Slow Apocalypse (50 page)

“We’re through,” he told the women. “The guy in the Toyota is right behind us, if you were worried about him, Addison.”

“I was, but I forgot all about him for a while there. I’m so pissed off at myself. I never knew I could be so damn scared. I’m such a wuss.”

“It’s all right, honey,” Karen said, “and no, you’re not. I was scared, too.”

He paused at the place that he always thought of as the quintessential Hollywood location: the intersection of Gracie Allen Drive and George Burns Road. Each of the streets was only two blocks long. The intersection was right at the heart of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the hospital of the stars.

Looking to his left, Dave saw that a curved pedestrian elevated walkway had fallen into the street in a heap of twisted metal beams.

The corners to his left held the Thaliens Mental Health Center and the Theodore E. Cummings Family Patient Wing. Both were silent, with no lights showing through the broken glass of the windows. To his right and behind him was the Broidy Family Patient Wing. The block of George Burns Road to his right was also blocked by a partial collapse of one of the hospital towers up near Beverly. The other corner was a large open space, formerly a parking lot, now just another abandoned aid station. It smelled of human waste and sickness. Paper trash that looked like medical packaging was strewn all over, and it was swirled around them by the Santa Ana wind entering the hospital canyons and not finding an easy way out.

When Karen played her flashlight over the jumble of beds and bedpans,
empty plastic blood and glucose bags, food trays, equipment racks, billowing, filthy sheets, and bloody wads of gauze, it was clear that no one was home.

“They’ve moved on,” Dave said.

“Honk your horn, anyway.”

He did, and in a moment the Toyota pulled up near him and began honking, too. The echoes were loud in this space surrounded on three sides by tall hospital buildings. They waited a moment, and tried again.

“Hey, dude, cut it out. I’m trying to get some sleep!”

Dave jumped, Addison made a stifled squeal. Hearing a voice in that place and at that time was like being tapped on the shoulder during a stroll through a haunted house at midnight.

“Flashlight, Addison!” Dave shouted. The beam clicked on and she shined it out the window on her side. Soon the beam picked out a tall, long-haired man dressed in filthy, bloodstained green surgical scrubs shambling toward them from the direction of one of the hospital buildings. He held his hands up lackadaisically, and squinted at them.

“I’m not armed, folks. You can lay down them shootin’ irons.”

He kept coming, and Dave tentatively decided he was harmless, since he could see no place where he could have concealed a handgun. The bottoms of his scrubs were so carelessly tied they looked as if they might fall off at any moment.

Karen quickly got out and ran around the front of the car. She held her shotgun aimed in his general direction, but pointed at the ground.

“That’s far enough, sir,” she said. The man shrugged, and stopped walking. He stood about ten yards from the car, loose-limbed either from exhaustion or what Dave thought might be some very good drugs.

“Are you a doctor?” Dave called out. The man laughed.

“Might as well be. I’m the closest thing to a doctor left in this spook house. I been doing things it used to take a doctor to do. No, man, I’m a nurse.”

“Where is everybody?”

“Blew town, dude. Marching to the sea. Like Sherman. Like lemmings. All but yours truly. When the soldiers came, I found a place to hide. I’m not going to the ocean. Sharks in the ocean, man.”

“Are you saying they were forced to leave?”

“Shit, I don’t know. All’s I know is the soldiers came, navy soldiers.”

“Sailors.”

“And Marines. Looking for a few good men.” He leaned forward with comic intensity, put his hand close to his mouth as though imparting a confidence,
and stage-whispered, “I have it on good authority they’re taking them all on that big-ass aircraft carrier, that
nuke
-u-lar carrier, as a former president used to say, and dumping ’em. Feeding them to the sharks. No place to put ’em, no food to feed ’em. Make ’em walk the fucking plank, man. Yo-ho-ho.”

“…hurts…”

“What was that? What did you say, Jenna?”

“She said she hurts, Daddy.”

Dave looked at Jenna, rolling her head slowly from side to side. It looked like her bandages were wet again.

