Authors: Lee Goldberg
Yes, indeed, it was Marty’s lucky day. “Where are you going next?”
“I hear the Century City towers collapsed. Thousands of people died. It’s gotta look spectacular.”
“You ought to go to the valley.”
“Yeah, right, like anyone cares. You’ve seen one pancaked apartment building, you’ve seen them all.” Kent took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and offered it to Marty, who declined.
The director stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “I’m trying to get landmarks, or what’s left of them. That’s what people what to see destroyed. That’s what has emotional resonance and, more importantly, re-sellability. Why do you think asteroids in movies always hit the Chrysler Building or the Eiffel Tower?”
Kent took a deep drag and blew the smoke off to one side, away from Marty.
“You’re right, of course.” Marty said. “But I’ve got special needs. The movie I’m thinking about takes place in the valley and the city.”
“You’re thinking about a movie?”
“It’s about a guy who’s walking home from downtown LA to his family in the valley. The movie will shift between his wife and kids trying to survive in their ruined neighborhood and this guy’s heroic struggle to get back home.”
Kent thought about it a minute. “
Die Hard
meets
Cold Mountain
.”
“More like The Odyssey meets Survivor. I see Tim Daly or Kevin Sorbo in the lead.”
“I like it. It’s fresh and original. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“If you were to shoot exactly what I needed, it wouldn’t be stock footage any more(it would be second unit work. You’d get a screen credit, maybe even a co-producer card.”
“But I would still own all the rights to the footage in perpetuity.”
“Absolutely.”
Kent smiled and put his arm around Marty. “Let’s go scout some locations.”
1
:30 p.m. Wednesday
Beverly Hills was not a city, it was a theme park. And today, the attractions, gift shops, and concession stands of Wealthy World were closed.
Marty shared a motorbike with Kent, holding the director loosely by the sides, as they snaked their way around millions of dollars in leased German cars left abandoned on the buckled asphalt of Santa Monica Boulevard. The Skipper and Gilligan, carrying the equipment, followed right behind them on the other two motorbikes.
They passed solemn, armed police officers leaning against their shiny, black-and-white Surburbans, manning the barricades that sealed off Beverly, Rodeo, and Camden drives from intruders.
And yet, just across the street, beyond the grassy park that ran alongside Santa Monica Boulevard, hundreds of Beverly Hills residents were trapped under their five-car garages, waiting for help that Marty knew would never come. The cops were too busy rescuing Polo shirts and dragging Cartier watches to safety from the flattened stores.
Those streets and the shops on them were the Smithsonian of Beverly Hills, where ancient history was measured in increments on a parking meter; where a Prada bag and an Hermes scarf were artifacts of incalculable cultural, artistic, and scientific value, at least until the new fall lines came in; where the original kinescope of the
I Love Lucy
pilot, screened hourly in the Museum of Television and Radio, was as well guarded as the Mona Lisa.
Kent made a U-turn, steered the motorbike onto the park across from Rodeo Drive, and stopped, much to Marty’s annoyance. They had hardly covered any ground yet which, of course, was Marty’s only reason for riding along with the stock footage crew.
“Why are we stopping?” Marty asked.
“Rodeo Drive is dust, we can’t pass that up. It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire!” Kent hopped off the bike and motioned the Skipper and Gilligan to park alongside.
Marty sighed, resigning himself to the inevitable. Even with the occasional stop for filming, he’d still move faster with Kent and his motorbike than without him. He sat down on the edge of a large, concrete fountain in the park to wait Kent out.
Kent looked at ruptured asphalt and crumpled storefronts of Rodeo Drive through the frame he created with his hands and yelled at the Skipper. “Get a couple wide angles from here.”
The Skipper spit a gob of tobacco into the stagnant water in the fountain. “Without a crane, we aren’t gonna see much from here ’cept the barricades. We gotta get closer. Those are the money shots.”
“Just get the damn wide angle. I’ll have a chat with the local constabulary.” Kent took a deep drag on the small stub of cigarette he had left and exhaled slowly. “When I’m done sweet-talking them, they won’t just welcome us onto Rodeo Drive, they’ll help you carry the equipment.”
While Kent sauntered across the street to work on the cops, Marty glanced at the fountain he was sitting on. It was a round pool about a foot deep, surrounding a cracked statue of a stout, naked nymph holding an armful of squirming, open-mouthed fish. According to the plaque at the base, the antiquity was a gift to Beverly Hills from Cannes, their official “sister city” in France. They’d probably been waiting 400 years for someone to unload it on.
The Skipper peered through the eyepiece of the camera, then set it down on the ground, abandoning the shot in a huff. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to shoot anything with him standing there like that. He’s right in middle of the shot.”
Marty glanced back at Kent, who was waving his arms around, animatedly articulating a point to the stoic policemen. Kent didn’t seem to be making much headway, which meant they could be here a while.
The thought made Marty look over at Kent’s motorbike. The director had left the key in the ignition.
“You work at the network?” The Skipper asked Marty.
“Uh-huh.” Marty’s gaze hadn’t left the motorbike.
“I worked a camera on
The Tortellis
in ’87.” The Skipper spit a gob of chaw and watched it arc through the air until it plunked into the fountain water. “Some people confuse that with
The Torkelsons
because they were both NBC sitcoms that started with a ‘T.’ But they weren’t in the same league.”
