The Deluge, page 45
“Is there anyone else you can call there? Any of her friends?”
“I don’t know. She was seeing this guy, but nothing serious…” She trailed off.
“Okay, let me call my colleague in D.C. He might know something…” It was his turn to let his helpless sentence wither.
“Call me back.”
“Okay.”
Ash didn’t answer, so Tony left a message. The news was grim. The Wisdom Tree Fire had raced east and south, threatening homes around the Hollywood Reservoir. Fire crews had been unable to contain it overnight. With nothing to do but wait for Ash to call, Tony showered and changed. When he returned, CNN was still replaying the footage of Hollywood ablaze. From ten thousand feet, a plane captured the massive plume of smoke. It looked like an enormous horned beast. He had a missed called, but it was neither from Hasan nor Holly. It was Dean. He dialed his son-in-law back.
“Hey, Tony, man.”
“Dean. Everything okay?”
There was the sound of traffic white-noising in the background.
“So, you can’t let Holly know I called you, okay? I’ve been sworn to secrecy too many times to count, but look, you’re like a dad to me. I love you and respect you, man. I feel obligated.”
“Okay…” Almost every time they spoke, Dean repeated that Tony was like a father to him, and he loved and respected him. Utterly cloying. He liked Dean just fine, but at some point, give it a rest.
“Holly’s been worried about Catherine for a while now.”
“Worried how?”
“She’s been out to LA twice in the last year to take Catherine to meetings.”
“Meetings?” Tony choked. “Dean, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Cat’s just… She’s a partier, man. She works at that bar, drinks every night. She’s into harder stuff too. She goes on benders where she blacks out… Did you know she was arrested?”
“What?” Tony barked the word so loud that Tyrion darted behind the couch.
“For possession. But that’s not a big deal, man. That was years ago. We’re just worried because she’s not answering and—I don’t know. Holly didn’t want to tell you, but I think— Fuck! Watch where you’re going!” Dean muttered something he couldn’t make out. “Sorry, Tone, I’m on my bike. Anyway, I just thought you should know. And don’t be mad at Holly. She’s just trying to look out for her sister but not betray her trust.”
“Thanks for calling, Dean.”
Tony stewed on this information while he watched Los Angeles burn. He tried calling his colleague Niko, thinking maybe Niko could drive up from La Jolla to find Catherine, but his wife answered and told Tony that was an absurd idea. People were driving away from Los Angeles. He tried the LA Fire Department next but got an automated message. Every emergency service in the city was engaged at this point. Then the news started coming very quickly.
“We’re getting reports that the fire has jumped the 101 near the Hollywood Bowl, and at least thirteen firefighters and rescue workers are dead. The fire apparently leaped over the Cahuenga Pass when wind speeds picked up. We’re now seeing winds gusting at upward of eighty miles per hour and that is pushing the flames down into the city…”
Tony had his phone out, looking at flights to Los Angeles, and of course this was stupid, there were no flights to Los Angeles. All of them delayed or canceled, LAX suffocating. Ten minutes later, the harried CNN reporter was back on: the governor had ordered the evacuation of Los Angeles.
“This is unprecedented. As many as five million people ordered to leave their homes, as multiple fires converge, and the winds—I think it’s difficult to explain just how hard the wind is—”
Tony snatched up the remote and turned off the TV. He sat staring at the blank screen. Tyrion perched on the armrest, green eyes locked on him. You’re wasting time, old man.
His phone rang. Holly.
“I know,” he said.
“Dad, they’re evacuating the city. I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“Yeah.”
“What about Catherine? She’s still not answering.” Holly sounded less frightened than furious at her irresponsible little sister. Tony could not recall being this scared in his life. Not when his mom passed away when he was a boy. Not following Gail’s diagnosis. Not when he opened the envelope and rubbed his fingers together to test the consistency of that powder.
“Your track-a-friend thing still says she’s in her apartment?”
“Yes. Dad, I’ve called every emergency line in LA. It’s fucking pandemonium. All her friends I know of are already gone. No one knows where she is, and they’re sure as hell not turning around to go look for her.”
“Okay,” said Tony. “Okay.” His phone beeped with an incoming call. “Hold on, Holly, it’s my colleague. Let me take this.”
