Slow Apocalypse (26 page)

He had mostly worked on boarding up the first-floor windows. Not just the ones that had broken in the quake, but all of them, sealing off his million-dollar view. Luckily, there weren’t too many of them. On the first floor, the north and west sides were windowless, as their only views would have been of the wall and the gate. On the east side, there were three picture windows facing the patio and pool. That left the south side, which had been all glass. He used
the sheets of plywood he had laid in during his shopping spree. He felt sure he could have gotten the job done in a few hours if he had unlimited electricity, and from time to time he would look longingly at his power saw. He could have run it for a short time from his solar batteries, but that would have meant turning off the small refrigerator, and that was one luxury he wasn’t ready to part with. By cooling their leftovers they were able to make sure nothing went to waste.

Best of all, they had ice. The weather continued hot, and a glass of iced tea or lemonade made from powdered mix kept him going when he thought he might collapse.

Using a handsaw instead of a power saw wasn’t exactly a retreat to Stone Age technology, but it felt like it. He would work for five minutes, then rest. Karen gamely offered to spell him while he rested, but she had even less success. Addison gave it a try, but could barely get the saw to move at all. Dave squirted a little oil on the blade and that seemed to help, but he was soon plastered in sawdust and feeling more than a little grumpy. At the end of the first day, he wasn’t halfway through the project. He was getting a blister on his hand, despite the work gloves.

Then Karen and Addison would help hold the finished piece of plywood in place and he would nail it in. When he had the first section in place he felt a sense of accomplishment, as if he had built an entire house, but looking at how much he had left to do was depressing.

He was enormously glad when the sun went down. No question of working after dark anymore.

The three of them gathered around the dinner table for a macaroni and cheese hot dish that was only burned a little bit on the bottom, with canned pears and string beans, and tiny cups of chocolate pudding for dessert. Karen set out a plate of biscuits made from powered mix, but they were soggy when they bit into them.

“I’m still getting the hang of baking on the camp stove,” she said.

“This isn’t so bad,” Dave said, bravely eating a second bite. And in fact, he was so hungry he could have eaten almost anything, including raw biscuit batter. “But I think we maybe should cut back on portions. I hate to say that, because I could eat everything on this table and still want more, but we have to make it last.”

“I wish we knew how long,” Karen said. “How much do you think? Fifteen hundred calories? Twelve hundred?”

“We can figure it out later. Tonight, let’s eat our fill. I know there must be a lot of hungry people out there, who are getting less than twelve hundred calories.”

Addison pushed her plate away.

“I’ve had enough,” she announced. Karen pushed it back at her.

“Clean your plate, dear. My mother used to say, ‘there are people starving in Africa.’ Now there are people starving in Los Angeles, so count your blessings.”

“I wish I could give it to them.”

“And I wished I could feed the starving children in Africa, but we can’t. You’ve just got a few bites there, and I know you’re still hungry. If you want to make a sacrifice, don’t open your pudding.”

Dave mopped his plate with the soggy biscuit, then cleaned out the empty cans and plastic pudding containers in the tub of bathwater they had used earlier in the day and buried them under the pile of debris they had moved out of the guesthouse.

After Karen finished washing their dinnerware in a bucket of clean water, they lit a lantern and sat around the picnic table.

They had one surviving television set, a small one from Addison’s room that had been knocked down but still showed a blue screen when they turned it on. But that was all they got. There was no cable service, and they didn’t have a satellite dish. Dave thumbed through all the channels, and the screen still stayed blue.

“Well, it’s a better light,” Karen said, turning off the lantern, “and it runs off our batteries.” It was true. The flat screen made them look like they were underwater, but it was enough light to see by.

The radio was part of the home theater system. He slowly turned the big black knob, looking for stations, as the three of them clustered together in the blue light.

There wasn’t a lot to hear.

He found a dozen stations, about half of them in Spanish. Many of the stations were broadcasting just music or simple tape loops advising listeners to return on the hour for news updates. Dave thought they probably didn’t have the personnel to keep up the twenty-four/seven yakking everyone was accustomed to. That was confirmed when one station switched to live reports at ten
o’clock. The man in the studio gave the call letters and the frequency, then identified himself.

“As we told you at nine, we will keep broadcasting as long as our emergency generator holds out. The engineer tells me he has enough gas for about a week. Write down this frequency, as we have decided to give updates on the hour.

“We are sending out our reporters as often as we can, but not many have shown up since the quake. Most of our news is coming from City Hall. Here’s what they say:

“Exercise caution when leaving your homes. We are hearing a lot about people joining together for neighborhood protection, and that sounds like a good idea to me. Work with your neighbors, my friends. Get to know them.”

Dave was reminded of old movies set during World War II, of London families during the Blitz, gathered around a big console radio to hear the news of the bombings. The darkness pressed in around them.

The silence was almost total between radio broadcasts. Each time a station signed off they would be directed to another frequency. The remaining stations had worked out a schedule of quarter-hour time slots. Karen jotted down the information, so they could listen again on following nights.

None of the news was good. Mostly it consisted of reports of violence, much of it of dubious reliability, as the first radio station had warned. A gun battle had broken out between police and unidentified gangs in the area of the Disney Center and continued on up Bunker Hill. Snipers were known to be in the lower floors of the Library Tower, and higher up in several other skyscrapers. More snipers had been reported from some buildings near the beach in Santa Monica.

Koreatown seemed to have the strongest organization, with armed men guarding all major intersections in the big square between about Olympic and Third, Hoover and Rossmore. Bodies were reported to be hanging from lampposts all along Wilshire Boulevard, and at the major streets entering the area. Some had signs hanging around their necks, identifying them as looters, killers, and “invaders.” The Korean militia had fought several pitched battles with either Mexican and Salvadoran gangs or hordes of hungry Hispanic families, depending on what reporter you believed. Everyone agreed that the Koreans had won. It was said that food and water were still being delivered and distributed to residents of Koreatown, but that could not be confirmed, as no one from that neighborhood was talking about it.

