Slow Apocalypse (5 page)

He was shaking as he got on the Red Line train, and still shaky as he got off in North Hollywood. Seeing the colonel fall again and again. You see things like that in movies all the time, but it looks completely different in real life.

He sat there in the Escalade, sweating, trying to come up with a plan. What he wanted to do was go get Addison, and find Karen wherever she was. Gather his family together and get the hell out of town.

Could they connect him with Colonel Warner? Had he left a fingerprint? He was glad now that he had refused the coffee.

He started the Escalade, and headed up and over Laurel Canyon.

He lived on Mockingbird Drive, right on the extreme western edge of the expensive part of Hollywood, in the hills. In fact, he was so close to the Beverly Hills Trousdale Estates that he could stand on his back patio and throw a baseball over the city line. That baseball would land at the bottom of a ravine, and on property worth about twice as much per square foot as his because of the Beverly Hills address.

The neighborhood didn’t have a formal name, but his family always called it Birdland, a name Addison came up with when they moved there, when she was five. Some of the streets around them were Thrush, Kinglet, Robin, Swallow, Oriole, Thrasher, and Skylark. The house was very near Blue Jay Way, where George Harrison once lived, though actually getting there involved over a mile of driving through the spaghetti maze of streets in the canyons.

He found himself looking for helicopters as he climbed Doheny Drive. When he got to Mockingbird he turned cautiously, all his senses on alert. There were no military vehicles parked near the house, no soldiers with black uniforms and rifles. He turned into the driveway, activated the electric gate, drove through, turned off the engine, and listened to the silence. After a while he got out and cautiously entered the house.

Built in 1972, the house had five bedrooms, six and a half baths. Five thousand square feet in two stories, and that was not counting the guesthouse. Four-car garage, swimming pool, and something not many houses up in the hills had: almost a quarter acre of lawn. The southern end was a large deck that ran to the edge of a forty-five-degree downslope covered in ice plant to hold the soil in place. The whole thing was white, boxy, and modern, with a lot of glass walls facing south and no windows at all facing the street, which was standard practice for people living in the hills.

It was way too much house for the three of them. Dave had grown to hate it in the last few years. It was an albatross around his neck. He had paid what seemed an insane amount for it at the time, then watched as his investment doubled, then almost tripled, then fell over the edge with the popping of the housing bubble. If he sold it, he would walk away with a few thousand dollars.

His office was the guesthouse. The top floor was used for storage. The bottom floor was one large room with a galley kitchen, a gas fireplace, the obligatory media center, and a large conference table. When he was flying high in the situation comedy business they would often hold story conferences at that table.

The south wall, like the south wall of the main house, was all glass. The view ranged from Hancock Park to Mar Vista, with Century City, the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard, Baldwin Hills, and of course downtown Beverly Hills in between. At night he could see the long lines of headlights and taillights on the I-10 and the 405, and the planes lining up to land at LAX. It was a killer view, and he had arranged the series of long oak tables he used for a desk to face it. He sat down in his chair and powered up one of the three computers on the desk. He brought up the views from the three street-side security cameras.

All was still quiet on Mockingbird Drive.

He saved his treatment onto a flash drive. Then he shredded it, and files of his interviews with Colonel Warner. There was nothing he could do about the bank records of the checks he had written to him. And who was he kidding? If those people thought he had seen data he shouldn’t have seen, there was a waterboard or a bullet somewhere out there with his name on it.

Once more he went back over the events of the last two days in his mind. Was there any other possible interpretation than what Colonel Warner had shown him? Up until that morning Dave had been leaning toward the theory that he had simply been spinning a tall tale, or maybe exaggerating some rumors he had picked up from some of his friends still in government. How
was it possible that something of that magnitude was going on, spreading around the globe, and it wasn’t all over CNN? Was that plausible?

