Slow Apocalypse (60 page)

They set up a workshop right there in the parking lot. Word got out and a lot of people showed up to see the burners built from items scrounged from hardware stores and warehouses. By the end of the third day they had equipped half a dozen city trucks with burners, and a lot of people had gone to their homes with the intent of building their own.

There was a water truck that came by every day, and they refilled their big tank and all the empty plastic jugs and bottles, which they had saved. Ranger got his fill of water every day, and had plenty of places to forage.

While Mark and Lisa were engaged in their own specialties, everyone else circulated through the impromptu trailer park and talked to people. One of the first things they learned was the reason why the camp was here in this particular parking lot and not somewhere else. It was because of the chicken dinners.

Knott’s Berry Farm had originally been just what the name said: a place where boysenberries were raised and sold. In the 1930s Mrs. Knott started serving chicken dinners to travelers on the main road from Los Angeles to Orange County. It grew from there into an entertainment complex rivaling Disneyland, but they still served their signature chicken dinners, around four thousand of them every day. Naturally, they always had a lot of chickens on hand.

When the park was closed because few people were able to get to it anymore, chickens kept arriving. The Knott’s management brought in freezer
trucks to store the excess. When the gasoline ran out they found solar generators to keep the motors running. And when things got critical, when people began to run out of food, they opened a soup kitchen.

It was free. They didn’t serve chicken dinners and what they did serve would certainly have horrified Mrs. Knott, but it was a nutritious—if rather thin—chicken soup that, on many days, was all the patrons would have to eat that day.

As the crisis dragged on many people left, and the cooks made less soup each day, and put less chicken in it, trying to stretch it out until help arrived. Now that the bleak consensus was that help might
never
arrive, it was about as thin as it could be and still be called chicken soup, but they were still serving it. No one knew how much chicken was still in the freezers or how much flour and dried vegetables were in the larder to make the noodles and other ingredients that went into it, and none of the cooks would say, but every day they were feeding around five hundred, most of them from the parking lot.

Dave and Karen and Addison went across the street to the evening meal the first day. They hadn’t planned on eating since they still had their own food, but everyone insisted. So they sat at picnic tables and chowed down on what everyone was calling “Knott’s Not-So-Famous Chicken Soup” and one bread roll each, no butter. They scoured their bowls like everyone else, and helped with the washing afterward. It was a satisfying meal, and actually surprisingly tasty. There was no shortage of spices. Just a pinch or two in the vats made all the difference.

During the meal they questioned their neighbors about their experiences since the crisis began, since the quake, since the fire. There were heartbreaking stories, but these people had for the most part not been hit as hard by the quake as the people farther north. The fire had missed them.

As for intelligence in the military sense, there was not a lot of that floating around the campground. It didn’t surprise him, because everyone was living with the same limitation: the great difficulty of traveling much farther than you could pedal on a bicycle in a day. Those who traveled farther seldom came back to report on what they had seen.

Radio was slowly coming back on the air, but the information it broadcast was highly suspect, often contradictory, and frequently political. No one trusted the government broadcasts. They had heard things they knew to be untrue, and if they’ll lie about one thing, why not lie about others? The military evacuation was being promoted like a free trip to the Bahamas. Milk and honey—
or at least rice and beans—were promised at the end of the journey. All the information they had to the contrary was the word of two deserting sailors…and Dave trusted them much more than he did the government propaganda.

The people in the parking lot felt the same way. Some of them listened to commentators with various points of view. Radio preachers were there, and they were a happy bunch, reminding listeners that all the recent travails were the result of human sin, that the apocalypse was in hand, already begun, so repent. And by the way, I told you so.

Right-wingers discovered a new conspiracy every day. Some of them might even be accurate, at least so far as the government had covered it all up until it was too late to do anything about it. As for the bacterium itself, it came from Russia, from China, from Al Qaeda, from the Jews, from the commies. Or from our own government. No one doubted that the bug had been deliberately released, and a thousand explanations for why someone thought that was a good idea were advanced, all fairly loony. The notion that it was all the prelude to an alien invasion was gaining traction, and there was much debate about where the aliens would be coming from.

The left wing wasn’t much better. Plenty of loonies there, too. The dominant paradigm was that the whole thing had been planned and carried out by the oil companies. Dave hadn’t understood why Big Oil should do such a thing until he heard part two of the argument. The oil companies had been secretly buying up all the world’s coal for at least a decade, against the time when the oil ran out, which everyone agreed was inevitable, disagreeing only on the date. True? Bullshit? Who knew? If they had been involved, it had probably been a big bummer when the markets not only crashed but were obliterated, making all their stocks worthless.

Another story from the far left was that this was Mother Nature, the planet itself, getting revenge for all the damage humanity had inflicted on it. Dave thought he would have to smoke a lot of dope to believe that one, but it was a popular theory.

There were so many low-power radio stations coming back on the air, and so much misinformation and so many conspiracy theories that it all became essentially worthless. Word of mouth was more reliable, in that most people had no reason to lie about what they had seen with their own eyes, but the trouble was almost no one had seen anything farther away than three or four miles. They got a lot of information about towns to the north, very little from the south, where they were going.