“What’s strange about these fires,” said Hasan, not bothering with any phatic drivel, “is how far the flames are reaching into urban areas. The factors involved are quite interesting.”
Tony rubbed his head and considered hanging up.
“What makes these particular fires so pernicious is fountain grass.”
“Grass.”
“Yes. It’s an invasive species, highly flammable, and it grows best in areas burned by fire. On top of that, the horticultural trade actually promotes it. People plant this in their yards! Which is helping the flames carry down into the city.”
“Ash. Stop.” The other end of the line went quiet. “My daughter is in Los Angeles. I can’t get a hold of her.”
“Oh.” He paused. “I’m sorry to hear that. Where does she live?”
“Silver Lake. Right around Sunset and Hollywood.”
“That’s…” He could almost hear Ash pulling up a map. “That is not a good place to be right now.”
“I know.”
“Have you tried contacting local officials?”
“Local officials appear to be busy.”
“Of course.” He hesitated, probably trying to come up with anything that didn’t make him sound like a mutant. “Would you like me to send over the executive summary I’ve drafted for the congresswoman?”
Tony snorted. “Sure. I gotta go.”
He hung up without waiting for a reply. He stood in his living room watching the same cell phone and helicopter footage repeat on CNN, though they’d changed the chyron to GOVERNOR ORDERS EVACUATION; CHAOS AS HIGHWAYS CLOG. Just in case anyone didn’t know to panic. He felt detached from his own skin, unable to pull himself back into the moment. Tyrion whispered past his ankle. Then he remembered he’d hung up on Holly, but he didn’t call her back. He didn’t know what he’d say.
His phone buzzed. Hasan again.
“What.”
“Tony? It’s Ash.”
“I know, it says that.”
“This may be dangerous and perhaps unethical, but I think I’ve found a way you could get to Los Angeles before nightfall.”
Tony sat down. “How?”
“The airports in the area surrounding Los Angeles are all closed, but there are special dispensations for disaster response professionals flying into emergency zones. I can get you on a FEMA plane bound for Ontario, California. President Randall is sending every available resource, so I’ll recommend you as a climate variability expert—”
“A what?”
“It’s a made-up title. Ontario is roughly an hour away from the city. Once there, I can have a car waiting for you through FEMA channels. Officials are turning all incoming highway lanes to the city outbound, but there will be an emergency route in. I’ll figure that out while you’re in the air. Of course, you have to understand the danger, and I simply can’t ask anyone to accompany you—”
“No, of course not.” Tony caught his breath, and then he hurried into his bedroom to pack a bag. “Ash—my God—thank you. Thank you so much. I can’t even…”
It was like a wire had tripped inside him, the fear blown back by this chance he’d been given.
“If you can get to the New Haven airport in the next hour, I’ll route you through Chicago where you can catch the FEMA plane. You should read my executive summary despite your skepticism of my methods. It would be best if you had some background on the behavior of large-scale fire events in case of emergency.”
“This is incredible of you, man. I swear to Christ, I’ll never forget this.”
“I was thinking of how my sister and her husband, Peter, would behave if it were their child, and that allowed me to think creatively about the situation.” He said it like such a fucking robot, and Tony felt such warmth for him. “I just hope you find your daughter.”
He packed a change of clothes and a toothbrush. He called Holly on his way to the airport.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? Dad, the city’s being evacuated. People are dying in car accidents on the highways trying to get out.”
“What choice do I have, Holly? Your tracker still says she’s in her apartment, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So I’ll get into the city and find her. The fires are still well north of her.”
“Not that far north! Dad, this is a terrible idea. You don’t know if she’s even—”
“What the hell do you want me to do, Holly?” He immediately regretted shouting at her. He had to keep a lid on his fear. He lowered his voice. “I can’t sit in my goddamn house and watch the city burn down knowing she might be there. And you, Older One, should have told me about her problems.”
Holly was silent for a moment. Tony was almost at the airport.
“I guess I thought if I told you, you’d do something stupid like fly to Los Angeles in a firestorm.”
Tony couldn’t help but laugh. God, these girls were just too much, all the time, they were too much, and he loved them so intensely it made him insane.
“We don’t need to argue. I’ll be fine.”
