Slow Apocalypse (21 page)

“He’s calmed down a lot,” she said. “Can I take him out on the road? He really wants to keep moving.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. At least not until we find you another flashlight.”

“That’s what I’m after,” Karen said. He found her beside the Escalade, which was partially buried in garage junk. The whole vehicle had crept along the concrete until the driver’s side was banging against the garage wall and the rear had crunched into the garage door, buckling it outward.

Unable to reach and open the tailgate, Karen had opened the right rear door and was pulling out boxes, trying to get to where they had stored two lanterns. She had already removed the other 4-cell Maglite from under the seat and set it on the floor beside her. She was an incongruous sight, dressed in a nightgown and red high heels, bent over and burrowing through their carefully packed gear.

She glanced at him, and then at the flashlight on the floor.

“Give that one to Addison,” she said. So he took the light to his daughter and waited until her circling brought her near him.

“You can take the horse out onto the street, but don’t go farther down than the Greenbergs’ house, and don’t go so far around the curve uphill that you can’t still see our house.
Walk
him, don’t ride, and keep that flashlight on the ground. No telling what might be in the street.”

She nodded, and went down the driveway and then down the street.

He turned away and walked back to the patio. He encountered Karen crossing from the garage with an electric lantern.

“I’m going inside to get some better shoes and clothes,” she said.

He swept his flashlight beam over the outside of the house. He was surprised to find that only two of the big glass floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the patio had broken. Both of the sliding doors had sprung, but they would probably go back in their tracks easily enough.

He headed toward the southern edge of his property, at the edge of the hill, intending to look at the city.

His first thought: the plains of Mordor.

Dust still hanging in the air obscured everything on the flatlands except some
of the tall buildings on Sunset, farther south on Wilshire, and west in Century City. Not a single light shone in a single window in any of them. If not for the bright moon hanging in the west he probably wouldn’t have seen them at all.

Beneath the dust there were hundreds of orange lights flickering, like lava boiling up from the ground. At first he thought it might
be
lava, that the earth might have opened up along the fault lines and was now spewing molten rock directly into the city. But it was nothing as cataclysmic as that, though it was bad enough. It was houses on fire.

With the electrical grid so erratic, and in some places almost nonexistent, people had looked to other alternatives. Those who had kerosene lamps and the fuel to put in them used them. Others used candles.

Karen joined him at the edge of the hill.

“Dave, Addison says we should…My God, there’s fires everywhere. Where are all those people going to go?”

“Sleep outdoors, I guess. I’ll bet a lot of them won’t be too eager to sleep indoors for a while, anyway.”

“I know I wouldn’t. Um…Addison says there’s something we should see.”

“Is she—”

“She’s okay. She came back with the horse and gave him something to eat.”

They started for the driveway. Karen was now dressed in a pair of white Reeboks, a pair of loose slacks, and a blouse that looked far too fancy for the situation, but everything she had of a practical nature—which was only a few changes of clothes—was packed away.

“What is it, Addison?” Dave asked.

“Just come and look, Daddy.”

They followed her out the gate and down the hill. Five houses down, almost where Mockingbird Lane intersected Doheny, Dave began to see what Addison had wanted them to see, looming out of the darkness.

The ground had cracked and slid, with their side now about three feet lower than the other side. There was a gap about two feet wide. It ran the width of the street and into the lawns on either side. On the north it ran beneath a house, which had shifted badly. On the south side the crack had missed the house there, running along the east side of it and then out onto Doheny, where it looked like it crossed the road, but his flashlight wasn’t powerful enough to see that far. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if there had been a landslide there where the crack entered the hillside. He suspected there would be more, both uphill and downhill.

He cautiously moved toward the edge and shined his flashlight down into the crack. It was not too terribly deep, and narrowed the farther down it went, but it was deep enough.

“I guess you know what this means,” he said.

Karen sighed. “It means we won’t be leaving today.”