Well, maybe just. Keeping the secret in the Arabian desert would be the easiest. Nobody lived out there except oil workers, and they could be sequestered. The visible evidence—the smoke during the day and the flames at night—reminding him of the biblical pillars that guided the Israelites—could be explained as accidents or sabotage, for a while.

It would he harder to cover up in Iran, Iraq, and Russia, but not impossible. For a while. That seemed to be the key here: for a while. Weeks? A month? He didn’t know how long this had been going on, so it was pointless to try to figure out how much time might be left until it all came out. Because it would have to. Surely the people living around Samotlor knew something beyond sabotage was going on. You can prevent people from traveling, cut off electronic communications, but you can’t cover all the bases. Word will get out. In time, even the
absence
of news from the region becomes noteworthy.

So he decided the story was plausible. But plausibility was not truth. If it
was
all true, he should be doing something about it. Even if only a part of it was true, there were probably things he should be doing. Things like stocking up on food and water. Things like—worst-case scenario—buying a gun.

But what? What would be prudent, and what would be panicky?

He realized he didn’t have enough information. First he needed to answer the basic question: What would things be like in Los Angeles if there were no gasoline? What would they be like in the state of California, for that matter? What would they be like in America?

He went online to try to find some answers.

In a few hours he was much more frightened than he had been before.

“Did you know that Los Angeles has about a sixty-day supply of water?”

Karen looked up from her plate of take-out Thai food and frowned.

“You mean with the drought? We’ve already cut back to watering the plants once a week. What more do they expect us to do?”

He wasn’t going to tell them the story of the last two days until he was sure of a few more things. But his mind was swimming with recently learned information, and he wanted to share it.

“We get almost half our water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct. It’s a hundred
years old now. It brings water from way up north in the Owens Valley and Mono Lake. It’s downhill all the way.”

“No it’s not,” Addison said. “There are mountains between here and there.”

“The water is siphoned over them,” he told her. “There are no pumps needed. Doesn’t cost much to run it. Not that the people of the Owens Valley have ever been happy about it. They were bamboozled by William Mulholland back in 1905. Without that water, Los Angeles could never have developed the way it did.”

“Didn’t we see a movie about that?” Karen asked.

“
Chinatown
was based on the water wars. The thing is, the people way up there in the Sierras have never really forgiven L.A. for it, and in fact, the way they figure it, we’re
still
stealing their water. And we keep wanting more. I was just thinking, if they ever got angry enough, it would be easy to sabotage that big pipe. You know how many people the Los Angeles metro area could support without the water we bring in?”

Karen didn’t even look up, already bored with the subject.

“How many, Daddy?”

“Nineteen out of twenty people who live here would have to go somewhere else.”

Neither of them had anything to say about that. Dave figured he might as well give them the rest of the story. It’s not as if conversation had sparkled around the Marshall dinner table lately.

“Most of the rest of our water comes from the Colorado and California Aqueducts. That water has to be pumped.” And pumps need electricity or fuel to operate. But he didn’t add that. “Only about 10 percent of our water comes out of the ground.”

“That’s fascinating, Daddy.”

He could tell she didn’t really think so, but Addison had always been tactful. He smiled at her.

“So, would you like to hear about our power supply?”

Neither of them did.

In trying to answer that basic question—what would Los Angeles be like with little or no petroleum fuel?—he had found some interesting and alarming facts.

He was surprised to learn that L.A. got about half its electricity from coal-fired
plants, some of them in the city, some in the neighboring states. Another quarter came from burning natural gas, 10 percent from nuclear plants, and around 5 percent from hydropower, mostly from Hoover Dam. But all the coal for the plants in Arizona and Utah was brought in by trains that ran on diesel fuel.

How would Los Angeles, perhaps the most gasoline-dependent city in the world, react to a severe shortage?

He had an idea that it wouldn’t be pretty.

The next day after taking Addison to school Dave dropped Karen off at the Burbank airport for a flight to San Francisco. She was attending a conference there. He wasn’t sure what it was about. He felt guilty about that, but he had a hard time keeping up with her causes at the best of times, and this was far from the best. He couldn’t stop thinking about Colonel Warner and the burning oil wells.

