by Lee Goldberg
He looked away, repulsed and terrified. In a war, Marty thought, there must come a time when a person becomes inured to the carnage and violent death, when the experience changes from something unusual and shocking into something commonplace and expected.
That time hadn't come for him yet. He wished it would hurry up and get here or, if it didn't, that he could be spared any new variations on the theme. Marty didn't know how much more he could take.
His sanity felt almost physical, like a joint that had already been flexed too far. He knew it was about to snap, but unlike with a torn ligament or broken bone, he had no idea what consequences to expect if it happened.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
Maybe it would be a pleasant numbness, a blissful separation from direct contact with reality.
Or maybe not.
It could mean losing all sense of self, all intelligence. He could end up a mewling idiot, staggering mindlessly through the rubble.
And then he would never get home.
Stop being a pussy. So people are dying horrible, grotesque, and painful deaths right in front of your eyes. Big fucking deal. Be glad it's not you and move on.
Lately, the voice in his head was sounding more and more like Buck and yet, strangely enough, seemed to be making more and more sense to him.
The way to deal with it, he decided, was to look at death clinically, the way a coroner does. When a coroner looks at a corpse—whether it's been hit by a train, torn apart by sharks, mutilated with an ax, mangled in a car crash, or left decaying in the sun for a week, infested by maggots—it doesn't sicken or terrify him. Why? Because it isn't a human being any more. It's an object, a by-product, a thing. A fleshy sack of organs and bones that just resembles a living thing.
Marty would just have to get in the right frame of mind.
But it occurred to him that coroners had an advantage he didn't. They rarely witnessed the killing, the moment when a person stops being a person and becomes a corpse.
Then again, millions of soldiers over tens of thousands of years had come to grips with that moment on the battlefield. And most of them didn't lose their minds. How hard could it be?
Be a fucking man.
Yes, Marty thought. That's exactly what I'll do. I'll be a fucking man.
He turned and faced north on what was left of Rodeo Drive. For the first few blocks, houses on both sides of the street were aflame and charred bodies were scattered on the sidewalks.
Be a fucking man.
Marty took one flap of his wet jacket, raised it in front of his face like a cape, and trudged across the blackened grass into the smoke.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Over the Hill and Through the Woods
2:42 p.m. Wednesday
The statues had pubic hair.
It wasn't some artist's chiseled interpretation of pubic hair, but actual hair of some kind glued to the carved crotches of a dozen stone nudes. Beyond that, the row of gaudy statues that lined the top of the wall around the Sunset Boulevard mansion would otherwise have been unremarkable.
When Martin Slack first saw those statues twenty years ago from the front seat of his over-heated Chevette, arriving from Northern California for his freshman year at UCLA, he knew for certain he'd arrived in Los Angeles.
The wall was still there, only now it was riddled with fresh cracks and surrounded an empty lot full of tall, dry weeds. The statues and the mansion were long gone, but they undoubtedly lived on in the photo albums of a thousand tourists.
The homeowners on Sunset wanted their properties photographed, not by Architectural Digest but by busloads of tourists, and would go to extreme, and expensive, lengths to get those snapshots taken.
The fervent competition for tourist eyeballs often made Sunset Boulevard look like a residential version of the Las Vegas Strip, only without the budget buffets.
To become a sidewalk attraction, it wasn't enough to have lavish architecture and lush landscaping, or to park shiny limousines and Italian sports cars around a sparkling fountain. Extravagance, opulence, and gratuitous displays of wealth were merely starting points.
Some homeowners made their blatant grab for snapshot glory only on the holidays, festooning their lawns and eaves with hundreds of flashing lights, elaborate floral displays, and animatronic dioramas that Walt Disney would have envied.
Others were in it for the long run, striving to become a permanent stop on the Hollywood Star Tour and yet, at the same time, maintaining the charade that they valued their own privacy with small "no trespassing" signs staked in their lawns.
