Blind Panic (19 page)

“Any special reason?”

“They ain’t natural, those lights. That’s reason enough.”

“What do you mean? What are they? They’re cameras, aren’t they?”

Auntie Ammy shook her head. “They ain’t no cameras. I seen somethin’ similar when I was a girl. They
devils.
”

“Oh, come on, Ammy. You don’t believe in devils, do you?”

Auntie Ammy looked up at Jasmine with her mouth pursed defiantly, so she looked as if her lips had been sewn together by a headhunter.

“Anybody who believe in good spirits gotta believe in the opposite. You wouldn’t have to say prayers to God if there weren’t no Satan, now would you?”

“I guess not. But I don’t believe that
those
are devils.”

“What do you want to do, then? Go find out for yourself?”

Jasmine hesitated. The lights were still flashing, like strobe lights. Then, carried on the wind, she heard the sound of people screaming, both men and women. A dreadful
low
screaming—more like moaning than screaming—the way that airline passengers moan when they think that their plane is going to crash.

“Okay, you win,” said Jasmine. “But I still don’t believe they’re devils.”

They started walking northward. A little farther on, they came across two abandoned cars by the side of the street, a Buick LaCrosse and a Honda SUV, but both of them were badly damaged. The Buick’s windshield was shattered and the driver’s seat was glistening with blood. Jasmine saw an erratic spattering of blood all across the blacktop, but there was nobody in sight.

Auntie Ammy looked down at the blood trail. “May the saints take care of whoever that was.”

They walked on. As they did so, more lights began to go out—up in the hills, and over to the east, toward Pasadena. The only other person they passed in the street was a grayhaired woman in a gray dress standing in the darkness in front of a single-story house. She was slightly stooping forward as if she were trying to focus on something in the middle distance.

Jasmine called out, “Are you all right, ma’am? Are you okay?”

The gray-haired woman didn’t answer, didn’t even wave her hand.

Jasmine said, “Maybe I should go across and see if there’s something wrong.”

“Let’s take care of ourselves first,” Auntie Ammy cautioned her.

A net curtain in the front window of the house was drawn aside, and a pot-bellied man in a white T-shirt stared out, although he didn’t seem to be looking in their direction.

“I don’t think they can see, neither of them,” said Jasmine.

“Well, there’s nothin’ we can do about that,” Auntie Ammy retorted. “Let’s keep going. Maybe we should try to
walk
to Hubie’s house.”

“Wait up a minute,” said Jasmine. “Do you see what I see?”

Up ahead of them, South La Brea curved to the left slightly, but a huge red-and-white truck had carried on, going straight ahead. It had mounted the sidewalk and jack-knifed into the whitewashed cinder-block wall in front of somebody’s house, and here it still was, its cab facing toward them, its trailer angled halfway across the road. Its head-lights were still on, but the driver’s door was open, and there was nobody in the cab.

Jasmine jogged toward the truck and gave it a slap of appreciation on its shiny chrome hubcap. It was a Mack Titan, the largest and most powerful truck on the road. It was loaded with steel construction girders—more than a hundred tons of them, in Jasmine’s estimation.

She looked around. There was no sign of the driver, and behind the cinder-block wall the house was in complete darkness. She went up the steps and knocked at the front door. There were no candles burning inside the house, no flashlights. She called out, “Hello! Is there anybody home?" but nobody answered.

Auntie Ammy was waiting for her outside the front gate, holding the baby.

“Nobody home,” said Jasmine. “Or if there is, they’re too chicken to open the door.”

She tried the next house, but that, too, was in darkness, although she thought she could hear somebody stumbling around inside, and somebody say, “
Ssshh!
”

“Hello?” she shouted, and knocked again, and yet again. But a half minute went by and there was no response. She came down the steps and walked back over to the abandoned Titan.

“Looks like finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers,” she said.

She climbed up into the cab. The keys were still in the ignition, with a bare-breasted hula dolly dangling on the key ring.

“What you think you
doing
, girl?” Auntie Ammy called up to her. “You can’t take this monster!”

“Why not? Don’t look like nobody else wants it.”