From up the street, they heard a woman screaming for help. They hurried in that direction. Rounding the corner, they passed several houses on their way uphill. A man came from his driveway. Dave knew most of his neighbors downhill, at least to say hello to, though they didn’t socialize. Uphill he only knew his immediate neighbors, and he didn’t know this man.

“Is your family okay?” Dave asked him as they got nearer.

“Yes, thank God. There’s a lot of damage, but all we have is a cut where my wife stepped on something on her way out. Do you know the people at the end of the road? It sounds like it’s coming from there.”

“No, I don’t, but I guess we’d better go see.”

“I’ve got to take care of my wife first. I just located the first-aid kit. Have you got any phone service?”

“I haven’t even tried. I’d be surprised if we did.”

The man looked very worried.

“I need to get in touch with my son in Pasadena,” he said. “I need to see if he and his family are all right. I don’t think I have enough gas in the car to get over there. You wouldn’t happen to have any gas for sale, would you?”

“Sorry,” Dave said. They left him and kept going up the hill. The woman had stopped screaming, but Dave could hear voices up ahead.

“Dave!” Karen gasped. “Dave, look!”

She was pointing off to their left. They had been hugging the right side of the road, stepping over cracks in the pavement here and there, nothing like the monster down below but enough to trip over if you weren’t careful. Now he joined his flashlight beam to Karen’s, and saw a big bite had been taken out of the pavement.

“Don’t go too close to it,” she said. “It might collapse under you.”

“I’ll be careful,” he said, and moved toward the brink in small steps. He edged around the huge hole and stepped up onto a broken piece of sidewalk. From that vantage he could look down, and it was only then that it hit him that a house had been where this chunk had been taken out of the hillside.

“Addison, don’t go there!”

“I’ll just stand beside Daddy.”

She took his hand and they both looked over the new cliff. The house had slid a long way, and was nothing but matchsticks now. It might have landed on another house down below, but he couldn’t be sure about that. Daylight would reveal the extent of the damage, as it would certainly reveal so many other things.

“Did you know these people?” he asked his daughter.

“Just by name. The Solomons,” she said. “Remember Judy Grainger? She lived next door to them, but she moved away a few years ago. Mrs. Solomon gave us cookies when she was baking. They’re in their sixties or seventies. He worked at Paramount doing something in the art department, Judy said. I hope they weren’t at home.”

“Me, too.”

There was nothing for them to do, and he could see flashlight beams in the canyon. People down there were looking for survivors. They hurried on up the street.

At the very top there was a small traffic circle. There were houses to the east and the west, and a third one up against the hillside to the north. Behind it was scrubland much like the area must have been before the developers came. No houses loomed up there, and part of the hillside had been planted in ground cover intended to keep the hillside in place. But they were recent plantings, and they hadn’t spread very far. The house was an ultramodern box, put up only a few years ago. Dave remembered it, as all the Mockingbird Lane residents did, because of the constant truck traffic back and forth during the year and a half it took to build the place.

He assumed it had been built to earthquake code and probably would have still been standing, but a big part of the hillside had shaken down onto the flat roof, and crushed it like a wooden matchbox.

There were four people near the wreckage. He didn’t know any of them. One man was down on his hands and knees in front of a gap where the roof had not quite touched the sidewalk when the building collapsed. He was shining a flashlight into the gap, which just might be high enough for a man to wriggle through.

A woman in a torn nightgown saw them and zeroed in on him. She looked to be in her forties. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward her ruined home.

“My husband is in there,” she cried. “Please, please, help him get him out.”

He looked around at the two other people, a man and a woman who stood
close together, probably a man and wife. The man shrugged helplessly. Dave reluctantly got down beside the other man. He looked through the gap, and saw that it ended maybe ten feet farther in. It was possible that the gap continued to the left or right, but there would be no way to tell unless you crawled in there.

“I haven’t heard a sound,” the man said, quietly. “What’s your husband’s name?”

“Phil. I was downstairs watching television, I couldn’t sleep, that’s all that saved me. I ran outside and the whole hill came down…” She lapsed into tears again.