* * *
Total flight time six hours. In Chicago, he transferred to a FEMA plane packed with bureaucracy, men and women huddling over maps and spreadsheets, wizarding away on phones, and a few watching movies or slumped into VR sets. Tony didn’t make friends, and no one appeared to recognize him. He tried reading Ash’s report to pass the time.
Fountain Grass, Soil Moisture, Wind Speeds, and the El Demonio-Los Angeles Complex Megafire in Context: Plans and Protocols for Containment was forty-six pages long and began with a tedious description of the proliferation of fountain grass that Tony mostly skipped. More importantly, Southern California had been in a state of periodic drought since the early 2000s with spates of wet years that would interrupt these longer spasms of rainless winters and diminishing snowpack in the mountains. The years of rain, however, simply grew more fuel, and when the heat returned, months of sun and wind depleted fuel moistures, leading to climatic whiplash. Bark beetles took their toll and chaparral was moving higher into the mountains as the region warmed. The summer of 2031, the entire North American West had been a tinderbox. Firestorms raged, leveling whole towns, sending people fleeing down highways on foot. There were currently two hundred large fires burning across twenty-one states with nearly forty thousand people fighting them, including volunteers from Mexico, South Africa, Portugal, Chile, and Australia. Many of the ignitions were due to humans, as was typical, but there was also lightning. The storm that had begun the Flower Lake Fire in Montana produced twenty thousand bolts of lightning in a single day. There was simply no precedent for that kind of pyrocumulonimbus behavior.
The Los Angeles megafire, now nicknamed El Demonio after folks got a gander at the eerie image of a demonic face formed by the smoke cloud, began as four separate fires, but grew due to mismanagement by firefighters in the Hollywood Hills. Wealthy residents employed private firefighting companies to protect their homes. They coated the houses in Phos-Chek, a Monsanto-developed chemical retardant, and tapped the public hydrants to beat back embers and spot fires. A company called Transpen Fire Services had engaged in a pitched battle with another called Firestop for water and staging areas. The result was that the hydrants went dry, and the fire leaped from unprotected home to unprotected home until entire neighborhoods went up, and the firefighters were forced to retreat. The flames eventually joined up with the Wisdom Tree Fire and were carried eastward by abrupt shifts in the wind. There was a link to a video in the report, cell phone footage of Route 101 near the Hollywood Bowl, cars inching along in traffic, and within seconds fire came barreling down the side of the highway, trees candling, flames blowing sideways across six lanes. As the video went on, the smoke became a dark blanket and you could see people in their cars panicking, screaming, a few trying to get out and run, but soon they were all engulfed.
Another link took him to a video of the “firenado” in Beverly Hills. It was actually called a fire whirl but the effect was basically the same: a red-hot cyclone of smoke, dust, and flame eating its way across Coldwater Canyon, and he could hear drunk people gabbing from a rooftop deck. Then the firenado picked up a landscaping truck, whipped it in a spiral, and sent it crashing through the side of a building.
Ash wrote that he’d been in contact with the US Naval Research Lab, and its models were predicting that no amount of airpower would put this out, and only containment was possible. Abruptly, Ash’s paper detoured to his sister’s work as an economist of climate disaster, which then jumped to a description of their relationship. Apparently, they’d grown quite close over the last few years ever since she married his best friend. The whole report culminated in a scene at his sister’s wedding, in which they had a traditional Islamic ceremony on a Friday night and a standard American on Saturday.
“You’re one weird fuck, Hasan.”
Descending into California, the pilot warned they’d be in for a bumpy ride as the Santa Anas blew hot. They could all hear loose chunks of soil pelting the hull. To the north, there was no sun, just an impregnable wall of smoke like a fortress erected to guard the horizon.
* * *
Climbing down from the plane, his particulate mask on, overnight bag slung across his shoulder, the first thing Tony registered was the heat: 103 degrees was different. He futilely unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt as sweat soaked his back and stomach. The air smelled of a region-wide campfire.
A man, dirty, sweating, hands dark with grime, stood holding a handwritten sign with Tony’s name. Hasan must have put all this together while Tony was on the plane, and for a moment he was humbled and felt guilty for how much Hasan had done for him.
