She hit him again and again and it’s true what they say, you can literally beat someone’s brains in. Or rather, out, you could beat them out, because the gray ooze was all over the desk, all over her, too.
She dropped the statuette, finally. Birnbaum was slumped over the desk, his shattered head barely connected to his neck. D-Girl was still shaking, shaking harder than ever, shaking so violently she could barely keep her footing. And finally she realized that she wasn’t the one shaking – it was everything – the floor, the walls. Scripts were falling off the shelves and then the shelves were falling too and the desk was sliding around the office like the Tea Cups at Disneyland… batting into the office chair with Birnbaum’s limp and nearly headless body.
And then the ceiling came down on top of her.
Chapter 5
She was drowning in dirt. The panoramic window had shattered and dirt flooded around her, crushing her chest, then filling her nose and mouth. The loose brown rivulets streamed downward, mixed with hunks of plaster and concrete, an avalanche of dry earth. Stone and gravel and dirt flowed around her, pinning her legs and spreading fast toward her face and chest. More dirt cascaded over her body; she was helplessly frozen under the crushing weight that rose like the tide.
Not only had the building collapsed, then, but the foothills above the studio must have collapsed as well. It’s The Big One, she thought with frightening calm. The one everyone was always warning about, the one that made some people say they would never live in California, ever. I guess I’m dead, then. The thought was not so terrible. The avalanche continued, a whole mountain, pouring on top of her.
Chapter 6
It was heavy, so heavy. And dark. The heaviness and darkness pressed in all around her.
She was buried, but she wasn’t dead. She couldn’t move at all, though; she was completely encased in dirt and rubble, buried alive.
But it didn’t feel bad. The thing about Hollywood was that you never really felt much of anything at all, there was a comforting layer of unreality which somehow kept you from experiencing reality, which was proving to be useful in the case of natural disaster. There was no panic, so maybe she was in shock. She felt, oddly - safe, held, loved. She liked the feeling of being buried, surrounded by earth, supported by it, blanketed by it, embraced by it. She could almost feel the earth’s heart beating against hers… or maybe that was her own heart beating against the earth. Maybe there was no difference. She would like to remain in the earth, she thought, and dream for the earth. So still, so peaceful.
A thousand years passed. Now she had no idea why she had ever thought she was weak. She was huge, and heavy and immovable. She was gravity and weight and magma and magnesium and ore and granite and even diamonds… she was as hard as diamonds.
She must have passed out then.
* * *
She was still in the earth, but she was free, she was running. At first it was like watching a movie, but she could feel, too… the heart of the earth was beating around her and there was sand under her bare feet as she ran through… tunnels?... carved into the rock… deeper, downward, winding her way further into the soul of the earth.
And she was not alone. She could feel the echo in the ground of others running, footsteps like horses’ hooves. There were three others, women. She knew there were three because three plus one made four and four was THE NUMBER. It was in the script, not the stupid Birnbaum script, but the original script, the screenwriter’s script. Three other women. And she knew she had to find them.
She put on a burst of speed to round a corner…
And stopped short, rocking back on her feet. She had come out in… an anteroom, she thought they were called, like the entry to a palace. Two enormous bronze winged figures, thirty feet high, vaguely Egyptian, sat in thrones guarding an open double door. On the floor between them, set into the marble, was a… what looked like a star chart.
Feeling a little like Dorothy now, if the tornado had somehow landed Dorothy in Egypt, D-Girl took a breath and carefully walked across the star chart, between the two winged figures, and stepped through the doors.
She was in a huge chamber. The roof soared up into a triangle shape – no, not a triangle, a pyramid, and there were crisscrossed pipes in crimson and gold on the ceiling. Below the ceiling was a mosaic floor with primitive shapes like ancient sand paintings, and huge cylindrical drums of crimson were lined up against a gold wall. The drums were smooth, and tall, and they hummed, a constant, low throbbing.
Across the vast and shining floor, a thin, dark-haired girl, not a child, not yet a teen, stood in front of a cave in the wall… not exactly a cave, though, and there were several of them… seven of them, all in a row. Some kind of skin had been stretched across the front of each, pale and tight and translucent, and each had a thick red mass stamped on it, like a seal on an old-fashioned letter.
The girl’s back was to D-Girl and she hunched her bony shoulders in concentration as she picked at the seal of the cave in front of her. Red covered her hands and ragged fingernails.
D-Girl moved closer. Past the girl, where the seal had been picked away, the cave opened onto dazzling light: a vast red desert with a river canyon cut deep into the earth. The Grand Canyon? D-Girl wondered. It seemed almost that big. The sky above was azure, with thick drifts of clouds, and the river in the canyon bed was deep blue and fast, she could see white crests in the blue. And then she saw It – an immense concrete wall rising up from the river, tall as a skyscraper but wider, massive…. imposing and ominous as the gates of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings, a sheer cliff face of pale concrete, with what looked like turrets on the top walkway…
As D-Girl stared, so strong was the sense of danger that her blood turned to ice in her veins. And then the hooves began to thunder, reverberating through the temple… and the walls around her began to shake… sand and earth and rock cascading down all around….
