Slow Apocalypse (38 page)

“Do you think there are any juries operating out there? Or prosecutors, for that matter.”

“Your guess is as good as mine. The police are still functioning, some of them, anyway, and the National Guard. I’ll bet there’s a jail, or some kind of compound.”

“But you don’t think anybody will be coming after us?”

“I guess I doubt it. Everybody wants law and order, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the police have their hands full just trying to maintain order. In a near anarchy, the only law
is
to maintain order. My guess is that they’re concentrating only on the most violent crime, committed by violent people, people who were bad guys before all this.

“You know, the people who did things during the Rodney King riots, I don’t think they ever did anything about most of them. Not just looters, there were way too many of those, but people who killed other people. When conditions are like that, most people who commit crimes get away with them. And this situation is ten thousand times worse than the King riots. A million times worse.”

“So that’s the good news? For us, I mean? They’re too busy trying to keep things calm, so they probably don’t have time to look very hard at killings? And probably don’t have the legal staff to deal with it, anyway?”

“Well, we could use some good news, couldn’t we? It’s also the bad news, too, of course. If things have reached the point where there’s no law, it’s people like us who will suffer for it. We’re not used to violence. The whole population of the state prison system might be out there, roaming around, as hungry as everybody else but maybe more prepared to do something about it. What I’m thinking is, we got lucky. If they had been just a little bit smarter, it might have gone badly for us.”

They thought that over for a while.

“I just don’t understand those boys.” Her voice caught in her throat, and
he felt her tears on his shoulder. He hugged her tighter. “We had our guns in our hands! We weren’t exactly pointing them at them, not
right
at them, but any idiot could see it wouldn’t take us a second to fire.”

“That’s what I said. That was our luck. We were dealing with idiots.”

“Do you think so?”

“Only in a certain sense. They might have been bright enough in some ways, but they were slaves to their macho image of themselves. Did you notice the way that guy with the pistol was pointing it? Holding it sideways like they do in the movies? The stupidest way to aim a pistol? That’s
cool
. It’s so cool that gangbangers picked it up from the movies, like the Mafia picked up stuff from
The Godfather
.”

“That’s so awful. If they’d had any sense…”

“They’d still be alive. But they couldn’t let us go. They had this image of themselves as the big bad gangsters, and their image of us as weak, people who would barf at the idea of shooting somebody.”

“I did barf.”

“Afterward, and that’s the important thing.”

There was another brief silence.

“What do you feel about it?” she asked.

“Feel? Not good. But I’ll tell you the truth, if I had it to do over again, I can’t think of what I’d do differently. We gave them every chance.”

“Maybe a warning shot?”

“I don’t think you even believe that yourself.
He pointed a gun at us,
Karen
!
What was I supposed to do? Ask him to put it down? I had to assume he was about to shoot, that was the
only
way to deal with it. And that other guy, the one coming up behind you. You think he was going to shout
boo
? They were playing for keeps, honey, and the only way to deal with that is to play harder and faster and meaner than them.” He paused, and heard her sigh.

“So how do
you
feel about it?”

“I killed someone. I’ll deal with it.”

He thought she might be done, but there was one more subject to bring up, and it was an important one.

“Dave, I’m sticking to what I said. The decision is yours. But I told you I’d give you my opinion, and I have to say I’m not sure that leaving here is the right idea.”

“Big surprise,” he said, and instantly regretted the way that sounded. “No, I mean, of course you have doubts. After what happened? I do, too.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I’ll tell you what we aren’t going to do. We aren’t leaving tomorrow. I need some time to think about it some more. And I want to see what Addison and Jenna think. Do you think we should tell Jenna?”

Karen thought about it.

“Maybe we should think about that a little longer, too.”

“Fair enough. Honey, this is probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. Getting it wrong scares me more than anything I’ve ever faced. Getting it wrong is just not an option. And I’m not sure I’m up to it.”

Karen embraced him.

“You’ve guided us well so far. I’m willing to rely on you again.”

“I appreciate that, and at the same time I have to say I kind of resent it. I hope that isn’t too harsh.”

“I think I deserve worse than that, so I take no offense.”

“What I want most of all is for us to be a team again. I know you’re strong enough; you were so strong when we had nothing.”

“I may be ready to be part of the team again soon. But not yet.” She sighed. “That was my downfall, wasn’t it? Going from having nothing, struggling, counting the money, and suddenly we had it all. I couldn’t handle it.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It was my downfall, too. We both misplaced our values. The miracle, to me, is that Addison has turned out so levelheaded. With precious little help from me. She doesn’t even remember the hard times, she was too young.”

“She remembers.”

“You think so?”

“She’s told me she had more fun ‘back when we were poor.’ Isn’t that sad?”

“If I’d known that, maybe…no, by then, by the time we moved into this monster of a house, I was blind to everything but getting ahead, being a big success.”

“I loved you for it. The thing I did wrong was to stop loving you when times got hard again. What was I thinking?”

They were silent for a while.

“If you love me again, then everything’s all right.”

“I do. I always did. I just got angry and couldn’t show it.”

They both jumped when they heard a noise from the doorway. Dave was groping in the dark for his pistol when Addison spoke.

“Mommy, can I come in?”

Dave quickly found the electric lantern and switched it on. He had forgotten to recharge it and the light it cast was dim, but enough to see Addison standing in the doorway to their bedroom, her pillow and a blanket in her arms.

Karen got out of bed and went to her daughter. She hugged her.

“I can’t get to sleep. I feel like a baby, but I’m scared.”

