Slow Apocalypse (29 page)

“Would you put down your weapons, please?” the older one asked.

Dave looked at Art Bertelstein and Maria O’Brien, his companions on the evening shift. Art shrugged, and set his shotgun on the ground. Dave and Maria did the same.

The woman cop gestured behind her with a jerk of her head.

“And tell the guy in the bushes to come out, too, okay? We’re not here to cause anybody any trouble, and he makes me nervous.”

Art thought about it, then picked up the radio and made the series of clicks they had arranged. Down the street, Sam Crowley’s son, Max, stepped out onto the pavement, looking sheepish. He left his gun in the bushes where he
had been hiding—though not well enough, it seemed—and walked up the street to join the others as they came out from behind the barrier and faced the cops.

“Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble,” the older man said. “I’m Sergeant Daniels and this is Officer Gomez.”

“We weren’t sure there were any LAPD left,” Art said.

“There’s more of us left than you might think. But you’re right, there’s far from enough of us to handle this situation. That’s why the mayor and the chief have decided, reluctantly, to enlist the help of the various posses that are forming around town.”

“What, you want us on patrol, or something?” Marie asked.

“Nothing like that,” Gomez said. “We’re not asking you to enlist. Mostly, we’re trying to find out how many of you there are, and how well prepared.”

“Intelligence has been one of our biggest problems,” Daniels said. “We’re getting a lot of our information from the same place you’re probably getting it. Radio reports that may or may not be reliable. We’re trying to pull it all together here on the ground, eyeballing it. We need to know where everybody is, and what they’re doing.”

Bertelstein had called Ferguson when the cops first appeared at the end of the street. Now he came hurrying up, looking winded and dripping sweat from the short walk from his house. It was another hot, muggy day, but the sweat seemed excessive.

“What’s the situation, Officers?” Ferguson asked.

“Are you in charge here, sir?”

“As much as anyone is, I guess. We’re a loose organization, banded together for self-protection.”

“I understand. It’s happening all over, and that’s the biggest reason we’re here. We’re making a list and a map. What we’d like to do is get your name, the names of any of your lieutenants, if any, and the amount of territory you are taking responsibility for.” Daniels opened a fiberglass pannier on the side of his bike and took out a clipboard. Ferguson got busy filling out the form. Officer Gomez had taken more papers from her own bike and now laid some of them out on the hood of one of the cars.

The first showed the whole Los Angeles area, from Malibu down to Long Beach, and east as far as the beginning of the San Gabriel Valley. Different areas had been outlined and lightly crosshatched in different colors with fine-tipped markers. Everyone crowded around as Gomez pointed out the important facts.

“These green zones are where the LAPD and the military are in control.”
She paused. “Mostly. The fact is, there is nowhere in this city where I would want to go out at night. We don’t patrol at night; we’ve lost too many officers. And when I say we control it, what I’m really saying is that we’ve contacted the posses, the militias, the self-defense cadres, whatever they call themselves, and determined that they are sufficiently organized to defend themselves.”

Dave saw that the green areas were patchy. There were some in the Valley, in the Sherman Oaks and North Hollywood areas, and Studio City, and much of Burbank. There were some green patches north of that, but also a lot of yellow and red.

“Yellow is places where we think there are people in control, but we haven’t actually determined that on the ground. Red is just what you think it is. Don’t go there. Some of it is burned-out. Some of it is ruled by gangs. The National Guard has made some efforts at cleaning them up, but they’re hampered by the same constraints we are. Lack of transportation, lack of communication, and…defections.”

She looked away from them when she said that. Even the mayor had admitted that the force had been decimated, for many different reasons. It was no surprise to anyone there that evening.

“These areas to the north, the ones in gray, we just don’t know. Northridge, Chatsworth, Reseda, Panorama City, Canoga Park, east of Glendale, anything south of the 105, we just don’t know.

Here be monsters,
Dave thought. It was what old mapmakers had often written in areas unexplored by humans. And some of those gray areas were half an hour’s drive away, in what he was coming to think of as “the old days.”

“We’re trying to find out which roads are passable and which ones aren’t. These little Xs are places where there’s a gap too big to cross, or pavement too buckled, or a collapsed bridge or overpass. Most of the freeway overpasses held up, but enough of them didn’t that there isn’t a single freeway that doesn’t involve a detour,” Gomez said.

“What would you say is the best way out of town?” Marie O’Brien asked.

“We get asked that a lot. And we’re advising anyone who has fuel, or is up to a long trip on a bicycle, to leave. Everything is running short. So basically, you have the choice of hunkering down until help arrives, or trying to get out.

“You don’t want to go east at all. Even if you make your way along the 10, or the 210, or the 60, you’re gonna end up in the desert. People have come back from that way, and they said they were not welcomed.

“South…there’s quake damage down as far as Camp Pendleton. There
are refugee camps in Oceanside and Escondido, but I don’t know if they’re getting food. The whole Southland is running short on food. Hell, the whole country for all I know.

“To the west, forget about the Coast Highway. Half the houses in Malibu fell into the sea, and most of the highway with them. The 101 is a mess, at least as far out as Camarillo. You have to take surface streets to get anywhere.

“North on the 5, some of the officers have gone as far as Santa Clarita. The CHP says there’s major landslides on the grapevine, from Magic Mountain on north. You could bike it or hike it, and maybe a Hummer could drive over some of it, but I can’t guarantee that.”