“Hank Magdolin with Cal Fire.” He shook Tony’s hand while he crumpled the piece of paper with the other. His mask clutched a thick gray beard, and he was humming with adrenaline. “You’re the crazy son of a gun who wants to drive into LA in the middle of the book of Revelation, I take it? Look,” he said without waiting for a reply, bounding across the asphalt toward the airport gate. “I don’t condone this, but I got a call from some muckety-muck Fed asking if I can get this guy a car and a clear shot into the city. You know much about wildfire?”
Tony half shrugged a shoulder. “More than the average prole, I guess, but I’m not taking a test on it.”
“Wow. Huh. Well, let me warn you, fella, this thing is a real kettle of fish. We’ve got lightning and Santa Ana winds, which is not supposed to be possible. Fire’s burning so hot it’s making its own weather. It came outta the Angeles Forest this afternoon, taking houses down to the frames in a minute, going through a thousand acres an hour. Fire-line construction’s been impossible. Too much fuel, and it’s moving too fast.”
Inside the blessed air-conditioning of the terminal, Tony sucked in a welcome breath of cool oxygen. None of the businesses were open. The entire airport had been converted into an emergency command center. Hank Magdolin tore his mask off, revealing a ring of soot around his beard.
“No smokejumpers available at first—everyone was busy in other states. Wind too strong to deploy aircraft anyway. You can’t fly in ’em. Updrafts are a nightmare and when they collapse, it’s like the devil breathing on the city. Water, electricity, and cell signals are all failing. Hydrants are dry.” They made their way back outside and into the parking structure. Magdolin took the stairs two at a time. “We’ve got you set up with a Suburban from DHS. Obviously, don’t use the self-driving mode. You’re going to take the 210, then cut down on the 710 once you get near Pasadena.”
“Why?”
Magdolin looked back at him, cocking one twitchy gray eyebrow. “Pasadena’s burning down, fella.”
He took out a paper map and slapped it on the hood of the SUV. “This son of a gun’s not going to sleep tonight. It’ll be hunting for fuel. Where exactly are you headed?” Tony gave him the street address and neighborhood. “Phewww. Doc. Okay. You sure about this?”
“My daughter’s there,” he said.
Magdolin nodded knowingly. “Yeah. Okay.” He folded the map and handed it to him. “I’d say we could try to get a fire crew in there, but the whole city’s spilling out. No way of knowing how long it would take. You gotta hustle. The crews are going to drop back to Highway 10 and use that wide strip of concrete as a fuel break. Try to make a stand there and save the other half of the city.” He handed Tony a walkie-talkie-looking device with a screen. “Sat-nav. Sorry, you’ll have to learn it on the fly, your cell definitely won’t work.”
“Thank you,” said Tony.
He dropped the car’s fob in Tony’s hand. “Once you get there, if your kid’s gone, don’t dawdle. Be safe. This thing is alive, angry, and a total F-E-A-R fire.”
Tony smirked, sensing good jargon. “And what’s that stand for?”
Magdolin spit on the concrete. “Fuck Everything and Run, of course.”
* * *
Tony drove faster than felt safe as gales tore across the freeway. Choppers clattered low where they could still fly. Bucket drops and slurry tanker runs. It had the feel of a military campaign. He watched one of them dump red fire retardant on a ridge, only to have the load blown sideways, vaporizing, then vanishing.
He shared the road only with LA County Fire convoys and other emergency vehicles, lighting up the tangerine haze with their reds and blues. White ash fell like snow. To the north, the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains thrust upward like the backs of wild beasts, and every few moments he’d catch flashes from the corner of his eye, lightning in those massive clouds, somehow battling the Santa Anas. As night fell, and he neared the city, the full scope of the refugee flow became clear. The 210 was bumper to bumper in all twelve lanes. There were cars in ditches or pulled to the side of the road, out of gas or charge. People vehicularly trampling each other. In a subdivision adjacent to the freeway, he saw them carrying cardboard boxes, TVs, and VR sets, piling suitcases into their cars or strapping them tight to rooftops. The wind had blown over most of the trash and recycling bins, so cans and glass jars and plastic milk jugs crunched and exploded under escaping tires. He saw a man in a bulldozer plowing into a house, destroying the vinyl-sided one-story, probably to clear fuel around his own home. Perhaps it was foreclosed, or maybe the neighbors had just fled.