“We’re all scared, Addie.”

“Can I sleep in here? I can curl up on the floor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“She’s right. My daughter’s not sleeping on the floor. You get in bed with your mom, and I’ll go downstairs and sleep on the couch.”

“I wish you’d stay, too, Daddy.”

In the end Dave set up a cot a few feet from the bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but he felt immensely comforted to have both his wife and his daughter sleeping so close. To his surprise, he fell asleep almost at once, and slept soundly through the night.

When Dave got up at sunrise the next morning he looked at the little battery-powered weather station that had survived the quake undamaged. It was reading 85 degrees. The wind gauge was no longer working, but when he stepped outside he could feel the hot, dry breath of a Santa Ana blowing down the canyon to swirl the dead leaves around on his patio. He wouldn’t be surprised if the mercury topped a hundred later in the day.

He spent half an hour painting the scooters.

He had a choice of red or black, from some spray cans left over from a project he didn’t even remember. He went with black, wanting to decrease their visibility as much as possible. When he was done they looked awful, full of drips and smears, but at least neither one of them looked pink. He kept worrying about that possible APB:
Be on the lookout for a blonde on a pink Vespa and a man on a white one.

“Great job, Dad,” Addison said, when she saw the results. “You just turned two nice rides into eyesores. No self-respecting thief would dare steal those. He’d die of shame, driving around.”

“That was the idea.” Dave wasn’t so sure. Any ride at all with gas in it might be desirable now, a clapped-out Ford with a full tank better than a Rolls with no gas.

That she was speaking to him at all he regarded as better than he might have hoped. But she had never been one to bear a grudge for long.

He had often found that doing things that didn’t require a lot of thought were the times when he came up with his best ideas for new stories on the TV series. What he usually ended up doing was the quintessential Los Angeles activity: driving. He had driven as far south as San Diego, west to Santa Barbara, east to Palm Springs, always on the freeways so he didn’t have to give any thought to where he was going. Inching along or tooling down the highway at eighty-five, it was all the same to him. He would plug his iPod into the stereo system and
let it shuffle at random through the hundreds of selections he had stored there, from Bach to Beyoncé. About half the time he would arrive back home with at least the seed of an idea and would summon his posse to his office in the guesthouse, where they would gorge on deli takeout he had brought up the hill from Canter’s on Fairfax and toss out ideas for plot developments and jokes.

But when he was done with the painting, he was no closer to a decision than when he started. At noon he left the house for his shift at the barricade, and suddenly everything changed.

Dave arrived at the barricade on his bicycle a little after eight. Art Bertelstein and a woman he didn’t know were already on duty, hot and out of sorts. The woman was introduced as Peggy Wysocki. She looked to be around forty, and was dressed in Iraq War desert camo gear. Ferguson was there, too, looking bad. He was drenched in sweat, his skin was grayish, and his hand shook as he mopped his face with a towel. His eyes were hollow and haunted.

“Marshall, where have you been? You’re ten minutes late.”

Dave didn’t feel he owed anyone an explanation, though an apology was in order. Where had he been? Taking care of his own business. He hoped Ferguson wasn’t forgetting that guard duty down there was voluntary. He hoped the man wasn’t letting himself turn into a petty general. He wondered if the man’s deterioration was the result of the heavy strains of leadership—which Dave could easily understand, feeling overwhelmed to be responsible just for his own family—or the fact that he, like many others, had run out of a medication he needed.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“You’ve got a visitor,” Ferguson said, jerking his head toward the other side of the barricade. Dave looked there and at first didn’t see anybody, then spotted a young man sitting on a curb in the shade of a tree, drinking from a plastic water bottle. He wore spandex cycling clothes, a yellow jersey with a Nike swoosh and black shorts with blue racing stripes and bold letters that said
PINERALLO
. A bicycle that looked very high-tech was resting on the grass beside him. He was in his mid-twenties, with buzz-cut blond hair and a pleasant face that women would find irresistible. He had the lanky, wiry build of the long-distance racer. He looked up, smiled, and sprang to his feet, walking easily to stand a few feet away from the barricade.

“You’re Dave Marshall,” the man said. “I recognize you from pictures my dad sent me over the years.”

Dave suddenly grinned.

“You’re Teddy Winston!”

“Guilty. Dad sent me over here to talk to you. But…” He extended a hand to indicate the barrier and the armed people on the other side.

“Let him through,” Dave said. “I know him.”

“Doesn’t sound like it to me,” Ferguson said. He was frowning. “How about we see some identification?”

Teddy didn’t miss a beat, his smile didn’t falter.

“Sure. It’s back in my saddlebag. Can I bring my bike up closer?”

Ferguson grudgingly nodded, and Teddy hurried back to his bike and walked it back to the barricade.

“I’ve got a pistol in here,” he said, as he opened the flap of a canvas pannier.

“Reach in and take your hand out very slowly,” Peggy said.

“Sure thing.” He did as he was told, and brought out a wallet. He thumbed a California driver’s license from it. He passed it over to Peggy, who studied it and seemed satisfied.

“Says Ted Winston, all right.”

“He’s the son of one of my best friends,” Dave explained. “I’ve never met him. He lives in San Diego.”

That got everyone’s attention, almost as much as if he had said Teddy had just arrived from the moon. Peggy handed Teddy’s ID back to him and gestured for him to come around the barrier.

“Sorry about that. Can’t be too careful these days.”

“Believe me, I know where you’re coming from.”

Then they all wanted to know what things were like in far-off San Diego, but Dave took him aside.