She swung herself into the driver’s seat. Scotch-taped to the sun visor in front of her were two photographs of the truck driver and his family: a broad-faced, suntanned man in a Mack truck cap, and a plump peroxide blonde in a sleeveless top, with a barbed wire tattoo around her upper arm. Two plump little boys were sitting in front of them, one of them giving a toothless grin.

Jasmine turned the key and the truck immediately rumbled into life.

“It’s working fine!” she shouted down to Auntie Ammy. Then she switched off the engine and swung back down to help her.

Auntie Ammy scaled the side of the truck as slowly and cautiously as if she were climbing the north face of the Eiger. “Don’t hurry me, Jazz! Don’t you go pushing me, neither!”

She went through an inelegant struggle to pull herself into the cab, her black-stockinged legs waving like an overturned stag beetle, but she eventually managed to settle herself into the passenger seat. Jasmine lifted the baby up to her, and, as she did so, the baby gave her another one of his grave, slightly frowning looks, as if he knew that something bad could happen to all of them, but couldn’t tell her what it was.

Jasmine climbed back into the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. She put the Titan into reverse and slowly backed up, using the rearview TV monitor to see where she was going. The tractor’s fender made a thick scraping noise against the wall, but gradually she managed to steer it off the sidewalk and maneuver it back into line with its trailer.

She shut off the trailer air supply to lock its brakes, and eased the pressure on the fifth wheel locking jaws by gently backing up a little more. Then she switched off the engine again and opened the door.

“What now?” asked Auntie Ammy.

“I’m just going to lose the trailer,” Jasmine told her. “We’re not going to get very far hauling a whole load of steel, are we?”

She walked back to the trailer. Usually she would have made sure that its wheels were chocked, but tonight she didn’t have the time or the chocks. She wound down the trailer’s landing gear, and once it had made contact with the road, she gave the crank a few extra turns so that it would be easier for her to unlatch the trailer’s kingpin from the cab’s fifth wheel. Then she disconnected the air lines and coupled them up with the dummy couplers at the back of the cab, and pulled out the electric plug. There was a smoky-smelling breeze blowing from the southwest, and from far away she could still hear people wailing, like damned souls screaming in hell.

She tugged the release handle to unlock the fifth wheel. A yellow taxi drove past very slowly, and she saw the driver staring at her, but he didn’t stop. In the ten minutes since they had escaped from Auntie Ammy’s apartment block, only three other cars had passed them by, and none of them had stopped, either. South La Brea was lined on both sides with single-story houses and apartments, but candles were twinkling in only a few of them, and the gray-haired woman in the gray dress was the only person they had seen on the street.

She hauled herself back into the cab. Before she closed
the door, she looked back down the street, and she could still see the bright flashes of white light—the lights that Auntie Ammy called devils. She wondered what they really were.

“Okay,” she said. She adjusted her seat with the foot pedal, and then she started up the Titan’s engine. “Let’s see what this baby can do.”

She slowly drove the tractor unit forward until it was clear from its trailer. Then she put her foot down, and the Titan bellowed up South La Brea toward the intersection with West Slauson. The traffic signals were out, so Jasmine slowed down. A single SUV with darkened windows appeared from the left, but it stopped for them and flashed its lights. The driver obviously didn’t want to get into an argument with a sixteen-liter, ten-wheeled truck that weighed more than nine and a half tons.

Jasmine took a right and headed east toward Maywood. She had never driven a Titan before, and at any other time she would have found it exhilarating. It was hugely powerful, its engine producing over six hundred horsepower, and now that it was bobtail, without a hundred tons of steel girders to pull around, the tractor unit surged forward eagerly every time her foot touched the gas pedal.

“I’ll tell you something, Auntie Ammy. If we ever get out of this mess, I’m going to save up and buy me one of these.”

It took them less than twenty minutes to reach Maywood, although East Slauson was littered with abandoned vehicles, several of them burning. South La Brea had been almost deserted, but as they drove farther east, they came across more and more people wandering blindly around the streets.

“Jesus,” said Jasmine. “It’s
Day of the Dead.
”

Again and again she had to slow down and let out a deafening blast with the Titan’s double air horns. Some people stumbled out of their way, but others milled around in the middle of the road, their arms lifted in a vain appeal for help.

