Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  She looked away from them when she said that. Even the mayor had admitted that the force had been decimated, for many different reasons. It was no surprise to anyone there that evening.

  “These areas to the north, the ones in gray, we just don’t know. Northridge, Chatsworth, Reseda, Panorama City, Canoga Park, east of Glendale, anything south of the 105, we just don’t know.

  Here be monsters, Dave thought. It was what old mapmakers had often written in areas unexplored by humans. And some of those gray areas were half an hour’s drive away, in what he was coming to think of as “the old days.”

  “We’re trying to find out which roads are passable and which ones aren’t. These little Xs are places where there’s a gap too big to cross, or pavement too buckled, or a collapsed bridge or overpass. Most of the freeway overpasses held up, but enough of them didn’t that there isn’t a single freeway that doesn’t involve a detour,” Gomez said.

  “What would you say is the best way out of town?” Marie O’Brien asked.

  “We get asked that a lot. And we’re advising anyone who has fuel, or is up to a long trip on a bicycle, to leave. Everything is running short. So basically, you have the choice of hunkering down until help arrives, or trying to get out.

  “You don’t want to go east at all. Even if you make your way along the 10, or the 210, or the 60, you’re gonna end up in the desert. People have come back from that way, and they said they were not welcomed.

  “South…there’s quake damage down as far as Camp Pendleton. There are refugee camps in Oceanside and Escondido, but I don’t know if they’re getting food. The whole Southland is running short on food. Hell, the whole country for all I know.

  “To the west, forget about the Coast Highway. Half the houses in Malibu fell into the sea, and most of the highway with them. The 101 is a mess, at least as far out as Camarillo. You have to take surface streets to get anywhere.

  “North on the 5, some of the officers have gone as far as Santa Clarita. The CHP says there’s major landslides on the grapevine, from Magic Mountain on north. You could bike it or hike it, and maybe a Hummer could drive over some of it, but I can’t guarantee that.”

  She sighed, and straightened up. Dave had known some of what she had just told them, and some of it was new. He had been thinking of taking Interstate 5 north, but had wondered about the grapevine, the twisting, rising, and falling forty or fifty miles before you came down the last long slope and into the Central Valley. If food was being grown and harvested anywhere in California, he felt it would be there. But though the Escalade was called an off-road vehicle, he doubted its ability to traverse a serious landslide.

  “Bottom line, I can’t recommend any of the routes out of here. But I can’t recommend staying, either. They say they’re working on the rail lines, but it might be a month or two before they get them straightened out enough to carry a big load of food. And I don’t even know if anyone will be sending big loads of food.”

  There it was again. The bleak assessment. Los Angeles was on its own, the rest of America had its own problems. Angelenos weren’t likely to be welcomed anywhere else, and they weren’t going to be able to hold out on their own indefinitely with no power, no gas, little water, and no food coming in.

  Ferguson had finished filling out the forms for Daniels and joined the others looking at the maps. Daniels took over with the second one. It was on a much smaller scale, also mimeographed, traced from a terrain map downloaded from Google before Google ceased to exist, along with the Internet. The map showed the hills north of Sunset, between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon, and as far north as Mulholland. They had marked it into seven distinct areas, each more or less cut off from the other by ridges.

  “The boundaries are clear-cut here in the hills,” Daniels said. “They’re also more defensible than the areas down on the flatlands. Our beat is west of the 101. This is what we know. There’s the Hollywood Bowl area, then Runyon Canyon and Nichols Canyon. Three different areas on Laurel Canyon, at least as far up as we’ve gone. Lower Mount Olympus and Upper Mount Olympus, then Willow Glen and Laurel Pass.”

  He filled them in on the state of organization and readiness the two of them had been able to determine by talking to the residents and doing a cursory examination of their preparations for defense and survival.

  “These areas marked in orange are largely burned-out. The areas in red are major landslides.”

  There was a lot of orange on the map, and quite a bit of red.

  “We’re asking residents to make a more complete survey. What we’d like you to do is make a map and show where there were fires, what houses slid down the hill, and where roads are broken.”

  The officers asked them more questions about Doheny. Dave told them what he knew about the Wonderland Drive area, which the officers hadn’t visited yet.

  Dave watched them cycle down to Sunset. He realized they represented the first signs of authority any of them had seen since the quake, six days ago. It wasn’t much, but it was good to know that at least a remnant of the city’s political infrastructure still existed, and that it was trying to pull itself together.

  Over the next week Doheny Drive had a few visitors, but none that came to stay.

  A thick yellow line had been painted on the pavement, and a sign had been painted on a big piece of plywood and nailed to a tree near the bottom of the hill, about a hundred yards north of Sunset, positioned so that when someone reached it the barricade and armed guard were visible:

  THIS IS A DEFENDED COMMUNITY

  NO ACCESS TO THE VALLEY FROM HERE

  LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS AND APPROACH WITH YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR. STOP AT THE YELLOW LINE. STATE YOUR BUSINESS. UNLESS YOU HAVE FRIENDS HERE WHO WILL VOUCH FOR YOU, YOU WILL NOT BE ADMITTED. WE HAVE NO FOOD OR WATER TO OFFER YOU. PLEASE MOVE ALONG. WE WILL FIRE ONLY ONE WARNING SHOT.