“Hey, man, you got a casualty in there? Somebody hurt?” He straightened up a little and mooched over to the car, leaned in and looked at Jenna. Dave heard the burned Toyota accelerating away in a clatter and a shower of sparks, but didn’t pay much attention to it. He was debating if he should let this man examine Jenna or if they’d be better off just heading to the Winston house as fast as possible. Was he really a nurse? Was he insane, or just stoned? Both?

Before he could decide the man held his hand out behind him, and called out.

“Flashlight!”

It was a sad parody of a surgeon, but after a small hesitation Karen slapped the Maglite into his hand. He leaned into the car and shined the light into Jenna’s face. He reached out and, with surprising tenderness, peeled back one of her eyelids and studied her pupil. Then he put the light on Jenna’s bandaged leg and poked gently at it. Jenna had no reaction.

“She’s passed out. Which is probably good. That’s gotta hurt like hell. And the blood keeps oozing out of there. If you don’t tie it off, she could bleed out pretty soon. You have something I can use for a tourniquet?”

They opened the door and improvised a tourniquet out of a torn blanket and a wooden spoon, which the man tightened and then fastened in place with duct tape. The ooze of blood stopped.

“You can’t leave that on, like, forever, dude. Loosen it a little every ten minutes or so, let blood get to the leg. See if it’s still bleeding. You have to get her to a doctor who can take a look in there and see what’s going down, sew her up. Otherwise, she’s gonna lose the leg. Might lose it anyway. I’ve seen a lot who did. I’ve done all I can do.”

“Thank you for that,” Karen said.

“Hey, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He paused, swayed on his feet, caught himself before he fell. “Say, dude, have you got any weed back there?”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Half the people in California have a medical condition that feels better with weed. Just thought I’d ask.”

“Here,” Addison said. She hadn’t gotten out of the car when Dave did, but had watched the treatment from the backseat. She had apparently been busy. Tears were running down her face as she thrust a plastic bag out the window. The bag rattled with the sound of cans.

The nurse took it and looked down into it, then reached in and pulled out a can.

“Peaches, man! Haven’t had any of
those
for a long time. In heavy syrup, the best kind for when the world ends. I’m gonna have
such
a sugar rush!
Muchas gracias
, sweetheart!”

“Hasta la vista,”
Karen said, getting back into the car. Dave got in, too, and started it and put it in gear. As they drove off Dave saw the man scuffing through the parking lot, where he sat down on a bed facing the approaching fire. He felt guilty about not offering the man a ride, but he had shown no signs of wanting to leave. He didn’t think the fire posed much of a threat to him, with all the concrete parking structures in the hospital complex to take refuge in.

He realized he had never asked the man’s name.

The next morning never dawned. As they got closer to the Winston house a sick, grayish light gradually worked its way into the landscape, not much better than the night. The glow of the fire, though it was increasingly distant as they worked their way west, still overpowered what sunlight worked its way around the cloud of black smoke that obscured the horizon to the north and east and south. Dave once caught a glimpse of a band of blue to the west, but it was a pitiful thing.

The wind was still blowing powerfully, shifting from time to time, and each time it blew from the northeast they were showered with a thick fall of ash. No embers, no firebrands, just gray, powdery ash that swirled like a terrible snowstorm and came in the windows and soon coated them all.

By the time they got to the Winstons the wind had veered and was coming from the northwest, but it brought little relief, as everything was obscured by ash swirled into devils by the relentless wind. Dave honked the horn as they pulled into the driveway. Karen hit the ground running, going around the back of the house as Dave eased the SUV and trailer after her.

Bob Winston was standing near the rear border of his property, hands on his hips, looking east at the conflagration that seemed destined to eat the entire city. He turned when Karen came up to him, listened to her, and hurried back toward the house.

Dave got out at the same time as Addison.

“What can I do, Daddy?”

“There’s nothing you can do for Jenna. Either Lisa is here, or she isn’t. You better take care of your horse.”

Addison looked dubiously at Dave, then at Jenna, unconscious in the front passenger seat. He knew she was desperate to tend to Ranger, but was glad to see she had her priorities straight.

“Go on, sweetheart. There’s really nothing we can do.”

With one more agonized look, she went around to the back of the trailer.

Karen joined him and they waited, impatiently. There was nothing to do but watch the fire, and from Bob’s backyard they had an excellent view of it, out over the relatively clear grounds of the country club.

