He wanted to turn and call to her. He wanted to tell her it was no use, and that he was miserable, and he’d torn his clothes, and…
Instead, he crouched and inserted the jack handle again, twisting and prying at the wire, until it broke free of the post. Then again, and again, and suddenly the whole length of fence was loose there. He went to the next post and began his work.
Eileen gunned the car. The horn sounded, and she called, “Stand aside!” The car left the road and came at the fence rammed it, tore it loose from another post and flattened it onto the grass, and the car drove over it. The car motor raced. “Get in,” she called.
Tim ran for it. She hadn’t stopped completely, and now it seemed she wasn’t going to stop at all. He ran to catch up and tugged open the door, threw himself onto the seat. She gunned the car across the fairway, leaving deep ruts, then came to a green. She drove across it. The car tore at the carefully manicured surface.
Tim laughed. There was a note of hysteria in it.
“What?” Eileen asked. She didn’t take her eyes off the grassy fairway ahead.
“I remember when some lady stepped on the Los Angeles Country Club green with spiked heels,” Tim said. “The steward nearly died! I thought I understood Hammerfall, and what it meant, but I didn’t, not until you drove across the greens…”
She didn’t say anything, and Tim stared moodily ahead again. How many man-hours had gone to produce that perfect grassy surface? Would anyone ever again bother? Tim had another wild impulse to laughter. If there were golf clubs in the car, he could get out and tee off on a green…
Eileen went completely across the golf course and back to the blacktop road up into the hills. Now they were in wilderness, high hills on either side of them. They passed a picnic ground. There were Boy Scouts there. They had a tent set up, and they seemed to be arguing with the scoutmaster. Tim opened the car window. “Stay on high ground,” he shouted.
“What’s happened below?” the scoutmaster asked.
Eileen slowed to a stop.
“Fires. Floods. Traffic jams,” Tim said. “Nothing you’ll want to go into. Not for awhile.” He motioned the adult closer. “Stay up here, at least for the night.”
“Our families…” the man said.
“Where?”
“Studio City.”
“You can’t get there now,” Tim said. “Traffic’s not moving in the valley. Roads closed, freeways down, lot of fires. The best thing you can do for your families is to stay up here where you’re safe.”
The man nodded. He had big brown eyes in a square, honest face. There was a stubble of red beard on his chin. “I’ve been telling the kids that. Julie-Ann, you hear that? Your mother knows where we are. If things were really bad down there, they’d send the cops after us. Best we stay here.” He lowered his voice. “Lot of rebuilding to do after that quake, I guess. Many hurt?”
“Yeah,” Tim said. He turned away. He couldn’t look into the scoutmaster’s eyes.
“We’ll stay another day, then,” the scoutmaster said. “They ought to have things moving again by tomorrow. Kids aren’t really prepared for this rain, though. Nobody expects rain in June. Maybe we ought to go down into Burbank and stay in a house. Or a church. They’d put us up—”
“Don’t,” Tim said. His voice was urgent. “Not yet. Does this road go on over the top?”
“Yes.” The man brought his face close to Tim’s. “Why do you want to go up into that?” He waved toward the lightning that flashed on the peaks above. “Why?”
“Have to,” Tim said. “You stay here. For the night, anyway. Let’s go, Eileen.”
She drove off without saying anything. They rounded a bend, leaving the scoutmaster standing in the road. “I couldn’t tell him either,” Eileen said. “Are they safe there?”
“I think so. We seem to be pretty high.”
“The top is about three thousand feet,” Eileen said.
“And we’re no more than a thousand below it. We’re safe,” Tim said. “Maybe it would be better to wait here, until the lightning stops. If it ever does stop. Then we can go on or go back. Where do we get if we go over?”
“Tujunga,” Eileen said. “It’s a good eighteen hundred, two thousand feet elevation. If we’re safe, Tujunga should be.” She continued to drive, winding further into the hills.
Tim frowned. He had never had a good sense of direction, and there were no maps in the car. “My observatory is up Big Tujunga Canyon — at least, you can get to it by going up that road. I’ve done it. And the observatory has food, and emergency equipment and supplies.”
“Hammer Fever?” Eileen teased. “You?”
“No. It’s remote up there. I’ve been snowbound more than once, a week at a time, more. So I keep plenty of supplies. Where are we going? Why don’t you stop?”
“I’m — I don’t know.” She drove on, more slowly, almost crawling along. The rain had slackened off. It was still pouring down, hard for Los Angeles, unheard of for summer, but just then it was only rain, not bathtubs of water pouring out of the sky. In compensation the wind rose, howling up the canyon, screaming at them so that they were shouting at each other, but the wind was such a constant companion that by now they didn’t notice.
They came around another bend, and they were on a high shelf looking south and westward. Eileen stopped the car, despite the danger of slides from above them. She turned off the motor. The wind howled, and lightning played above and ahead. The rain beat down so that the San Fernando Valley was obscured, but sometimes the wind whipped the rain in a thinner pattern and they could see blurred shapes out there. There were bright orange flares down on the valley floor. Dozens of them.
“What are those?” Eileen wondered aloud.
“Houses. Filling stations. Power-plant oil storage. Cars, homes, overturned tank trucks — anything that can burn.”
“Rain and fire.” She shivered, despite the warmth inside the car. The wind howled again.
Tim reached for her. She held back a moment, then came to him, her head against his chest. They sat that way, listening to the wind, watching orange flames blur through driving rain.
“We’ll make it,” Tim said. “The observatory. We’ll get there. We may have to walk, but it’s not that far. Twenty, thirty miles, no more. Couple of days if we walk. Then we’ll be safe.”
“No,” she said. “No one will ever be safe. Not again.”
“Sure we will.” He was silent a moment. “I’m… I’m really glad you found me,” he said. “I’m not much of a hero, but—”
“You’re doing fine.”
They were quiet again. The wind continued to whistle, but gradually they became aware of another sound — low, rumbling, building in volume, like a jet plane, ten jets, a thousand jets roaring for takeoff. It came from the south; and as they watched, some of the orange flares ahead of them went out. They didn’t flicker and die; they went out suddenly, snuffed from view in an instant. The noise grew, rushing closer.
“Tsunami,” Tim said. His voice was low, wondering. “It really did come. A tidal wave, hundreds, maybe thousands of feet high—”
’’Thousands?” Eileen said nervously.
“We’ll be all right. The waves can’t move far across land. It takes a lot of energy to move across land. A lot. Listen. It’s coming up the old Los Angeles River bed. Not across the Hollywood Hills. Anyone up there is probably safe. God help the people in the valley…”
And they sat, holding each other, while lightning played around and above them, and they heard the rolling thunder of lightning and above the thunder the roar of the tsunami, as one by one the bright orange fires went out in the San Fernando Valley.
Between Baja California and the west coast of Mexico is a narrow body of water whose shoreline is like the two prongs of a tuning fork. The Sea of Cortez is as warm as bathwater and as calm as a lake, a playground for swimmers and sailors.