Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  “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 for
mation, 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.”

  They set up a workshop right there in the parking lot. Word got out and a lot of people showed up to see the burners built from items scrounged from hardware stores and warehouses. By the end of the third day they had equipped half a dozen city trucks with burners, and a lot of people had gone to their homes with the intent of building their own.

  There was a water truck that came by every day, and they refilled their big tank and all the empty plastic jugs and bottles, which they had saved. Ranger got his fill of water every day, and had plenty of places to forage.

  While Mark and Lisa were engaged in their own specialties, everyone else circulated through the impromptu trailer park and talked to people. One of the first things they learned was the reason why the camp was here in this particular parking lot and not somewhere else. It was because of the chicken dinners.

  Knott’s Berry Farm had originally been just what the name said: a place where boysenberries were raised and sold. In the 1930s Mrs. Knott started serving chicken dinners to travelers on the main road from Los Angeles to Orange County. It grew from there into an entertainment complex rivaling Disneyland, but they still served their signature chicken dinners, around four thousand of them every day. Naturally, they always had a lot of chickens on hand.

  When the park was closed because few people were able to get to it anymore, chickens kept arriving. The Knott’s management brought in freezer trucks to store the excess. When the gasoline ran out they found solar generators to keep the motors running. And when things got critical, when people began to run out of food, they opened a soup kitchen.

  It was free. They didn’t serve chicken dinners and what they did serve would certainly have horrified Mrs. Knott, but it was a nutritious—if rather thin—chicken soup that, on many days, was all the patrons would have to eat that day.

  As the crisis dragged on many people left, and the cooks made less soup each day, and put less chicken in it, trying to stretch it out until help arrived. Now that the bleak consensus was that help might never arrive, it was about as thin as it could be and still be called chicken soup, but they were still serving it. No one knew how much chicken was still in the freezers or how much flour and dried vegetables were in the larder to make the noodles and other ingredients that went into it, and none of the cooks would say, but every day they were feeding around five hundred, most of them from the parking lot.

  Dave and Karen and Addison went across the street to the evening meal the first day. They hadn’t planned on eating since they still had their own food, but everyone insisted. So they sat at picnic tables and chowed down on what everyone was calling “Knott’s Not-So-Famous Chicken Soup” and one bread roll each, no butter. They scoured their bowls like everyone else, and helped with the washing afterward. It was a satisfying meal, and actually surprisingly tasty. There was no shortage of spices. Just a pinch or two in the vats made all the difference.

  During the meal they questioned their neighbors about their experiences since the crisis began, since the quake, since the fire. There were heartbreaking stories, but these people had for the most part not been hit as hard by the quake as the people farther north. The fire had missed them.

  As for intelligence in the military sense, there was not a lot of that floating around the campground. It didn’t surprise him, because everyone was living with the same limitation: the great difficulty of traveling much farther than you could pedal on a bicycle in a day. Those who traveled farther seldom came back to report on what they had seen.

  Radio was slowly coming back on the air, but the information it broadcast was highly suspect, often contradictory, and frequently political. No one trusted the government broadcasts. They had heard things they knew to be untrue, and if they’ll lie about one thing, why not lie about others? The military evacuation was being promoted like a free trip to the Bahamas. Milk and honey—or at least rice and beans—were promised at the end of the journey. All the information they had to the contrary was the word of two deserting sailors…and Dave trusted them much more than he did the government propaganda.

  The people in the parking lot felt the same way. Some of them listened to commentators with various points of view. Radio preachers were there, and they were a happy bunch, reminding listeners that all the recent travails were the result of human sin, that the apocalypse was in hand, already begun, so repent. And by the way, I told you so.

  Right-wingers discovered a new conspiracy every day. Some of them might even be accurate, at least so far as the government had covered it all up until it was too late to do anything about it. As for the bacterium itself, it came from Russia, from China, from Al Qaeda, from the Jews, from the commies. Or from our own government. No one doubted that the bug had been deliberately released, and a thousand explanations for why someone thought that was a good idea were advanced, all fairly loony. The notion that it was all the prelude to an alien invasion was gaining traction, and there was much debate about where the aliens would be coming from.

  The left wing wasn’t much better. Plenty of loonies there, too. The dominant paradigm was that the whole thing had been planned and carried out by the oil companies. Dave hadn’t understood why Big Oil should do such a thing until he heard part two of the argument. The oil companies had been secretly buying up all the world’s coal for at least a decade, against the time when the oil ran out, which everyone agreed was inevitable, disagreeing only on the date. True? Bullshit? Who knew? If they had been involved, it had probably been a big bummer when the markets not only crashed but were obliterated, making all their stocks worthless.

  Another story from the far left was that this was Mother Nature, the planet itself, getting revenge for all the damage humanity had inflicted on it. Dave thought he would have to smoke a lot of dope to believe that one, but it was a popular theory.

  There were so many low-power radio stations coming back on the air, and so much misinformation and so many conspiracy theories that it all became essentially worthless. Word of mouth was more reliable, in that most people had no reason to lie about what they had seen with their own eyes, but the trouble was almost no one had seen anything farther away than three or four miles. They got a lot of information about towns to the north, very little from the south, where they were going.

  After their meal, Dave and Karen and Addison took a walk through the park.

  The last time they had been there was a little over a year ago, with several of Addison’s friends. They had spent the day riding the roller coasters. Karen went with them on most of them, but Dave had stayed on the ground. He had no fear of heights, and no problem with speed, but the twists and turns did him in.

  That day Knott’s was a sad place to see. It was not deserted, since some of the children from the camp pla
yed there under the supervision of a volunteer, but the presence of so few children somehow made it even more spooky. Addison was on Ranger and rode him on ahead, as they had been assured the park was safe. Dave and Karen followed more slowly.

  “The rides didn’t do so bad in the quake,” Karen said. “I thought they’d all be on the ground. Big metal pretzels that somebody stepped on.”

  “I think it’s a great sign. The farther we get from Hollywood, the less damage we’re seeing. I think if we make it to San Diego, the damage might be minor.”

  “I wonder how long it will be before anyone can come to a place like this again?”

  “Probably about the same time there’s a need for sitcom writers again.”

  Karen sighed, then kissed him.

  “Are you planning to be a farmer?”

  “Probably. I’m planning to do absolutely anything that needs doing, wherever we settle. I expect that will be stoop labor, planting and harvesting corn or wheat, picking apples. Whatever. I don’t expect to be good at it at first. But I’ll learn.”

  “And I guess I’ll have to learn to be a farmer’s wife.”

  “Wife, hell. You’ll be a farmer, too. When Ranger gets tired of pulling the plow, I expect I’ll just hook up you and Addison.”

  She punched him, then laughed and kissed him again.

  “Whatever it takes,” she said.

  “Whatever it takes.”

  From the first day they arrived the people in the caravan had noticed people coughing and blowing their noses. After Lisa examined them, she told Bob it didn’t take a doctor to make the diagnosis.

  “Headache, sore muscles, chills, extreme tiredness, cough, runny nose…one girl was running a temperature of 103. It’s the flu.”

  On the last day of their stay, four of them came down with the flu. They were Sandra and—not to be outdone by her twin—Olivia, Emily, and Teddy. As they were departing the next morning Bob was sitting with his wife in the bus. He mopped her feverish brow with a damp cloth.

  “Well,” he said, “look on the bright side. It isn’t cholera.”