“I don’t know. She was seeing this guy, but nothing serious…” She trailed off.
“Okay, let me call my colleague in D.C. He might know something…” It was his turn to let his helpless sentence wither.
“Call me back.”
“Okay.”
Ash didn’t answer, so Tony left a message. The news was grim. The Wisdom Tree Fire had raced east and south, threatening homes around the Hollywood Reservoir. Fire crews had been unable to contain it overnight. With nothing to do but wait for Ash to call, Tony showered and changed. When he returned, CNN was still replaying the footage of Hollywood ablaze. From ten thousand feet, a plane captured the massive plume of smoke. It looked like an enormous horned beast. He had a missed called, but it was neither from Hasan nor Holly. It was Dean. He dialed his son-in-law back.
“Hey, Tony, man.”
“Dean. Everything okay?”
There was the sound of traffic white-noising in the background.
“So, you can’t let Holly know I called you, okay? I’ve been sworn to secrecy too many times to count, but look, you’re like a dad to me. I love you and respect you, man. I feel obligated.”
“Okay…” Almost every time they spoke, Dean repeated that Tony was like a father to him, and he loved and respected him. Utterly cloying. He liked Dean just fine, but at some point, give it a rest.
“Holly’s been worried about Catherine for a while now.”
“Worried how?”
“She’s been out to LA twice in the last year to take Catherine to meetings.”
“Meetings?” Tony choked. “Dean, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Cat’s just… She’s a partier, man. She works at that bar, drinks every night. She’s into harder stuff too. She goes on benders where she blacks out… Did you know she was arrested?”
“What?” Tony barked the word so loud that Tyrion darted behind the couch.
“For possession. But that’s not a big deal, man. That was years ago. We’re just worried because she’s not answering and—I don’t know. Holly didn’t want to tell you, but I think— Fuck! Watch where you’re going!” Dean muttered something he couldn’t make out. “Sorry, Tone, I’m on my bike. Anyway, I just thought you should know. And don’t be mad at Holly. She’s just trying to look out for her sister but not betray her trust.”
“Thanks for calling, Dean.”
Tony stewed on this information while he watched Los Angeles burn. He tried calling his colleague Niko, thinking maybe Niko could drive up from La Jolla to find Catherine, but his wife answered and told Tony that was an absurd idea. People were driving away from Los Angeles. He tried the LA Fire Department next but got an automated message. Every emergency service in the city was engaged at this point. Then the news started coming very quickly.
“We’re getting reports that the fire has jumped the 101 near the Hollywood Bowl, and at least thirteen firefighters and rescue workers are dead. The fire apparently leaped over the Cahuenga Pass when wind speeds picked up. We’re now seeing winds gusting at upward of eighty miles per hour and that is pushing the flames down into the city…”
Tony had his phone out, looking at flights to Los Angeles, and of course this was stupid, there were no flights to Los Angeles. All of them delayed or canceled, LAX suffocating. Ten minutes later, the harried CNN reporter was back on: the governor had ordered the evacuation of Los Angeles.
“This is unprecedented. As many as five million people ordered to leave their homes, as multiple fires converge, and the winds—I think it’s difficult to explain just how hard the wind is—”
Tony snatched up the remote and turned off the TV. He sat staring at the blank screen. Tyrion perched on the armrest, green eyes locked on him. You’re wasting time, old man.
His phone rang. Holly.
“I know,” he said.
“Dad, they’re evacuating the city. I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“Yeah.”
“What about Catherine? She’s still not answering.” Holly sounded less frightened than furious at her irresponsible little sister. Tony could not recall being this scared in his life. Not when his mom passed away when he was a boy. Not following Gail’s diagnosis. Not when he opened the envelope and rubbed his fingers together to test the consistency of that powder.
“Your track-a-friend thing still says she’s in her apartment?”
“Yes. Dad, I’ve called every emergency line in LA. It’s fucking pandemonium. All her friends I know of are already gone. No one knows where she is, and they’re sure as hell not turning around to go look for her.”
“Okay,” said Tony. “Okay.” His phone beeped with an incoming call. “Hold on, Holly, it’s my colleague. Let me take this.”
