“You mean — with Angel? I haven’t done anything. Neither has she.”
“I’m not talking about Angel now. Try to keep up. I’m talking about the picture I saw, the one the guy showed me, the guy who told me to break up with you. The one of you and that — that woman.”
Chapel felt like a deflating balloon. He had never wanted to talk about this, not with Julia. He’d also always known he would have to, eventually. “Her name was Nadia,” he said. “Do you want the details?”
“Absolutely not.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Jim. When I saw that picture, I hated you a little. I had no right to. I mean, I’d broken up with you. You were a free agent. You still are. I know that logically. But I couldn’t help myself. I was filled with rage. You made promises to me.”
Chapel bit his tongue, at least metaphorically. He did not want to say out loud the words, You’re the one who refused my marriage proposal. He wasn’t quite that oblivious. So instead he said, “You’re going to feel what you’re going to feel.”
“That’s really very big of you,” she said, sarcasm dripping from the words. “I was getting past it. I was pretty much going to let Badass Julia screw your brains out, because she really, really wanted to.”
“I like Badass Julia,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.
“Don’t be so sure. Now Badass Julia is considering what her chances are if she’s competing with a cute little twentysomething with daddy issues.”
“Now we’re talking about Angel again,” he said.
“You’re getting better at this game,” Julia told him. “I’m nearly twice her age. You can’t possibly prefer me to her. Men don’t work that way.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No,” she said, and he could tell she wasn’t.
“Julia,” he said. “I love you.”
“Badass Julia isn’t sure she believes you.”
“I wasn’t talking to her. I was talking to Julia Taggart, DVM. I’ve loved you basically since we first met and I always will. You don’t want to hear about Nadia, but I’m going to tell you this — none of that would have happened if I wasn’t so heartsick for you I couldn’t see straight. I know that’s not a very good defense, but it’s true. When I came to your apartment, back when all this started — I knew I was already being chased by the police. I knew I was in danger of being caught. But I came anyway because I thought maybe, just maybe you wanted to see me again. It didn’t matter why. It would have been worth it because I got to see you again.”
Her face was guarded. “You are good, I’ll give you that. You talk a great game.”
“Give me a chance to do more than just talk,” he said. “Wait. That sounded dirty. I meant it to be romantic.”
She rolled her eyes. “Maybe we will later. Talk, I mean. Go to bed, Captain Chapel. You need to heal. Your veterinarian insists.”
She stood up and started to turn away. But then she stopped and looked back at him. He had no idea what she was thinking.
Luckily Badass Julia wasn’t about mixed signals. She reached under his sheet and grabbed his cock. It stiffened instantly in her hand.
“Get better soon,” she said, and then she left him there.
Behind the chain-link fence nothing but anarchy held sway.
The National Guard had set up a temporary base at LAX. Patrick Norton, the secretary of defense, had flown in for an inspection. As he stepped off the plane he was led down a corridor formed by two rows of soldiers in full battle gear, every single one of them standing at attention, spaced exactly apart from one another. It was a perfect display of military discipline, designed to impress the absolute top brass.
A display that failed altogether once Norton could hear the protesters screaming just a few dozen yards away.
They pressed their faces against the fence, their mouths open, spittle flying in rage. He couldn’t understand what any of them were shouting, but some of them carried signs he could read:
WE WON’T LIVE LIKE THIS
KATRINA 2.0
NO POWER NO PEACE
“Sir?”
Norton looked to his left and saw a guard captain waiting to lead him away. He nodded gratefully and followed the man into a Quonset hut full of radio gear. In the center of the prefab building stood a series of card tables, each of them covered in manila folders. The captain picked one up and handed it to the SecDef.
“This is your briefing, sir, which you can peruse at your leisure. I’d be happy to give you the salient points in verbal form, if you would prefer that.”
Norton took the folder and glanced at it for a second without opening it. Then he threw it back down on the table.
“Show me,” he said.
It took an age to get a helicopter ready to go — the main concern seemed to be finding one that was properly armored, so that no one could shoot the secretary of defense out of the sky with a target pistol. Once they were airborne, though, Norton knew immediately he’d made the right choice. No paper briefing could give him the same perspective on the chaos that he got from the air.
For one thing — he wouldn’t have felt the darkness sprawling under him so intensely. Wouldn’t have known just how apocalyptic it could feel. He’d flown over Los Angeles many times in his career and always, when you came in by night, the whole landscape glowed like it was on fire. Lights from the buildings bounced off the permanent cloud of smog and lit up the countryside for miles around.
Now there was nothing down there except where something actually was on fire. Just inky blackness, interrupted here and there by a burning trash can or a car that had been doused in gasoline and set ablaze in the middle of a street crossing. Norton wondered if the cars had been lit up as a form of protest, or just because the locals were so desperate for whatever light source they could find.
Off in the distance, in the hills, there were some electric lights still burning. And if Norton looked to the south, he saw whole neighborhoods that glowed just as brightly as they ever had. But downtown L.A. had reentered the nineteenth century.
“Is any power getting through? Even just for part of the day?” Norton asked over his headset microphone.
The captain consulted his handheld. “Yes, sir. We had four hours today, that’s good for the average. Yesterday we had nothing. We get rolling blackouts that just kind of roll in and… stay. We’ve got the Army Corps of Engineers trying to put everything back together, get the grid online again, but their reports aren’t encouraging. If I didn’t know better, I’d think somebody was trying to stop them. They’re telling me it’s all computer problems, that every time they get a substation cleared, another one drops off-line.” The captain shook his head. “It’s going to be a matter of weeks, not days, before this is cleared up.”
Norton peered down into the soupy gloom. He occasionally thought he saw someone running on a sidewalk in the dark or a car moving between palm trees, but it was hard to tell.
Off to the east a blare of light alleviated the darkness, like a cloud of fire hovering over the black landscape. “What’s that?” Norton asked.
“Sir, that’s Dodger Stadium, it’s our relief station. We’ve got gasoline generators out there working all night. We’ve advised anyone in distress to head there; we’ve got medical teams, clean water, some communications—”
“Let me see,” Norton commanded.
The captain clearly didn’t think it was a good idea, but he said nothing. The helicopter swung around and headed directly for the light, which soon enough Norton could see came from the big stadium lights that normally illuminated nighttime ball games. “We keep those on from dusk until dawn,” the captain explained. “Some people… they just want the light, that’s all. They just need to get out of the dark.”