Slow Apocalypse (10 page)

Once on the freeways, of course, the real benefit of the gas shortage became obvious. The commute had never gone more smoothly. The parking lots downtown were three-quarters empty.

Metro riders had the worst of it. The buses and trains were jammed far beyond capacity, running late, and the bus stops and train stations overflowed. Talk radio hummed with outraged callers, and the majority of them were riders on the Metro. The mayor appealed to school-bus companies, and after they did their morning rounds thousands of them roamed the Metro routes, picking up people who were already late for work and not happy about it.

To the surprise of many people, the city muddled through a hectic week.

It turned out that 90 percent of public-school students who had been taking buses could reasonably be expected to walk to school, though that was sometimes as much as three or four miles. Parents objected, overweight students objected, and the school district shrugged. This is how it is, the superintendent said. There will be no buses. Deal with it.

But the gasoline tankers continued to roll along the interstates and delivered their loads to the neighborhood service stations, defying Dave’s gloomy predictions. Gas could be had, just not as much of it as they were used to.

People bitched. People moaned. People vowed never to vote for the mayor, the governor, the president, and all the Congress ever again.

But as the days went by they began to adjust.

Dave had to admit that he was conflicted. He had invested pretty heavily in a doomsday scenario. Everything he thought he knew had pointed to it. It had all seemed reasonable, it had seemed impossible that things could simply carry on, though at a much reduced level. He had bet the farm—or what pitiful acreage he had left after three lean years—and he was beginning to think that he’d made a terrible mistake. He was feeling like a millennialist end-of-the-world prophet on January 1, 2000. He was besieged by doubts.

Karen went out frequently, at first. One thing that can be counted on in a rationing regime is that a black market will develop, and that there will be those
willing to pay premium prices for somebody else’s gas allotment. Many of Karen’s friends were quite wealthy, and were not about to let a gas crisis crimp their lifestyle. One or another of them would call on her most days, in their BMWs and Mercedes SUVs, and they took off to the Polo Lounge or Spago or Urasawa for lunch. Dave had taken to leaving hundred-dollar bills here and there where she would find them. It was easier than getting into a row by forcing her to ask him for money.

One day in the middle of the second week of their official estrangement, the ladies stopped dropping by. The phone stopped ringing. Addison, the confirmed supersnoop, informed him that she had listened as his wife made a few calls of her own, and it was clear she was being cut off. Like sharks scenting blood in the water, they had sensed that she could no longer afford to run with them. Karen got the message eventually. She stopped making calls and took to her bed with a massive migraine. She hadn’t had one in years. This one lasted four days.

It was three weeks into their estrangement that something finally happened that seemed to confirm his worst fears.

Dave was sitting in his office contemplating the wreckage of his finances. The bills for his spending spree had come in, and even though they were not yet overdue, he was getting calls from the credit-card companies asking when they could expect payment on the over-limit balances. He was thinking he had made a big mistake.

He was jolted out of his dismal thoughts by a shock wave that rattled the windows in front of him.

It was an exceptionally clear day, about an hour from sunset. Beyond his windows, smoke and debris was rising from a wide area just over six miles due south of him. He knew the distance because he had measured it on a map. It was the Doheny oil field, erupting like a volcano.

The field was one of the reasons people came to Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century. Over the years the city had grown up around it, and now it sat between Culver City and Baldwin Hills. La Cienega Boulevard cut right through the middle of it, and on each side you could see hundreds of pumpjacks, big iron beams on fulcrums that had always reminded Dave of some strange bird pecking slowly and rhythmically at the ground. What they were doing was pumping oil, a hundred years after the original wells had been sunk.

He watched, awestruck, as large chunks of earth and metal rose slowly into the air, finally reached an apogee, and were relentlessly pulled back to the ground by gravity. He knew they were much larger than they looked, to be visible six miles away. Where they hit, they sent up secondary showers of debris. It took him a moment to realize that beneath some of that falling wreckage were homes. People would be sitting down to dinner, mothers and fathers and children.

He raced outside, digging in his pocket for his phone. He was punching buttons with his thumb as he entered the main house. Karen was just coming down the stairs, looking confused.

“Was that an earthquake?” she asked.

“No. The oil field just exploded.”

The screen said
Dialing
…then Addison answered.

“Daddy? Did you feel that quake?”

“It wasn’t an earthquake, Addie. It was an explosion. Where are you?”

“I’m at the Beverly Center.”

That put her two miles closer to the inferno than he was. Karen was watching the huge rising column of smoke and flame, looking stunned.

“Where is Addison?” she asked.

“She’s okay. Listen, Addie, I want you to stay on the line.” The Beverly Center was at La Cienega, between Beverly and Third. There were five aboveground levels of parking, and three levels of retail sitting on top of them. Access from the parking levels to the shops was by a series of external escalators.

“I want you to go to the escalators and take a look outside, and to the south. Can you do that?”

“Sure.” She sounded a little frightened, and she hadn’t even seen the fire yet. He was worried because some of that debris seemed to have landed a mile or two from the column of flame that was still growing. Could it reach four miles? Should he try to go get her in the Escalade? He suspected her best bet for getting back to him quickly might be on her bike, but he didn’t feel good about that.

Even as these thoughts were churning through his head, there was another bright explosion, silence for a few seconds, and then a third. He backed away from the windows, which soon rattled from the shock waves. These blasts seemed even more powerful than the first one.

“Daddy, I’m outside, and I can see a lot of smoke and fire down south. What’s happening? I’m scared!”

“Just stay calm, Addie. It’s an explosion at the oil field.”

“Like in Iran and Russia and stuff?”