One such homeowner decorated the circular drive in front of the white walls that sealed his property with incredibly life-like bronze statues—albeit clothed and presumably without pubic hair, real or otherwise. He began with only a uniformed security guard at his gate, then quickly expanded his repertory company of statuary to include a gardener, a painter, a jogger, kids at play, and in case anyone missed the subtle intention behind his efforts, a tourist couple taking pictures of it all.
Marty sat in front of this house, resting on the homeowner's sturdy, wood-carved "private property" sign. He didn't know or care if the house behind the walls still stood, the tall trees behind the wall hiding it from view. But he was glad the statues had survived because now, in his mind, nothing was more authentically LA than this.
Except, perhaps, for the statues with pubic hair, but sadly they were already lost. He thought somebody should have lobbied to give them protection as a historical landmark. They were significant to him, if no one else, even if he didn't really miss them until now.
Even though he'd traveled on Sunset countless times over the last twenty years, somehow this time it felt like he was retracing the path he took when he first came here from San Francisco, when he was full of dreams and plans that still hadn't come true.
His melancholy was compounded by his physical state. He'd never experienced so many different kinds of discomfort at once. His back burned, his cuts stung, his shoulder throbbed, and his skin itched under his charred, damp, dirt-caked clothes. Every muscle in his body was sore, and his feet felt as if they had swelled to twice their normal size. He was hot, thirsty, and sweating all over.
And then there were all those dead faces that wouldn't stay buried in his mind, flashing in front of his consciousness like commercial breaks.
The memories, the weariness, and the pain became an almost palpable weight, carried all over his body. This must be why so many elderly people stooped, Marty thought. Seventy years of this shit must weight a lot.
So he'd stopped to rest, to clear his head, to marshal his strength for the next leg of his journey over the Sepulveda Pass. He knew the hills were ablaze, even from here he could see the smoke. But he was going to take the Pass anyway, because the alternative, trekking twenty or thirty more miles further west and inching into the valley from the coast, was unthinkable. It would take days in the condition he was in now and there was no telling what hazards he'd face there–-mudslides, forest fires, deranged mountain lions, swarms of locusts.
The locusts seemed like a stretch, but then again, Marty never would have imagined running into a tidal wave in the middle of Hollywood, either.
He figured the Sepulveda Pass wasn't too big a risk anyway. He was planning on walking straight up the center of the San Diego Freeway. The ten lanes of concrete plus the two lanes of Sepulveda Boulevard should make a nice, wide fire break.
Marty took a deep breath, got to his feet, and started walking again. To distract himself from the pain, and to make the time pass, he sang TV themes to himself, beginning with fifties shows and moving forward from there.
He began with Have Gun, Will Travel and was up to Green Acres a half-hour later as he approached a guy near the ornate gates to Bel-Air, sitting in a lawn chair beside a sandwich board that advertised "Maps to the Stars' Homes(Only Five Dollars!" The "five" had been scratched out and replaced with a hastily scrawled "two." The man was going through his maps,
spreading them open on his lap and X-ing out homes with a fat magic marker.
"Doing much business?" Marty asked.
"Some," the man said, intent on his work. "News crews, mostly."
Made sense. It didn't matter much to Americans if Los Angeles was destroyed, Marty thought, but God save Jay Leno's garage, Brad Pitt's sun deck, and Meg Ryan's tennis courts.
"How do you know which homes have been destroyed?" Marty asked.
"I have my sources," he said mysteriously and started marking up another map.
Marty headed off again, picking up where he left off in the sixties with Branded. He was in middle of the seventies and Good Times when he passed the northern fringes of UCLA. The jogging track, like most open spaces he'd seen since the quake, was clogged with people in make-shift shelters and tents. Above them, to the west, the ruins of the dormitories lay across the stands like fallen stacks of Legos.
His first home in LA was gone. Scratch that one off the Martin Slack Historical tour.