“What’s strange about these fires,” said Hasan, not bothering with any phatic drivel, “is how far the flames are reaching into urban areas. The factors involved are quite interesting.”
Tony rubbed his head and considered hanging up.
“What makes these particular fires so pernicious is fountain grass.”
“Grass.”
“Yes. It’s an invasive species, highly flammable, and it grows best in areas burned by fire. On top of that, the horticultural trade actually promotes it. People plant this in their yards! Which is helping the flames carry down into the city.”
“Ash. Stop.” The other end of the line went quiet. “My daughter is in Los Angeles. I can’t get a hold of her.”
“Oh.” He paused. “I’m sorry to hear that. Where does she live?”
“Silver Lake. Right around Sunset and Hollywood.”
“That’s…” He could almost hear Ash pulling up a map. “That is not a good place to be right now.”
“I know.”
“Have you tried contacting local officials?”
“Local officials appear to be busy.”
“Of course.” He hesitated, probably trying to come up with anything that didn’t make him sound like a mutant. “Would you like me to send over the executive summary I’ve drafted for the congresswoman?”
Tony snorted. “Sure. I gotta go.”
He hung up without waiting for a reply. He stood in his living room watching the same cell phone and helicopter footage repeat on CNN, though they’d changed the chyron to GOVERNOR ORDERS EVACUATION; CHAOS AS HIGHWAYS CLOG. Just in case anyone didn’t know to panic. He felt detached from his own skin, unable to pull himself back into the moment. Tyrion whispered past his ankle. Then he remembered he’d hung up on Holly, but he didn’t call her back. He didn’t know what he’d say.
His phone buzzed. Hasan again.
“What.”
“Tony? It’s Ash.”
“I know, it says that.”
“This may be dangerous and perhaps unethical, but I think I’ve found a way you could get to Los Angeles before nightfall.”
Tony sat down. “How?”
“The airports in the area surrounding Los Angeles are all closed, but there are special dispensations for disaster response professionals flying into emergency zones. I can get you on a FEMA plane bound for Ontario, California. President Randall is sending every available resource, so I’ll recommend you as a climate variability expert—”
“A what?”
“It’s a made-up title. Ontario is roughly an hour away from the city. Once there, I can have a car waiting for you through FEMA channels. Officials are turning all incoming highway lanes to the city outbound, but there will be an emergency route in. I’ll figure that out while you’re in the air. Of course, you have to understand the danger, and I simply can’t ask anyone to accompany you—”
“No, of course not.” Tony caught his breath, and then he hurried into his bedroom to pack a bag. “Ash—my God—thank you. Thank you so much. I can’t even…”
It was like a wire had tripped inside him, the fear blown back by this chance he’d been given.
“If you can get to the New Haven airport in the next hour, I’ll route you through Chicago where you can catch the FEMA plane. You should read my executive summary despite your skepticism of my methods. It would be best if you had some background on the behavior of large-scale fire events in case of emergency.”
“This is incredible of you, man. I swear to Christ, I’ll never forget this.”
“I was thinking of how my sister and her husband, Peter, would behave if it were their child, and that allowed me to think creatively about the situation.” He said it like such a fucking robot, and Tony felt such warmth for him. “I just hope you find your daughter.”
He packed a change of clothes and a toothbrush. He called Holly on his way to the airport.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? Dad, the city’s being evacuated. People are dying in car accidents on the highways trying to get out.”
“What choice do I have, Holly? Your tracker still says she’s in her apartment, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“So I’ll get into the city and find her. The fires are still well north of her.”
“Not that far north! Dad, this is a terrible idea. You don’t know if she’s even—”
“What the hell do you want me to do, Holly?” He immediately regretted shouting at her. He had to keep a lid on his fear. He lowered his voice. “I can’t sit in my goddamn house and watch the city burn down knowing she might be there. And you, Older One, should have told me about her problems.”
Holly was silent for a moment. Tony was almost at the airport.
“I guess I thought if I told you, you’d do something stupid like fly to Los Angeles in a firestorm.”
Tony couldn’t help but laugh. God, these girls were just too much, all the time, they were too much, and he loved them so intensely it made him insane.
“We don’t need to argue. I’ll be fine.”