  Dave thought the warning shot business was a bit overboard, but then he learned that some had suggested much more forceful wording, the least of which was to not bother with the “please.” One hothead wanted the sign to read simply INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT. He was overruled when others pointed out that many people on Doheny had friends or relatives they still hoped to see. Since the only real threat they had faced so far had been the bikers high above them, who had been unlikely to come down in any case, even if Dave had not fired on them, it was agreed that the Doheny Militia should not be trigger-happy.

  One of the sets of visitors at the end of the road had been bikers, too, seven of them on noisy Harleys, four men and three women on back. They wore some sort of club colors in a script too baroque for anyone who saw them to decipher. Dave hadn’t been there that day. As it was told to him later, they were filthy, bearded, in sleeveless denim, leather pants, and thick butt-kicking boots, with lengths of chain wrapped around their waists, large handguns stuck into belts and holsters, and shotguns and rifles attached to their bikes. One of them had a bloody bandage around his head.

  They pulled up right on the yellow line and sat there, gunning their engines contemptuously, flaunting the fact that they seemed to have all the gasoline they needed. One of them started to draw a rifle from an improvised scabbard over his handlebars. One of the defenders fired a shot into the air.

  “Well, it was in the air,” he later told Dave. “At least a foot over their heads. I think they would have heard the bullet go by.”

  They didn’t flee like scared rabbits—they were far too macho for that—but after letting his rifle slip back into place and gunning his engine a few more times and flipping the bird, the leader made a wide turn back down Doheny.

  “We’ll be back,” one of them shouted, trying to sound like the Terminator. That prompted a volley of shots not aimed in the air, none of which hit anything but a palm tree.

  Later, at the postmortem, there was good news and bad news. Everyone was pleased that their radio alarm system seemed to have worked well. Armed reinforcements on bicycles had arrived at the barricade only a moment after th
e gang had fled, which was pretty good time.

  On the other hand…

  “If you guys were aiming,” Ferguson said when he heard about it later, “we are badly in need of some target practice. But we can’t waste the ammo.”

  Luckily, it turned out there was a solution. A canvass of the neighborhood turned up quite a few air rifles, pellet guns, and even a couple paintball guns. There were plenty of projectiles for all these toys, some of them recoverable and reusable. So a practice range was established on a straight stretch of street with targets at fixed distances. Soon just about everybody was banging away every chance they got.

  No one with any sense thought that firing BBs was going to turn them into stone killers, but it did improve their aim. Everyone also got to fire a certain number of real rounds from real rifles and shotguns as well, to show them what difference in noise and recoil to expect if it came to using serious weapons.

  For the next few nights the number of guards at the barricade was increased, and extra patrols were assigned to walk the streets to guard against any sneak attack. But the biker boss’s boast was an empty one. They never saw them again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  All during that week, Dave saw others at the barricades, but no one who posed any threat. They were refugees in their own city, people with no place to go, but going anyway because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. Most often it was a single man, on a bicycle, or pushing a shopping cart, or on foot with a backpack or shopping bags. Some of them were armed, and some weren’t. Since the grocery stores had emptied out early in the crisis, they were probably breaking into unoccupied homes for the meager leavings of those who had gone elsewhere or never made it back to their homes because of the previous catastrophe of eruption and fire, or had been stranded elsewhere due to the vagaries of the earthquake, or had simply died.

  No one’s backpack bulged. The shopping carts might contain a few battered cans or bottles of water or soda. One man had a shopping cart that was half-full of oranges. Dave knew that most of the citrus trees that grew in Los Angeles yielded fruit that was dry and all but tasteless, but he supposed sucking on one would be better than nothing.

  Some of the people just paused and looked forlornly up the street at what they probably presumed was plenty. After all, the people up in the hills were rich, weren’t they? Probably still had servants, and gardeners coming in to trim the plants. Probably had gasoline and generators and Internet service and cable TV.

  Others ventured as far as the yellow line. Dave wasn’t sure why. None of them looked as if they expected charity any longer. The resentment showed in some faces; others seemed simply resigned, all but defeated.

  “Do you know anyplace where a man and his family can get something to eat?” one man asked. “My kids haven’t eaten in two days.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said. “I saw a large soup kitchen at the Staples Center. You might try there.”

  The man’s face brightened for a moment.

  “When was this?”

  “A while ago,” Dave admitted.

  “Well, I was by there right after the earthquake, and there was nobody handing out food. Part of the Convention Center collapsed and a lot of people were killed. They were hauling out bodies. Everybody else was leaving.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “You wouldn’t have…”

  “I have my own family to provide for. No matter what you might think, we don’t have a lot of food here, either. I’m…” He realized he could only say he was sorry so many times, and it was already starting to sound hollow. The man nodded and turned away, having expected no other answer.

  And what he said was true, mostly. Dave himself still had quite a bit of food stored away, and he assumed some others did, too. But it was becoming apparent that many people were running out. You could see it in the looks on people’s faces. Neighbors were beginning to eye each other with looks of speculation, or even of suspicion. You could practically read their thoughts by the way they regarded you.