Although there might be food and water on campus, he decided not to stop there for fear he'd never get started again. He walked on, reaching the San Diego Freeway just as he was entering the eighties with Gimme a Break.
The freeway stretched up into the hills, towards a pall of smoke a few miles north that blotted out the sun. The ten-lane roadway was riddled with fissures, ripples, and sinkholes and littered with mangled, wrecked, and overturned cars. The only traffic was a small handful of living dead, either heading into or out of the valley. Surprisingly, the people walking south stayed in the southbound lanes to the left, while those heading north remained on the right, as if those rules made any difference now.
Marty supposed they instinctively clung to the habit for the same reason he was singing TV themes. It grounded them, allowing them to forget what they'd seen, to move like zombies on a pre-destined course. So he headed north into the Pass and dutifully stayed to the right, belting out The Greatest American Hero with all the passion he could muster.
* * * * *
3:25 p.m. Wednesday
After the Getty Center Drive exit, the hills on either side of the freeway seemed uninhabited, except by flames, which swirled amidst the acres of dense, dry scrub-grass, sending plumes of dark smoke into the sky, turning day into night.
He'd read somewhere that an acre of brush was equal to 5000 gallons of gasoline. It didn't give him much comfort.
The fire had a sound, deep and heavy, like a waterfall only without the water. Glowing orange cinders swirled around him like red-hot snowflakes. Waterfalls without water. Snowflakes on fire. Walking through the Pass was surreal.
Marty's journey was getting much harder now, not so much the walking, but finding TV themes to sing. He was discovering that the eighties and nineties were mighty lean years for TV songwriting. That, and it was increasingly hard to concentrate on distraction with an orange-black curtain closing in on him from both sides.
He stayed low, and well to the middle of the roadway, snaking through the abandoned cars, trying not to look at the bodies and body parts also left behind. Instead, he struggled to remember the lyrics to Helltown. Sammy Davis, Jr. sang it, but Marty kept confusing it with the theme to Baretta, which was easy, since Sammy and Robert Blake did them both.
Little balls of fire rolled down the hillside and across the freeway like tears. He didn't know what to make of them until one rolled right in front of him.
Only it wasn't rolling. It was running.
It was a wild rabbit, a ball of flaming fur, fleeing from the inferno. The freeway was being over-run with burning wild life. And where these burning rats, squirrels, and rabbits perished on the hillside, new fires started. The blazing creatures, in death, were unwittingly increasing the size and ferocity of their pursuer.
At least on the freeway there was no dry brush to spark under their fiery corpses.
Just puddles of gasoline.
No sooner did the thought occur to him than one of the burning rodents ignited a puddle of fuel with a loud whoosh just a few yards away.
It burned out quickly, but it was enough to terrify him. Suddenly, in Marty's mind, those flaming animals became rolling grenades.
He hurried along, looking in all directions, trying to keep his eye on every flaming creature, every drop of gasoline, every wrecked car, hoping to anticipate the next blast.
This was so damned unfair, he thought. After what happened in that downtown alley with Molly, and what he went through in Beverly Hills, he should be exempt from having to deal with explosions any more. Since Fate hadn't issued that exemption yet, this had to be another cosmic payback, retribution for demanding more explosions in the action shows on his network, despite the creative and financial pleas from the producers.
Blow something up, he'd say. Something big. You can never have too many explosions.
Now he was learning first hand how wrong he was.
To his right, a Jetta exploded, spinning through the air towards him like a gigantic sheet metal football.
Marty ran like a wide receiver, only he was screaming and this was one pass he didn't want to receive.
The car smashed into the freeway not far from where he had stood, cartwheeling over the top of several cars, then crashing into the low concrete median.
He stared at the wreckage in amazement, gasping for breath.
A rat did that, he thought. One hot rat.
Marty hurried on, frightened, performing "The Eyes of a Ranger" as loud as he could, the flames dancing along with him on the hillside like insane orange ghosts.
