Slow Apocalypse (35 page)

“I can get behind that.”

“I like it that you didn’t try to bullshit me about the looting business. In my book, there’s no shame in going out to get food when your family’s hungry, even if you have to break into a warehouse. I’m sorry we had to meet like this, the guns and the threats.”

“I’ve already forgot about it.”

“Listen, I don’t have any idea what’s going on out there. This isn’t my area. Anything you could tell me would help us out a lot.”

Justin shrugged.

“I don’t know a whole lot more than you do, probably. At first it was…”
He stopped, and they both listened as the kids outside raised their voices. Dave didn’t get the first part of it. Then one of them spoke again.

“Fuck this,” the kid said. “I ain’t waiting around all day. How long it take to search a goddam warehouse like this, anyway? Let’s catch up with the others.”

“I hear that.”

Justin and Dave waited. Dave thought he heard footsteps moving away. He started to go around the corner of the crates, and Justin put a hand on his shoulder.

“Might be a trick,” he whispered.

“I don’t think they’re cunning enough for that.”

“I don’t either, nor smart enough. But give it a few minutes, just in case.”

Dave nodded, and gestured to Karen and Kareem. They joined the men, and Dave whispered to them.

“Very quietly, make your way toward the back and see if there’s a door back there that can be opened.”

Karen nodded. Kareem raised his eyebrows and pointed his thumb at his chest. Dave nodded, and the young man headed off with Karen.

“She ain’t trigger-happy, is she?” Justin said.

“She’ll do what she has to do, I think. If the situation arises. But your son has nothing to fear from her. She’s a good shot. Better than me.”

“I ain’t no kind of shot at all. Hardly ever fired that pistol, but you feel like you gotta have one down here.” He gave a bitter laugh. “All my life I kept my nose clean, didn’t run with no gangs, worked hard. And now look at me.”

“Everybody’s in a bad spot.”

“Some worse than others. Those your little bikes back there?”

“Yes.”

“So you got some gas.”

“I put some away.” Dave didn’t know why he was telling this man about his business; his instincts told him to shut up, but he didn’t. “I had a little advance warning things were going to go bad.”

“Wish you’d have told me.”

“I wish I could have shouted it from the rooftops, But who would have believed me?”

“You got a point there.”

Karen and Kareem came back and reported that the back door was locked,
and they hadn’t heard anybody out there. They all sat down and waited, speaking softly. Dave kept an eye on the open door.

“There was already some bad shit going down before the quake,” Justin told them. “About what you’d expect. Black folks against the Latinos. When the gangs realized the cops and even the Guard was pretty busy, the gloves came off. Shooting every night, bodies in the street in the morning. But before long everybody was on foot or on bicycles, even the bangers. Nobody had any gas.

“Worse than that, the food was running out. When it was clear that no food was coming in, I finally saw the light and went to the grocery, spent all the money I had left ’cause the banks didn’t open, not down here, at least. This Korean family, known them most of my life, had the only grocery store still open when I went shopping. By the end of the day, it was pretty much a riot. I’d paid for my stuff, some sacks of flour, as much canned goods as they had left. But pretty soon people was just taking stuff. That Korean couple got roughed up. That was…how many weeks ago, son?”

“I’ve lost track. One day seems pretty much like another, with no TV and no Internet. All I know is I been real hungry for at least a week.”

“We all been. We ain’t got much left. Couple cans of soup, a little flour. Anyways, we heard a rumor about these warehouses around here, how the owners were guarding all the food the people needed. We came down here looking. Came upon some folks had a pickup truck, one of those they converted to burn wood. They had chains, and they was pulling the doors off warehouses.

“They done a dozen of ’em, and there was nothing in them worth taking. Not nowadays, anyway. Who needs a goddam flat-screen television, or a tranny for a Lexus?

“Then they opened that one around the corner from here, and it was full of stuff, sacks and crates with Chinese letters on ’em. Lots of rice in big old sacks, lots of pallets full of those ramen noodles, cans full of I don’t know what. And a bunch of Chinese guys with guns. Maybe a dozen of ’em, I couldn’t see for sure.