* * *
D-Girl’s eyes flew open in panic, or rather her eyes tried to fly open, but the dirt was pressed in too hard, she was encased in her coffin of earth and she couldn’t open her eyes any more than she could move any part of her body. She was awake now, but she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe… D-Girl was pretty sure she was dying, now…
Then somehow there was someone there with her in the darkness, and even though she couldn’t see she knew it was a dark-haired, dark-skinned young woman of many races, and the woman’s mouth was on hers…. Kissing her? No, breathing, breathing into her mouth, breathing into her lungs, breathing through her, for her, until D-Girl felt her own chest rising and falling and she could breathe through the earth. And she slept.
* * *
Another thousand years went by, and she woke again. Thirsty, so thirsty. She knew there was water somewhere in the office, if she could just find the refrigerator with its endless, endless supplies of bottled water, but she couldn’t move, and the office was no more, there was only a mountain of earth. Dust filled her mouth… so dry, so hot. She would die now, die of thirst….
And then she felt another presence with her, a woman with creamy skin and long, straight hair, and the woman was lying with her in the dark, kissing her, and this time the kiss was water, cool water pouring down her throat.
And then the earth began to rumble again, from deep within itself, and D-Girl felt herself being pushed upward, an upheaval that cracked open the earth she was buried in.
When the rumbling stopped she found herself lying in dirt, in a cloud of dust, with cracked concrete all around her. She didn’t know where she was exactly, but there were girders and concrete columns, and mosaics of glittering shattered glass, like an ancient, mangled temple. It was the film vault. And it was on fire. There was smoke all around her and flames licking between the concrete columns.
Somehow the aftershock had pushed her up into the wreckage of the film vault and it was burning around her. All those films, burning around her, the ghosts of the movies flying upward, brushing her cheeks.
>
She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and from there she managed to get to her feet, choking and coughing on the smoke. There was a wall of orange fire in front of her, and she knew she would never get out, she would never be able to get through it; she would surely die now, as the only way out was through the fire, and she hated fire, hated it, had always been terrified of it.
And then there was someone in the fire. A third woman was in front of her, in the flames. Her hair was red and curly and she was muscular and strong and graceful as a panther. She was reaching her hands through the fire, taking D-Girl’s hands… and though D-Girl tried to back away, the woman pulled her forward, pulled her into the fire. The heat was terrible around them but it didn’t burn, they didn’t burn, it was pretty like flowers, and they walked through hand in hand and at the other side of the fire the red-haired woman dropped her hand and smiled, and disappeared back into the wall of orange flame.
D-Girl turned from the fire… and saw she was on the town square from Time Tripper. There was a massive pile of rubble where Birnbaum Productions used to be, the office was no more; the entire building had completely collapsed. Now it was a tomb. Birnbaum was buried in there, at the very least. Maybe the receptionist and the assistants, too, but maybe it was just Birnbaum.
I was in there? she thought. I should be dead.
There was no real reason why every bone in her body wasn’t broken, and she wondered a bit about that, but there was no time to contemplate in the midst of so much devastation.
It was, well, apocalyptic. Buildings were collapsed all around her. Live electrical cables lashed and sparked and spit on the back lot streets like angry snakes. It was hard to get a grasp on it all.
And for a moment the disorientation was gone, because it was suddenly so clear what was happening. It was a Birnbaum movie. The sets were burning all around her, and people were screaming and cars were overturned and burning and the streets were cracked and lifted. I must be in a Birnbaum movie. But I can’t be in a Birnbaum movie, because if this were a Birnbaum movie, I’d be a stripper. I’m covered in dirt and blood and my Moschino suit is ruined, but I’m not a stripper. And by the way – Birnbaum is dead, because I killed him. She started snickering, then, and it was a frighteningly hysterical sound, so she stopped.
She tried taking a step. Remarkably, her shoes were still on her feet – the vintage Chanel pumps that she’d scored on e Bay in a different lifetime. She still had her purse on her shoulder, with the unused gun in it. Walking gingerly in her too-high heels, she picked her way through the rubble, moving shakily across the ruined set of the fictional small town. The clock in the clock tower was shattered…
London Bridge is falling down — a clear British voice sang in her head.
And people were crushed, and bleeding and dead. She smelled the sickening smell of charred meat, and she realized it was human flesh and she almost retched but then pretended to herself it was just a stupid Birnbaum film, and she couldn’t smell anymore, because of course that was the one sense film couldn’t duplicate. There were blackened legs sticking out from underneath a blackened car, and the water tower had collapsed. The Hollywood sign on the hill was gone, too… the mountain seemed to have rearranged itself, and for some reason that made her queasier than the charred legs.
I have to get home, she thought, clearly enough for someone who had just bashed her boss’s head in and had somehow escaped being buried alive. She knew pretty well that there might not be anything left of home, but it was just a little too weird out here.
She turned on to the street of the lot’s main entrance, which having no tall buildings immediately nearby was less damaged than the back lot, and moved toward the main gates.
