Slow Apocalypse (2 page)

Warner scowled down at the bar, then killed the last of his drink, which had probably been a Jim Beam. Warner was about seventy, but you wouldn’t want to tangle with him. Bald as a cue ball, with a face weathered by desert and jungle, he still communicated a wiry strength that said he could toss a man twice his size through a window, and had done so many times. His hands were scarred, with thick knuckles. He was a spit-and-polish Marine down to his boots, his clothes always freshly pressed, his bearing upright and military. But today he was hunched over his drink, and he looked a lot older than he had two days ago, when Dave had last seen him.

“That yardarm business is navy talk,” Warner said. “Marines drink whenever we want to.” He signaled for another. The bartender looked dubious.

“Maybe you ought to wait a bit, Colonel,” he said.

Warner lifted his head and glared at him.

“Do I look visibly intoxicated to you?” He turned to Dave. “Marshall, do I look drunk?”

Dave had to admit that he didn’t, though he knew he must be.

“Then set me up again, and one for Mr. Television Writer here. You guys know each other? Stan, this is Dave Marshall. Dave, meet Stan.”

Being a writer carried no particular weight in the Frolic Room. Hollywood is lousy with writers. Some of them even work now and then. Stan poured for both of them. Dave took a sip of the bourbon and looked at the colonel.

Lionel Warner first saw combat in Vietnam and seemed to have been at least peripherally involved in every American conflict since then, right up to and including the beginning of the Iraq War. But many of the things he had done were off the books. There was a lot he claimed he couldn’t talk about. Beginning in the early eighties he had been involved with intelligence work for agencies he had never named. Dave wasn’t sure that some of them had names. He’d been talking to Warner for just over a month, looking for ideas, for stories he could tell, and had gotten the distinct impression that what he’d heard was
just the tip of the iceberg, that 90 percent of what Warner might have told him was just never going to be told.

That was a shame, because while some of the stories the colonel had been free to relate were interesting, none of them had really grabbed Dave. But he kept plugging at it, because he knew there would be something there eventually, and because he rather liked the old buzzard.

Dave had met the colonel at a wrap party for a picture about the Gulf War. He hadn’t been involved in the picture, but he knew somebody who knew somebody, and found himself with an invitation. Warner had been the military advisor. They found themselves thrown together more or less at random, and when the colonel found out Dave was a writer he said he had a lot of stories to tell, and then told some of them. They were fascinating. Dave had never done a war picture, but there was no need to tell the colonel that, and he didn’t seem to care. Dave was looking for ideas, and the colonel was a fountain of them. At the end of the night they had an informal agreement to meet and see what they could develop.

He hadn’t expected to hear back—all sorts of ephemeral deals are cooked up at parties like that, and they seldom survive the night—but Warner called the next morning and wanted to get together. That led to their first meeting for lunch in the restaurant at the W, where he was surprised to learn Warner had a two-bedroom condo. Dave knew the insane prices apartments sold for in that building, and he knew Warner couldn’t have made that kind of money on a colonel’s salary. But if half the stories he’d told him the night before were true, he’d had plenty of opportunities to pick up a little here and there, under the radar. If you are involved in the “takedown”—his word for assassination—of a Colombian drug lord, for instance, who was going to complain if you pocketed a few of the stacks of hundred-dollar bills guys like that liked to keep around for bugout money? That, or bags of jewels, or raw gold. Dave hadn’t asked Warner where his money came from, but when the right time came he planned to. There was very likely a good story there, if he’d tell it.

The colonel had been studying him for quite a while. Now he spoke.

“What would you do if you knew the world was going to end?”

“What? Like, today? Next week? Next year?”

“I guess that would make a difference,” Warner allowed.

“Are you talking about the planet blowing up, something like that, where nobody could survive? Or just a major catastrophe, like an earthquake?”

“Smaller than the planet blowing up. Bigger than an earthquake. Let’s say
it’s not the end of the world, but it’s the end of the world as we know it.” He frowned. “Isn’t there a song about that?”

