At that moment, the man in the back of the patrol car went limp and collapsed.
“What the fuck,” Danny said, instead of her prepared statement. She strode over to the car, her legs sore from the hike, and examined the now-still man through the window. He was dead. He had to be. His naked ribcage wasn’t moving. Nobody could scream for half an hour and flail around like he did without gasping for air.
Danny waited. If the captive was somehow holding his breath as a ruse, she wasn’t going to let what was left of her humane impulses put her in harm’s way. The deputies were exclaiming loudly to her left and right.
“Shut up,” she barked, and popped the door latch. They all stood well back, and the weight of the man’s legs was enough to push the door open a few inches. One of his sneakered feet fell through the gap. Danny saw the shoes were chewed up—he must have run a long way over some pretty
rough terrain. She remembered the shoeless foot of the corpse in the woods, bloody and matted with dirt. Danny swung the door all the way open and stepped back again. If he was going to try to kick somebody, she didn’t want to make it easy.
But he didn’t kick. He didn’t breathe. He lay there on the hard plastic seat, unmistakably dead.
“Ted, put on some gloves and check his vitals, but I think he’s gone,” Danny said. “Artie, you got a tarp or a sheet or something we can put over him for the drive down Main Street? I don’t want any lookie-loos. They’ll think we beat him to death.”
“Rabies,” said Artie.
Nick drove the body back toward the Sheriff’s Station. It was concealed beneath a vinyl advertising banner that proclaimed
Cleanest Gas in Town
, a gift from the Chevron corporation. “
Only
Gas in Town” would have sufficed. Danny rode shotgun; Ted could walk back once he was done taking statements. Do him some good. They were halfway there, along where the first houses sprouted up to signal a human settlement was ahead, when the radio went crazy. Park had patched through the transmissions coming from the flatlands so he could explain what they were hearing.
“This is happening everywhere,” the highway patrolman said, his voice cutting in over the rest. “People are running around and falling down dead, like up here. But a lot
more
of them.”
Beneath Park’s words, a continuous din of voices crossed and recrossed as law and order attempted to get a handle on the situation. At first it was confusion, the formless back-and-forth of a vast network of individual radios and incidents that could only be followed once you could separate one conversation from the rest. It took Danny twenty seconds before she could sort out any of it.
“We got ten or more down here on Crenshaw,” someone said.
“More like fifty,” the same voice amended a few seconds later.
Then another voice:
“They’re running straight up Highland, must be a thousand. Lot of them falling. Something’s in pursuit—can’t see what. We’re driving by.”
“The Costco parking lot looks like a battlefield, there’s hundreds,” said another.
And then:
“Jesus, it’s coming this way.”
Officer Park interjected: “This situation is happening from L.A. to at least Claremont. I should get back down there, please advise, over.”
Danny was about to reply, the handset at her lips, when a woman in bra and panties ran past the police car, screaming.
A lanky man with a beard, dressed as if for a hike, charged after the woman. He was also screaming.
“Hit the gas,” Danny said. They had to cut these people off before they got to the crowded part of Main Street, or there could be a panic.
Patrick and Weaver were about ready to give up pretending to look at the crafts booths. The atmosphere had gotten very weird—the most distinct case of “bad vibes” Patrick had ever experienced, with the exception of one evening at a nightclub in Idaho. The phone calls had continued, and then people bundling their families into cars and driving away too fast through the one lane open along Main Street.
Two-thirds of the crowd was oblivious to this undercurrent of alarm, but more people were figuring out something was wrong by the second. And the number was expanding exponentially because now people were honking their horns and cutting each other off with their vehicles.
“Let’s go,” Patrick said. Typically, Weaver would have taken his time to respond, putting on a show of unflappable cool, but this time he simply nodded and set out through the crowd. By the time they were near the motor home, half the crowd was in on the excitement, those who hadn’t gotten phone calls now overhearing what the others were saying, or assuming there was a fire or something like that—otherwise, why were people screaming?
