The Deluge, page 46
Then he saw his first flames.
Orange embers danced in the air, and it appeared some of the vicious stowaways had found a community of mobile homes off the highway. Three of the trailers in the center of the park were ablaze, smoke pouring skyward, some chemical in the siding giving the flames a purple tint.
He raced down the cleared emergency route until he found the exit from the 710. The surface roads were mostly empty going into the city, and he used the satellite device to send Holly a quick text: Landed safe. Heading to find Cat now. Will call soon. What a preposterously calm message, as he looked up to see the ridge of Griffith Park glowing a pitch-dark amber. He crossed into Franklin Hills, and he began to understand.
Many of the homes in the hills were ablaze, as if the fire was picking and choosing, executing at random like a bored king. The sound was deafening, a freight train roar. Trees candling, grasses smoldering. He had the windows up and still the bonfire smell overpowered him. Embers suspended in the air like fireflies, smoke and flakes of ash forming a permanent silk haze. The power was out, but those burning homes at the top of the hills made it bright as day. Dogs and cats ran wild in the streets, and he honked the horn to avoid flattening a lost retriever.
He turned onto Hyperion Avenue, following the sat-nav. As he sped down the empty street he came to an intersection where sparks sizzled from a downed electrical line. The frying wires looked like a firework, sparks spraying into nearby shrubbery, and he was forced to make a right turn. He whipped the Suburban left down another street as his navigation redirected. It was a residential neighborhood; big, beautiful homes, most still without fire, except here was one, with just the wooden porch aflame. And here were either homeowners or looters, carrying a couch to the back of a truck, risking their lives for whatever salvageable prizes lay inside. They didn’t even glance at him as he drove by.
He heard the horse’s whinny before he saw the animal. It came streaking out of a yard, its fur smoking, hurtling into the street in a panic, and Tony slammed the brakes. The horse had a choice—either dart across the road or pull back to avoid him—and it lost itself in indecision, so Tony made the choice, yanking the wheel hard left, missing the animal, crashing into a blue recycling bin, and he thought he was safe, when something to the right of the car exploded.
The way his skull smacked the window felt like a bat to the side of the head. He lost control of the SUV and found himself spinning, spinning, spinning, and he felt the tree catch the hood with the simultaneous crunch of metal and pop of the airbag, and he thought he was blacking out but maybe not. Maybe he was smelling himself burning alive.
* * *
It was hard to tell how long he sat there. He was awake but also not. Aware enough to hear the fading cries of the horse, but unable to recall why that mattered. At some point he realized he’d thrown up. A pile of vomit lay in his lap. Then he remembered Catherine, and he looked up and around, his fog blowing away. Something was on fire. He touched the side of his head where it had thunked off the window, but he wasn’t bleeding. As a kid, he’d taken a hit to the head during a game of backyard tag. Got your bell rung, his father had said, examining the knot on his head. Then he was lost in a memory of his dad passing away.
Tony stumbled out of the car into the inferno. He’d driven into the trunk of a palm tree, and this tree was in the process of going up. On the other side of the car, he saw pieces of what looked like a rocket or mortar buried in the side of the vehicle, and he stupidly looked around, wondering if some Mad Max crew of postapocalyptic thugs had taken a shot at him. Then across the street he saw one of the burning homes, saw the mangled remains of a grill, and understood. Someone’s propane tank had exploded. Launched sideways like a missile into the car.
He went back to the Suburban, spitting to clear the acrid taste of fumes, and of course the vehicle was done. The bucketing noises of an engine grinding uselessly. He couldn’t find breathable air, so he grabbed the sat-nav and hurried out, eating smoke and then hacking it back up in painful upchucks. He tried to follow the blue line of the map pointing the way to Catherine, but he saw a gas station on the horizon, and he really needed water. His eyes, itchy and swollen, kept filling with tears, and he couldn’t stop coughing. All he could picture was clear cold water.
The gas station convenience store was locked, but he found a cinder block around the side, threw it through the glass, and crawled through the shattered spikes. The air inside was marginally cooler. Barely able to see, he made his way to the back row of beverages and grabbed the first plastic bottle he found. He cracked a Gatorade open and dumped its sticky contents on his face. After he washed his eyes out, he swigged from another bottle. His nose was bleeding. His head spun and throbbed. His skin itched like crazy from the smoke. Outside, the roar of burning structures was like standing under a jet engine. Gas station not the place to be. Keep moving.
He bagged the remaining four bottles of Gatorade (there was no actual water left in the place) and crawled back through the door. There was a dog waiting for him. It could have been the brown retriever he’d swerved to avoid or, given the dizziness, it could have been a hallucination. It looked at him hopefully.
“Can’t help you, dog.”
He was less than half a mile from Catherine’s. He went south as fast as he could, and the dog followed, trotting along at his side while a small metal heart tinkled on its collar. A glance back to the north and he saw the way the fire had marched out of the hills and into the city, sending its deadly ember emissaries as shock troops, all those tightly packed homes offering the perfect kindling.