Farther south established black and Hispanic gangs were reported to be rampaging, though some said that was much exaggerated. The one hopeful
thing Dave heard was that the elders in both the African-American and Latino communities on the flatlands were trying to work together to battle the lawless youth of both races. But once again, that was not easy to confirm. In the San Fernando Valley the story was similar. They got no news at all from the San Gabriel Valley, or from farther south in Orange County.

And once more, Dave thought, our world contracts. Orange County might as well be on the farside of the Moon. At ten o’clock they turned the radio off, then the television, and sat silently for a while.

“I wish I could call some of my friends,” Addison finally said.

Dave didn’t know what to tell her. Only two of her friends had lived in their canyon, and both had left with their families a week earlier. The others had lived either in neighboring canyons or down on the flats. Both places were impossibly distant at the moment.

“I’ll bet you miss your cell phone,” Karen said. “I know I do.”

Addison said, “I try it a few times a day. No bars.”

Strange as all this seemed to Dave, he knew it must be even more of a wrench for his daughter, who had never known life without her cell. No Facebook page to update, no Twitter messages to post, no texting, none of the social media that Dave had never used but which were so big a part of the young generation’s lives.

“Tomorrow night you have to stand guard duty,” Karen said.

“That’s what I agreed to.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t like the family to be separated, even for a few hours.”

“I don’t like it, either, but I think Ferguson is right, we have to stand together. You heard the reports on the radio. Some very nasty people might figure that there’s more food and loot up here than down there.”

“What’s to prevent them from coming over the hill, behind us?”

“For one thing, they’d have to fight their way uphill from the Valley. We can hope that the people on the north side of the hills are organizing just like we are.”

“But if they do make it, we’re pretty close to the top. Last night I had bad dreams about people coming down the hill, not up.”

Dave took her hand and squeezed it, while at the same time Addison reached for his other hand. He knew even more strongly that he would do anything, absolutely anything, to keep this family safe.

“I’ll bring it up the next time I see Ferguson.”

“I think we should reach out to those people on the Valley side,” Addison
said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we all had some idea of what everyone else is doing?”

“I agree.” And so now would the Doheny Militia be formulating a foreign policy, and alliances with its neighbors? It was like medieval city-states banding together, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?

“For now, let’s go to bed,” he said. And they once more retreated to their cots in the tent. Before he could get to sleep, Dave felt another aftershock, and heard Karen cry out. It wasn’t a big one, but probably meant they would be spending at least another night without a roof over their heads.

They spent the next day as they had the day before, putting the finishing touches on their new and smaller residence. They managed to complete the plywood work, walling off the entire first floor. There was a single door hung on heavy hinges that swung outwards. Not that it swung well, or fit perfectly, but it was stout, made from two pieces of plywood screwed together. Inside, a two-by-four could be set into brackets on either side of the door. It would take a lot of battering to bring it down.

They had made openings in several places from which they could watch the patio and the gate. From the second-floor north wall they knocked out one of the small slit windows, which now gave a view over the northern wall and into the street beyond.

Dave didn’t want them to have only one way in or out of the house if they had to hole up in it, but he didn’t want two doors to defend, either. So in the very southwest corner of the first floor, down at floor level, they made a three-foot-square escape hatch that could be kicked out. It would be used only in desperation, because it opened on the very lip of the cliff, and if they used it they would have to walk—or more likely, roll—down the steep hillside to the street below.

They concealed the escape hatch from the outside by arranging some empty ceramic pots against the wall and putting dead plants in them. They could be easily shoved aside and, with any luck, the family could be on their way down the hillside before anyone breaking in the front door was any the wiser.

The next-to-last task of the day was to go back into the main house and clear a path to the northwest corner, which was in Addison’s room. There were two floor-to-ceiling windows there, one facing west and the other north. They were wider than the arrow slits in a medieval castle, but narrow enough that
Dave could have just squeezed through them. They knocked out the glass, then cut two sheets of plywood into four pieces. They screwed one piece over the west window at floor level, and another higher up, flush with the ceiling. They left a foot-high gap between them, at shoulder height.

Getting one of the shotguns, Dave climbed the stairs again and stood at the window. He brought the gun up and poked the barrel through the gap, swinging it back and forth. He could cover a lot of the street from there, about five feet above the level of the security wall. It looked good to him, so they did the same with the north window, and then they could cover almost all the rest of the street.

The last thing they did that day was go to the room in the northeast, which was smaller than Addison’s but had the same corner arrangement of windows. Both of them had broken, and they knocked out the rest of the glass.

Karen had talked him into the house, even though he thought it was ugly. Too modern, too boxy, he felt. “Very L.A.,” she had said, and so they bought it.

Now he was grateful to the unknown architect for building a home that might have been designed with self-defense in mind. It had proved easier to seal away from the outside than most houses, because it was already sealed off except for the open south face. When they had prepared the two windows in the storage room in the same way they had done in Addison’s room, it commanded a view of all the street. They could move quickly from one gun port to another, one room to another, or Dave could station himself in one room and have Karen look out from the other.

They ate a dinner that left Dave still hungry, but he said nothing about that. He probably ought to lose a few pounds, anyway.

Dave fell into his cot ten minutes after eating, setting the alarm for eleven thirty. At least battery-powered clocks still worked.

He slept right through it, but Addison woke him and he downed a glass of orange juice, stumbled out onto the street, and painfully lifted his leg over the bicycle. It seemed that every muscle in his body was stiff and sore as he coasted down the hill for his shift on guard duty.