by Nick Cole
LOCK YOUR DOORS. And, STAY INSIDE.
He opened the garage door and backed the little MG out into the courtyard where all the other townhomes attached to his had their garages. The garages all looked out into the same enclosed space, reminding Holiday of a courtyard in a castle. Or at least it reminded him of movies, he told himself, in which there had been castle courtyards. He couldn’t actually remember ever being in one. Just seeing them on TV.
He drove out onto the street that ran the entire North-South length of the Vineyards. Another street on the opposite side of the complex ran the same length. Two smaller connecting streets at each end created a large rectangle. The entire complex was ringed by an inner and outer perimeter of attached townhomes. He headed toward the palm-lined entrance up near the community pool, beyond the wreck and the Rat Pile.
He slowed the MG, its engine sputtering and growling temperamentally as he passed the wreck. There was blood everywhere along the smashed and shattered SUV.
Bullet holes in the windows.
Blood everywhere.
Stunned, Holiday stopped next to the bright metallic orange new model SUV. It looked like something straight out of the dirt streets of some war-torn third world country.
All that blood…
And…
Where did it come from?
Closing his mouth he put the MG in gear, listening to it grind as he’d missed the exact finesse one needs to perform the shift the difficult little British sport car required. He drove up toward the main road of the complex and doglegged right and then left toward the palm lined entrance to the community.
He turned left at the entrance and drove up the hill toward the intersection and the main road that led back to the big box chain grocery store. The Market Faire.
At the top of the small hill where the wide main road led to a dead end, below the McMansions on the hill above, there was a body in the intersection.
Maybe.
There wasn’t much left of it. Bloody drag marks made a trail that led away from it. Like it’d been hit by a car and the blood trail had gone on for ten or more feet across the two white stripes marking the crosswalk. But there was little left of the body that was still body-like. What was left looked as though a bomb had exploded inside and blown the person off in one direction. A moment later he saw a dog’s head nearby and followed the trail to where the dog’s body had also exploded.
This is bad, thought Holiday and gunned the engine. Real bad.
Driving fast to the Market Faire, the bi-plane sound of the MG’s rattling engine drowned out all those images of blood and blown out bodies he’d seen on the street. For a brief moment of speed, he let the MG blow away everything as the wind and the noise felt cleansing and momentarily good. As though there was nothing other than speed and noise.
Like I could drive down to the beach today and forget everything, he thought. Like I could buy a six pack… a twelve pack, and just drink at the beach and listen to nothing but the waves. I could smell the salt down there and feel the sand beneath my feet as I scrunched my toes.
The grocery store parking lot was mostly empty. There was a flatbed truck parked far out in the lot. There were cans of food and bottles of water in a few piles next to empty parking spaces. He pulled into the middle of the lot, marveling at the wide expanse of the black top’s total lunar-like emptiness. He turned off the engine and heard a new wave of gunfire echoing off the hills surrounding Viejo Verde. It careened through the small canyon of a wilderness park that bisected the planned community. A place where mountain bikers came on the weekends to ride the trails and push themselves to the limits of recreational exertion.
He climbed out of the MG, literally, and stretched. His bones felt tight, his neck muscles thick, his stomach churned acid.
He got his wallet out of the glove compartment and checked that there was at least some money left over from the binge of previous days. There wasn’t, but he had room on his credit card.
He walked slowly across the parking lot.
Inside, the air conditioner hit him like a fresh wave of cool mountain air. Aerosmith screeched across the store about living on an edge. Repeating it over and over about not being able to help yourself. There was no one else in the store.
He went to the checkout stand and stood there for a moment.
“Hello…” he called out to the empty store. “I’d like to buy a pack of cigarettes.”
No one answered.
Aerosmith died.
Paula Cole sang about cowboys.
Holiday noticed that the cash register at his station had been opened. Pried open with violence. All the money was gone.
So…
He walked to the plastic display case that contained all the cigarettes, pulled on it as it opened easily. Someone had cleaned out his brand. So he cleaned out another brand he’d smoked before he’d switched.
“Adapt and overcome,” he whispered to himself.
He had twenty packs of cigarettes.
Might be awhile before…
He heard a crash at the back of the store.
… things return to normal, he finished.
So…
A few minutes later, he pushed a shopping cart from the beer aisle to the hard liquor aisle. He had a few cases of beer and he didn’t take as much hard liquor as he could have because he was afraid of drinking himself to death. But it was a lot. He finished off the trip with a quick detour through the canned goods aisle, taking chili and tuna fish because he didn’t think the power would stay on much longer. In fact, he was surprised it had stayed on this long if things were this bad.
Outside the store, he loaded his groceries into the tiny trunk of the MG as a hot dry wind swept the parking lot, sending ash and smoke along the blacktop. Nearby palm trees rustled, making their white noise as dry brown fronds shook neurotically in the hot breeze.
It’s the Santa Ana winds, thought Holiday. Bad time for those right now.
