Slow Apocalypse (22 page)

At the top of the stairs they heard the cry again. It was actually more of a whimper, and Dave was sure he would not have heard it from outside the house.

“Over that way,” he said. Joe followed him as he made his way toward the part of the house that had fallen in.

They swept their flashlights into each of three bedrooms as they passed them, then into the fourth. Dave could see a lot of broken red barrel tiles, and big, splintered ceiling beams. It took him a while to realize that the biggest heap of debris in the room had a king-sized bed beneath it. He continued sweeping his flashlight beam, passed over what looked like a heap of clothes, then brought it back.

“Oh, man, I think that’s a person, Joe.”

They picked their way over a few roof beams and then crouched. It was a woman, completely covered in dust. She was only visible from the waist up, clad in a nightgown. Dave gently brushed dust and bits of plaster from her face. Her eyes opened.

“Can’t move,” she said.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out.”

“Hurts.”

“We’ll get you out.”

Joe had been exploring down where her legs should be. He lifted pieces of plaster away one by one, set them aside.

“My husband,” she said.

“Shh. We’ll find him. You just hold on.” She squeezed Dave’s hand, but weakly.

He watched as Joe got down far enough to see what the problem was. Joe gestured, and Dave craned his neck to have a look, not wanting to let go of the woman’s hand. One end of a big, heavy beam had fallen on her leg, just above the knee. A jagged point had driven into the flesh. Joe put his hands under the beam and lifted. It didn’t budge so much as an inch.

“Should I give you a hand?” Dave asked. Joe slowly shook his head, and leaned over to whisper in Dave’s ear.

“There’s way too much weight on it. I don’t think we can shift all that stuff. We might be able to cut through the beam.”

Dave leaned closer to the woman’s ear.

“Ma’am, do you or your husband have any tools in your garage?”

“Tons of them,” she whispered. “Whatever you need.”

“Okay, I’ll go—” The woman squeezed his hand much harder.

“Please don’t leave me.”

He glanced at Joe, who nodded.

“I’ll take a look.” He got up and headed for the door.

“Joe, wasn’t there a woman down there who said she was a nurse?”

“Used to be, she said. Name was…Milly.”

“See if she’s willing to come up here. I’m in over my head.”

“Got it.”

Alone with the woman, Dave leaned as far as he could over the pile of debris and aimed his flashlight down at the woman’s leg.

“What’s your name?”

“Dave. Dave Marshall. I live about—”

“I think I’ve seen you. You drive an Escalade? You have a little girl, and a pretty wife, she’s usually in a Mercedes?”

“That’s Karen. Addison is my daughter.”

“My name is Roberta. Bobbie to my friends.”

“We’ll have you out of here soon, Bobbie.” He looked at her face, realized that with all the dust and dirt and sweat that was running down it, he couldn’t estimate her age within twenty years. She might be thirty, she might be mid-fifties.

“Dave, you have to look for my husband.”

He didn’t know what to tell her. He had finally got a good view of her
injured leg, and he didn’t like what he saw. There was no gushing blood that would indicate a severed artery—she would certainly have bled out before they even got there if that was the case—but blood was definitely flowing.

“My husband,” she said, and then had a coughing fit.

“I haven’t seen him.”

“He was in the bed. I was thrown out.”

Dave explored again with his flashlight. Everything was so chaotic, the flashlight beam throwing such hard-edged shadows, it was hard to tell what anything was. So much debris, absolutely no order to it.

“I can’t see him from here. I haven’t been able to check the other side of the bed. That’s probably where he is. What’s his name?”

“Ralph.”

Dave called his name. There was no response. He tried again, mostly for something to do to take his mind off his helplessness to free Bobbie.

Joe showed up with Millie behind him. He had a handsaw, and she had a first-aid kit. They made their way over to where Bobbie was pinned. Millie took over the hand-holding duty, while trying to examine her at the same time. Joe was looking over the beam, coated with decades of dust and cobwebs, trying to determine the best place to start cutting.

The beam pinning Bobbie was resting at a forty-five-degree angle, part of it still in the attic, the other end pressing on her leg. A jumble of stuff that must have been stored in the attic had fallen on the bed. Judging from the boxes that had split open, most of them had contained books. A lot of books, a lot of weight.

Dave gathered a handful of the spilled books and threw them into a corner, then another, and another. He cleared off most of a sheet of plywood that was lying almost level, pressing down on the fragment of roof beam. And once more it took him a while to realize the dusty, plaster-covered thing he had uncovered was a human head and shoulders. The top of the man’s head was crushed, gray matter leaking out. His eyes were open, but coated with dust.

Dave hurried back the way he had come and made it almost to the end of the balcony before he leaned over the railing and vomited. He started back toward the bedroom. He was met at the door by Joe, who took his arm and led him a few steps back the way he had come. He spoke quietly.

“If I cut that beam, the rest of the ceiling will collapse.”

Millie joined them, looking grave.

“She’s in and out of consciousness. Even if we can get her out, she’s going to lose that leg. In fact, the best way of getting her out would probably be to amputate it.”

“Can you do it?” Joe looked at the saw in his hand. Tears were running down Millie’s cheeks, making trails in the dust.

“I’m sorry, guys, I just don’t think I’m up to that.” When neither man said anything, she got angry. “Look, damn it, I worked in a hospice, I have no experience of trauma care. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Nobody said you should,” Dave said. “We were just asking. So what do you think we can do for her?”

“Hold her hand, I guess.”

So they went back into the room and Millie knelt beside her. But she was only down there for a moment, holding Bobbie’s wrist. She stood up.

“She’s passed,” she said.

Joe sighed, and threw the saw across the room.

