Slow Apocalypse (56 page)

“You go back to the group, Addison. We’ll join you later.” He gave her a gentle push, and she didn’t resist. She was walking stiffly, like a robot.

Dave and Bob hurried in the other direction, toward a tall monument that was circled by a road. As soon as they reached the road they knew what had so horrified Addison. There were five shapes huddled together on the ground. Three were adults, the other two were children. Next to them was a dog.

“They don’t look badly burned,” Bob whispered.

He was right. Their clothes looked charred and browned in places, but their faces hadn’t blackened. They had more of a reddish color. Dave smelled something, and realized it was cooked meat. He turned aside and vomited.

Bob didn’t look good, but he managed to keep his food down.

“They were dead before they were exposed to the heat,” Dave choked out. “That’s why no blistering. They just started to…to cook a little, and the fire moved on.”

“But what killed them?”

“No oxygen. They suffocated. Oh…my God.” Dave had looked farther, and now he spotted dozens more corpses, possibly as many as a hundred, just from where he was standing. He saw that people had thought they might seek refuge here, in the open space. But the fire had stolen all their air. They had died in family groups or alone. Some were in the fetal position, some were stretched out on their backs.

“It doesn’t look like they suffered too much,” Bob said, hopefully.

“I think you just get short of breath, gasp for a while, and then sort of go to sleep. At least I hope so.” Dave looked at the children again. “This is the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Please, let it remain so.”

“Oh, Bob, what am I going to do about Addison?”

“All I know is to offer comfort and love.”

They found Addison with her mother. They were embracing and rocking slowly back and forth. Others were watching, probably wondering what had happened to make her feel so terrible, but they all kept their distance. Karen looked up and frowned at Dave, as if she blamed him for it. Well, maybe he should have kept her closer. He shrugged, helplessly, and she relented.

“Everyone, please pause for a moment,” Bob called out. The chain saws and the chipper fell silent. They gathered around.

“You have all stayed close to the vehicles. Addison went farther afield to find forage for her horse, and she has made a gruesome discovery. There are many dead people up in that direction. Dave and I saw about a hundred. I have no idea how many there might be elsewhere. People tried to ride out the fire here, and they seem to have been asphyxiated.

“Every instinct I have tells me we should give them a decent burial, but there are simply too many of them. It would take a bulldozer to dig a mass grave. We just don’t have the time or the resources. I want to do something, and all I can think of is a moment of silence. Those of you who pray, please do. If you don’t pray, please do whatever it is you do to honor the dead. Thank you all.” He stopped speaking and bowed his head.

Dave saw Lisa get on her knees and put her hands together. Her daughter, Elyse, knelt beside her. Nigel remained standing, looking at the ground. Marian stood at attention, crying silently. Gordon crossed himself, and put his arm around her. Solomon looked confused, but got on his knees as well. He laced his fingers together and looked at his mother, who knelt beside him and embraced him. Mark looked uncomfortable, but knelt beside his wife and child.

“I must add,” Bob said, after what he judged a suitable interval, “that Addison has just had a very bad emotional shock. Please, all of you, give her all the support you can. She needs us all now.”

That brought a swift reaction. Everyone headed for Karen and Addison. Some of them were crying, and Addison began to sob loudly. He knew it was better if she got it out as quickly as she could. Once more he felt helpless, and knew there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t join the group. He would talk to her later.

Work had to resume quickly, and in another half hour they had taken on all the chipped wood they could. Ranger was loaded back into the trailer,
presumably with a stomach that, if not full, was at least not as empty as it had been. The wood burners were stoked with new fuel, Dave started his engine and pulled out of the cemetery behind Teddy on his bike, and they headed south and east again.

They were able to get on the I-10 and follow it for a while, and they made good progress. But they soon came to a section that had formerly been elevated, and now was just a long pile of rubble. There was no place to get off, and they had to backtrack. Teddy swore that it had been possible to get as far as the 110 Harbor Freeway before the fire. They assumed that the heat had weakened the already damaged structures and they had fallen down because of it. In the end they had to go all the way back to Normandie before they could find an undamaged exit. Then it was down to Adams, and east again.

They had intended to get on the 110 from there, but they could see that the overpass a block to the south was down, blocking it. Teddy returned at that point and said that he had been to Exposition Park, and there were wide, unburned, open spaces there where it might be good to make camp. There was a hurried discussion and it was decided, though there were still some hours of daylight left, that they should stop for the night. Everyone agreed that they would need extra time to get the things done that were necessary before darkness fell, and they needed some leeway to find out just how long all those things would take. So they turned south on Figueroa.

The campus of the University of Southern California began at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard. The grounds were much more crowded than its crosstown rival, UCLA.

Everything had burned thoroughly, trees and buildings, and more than a few people. It was there that they saw their first burned corpses.

It looked to Dave like there had been a substantial population still residing on campus. It seemed that at least some of them had decided to try to weather the oncoming firestorm in the brick buildings rather than flee to the south.

The dead people they saw must have been the ones who had seen their folly too late, and tried to cross Exposition Boulevard, because there they lay, unrecognizable except for being vaguely shaped like human beings. It was a sight
that firefighters must be familiar with. The corpses looked shrunken, lying on their sides, arms and legs drawn up into a not-quite-fetal position. All clothes were burned away, and the skin, too. What remained was blackened. It was impossible to tell age, race, or sex.

They saw five of these horrific remains on the street. How many might be on the campus itself was anybody’s guess, and not one that anyone wanted to learn more about.