“R.E.M.,” Dave said, surprised that the colonel had heard it.

“Don’t look at me like that. I listen to the radio. My men in the Gulf War liked that song. And don’t forget, my generation invented rock ’n’ roll.”

“So you did. Are you telling me you’re getting drunk because you think the world’s going to end?”

Warner considered it.

“It might. I’m not saying it will. But I think there’s hard times ahead.”

“Tell me about it.”

And he did.

It took several hours, and more drinks. Colonel Warner paced himself instead of tossing them back, but he was pretty out of it by the time he was through. Dave had made his first drink last for most of the story, so when Warner began to show signs of passing out, Dave was able to navigate him out onto the street, across it, and up the elevator to the eleventh floor of his building. He found Warner’s keys, got him inside, and poured him onto the nearest couch, where he fell instantly asleep. Dave pulled off the man’s shoes, and stood for a moment looking down on the old warrior.

Quite a story he’d told him. Could any of it be true? He frankly doubted it, but it didn’t matter. It was the story that counted, and he finally had what he wanted.

Dave thought about it all the way down in the elevator, then on the escalator down to the Hollywood and Vine subway station. He could see it all falling into place as he stared up at the thousands of empty film reels that decorated the ceiling of the station, and it got even better as he boarded the train and found a seat. The train sped through the long tunnel under the Cahuenga Pass, and soon reached the end of the line in North Hollywood.

When he first started interviewing the colonel he’d parked in the structure behind the W, but it was outrageously expensive. There was plenty of free parking within an easy walk of the North Hollywood station. He told himself that it left him well positioned to pick up his daughter in Burbank after the meetings, but the truth was, he was pinching pennies. A year earlier he would never have
given a twenty-dollar parking fee a second thought. Hell, he’d been known to hand a twenty to the parking valet.

Not any longer.

He found his five-year-old Cadillac Escalade. According to his wife, Karen, it was already an antique, ready for the scrap heap. She was ashamed to be seen in it, which is why she was driving the newer Mercedes these days, even though the Caddy had been her idea.

He was still early to pick up his daughter, Addison, at the equestrian center. He drove down Lankershim, then Riverside, then Alameda to Bob Hope Drive and found a place to park the beast in the shade at Johnny Carson Park. Right across the street were the NBC Burbank Studios, where he had labored for seven very lucrative years.

Three years ago.

He had written for a lot of different comedies at first, none of them very memorable, but all of them paid well, thanks to the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement. It changes your life, getting on staff at a successful sitcom after six years of scrambling as a freelance. Karen and he had been living in a studio apartment in North Hollywood when Addison was born, and the rent was overdue. They managed to scrape by, and then, almost without warning, they were well-off, living in a two-bedroom high-rise in Mid-Wilshire.

Then came the big break. He wrote a pilot called
Ants!
It was about three exterminators waging war on a race of alien insects who were living among them. But it wasn’t
X-Files
material, it was a little
Coneheads
and a little
Slackers
and a little
Men in Black
and a little
Ghostbusters
. He had based one of the characters on the John Goodman character in
Arachnophobia
, another on the Jenna Elfman character in
Dharma and Greg
, and another on…well, on several characters, all of them played by Adam Sandler. The pilot was picked up, and the first season was a smash. The show never made number one in the Neilsons, but was usually in the top ten.

They had a seven-year run. During the second year Dave and his family moved into a five-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills. Then the show was canceled, and he’d been scrambling ever since.

He got some money from syndication rights, residuals, but that market was not what it used to be. A lot of stations preferred to sell their off-peak time to infomercial companies instead of spending money to run an old show. He had written three sitcom pilots, but none of them had been made. During the last year he had even tried to get back as a staff writer on another show, any
show, but got nowhere. He was about to turn forty, over the hill for a sitcom writer. You have to be tuned in to those absolutely latest trends, and even if he felt he was, he was
perceived
as being an old man. At thirty-nine. A one-hit wonder.

