Slow Apocalypse (42 page)

“There’s somebody behind that wall over there,” Karen said.

“I see it. Try to look harmless.”

They bounced on until they were close to where he thought Bob’s house was. Somebody stepped into the road. Dave recognized Mark, one of Bob and Emily’s sons. Mark was on the tall side, like all of the Winston family, with a receding hairline, blue eyes, and a strong chin. He looked to be nearing forty. He was dressed in khaki work clothes and thick boots and he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He gestured to them, waving his free hand toward a break in the otherwise impenetrable high hedge, his other hand holding a firearm that looked like an M-16. Dave turned right and bumped over the ruts in the road. He ended up on what must have been Bob’s driveway, though it was now covered with a layer of dried mud. In fact, the whole yard was now a dusty desert with a few half-buried, dead shrubs surrounding the four tall palm trees still standing. He could no longer see the cobbles that had made up the circular driveway and small parking area.

The house was in a shocking state.

It was a sprawling two-story brick structure, almost eight thousand square feet not counting the detached four-car garage and separate workshop. Bob had told him it had nine bedrooms and seven baths, all but a few of them closed up as his children had moved away to their own lives. Dave could see the dozens of diamond-shaped steel plates with bolts protruding, all painted to match the color of the brickwork. You could see plates like that all over Los Angeles. The bolts were screwed onto long metal rods that went all through the structure and tied it together much more tightly than the original builders. It was earthquake retrofitting, and the work on Bob’s house dated back to shortly after the Northridge quake of 1994, when suddenly engineers had more jobs than they could handle reinforcing older structures.

In spite of that, there had been damage. There were two cracks in the outer wall, one of them fairly minor, the other reaching from the ground to the eaves, a foot wide in some places where bricks had fallen out. The house had a high, peaked roof that had been covered in terra-cotta barrel tiles. A great many of them were now lying on the ground, baring the wood and tar paper beneath. The house was L-shaped, with the long leg parallel to the street. The northwest corner had caved in, the roof falling to the second floor, the big timbers cracked,
and the smaller planks sprung free. All the windows in front had been boarded up. There were slits for guns to shoot from.

Shortly after the quake the water from the broken dam must have arrived. It would have come from the north. They would have to get the story of that from Bob and Emily. Dave suspected it was a harrowing one. The high-water mark of mud on the house was about three feet.

Mark came up to Dave and stuck his hand out.

“We met once, Dave. I’m Mark.”

“This is my wife, Karen, and my daughter, Addison.”

“Addison. Nice name. Pleased to meet you, ladies. Dave, drive around the house to the back.” He made a waving gesture toward the house, and Dave saw a hand come through one of the second-floor gun slits and wave back.

Mark trotted on ahead of them, and rounded the corner into the backyard. Dave drove over what had been the side driveway and was now a dirt lane, and pulled up beside the garage, which looked undamaged. They all got out of the car and stretched. It had been a long, slow drive.

The first thing they noticed was that the thick trees and shrubs that had completely shielded the grounds from the country club in back had all been cut down. So had the high chain-link fence. The same thing had been done with the houses on both sides of Bob’s place. The view of the golf course was unobstructed.

Dave was not a golfer, but he had visited the Los Angeles Country Club a few times as a guest for lunch. From the dining room and the grounds out front he remembered the two courses had a lot of tall trees lining the fairways, and naturally the grass was always perfectly cut and a sparkling emerald green. That was all gone. Most of the trees had been cut down, and the fairways were brown. Where there had been sand traps and low places, filthy-looking brown water now stood.

“We’re boiling and distilling it,” said a voice from behind him. He turned and saw Bob coming toward him. He didn’t look good. He was wearing an improvised eye patch and walking with a cane, favoring one foot that was tightly wrapped in bandages. One side of his face was a big, yellowish bruise and his cheeks seemed sunken.

“Fell down the stairs in the dark right after the quake,” he said, shaking Dave’s hand. “Sprained an ankle, cracked a couple of ribs, and something poked me in the eye when I smacked my head on the floor. Lisa says I’ll probably still be able to see out of it. Quite a face, huh? I don’t heal as fast as I used to.”