“They was outnumbered, but they stood their ground. Then the firing started, and it went on for a while, in that warehouse. We ducked around a corner. But then the firing stopped, and people started going inside. So we did, too.”

He stopped for a moment, and rubbed his hand over his face.

“I ain’t proud of what we did. There was dead Chinese guys all over the
place, all of ’em, I guess, unless some of ’em run, and black folks and Mexicans. And people wounded, some of ’em crying out.”

“God, Dad,” Kareem said, with a catch in his throat.

“I know, son. And people was loading up their carts with the Chinese food. And that’s what we did, too. God help us, we took all we could handle, and then the shooting started again.

“This time I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. It seemed liked everybody was shooting at everybody else. It wasn’t a black against brown thing, least it didn’t look like it. There was some Chinese in there, and some white guys, some of ’em in uniforms. Not cops and I’m pretty sure they weren’t the Guard. Some of ’em looked like private security, but they had some serious weapons.

“We started to run, and I dropped my pistol, and we had to leave the cart behind. And the next thing I know, you two was pointing your shotguns at us.”

Everyone was silent for a while. Dave looked around the crates again, just for something to do. He took a deep breath.

“It’s been about half an hour and I don’t hear anything. We can’t stay here all day. I’m going to see what’s happening out there.”

“Be careful, honey.”

Dave nodded. He crept to the open door. He looked back and saw that everyone was following him. Well, why not?

He reached the door and carefully looked around it.

There was a dead man lying in the street, facedown. About a hundred yards to the north was what looked like another dead body. Far away, probably to the north, they heard isolated gunshots. Nothing was moving, not even on the freeway in front of them. Any travelers were still lying low, it seemed.

Dave walked to the dead man. A stream of blood had flowed down the slight slope of the street to pool at the curb. He didn’t want to do it, but he crouched down and put his hand at the man’s neck and confirmed what he had already been sure of when he saw the gaping hole in the man’s back. It looked like an exit wound, and it was right around the heart.

There was a pistol, a .45 caliber, maybe a Glock, not far from the dead man’s hand. Dave picked it up and stood. Kareem was pointing at something on the ground.

“That’s a clip for that weapon,” he said.

Dave saw it and picked it up. It was empty. He clicked the release and another clip fell into his hand. It was full.

“Looks like he was reloading,” he said. He pushed the clip back into the butt. He looked at Kareem, and hesitated only a moment.

“Do you know how to use this thing?”

“I could figure it out.” He shrugged. “I seen it in the movies.”

Dave tossed the weapon to Kareem, who caught it, looked at it, and tucked it into the waist of his jeans.

“Thanks, man.”

Dave had a feeling the kid had handled a Glock before.

The pistol was back in Kareem’s hand as they cautiously moved along the street until they could see the parking lot where the battle had raged. There were more bodies, and this time there were some living people. They were scuttling among the carts, some of them overturned, quickly gathering what they could. Down the street they could see more people entering and leaving the warehouse where the food had been. There were sacks of rice spilled on the pavement. Some of them had burst open, and people were scooping up handfuls and putting it in plastic grocery bags.

“I guess here’s where we leave you,” Justin said. “We’d better get some of this grub before the fighting starts again. And you folks, you only got a little more daylight. You’d probably better head back to the hills.”

“That’s what we plan to do,” Karen said.

“Thanks for the gun,” Kareem said. “Y’all didn’t have to do that.”

“I didn’t want to see you unarmed.”

Justin held out his hand, and Dave and Karen shook it, then Kareem’s. The man and his son hurried off across the parking lot, Justin grabbing a cart with a bent wheel that made a racket as he pushed it. Dave and Karen watched them load a sack of rice onto it and move on.

“I wish them luck,” Karen said.

“They’re going to need it.”

They returned to the freeway and as they made their way north, they began to see more people heading south again. They also saw people cautiously watching from the side streets, hiding behind houses or industrial buildings.

