Slow Apocalypse (49 page)

“…Dave…”

It was little more than a whisper. Dave shined his flashlight into the car and Jenna winced as the light hit her face.

“Jenna, are you all right?”

“I thought I was…I…think I may have been hit worse than…I realized.” She looked down, and Dave followed her gaze with his light. Her jeans were soaked in blood.

“Karen!” he called out. “I need you over here.”

“Just a minute, we—”

“Now, Karen.”

She caught the urgency in his voice. He was pulling on the door handle but the door was jammed, bent out of shape by the recent fender bender.

“Maybe you’ll have to get in on the other side,” he told Karen, as she joined him. He tugged again, with no result, then put his foot against the rear door
and pulled as hard as he could. The door popped open and he almost went down in the street, still hanging on to the handle.

“See how badly Jenna is hurt, and if you can do anything for her.”

“Jenna…is she…” Karen turned her light on Jenna.

“I think I got shot,” Jenna gasped.

“Daddy, what’s—”

“Addison, the ramp is down, get that animal into the trailer. Right now, first time, no hesitation, no misbehaving on his part, or we leave him here on the street.”

Addison looked shocked, but obeyed without question. That job would keep her out of the way while they determined how badly Jenna was hurt.

Karen got out her big knife and explored Jenna’s right pant leg, where most of the blood seemed to be coming from, for a place to begin cutting. She was about to go all the way down and begin at the bottom hem when Dave spotted a small hole on the inside of Jenna’s right thigh, about midway between her crotch and her knee. Karen gingerly inserted the point of the blade into the hole.

“This will probably hurt.”

“I don’t feel a lot of pain,” Jenna whispered. “Feel…really weak…”

Karen continued cutting on the fabric, and Dave felt his stomach heave as he saw more and more blood. He controlled it, at least for the moment, and held the flashlight as the work went on. Dave could feel the car shift as Addison loaded Ranger into the trailer.

Soon the leg was bared.

“What do you think?” Jenna asked. She was looking up at the ceiling.

“You should be okay,” Karen said, but she was looking at Dave, and slowly shaking her head. Since Karen didn’t know any more medicine than basic first aid, Dave was at first puzzled by the gesture, until she added a shrug, which clearly meant
How the hell should I know?
He felt the same way, and agreed that reassuring words were what Jenna needed to hear, no matter how bad the actual situation was.

“It doesn’t look all that bad,” he said. One thing was clear, and a hopeful sign. The wound was not pumping blood. It was steadily oozing, but if an artery had been severed, surely the blood would be gushing out. At least that’s what he told himself. He was fairly sure of something else, and passed the information on.

“It looks like a small-caliber bullet wound to me, not that heavy weapon the leader of the group was carrying. Maybe a .22 rifle.”

“Ranger’s in the trailer,” Addison said. Dave had heard the tailgate clang into place while they were cutting away Jenna’s jeans, and she had hurried to them a moment after that. “Mom, shouldn’t we bandage her up? That’s what they said in first aid, the most important things to do are stopping the bleeding and establishing an airway.”

“That’s what I was about to do,” Karen said. “I’d like a sterile bandage to put against the bullet hole, Addison. Do you know where they are?”

“I can find them.”

“How bad is the bleeding?” Jenna wanted to know.

“I’d say it’s not too bad,” Karen said.

“What about a tourniquet?”

“I don’t know,” Dave said. “Didn’t I hear that you weren’t supposed to do that unless the bleeding was really bad?”

“I think so. Let’s get it bandaged and then let’s get her to a doctor.”

Addison found the first-aid supplies, and Dave got out of the way as Karen opened packages and pressed them to the wounds. They quickly became soaked. In the first-aid kit was a book he had skimmed over some weeks ago. Addison took it and quickly thumbed through it while Dave held the flashlight.

“It says first try to stop the bleeding with pressure,” Addison told her mother.

“Okay. Jenna, the bleeding’s slowed down a lot.”

Jenna said nothing, just nodding. She was sweating profusely, Karen shined her flashlight on her face, and she reacted sluggishly.

“Dave, her skin is pale, and her hands feel cold.”

“Sounds like she’s going into shock,” Addison said. She flipped to the right page and scanned it rapidly. “I think you’re right. Are her fingernails turning blue?”

“Yes.”

“Is she having trouble breathing?”

“No,” Jenna said. “But it’s starting to hurt, and I’m feeling sick.”

“Can you take her pulse, Mom? Find out if it’s fast but weak?”

“I don’t think we have enough experience to know what fast or weak are. I think we should get her to the hospital. Isn’t Cedars close around here?”

“It’s just a few blocks away.”

“It says here no fluids except intravenously,” Addison sad. “Give her oxygen,
some other things we can’t do. We need to keep her warm. Can we find a way to lay her flat and elevate her feet? That’s supposed to bring her blood pressure back up.”

They managed to get the seatback to a forty-five-degree angle, but then it was blocked by all the cargo in the back. They shifted enough of it so they had the seat almost level, and Jenna supine. Karen elevated her legs by placing her feet on the dashboard.

Cedars-Sinai was only half a mile away, but no trip was as easy and obvious as it had been before the quake. They had to wind through some back streets, but eventually they came out onto San Vicente a few blocks north of Beverly and headed south along the long, gradual curve, having to dodge around only one fallen tree, and then the huge, hulking mass of the Beverly Center was looming before them, lit a pale orange by the fire to the north. In his rearview mirror Dave could see the fire covering the hillside. He assumed it wouldn’t spread quite as rapidly in the urbanized setting south of Sunset, but beyond that there was simply no telling how far it might reach.

The northern end of the Beverly Center was mostly intact, the Macy’s sign still on the slab side of the building above the parking levels. But there was something wrong down Beverly to the east. That part of the building seemed to have collapsed.