Near a dark Goodwill store, the dog ran ahead of him to sniff at a pile of clothes heaped on the sidewalk. It took him a moment to realize that the pile was a man lying dead under a heap of rags. He was about to walk around it when the dead man spoke.
“Nice pup.” He was older, Black, bald, and missing teeth.
“It’s not mine,” said Tony. He didn’t want to stop. Not for anything, but he did. “Hey man, you’ve got to get out of here. Look around.”
As if for the first time, the old man did. “Yeah, but where to go?”
“South, buddy. Get to the 10. That’s where they’re trying to hold it.”
He smushed his lips in skepticism. “Nah. Thought I’d stick around and see if I couldn’t move in one of them houses when everyone’s gone.”
This was not a conversation worth having. “Get out, pal. Right now. While you can. The fire’s already hitting a few blocks away.”
“God won’t let it touch me. Know how many times God’s had my back?”
“Whatever.”
Tony kept on. For a moment the dog looked indecisive about who to follow, but when Tony turned the corner, the dog yipped and bounded after him.
Catherine’s apartment building was as dark as the rest of the city, but the gate was propped open, likely by residents trying to carry out belongings as they fled. He bounded up the stairs to the second floor, found her number, and began pounding. The dog stood alongside him, tense, then it started barking.
“Catherine!” Tony screamed. “Catherine! Are you in there?” He slammed his fist over and over. The side of his head throbbed from where it had connected with the window, and the circumstances—well, it all felt too much like one of his dreams. “Catherine, goddamnit!”
He rammed his shoulder into the door, then tried to kick it, but he was kidding himself. He rattled the knob. Kept screaming her name. The dog barked and barked. He left and ran back around the side of the street to where the homeless guy was sitting under the Goodwill’s awning, smoking a cigar or blunt and watching the city burn.
“Hey man,” said Tony. “I’ll give you all the money in my wallet if you help me break a door down.”
“What kind of door?” he asked, curious but noncommittal.
“I don’t know—a fucking door. A door I can’t break down.”
“Hold on, I got you.”
He picked up a few of his rags and wandered into the unlocked Goodwill. Tony waited for a minute and thought about leaving. Then the man emerged from the store, carrying a crowbar like a sword. They reached Catherine’s apartment, and Tony emptied his wallet into the man’s hands, maybe sixty-five bucks.
“Thank you much,” he said. “This illegal?”
“Look around, man,” Tony said frantically. “There’s nothing fucking illegal anymore. Now help me open the door or give that to me.” He pointed madly at the crowbar. “My daughter’s in there.”
The man shot him a horrified look, big folds of his brow bunching into tension. “Well, why didn’t you say. Here.” He handed the bills back. “I can’t take your money. Not for God’s work.”
Tony jabbed two fingers into his chest. “Keep the money. Open the fucking door.”
The man slammed the end of the crowbar into the frame and pried. A minute of wrenching, each of them taking turns, and the door ripped open in a crack and shriek of splintering wood.
At first he thought he had the wrong apartment, and then he thought maybe looters had torn through, and he feared for his daughter. But then he recognized the place was just a dump. Pizza boxes and liquor bottles and fast-food containers littered every surface because the garbage bin was overflowing. Every dish in the sink, dirty laundry strewn over the furniture. He swung the sat-nav’s flashlight back and forth, trying to make sense of the person who lived here, and it revealed yet another table where empty vodka and tequila bottles stood like mini skyscrapers in a diorama.
He made his way to the bedroom and found Catherine in a beanbag chair, a dead VR set and headphones wrapped around her face. Her mouth hung open and drool ran down her lip. She wore sweatpants and a T-shirt with no bra. There was a glass with a small pink straw poking out and the entire room reeked of booze. She was breathing, though. The dog trotted up to her and licked the tips of her dangling fingers, but she did not respond. He pulled the VR set from her face.
“Catherine,” he said gently. Her eyes didn’t even flutter. There were garbage bags taped across the window, blacking out the room. He didn’t see her phone anywhere.
He still had the bag of Gatorades and splashed some of the sticky beverage on her cheeks. “Cat.” She looked terrible. Her hair was matted. She’d put on weight since he saw her in December, and her skin was riddled with acne. He splashed more Gatorade. “Khaleesi,” he said.
Finally, she swiveled her head to get away from the moisture. Her eyes slid open. She looked drunk, high, and confused. “Daddy?”
“Honey, we’ve gotta go.”
“What?”
“We’ve gotta go. There’s a fire.”
“Huh?” She looked around her room, as if trying to remember where she was. “Whose dog is that?”
Tony took a moment to scan the room, looking for evidence of what else she might be on. He had a father’s impulse to open all her drawers, ransack the medicine cabinet, search under her bed, but there was no time. She drank a bit of the Gatorade, but she couldn’t walk without Tony’s help. She laid an arm around his shoulder and leaned into him, feet dragging, eyes slipping open and shut.