* * *
Total flight time six hours. In Chicago, he transferred to a FEMA plane packed with bureaucracy, men and women huddling over maps and spreadsheets, wizarding away on phones, and a few watching movies or slumped into VR sets. Tony didn’t make friends, and no one appeared to recognize him. He tried reading Ash’s report to pass the time.
Fountain Grass, Soil Moisture, Wind Speeds, and the El Demonio-Los Angeles Complex Megafire in Context: Plans and Protocols for Containment was forty-six pages long and began with a tedious description of the proliferation of fountain grass that Tony mostly skipped. More importantly, Southern California had been in a state of periodic drought since the early 2000s with spates of wet years that would interrupt these longer spasms of rainless winters and diminishing snowpack in the mountains. The years of rain, however, simply grew more fuel, and when the heat returned, months of sun and wind depleted fuel moistures, leading to climatic whiplash. Bark beetles took their toll and chaparral was moving higher into the mountains as the region warmed. The summer of 2031, the entire North American West had been a tinderbox. Firestorms raged, leveling whole towns, sending people fleeing down highways on foot. There were currently two hundred large fires burning across twenty-one states with nearly forty thousand people fighting them, including volunteers from Mexico, South Africa, Portugal, Chile, and Australia. Many of the ignitions were due to humans, as was typical, but there was also lightning. The storm that had begun the Flower Lake Fire in Montana produced twenty thousand bolts of lightning in a single day. There was simply no precedent for that kind of pyrocumulonimbus behavior.
The Los Angeles megafire, now nicknamed El Demonio after folks got a gander at the eerie image of a demonic face formed by the smoke cloud, began as four separate fires, but grew due to mismanagement by firefighters in the Hollywood Hills. Wealthy residents employed private firefighting companies to protect their homes. They coated the houses in Phos-Chek, a Monsanto-developed chemical retardant, and tapped the public hydrants to beat back embers and spot fires. A company called Transpen Fire Services had engaged in a pitched battle with another called Firestop for water and staging areas. The result was that the hydrants went dry, and the fire leaped from unprotected home to unprotected home until entire neighborhoods went up, and the firefighters were forced to retreat. The flames eventually joined up with the Wisdom Tree Fire and were carried eastward by abrupt shifts in the wind. There was a link to a video in the report, cell phone footage of Route 101 near the Hollywood Bowl, cars inching along in traffic, and within seconds fire came barreling down the side of the highway, trees candling, flames blowing sideways across six lanes. As the video went on, the smoke became a dark blanket and you could see people in their cars panicking, screaming, a few trying to get out and run, but soon they were all engulfed.
Another link took him to a video of the “firenado” in Beverly Hills. It was actually called a fire whirl but the effect was basically the same: a red-hot cyclone of smoke, dust, and flame eating its way across Coldwater Canyon, and he could hear drunk people gabbing from a rooftop deck. Then the firenado picked up a landscaping truck, whipped it in a spiral, and sent it crashing through the side of a building.
Ash wrote that he’d been in contact with the US Naval Research Lab, and its models were predicting that no amount of airpower would put this out, and only containment was possible. Abruptly, Ash’s paper detoured to his sister’s work as an economist of climate disaster, which then jumped to a description of their relationship. Apparently, they’d grown quite close over the last few years ever since she married his best friend. The whole report culminated in a scene at his sister’s wedding, in which they had a traditional Islamic ceremony on a Friday night and a standard American on Saturday.
“You’re one weird fuck, Hasan.”
Descending into California, the pilot warned they’d be in for a bumpy ride as the Santa Anas blew hot. They could all hear loose chunks of soil pelting the hull. To the north, there was no sun, just an impregnable wall of smoke like a fortress erected to guard the horizon.
* * *
Climbing down from the plane, his particulate mask on, overnight bag slung across his shoulder, the first thing Tony registered was the heat: 103 degrees was different. He futilely unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt as sweat soaked his back and stomach. The air smelled of a region-wide campfire.
A man, dirty, sweating, hands dark with grime, stood holding a handwritten sign with Tony’s name. Hasan must have put all this together while Tony was on the plane, and for a moment he was humbled and felt guilty for how much Hasan had done for him.