The scooters were not noisy, but Dave was wishing they were as silent as bicycles. After what they had seen, the last thing they wanted to do was attract
attention. He worried that they presented a tempting target to anyone hungry for transportation, which could be just about anyone they encountered.

They agreed that since the main purpose of the trip had been to take the measure of the situation on the ground between them and San Diego, they should take a different route home. But the neighborhood they were in was not familiar to either of them, and was full of rail yards. So after crossing the 710 Interchange they got off on Olympic Boulevard and headed west.

They saw very few people for several miles. No one moved to approach them. Dave wondered if things might have been different if they hadn’t been carrying shotguns displayed so prominently.

They came to the Olympic Street bridge over the river, which didn’t seem to have suffered any damage. But just to the north the freeway bridge that carried the I-10 over the river was in ruins. Great slabs of roadway had fallen down into the concrete channel.

The freeway had fallen onto the railroad tracks on both sides of the river, and there they saw the first constructive activity they had seen in a long while. A crane mounted on a railcar had been moved into place from the north, and fitted for wood burning. People were attaching cables to the large chunks of concrete and trying to move them off the tracks. Several had already been dumped to the side, and one track was clear, though badly damaged. Other men were working to repair the tracks.

“Maybe they’ve got some trains running again,” Dave said.

“Do you think that means we might be seeing some relief supplies soon?”

“I wish I knew.”

When they reached the intersection of Olympic with the I-10, they discovered that there no longer was an I-10. From the river to the 110 the freeway had been elevated on concrete pillars. They had all collapsed.

They discussed going back over the river and thus back up the I-5, but decided to continue on awhile to see if there was a way to get past the wreckage. In particular, Dave wanted to see the Convention Center again to see if there were still refugees there.

Fifteenth Street was blocked by the ruins of the freeway, as was Sixteenth. They got onto Eighteenth and headed west. At the corner of Naomi Street there was a small church with flat stucco sides and a modest steeple. A few people were sitting in the open door and organ music was coming from within. Dave was not a religious man, but the hymn grabbed at him on some deep level, and for one wild moment he wanted to go inside, join with his fellow men and
women in song. But it was getting late and they still had a long way to go though uncertain territory if they were to get home before dark, as they had promised Addison and Jenna.

There was a big open barbecue pit made of black iron set up on the sidewalk. Smoke was pouring from it. As they passed, a woman turned something lying on the grill. She watched them without expression as they passed.

“Tell me that wasn’t a dog,” Karen said.

“I’m going to say goat.”

“From your lips to God’s ear.”

The fact that the dog population of Doheny Drive had fallen drastically in the last weeks was something Dave had kept from Karen and Addison. It was one of the things people had talked about during the long watches at the barricades. If anyone had eaten their pet Dave wasn’t aware of it, and he doubted it. But the simple fact was that food was running low for humans in most households. There just wasn’t anything to spare for a dog, particularly a large one. One man had broken down and wept as he told of putting down his dog.

Many cats, of course, could fend for themselves, finding small rodents when they had to.

“Look on the bright side,” he said. “It definitely wasn’t human.”

They continued on Washington Boulevard, looking to the northeast every time they crossed a street, seeing each street blocked by the remains of the I-10. They got to Figueroa and could see from there that the 110 Harbor Freeway was blocked, too, from a collapsed overpass. The 110 was not elevated on pillars like the I-10, it traveled on an earthen berm except for when it crossed streets, but the berm was too steep to climb safely and they didn’t know what was on the other side.

“I wonder how far south we’d have to go to get past that?” Dave said.

“Or would you prefer to go back to the 5?”

“I hate to go back…but we may have no choice.” He studied his GPS. As soon as he had identified Georgia Street as the last one before the 110, the unit gave a little beep and shut itself off. Dead battery.

On Hill Street the city had parked a lot of buses under the freeway. The freeway had fallen on them…but not crushed them completely. They went down the lines, and at one point Dave could see all the way through between two lines of crushed buses.