Slow Apocalypse

by John Varley

  Dave was part of the party that moved the bodies. He doubted that any of these men had been good men before the disaster, was sure that most if not all had been violent before. But he had killed some of them. He would never know just how many, and didn’t want to know, but he couldn’t just leave them lying in the road, and he couldn’t let others clean up his mess. He joined Mark and Bob and they ventured once more beyond the relative safety of the bus.

  They approached each body with caution, weapons pointing at them. It turned out there were nine, not including the one Dave had seen falling off the slope on the side of the road. They never found him.

  All but one of them were dead. They pulled them to the side of the road and behind some shrubs. Mark had to pause for a moment to throw up; one of the bodies didn’t have much of a head left, and then there was the one Dave had thought of as the screamer, who was almost cut in half.

  They came last to the one still living. He was able to raise his head as they approached, and he held his hands out to his sides to show he was not armed.

  “You fuckers,” he said, weakly. “You shot me.”

  “Where are you hit, son?” Bob asked him.

  “I’m gut-shot, you bastard. My boys will get you for that.”

  “I don’t think you’re in a very good position for making threats,” Bob said. “How many of you are there?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Do you want to live?”

  The man looked up at them uncertainly, then he was hit by a spasm of sharp pain. He turned onto his side and curled into a fetal position. Dave trained the flashlight down at him and looked closer.

  “He’s got a real big wound there. I don’t think he’ll make it.”

  “Damn you,” the man moaned. “there’s a hospital down there at the lake. You got to get me to it.”

  “We can’t,” Mark said. “We won’t move at night. We’re worried there are more of your boys down that road.”

  “Listen, it looks like most of us are dead. There was only three women stayed behind, at a clubhouse a mile down the road. I don’t know how many you killed…”

  “Nine,” Bob said. Not counting you.”

  “Nine? Fuck! How did you—”

  “Because you are stupid,” Dave said, suddenly angry at this pathetic specimen. “Come on, guys, we’ve got to get him back to Lisa. What’s your name?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Well, sorry, but we don’t have a stretcher and we can’t spend any more time out here in case your friends come back. So we’ll have to pick you up.”

  Dave took his feet and Bob and Mark each lifted him under an arm. The man howled, then lapsed into rapid panting. It looked like he had lost consciousness.

  Lisa examined him quickly, and shook her head.

  “There’s very little I can do for him.”

  “He said there was a hospital down there.”

  “Yeah? Well, if we move him tonight—”

  “He also said they had a clubhouse down the road,” Mark said. “There’s no way we’re going to drive past that tonight.”

  Lisa was obviously frustrated, but had grown used to that, to some extent. As a doctor she was only interested in saving lives, it didn’t matter whose life it was. But she couldn’t argue that they should risk all of their lives to save this man, who had tried to kill them.

  In the morning they got an early start, since no one had slept. They fired up their burners, and as they were warming up Mark set out on one of the scooters to scout ahead. He reported back that the clubhouse the injured man had spoken of appeared to be a tavern, a small building perched on the edge of the cliff overlooking the lake. The views from inside must be spectacular, he said, but he had not approached it closely.

  “I didn’t see any activity. No motorcycles parked outside. No cars, no people, no nothing. I think they’ve split.”

  “We’ll be careful anyway,” Bob said.

  “Naturally.”

  They set out, the bus in the lead, the truck following with Lisa and the wounded man in the back, Addison bringing up the rear on her horse.

  There was no sign on the place. It was an uninteresting little concrete-block building with few windows on the street side. There was a large gravel parking lot, with nothing in it but an overflowing Dumpster.

  “What do you think?” Bob asked Dave. “Drive on by? It doesn’t look like they have any way to chase us.”

  “They could get a Harley through those doors. I think we need to check it out. I don’t want anybody coming up on us from behind.” Dave was uneasy about Addison’s riding behind them. Now that they had cleared the way, others could make it across the mountains in cars.