One man stood right in front of them, holding up a little
curly-headed girl “She can still see!” he shouted. “She can still see! Please—take care of her for me!”

Jasmine blew the Titan’s horns again and again, until the little girl was screaming with fright. At last the man clutched the little girl tightly against his chest and weaved his way back to the sidewalk, almost tripping on the curb as he did so.

“God, I hate myself,” said Jasmine.

Auntie Ammy reached over and touched her arm. “Don’t you feel bad, Jazz. You didn’t have no alternative. The saints will forgive you when you get to heaven.”

“Well, I hope that’s not too soon.”

They turned north toward East Fifty-sixth Street, where Hubie lived. It was a scrubby area of small one-story houses, close to the railroad line, but most of the fences and front yards were well-kept, with roses intertwined into trellises, and brick pathways, and concrete garden statues.

They were still a block away from Hubie’s house when Auntie Ammy pointed ahead of them and said, “Look!”

Dense black smoke was rolling across the street. Jasmine put her foot down and pulled up in front of Hubie’s house so hard that the Titan’s wheels locked. Through the smoke she could see that the house was burning fiercely, with flames dancing inside the living room like some hellish house party. The house next door was beginning to burn, too, with smoke pouring out from under its shingles.

“Where’s Hubie?” asked Auntie Ammy. “I can’t see Hubie nowhere!”

The baby sensed her anxiety and started to cry. Jasmine said, “Wait here. I’ll see if I can find out where he’s at.”

“Oh, Changó, pertect him,” said Auntie Ammy, fingering her necklace of red and white beads. “Oh, Changó, please pertect him.”

Jasmine jumped down from the Titan’s cab. She opened Hubie’s front gate and stepped into his concrete-paved yard. His Toyota was still parked in front of the garage, although its windshield had been cracked and its yellow paint was blistering.
As she approached the front porch, she had to lift her arm to protect her face. The heat was overwhelming, and she couldn’t get close. Blazing fabric from the living room drapes was flying up into the darkness, and even the wooden swing seat was alight.

She looked up and down the street. About a hundred yards away an elderly man and a woman were shuffling along the sidewalk, but the man was touching every fence and every wall to guide him, and the woman was holding onto his belt. It was no use asking them where Hubie was. They probably didn’t even know where
they
were.

She climbed back into the cab. The baby was still crying and Auntie Ammy was rocking him and shushing him.

“Hubie’s not there?”

“I’m sorry, Auntie Ammy. But you know Hubie. He’s a survivor. Remember that time at Venice Beach when he almost drowned? And that time he rolled his Jeep over? I’ll bet you whatever you like that he got himself out of there.”

Auntie Ammy said, “His car’s still here. He wouldn’t never have gone noplace on foot. Not Hubie.”

“You don’t know that for sure. He could be with one of his friends. Or—I don’t know—”

“Or he could have been blinded and gotten himself lost?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Maybe you didn’t, but you thunk it.”

They sat for a while, watching the roof of Hubie’s house collapse. The single stone chimney was left standing, with smoke pouring out of it, in a grim parody of a happy home.

The baby had stopped crying. He, too, was watching the house burning, with one hand held out, opening and closing his fingers as if he were trying to catch hold of the flames that were reflected on the window. “
A gah
,” he said. “
A wum wum.
”

“So what do we do now?” asked Auntie Ammy. “Do you think we should drive around for a while, see if we can find Hubie someplace?”

“Don’t think there’s a whole lot of point,” said Jasmine. “We’d only be wasting diesel, and if the power’s still out, none of the gas station pumps are going to be working.”

“But if we don’t go looking for Hubie, where else are we going to go?”

“I don’t know. I guess we could try going back to my place but it sure didn’t look too healthy around Inglewood, with all those planes crashing. I don’t know if
any
place is safe.”

She was still thinking what to do next when—behind the dark brown smoke that was rolling across the street—she glimpsed three or four bright flashes. Only a few seconds later, she saw at least six more, much clearer this time.

“
Hey
—lookit!” she said. “There’s those lights again.”