In desperation, he was trying to write a feature movie, something he had never done. And he was using the same formula that had worked so well with
Ants!
That is, find out what’s popular and do that, only more. In other words, copy.

What was most popular right then was war films based on video games. So his research had to be in two parts: games, and war. The first part was easy. Even if he was a living fossil of almost forty, he could buy and play games just like anyone else. He felt he had a good handle on that stuff. But he’d never served in the military and all he knew about real war was what he’d seen in movies or read in books. Colonel Warner had been consulting for studios and gamers for years. Dave had winced when he learned how much Warner’s per diem was, but he paid it. And so far it had been a bust, he’d not heard a thing that inspired him toward a story line.

Until today. And oddly enough, the story line didn’t have anything to do with war.

He realized he was woolgathering, switched on his iPhone, and started dictating everything he could remember about the colonel’s unlikely story while it was still fresh in his mind.

That occupied him for a little over an hour, and he realized he’d better get going or he’d be late picking up his daughter.

There is a neighborhood in the Valley where most people own a horse.

It’s east of the Disney Studios, west of Dreamworks, partly in Burbank and partly in Glendale, just across the Los Angeles River—actually a concrete-lined ditch most of the year—north of Griffith Park. It surrounds the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. Drive through it on Riverside and you’ll see that instead of bike paths, there are horse lanes. Take any of the side streets and you might see blacksmith trailers parked in driveways, with the smiths busy shoeing horses. Most of the houses, and even a lot of the apartment buildings, have stables in the back. The area is crisscrossed with riding trails, and bridges connect it to the much bigger network of trails in Griffith Park itself.

This is where Dave’s daughter had stabled her ten-year-old warmblood
gelding, Ranger, since she convinced Dave to buy him two years ago. Ranger was a move up from her first horse, Hannah, an even-tempered Appaloosa mare that he had been assured was a suitable mount for a ten-year-old. Back then she wanted to be a rodeo rider. Now she aspired to dressage and jumping—which she would not do as long as she was a minor living in his home. Bottom line, Addison was a horse person and enjoyed anything about riding. Including, Dave had to admit, currying, feeding, and mucking out the stable.

They say a boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money. Dave was neither a nautical nor an equestrian person, but he had learned in the last four years that a horse is a money pit, too, especially if you live in the city. There was the expense of the animal itself: $15,000 for the nag she was currently riding, which was in the low-end range. There was the cost of feeding and stabling, which was more than he used to pay in rent. There’s all the tack: bridles and bits, stirrups, halters, things he’d never even heard of, like breastplates and martingales. A good English saddle could go for $2,000 and up. And don’t forget riding lessons. You can’t just get up on the back of a horse and teach it dressage. You have to have someone show you how. A good riding coach doesn’t come cheap.

One day soon she’d be wanting a mount with better bloodlines. He wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. And, of course, she would want to keep Ranger. Dave was facing the possibility of owning two horses. Right then, he couldn’t afford just the one. He was wondering how he was going to break that to Addison.

He parked and walked over to the ring where she and a few others were putting their mounts through their paces. He had to admit, his heart swelled every time he saw her sitting there on her English saddle, wearing her white jodhpurs, gray coat, top hat, and shiny black knee-high riding boots ($600 a pair), her blonde hair tied up in a bunch at the nape of her neck. His little girl was growing up. He watched her trot the horse toward a low obstacle—two feet six inches high, the tallest he’d allow her, and he had to close his eyes every time she took one.

Then she spotted him and smiled and waved, and for a moment the poised young woman went away and was replaced by the tomboy she had been until a few years ago. Sometimes he wished she’d stuck to the rodeo dream. He thought he might rather see her barrel racing in cowgirl boots and jeans and a shirt with pearl buttons than so erect and dignified and in control. He wasn’t always sure he knew this new girl.