  “You’re right. Let’s you and me do it.”

  They approached from the side that had no windows. Gordon, on the roof of the bus, had his sights trained the front door. They kicked the door open. Bob peered into a single big room that had been trashed as thoroughly as if a frat party had been going on for a year. Open cans had been kicked into corners. Liquor bottles had been smashed. Filthy sleeping bags were crumpled on the floor and on the bar.

  There was someone lying on his back on one of the tables. Dave aimed the shotgun at him as he walked up, but there was no need. The table and the floor around him were covered in dried blood.

  “He hasn’t been dead long,” Bob suggested.

  “Wounded last night, I’ll bet. Bled out.”

  A rat poked his nose out of a clutter of empty cans and sniffed the air. Dave looked away. And in the corner behind him he saw a large stack of wooden cargo flats in shrink wrap, with cans of food visible. There were hundreds of cans, maybe a thousand, things like corned beef hash, Spaghetti-Os, and fruit cocktail.

  “They didn’t attack us because they were hungry,” Dave said. “They’ve been eating well.”

  “You think they stocked up before the stores ran out, or robbed?”

  “My guess would be robbery. It would be their style.”

  “You want to take any of this?”

  “I’m tempted, but I’m still worried about them coming back. And, come to think of it, wouldn’t it be looting?”

  Bob looked away, then back, with a sheepish expression.

  “I’m ashamed of myself. I guess it’s easy to get into the attitude of ‘If it ain’t nailed down, it’s mine.’ ”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I thought if it, too. Looting the looters, that doesn’t sound all that bad to me.”

  “Little doubt of that.”

  “And furthermore, if we were out of food, I’d take every can.”

  They stepped out of the building and gave the all clear. Lisa had been watching. She got down from the back of the truck and walked toward them.

  “He just died,” she told them.

  They didn’t spend a lot of time mourning the dead biker, but Dave wished he had at least told them his name.

  “Do we want to leave him here, or take him to the bottom of the hill?” she asked.

  “I’d say here. There’s another body inside.”

  The three of them wrestled the body through the doors and, kicking aside the layers of trash, arranged him on a table next to what they presumed was one of his buddies. Lisa looked around at the boxes of food, and they could see her struggling with the same problem they had talked about. In the end she faced her father.

  “Did you come across any medical supplies? Any liquor?”

  “We didn’t think to look.”

  So they rummaged around. They didn’t find any bandages, not even a Band-Aid, but they did find a stash of prescription pills, many of which Lisa could use, and a box of military syringes full of morphine. Lisa almost jumped up and down in delight. She insisted they take all of it, and no one had the slightest objection. She was almost as happy to find an unopened case of half-gallon bottles of vodka, and another of Scotch.

  “Absolut and Glenfiddich,” Bob said, admiringly holding up a bottle.
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  “Is that good?”

  “They stole only the very best, my darling daughter.”

  “Well, you won’t get to drink any of it unless I come across a whole lot of regular alcohol. Vodka should sterilize a wound nicely.”

  “All I ask is that you pass the Scotch under my nose once a day,” Bob said. “And to be allowed to gaze at the bottles.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  They started out again, steadily down the winding road. This time Dave and Karen were in the lead, on their scooters. Addison was allowed to follow on Ranger as long as she kept around five hundred yards between herself and her parents. They took it slowly, particularly through the cuts that had been blasted through the hills, where the road narrowed considerably into perfect spots for an ambush. There were a few driveways off to the right. All of them were blocked with chains or cars, but they saw no people. Then, for a mile or more, there was nothing but the road and the drop-off.

  They came to a turn that was not a hairpin, but a long circle that took them through 180 degrees. They were getting down to the level of the lake. There were trees on each side of them, and then a walled community with just the tops of the roofs visible on the other side.

  Ahead of them, a roadblock.

