In the Court of the Yellow King (41 page)

Bum grabbed it, squinted in the dying light. “A play at Dodger Stadium? During playoffs? Is this some kind of fucking joke?”

“Dodger Stadium is in Chavez Ravine.” Ganz started walking.

“Where’re you going?”

“Go home, Vic. Get far away from here. Out of the city. Maybe further. I don’t know...”

“
Vic
? Since when did you start calling me Vic?”

“I wanted you to know that I remember.”

Bum looked around at the darkened city. “Something’s happening, isn’t it?”

“Something’s happening,” Ganz said.

“A cleansing.”

Ganz nodded slowly, half turned. “Vic?”

“Yeah?”

“Christian isn’t coming back.”

Before Bum could respond, Ganz was already running up the street, heading north, as the last rays of sun snuffed out above, leaving skyscraper-sized shadows as the only remembrance of the day.

he 111 Steps

Ganz ran up Broadway, not recognizing the street. It was dark now in a way that Los Angeles had never been before. The brown out became black. Landmarks blurred, melted together. Only fires – in alleyways, on street corners, the guts of buildings – gave light to a city cloaked in quiet chaos. Yellow light, tinged on the outside with red. Screams and the pop pop of gunshots pierced the hush, but mostly it was quiet in that bloated way that fills up the space right before the perp rushes from the closet, knives out, reaching for your face.

The mask people were everywhere. They stood in groups, lined the sidewalks. They busied themselves pulling people from buildings and stringing up police officers and fire fighters from anything that jutted away from a vertical structure. Ganz gripped the play flier in his useless hands, and it seemed to grant him passage. He soon saw other people like him, faces bared to the world, clamoring up the street as fast as jellied legs would take them, all watched by a thousand sets of eyes hidden under those pallid masks. Some were yanked from the asphalt and dragged away screaming. Some went quietly, as if they knew, or maybe came to an understanding. There were kids amongst them. Little ones. Good Christ...

Still Ganz ran, stumbled, crawled on the stained asphalt like a crab. Had to keep moving, sliding through the funnel that was rapidly forming out of the melted plastic of downtown. Move,
MOVE
, you son of a bitch... Can’t fight them all. Too many. Just too goddamn many, all of them armed to the fucking teeth. Clubs, long knives, SWAT issue assault rifles... What
was
this? How did this—? The Thirst was shriveling him underneath his labored breathing. Should have stopped with Bum... Baumgartner... Wait, who?

Ganz slowed, becoming dizzy. It was too much. He was less than an hour from all of his past lives, an entire world that had slipped into the howling abyss that spiraled down endlessly, sucking up the realness of memories as a black hole inhales physics. An immense blaze burned on the front steps of the justice building as well-dressed bodies were lashed to thick pillars on each side, some without heads or limbs, some with several additional protrusions stuck into their torsos like a child experimenting with Play-Do. A fire engine lay on its side, spinning red lights strobing up the side of a building like a repeating laser site. It was clear what they had done. The masks had moved on the FBI building and police stations, then the fire stations, then the consular offices and the newspaper. Then the Twin Towers Correctional and LA County Jail on the edge of downtown. Any authority figure, anyone associated with the city, state, country, or wider world was taken down, dragged out into the street and hung up on anything high. Ganz faltered, and was shoved out of the way by a woman running past him, howling like a gut-kicked canine. This was the French Revolution on peyote, Bosch painting the apocalypse in smears of human blood. He knew the history. Read about it, dreamed about it. This was the rise of the savage death cults waiting just below the boot print of civilized man. Ganz quickened his pace, determined to finish this marathon of madness. There was no other way.

He descended the hill toward Olvera Street and Avila Adobe. The entire area, boxed up years ago into a tidy historical site and touristy shopping square was teeming with the masked. They climbed on building tops like a hive of angry insects, tossing boxes and furniture and bits of dismembered humanity into their air, stuffing pieces under their masks. Each side of the street was hemmed in by either violence or the complete stoicism of those who wore the masks, with all the side streets blocked by people and things stacked on top of each other. This created a destabilizing effect on the brain, as chaos and rigid order lined up side by side, both serving the same master. Ganz reeled, sweated. He threw up as he moved, spitting slimy foam...

Passing under dragons. Chinatown now. The sidewalks were cleared of product bins, and all the trinket shops boarded up, painted over in yellow. Several had been burned down. A few still smoldered. They must have hit Chinatown early in this insane insurrection. How long had this been going on? How many knew it was coming? At every block, a few local residents shuffled from doorways and hiding spots and joined the hunched procession scuttling up Broadway like a parade route of the damned, each holding a flier for the show to come. Tonight only. Bring the family.