It was very noisy around her, even though she felt detached from the sound. There was the roar of fire, and shrieking alarms, and of course the screaming, all from a certain distance. The sun blazed down (earthquake weather is right…) and she could feel her skin reddening (no ozone, you know). But oddly, she wasn’t thirsty, hadn’t been thirsty since that watery kiss…
But that was a dream…
The black iron gates had half-fallen from the gateposts, and the posts themselves were cracked. The guard booth had fallen over on its side and the guard’s body was impaled by the flagpole.
D-Girl did her best to ignore that as she moved through the ruined gates onto Hollywood Boulevard.
World Studios was located on the bad end of Hollywood, where tech warehouses gave way to liquor stores and discount shoe marts and bodegas and pawn shops. It was in fact right on the strip that had seen some of the worst rioting and looting when the city erupted in chaos after the Rodney King beating verdicts.
And predictably it was now chaos again, nearly unrecognizable, Armageddon. More collapsed and burning buildings and piles of glittering shattered glass. More overturned cars, flipped by the undulations of the street, which had sprouted mini-hills of cracked asphalt. More hydrants geysering at what was left of the curb, and sirens wailing and car alarms shrieking.
Looters of a rainbow of races pushed grocery carts full of TVs and athletic shoes and bottles of alcohol and diapers on the broken sidewalks, passing bodies crushed under falling debris. There were helicopters circling above; of course it was all being filmed.
The street differed from a movie set and the studio lot D-Girl had just left in that it was far, far dirtier – with real splotches of chewing gum melting on the sidewalk and asphalt in sticky polka dots, beer bottles and McDonald’s wrappers and planet-killing plastic grocery bags littering the streets.
The dirty men who raved now in the streets with their combat jackets and shredded pants cuffs and sunburned skin and blackened bare feet were no costumed extras; they stank of piss and sweat and cheap booze.
A Rastafarian who seemed cleaner than the others around him sat cross-legged against a wall, smoking a joint. He smiled up at D-Girl dreamily through thick dreadlocks. “In Patmos we speak the Patois,” he said, in a lilting Jamaican accent.
She barely had time to wonder, “What the hell?” when her attention was diverted by another homeless man, a tall one with mad blue eyes under long and unkempt hair and beard, who strode back and forth on the broken sidewalk, preaching for all he was worth.
“I watched as The Lamb opened the first of the seven seals. Then I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, COME!!!’ I looked and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest!”
The large dirty man stopped his ranting and fixed his eyes on D-Girl. He suddenly pointed at her with one long-nailed finger, and she flinched back, expecting a stream of obscenities, or worse. If this were a Birnbaum movie, she would be raped now, in loving and lingering detail. It would be the money scene.
But it wasn’t a Birnbaum movie, she knew that for a fact, because when the dirty man looked at her he suddenly bowed, bowed to her, almost regally gallant, and she stared back at him in confusion.
“It’s time,” he whispered.
She felt herself starting to shake. There was another rumble building, another aftershock, and the looters started screaming as their grocery carts full of booty suddenly turned into crash carts, jerking away from their owners and plummeting crazily along the street. The ground rolled like the waves on an ocean, as if a giant snake were undulating underneath the asphalt.
D-Girl planted her Chanel pumps on the ground and felt the rumbling of the earth beneath her feet. It felt good; it felt right, it felt like power. Debris rained down all around her from what was left of the buildings, metal girders and shattered glass and chunks of plaster, but none of it hit her, she was rooted to the ground, and she rode the waves.
And then it stopped, the rumbling and shaking dying away, but for a moment nobody moved; all the looters were frozen in place. And into that tableau, a white horse galloped out of a cloud of smoke and dust, galloped down the street, riderless, saddleless, m
ane streaming behind it in the smoke.
It’s not Birnbaum, it’s Fellini, D-Girl thought, abstractedly.
The horse was gone. But about halfway down the block the thin young girl from her dream stood in the ruined street.
D-Girl stared through the blue haze of smoke.
There was no little girl.
No, surely she had been imagining it.
The rumbling had stopped but the alarms were still shrieking, a new set of car alarms jarred into action by the aftershock.
D-Girl could also hear screaming, coming from the same place that she had imagined the girl. She moved forward a little, coughing at the smoke, which smelled like burning tires.
The screaming was coming from a flipped SUV… from underneath a flipped SUV, actually. “Help me! Por favor!”
Looters had semi-recovered from the aftershock and were starting up again, grabbing whatever carts they happened to be closest to.
The screaming continued from underneath the SUV, an accented woman’s voice.
“Madre María ayúdame!”
It didn’t look much like anyone was going to help her, so D-Girl approached the SUV warily. She was rather afraid to look because the way the SUV was folded in on itself the woman was probably crushed beyond repair. In fact a man’s body was still strapped to the driver’s seat, missing its head. The woman’s shrieks were now high-pitched and incoherent, but now that she was closer D-Girl realized the shrieking she was hearing was actually coming from a baby. There was a child under that vehicle, too. And perhaps they were not fatally crushed; that baby sounded pretty alive, and the street was buckled underneath the SUV so maybe they were only trapped. Trapped with an SUV on top of them, that is.
Apocalypse- Year Zero Page 21