The hills were burning brightly, but maybe not so fiercely as they had been a few hours ago. There wasn’t much left up there to burn.

“Could we see our house from here?” Karen wanted to know.

“I don’t think so. I think there’s a ridge or two in the way.” He put his arm around her waist. “But it’s all gone, Karen. You know that.”

“Of course I know that. I’m wondering why it isn’t affecting me more.”

“It was already in pretty bad shape.”

“Well, for all that, it was a roof over our heads. We’re homeless now.”

“So are a few million Angelenos. And we’re better prepared to handle it than 99 percent of them.”

Lisa and her two children came running out of the house. Dave saw Nigel pause for just a moment and stare to the west at the towering flames, then hurry on with his mother and sister.

Dave and Karen moved out of the way as the three arrived. It was quickly apparent they were used to working as a team. Many days of Elyse and Nigel helping their mother at the hospital had made them all terse and efficient. Only a few words were spoken as they shined a light into the gloom of the front seat, and carefully unwrapped the bandages.

“We need to get her into the house where I have some room to move,” Lisa said. “Elyse, you start some water boiling, sterilize those scalpels, you know the drill. Did you wash those rubber gloves?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She hurried off.

“Do we need to get a board or something to move her?” Karen asked.

“I don’t want to take the time. Let’s just lift her out of there. We need to do it carefully, I don’t want to put too much strain on that wound. Nigel and I will work her out of that seat, and then I need you, Dave and Karen, to move in from either side and support her as we get her out.”

They got Jenna into the house, and Lisa told them to go outside. They rejoined Bob and stood side by side for a while and watched the fire.

“I think the wind has died down a little. Has it?” Dave asked.

“Hard to tell. Maybe.”

“It feels like it’s blowing in from the coast now. Unless I’m turned around.”

“You’re right. That’s west, behind us. If it stays that way, the fire might blow away from us.” He stopped, and frowned. “I understand Jenna has a gunshot wound. Were people shooting at each other, trying to get out?”

“It almost came to that. But it was sort of an out-of-the-fire-and-into-the-frying-pan situation. As soon as we crossed Sunset, we ran into an ambush.”

“Oh, my God.”

“That’s what I thought. Bob, the bullet that hit her came through
my window
, must have missed me by inches.”

For a moment he couldn’t go on.

“They were waiting for us. We must have been some of the last ones through the gauntlet they were building, a jackleg barricade with cars and a bus. We took some fire, and we shot back.”

They were both silent for a moment, watching the fire. It was hard to tell for sure just where it was burning, since Dave was not that familiar with Bob’s neighborhood, but it was clear that it was now far beyond Sunset, eating its way through the more urbanized areas of West Hollywood and the eastern part of Beverly Hills. It might be as far south now as Melrose, maybe even Beverly. He wondered if it was at Cedars, and if their helpful, stoned nurse was in a safe place.

Lisa worked on Jenna for almost an hour, and when she was done she was far from happy with the result.

“The bullet nicked the deep femoral artery,” she said. “Not the main femoral. If it had been an inch to one side, it would have and you would have had
no chance to save her. That was good work, by the way, putting on that tourniquet.”

“We didn’t do it,” Dave admitted. “We weren’t sure we were supposed to. I’d heard you could cause more harm than good. Like, she might lose the leg.”

“She might lose it anyway. It will be touch and go. I might as well warn you, too, that there’s a good chance she won’t make it.” She paused, and looked puzzled. “So who did put on the tourniquet?”

“Some guy at the hospital. We went there, hoping to find you or any doctor, but there was no one there but this male nurse.” He told her about their experiences at Cedars. They were standing in Bob’s backyard, with Karen and Addison and Elyse and Bob. Nigel was back in the kitchen tending to Jenna.

“They started moving everyone out yesterday, not long after I came back here. We went back there to work some more, but almost everyone was gone. Soldiers—Marines, I think—were herding everyone out. They wanted us all to join the march down Santa Monica that you told us about, they said Los Angeles was being evacuated, everyone was being loaded onto aircraft carriers and taken away. They wouldn’t tell us where. They wanted me and Elyse and Nigel to go that way, too, and we might have been forced to—”