“I fell asleep with the VR on,” she mumbled. “It was a space journey. I was going to space.”
When he got her outside the apartment, the homeless man was still standing there with the crowbar.
“She okay?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Tony. From their perch on the second floor, he could see the glow of the fire just over the hill, hear its steady raging thunder, watch its embers drifting down onto roofs. They would never outrun it, not with Catherine the way she was. She didn’t have a car. The sat-nav still worked, but who would he call? And what was the likelihood any kind of rescue would reach them before the fire engulfed the neighborhood? He thought of Ash’s report. Buried amid an unexpectedly tender story of his younger sister convincing him to reveal his sexuality to their mother, there’d been a few useful suggestions for what to do in a wildfire. “What’s around here? Something brick and big. With a basement maybe. Something that won’t ignite right away.”
The homeless guy looked at the dog, as if it might know, and the dog looked right back at him.
“The middle school,” Catherine slurred. “S’pose,” she added. And she gestured vaguely to the south.
“Help me,” Tony begged, but the man was already sliding under Catherine’s arm to keep her upright.
“He smells,” complained Catherine.
“You ain’t fresh out the bath yourself, sister,” said the man.
They struck off down Catherine’s street, a savage wind raking heat and embers across their faces. The heat was so intense, it created a sunburned feeling on his skin. From the map it looked like there was some kind of movie studio to the left, but the flames had reached it. A few of the structures within the gated compound were already burning. The only other sound besides the fire was the dog barking at them as it bounded ahead, urging them on, Lassie-like. Catherine wasn’t dead weight, but she was close, her feet barely carrying her.
Tony could’ve cried with relief when he saw the campus. Thomas Starr King Middle School had trailers and classroom annexes that would catch, but the main building was solid brick. A few of the houses surrounding the school were already igniting. The tops of the palm trees surrounding the PE field were torches, raining embers on the campus. Tony hustled their ragtag crew across the basketball courts, the soccer fields, and to the main building. The doors were locked, but it only took his friend a moment with the crowbar to bust out a window and crawl inside to let them in. Tony checked the sat-nav. There was an SOS button, and he activated it. He texted Holly anyway, telling her what had happened, where they were, and that he was sorry. Then he ducked into the school. They found the stairs to a basement, and there, along with a boiler and janitorial supplies, they hunkered down, soot-covered, smoke-reeking, and thirsty, hoping the walls of the building would hold, and the fire wouldn’t eat all their oxygen.
* * *
It was hot as hell in that basement, lit only by a haze of orange splashing down from the window near the ceiling. He found a flashlight in a supply closet, but there was nothing else of use. No food, no water. The temperature ticked up the longer they sat there. The smell of smoke leaked down to them but not the substance itself. The second it crept under the metal door at the top of the stairs, it would mean they were done. Catherine had fallen back asleep in the corner of the room, using her arm as a pillow. The dog settled near her, resting its head on her feet. Tony tried to give her some of the last bottle of Gatorade, but she just wanted to pass out. He drank a little and offered the rest to the homeless man. Tony thanked him for everything he’d done. “Probably just so we can die down here instead of out there but thank you anyway.”
“Nothing to think on,” he said, gulping down the purple sugar water.
“What’s your name?”
“Diamond.”
“I’m Tony.”
“Used to be I worked in this place.”
“This school?”
“Naw, but one like it. Down the way a bit. Used to be. They took me away.”
He didn’t share anything more.
An hour after that, he checked on Catherine. She was slick with sweat and shivering. She’d wet herself. He’d read enough to understand she was going through the first stages of withdrawal. He could hope it was heroin but there were no needle tracks on her arms, which probably meant it was this concentrated fentanyl shit or worse. He’d asked plenty of questions but not enough; he’d sent her money every month when she needed it; he’d let her plead her way out of any reckoning. He was at least partly responsible for this, and now it was going to kill them both. When Catherine had been little she’d refused baths with borderline violence, especially if Dad was the one enforcing her hygiene. Once, trying to get her in the tub, she even bit him. Of course, once she was in the bath she’d have the time of her life and never want to leave and another fight would ensue to get her out. He’d pull the drain and she’d try to put it back in, stand in the water and stomp her feet furiously. How feeble these memories felt in the face of an inferno. That was when he coughed, tasting smoke yet again. He clicked the flashlight on, and there it was: wisps creeping under the door, gathering in the beam.
“Goddamnit,” he moaned.
Diamond tore his coat off and stuffed it into the crack, but it was still seeping in around the edges. He stepped back beside Tony and Catherine. The dog whined.
“I’m sorry, brother,” said Diamond.
“No,” said Tony, stroking his daughter’s face, thinking about the time she was seven and he wouldn’t let her stay up so she shouted You’re a tyrant! and launched a bowl of SpaghettiOs at the wall. “I’m sorry.”
Smoke sipped in around the frame of the door, exploring the ceiling and crawling, a step at a time, toward them. Catherine woke as the smell became too powerful. He smiled and put his arm around her.
