Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  If you weren’t talking about friends, you could always discuss the television shows or movies you had just seen. That had been popular watercooler talk for a lot longer than any of them had been alive. Now not only were there no new shows to discuss, there were probably very few watercoolers to gather around.

  And what of the Internet? It had gradually taken over a large part of Dave’s life, as it had so many others’. That had been how he got most of his information. He had stopped subscribing to the Los Angeles Times, and seldom watched TV news unless it was a breaking news story, like 9/11 or the explosion of the Doheny oil field.

  In recent years television, telephones, computers, both desktop and handheld, had been merging into one cybernetic colossus that so far didn’t even really have a name. Cyberspace? Maybe, since more and more of everyone’s lives were being lived virtually, from social networks to online games to things Dave knew he had probably never even heard of. It was all gone, swept away in a matter of weeks.

  Dave had noticed that Addison, Elyse, Nigel, Sandra, and Olivia sometimes gathered together in a teenage huddle. He had seen them get out their defunct cell phones and look at them morosely for a few seconds, as if ready to pounce with their thumbs if even one reception bar showed up. If there was even one cell tower out there still operating, they would instantly try to call or text their friends, people they hadn’t seen or talked to in weeks.

  He remembered that shortly after the cell phones stopped working Addison had gone through a grouchy few days, completely unlike her usual positive disposition. He realized she had been going through a withdrawal very much as if she had been taking an addictive drug. And he recalled, ruefully, that he had felt some of the effects himself when his PDA was no longer able to interact with other machines around the world. He had been addicted, too, but he thought it was nothing like what the teens were feeling. He could remember a time when there had been no cell phones, no personal computers, no social networks. A world without them was imaginable to him. To them…well, they had grown up in a world where all these things were taken for granted.

  Dave brought this up—what do we talk about now that all our usual sources of entertainment and distraction are gone?—and that itself became a topic of conversation for a while. The younger ones especially seemed glad to bitch and moan for a while about how much they missed their phones and computers and the wide world they opened to them. But it wasn’t the loss of the instruments themselves that troubled them. It was the sense of connectedness, and more importantly, those they had been connected to. None of the children had been in contact with most of their friends for weeks or months. Olivia soon broke down in tears as she recalled all the good friends she had been unable to talk to, or even find out if they were dead or alive. Nigel just stared at the ground and looked bitter, as if he blamed the adults present for what they had done to his world.

  And why not? It certainly hadn’t been Nigel’s fault. The only consolation Dave could find was to realize that for as long as he could remember, and probably for a long time before, children had been bitching about how their parents had screwed up the world. He recalled how the Boomers were bitter at the nuclear world the previous generation had made for them, and his own frustration, as a child of Boomers, at just how screwed up those goddamn egotistic sixties hippies had made everything.

  Dave’s heart went out to them. He recalled how important his friends had been to him at their age, how badly he had missed some of them when, at a slightly younger age, he had been sent off to camp in the days before every child had their own pocket communicator, like in Star Trek. His parents had given him a phone card, but who was he going to call? Many of his friends had been out of town for the summer, too. And if he did call them, what would he say at long-distance rates? They would call him a pussy or a homo for calling up to say he missed them. These teenagers around him phoned and texted constantly, and they never seemed to have an awkward adolescent lack of words.

  Why, these kids today just don’t know how good they have it!

  Dave smiled at himself, thinking he could have made a pretty good episode of his former sitcom out of some of that. The old man realizing he was saying the same things his father had, and his father before him. I’m an old fogy, he realized.

  “So what did people do before electricity, Mom?” Addison asked, with a sly grin. Karen elbowed her.

  “Well after we got all the chores done—like plowing the south forty; we pulled the plow ourselves, you understand, we were too poor to afford a mule—we gathered around the windup gramophone in the parlor and listened to Edison cylinders all night.”

  Bob had to explain what an Edison cylinder was. “Not from personal experience, you understand. We were too poor for that. No, we got out the fiddle and the washtub and the harmonica and had us a hootenanny in the hayloft. Playin’ that old devil music, ragtime and Dixieland.”

  Mark leaped to his feet and grabbed Rachel’s hand and started a wild impromptu country dance with much foot stomping and swinging his partner around. Soon the others were clapping along until they collapsed against each other, laughing and sweating. There was applause and laughter.

  “Seriously, folks,” Gordon said, when it had died down, “the Victorians had a thousand ways to amuse themselves. There would be a piano, most likely, or if you were poor there were other instruments. Many, many people learned to play. Before the record player really took off the main thing they sold in music stores was instruments and sheet music for the piano. People were expected to hone some talent, and it didn’t have to be music. You could learn to recite some famous bit of poetry, or passages from Shakespeare or the classics. There were amateur theatricals, and tableaux, where you would dress up in costumes and pose. And, of course, card games. Anyone for whist?”

  “Did we bring a Scrabble board?” Lisa said. “I’m a killer Scrabble player.”