  Concrete road dividers had been placed across the road so that it was possible to drive through them in a zigzag pattern, but only at about five miles per hour. While you did that police would be firing on you from concrete-and-sandbag bunkers on each side of the road. A large sign warned that remote control mines were embedded in the roadway. There were two police cars behind the barrier, and a large tent.

  “I think we’ll wait right here until the others catch up with us,” Dave said.

  “Good idea.” They shut off their motors and rested the scooters on the kickstands. Karen removed her helmet and stood looking at the barrier ahead.

  “That’s what we have to get through,” she said.

  “Doesn’t look exactly like a rolled-out red carpet, does it?”

  “They have to take us, David. We have nowhere else to go.”

  “Then we better make ourselves irresistible.”

  Two police and three civilians were behind the concrete barriers, holding their weapons. Addison had caught up with her parents, dismounted, and led Ranger to a patch of grass, where she hobbled him. No one behind the barrier made any move to come forward and contact them. Addison looked anxiously at her parents, but said nothing. Dave thought she was still a little shell-shocked from the battle last night.

  Fifteen minutes later Bob in the bus and Mark in the truck arrived, pulled up close behind them. The drivers got out.

  “Should we walk over there, or drive?” Mark wondered.

  “I’d say drive, but as soon as they show any nervousness, we stop and get out.”

  “Unarmed,” Dave said.

  “I think that would be wisest.”

  Dave and Karen handed their weapons to Mark, who stowed them in the back of the truck, then they boarded their scooters and Addison mounted Ranger, and the whole ragtag party moved slowly forward to meet the cops until one held up his hand.

  “You folks will have to turn around and go back to where you came from.”

  Bob and Mark were standing with Dave, Karen, and Addison. Bob looked down at the ground for a while, then turned toward the vehicles.

  “Everybody out,” he called. “Turn off the engines. Don’t bring any weapons.”

  Lisa was first with her two teenage children, then Rachel, who joined Mark with their twins, and little Solomon, who looked around with the same wonder he brought to any new situation. Marian and Gordon came next, Gordon holding four-year-old Taylor. Last was Teddy, helping Jenna, who was getting around better but still needed crutches. Emily was too sick to get out of bed.

  The officer was a young man in his late twenties. His black hair was cut short under his broad-brimmed hat. His eyes were tired and showed a lot of strain. He regarded them and handed his shotgun to a female officer standing just behind him. She took it, and looked at them with a face that was devoid of expression. The officer in charge folded his arms in front of him. A clear posture of rejection, if Dave was any judge.

  Bob had been elected to do the talking. He looked the officer in the eye.

  “My name is Bob Winston. This is Dave Marshall and his wife, Karen, and daughter, Addison.” He went on to introduce Jenna and all the members of his biological family. “You’re not wearing a name badge, Officer. Could we know your name?”

  “I’m Officer Lopez.”

  “Could we have your first name?”

  “I don’t think that would be wise. My orders are to turn anyone around who comes down from the hills. I don’t like the job, but it’s—”

  “I have to tell you, Officer Lopez, that we won’t be turning around. We’re not defying you. It’s just that we can’t turn around. There’s nothing for us to go back to. We were forced out of town by the big fire, I suppose you heard of it?”

  “The smoke covered us for days. Yeah, we know about it. And I’m damn sorry, but you’re not the first people from L.A. who want to move in with us. There have been thousands of them. We can’t handle them all.”

  “That’s the same story we got from all the towns near the coast. People are starving in refugee camps back there.”

  “So I’ve heard. I can’t do anything about that.”

  “Of course not. What are you doing with the people who come down along the interstate?”

  “We’re stopping them. Turning them back.”

  “I see. What about the ones who won’t go back? Do you shoot them?”

  Officer Lopez looked offended.

  “Sir, you need to turn your vehicles around—”

  “They’re camped out just north of town,” the female officer said. The man turned to look at her and he didn’t look happy, but he didn’t stop her.