“Yes, like that. I didn’t think about all the oil we’re sitting on here in Los Angeles. I mean, it’s nothing like Saudi Arabia…” He shook his head. That was more detail than she needed. He was pacing, mostly looking at the fire. He did notice that Karen was going back upstairs.

“You’re a long ways from it,” he told her. “Back here at home we’ll be even safer. What I want you to do…Hello? Hello? Addie, stay on the line.”

But she was gone. The call had been dropped. Cursing, he dialed again,
and the call went straight to voice mail. “Addie, come right home!” he said, and dialed again. This time she answered.

“I lost you, Daddy. You didn’t hang up, did you?”

“No, honey, and don’t you hang up, either. I think the cell towers are overloaded with people making calls about the explosion. We may get dropped again, so listen. I want you back here.”

“So do I.”

“I’m coming for you. I want you to wait for me on the San Vicente side, okay? I’ll be coming that way. I want you to stay up there on the second parking level, and if you hear more explosions, I want you to move to the center of the parking lot. I’m worried that some debris might be falling down there. Can you do that?”

“Yes. This far away?”

“I really doubt it, but I don’t want to take the chance. I’ll be there in…fifteen minutes. You stay on the line. If we get cut off again, don’t try to call me. I’ll be calling you.” Something else occurred to him. “Is anybody with you?”

“Laurie was, but she took off.”

Good. He wouldn’t have to take any of her friends home. He ran out to the garage, holding the phone to his ear.

They were cut off again as he backed the Escalade out of the garage. He kept thumbing redial as he barreled down the street, but couldn’t get a connection. He wanted to do eighty, ninety miles per hour but he forced himself to slow down. There are a lot of hairpin curves on Doheny. It wouldn’t do Addison any good if he rolled the car.

Traffic was still light as he made the left on Sunset. He turned on the radio as he crossed and sped down the hill. Incredibly, most of the stations were still playing music or idiotic talk shows. He kept thumbing the dial until he arrived at KPCC, public radio, which had switched to crisis mode. But they didn’t have much to report yet beyond the fact of the explosion itself. In fact, he knew more than they did from having observed it from his backyard. Reporters were on the way.

He made the right turn on San Vicente and as he was rolling down the hill again he found K-EARTH 101. They had reporters on the way, too, but theirs were closer. They also had people calling in from Culver City and Fox Hills and Ladera Heights, very close to the oil field.

“A lot of stuff fell out of the sky,” one guy was saying. “Something big landed on my roof, and something landed on my neighbor’s house and it’s on fire. Now this black stuff is coming down, and it sticks to everything. I’m getting my family in the car, and we’re…Come on, Shirley, we’ve got to move! I don’t know…the street is covered in this stuff. My shoes are sticking to the ground.”

“Sir, you hang up now and take care of your family,” the disk jockey said. “Now we’ve got…Mike in Culver City. Go ahead, Mike.”

“Chris, the smoke is black as ink, and it’s blotting out half the sky. It looks like it’s blowing south, toward Westchester and LAX. We had a—”

“Let me interrupt you, Mike. We have confirmed that all flights, that is
all flights
leaving LAX have been canceled, and all arriving flights have been diverted due to the smoke that has almost completely obscured the airport. Visibility is near zero in that area. So if you have loved ones arriving, call the airport information line and find out where they’re going. Flights are being diverted to Ontario, Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, and John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. Now, go ahead, Mike.”

“Like I was saying, Chris, first we got a shower of what was mostly dirt mixed in with something that looked like chunks of asphalt. Then we got this goo falling, like hot tar on the road. It sticks to everything. I don’t know how we’re going to clean this shit up…Sorry about the language.”

There was more, but Dave turned it down as he arrived at the Beverly Center.

He pulled off to the right and looked up along the opening of the second-floor parking lot, and there was Addison. She was waving to him. He gestured for her to come down, and she nodded. He got out of the car and looked south again. It was terrifying, it looked like the end of the world. The sun had just set but there was plenty of light yet to see just how large the smoke cloud had grown. As he stood there yet another explosion flared bright orange, the sound arriving a few seconds later.

Addison came spiraling down the ramp and onto the sidewalk, braked, looked both ways, and crossed over to him as he opened the back of the Escalade. He could see she had been crying.

“I’m scared, Daddy.”

“I know, Addie. It’s scary.” He gave her a big hug, and they both jumped as they heard another explosion. He put her bike in the back, got into the driver’s
seat, and waited a moment until she was buckled in. Then he made a U-turn and started back up San Vicente.

Addison called her mother to tell her she was okay, then she turned up the radio volume.

“This just in. The Los Angeles and Culver City fire departments have issued a mandatory evacuation order for a wide area. This is because of the danger of the many fires spreading, and also the smoke. Currently the wind is blowing to the southwest between five and ten miles per hour. The smoke is not known to be toxic. Let me repeat that, so far as is known now, the smoke is not toxic, but it is not healthy. Those with respiratory problems are in immediate danger, and even healthy people should avoid breathing it, especially the ash and fine particles of what seems to be tar that are in the smoke. Face masks are recommended. You can improvise a mask from a piece of cloth. Winds are expected to shift, so the evacuation area extends to the east and south as well as to the southwest. Here are the boundaries of the mandatory—let me say it again—
mandatory
evacuation area.”

It was a huge area, a monstrous area. There had to be half a million people within it. It was bounded by Venice Boulevard to the west and north, Jefferson Boulevard to the north, Crenshaw to the east, and Century to the south. It included parts of Venice, all of Marina del Rey and Culver City, Baldwin Hills, Windsor Hills, and most of Inglewood. Loyola Marymount University was within that area.