Slow Apocalypse (63 page)

“That’s far enough, sir,” he said through the bullhorn. “No one is allowed into this interdiction zone.”

“Listen, please,” Dave shouted. He was just close enough to make out the man’s face. “All I want to do is pass through the camp. I’m with a—”

“Absolutely no admittance, sir.”

“I’m telling you, I’m with a group, we have our own food and water, we’re not destitute. We just need to get to San Diego. There are women and children with us.”

“No admittance, sir.” There was no emotion in the man’s voice.

“Please…Can I come closer and talk? We just need to get through. If I could speak to your commanding officer…”

“These orders come from the commanding officer, sir. No one is allowed through.”

“But…why? We’re not spies, we will only take an hour to get through the camp, we can’t possibly—”

The man fired another shot into the air.

“Sir, I have been patient with you. I am instructed to fire one warning shot if someone approaches to the point where you are standing. I have just fired two. My third round will be into your body if you come any closer. Do we understand each other?”

Dave could think of nothing to say. He stared across the unbridgeable gap, a gap that was not only physical but was somehow moral, ethical, a gap between power and helplessness. The might arrayed against him was ludicrous, more appropriate for repelling an invasion than stopping a single man on a Vespa.

And it was such a short distance. Twenty miles to Oceanside. From there it was only fifty miles to San Diego.

Something inside him snapped. He raised his fist and screamed.

“Tell your fucking commanding fascist officer that David Marshall was here, why don’t you, you Nazi fuck! Tell him that if I survive this, if anyone in my family
doesn’t
survive this, I will find him, and I will tear off his head and shit down his fucking neck. I pay your salary, you prick. I paid for your training, I paid for your weapons, for your fucking tanks. I am a
United States citizen
, and you work for
me
, shithead. Your men work for me. They are supposed to protect me, and my daughter, and my wife, and my friends. And now you threaten to shoot me? Well fuck you and the tank you rode in on!”

Part of him knew this was possibly the stupidest thing he had ever done, and yet it was impossible for him to stop. The rage, the bile, poured out of him. It wasn’t for himself, and it wasn’t just for the family. It was for the people he had just shared his water with. It was for the seven families his daughter had
decided to feed…and for the thousands they had been unable to feed. It was for every hungry person they had passed on their journey, and every person they had turned away from Doheny Drive. It was for all the sad and sick plodders on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the people in camps he had never even seen, in Santa Monica and Dana Point. It was even for the people who had turned them away from their communities, people who were basically good but had little or nothing to share…and for those who shared anyway.

The sane part of him noticed the men in the ranks behind the officer stirring restlessly as the curses came screaming from his mouth. Angry at him, or just possibly angry at their officers? Either way, he knew he was in danger. The man with the bullhorn had put it down and his rifle was no longer aimed into the air.

Struggling back to something approaching calm was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Finally, still boiling, still shaking with rage, he shut up, spit on the ground in the general direction of the soldiers, and turned his scooter around.

For the first quarter mile he felt a target on his back, felt it in the form of an itch he couldn’t scratch even if he had reached behind him. But no shot came. When finally he dared look back he could no longer see the men and tanks.

“We’ve come all this way. For what?”

It was Rachel, voicing the thought they were all having.

It didn’t seem that morale could get any lower. When Dave returned with his news the group had decided to pitch camp beside the road and consider their options. Mark, always the planner, had spread out the map and enumerated their options.

“West is out, unless we want to swim to Japan. Dave tells us that south is out. To the north, we have a string of towns that have already turned us down. Our only choice is to head east.”

“How?” Bob asked.

“Backtracking is the only way I can see. All the way north to the 91 and the 71. Then east to Corona and the 15, when we can cut south again through Temecula. South of that there’s a lot of agricultural land.”

“How far back to the 91?”

“About forty miles. And remember, the farther north we go the worse the quake damage gets. Maybe fire damage, too. We don’t know how far east the fire spread.”

It didn’t look promising.

Marian was peering over Mark’s shoulder. She pointed to a line on the map.

“What about this?”

“Route 74. The Ortega Highway. Don’t even think about it.”

“It looks sort of twisty.”

“Twisty doesn’t even come close. It goes up into the mountains, two lanes wide, and most of it is cut into the mountainside. One landslide would be all it would take to stop us cold.”

Bob was looking at the map, too.

“I’ve driven it, and Mark is right. But we’re quite a ways from the epicenter. We’ve been seeing less and less damage. It’s not a populated area. Isolated
ranches and getaway homes. We probably wouldn’t encounter much human resistance.”

“I tell you, it wouldn’t take much in the way of fallen rocks or collapsed roadway to stop us in our tracks.”

“I think it might be at least worth taking a look,” Emily said. “And as I recall, it’s well forested. Finding wood would not be a problem.”

“That’s true,” Mark conceded. “But the road…”

“What’s this at the end of the line?” Elyse asked.

“That’s Lake Elsinore,” Bob said. “Largest natural lake in Southern California.”

“So it’s a community with water.”

“Yes, it’s a pretty big lake.”

“How many people there?”

Bob thought it was twenty or thirty thousand, spread out over a fairly large area. To the north there wasn’t much between the lake and the city of Corona, and to the south and east there was a lot of rural and semirural land. To the west there were only mountains.

For once the group seemed almost evenly divided. Mark had his allies, and Bob had his. The debate was civil, everyone being too tired and discouraged to bring real passion to the arguments. But Bob and Emily were in favor of trying the mountain road, and so were Dave and Karen, and eventually Mark gave in.

The next morning they would set out for Lake Elsinore.

The first miles were not difficult.