The screams weren’t coming from the crowd on Main Street. They were in the woods, it sounded like. People running and crashing through the undergrowth up behind the buildings. The band had stopped playing, and within a minute, almost the entire crowd had stopped speaking. They were all listening, trying to make sense of the cries off in the distance.
Then people were dropping their beer coolers, their shopping bags, abandoning empty strollers on the curb.
Panic spreads as fast as sound.
The voices of the crowd rose up in a roar of confusion, everyone trying to develop a reaction at the same time. Weaver took Patrick’s hand and towed him straight through the remaining ranks of open-mouthed holiday-goers to the railing around the parking lot, and from there—nearly getting
hit by a florid man in a station wagon—they forged on toward the White Whale.
They locked themselves inside and sat up front. The exit to the parking lot was pandemonium. Patrick was all for joining the motorized exodus.
“We don’t know what’s wrong yet,” Weaver said, reasonably.
Patrick folded his arms. “I don’t want to be stuck in this place when we find out.”
“Patrick,” Weaver said, again with that irritating lack of panic, “we’re sitting in a thirty-six-foot rolling hotel room. We don’t have to go anywhere. Unless it’s a forest fire, we’re probably better off sitting still in here than joining rush hour over a cliff.”
“As soon as traffic lets up, though,” Patrick said, going for a threatening tone.
They stayed parked where they were and listened to the talk on the CB radio and sat very still while the smaller vehicles surged and honked all around them.
People were using their cars like rams. A couple of fender-benders happened right in front of the RV. Only the first one excited any interest; the second didn’t even get the drivers out of their vehicles. They just kept on going. Patrick watched a couple shove their screaming kids into a minivan. The kids had balloons tied to their wrists. The back door slammed on a string and the balloon was cut loose to drift into the sky.
“I’m not going to suggest we try to do something about this,” Weaver said. “This isn’t a crowd control situation.” It hadn’t occurred to Patrick to do anything, so this came as a relief. The CB radio seemed to be mostly occupied with truck drivers describing an immense traffic jam to each other, people trying desperately to get into the city in one direction and out of it in the other. The drivers with police scanners reported the authorities were on it, but overwhelmed. It was all happening with bewildering speed. Hundreds of accidents and stalled cars in-lane from Downtown to Santa Monica, and the roads were getting impassable to the east, as well, in the direction of Forest Peak. Then one of the truckers described thousands of people streaming past his rig on the 405 Freeway, on foot, moving through the standstill traffic. He said people were abandoning their vehicles. He said:
“I can see right down the hill at the top of the pass between Hollywood and Studio City, and there are people swarming up the hill here, goddamn, it’s like bugs, the cars can’t do nothing. I ain’t moved ten feet in ten minutes.
Folks are going past the truck right now, scared shitless. I dunno what’s going on but it’s bad, I don’t see no smoking gun of a mushroom cloud but it’s bad…
“Christ, they’re running now, people running up this big damn hill through the cars, people getting out of their cars and they’re running, too.”
The squelched sounds of screaming could be heard in the background as the unknown trucker lowered his window.
“I can’t make it out, they’re yelling about something coming but I’m a good nine feet off the ground, I don’t see shit coming. But some folks are falling down. I can see down the hill they’re falling all over the place. Jesus. They’re falling all around—”
That was the last thing the trucker said.
In the silence that followed, Patrick realized he was holding his breath. Weaver was watching the radio as if it had a picture. After a few seconds, the rest of the voices on the CB radio started up again, all going crazy trying to figure out what happened to their good buddy. Someone with an open microphone started to sing loud psalms, and Weaver switched the radio over to FM band, where the Emergency Broadcast System had just kicked in.
Some stations continued to play preprogrammed music. On the rest, the weird faxlike tones of the EBS screeched out, then a recorded voice said, “Stand by for an important bulletin.”
In the police cruiser, Nick and Danny caught up with the bearded hiker—he’d fallen on the yellow lines a little way outside town, dead like the others. Cars were creeping past him on the way out, pale faces pressed to the windows. The screaming woman in her skivvies had run off behind the houses into the woods. They couldn’t hear her cries anymore, but there were others coming now, charging through the trees and hollering like banshees. A mass of traffic was quickly tangling up where the road widened at the end of town—too many vehicles trying to get around each other, clogging the street.