He decided to go on a shopping spree. But first he decided to make a list. What would he need to survive with limited or no gasoline? He went down to the basement to see what he had.

It was under the guesthouse/office, and reachable only by an outside stairway going down the hill, almost overgrown with vines. The door was sturdy steel with a strong padlock. He hadn’t been in there in ages.

His earthquake supplies were good for only the recommended three days, and it was all years old. The first-aid kit was a joke.

Against the east wall was a hodgepodge of stuff that most people accumulate.

When Addison was six and joined the Girl Scouts, Dave thought it would be fun if the family camped out together. So he bought a tent, a camp stove, a giant cooler, cots, air mattresses, all top-of-the-line, and they set out like pioneers on the Oregon Trail for the wilds of Lake Tahoe—where you have to make reservations several weeks ahead, and pay $75 for a three-day weekend. He had pitched the tent among a horde of forty-foot RVs. The Marshalls were the only tent people at the campground.

They lasted one night. Karen complained of the cold, hated bacon and eggs cooked over a propane stove, and was eaten up by bugs. They checked out, and checked in to a luxury hotel, and spent the rest of the weekend in the casinos or lounging by the pool. Addison asked one time about a month later if they
could do it again, and her mother said no. The camping gear had sat in the basement ever since.

He couldn’t blame it all on Karen. He wasn’t all that wild about sleeping on an air mattress himself. Addison seemed to enjoy the experience, but she knew better than to pressure her mother about it.

He ran a finger over the rolled-up tent, which was covered with dust. He recalled it had cost him about $600, and had been set up once. The old propane stove was still there, too, but he had no bottled gas for it. He put that on his shopping list.

Alongside the old tennis rackets and boxes of books were three bicycles that were also gathering dust. When they’d lived in the Valley, in the flatlands, they’d actually used them as a family, riding the bike trails on weekends or evenings. Then they moved to the hills, and after a few trips down and back up, pushing them the last quarter mile, they put them in the basement and never used them again.

It made him sad to look at them. What did they do as a family anymore? He’d spent most of the last decade in the high-pressure world of comedy writing, about as insecure as any job can be. Karen had flitted from one to another of her transient passions. He didn’t think Addison was actually
neglected
; they were involved in her school—Karen more than him—and she always seemed a happy little girl. Let’s just say she was encouraged to be self-sufficient, and she was good at that. Now he found himself wishing he’d asked her if she really
wanted
to be self-sufficient.

Addison had been five when they moved. Her bicycle was now much too small for her. All three of them were good bikes, with fat tires and light aluminum frames. In his youth it was all ten-speeds. He squeezed one of the tires and wasn’t surprised to find that it was flat, but the rubber also felt flaky from age. He made a note of the sizes and put that on his shopping list, along with a new bike for Addison.

By the time he left the house he had a long list.

For once he was happy with the cavernous interior of the Escalade. He descended on Costco in Burbank like Crazy Horse on the Seventh Cavalry. For the first time he used one of the flatbed shopping carts, and he filled it up with bottled water, cases of canned meat, tuna, veggies, and whatever else struck his fancy. For good measure he bought lots of toilet paper. He figured,
if it’s the end of the world as we know it, the toilet paper was going to have to last awhile.

When he had it all stowed in the back, he realized he was breathing hard, and felt like he was on the edge of a panic attack. He used to get them when they were writing to a deadline, and lately he’d had a few when he contemplated his financial situation. He knew that what he’d just done was more like a hysterical reaction than true prudent planning. He had not been able to talk this over with anyone, and the pressure of that was getting to him. He had seen a man killed. He had heard the most frightening story he’d ever heard, and he’d seen what looked like proof that the story was true, or at least partly true. And so what was it that he was most worried about at that moment? Why, it was telling Karen about all this. He was sure she would think he was crazy. And it would be hard to blame her.