Slow Apocalypse (55 page)

“At some point we’ll have to tell him that’s good enough,” Bob said. “Nothing is ever quite up to Mark’s specs.”

“He gets the job done.”

“He sure does. If only he could recognize when it’s done well enough.”

But Mark surprised them by announcing he was ready to start. Bob looked at him, nodded, and called his clan together.

“I’m not going to make a speech, and I don’t offer prayers, but I think it’s time for a moment of reflection. Just a moment. We’ve had a fine life in this old place. I just want to say that raising you all here has meant everything to me.”

“I will offer a prayer,” Emily said. “It’s for those of us who couldn’t be here. For Peter and his wife and children in England, and for George in New York, and for Teddy’s partner Manuel, wherever he may be. May they all be safe and healthy.”

“And for Roger and Dennis and their families, absent Posse members,” Dave added, “wherever they may be.”

“Amen,” several of them said. Dave saw many tears, looked at Karen, and saw that she was crying, too.

“We never got to say good-bye to our place,” she said. “And I know we’ll never see it again.”

Dave put his arm around her. “Let’s just wish for new beginnings,” he said.

“To new beginnings.”

He hugged her close, and held out his hand for Addison, who joined them.

“Ranger okay?” he asked.

“He seems eager to go. He gave me no trouble at all about getting into the trailer.”

“Good.” He paused. “You know there’s a chance we’ll have to abandon him somewhere along the way?”

“Yes. I know.” She tried to look brave, but he could see it was hard for her. They didn’t have a lot of hay and oats. If forage couldn’t be found, Ranger would have to be let loose, to survive or die on his own. The fact was that they might have left him behind to graze on the remains of the country club, except for the fact the Bob, and later Mark, had strongly argued that they needed the horse as a possible argument toward admittance to whatever community they might encounter that might otherwise be reluctant to admit outsiders. Horses were bound to be valuable in the new order of things, as transportation or to pull a plow.

The meeting broke up, and they all went to their vehicles. Bob remained outside for a moment, looking up at the faces of the drivers and passengers in the three vehicles parked side by side, and the faces of the others looking out the school-bus windows or down from the platform on top.

“I feel like I ought to say something dramatic, like ‘Wagons, ho!’ ”

Gordon, standing on the steps of the school bus, said, “How about ‘Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.’ ”

“That’ll do. Start ’em up, folks.”

Dave turned the key in the Escalade’s ignition. Next to him Mark engaged the starter on the U-Haul, and it ground to life with a burst of black smoke from the tailpipe. On the other side Marian cranked up the school bus, which coughed, stuttered…and died. She tried it again, and nothing happened.

Mark jumped down from the U-Haul cab and hurried over to the bus. He stood on the bumper and reached into the hoodless engine compartment. He had several tools on his belt, and he selected one and made some adjustment.

This time the engine turned over for about ten seconds, and then caught. It belched out an even bigger cloud of smoke, including some that went right into Mark’s face. Coughing, sooty-faced, Mark was still grinning. He pumped his fist in the air and ran back to his truck.

The order of travel had been the subject of some debate. There were good arguments for placing any of the three vehicles in the lead, and good arguments against any of them. The lead vehicle was likely to be the first one to run into trouble, and many of the Winstons were in favor of letting the bus lead, because it was the most heavily armored and had the most firepower. But Dave and others argued that because all the children except Addison would be riding in it, the bus should be in the safest position, which most agreed was the middle.

Mark wanted to take the lead in the U-Haul, but the danger of having it hijacked with all their provisions seemed greater if it was in the lead.

In the end, no one was really sure what the best order would be, and so Dave had argued hard for taking the lead in the Escalade. He pointed out that, even with the trailer, the SUV was the smallest vehicle they had, and the easiest to turn around. They all agreed that running was always the better option than fighting, something they would do only if forced into it. Turning around rapidly would put the trailer between Dave and his family and incoming fire from a threat ahead of them.

They would try that arrangement, with Dave in the lead and the bus following him, and at the end of the day talk it over again and maybe try out a new arrangement.

Dave recalled all that, knew his arguments made sense, and believed deeply that everyone on the trip would have to shoulder equal responsibility and equal exposure to danger. But it was not quite the same to volunteer to take point and to sit in his car with his family around him and have to actually do it.

He had debated having Addison ride on the bus, but in the end he and Karen had decided to stick to their agreement and not split up the family. And he discovered that he felt a lot better with her behind him in the car than he would have if she were on the bus. She had a shotgun in her lap, as did her mother. Karen and Dave both had loaded pistols handy. And he was as ready as he would ever be.

He started the engine, put it in gear, and slowly pulled down the Winstons’ driveway just as the first rays of the sun broke over the eastern horizon, now clear of smoke. He drove into the street at about five miles per hour and saw in his improvised side mirror that the school bus had fallen in behind him.

At last, the caravan was moving. If only they knew their destination.

They made it easily to the edge of the burn area. Teddy knew all the streets in the area, which were passable and which were blocked. He stayed out ahead about a hundred yards, sometimes turning around to ride beside Dave for a moment and update him on which direction they would be taking, then pressing on ahead.

The fire seemed to have died out around San Vicente Boulevard. Here was where the wind had shifted. To the west of San Vicente they encountered mostly earthquake damage. To the east, almost everything had burned.

