Beth didn’t really want to leave LA any more than he did. Their careers were here. And the more time that passed between quakes, the more abstract the threat became.
It wasn’t abstract any more.
Home. He had to get home. But at the rate he was going, it would take him a week. It was already half-past three, and he was only four miles west of downtown. The Cahuenga Pass was about five miles northwest. He had to make better time or he wouldn’t get to the valley by dark-and he certainly didn’t want to be here when the sun went down.
His shoulder throbbed, his shirt sticking to his gunshot wound, becoming part of the scab. Marty could feel blisters rising on his heels. His entire body was drenched with sweat, making him stink even more, which he didn’t think was possible without decomposing. He could only imagine what the smell was like without the protection of a dust mask.
He walked briskly up Beverly Boulevard, which no one would ever confuse for the western end that ran through the center of Beverly Hills. While the other end was paved with upscale boutiques, fancy restaurants, and pricey antique stores, this stretch catered to an entirely different clientele. Emilio’s Discount. Pepe Ranchero. Mercado Latino. Catalina Carniceria. Not merchants that usually came to Marty’s mind when someone mentioned Beverly Boulevard.
Marty glanced down the residential avenues that branched off the boulevard. The streets were lined with classic Victorian, Craftsman, English Tudor, and Spanish colonial houses with broad front yards, that would fetch upwards of $2 million each if they were in Beverly Hills, Hancock Park, or Pasadena. But these streets were ceded long ago to the tide of immigrants from Mexico, South America, and Asia who didn’t have the means to maintain the properties in their original style and grace.
Long before the earthquake, decades of neglect, economic hardship, and destructive improvements had taken their toll on the homes. Whatever architectural charms they once had were lost to iron-barred windows and cut-rate remodeling, cyclone fencing and junked cars parked on dead lawns. The once elegant porches were cluttered with old couches and Pontiac bucket seats, or closed in with chicken wire, transformed into open-air storage units.
Marty’s Calabasas neighborhood would never end up like this. It was against the rules of his gated community. No additions or remodels were permitted without the approval of the architectural committee, which never approved anything. Flowers planted without the consent of the landscaping committee were immediately yanked out of the dirt. Cars not garaged at night were ticketed. Basketball hoops, motor homes, and boats were forbidden.
That was how you maintained property values. Put a wall around it and appoint committees.
But in this neighborhood, just a few miles west of downtown, it was hard, except in extreme cases, for Marty to discern what was earthquake damage to these homes and what was just lingering wounds.
Whatever their state of decay or damage, the houses now shared one thing in common. They were all empty. Entire families had fled their homes, dragging their TV sets and stereos, mattresses and clothes, iceboxes and recliners out onto the streets, setting up encampments in their front yards. They built impromptu shelters, stringing blankets, garbage bags, and tablecloths from the roofs of their cars to the tops of their cyclone fences, covering the sidewalks underneath with bedding.
Marty averted his gaze, afraid it would be met by one of the sad eyes in those shabby shelters, and he definitely didn’t want to be drawn into anything there.
People were already mobbing the handful of small, earthquake-ravaged “Mercados” and “Supermercados” along the boulevard, picking through the rubble, searching aisles strewn with spilled and splattered merchandise for any surviving canned foods and bottled water.
As he passed the stores, he was stunned to see that the people, despite their desperation and fear, were still dutifully lining up at the registers to pay for what they found, fought over, and wrestled out of their neighbors’ hands.
Marty didn’t share their desperation, he still had enough food and water in his pack to make it home, where he and Beth had plenty of supplies stashed.
For a brief and satisfying moment, Marty once again felt like he’d conquered the quake with his cool head and superb preparation. The only itsy bitsy problem was the walk home. But in a few hours, that would be behind him and he’d be firmly in charge of the situation.
The important thing now was to learn from his recent mistakes and stick to his plan. Think only of getting home as quickly as possible. Think only about Beth and how much more she needed him than anyone else along the way.
Just ahead, beyond a curve in the boulevard, Marty could see a column of dark smoke. As he approached, he saw a fissure in the asphalt, a geyser of fire shooting out of it, flames lashing the buildings on either side of the street. All that was left of one blazing structure was its quirky, retro sign-a smiling cartoon character in a tuxedo, waving a chastising finger at a cockroach, distracting the insect from the mallet hidden behind his back.
The character seemed so familiar. He was trying to place the image when a dead bird smacked into the street at his feet. Marty looked up and saw two more birds plunging right at him.
He jumped aside, but it was futile. It was raining dead birds. The entire flock that had flown over his head moments ago were falling out of the sky all around him. They hit his body like baseballs, pummeling him to the ground.
And then he knew where he’d seen that cartoon character with the mallet. On the side of an exterminator’s truck.
The birds were dying because they’d flown into a cloud of poison gas, the same one that was over his head right now.
CHAPTER SIX
3:50 p.m. Tuesday
Marty scrambled to his feet and fled down the nearest side street, screaming “poison gas” as loud as he could.
But no one was listening to him.
For one thing, his words were muffled by his dust mask. For another, everyone was too busy evading the hailstorm of dead birds. The high-velocity, feathered bombs were pelting people off their feet, thunking into parked cars and collapsing make-shift shelters on impact. Compared to that, a lunatic running down the street yelling something unintelligible was easily ignored.
Marty ran in a panic, stumbling and tumbling over the debris in the street, stealing looks over his shoulder at the brown, roiling cloud of toxic smoke. He ran as if the dark cloud was alive and in pursuit, tendrils of insecticide reaching for him, hungry for his flesh. He ran until he couldn’t anymore, until his stomach cramped up and each breath felt like a sword being shoved down his throat.
He pulled his dust mask down and looked back, relieved to see the noxious cloud was no longer above him but moving eastward, pushed by a gentle breeze. But Marty’s sense of relief was obliterated by a body-buckling cramp and the sudden terror that he might lose control of his bowels.
And that possibility, that Marty might crap all over himself, right there in middle of the street, was more frightening to him than the toxic cloud ever was.
He didn’t worry about whether he’d already been poisoned and this was just the beginning of a gruesome death. He didn’t wonder if the horrible cramps were from the pesticide or his Authentic Kosher Mexican Burrito. The only thing Marty Slack was thinking about was finding a working toilet in the next sixty seconds, because that’s how long his biological stopwatch told him he had until his sphincters burst open.
One of his worst nightmares, far more frightening than the Big One hitting, was the fear of losing control of his bowels without a toilet nearby. This nightmare was topped only by the fear of the big one hitting while he was on the toilet.