affection behind them. "Are you going to be late tonight?" she asked softly.

"I should be back before primetime." That used to make her smile, a hundred repetitions ago.

And then, as if reading his thoughts, she gave him a small smile and returned to her paper.

9:16 a.m. Tuesday

Marty sat on his Richter scale, picking bloody bits of glass out of his hair as he wondered what the hell he should do.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. He wasn't supposed to be here.

In all his earthquake scenarios, he was always at home, where he was fully prepared. Everything in the house was bolted, strapped, or stuck down. There was bag under the bed bulging with survivalist stuff?bought in a binge after the last quake. There was even a sack of food for the dog. And on the slim chance the house was decimated, they had camping gear in the garage for emergency shelter.

At least he knew that Beth was safe.

There was nothing to worry about, he told himself. They had a thorough geological survey done when they bought the house. The report said it was earthquake safe and built on solid bedrock.

He had to go home.

But how?

He was stuck in downtown LA, a decaying urban wilderness, thirty miles from the safety of his gated community in Calabasas, his Mercedes crushed. And even if it wasn't, the roads and freeways were going to be all but impassable for any vehicle.

He'd have to walk.

No easy feat for a guy who's idea of a long walk was from the couch to the TV set, but he could do it. He had no choice, unless he wanted to stay here. And he knew what happened to guys like him who took a wrong turn and ended up in the 'hood alone, looking white, rich, and privileged, armed with only a spring-loaded Mercedes key-fob.

His heart started to race. He thought he might begin gagging again. He took a deep breath and willed himself to focus.

Marty looked back at his E-class. The trunk, defiantly shiny and unscratched, pinched out from under the rubble. He hurried over to the car, popped open the trunk, and rooted around the piles of scripts and videos until he found an old LA street map. Then he grabbed his gym bag, which was wedged into the furthest corner. It had been six months since he used the bag, back when he was caught up in the early enthusiasm of a new year's resolution and a two-year gym membership. He went twice and never went back.

Inside the gym bag were a pair of old Reeboks, a t-shirt, some sweats, and a bottle of water. He shoved the tire iron, a flashlight, and the Mercedes first-aid kit into the bag.

It was a start.

As he kicked off his stiff dress shoes and put on the Reeboks, he started thinking about what else he'd need for his journey. Packaged food, lots of water, duct tape, matches, dust masks, some rope. Basically, he had to make a mini-version of his home survival kit.

No problem. He could find most of those things right here, between the catering wagon, wardrobe trailer, and the grip, prop, and lighting trucks. Film crews had everything.

All he needed now was a plan of action.

Marty figured there was maybe nine hours of summer daylight left. If he started walking now, even as out of shape as he was, he could easily be in the valley and heading down Ventura Boulevard by nightfall.

That was okay.

He certainly had nothing to fear in the valley, where Tarzan and Universal Studios had entire communities named after them and the oldest historical landmark was the Casa De Cadillac dealership.

All he had to figure out now was the best way to get there.

It was possible to live your entire life in Los Angeles and never see the bad parts of town, except in a seventy-mile-per-hour blur on the freeway or channel-flipping past the evening news on the way to a
Cheers
rerun.

Even so, Marty knew where those dangerous neighborhoods were, and he was well aware that to get home, he'd have to walk through some of them. There was no way around it.

But he tried to make himself feel better by looking at the bright side. He'd be walking in broad daylight, in the midst of chaos, and would only be in truly bad places for a few miles. There were far worse parts of the city he could be stuck in. At least he wasn't visiting Compton, or South Central, when the quake hit.

He slammed the trunk shut and spread the yellowed, torn street map out on top of it. Calabasas was on the south-western edge of the San Fernando Valley, on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills.

There were two major freeways into the valley, the 101 over the Cahuenga Pass just five or ten miles north of downtown, or the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass, a good fifteen miles or twenty miles west. Between the two passes, there were three major canyon roads that snaked over the Hollywood Hills.

The other option was to head due west to the beaches of Santa Monica and then follow the Pacific Coast Highway north to one of the canyon roads that cut through the Santa Monica Mountains. But that meant crossing the entire LA basin, which was the last thing Marty wanted to do.

He decided the quickest, safest way home was the way he'd come, taking the 101, better known as the Hollywood Freeway, northwest over the Cahuenga Pass into the valley.

That was assuming there were no major obstacles in his path. Which, of course, there would be. Toppled buildings, buckled roads, crumpled freeways.

But that wasn't what worried him.

It was the thousands of little obstacles. The people. The injured and the dead underneath it all. The earthquake's human debris.

Then there were the derelicts and gang-bangers, who he hoped would be too busy looting to pay attention to one man walking home.

He wouldn't look at anyone. He'd just hurry along. Gone before anyone noticed him.

Just keep walking. Across the city, over the hills, and along the valley, never stopping until he got to his front door, where his wife would be waiting, alive and well.

Simple. From point A to point B.

Not too complicated. No reason he couldn't do it. There were guys who walked across entire states in the frontier days. Or at least they did in the western novels his flunkies read and summarized for him.

Marty zipped up the bag and headed for the trucks and trailers to assemble his kit.

He was going home.

10:30 a.m. Tuesday

Marty emerged from the grip truck, ready to go, his bulging gym bag looped over his shoulders like a backpack.

He pulled a white paper dust mask over his nose and mouth, slipped on his Ray-bans, took a deep, filtered breath, and headed off.