There were exceptions. The old Hollywood Farmer’s Market was undamaged. But just beyond it, the newer, upscale shopping center, The Grove, had been devastated. The diamond-patterned streets of the old Park La Brea housing had not burned. They moved down Third, around the bulging hill where the tar pits had been and the art museum had stood. It was just beyond this, at La Brea Avenue, that they reached the area of total devastation. Everything to the north, south, and east had been completely involved, every last building and every single tree. It was a hellish landscape, all black and shades of gray.

They paused here to test the ground. They would not stop long. The problem with a wood-burning engine was that it couldn’t be shut off. The fire would continue to burn, wasting precious fuel, until it went out. Then it had to be reignited. Because of that they had agreed that all stops except for emergencies would be as brief as possible.

People tested the ground with their feet. It was bare concrete, except at the edges where what looked like melted asphalt had run toward the gutters. Marian poked at the stuff with a stick, got some of the goo on the end of it, and gingerly touched it.

“Warm, but it won’t burn you,” she announced.

They approached some of the brick walls, which were the only things standing. Even some of those had collapsed. They could feel heat still radiating from the bricks, and from the concrete, but nothing seemed too hot to touch.

“Looks like it’s okay to go on,” Teddy said.

“I agree,” said Bob. “So let’s do it.”

Everyone hurried back to their vehicles and Dave started his engine. He pulled forward and entered the ruined city.

It made the earthquake damage seem minor. As far as they could see, nothing was intact. Whole blocks were nothing but piles of ashes. Sometimes they could see metal objects in the ash heaps, which were probably the twisted and half-melted remains of major appliances. Of the brick buildings only the shells remained. It reminded Dave of pictures of German cities after firebombing, except that few of these buildings were that tall, most only one or two stories.

It was a wasteland that stretched as far as the eye could see. Nothing was familiar. The iron posts holding the street signs had been twisted by the heat of the fire. They would soon have been lost except for something Dave thought was ironic. The network of GPS satellites in orbit was still functioning, and could pinpoint their location to within about ten yards. One was built into the Escalade, and there was a detachable unit they had installed in the bus. But it was surreal, looking at the bright network of streets on the small screen, with parks and landmarks, stores and gas stations neatly marked, and then to look up and see the reality.

Every now and then, through a caprice of the wind or some other unknown factor, they would pass a block or two that had not burned. There were mostly houses, and the paint had been scorched off them, the wood baked brown. Dave wondered if so much oxygen had been sucked from the surrounding air that they had been unable to ignite. The houses looked like they had been sitting in the desert, desiccating, for a thousand years.

Progress was very slow. Dave had thought he was moving slowly at five miles per hour, but he quickly saw that he would seldom be traveling any faster than that, and sometimes considerably slower. Teddy was clever at finding routes around the many obstacles in their path, but they had to take long detours, and sometimes stop completely to attach a chain to a tree so that the bus could pull it out of the way. Sometimes a block and tackle was needed.

By late afternoon they had only gone as far as Rosewood Cemetery at Venice and Normandie. And here was another quirk of the fire. The trees inside the fence were widely spaced. The fire seemed to have danced along the tops of
the trees without ever getting down to the ground. The brown grass had not caught fire. Again, Dave figured it was something to do with lack of oxygen.

Mark decreed that they call a halt, which everyone was happy to do. It was hard work, just driving, or even sitting on the alert for trouble. The heat was almost unbearable. They were drinking water faster than they wanted to, but they had no choice. They could not risk dehydration.

The reason Mark stopped them was that he needed to replenish their supply of wood chips, and he needed to see how the chipper functioned in the field. As with so many other things they had brought along, the failure of the chipper would be disastrous, leaving them no hope of getting very far.

The gates were open. Dave pulled in, followed by the other vehicles. Addison was out quickly, lowering the tailgate of the trailer and bringing out her thirsty and hungry horse. They had brought a basin for Ranger to drink from. This worried Dave, since water was such a problem, but no one was showing any reluctance to fill it and let the animal drink his fill. He sincerely hoped that situation continued, and that they came across another source of water soon.

Mark, in charge of the engines and their fuel, was out and about immediately, trying to do everything at once. He handed out the chain saws and hurried around, picking the trees he felt were the best sizes for feeding into the wood chipper. Soon the silence was broken by the purr of the chain-saw motors and the louder screech of the chains cutting into wood. When the trees were down and being dismembered, a sort of bucket brigade was formed to carry lengths of wood to the chipper. Mark started it up and began feeding in the branches and smaller pieces while Marian and Gordon swung axes to split the larger pieces of trunk into smaller bits the chipper could handle. The chipper was very loud. All the sounds of activity were very strange to hear amid the stark, leafless trees with their burned tops, and the thousands and thousands of tombstones. Dave remembered that Hattie McDaniel, the first black American to win an Oscar, for her role in
Gone With the Wind
, had been buried here after she was refused interment at Hollywood Memorial Park. He wondered where she was.

It was hot, sweaty work, and they all had to take a break every half hour or so. When Dave took a break he joined Bob and followed Addison as she led Ranger from one promising patch of grass to the next one. She was determined to get as much free forage into him as she could before they moved on, which Mark said should be in about an hour.

Addison got ahead of him, and then he saw her stop. She turned around
and came toward him, walking fast, leading the horse behind her. Her face was white. Dave hurried over to her.

“What’s the matter, Addie?”

For a moment she couldn’t get any words out. Tears began running down her cheeks.

“Don’t…don’t go over there, Daddy.”

“Honey, what it is?”

“You shouldn’t go over there.”