He drove down the street back to the edge of Viejo Verde, arriving at the intersection where the bodies of the dog and its owner, he guessed, lay exposed to drifting ash and smoke on the street above his townhome complex. The day was both dark and orange as the last of the hot afternoon claimed it. He could see out across the valley and down to the coast. He could see Irvine and Newport and Long Beach and even Palos Verdes. He saw black columns of smoke rising along the coast in different locations. He watched the city lights coming on down near the coast as small fires burned out of control in various places. He tried to see details amongst the buildings and highways down there. Occasionally he saw the flashing lights of emergency vehicles dashing from place to place. But those lights were always moving, never stopping.
And there were so few of them.
He couldn’t hear the gunfire from the top of the hill now, up in the expensive neighborhoods. He couldn’t hear it above the sound of the loud engine of the MG. But the black columns of smoke were growing up there along the ridgeline, somewhere among the McMansions, becoming an evil black anvil over the top of Holiday’s head. He could see flames flicking upwards from the crimson terracotta roof tiles of some of the larger houses at the top of the hill.
He drove back down the small hill to the Vineyards and into his garage, closing the automatic door behind him before he turned off the car. He unloaded the car, putting the beer in the fridge, the liquor in the cupboard. He had a beer but only finished half of it while he smoked and tried to get a handle on the situation.
Now there’s a fire. Fires.
I don’t hear the fire department, and if the Santa Anas continue to blow it might get real bad, so I might need to leave.
And don’t forget the people. The Rat Pile. That Rat Pile is somewhere out there, rat-piling someone.
How could I forget that?
He bolted the garage door that led into the house
, and drew the blinds across the windows. He put the safety pins in the sliding glass doors. He sealed the house as best he could.
“There,” he mumbled to himself with a cigarette clenched between his teeth.
He sat down in the large purple chair he’d bought from a rent-a-center outlet and popped a fresh beer, dragged the ash tray toward him and decided to be quiet and just listen and…
“…things will sort themselves out,” he told himself and blew smoke out across the quiet room.
Let’s just wait and see.
Chapter Six
By nightfall, the flames had fully engulfed the neighborhoods up on the hill above the Vineyards. Homes burned all the way to the top of the hill, as hot gusty blasts of superheated air roared down through a stand of lithe eucalyptus trees that stood guard between the two neighborhoods, the Vineyards and the McMansions above. The Santa Anas were blasting out of the desert to the east, driving the flames west toward the coast. Holiday knew that if the wind didn’t change direction soon, the fire would leap the road and come down into the townhomes.
An hour later, watching and smoking from the small back balcony off the guest room of his townhome, Holiday could see hot ash and glowing sparks streaming through the sky above the Vineyards and the now crazed palm trees. He got out the garden hose from the backyard and threw it onto the terracotta tiled roof above the garage, below the balcony.
There, he thought to himself. I can at least… do something if my house catches on fire.
The sound of the flames and the wind had turned into a great roaring gush above him. He turned and stared up the hill into the McMansions, seeing a great wall of flames like waves down at the beach rising up as roof tiles exploded along with gas barbecues and glass and cars parked in the streets laden with gasoline.
Holiday tried to estimate how many homes dotted the quiet streets of that planned and once perfect enclave of high-end hill dwellers.
Over a hundred maybe?
Now he knew it would be madness to stay in the townhome complex. There was no way a tiny garden hose was going to stand up against that firestorm. He climbed out onto the garage roof and then hoisted himself up onto the second story roof that ran the length of all the townhomes connected to his unit. There were ten homes in each building.
To the north, he could see the avocado orchard that began at the end of the property. Irvine Company land as most of the area had once been. To the west, he could see down into the coastlands beyond. There were fires everywhere down there. But nothing as huge as what was out of control above him on the hills to the east. He couldn’t see anything to the south because the Vineyards lay in a depression at the end of Viejo Verde. The rest of Viejo Verde, the markets, the stores, a few big box chain outlets and restaurants, along with some commercial nurseries, lay that way at a slightly higher elevation.
“Hey!”
Someone was shouting at him from down on the street. Lights in many of the houses were still on, as were the street lights and subdued unit lighting along the buildings and walkways between them. Standing under an orange street light was a man.
“Hey,” Holiday called back.
“You’re not one of ‘em,” stated the man.
Holiday had no idea what the stranger meant. But he suspected it had something to do with the rat pile that had begun the day.
“No, I’m not,” Holiday shouted back.
They stood there looking at each other. The other man was older. Middle aged. Gray hair at the temples, robust and brawny, but big bellied. He was wearing tan slacks and a robe. Holiday recognized him as one of his neighbors. He’d only seen him a few times down at the pool or leaving the neighborhood, passing Holiday’s house in the late morning when Holiday liked to stand on the front steps in his little yard behind the high bushes and have a smoke while he drank his first cup of coffee. He’d seen the stranger then, passing, leaving the neighborhood in a red corvette. His license plate read YEAH. Holiday had called him the Groovy Man. A relic from the seventies who still had it, or so Holiday assumed in his mind that the man thought such.
“How does it look from up there?” asked Groovy Man, who had some kind of tool in his hand.
Holiday scanned the world ending all around him once more.