After their meal, Dave and Karen and Addison took a walk through the park.

The last time they had been there was a little over a year ago, with several of Addison’s friends. They had spent the day riding the roller coasters. Karen went with them on most of them, but Dave had stayed on the ground. He had no fear of heights, and no problem with speed, but the twists and turns did him in.

That day Knott’s was a sad place to see. It was not deserted, since some of the children from the camp played there under the supervision of a volunteer, but the presence of so few children somehow made it even more spooky. Addison was on Ranger and rode him on ahead, as they had been assured the park was safe. Dave and Karen followed more slowly.

“The rides didn’t do so bad in the quake,” Karen said. “I thought they’d all be on the ground. Big metal pretzels that somebody stepped on.”

“I think it’s a great sign. The farther we get from Hollywood, the less damage we’re seeing. I think if we make it to San Diego, the damage might be minor.”

“I wonder how long it will be before anyone can come to a place like this again?”

“Probably about the same time there’s a need for sitcom writers again.”

Karen sighed, then kissed him.

“Are you planning to be a farmer?”

“Probably. I’m planning to do absolutely anything that needs doing, wherever we settle. I expect that will be stoop labor, planting and harvesting corn or wheat, picking apples. Whatever. I don’t expect to be good at it at first. But I’ll learn.”

“And I guess I’ll have to learn to be a farmer’s wife.”

“Wife, hell. You’ll be a farmer, too. When Ranger gets tired of pulling the plow, I expect I’ll just hook up you and Addison.”

She punched him, then laughed and kissed him again.

“Whatever it takes,” she said.

“Whatever it takes.”

From the first day they arrived the people in the caravan had noticed people coughing and blowing their noses. After Lisa examined them, she told Bob it didn’t take a doctor to make the diagnosis.

“Headache, sore muscles, chills, extreme tiredness, cough, runny nose…one girl was running a temperature of 103. It’s the flu.”

On the last day of their stay, four of them came down with the flu. They were Sandra and—not to be outdone by her twin—Olivia, Emily, and Teddy. As they were departing the next morning Bob was sitting with his wife in the bus. He mopped her feverish brow with a damp cloth.

“Well,” he said, “look on the bright side. It isn’t cholera.”

“Keep your bright side to yourself, all right?” Emily came back at him, miserably. “Until you get it, anyway.”

“It is a bright side, though,” Lisa said. “I can guarantee you that cholera is out there. Also typhoid. Maybe a lot of other things.”

Neither Bob nor Emily commented on that. Lisa was once more in a bad mood, and it was easy to understand why. She had lost a patient to the flu the previous evening, a four-year-old girl.

Everyone was shocked to hear it, and that made Lisa angry.

“People die of the flu, okay? Every year, thousands of them. Usually twenty thousand or more. More children get it, but more elderly die of it. That’s even in a hospital. These children…they’re malnourished. They’re weakened. So are the adults, the oldest most of all.”

“Lisa, no one is accusing you of anything,” her father said.

“I know you’re not. It’s just…I’ve lost so many, so very many.”

Teddy was in no shape to scout for them.

The flu hit him hard, with a high temperature and chills that left him shaking. Despite his doctor’s advice he got on his bike and pedaled it around the parking lot while the others were packing. He made it about a quarter of a mile before he lurched off, stumbled over to a curb, and vomited. After that he walked the bike back and was helped into the bus with the other sick passengers.

The healthy ones gathered when they were ready to roll, and hashed out whether they should stay another day or two. Or even three.

“I’m against it,” Mark said. “We know we can’t settle here. We know there are other refugees on the road. Yeah, I said refugees. The only difference between us and those hordes at the Anaheim city limits is we’re better equipped. I figure all those communities south of us are filling up rapidly. They’re going to start shutting the gates, like Anaheim, if they haven’t already. Which means we have to get wherever we’re going as soon as possible.”

Mark’s argument carried the day. They said a few good-byes to people they had begun to see as friends. Addison in particular was devastated to leave a girl of her own age named Guadalupe, who she had grown close to in a short time. And, Dave thought, possibly to her handsome brother, Francisco. But after some tearful hugs and kisses, she boarded the Escalade without complaint.

“Do you think there’s any chance we might see them again, Daddy?”

“I wish I could tell you, honey. You can see how difficult travel is now. But it won’t always be that way. Things will get better, and we may not have to travel too far to find a place.”

“But we don’t really know, do we?”

“No, Addie, we don’t.”

Though Teddy was sick, they still needed someone to scout for them. There were other volunteers to take on the job on bicycles, including Dave, but he
knew there was something better. It would, however, require some renegotiation with Addison.

“Daddy, you promised.”

“I know I did. That’s why we’re having this family meeting. Karen, do you want to say anything?”

“Yes, I do. Addie, I’m very impressed with how grown-up you are, even more than you were before all this happened. You never beat me over the head with how superficial I had become, or your father with how obsessed with work he was.”