  He doesn’t look like he’s missing any meals. I wonder how much he has stored away, when all we have is a few miserable cans?

  Karen had taken stock, done some calculations, and cut everyone’s rations down to what was needed to keep them healthy. It was never as much as they wanted. Dave was hungry most of the time and he knew everyone else was, too.

  He could see it was tearing Jenna up, having brought nothing at all to the table, to be eating their food. But Karen had tried to make it clear to her that they regarded her as family, and it was share and share alike.

  No one had thus far approached Dave about food. So far as he knew, no one was discussing the issue at all, but he didn’t think that would last. Sooner or later, as hunger, weakness, and malnutrition began to bite, the people of Doheny Drive would have to face what it meant that some people had food, and some didn’t. He was expecting someone to propose pooling all their food, and he expected that person would be a man or woman whose family had nothing left.

  He was dreading that moment, and he felt sure many of his neighbors were, too.

  Hard as it was to see the desperate men approach and look up the street, it was much harder when a whole family came by.

  Dave missed that experience for a while, but everyone on guard duty who had been there and had to turn a family away could talk of little else for days afterward. A few affected a hard-nosed attitude.

  “I’m looking out for my family. He should have looked out for his.”

  Most of them stopped talking that way when they saw the looks on the faces of the others who had confronted families with children. These people had haunted eyes, and some of them were prone to burst into tears without warning. The strain on everyone had been immense for a long time, and emotions were raw and on the surface.

  Finally, at the end of the week, Dave found out what it was like. They came an hour or so before sunset.

  There were five of them. A father, a mother, and three young children, two boys around eight and ten, and a girl of five or six. They were small people, Hispanic, of Mexican heritage but speaking English without accents. They could have been illegals who had been in the U.S. for a long time, or they could have been fifth-generation American…and at this point, who cared? Nobody was going to ask for a passport or a green card. To Dave, the only important thing about them was that they were hungry.

  The mother was dark and pretty, but there were circles under her eyes. The father was broad-shouldered, like so many Hispanic Angelenos, and probably had some Indian blood. The family had three grocery carts that looked as if they contained all their worldly possessions. There were sleeping bags and tarps that Dave could see, clothes, a box of laundry detergent, several plastic storage containers.

  The man spoke with his wife, then came slowly up the street and stopped at the yellow line. He took off the straw hat he was wearing and held it at his side.

  “I would like to speak to Mr. Alfred Charbonneau, please,” he said.

  Dave was on duty with Herman Patterson and Marie O’Brien. He looked at Herman, who shrugged and shook his head.

  “You know Mr. Charbonneau?” Dave called out.

  “I work for him. My name is Richard Vega and I have a landscaping business. Mr. Charbonneau lives on Oriole Way. He has a wife, Gretchen, and two teenage sons, Marty and Al. Could you see if they are home?”

  “I don’t know them,” Marie said. She lived on Doheny, not very far from where they were standing.

  “I’ll go check at Ferguson’s,” Herman said. He was referring to the neighborhood roster that had been compiled.

  “We’re sending for him,” Dave told Mr. Vega. The man nodded, then wiped his brow with a cloth that had once been white. He gestured to his family, who slowly pushed their carts up the gentle slope to the curb beyond the yellow line. They all sat down to wait. After a few minutes Vega spoke up.

  “I hate to ask you for anything,” he said, “but can you s
pare some water? We drank the last of ours a few hours ago.”

  Marie and Dave looked at each other. Their instructions had been clear: No one was to be allowed to approach the barricade unless someone on the other side vouched for them, and no one on the inside was to cross in the other direction.

  “The hell with it,” Dave said. He opened a cooler that held three one-gallon milk jugs of water taken from someone’s pool that morning. There were also two cans of strawberry soda. Dave didn’t know where they had come from. He picked up one of the milk jugs and started toward the small gap in the barricade, then turned around and took one of the soft drinks, too. If the owner griped later, he would replace them.

  Mr. Vega rose to accept the water, but couldn’t take his eyes off the soda can.

  “I’m afraid none of it is cold,” Dave said.

  “It’s been a while since we’ve seen ice…Thank you, sir. We are much obliged.” He cracked the top of the can, and gestured to his children. They rose solemnly, staring at the can of pop.

  “One sip at a time,” their father said. “We share, remember?”

  “Yes, Father,” the oldest boy said, and handed the drink to his little sister. Dave had to turn away. He was choked up. He didn’t like himself very much at that moment, and he hated what had happened to him. What had happened to them all. What was still happening, with no end in sight.

  They waited in the shade for a while, nobody saying anything. The children made the soda last, but all too soon it was gone. They drank some water.

  When Herman returned he was shaking his head.

  “The Charbonneaus are gone. There’s no contact information by their names, so they must have pulled out before the quake.”

  Vega was on his feet, and now he looked down at his shoes. He took a deep breath, and nodded. It seemed to take an effort to lift his eyes again.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “We would have got out, too, if we had a place to go. I was just hoping…Well. I guess we’ll move on.”