“Hank Magdolin with Cal Fire.” He shook Tony’s hand while he crumpled the piece of paper with the other. His mask clutched a thick gray beard, and he was humming with adrenaline. “You’re the crazy son of a gun who wants to drive into LA in the middle of the book of Revelation, I take it? Look,” he said without waiting for a reply, bounding across the asphalt toward the airport gate. “I don’t condone this, but I got a call from some muckety-muck Fed asking if I can get this guy a car and a clear shot into the city. You know much about wildfire?”
Tony half shrugged a shoulder. “More than the average prole, I guess, but I’m not taking a test on it.”
“Wow. Huh. Well, let me warn you, fella, this thing is a real kettle of fish. We’ve got lightning and Santa Ana winds, which is not supposed to be possible. Fire’s burning so hot it’s making its own weather. It came outta the Angeles Forest this afternoon, taking houses down to the frames in a minute, going through a thousand acres an hour. Fire-line construction’s been impossible. Too much fuel, and it’s moving too fast.”
Inside the blessed air-conditioning of the terminal, Tony sucked in a welcome breath of cool oxygen. None of the businesses were open. The entire airport had been converted into an emergency command center. Hank Magdolin tore his mask off, revealing a ring of soot around his beard.
“No smokejumpers available at first—everyone was busy in other states. Wind too strong to deploy aircraft anyway. You can’t fly in ’em. Updrafts are a nightmare and when they collapse, it’s like the devil breathing on the city. Water, electricity, and cell signals are all failing. Hydrants are dry.” They made their way back outside and into the parking structure. Magdolin took the stairs two at a time. “We’ve got you set up with a Suburban from DHS. Obviously, don’t use the self-driving mode. You’re going to take the 210, then cut down on the 710 once you get near Pasadena.”
“Why?”
Magdolin looked back at him, cocking one twitchy gray eyebrow. “Pasadena’s burning down, fella.”
He took out a paper map and slapped it on the hood of the SUV. “This son of a gun’s not going to sleep tonight. It’ll be hunting for fuel. Where exactly are you headed?” Tony gave him the street address and neighborhood. “Phewww. Doc. Okay. You sure about this?”
“My daughter’s there,” he said.
Magdolin nodded knowingly. “Yeah. Okay.” He folded the map and handed it to him. “I’d say we could try to get a fire crew in there, but the whole city’s spilling out. No way of knowing how long it would take. You gotta hustle. The crews are going to drop back to Highway 10 and use that wide strip of concrete as a fuel break. Try to make a stand there and save the other half of the city.” He handed Tony a walkie-talkie-looking device with a screen. “Sat-nav. Sorry, you’ll have to learn it on the fly, your cell definitely won’t work.”
“Thank you,” said Tony.
He dropped the car’s fob in Tony’s hand. “Once you get there, if your kid’s gone, don’t dawdle. Be safe. This thing is alive, angry, and a total F-E-A-R fire.”
Tony smirked, sensing good jargon. “And what’s that stand for?”
Magdolin spit on the concrete. “Fuck Everything and Run, of course.”
* * *
Tony drove faster than felt safe as gales tore across the freeway. Choppers clattered low where they could still fly. Bucket drops and slurry tanker runs. It had the feel of a military campaign. He watched one of them dump red fire retardant on a ridge, only to have the load blown sideways, vaporizing, then vanishing.
He shared the road only with LA County Fire convoys and other emergency vehicles, lighting up the tangerine haze with their reds and blues. White ash fell like snow. To the north, the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains thrust upward like the backs of wild beasts, and every few moments he’d catch flashes from the corner of his eye, lightning in those massive clouds, somehow battling the Santa Anas. As night fell, and he neared the city, the full scope of the refugee flow became clear. The 210 was bumper to bumper in all twelve lanes. There were cars in ditches or pulled to the side of the road, out of gas or charge. People vehicularly trampling each other. In a subdivision adjacent to the freeway, he saw them carrying cardboard boxes, TVs, and VR sets, piling suitcases into their cars or strapping them tight to rooftops. The wind had blown over most of the trash and recycling bins, so cans and glass jars and plastic milk jugs crunched and exploded under escaping tires. He saw a man in a bulldozer plowing into a house, destroying the vinyl-sided one-story, probably to clear fuel around his own home. Perhaps it was foreclosed, or maybe the neighbors had just fled.