She sighed, and straightened up. Dave had known some of what she had just told them, and some of it was new. He had been thinking of taking Interstate 5 north, but had wondered about the grapevine, the twisting, rising, and falling forty or fifty miles before you came down the last long slope and into the Central Valley. If food was being grown and harvested anywhere in California, he felt it would be there. But though the Escalade was called an off-road vehicle, he doubted its ability to traverse a serious landslide.

“Bottom line, I can’t recommend any of the routes out of here. But I can’t recommend staying, either. They say they’re working on the rail lines, but it might be a month or two before they get them straightened out enough to carry a big load of food. And I don’t even know if anyone will be sending big loads of food.”

There it was again. The bleak assessment. Los Angeles was on its own, the rest of America had its own problems. Angelenos weren’t likely to be welcomed anywhere else, and they weren’t going to be able to hold out on their own indefinitely with no power, no gas, little water, and no food coming in.

Ferguson had finished filling out the forms for Daniels and joined the others looking at the maps. Daniels took over with the second one. It was on a much smaller scale, also mimeographed, traced from a terrain map downloaded from Google before Google ceased to exist, along with the Internet. The map showed the hills north of Sunset, between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon, and as far north as Mulholland. They had marked it into seven distinct areas, each more or less cut off from the other by ridges.

“The boundaries are clear-cut here in the hills,” Daniels said. “They’re also more defensible than the areas down on the flatlands. Our beat is west of the 101. This is what we know. There’s the Hollywood Bowl area, then Runyon Canyon and Nichols Canyon. Three different areas on Laurel Canyon, at least
as far up as we’ve gone. Lower Mount Olympus and Upper Mount Olympus, then Willow Glen and Laurel Pass.”

He filled them in on the state of organization and readiness the two of them had been able to determine by talking to the residents and doing a cursory examination of their preparations for defense and survival.

“These areas marked in orange are largely burned-out. The areas in red are major landslides.”

There was a lot of orange on the map, and quite a bit of red.

“We’re asking residents to make a more complete survey. What we’d like you to do is make a map and show where there were fires, what houses slid down the hill, and where roads are broken.”

The officers asked them more questions about Doheny. Dave told them what he knew about the Wonderland Drive area, which the officers hadn’t visited yet.

Dave watched them cycle down to Sunset. He realized they represented the first signs of authority any of them had seen since the quake, six days ago. It wasn’t much, but it was good to know that at least a remnant of the city’s political infrastructure still existed, and that it was trying to pull itself together.

Over the next week Doheny Drive had a few visitors, but none that came to stay.

A thick yellow line had been painted on the pavement, and a sign had been painted on a big piece of plywood and nailed to a tree near the bottom of the hill, about a hundred yards north of Sunset, positioned so that when someone reached it the barricade and armed guard were visible:

Dave thought the warning shot business was a bit overboard, but then he learned that some had suggested much more forceful wording, the least of
which was to not bother with the “please.” One hothead wanted the sign to read simply
INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT
. He was overruled when others pointed out that many people on Doheny had friends or relatives they still hoped to see. Since the only real threat they had faced so far had been the bikers high above them, who had been unlikely to come down in any case, even if Dave had not fired on them, it was agreed that the Doheny Militia should not be trigger-happy.

One of the sets of visitors at the end of the road had been bikers, too, seven of them on noisy Harleys, four men and three women on back. They wore some sort of club colors in a script too baroque for anyone who saw them to decipher. Dave hadn’t been there that day. As it was told to him later, they were filthy, bearded, in sleeveless denim, leather pants, and thick butt-kicking boots, with lengths of chain wrapped around their waists, large handguns stuck into belts and holsters, and shotguns and rifles attached to their bikes. One of them had a bloody bandage around his head.

They pulled up right on the yellow line and sat there, gunning their engines contemptuously, flaunting the fact that they seemed to have all the gasoline they needed. One of them started to draw a rifle from an improvised scabbard over his handlebars. One of the defenders fired a shot into the air.

“Well, it was in the air,” he later told Dave. “At least a foot over their heads. I think they would have heard the bullet go by.”

They didn’t flee like scared rabbits—they were far too macho for that—but after letting his rifle slip back into place and gunning his engine a few more times and flipping the bird, the leader made a wide turn back down Doheny.

“We’ll be back,” one of them shouted, trying to sound like the Terminator. That prompted a volley of shots
not
aimed in the air, none of which hit anything but a palm tree.

Later, at the postmortem, there was good news and bad news. Everyone was pleased that their radio alarm system seemed to have worked well. Armed reinforcements on bicycles had arrived at the barricade only a moment after the gang had fled, which was pretty good time.

On the other hand…

“If you guys were aiming,” Ferguson said when he heard about it later, “we are badly in need of some target practice. But we can’t waste the ammo.”

Luckily, it turned out there was a solution. A canvass of the neighborhood turned up quite a few air rifles, pellet guns, and even a couple paintball guns. There were plenty of projectiles for all these toys, some of them recoverable and
reusable. So a practice range was established on a straight stretch of street with targets at fixed distances. Soon just about everybody was banging away every chance they got.

No one with any sense thought that firing BBs was going to turn them into stone killers, but it did improve their aim. Everyone also got to fire a certain number of real rounds from real rifles and shotguns as well, to show them what difference in noise and recoil to expect if it came to using serious weapons.

For the next few nights the number of guards at the barricade was increased, and extra patrols were assigned to walk the streets to guard against any sneak attack. But the biker boss’s boast was an empty one. They never saw them again.