The destruction of the campus looked total. Yet across the street the fire seemed to have jumped along the treetops again, leaving the ground untouched. Teddy said the Natural History Museum farther to the west was a burned-out shell, but the Museum of Science and Industry on Figueroa was almost intact. An old airliner—Dave thought it was a DC-8—had been knocked off its supports and was nose down on the ground, but it was not burned.

When they came to the entrance to Exposition Park that led to the Memorial Coliseum they saw that the grassy area leading up to it was undamaged, so they pulled over there and parked. They formed the vehicles into a triangle and made the gaps between them as narrow as possible. They had not seen a living person all day, but they weren’t going to start out being incautious.

Dinner that evening was Spam stew with canned vegetables, surprisingly good with the spices the cooks added to it. Or maybe it was just because he was ravenous, Dave thought.

There was debate as to whether or not they should have a fire. Some felt it was better just to burn enough wood to heat the food, that a larger fire might attract unwanted attention…which was any attention at all, whether from people seeking to do them harm or from possibly starving people who they could hardly refuse to serve with a bowl of Spam stew. A slight majority favored cutting some of the trees in the area and making a small fire to huddle around in the forbidding night. That notion carried the day.

Dave and Karen put up their tent with no trouble. Addison elected to sleep in the Escalade, where she could keep an eye on Jenna, who still had not regained consciousness, though at least her condition didn’t seem any worse.

Teddy set off a little before sundown, and everyone assumed he would be ranging to the south, scouting their route. But he returned a few minutes later from the direction of the Coliseum, looking pale and sick. He beckoned to his father.

Dave watched the two talking, and saw that Mark was doing the same. He wondered if he should join them and find out what was going on, and when Mark started over there he followed. Bob was looking grim.

“Teddy says the Coliseum is full of bodies.”

“By full…”

“Thousands, he says. Most of them on the field.”

The Coliseum had been built in 1923, and had later hosted both the 1932 and the 1984 Olympics. It was a huge concrete bowl, and Dave could understand why people might have seen it as a refuge from the fire. What he couldn’t understand was why they were all dead.

“Were they burned?”

“They didn’t look like it.” And suddenly he was crying with great, wracking sobs. Teddy had always seemed pretty stoic, but when the dam burst it let go with a torrent. Bob put his arms around his youngest son and hugged him tight. Dave turned away, not sure if his witness was welcome. The first thing he saw was most of the rest of the Winston family on their way toward Bob and Teddy.

“Teddy found something awful in the Coliseum,” Bob told them.

“What?” Addison asked, fearfully.

“A lot of dead people” was all Teddy would say at first.

“I thought I understood how those people died in the cemetery,” Dave said. “But this just seems like too big a space to me, I mean for all the oxygen to be sucked out. I can’t see that it would have reached a killing heat in there, there’s too much concrete around them, and it doesn’t seem to have been scorched.”

“What about chemicals?” Marian wanted to know.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Dave said.

“Just beyond the Coliseum is the swim stadium. Wouldn’t they have a lot of chlorine stored there?”

“I would think so. Do you think the fire burned around the pool?”

“I’m not going to go look,” Teddy said.

“No, of course not,” Bob agreed. “And if it wasn’t chlorine from the pool, it could have been any number of things around here. Who really knows what’s in all these thousands and thousands of warehouses?”

“It’s mostly residential around here, but within a few miles there are plenty of industrial areas. The wind could have carried just about anything here.”

“I think it’s one of those things we’re never going to know, unless somebody from the government comes in and does an investigation.”

“That could happen. Not soon, I guess, but somebody will come back here, someday. Don’t you think?”

It was Teddy asking, but no one wanted to venture an answer.

When it got dark everyone gathered around the fire in the oil drum. There was a tribal feeling to it, and Dave could easily imagine the comfort such a fire must have provided to the humans who first tamed it. Sometimes emotional comfort had to take precedence over tactical considerations. Marian had been the one who argued longest for a dark camp, a camp that wasn’t as easy to spot. But once it was dark and the fire was going, she settled easily in with the rest of them and seemed to enjoy it.

She had, however, changed the arrangements for standing guard. Now there were to be two people posted at all times concealed somewhere out there in the dark, watching and listening for anyone approaching. The people standing guard would be able to send any of half a dozen coded clicks on a walkie-talkie to people inside, without revealing their position. Marian pointed out that, in the event of an attack, it would be useful to have someone behind the attackers to give them something extra to think about. She had advised all the guards that, if they had to shoot, shoot the attackers in the back if possible. There were no gentlemanly rules in combat.

Dave was allowed to choose his own position when it came time for him to stand a watch, the only conditions being that it needed to provide some concealment, be east of and at least fifty yards from the encampment. He selected a tree and shinnied up into one of the lower branches. Now all he had to do was stay quiet, and not fall asleep.

Which was why he had chosen to be in the tree. If he fell asleep, he would fall out. He felt it must have worked, because though he had been very tired, he was still awake and alert when he was relieved after two hours without incident.

The night passed quietly.

According to the GPS, the fastest route from the Winston house to the Coliseum was a bit over eleven miles. According to Dave’s odometer, they had driven nineteen miles, and they had done it in about twelve hours, including the fueling stop at the cemetery. That was a bit over one and a half miles per
hour. From where they were, it was about 135 miles to San Diego. That was traveling by freeway, with no obstructions. If eleven miles turned out to be more like nineteen, it would be more like 230 miles they had to cover. At eleven miles per day, that was twenty-one days on the road.