It meant going past the rubble of the warehouse again. The surviving crewmembers were too intent on their work to notice Marty, which is what he was hoping. He diverted his gaze, afraid someone would see him watching and try to draft him into the hopeless enterprise.

The three bodies the surviving crewmembers had recovered so far were laid out on the cracked asphalt under the tent that was supposed to protect the caterer's junk food from the sun. It was amazing the tent was still standing. But the table had fallen, the donuts, candy, fruit, and drinks splattered on the street in a swath of crushed ice.

A woman Marty recognized as one of the hairdressers sobbed beside the body of Clarissa Blake, one of the twenty-something stars of the show. The hairdresser was soaking a napkin with Evian, trying to wipe the blood and dirt off Clarissa's unnaturally pale face, the only part of her celebrated body that was still identifiable. It was as if someone placed a perfect Clarissa Blake mask on a deflated inflatable girl. Thinking of it like that, it didn't seem real any more, just a grotesque rubber prop on a horror movie set.

Again, he glanced away quickly, not wanting to be drawn into the morbid scene or think too deeply about it. Clarissa Blake was dead, nothing Marty could do to change that. And bottled water was far too valuable now to be wasting on cleaning the dead. It could be days, maybe weeks, before drinking water was easy to come by.

The thought made Marty swoop down and grab a couple Evians off the ground, jamming them into his jacket pockets as he went. The little bottles were still cold.

Marty walked up the middle of Sante Fe Avenue, wanting to put as much distance between himself and anything that could collapse on him as possible. The most important thing now was to avoid tall buildings and power lines, tunnels and overpasses, staying out in the open as much as possible, even if it meant veering a mile or two off-course. It would be really stupid if he survived the quake only to get squashed by chunk of concrete two minutes later.

Marty didn't know downtown LA well; in fact, he probably hadn't been here more than half-a-dozen times in ten years, but he'd seen it from the sky, flying into LAX from New York or Hawaii. From above, the skyscrapers looked like a tangle of weeds breaking through a crack in a parking lot. It wouldn't be hard to keep away from them. He'd head north, cut across the Civic Center on 1st Street, then follow the course of the Hollywood Freeway back into the valley.

Having a solid plan, and a gym bag full of emergency supplies, made him feel in control of the situation. It was a relief to know that the shifting tectonic plates of the earth's crust could be tamed by clear thinking, bottled spring water, and a Thomas Brothers map.

There usually wasn't much traffic on Sante Fe any more, an industrial neighborhood with no more industry. So there were only a few cars on the street now, spread haphazardly along the roadway, banged-up Hot Wheels thrown on the floor by a bored child ready to play something else.

Marty approached a Crown Vic, resting on its side on a jagged slab of bulging asphalt, its wheels spinning slowly. The obese, middle-aged driver was still alive, belted into his seat and wide-eyed with shock, resting his head on the blood-speckled airbag like a pillow, listening to the radio.

"They're dead . . . they're all dead. There's fire everywhere. I can't get out. Harvey . . . he's burning. He's behind the glass and he's burning. He's all on fire. Oh, God. Oh, shit. If he doesn't stop banging against the glass, it's going to break! Stop! Can't you see it's cracking? Stop! Goddamn it, Harvey! Please!"

The driver didn't seem to hear it, or if he did, he was mistaking it for soothing music. Marty wasn't blessed with such blissful delusions. The terror was seeping out of the radio's speakers like smoke and he didn't want to breathe it.

He kept right on walking past the car, trying not to listen to the frantic newscaster and yet unable to stop himself.

"Oh God, it's fucking breaking! Oh God. Oh fuck. I don't want to die! Somebody help me!"

Marty quickened his pace, stumbling over cracks and rocks, until he couldn't hear the voice any more, the newscaster's pleading muffled by the sobbing, moaning, and cries of pain coming from a parking lot up ahead.

Several dozen workers were behind a wrought-iron fence topped with curls of razor wire, huddled as far as they could get from the building they'd just escaped, its pre-fab concrete walls caving in under a collapsed roof. They hugged each other, covered in plaster and gore, lost in their sorrow and fear.

Don't look, Marty told himself. Keep moving.

He knew there were going to be a lot more sights like this. Dioramas on a gruesome theme park ride. He couldn't let any of them get to him. The only person he had to care about was Beth. That was his moral imperative as a good husband.

So he was absolutely doing the right thing. Letting himself get distracted from his moral imperative by the misery of others would be the real sin.

Up ahead, the 4th Street bridge arched over Sante Fe Avenue on its way across the LA River to Boyle Heights. The concrete bridge was still standing, unlike its big sister two blocks south, but as Marty got closer, he could see it was severely cracked, raining a fine powder on the street. Perhaps it was only cosmetic damage, but it wasn't worth the risk.

Marty took the first side street that came along. It wasn't much wider than an alley, bordered by gutted, decomposing factories, and blocked mid-way through by an ugly car accident. A big-rig truck had driven over one of those boxy old Volvos, then rolled over and slammed through the wall of a derelict loading dock.

His best guess was that the two vehicles were about to pass one another in the instant before the quake and veered head-on at each other.

He stopped for a moment, worried, feeling beads of sweat roll down his back.

What was bothering him?

There was no fire, and if he hugged the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, he could slip past the accident easily and continue on to Alameda Street, where he was bound to see worse pile-ups than this.