  “No, but it shouldn’t be hard to make one,” Emily said.

  “Or people told stories,” Gordon went on. “I don’t know if they made them up or memorized or retold old classics, probably some of both.”

  “Anybody know any good stories?”

  “None really suitable for children,” Dave said. Addison threw a stick at him.

  “There’s always reading, of course,” Emily said.

  “I’m all in favor of reading, but it’s not real social,” Elyse said.

  “I was speaking of reading aloud.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Mark said, suddenly enthusiastic. “I remember you reading to me when I was little. I’d love for you to do it again.”

  “Which would you prefer, Green Eggs and Ham or Hop on Pop?”

  “C’mon, Mom, I’m all grown-up now. I was thinking of The Little Engine That Could. That, or Lolita.”

  It turned out there was some enthusiasm for a group reading. Even those who had been dubious at first soon gathered around when it actually began.

  Much of Bob and Emily’s library had been ruined by the earthquake and flood, but of those books that had remained on the shelves or out of the water Emily had insisted on selecting some of the very best and bringing them along. There were five boxes of them, and they had been arranged along one side of the school bus where Solomon and Taylor slept, as an extra layer of protection in case they encountered weapons high-powered enough to shoot through the steel plate.

  Books could stop bullets. Though he hated the thought of books being destroyed, there was something in that notion that Dave liked.

  Emily went into the bus and came out with half a dozen books, which she laid on the table and let people walk by and examine. Then they voted, and the majority favored To Kill a Mockingbird. All the adults and Addison had read it, but the other teens hadn’t and no one had any problem with hearing it again.

  Emily opened it and began to read.

  “ ‘When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow…’ ”

  By the time night fell they were all gathered around the
small fire, even those who hadn’t been interested in the reading at first.

  Emily read for half an hour and then went off to help prepare the evening meal. Gordon took over, and then passed the book on. They listened while they ate, and until a little past sundown. Even then, many of them wanted it to go on into the night, especially Sandra and Olivia, and even Nigel.

  That night in their tent Dave and Karen made love quietly, and then lay in each other’s arms.

  “This is the best day I remember in a long time,” she said.

  “Weeks, at least,” he said, and she laughed.

  “I know. It’s hard to remember sometimes that this has all been going on for only a few months. And the worst of it a lot less that that.”

  “Our days are more full. Full of things that have real meaning. That’s part of it. It’s getting hard to remember how worried I was about writing that screenplay.”

  “Everything seems unimportant now, except you and Addison and the rest of our extended family.”

  “How did we lose that? Not as a couple, we’ve talked about that. As a civilization? As a culture? Most of us spent most of our time doing things that really didn’t do all that much to improve the world.”

  “Art is important, darling.”

  “Not the ‘art’ I created. ’Fess up. Did you like the show?”

  “It was funny at first.”

  “Most pilots are funny. But where do you go from there? We milked the same jokes for years.”

  “Lots of people laughed.”

  “They laughed at The Beverly Hillbillies, too. I can see it now, on my headstone: HE WAS ALMOST AS FUNNY AS GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.”

  That got a laugh out of her.

  “Well, don’t forget it kept us in groceries for many years.”

  “Yeah, and robbed me of a lot of time seeing my daughter grow up.”

  “And spoiled me rotten. Would you have preferred to be an insurance agent?”

  “No. But I wish I’d written something more important.”

  “Laughter is important. And your life isn’t over. Scoff if you want, but people are still going to need art.”

  “But maybe not in movies or television.”

  “Sure they will. The world’s not over. Civilization isn’t over. We’ll scramble back. It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but we will.”

  “I’m willing to work.”

  “And anyway, if there are no more movies or television, you can write a book.”

  “I can, can’t I? I think I might like that.”

  For the next week they followed the fire, and finally came out of the burned area in Anaheim, about a mile north of Disneyland.

  In that time they did not see another living human being. They did find a lot more dead ones, but nothing like there had been in the Coliseum. The corpses were scattered here and there, usually singly but sometimes in small groups. All were burned beyond recognition, and all of them were starting to smell. They announced their presence from a block away.

  Once more, they did not have the time or energy—or after a few days, even the inclination—to bury them. If the dead were on the sidewalk, the caravan usually just drove on by, but they had not become so hardened that they felt good about leaving them lying in the middle of the street. So the adults took turns pulling them to the sidewalk and, sometimes, if a pile of ashes and embers was handy, shoveling a little of that over them to at least conceal their awful, incinerated nakedness.

  Addison and Elyse offered to take their turns, but it was halfhearted, and neither argued when their parents gently told them no. Sandra and Olivia did not volunteer, and Sandra could not even look at the bodies without being sick. But Nigel insisted, and got his way. Dave was sure it was a macho thing, feeling his manhood was at risk if he joined the girls on the sidelines. He had no problem with that, but saw that the boy was very quiet for a long time after his turn had come and gone. Luckily, the dead were not so numerous that anyone was likely to have to take removal detail more than once a day.

  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?”