He turned to Karen and embraced her, then shook hands with Addison. Dave saw Bob’s wife, Emily, coming up behind him. She smiled at them, and set a pitcher of water on a picnic table beneath the only tree remaining in their backyard.

“We’re so glad you made it safely,” she said. “I hope you didn’t have any trouble along the way.”

“Not really,” Karen said.

Other people were coming out of the house and the workshop. Dave noticed that most of the adults had handguns in holsters, and some carried rifles or shotguns. Bob started making the introductions.

“This is my oldest son, Mark. He’s an engineer, and the man who is going to get us out of here.”

“We already met.”

“Mark’s wife, Rachel.” Rachel was Jewish, and though not Orthodox, was faithful enough that she had insisted Mark convert before she would marry him. She was barely five feet tall, a foot less than her husband, and a little chunky. Her hair was thick and blonde, but black at the roots. The grip of her small hand was almost as firm as her husband’s. She was followed by Sandra and Olivia, identical twins of fifteen with red hair and freckles. They each held one hand of their younger brother, Solomon, nine. He had the close-set features and friendly smile of Down Syndrome.

They had all been gravitating toward the picnic table. Beyond it was a deep, kidney-shaped hole where the pool had been. The bottom of the pool had cracked, and it was filled with the same dried muck that had covered everything in the flood. The fiberglass waterslide had been knocked over by the wave. Dave gratefully took a glass of instant iced tea from Emily and swallowed half of it at once.

Next in the parade of Winstons was Marian, the younger daughter, in her early thirties, average height with an athletic body and hair cut short. She was carrying her four-year-old son, Taylor, on her hip. Dave remembered Bob’s worry when she had joined the army and been deployed to Afghanistan. Her parents didn’t approve but they weren’t the sort to stand in the way of their children. She had returned unharmed, physically. If she had other issues, Bob had never talked about them, but after leaving the military she had separated from her husband, Gordon, and moved back in with her parents, where she had been living for at least the last two years. Dave’s impression was that she
hadn’t decided what to do with her life yet, though there had been talk of the Police Academy.

“Her husband’s the one you probably noticed upstairs,” Bob said. “We’re standing twenty-four-hour watches these days. There’s been some trouble.”

Dave didn’t ask about the state of their marriage. He assumed that things might look a lot different to a couple in light of recent events, that previous troubles might seem a lot less significant. It had certainly been that way between Karen and himself.

“So. You’ve met Teddy, I assume.”

“Yes, he’s the one who told us to come over here.”

Bob looked pained.

“His lover, Manuel, is among the missing. It’s so easy to lose contact now. They were both planning to come up here, but Manuel had to go check on his own family in Tijuana. Even though they’ve disowned him. He had to sneak back into Mexico, how’s that for irony? So we don’t know where Manny is, but we hope he’s safe.

“Peter is in England. It’s been months since we talked to him. He said it was just as bad over there as it was here. That was before the quake, naturally. He was looking into finding a sailing ship that might take other Americans across the Atlantic, but even if he made it, there would still be the whole continent to cross. And George is still in New York, as far as we know. At least he was the last time we talked to him. He and his family had no plans to join us out here.”

“Except when winter arrives,” Emily said, darkly.

“Yes, there’s that. Last time we spoke he said he had some friends upstate, around Woodstock. They might be up there.”

Dave had been doing a head count. Peter and George were impossibly far away, and of the others he had seen two of Bob and Emily’s six children, and one spouse, Rachel. Gordon was upstairs, and there were four grandchildren, ages fifteen to four. Teddy was accounted for, somewhere in the area searching for Dennis and Roger and their families. That made eleven, counting Bob and Emily, and fifteen people counting Dave, his wife and daughter, and Jenna. That left the oldest child, Lisa, and her husband, Charles, both doctors, and their two children of high-school age…Elyse and Nigel, if he was remembering correctly. He was about to ask about them when they were interrupted by a sound he hadn’t heard in a while: a police siren coming up the street.