The situation was devolving with the speed of a wildfire.
“Find out where Dave is,” Danny said to Nick. “Get him out here. We need all hands, now. Tell Ted to haul ass back here. I want these people to stay right here in town until we know what’s going on.”
Danny hopped out of the car and jogged the rest of the way into town—it was faster than driving, at this point. The Sheriff’s Station was only a few
hundred yards away, but with the confusion reigning in the street, it took Danny twice the time she could afford. A lot of people were shouting at her from their vehicles, even climbing out to make demands she couldn’t possibly meet: Get us out of here, take control, do something. Danny ignored them and kept on going until she was through the station doors, where Highway Patrolman Park was trying to organize a crowd of some thirty people jammed into the front room—standing room only, the air rancid with fear and anger.
Danny forced her way through the crowd, took a position next to Park, and banged the flat of her hand on the counter until most eyes were turned her way.
“Listen up!” she shouted. “You all need to get to your vehicles or find a quiet place to wait until we have things calmed down, you hear me?” Danny’s voice sounded harsh and ragged to her ears. It sounded the way it did back in the foreign desert. “We do not have the personnel to deal with individual situations. Please leave in an orderly manner and I’ll get back with everyone as soon as possible.”
This last detail was patent nonsense, but it helped. The people nearest the door, complaining loudly and bitterly, went back outside. The others filed out after them with the heavy, headshaking tread common to all thwarted taxpayers.
They can write their representatives
, Danny thought.
I’m about ready to cap the fuckers
.
“I can’t keep you here,” Danny said to Park, as the last of the civilians slammed the door on the way out. “But you’d better get going, because traffic isn’t getting any better, even if you light up the bubblegums.”
Park drew a long breath and let it out at the same slow rate. “I’ll…I guess I’ll stay here. I haven’t heard anything from my department in fifteen or twenty minutes. Be an hour at least before I got back there. I might as well stick around and be useful as get myself caught in rush hour on the mountain.”
“Thanks,” Danny said, and meant it.
Park went outside after a brief conference about Danny’s objectives, which were at this point limited to keeping injuries to a minimum and maintaining general order, until the nature of the situation was clear.
Danny took a few moments at the radio desk to call around to other police and fire departments, but didn’t get much useful information—they were all in the same boat, trying to catch up with events.
Wulf Gunnar was complaining from his cell, demanding to know what
was going on outside, and it gave Danny a small pleasure to ignore him. Forest Peak was lucky to be on the margin. Down in the thickly settled areas, if the radio chatter was to be believed, circumstances were devolving at a pace not even a military presence could slow down. This thing was going to have to play itself out overnight, at least.
Danny was trying to find somebody at the federal level who could tell her what the hell was going on, but the FBI was not answering any of its phones and the civilian government’s snarl of automated touch-tone phone assistants sent her around in ever-decreasing circles. She was setting the handset of the phone back on the cradle when Nick came in, dragging the dead man from the back of the cruiser. The body was wrapped in the vinyl banner from the Chevron station.
“Somebody gotta tell me what the fuck is happening,” Wulf growled when he saw the corpse. Nick left it on the floor alongside a desk. Danny relented: Wulf
did
have a right to know, especially if she was going to keep him locked up. She couldn’t remember if he’d been charged yet. She turned to speak to him.
They all heard glass breaking on Main Street, and screams—not the screams of those crazy people running through the woods, but screams of fear, anger.
Danny rushed out the front doors of the station onto the sidewalk, heard an engine racing, and an instant later got clipped by the wing mirror of a BMW with a “Trojans” frame on the license plate. She stumbled back into the wall and gritted her teeth, feeling the big muscles of her thigh contract with pain. Nick came rushing out and thumped into a woman holding a small dog. The dog leaped to the ground and ran off beneath the idling cars. The woman spat at Nick:
“Asshole!”
and threaded her way between the cars after the dog, shouting “Puff! Puff, stay!”