“It looks bad. Real bad.”
“If we don’t do something… that fire’s coming this way,” shouted Groovy Man. Holiday could not imagine anything that could be done against the wall of flames roaring down on them. Up there, a McMansion a moment was collapsing and disappearing into the greedy flames that seemed unsatisfied with even that much luxurious destruction.
“I think…” Holiday paused. The line of tall eucalyptus trees was now on fire. “I don’t think there’s much we can do. Might be time to get out of here.”
“Come down here,” said Groovy Man. “I think we can still do something.”
Holiday looked at the man on the street, and then the massive wall of flames heading down toward them.
“Alright,” said Holiday and climbed down from the roof and went back into the house. He grabbed two cold beers from the fridge, amazed that the power was still on.
Out on the street, Groovy Man waited in front of the little gate that led to Holiday’s townhome. He was holding a big pipe wrench.
“Beer?” asked Holiday.
Groovy Man checked Holiday briefly with a quick glance that said something, then replaced it with a smile and a, “thank you”.
They popped the beers and drank. The beer was cold and tasted good in the face of the driving hot winds and floating ash.
“Something’s not right,” said Groovy Man. “Which is saying a lot for the past three days. It’s still way too early for the Santa Anas. They don’t show up for another month or so. If these winds don’t change direction soon, we’re cooked.”
Holiday gulped his beer. “Like I said, might be about time to pack up and go.”
Groovy Man turned and looked at Holiday. His dark bushy eyebrows arching. “Where have you been?”
Where have I been?
Not waiting for an answer, Groovy Man continued. “There’s nowhere to go. There’ve been riots all throughout the country and no one can explain why, or at least they couldn’t while the news was still broadcasting. Believe me, if there was some place to go, I would’ve already gone there. I tried to get down to the freeway two days ago but it was…” Groovy Man took a small sip of his beer. “It was a nightmare, and I don’t mean that in the usual LA traffic way.”
“You mean like…” and Holiday pointed toward the wreck up the street. The place of the rat pile.
“Yeah,” whispered a gravel-voiced Groovy Man. “But worse. Much worse.”
The tops of the eucalyptus trees were now fully engulfed, like candles on a candelabra. They waved madly in the howling firestorm, aflame and insane.
“I’m Frank,” said Groovy Man sticking out his hand. Holiday shook it.
“Holiday.”
“Glad to meet you,” said Frank. “Now, if we can find the sprinkler system control for the common areas, we can turn that on. That might give us some protection. Then we can try to get on top of any fires that start on the structures before they really get going. Are you game?”
Holiday nodded.
It took some time, but they found the sprinkler control system for the community. It was automated and the display was LED. Old School. State of the art twenty years ago. It took time to switch off the timers and then to get the system to recognize manual input. A moment later they heard the sprinklers going full tilt nearby. They circled the entire community, walking along the narrow streets. Everywhere, every sprinkler gushed a shower of water. The mist from the sprays of water felt good against the rushing waves of heat and ash that blasted down on them like hot, burning sleet, racing through the narrow streets of The Vineyards.
“There should
be more sprinklers that run along the outside of the community and those should be on too,” said Frank. “It ain’t a lot, and if the winds keep up I don’t know how much good it’ll do, but it’s worth a try. Like I said, there’s no place to go. We’re outta options.”
Until midnight they watched from the rooftops, waiting for hotspots to leap up, but none did and the wind shifted. It shifted and drove the flames out into the avocado orchard to the north. By three o’clock in the morning, the entire orchard and the hill above it were a wall of fire, as all the dry late summer brush turned to fuel. The fire became even more violent and fast moving, looming over everything, heaving like the bellows of some mad demon rushing off in another direction, and before dawn it drove itself off toward the toll road that cut from Irvine over to Santa Margarita.
At dawn there was silence and fog.
Holiday met Frank in the middle of the street after they’d climbed down from their roofs on opposite sides of the complex.
After they’d shut off the sprinklers they walked up toward the entrance to the complex and up the hill to the intersection that guarded the streets leading up into the McMansions.
Their side of the street was untouched.
The exploded body of the walker and its dog remained. The grass and landscaping, still vibrant in that Southern California oasis way, lay untouched along the western side of the street. The white stucco walls of a nearby neighborhood on this side of the street were only slightly soot-stained. Their neighborhood, the Vineyards, remained quiet and seemingly untouched. Looking up the hill from the intersection, on the far side of the street above them, to the east of The Vineyards, they saw the aftermath of the fire on the hill where the McMansions were.
It may as well have been a photograph of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The matchstick skeletons of once-buildings still smoked in the early morning fog of steam and heat. All the ground on that side of the street; the lawns, the roads, the commons, the insides of the skeletons of the once-mansions rising up the scorched hill was blackened. Ash and soot was all that remained. The destruction climbed the hill, its heights lost in the strange morning fog. Every manner of thing; luxury car, speedboat, grand fireplace, whatever had been there had melted into unrecognizable post-modern piles of slag. The mind could not help but try to figure out what each twisted pile had once been.