A white Hummer with a red cross on the door turned the corner and stopped twenty feet away. Two uniformed LAPD officers, a man and a woman, got out of the front doors and held the rear doors open. A tall woman with graying hair tied up in back got out, followed by two teenagers. All three were dressed in green surgical scrubs.

“Here they are, Mr. Winston,” the female officer said, with a hint of pride in her voice. “Safe and sound, like we promised you.”

“Thank you, Janet. We appreciate it.” Bob glanced at Dave. His eyes were full of anguish. “No questions just yet, my friend,” he whispered, and got up. He walked toward Lisa, his daughter, holding out his arms. She collapsed and fell into his arms, sobbing aloud. Bob embraced her. The two children stood a little apart from them.

“Charlie was killed in the quake,” Emily said, quietly. Karen gasped, and Addison looked agonized.

“Lisa was working at the UCLA hospital, where she’d been putting in sixteen, eighteen hours a day for weeks. Now everything’s been moved to Cedars-Sinai. The patient load was overwhelming, with a lot of gunshot wounds and medical emergencies that they were running out of medicine to treat. On top of that, they were understaffed. By and large, everybody who could report to work did report to work.” Her face darkened. “Though there were a few who simply stopped coming in. I’d never seen Lisa so angry as when she told me about those people, a few doctors and nurses who lived within a reasonable distance and just never showed up when things started getting really bad. A lot of high-tech doctors found themselves practicing medicine on the level of poor, third-world nations.”

Dave remembered that Lisa’s husband had been an orthopedic surgeon with a large sports-medicine practice of his own. Charlie had treated several Lakers and Dodgers for knee injuries.

Across the way, as the police escort turned around and headed out, Lisa and her children were still talking to Bob. Emily filled them in on some of the rest of the story.

The only thing that saved Lisa was that she had stayed late at the hospital. She had been due home before dark that evening—as a doctor, she still was able to get gas for her car, and the commute to Sherman Oaks that sometimes could take two hours on the nightmare 405 freeway now could be done in ten minutes at any time of the day. Charlie had been working at a hospital in Reseda, a little closer to their home, and was in their bedroom, sleeping the four hours
he was allowing himself before heading out at sunrise to face the new day and the new patient load. The quake had destroyed the bedroom and pinned him beneath a roof beam.

Their children had worked for two hours to get him out. Fighting through a daze and in terrible pain, he self-diagnosed a punctured lung, two broken legs, and a probable concussion before he became irrational, then unresponsive.

They got him into the car and Elyse headed toward Valley Presbyterian Hospital through a city changed in an instant to a place they hardly recognized. Everywhere it was pitch-dark, except where buildings were burning. There were people in all the streets. Dodging around them, she didn’t see the three-foot gap in Van Nuys Boulevard until too late. She slammed on the brakes, but her front wheels dropped into it. The car was just hanging there, in no danger of falling in but unable to back up.

Eventually they persuaded a few people to help rock the car until the front wheels could gain traction. They set off again, one wheel so far out of alignment it threatened to shake the car apart.

As the sun was rising they checked their father again, and could find no pulse.

The journey took them all day, and could have been an epic story in itself. The left-front wheel fell off somewhere on Sunset Boulevard. They continued driving. The cooling system failed shortly after that.

They covered their father with a blanket and set out on foot.

They found their mother in the parking lot beside a hospital, up to her elbows in blood. They drove together back to the abandoned car, loaded Charlie’s body into her car, and took him to her father’s house.

“That’s his grave over there,” Emily said, quietly. Dave saw a mound of earth with a wooden plaque stuck into the ground. The name Charles Tomasino, and the dates of his birth and death had been carved on it. Wilting flowers stood in some of the vases that had survived the quake.

Bob, Lisa, Elyse, and Nigel were walking slowly toward the rest of them sitting around the table under the tree. Lisa was leaning her head on her father’s shoulder. She was six feet tall, just an inch less than Bob. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“Lisa, my darling, you’ve done all you possibly can,” Bob said. “They’re saying the evacuation is really picking up steam now. Soon your patients will
all be headed north, where there’s sure to be a lot more doctors and intact hospitals.”