Straight ahead of them the road was reasonably clear, with the first of the high-rise buildings that made up the Cedars complex throwing back crazy reflections of the fire from hundreds of broken windows. There were no signs of life that Dave could see, not a single lighted window.

“Straight ahead, or right?” Dave asked.

“Didn’t Lisa say they were treating people in the parking lot? There’s a big one just past that street that goes under the building.”

“Gracie Allen Drive,” Dave said. Dave had always liked the name of that little, two-block street that tunneled under one of the hospital buildings, just across from the entrance to the Beverly Center parking levels. “Let’s try to go around, first.”

Dave put the car in gear and headed south. But not for long. His headlight picked out a massive pile of rubble completely blocking San Vicente. Just before it, and partially obscured by the collapse, was a six-foot wall of dirt and cracked concrete and asphalt where the earth had heaved and broken and thrust up.
The crack seemed to run directly beneath the southern part of the Center, where Bloomingdale’s had been.

“I don’t think we should drive under that building,” Addison said.

“We’ll take a look. It stood up this long, it should stand up another ten minutes.”

He made a wide circle and headed back north.

He hadn’t noticed it in his rearview, but as soon as he was turned around he saw the headlights coming toward them. He heard Karen and Addison shifting around. Glancing back, he saw that Karen had her shotgun barrel out the window behind him, and Addison held hers at the ready.

He slowed to a crawl and they all watched as the other vehicle came on, not slowing at all until they were almost side by side. It was a red Toyota SUV, and the odd thing about it was that it was smoking. Not from the tailpipe; the body of the car was giving off wisps of smoke.

“Stop right there!” Karen shouted, and aimed her gun at the car. It kept rolling for a few more feet, until Dave could see into the driver’s seat. The man sitting in there held his hands off the steering wheel, palms spread.

“We’re not armed,” he wheezed, tiredly. Now that Dave could get a good look at him, he saw the man was badly burned on the left side of his face. He had burns on his arms and hands, too. There was moaning coming from the backseat, where Dave could see the heads of two people. One was a man and the other a woman, and the man seemed to be unconscious. Both looked burned.

“Those people in the back,” Karen said. “I need to see their hands, too.”

“I don’t know if they can hear you, and I’m not sure they can move.”

“I said, I need to—”

“It’s okay, Karen, I can see them. They’re all hurt badly.”

She didn’t say more, but her gun never wavered.

“We live up near the top of Rising Glen,” the man said. “The fire caught us flat-footed. One minute I was sleeping, the next everything was on fire. The heat! I never saw anything like it. It was on us, we got in the car, and we drove through fire all the way down the hill.”

Rising Glen was the next canyon to the east of Doheny.

Now that Dave could get a better look at the Toyota, he was astonished that it was still moving. The paint was blistered. Some of the body panels were made of fiberglass, vinyl, and probably other kinds of plastic Dave wasn’t familiar with. The heat had warped these panels. The windshield was intact, but partially
blackened. There were streaks where the man had wiped off enough of a space to see through. The left-rear tire was flat, almost gone, just remnants of flayed rubber. It was as if the man had driven the Toyota through hell’s car wash.

“We’re all burned, we’re looking for medical help,” the man said.

“Well, there’s nothing on this side of the hospital,” Dave told him. “We’re going back up to Beverly, try to go around and see if there’s anything happening on the other side. We’ve got a gunshot wound here, and—”

“Gunshot? What the hell happened?”

“They were waiting for us as we came off the hill. Men with guns. Lots of them. We barely squeezed through the ambush.”

“Ambush.” The man sighed. “My God, my God, what have we come to?”

“David, we don’t have time for this. Jenna’s started to bleed again.”

“Right. Sir, there’s no point in going south. Bloomingdale’s collapsed into the road. It’s completely blocked.”

“Beverly’s no better. We tried that way.”

There was a brief silence.

“Then I guess it’s got to be the Gracie tunnel,” Karen said.

“Mom, I don’t want—”

“Be quiet, Addison. It’ll only take a few seconds. Sir, we’re going under the building, right over there. You’re welcome to follow us.”

“Could you possibly help me change a tire? I don’t know how much farther we can go on this one.”

“Sorry, we just don’t have the time. I wish you well.” Dave put the Escalade in gear and pulled away from the man and his burned family, feeling very low. But what could he do? They would find help on the other side, or they wouldn’t, and nothing he could do was going to change that.

Addison seemed to have developed a specialized claustrophobia that Dave knew was often suffered by survivors of earthquakes. She didn’t like to be indoors, but she could tolerate that. What gave her the real horrors was to have anything of great weight suspended over her head. As soon as Dave drove into the underpass beneath the medical complex she began to whimper, and she buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. Karen murmured soothing words and hugged her.

Dave wasn’t happy to find that he, too, didn’t like being under all that concrete. Unable to help himself, he scanned the ceiling for cracks, and was horrified to find several. Each time he saw one he felt the tires crunch over cement dust and bits of rubble. He had a strong urge to floor the accelerator
and get the hell out of there, but made himself maintain a cautious five miles per hour. This would he a hell of a place to have a breakdown, or get stuck.

He was glad of his caution when he came to a large chunk of concrete positioned perversely just where he would be least likely to see it. Looking up as he steered around it, he thought he could see the roof of the parking level above him.

From behind, he could hear Ranger rearing and stomping, whinnying his distress. That alarmed him, since the horse couldn’t see anything of the situation, and he remembered all the stories about pets and zoo animals acting agitated just before an earthquake. This would be the worst possible time for an aftershock.

It couldn’t have taken him more than thirty seconds to travel through the tunnel and out the other side, but it seemed much, much longer. Then the night sky opened out again, with the fire to the north casting faint orange light over the scene.