They passed through rolling hills with scrub brush and copses of trees. Caspers Regional Park appeared on their left, nothing to write home about. Ahead of them bare rolling hills began to rise. They saw few signs of human habitation other than dirt roads branching off to the sides, some gated, some not. There were some cattle guards, so Dave assumed the roads led to ranches down in the hollows. As the road cut through the first of the hills there were some small slides of rock and dirt, but nothing they couldn’t drive around or bump cautiously across.

It was a nervous ride. Around every corner might be an impassable barrier, a length of road collapsed into a canyon below, or a boulder the size of a house
blocking their way. There were plenty of boulders that size and much larger, waiting to fall.

They started coming to hairpin turns, making a full 180 degrees, as they wound their way up the hills. Twice they had to stop for fallen trees. These were both old and dead. It seemed the jolting this far south had not been enough to topple most living trees.

They did not see another human being all day.

Then they came around one bend and found the worst obstacle yet.

It was a rockslide much bigger than any they had seen before. Most of it was dirt and rocks that looked as if they could be moved, with some heavy lifting by several people. But there were twenty or thirty that could very well be immovable. They stopped, and everyone got out to look at what might very well be the end of the road.

“Well, now we know why we haven’t seen anyone coming up from the other side,” Mark said. Dave thought there might be a little
I-told-you-so
in his voice.

Nigel climbed up on the rock pile, followed quickly by Sandra and Olivia. Dave followed them, kicking tentatively at some of the larger rocks. None of them budged.

“So what do you think, people?” Bob asked. “Is this the turnaround point?”

“No way,” Nigel shouted. “No way. We can
move
this. Unless there’s a
really
big rock under this pile, we can
move
this, guys.”

Dave wasn’t so sure, but he didn’t feel much like turning around.

Mark sighed, then grinned.

“Okay. We have four shovels. We can take turns tossing dirt. Everybody else can grab rocks as heavy as they can lift, and toss ’em overboard. Sound good?”

It was hot and heavy work. Everyone who could handle a shovel—which was all of them except Jenna, Solomon, Emily, and Taylor—took fifteen-minute shifts attacking the pile. Even Teddy was feeling well enough to work.

At first it was just a matter of getting a scoop of dirt onto a shovel and tossing it over the side. But as the day wore on and the pile grew smaller, it was too far for most of them to throw. So one person would toss a load toward the edge, and others would pick up that dirt and toss it over the side.

Some of the rocks were small enough to handle with the shovels, but when they came to a larger one it had to be wrestled loose, and then either lifted or dragged to the edge and kicked over.

Both Solomon and Taylor ended up “helping out,” Solomon with rocks the size of baseballs, and Taylor with smaller ones. They both enjoyed tossing them as far as they could and seeing them roll down the hill.

That used up the rest of the morning, and went into the afternoon. As they worked they got a better idea of what they were facing in terms of larger rocks. It didn’t look good, but Mark insisted it was not impossible. Facing a logistical engineering job he thought he could tackle, he had become a convert to the idea of getting across the mountains one way or another. He enlisted Dave and Marian in converting the U-Haul truck into a bulldozer.

“My idea is to take out two of the armor panels from the truck,” he said. “Then I’ll weld them into a wedge shape and attach that to the front. Maybe I can shove the biggest ones aside.” He looked dubiously at the front of the truck. “And maybe not.”

The thing Mark fashioned was not elegant, but it looked sturdy. Whether it was sturdy enough to move the two largest rocks remained to be seen.

First he had stripped away all the front grillwork on the U-Haul, making an ugly beast that seemed to be snarling at them. He propped up the two pieces of armor and welded them together, then welded two steel braces between them to give the structure strength. When he was done he had a plow blade eight feet wide. It was designed to deliver brute force to rocks, and it only had to move them about ten feet.

By the time it was done, all the dirt and smaller rocks that had to be moved were out of the way. The labor force was exhausted, sweaty, and filthy. Dinner was served while Mark regarded his creation from all angles. They all stood to one side and Mark fired up his wood-burning engine and slowly eased the front of the truck into contact with the first rock. This was the smaller of the two, standing about three feet high and about six feet in its longest axis. The blade kissed the rock. Mark looked out at his audience.

“Here goes nothing,” he said.

Unfortunately, he was almost accurate. The truck’s engine revved up and whined at a higher pitch. Smoke belched from the vertical stack.

The rock moved, cutting a rut in the asphalt. Everyone cheered. In all, the rock moved about six inches. Then the truck stalled. Mark hit the starter and revved the engine again. The truck stalled. In all, Mark tried six times to move the rock. Each time the truck stalled.

Mark hunkered beside his truck, using a stick to draw things in the dirt and muttering to himself about torque, compression ratios, and other considerations. He was not a happy man.

“Can we break it up?” Marian asked. Mark sprang to his feet.

“Sure, if we had some dynamite. I didn’t think to pack any.”

“Nobody’s blaming you, son,” Bob said. Mark wasn’t buying it.

“I could probably cobble together some explosives from common household chemicals,” he said. “But I’m not sure I remember just how to do it. I’m not real happy messing with explosives when I’ve never—”

“I absolutely forbid it,” Emily said, reverting to protective-mother mode.

“I remember some stuff,” Marian said. “But I wouldn’t want to mess with it, either, without someone who knew more than I do.”

“Could we break it up any other way?” Nigel wanted to know.

Mark blew out a breath.

“It would be a lot harder than you imagine. That’s very hard rock. That’s a damn
big
rock. I only have one sledgehammer. I don’t know if it would last long enough for this job. But if it did…it might take days.”