Slow Apocalypse

BOOKS BY JOHN VARLEY

The Ophiuchi Hotline

The Persistence of Vision

Picnic on Nearside

(formerly titled
The Barbie Murders
)

Millennium

Blue Champagne

Steel Beach

The Golden Globe

Red Thunder

Mammoth

Red Lightning

Rolling Thunder

Slow Apocalypse

THE GAEAN TRILOGY

Titan

Wizard

Demon

The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Epilogue: From the Journal of David Marshall

The sound of automatic weapons firing made everyone look up.

Dave Marshall was standing on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard with a hundred other gawkers. They had all been looking at the front entrance to the W Hotel, where half a dozen men in black armor, combat helmets, heavy equipment belts, and military assault rifles were blocking the doors. They didn’t wear any kind of insignia or identification of rank, no bright yellow
FBI
printed on their backs, no Homeland Security patches, no
LAPD
.

A few minutes earlier three black armored personnel carriers had roared up and these anonymous heavily armed men poured out. They quickly cleared the small plaza around the subway station, and a dozen of them had entered the building just as Dave was leaving it.

He was as curious as everyone else, and maybe a little worried, so instead of doing the prudent thing—if this was a bomb report or a hostage situation—which would have been to get as far away as possible, he’d lingered to see if he could find out what was going on. Regular LAPD patrol cars arrived without sirens, half a dozen of them almost simultaneously, and the officers had blocked off the street and gave orders for everyone to move along. That’s when they heard the gunfire.

He looked up. One of the big panes up there had shattered. Shards of glass glittered in the sunlight as they twisted and turned on their way down. Before they had gone very far a human figure followed them, falling backwards, his arms flailing.

Dave could tell the man was bald. He could see bright redness on the back of his white shirt. He even fancied he could see a stream of blood arcing away from the falling body, though that might have been his imagination.

Then he lost sight of him behind other bystanders, and there was the sickening thump as the man landed very close to where Dave had been standing only seconds before. It was much louder than he would have expected. He actually felt the impact with the concrete. There were shouts and screams of horror.

The cops quickly got a lot more serious about moving people along. He was jostled and almost lost his balance because he kept looking back over his shoulder and trying to count the floors. It wasn’t until he was across the street and could stand still for a moment that he was able to get a good look at the hole in the side of the building where the big glass pane had been. One of the black-clad commandos was leaning out, looking down at the dead man below. Dave was now sure that the man had fallen from the eleventh floor.

Something else he was sure of was that, no more than ten minutes ago, he had been talking with the dead man in the man’s apartment.

Suddenly, he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

It had all started a little over twenty-four hours before…

Hollywood and Vine. The Walk of Fame, the boulevard of broken dreams.

Dave Marshall was standing on Carmen Miranda’s terrazzo and brass star embedded in the sidewalk, in front of the Hollywood and Vine subway station.

The place bustled with activity at midday. Noon, by Dave’s watch.

He was looking for a man who lived in the W. The concierge told him his quarry had left over an hour ago, and had said something about needing a drink.

Where would you go if you needed a drink at noon on Hollywood Boulevard?

On the southwest corner was what used to be The Broadway. All that was left of that was the sign on the roof. It had been converted to condos, and the ground floor was a trendy restaurant and nightclub called Katsuya, frequented by wannabes and some actual celebrities. The drinks there would be expensive, and it wasn’t open, anyway. Almost across the street from him was the fabulous old art-deco Pantages Theater, home of the Academy Awards for eleven years. Several small businesses were squeezed in along the theater frontage, and one of them was the most likely spot to find his man: the Frolic Room.

Dave made his way over there.

Everybody in Hollywood knows the Frolic Room, though most residents have never been inside. Its exterior has been in countless movies and television shows. There’s something about the neon outside that evokes the 1940s, and sleaze. Every other month or so the sidewalk is blocked with big reflective screens and camera dollies, and the curbs are full of the grip trucks and Winnebagos that signal a movie shoot. But not today. When there’s no shooting going on, the front door is usually open, as it was now.

He entered and stopped to let his eyes adjust. It was a small room, quite dark, a lot longer than it was wide. To the left was a bar with a dozen stools, and to the right was a counter with more stools, beneath a black-and-white mural of Hollywood scenes done in the style of Al Hirschfeld. The bar got some
of its business from tourists, movie buffs, and people waiting to get into the Pantages next door, but most of the people who drank there were regulars, many of them relics from an earlier Hollywood. Three of these serious morning drinkers were seated at the bar near the door, and all the way back was the short and scrawny figure of Colonel Lionel Warner, USMC, ret., hunched over and scowling down at his drink.

He didn’t look up as Dave took the seat beside him.

“I guess the sun is over the yardarm somewhere,” Dave said.