They crossed the crack in the ground and checked the last few houses. All the residents were okay except for the normal bumps, bruises, and minor cuts, which they had already treated. They came to Doheny Drive and met another party making their way down the hill. Everybody exchanged information. Doheny dead-ended against the hillside about a quarter of a mile up, and there had been a major slide up there, which had buried two houses. Three others had totally collapsed, no sounds coming from any of them. They estimated six or seven dead up there. They also had three bad injuries, including one that was critical. The good news was that two doctors lived up there.

They met another group coming up the hill.

“We need to stand together as a neighborhood,” one of them said. His name was Richard, and he said only one room of his house on Doheny was habitable. It was agreed that those who wanted to would meet at an address almost on the flats, a few streets up from Sunset Boulevard, a home that was largely undamaged. Dave thought he knew the place. The time of the meeting would be at noon.

“What time is it now?” someone asked.

Several people got out their cell phones, which were showing no bars but still had working clocks.

“I have seven thirty.”

Dave had noticed that it had gotten lighter, that they were no longer groping around in total darkness, though the flashlights were still useful.

“That can’t be right,” another person said.

But it was. The sun never really came out that day. They had all gotten used to the amazing crystal blue skies of Los Angeles with hardly any gasoline engines pouring pollution into the air. That day the sky was black.

Dave and Karen walked back up the hill and through their open gate and stood on the edge of the hill looking out at a nightmare.

It looked as if every city block had a fire. That was probably an exaggeration, but there were certainly hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. And the smoke was all black. He knew that when firefighters poured water on a blaze the smoke usually turned white. There was not a single plume of white to be seen. The LAFD was out of commission, out of gas, probably out of water with broken water mains. These fires would have to burn themselves out.

Which could take a long time if they spread to neighboring houses, and jumped streets. Dave didn’t see any reason why they wouldn’t. The only good news was that there was no wind.

By far the largest fire was in one of the triangular towers in Century City. It looked like it had started down low, on the third or fourth floor, and had by now engulfed the whole structure. Dave thought it was unlikely that anyone had been in the building, then wondered if cleaning staff had still been working. They might have made it out by the stairway on the side opposite the fire. He hoped so.

He turned away and looked at his house. With a little light, it all looked even worse. He knew he should be grateful that the house was standing at all, but it was a difficult situation in which to count one’s blessings. He started to go inside.

He hadn’t gotten far when the ground began to rock again. It was not nearly as strong as the main quake, but that had been a monster, certainly the largest ever felt in Los Angeles. If he had to guess, Dave would have estimated this aftershock was around a 6.0. He set his legs apart and listened to more items falling inside the house. He was surprised there was still anything to fall. It continued to shake for fifteen or twenty seconds.

“Honey, don’t go in there,” Karen called out. “I don’t like you in there.” She was coming toward him. “We’ll sleep outside tonight.”

“You want some breakfast?” Addison asked.

They sat down at the picnic table to a meal of cold canned hash and oatmeal and instant coffee heated over the propane stove.

Addison brought over a pan of biscuits, which were soft on top and black on the bottom.

“They’re supposed to be baked in the oven,” she said, looking unhappy. “Maybe I should throw these away and try again.”

“Don’t worry about it, Addie. We’ll eat our mistakes for now, if we can, and I know we’ll get better. I don’t want to waste any food.”

“Maybe if I cover them next time.”

“That should do the trick.” He scraped the worst of the carbon off the bottom of four biscuits and spread boysenberry jam on the tops, and they went down okay. He refilled his coffee cup and drank half of it.

“Daddy, there’s an area over there to the west I’ve been looking at. It doesn’t look like there’s any fires there. I wonder why that is?”

Dave got up and went to the edge with his daughter and looked where she was pointing. Sure enough, there was a swath of land that didn’t seem to have any flames in it. It was hard to judge how wide it was, but it had to be at least five or six miles long, reaching to where he estimated Wilshire Boulevard would be. Then he noticed that there were some columns of white smoke rising from that area, as if the fires there had been doused by water. That would be around UCLA, Westwood, Holmby Hills. He thought he could make out the Los Angeles Country Club, sitting on the eastern edge of the fireless area. Could it be that people down there still had enough water pressure to fight the fires? Did the remnants of the LAFD concentrate their equipment over there? North of that area, where he couldn’t see, would be Bel Air. Expensive real estate, all of it, including Bob Winston’s home. So once again the rich seemed to be getting special treatment.

Then he realized he was wrong.

“I think a dam might have broken, Addison,” he said.

“Which one, Daddy?”

“Probably Stone Canyon. That’s the biggest one.”

“You mean the water put out the fires over there?”

“I think that’s what happened.” He didn’t add that the water might have done a great deal more than that.

The hills were a series of canyons running mostly north and south. The biggest was Cahuenga, where the Hollywood Freeway cut through. Then there was Runyon Canyon, Nichols Canyon, and Laurel Canyon to the east of him. To the west, Coldwater Canyon was a mile away, and just beyond that was Franklin Canyon. There were two dams in Franklin, one small one nearly at the top, and a larger one just above the flatlands. Dave didn’t think there was enough water in either dam to spread as far as what he was seeing, and besides, it would have been a lot closer.

But three miles away was Benedict Canyon, then Beverly Glen Boulevard, which ran just over the hill from Stone Canyon, which contained a dam and reservoir even bigger than Lake Hollywood. If that dam had collapsed, the water would have roared down the steep canyon walls, sweeping away hundreds of houses and everything else in its path until it crossed Sunset Boulevard and might have begun to lose a little of its force as it spread out over the flatter land of UCLA and Westwood