Up ahead, a deer stood shivering between two cars, staring at Marty. The animal was seared black, her hairless skin smoldering. Marty passed close enough to touch the deer, but didn't. "I'll Be There for You," he sang, turning away.
Marty marched on through Mad About You, The Nanny," and Baywatch. By the time he got to Touched by an Angel, the sound of explosions was receding behind him and sunlight began to break through the smoke ahead, revealing the ruins of the Skirball Jewish Cultural Center and the two overpasses that crossed the freeway at its peak.
The smaller overpass, the one nearest to him, joined Sepulveda to a small street leading up to Mulholland on the other side. The span seemed intact, but Marty ran under it with a shiver of panic anyway.
The taller overpass ahead was massive, rising up several hundred feet to stretch Mulholland over the San Diego Freeway. The span had collapsed on either end, creating a towering, concrete island out of the center section that remained. Marty could see maybe a dozen commuters stranded up there with their cars, castaways in middle of an urban ocean. From their lonely vantage point, the destruction in the LA basin and the San Fernando Valley lapped up against their concrete pillars like waves.
The choppers heading into the valley must have seen them up there, which could only mean the castaways were a low priority compared to the calamities elsewhere. That must have been little comfort to them, especially as each new aftershock shook them like glassware on a wobbly table.
The castaways looked down at him sadly as he passed.
"Help us," a woman whimpered, her voice echoing off the roadway.
He looked up at her. There was nothing he could do, and saying so wouldn't make a difference. So he just lowered his gaze and continued on.
Once again, Marty had little choice but to go under the unstable span, passing the piles of cars, concrete, and rebar that had come down in the quake. A man's unscratched arm stuck straight out from amidst the rubble, coated with a fine layer of dust, a cell phone still clutched in his hand. For a moment, Marty thought about taking it and trying to place another call to his wife, but he couldn't bring himself to do it.
Buck would have, if he had anybody to call. Marty wondered who that made the better man.
Marty emerged from under the overpass and the valley opened up below him. He could see clear across to the San Gabriel Mountains on the other side. And in the concrete, sub-divided flatlands in between, through the
haze of smoke, the face of the Big One stared back at him.
It was an angry, wickedly malicious face, the face of a vengeful giant who awakened from a deep sleep and dribbled a gigantic basketball up and down the valley, gleefully smashing entire blocks with each bounce.
Now the giant had taken his toys and crawled back into his hole in the ground to hibernate for a hundred more years before wreaking havoc again. By then, the mess would be cleaned up and everything rebuilt for him to destroy again.
Marty couldn't see Calabasas from here, it was ten miles east, but he imagined it hadn't fared much better.
He set off down the hill towards home.
* * * * *
4:07 p.m. Wednesday
Los Angeles shouldn't exist. It had no natural harbor, no dependable water supply, and bad air. All it had going for it was year-round sunshine.
That was more than enough, with the right spin.
Nothing symbolized this more than the San Fernando Valley, once a parched dust bowl baking under the incessant heat.
But Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and a few other wealthy businessmen saw the potential under all that cracked, dry earth. It was lousy farmland but these businessmen were interested in harvesting a more resilient crop: money. But to do it, they'd still need water.
Otis and his cronies bought up all the struggling farms and only then used their considerable clout to divert water along massive aqueducts from the Sacramento Delta hundreds of miles north to the arid valley.
With the arrival of water, the land was worth hundreds of times what the businessmen paid for it. And what they didn't own, they took control of by annexing it into the city. Otis used the pages of his newspaper to hype the valley as paradise and soon the people came in hordes.
Of course, Marty wouldn't have known any of this if he hadn't seen Chinatown. And if he hadn't seen the movie, and learned about the scandal and dirty-dealing behind the valley's creation, he couldn't have lived there. Without a hint of scandal in its past, the valley would have been just too bland to be habitable.