“Phil!” the other man shouted. “Phil, can you hear me?”

There was no reply. They got up and went around the house to the west. One window had survived almost intact, and Dave shined his light in there. He realized it had been a second-floor window, and it was now almost on the ground.

“I can see part of a room in there,” he said.

Karen had climbed up to join them. She tugged on his arm.

“Dave, you aren’t going in there, are you?”

“Not unless I hear somebody,” he admitted. If he heard someone crying out for help, he would have to do whatever he could to get him out. But he wouldn’t risk his neck crawling through a place like that, with aftershocks sure to come, without a damn good reason.

“My name’s Joe Crawford, by the way.”

“Dave Marshall. This is my wife, Karen.”

They returned to the street and gave the woman the bad news. She glared at them, then headed up the hill herself, still calling her husband’s name.

“I hope she doesn’t go in there,” Joe said. “Should we stop her?”

“It’s her right, I guess. But nobody could be alive in there.”

“I agree. How did your house hold up?”

“Pretty good,” Dave said. “There’s cracks here and there, and some ceiling fell down. But it’s habitable.”

“Sounds like my house,” Crawford said. “Not that I plan to sleep in it tonight.”

“Daddy,” Addison said. “I think we ought to go house to house and see if anyone needs help.”

He looked down at her and smiled, thinking he should have been the one to come up with that.

“Good idea, Addie. Let’s start at the top here and work our way down.”

They spent the next few hours knocking on doors. Many of the residents were already outside, all of them showing one degree or another of shock and disorientation. Dazed and confused, some just sat down on the street to await the coming of daylight.

Most of the rest of the people answered their doors promptly enough. Some of the houses were known to their neighbors to be empty, their occupants having fled in the last weeks to anyplace they thought might be safer than the big city.

None of the houses were as badly damaged as the one at the top of the hill, but many had shifted off their foundations. These tended to be the older homes, built to different earthquake standards.

Dave estimated that, in normal times, at least half of the houses they visited would have been deemed total write-offs. Just bring in the bulldozers and finish what Mother Nature had begun. Now, of course, they would remain standing. Even in normal times, this was the sort of event that bankrupted insurance companies, the sort of event that would have soon brought government intervention. Today, he wondered if the government would show up at all.

They came to the crack in the road and all had to peer down toward the bottom. It sobered everyone. Seeing destroyed or badly damaged houses was bad enough. Seeing the very earth cracked open made one feel very small, very vulnerable. If the ground you walked on was no more stable than this, where was there any stability?

Dave was beginning to think the neighborhood had escaped with only one probable death and two possibles, when someone from the search party thought he heard a cry for help from a house just on the west side of the crack. It was on the north side of the street, a two-story structure built in the traditional mission style, with adobe walls and red barrel tiles on the low, peaked roof. They approached the house, and their flashlights soon revealed that the east end of the roof had collapsed. It was from that part of the house that the cries were coming.

“That second-floor window,” said one of the men.

“I guess we go in,” someone else said.

Nobody looked too eager to do that, but they all knew it had to be done. They were all getting a new appreciation for the many rescuers they had seen on television, braving aftershocks to pull survivors from the rubble in Haiti,
in Turkey, in China and Indonesia. He followed Joe Crawford onto the porch and watched as he tried the door handle. It didn’t budge.

They looked to one side and saw a multipaned window with several panes cracked. Dave used his flashlight to knock one pane out, and cautiously stuck his hand through the gap and sprung the latch. The window eased open on its own, then almost fell onto the porch. There was room for Dave and Joe to squeeze through.

The living room they entered was a shambles, as they had by now come to expect. The residents had a lot of books, a lot of bric-a-brac, much of it quite fragile. All of it was on the floor in a jumble that made it almost seem a bomb had gone off in the room. Dave moved his flashlight beam around and saw a stairway leading up to a railed balcony overlooking the large open-plan living room. He gestured toward it. Joe nodded, and they picked their way carefully through the debris.