The pagoda architecture finally gave way to the open space of Elysian Park. The walkers moved off Broadway and down onto the parade grounds, surrounded by warehouses and the formerly smoking machinery of industrial LA. Then one by one headed down into the basin of the Los Angeles River.

alk the River Dreaming

He walked down the gentle incline to the cemented riverbed, where only a trickle of water flowed, sludged with algae and the sticky sheen of industry. All the trash and discarded appliances had been cleared away and the patchwork graffiti painted over, leaving the LA River clean and uncluttered for the first time since it was paved back in ‘38. More people were crowded in here, of various ages and races and ease of mobility, joined by others dropping down into the river in every direction. This was the destination chute for all of the living cattle left in the city. Ganz and the rest of the citizens around him were being herded toward the bowl built on top of the hill.

On either side, before him and behind, hundreds of masked figures worked with spray paint on a continuous mural that depicted breathtaking pastoral scenes of 19th century high society and rustic peasant frolicking in bucolic settings. Several crews teamed up on an enormous pronouncement topping the far river wall, painting the letters C-A-R-C-O, continuing on with the rounds and slopes of the next letter.
They passed under Suicide Bridge, where strange fruit hung down from the girders and exposed metalwork at the end of thick truck chains, creating a dripping curtain of barely clothed flesh, softening on the outside as the insides stiffened like drying tree branches. They would have rocked in the breeze, but there was none.

Northward the river pointed, and the walkers moved against the rumor of a current, coming to the Arroyo Seco Confluence, where the two enslaved rivers, tamed by cement, crossed paths in shame and continued on their way, dreaming of water and muddy riverbanks tousled with grass. Ganz vaguely remembered an old man with young eyes hiding behind thick glass, who told him about this place. Told him that Ganz had stolen his life, and now he’d see him again in hell. No, not in hell. On the other side. Here. CARCO...

On the right, the hills of Cypress Park and Mount Washington leered down at the quivering wretches slogging through the river. On the left, a wooden staircase led out of the cement crevasse. The masked had gathered here, and were ordering the others out of the river with blades and gun barrels, soaked feet squishing up the rough boards of the rickety stairs. Ganz looked up at the sheer hillside. At the very top, what lay on just the other side poured illumination into the dead night sky. The normally bluish white stadium lights were replaced now by a pale yellow glow that pulsed and danced. Writhed. The sky above Los Angeles used to look yellowish at night, with the smog reflecting back the city lights in on itself. A reassuring blanket of human achievement against the dark. Tonight, the sky was black, as all the lights from man were dead.

énouement

Ganz and the others climbed the hill, the interlacing cement tendrils of the 110 and the 5 Freeway growing smaller behind him. The hillside was steep, but Ganz moved steadily, grabbing hunks of stubborn brown weeds, smelling the sharp odor of the dusty soil that for generations had sucked up smog instead of rain while the city grew wild below.

Reaching the crest of the hill, where signal fires burned in six spots around the rim, Ganz stood tall and looked down into the bowl that was once Dodger Stadium. The seats had been ripped out, exposing tight stone steps like those on Mayan pyramids. Temple of Kukulcan. Chichen Itza. The terraced rings were filled to capacity with the masked figures, standing shoulder to shoulder at perfect attention. Sellout crowd. The unmasked citizens milled about on the field, in front of a stage that had been erected over home plate, six feet high and stretching from dugout to dugout on either side. Pale yellow curtains hid the preparations behind. The design of the stagework and draping was ornate to the point of decadence, channeling Louis XIV at his most sodden. The orchestra pit of two-dozen masked musicians wearing flowing robes took up a dissonant tune, heavy on brass and wheedling flute. The prelude.

The push of the crowd moved Ganz through a cut in the perimeter fence and down the stadium steps, loosing him and his companions out onto the grass. He tried to move to the back fence, to put distance between him and the repulsive symphony, but was pushed to the middle of the field, just behind second base, quickly pressed in close on all sides by breathless, moaning bodies that reeked of sweat and shit.

The orchestra swelled with a terrible spike in pitch and volume. Ganz clutched at his ears, gnashed his teeth. He wanted to fall to the ground, to die before his brain popped, but the bodies around him held him up.

A half dozen spotlights shot down from the sky, topped by the whumping sound of heavy helicopter blades. Loudspeakers mounted on the choppers buzzed out words, shouts.
Drop we
apons
...
National Guard
...
By order of the Pre
sident
...
Surrounded
... The spots raked the crowd of the masked, who hadn’t moved, all focused on the stage. Two beams of light fell onto the front of platform, perfectly illuminating the curtains as they slowly rose.

All around the stadium, those servants of the King removed their masks in one motion. The bellow from the field began at the edge and spread like a wave, wrenching wide every mouth and set of eyes as they saw what lay beneath.

The curtain was now open, exposing the players on stage. The backdrop. The costumes – what at first appeared to be costumes.

To the south, the tops of six downtown skyscrapers exploded with yellow flame, going up like ignited oilrigs. The boom and tremor arrived a second later.