  “We don’t let people starve. We don’t have a lot, but we feed them, once a day. They don’t have anyplace to go, either.”

  “There is a big camp north of town,” the male officer admitted. “Worse comes to worst, I guess you could come through and stay there. But we can’t admit you to the town. We have to look out for our own.”

  “I understand that, Officer, and I understand that you are following orders. But is there any possible way to speak to the ones who gave the orders? Can we present our case to them? The city council, the mayor, or whatever?”

  Officer Lopez said nothing. Dave thought again that was a good sign. Bob didn’t let the silence grow.

  “My daughter Lisa is a doctor. She has spent all her time since the quake and until we left town tending to injured people. Could you folks use a doctor?”

  Again, the man said nothing, but the woman looked interested. She glanced at the man in charge, but didn’t say anything.

  “Addison here has a horse. I’m betting that you find horses useful these days, with no gasoline for farm machinery.”

  “Can it pull a plow?”

  “Ranger can do anything,” Addison piped up. “He’s smart, and I can teach him to pull a plow or a wagon.”

  “My son Mark is an engineer. He converted the bus and the truck to burn wood or coal. He can fix anything, and he can build anything.”

  “We’ve converted a few vehicles ourselves,” the man said.

  “You have anyone who can improve them?” Mark asked, stepping forward. “I’ve got a lot of ideas to make them more efficient.”

  “That’s not something I know anything about. Look, Mister…”

  “Bob.”

  “Look…Bob. I can’t promise you anything. I’ve spent the last week on the northern town line, I guess you could call it a border now. I’ve been turning people away, and it about killed me.”

  “Me, too,” said the woman.

  “The children…Okay, you don’t need to hear my problems.”

  “Officer, I’d be glad to listen to any of them.”

  “Look,
” he said, clearly frustrated. “I’m surprised you made it down here at all. Nobody comes down the hill anymore. We haven’t had to turn anyone away for days.”

  “And why is that?” Bob wondered.

  “Because of the Overlords,” the officer said. “That’s a motorcycle gang we used to tangle with. They’ve been happy as pigs in shit. They took over the roadhouse up there a month ago. At first they were only robbing travelers, taking everything they owned. They’d let the people walk down. But lately nobody at all has come through.”

  “You figure they’re killing them?”

  “That’s what I think. They’ve raided some of the homes around here. Killed some people. We’re planning to go up there and try to root them out, but they’re well armed. They’ve got the high ground. I don’t really know if we can take them at all.”

  “There’s not as many of them as there were,” the woman said.

  The man smiled for the first time.

  “Weirdest thing. Last night—early morning, I guess—five of those fuckers came roaring up. I wasn’t here, but the way I heard it, they were yelling something.”

  “Way I heard it,” the woman said, “they were yelling about surrendering. Giving up. Something like that.”

  “I didn’t hear that. Anyway, they ran right over some tripwires we set out at night, attached to some Claymore mines. Just blew the hell out of them. Four of them died right there. One of them’s still alive, I hear, but he’s not gonna make it.”

  Lopez stopped, and frowned.

  “Wait a minute. Did you folks…”

  “They were running from us,” Bob said, calmly. “They attacked us, and we killed ten of them. There’s nobody left up there.”

  The officer frowned even more, and called another officer to come over. They drew back a little and talked quietly, and the other officer hurried to his motorcycle and started it. He headed up the hill.

  “If he finds what you say he’ll find…”

  “Do you think we could get an audience with your city council then?”

  “I’d say it’s a good possibility.”

  The motorcycle officer had returned with confirmation of their story, Officer Lopez had made a radio call, and they had threaded the concrete maze into town before they were halted by a train stopped on the tracks. That was amazing enough, but the nature of the train was even more unusual. It was composed entirely of open hopper cars heaped with coal, and pulled by a dusty black open-cab behemoth that seemed to be leaking steam from every seam. It belched and bellowed and gasped.