Marty nodded like he was listening when, in fact, all he wanted to do was jump on the motorbike and speed off. A couple things stopped him from acting on the impulse. For one, he’d never driven a motorbike. For another, it probably wasn’t a bright idea to steal something in front of a camera and two police officers.
He shrugged off his pack and dropped it on the grass. Might as well get comfortable.
“
The Tortellis
was from the guys who did
Cheers
.” The Skipper spit at Gilligan, just to see if he’d jump out of the way. He didn’t. The gob dribbled down Gilligan’s shirt, but the dazed assistant didn’t seem to notice. “It could have been
Frasier
, but it wasn’t. It sure as hell wasn’t
The Torkelsons
, though.”
The Skipper jammed some more tobacco into his mouth and watched Kent argue with the cops. Marty watched, too.
From the irritated look on the cops’ faces, it seemed if Kent tried to press his point any further, they’d gun him down. In a pique of anger, Kent flicked his cigarette stub at them and turned away.
The street exploded.
Marty toppled face-first into the fountain as a gale force wind of flame blasted through the cracked asphalt of Rodeo Drive and blew in all directions.
He felt the agony of the searing caress and heard the unearthly roar of the firestorm as it passed over him. His screams drowned in the water.
And then, only moments after it was ignited, the firestorm was gone, totally extinguished, absorbed into the air like a fine mist.
Marty immediately rolled over, his burning jacket hissing in the water. His back smoldered, red-hot needles of pain piercing deep into his flesh. He lay half-floating there for a long moment in shock, listening to the crackle of fire, astonished to be alive, trying to reconstruct what had just happened. He guessed that Kent’s cigarette stub ignited gas that had accumulated under Rodeo Drive from a leak somewhere. The jolt of the blast knocked Marty off-balance into the fountain, and the ring of concrete and the foot of water saved him. The firestorm passed right over his back, scalding his flesh.
It felt like someone tried to iron his shirt while he was still wearing it. But it could be much worse. If it hadn’t been for the two layers of wet clothing, he probably wouldn’t have any skin left on his back at all. Marty sat up slowly, grimacing in pain, and looked around.
After all the destruction he’d already seen, he thought he was past being stunned by the epic scale of the devastation, by the familiar rendered into something altogether different and nightmarish.
He was wrong.
Beverly Hills was a blazing wasteland. Buildings and cars and trees were consumed by fire. Flames licked out of a huge crater where the pavement once was, feeding on the last wisps of trapped gas escaping from below.
There was no sign of the Suburbans, or the police officers who once leaned against them, or of Kent Beaudine, the casual wreaker of the city’s doom. Marty assumed they were at the bottom of the crater, entombed with countless movie-star baubles.
The lavish houses and tall trees fronting the park were on fire, the ravenous flames jumping to the surrounding homes. It wouldn’t be long before the whole neighborhood was burning. He’d have to move fast if he didn’t want to get caught in it on his way home.
Wincing with pain, Marty lifted himself into a sitting position on the rim of the fountain, swung his legs over the edge, and was about to stand up when he froze. He’d nearly stepped on one of the smoking chunks of asphalt that covered the park like pieces of a meteor.
But that wasn’t what made him stop in mid-motion.
The Skipper was lying on the ground, his body scorched naked by the fire, his skin black as charcoal. But he was alive, smoke curling from his nostrils, his lungs seared.
“I don’t want to die,” the Skipper squealed, looking at Marty with imploring eyes, smoke pouring out of his mouth.
Marty crouched beside him but couldn’t bring himself to touch the man. “You won’t.”
But a few moments later, the cameraman did.
Marty didn’t even know his name. All Marty knew about him was that he spit tobacco and worked on
The Torkelsons
.
It wasn’t much of an epitaph.
He rose up slowly, unable to take his eyes off the horrifying sight of the dead man. Somewhere deep inside, the Skipper was still burning, thin wisps of smoke drifting out between his charred, dead lips.
Marty looked around for Gilligan and found him in pieces. The camera assistant had been decapitated by a piece of Rodeo Drive, his headless corpse slumped over the smoldering battery pack.
He looked away, repulsed and terrified. In a war, Marty thought, there must come a time when a person becomes inured to the carnage and violent death, when the experience changes from something unusual and shocking into something commonplace and expected.
That time hadn’t come for him yet. He wished it would hurry up and get here or, if it didn’t, that he could be spared any new variations on the theme. Marty didn’t know how much more he could take.
His sanity felt almost physical, like a joint that had already been flexed too far. He knew it was about to snap, but unlike with a torn ligament or broken bone, he had no idea what consequences to expect if it happened.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Maybe it would be a pleasant numbness, a blissful separation from direct contact with reality.
Or maybe not.
It could mean losing all sense of self, all intelligence. He could end up a mewling idiot, staggering mindlessly through the rubble.
And then he would never get home.
Stop being a pussy. So people are dying horrible, grotesque, and painful deaths right in front of your eyes. Big fucking deal. Be glad it’s not you and move on.
Lately, the voice in his head was sounding more and more like Buck and yet, strangely enough, seemed to be making more and more sense to him.
The way to deal with it, he decided, was to look at death clinically, the way a coroner does. When a coroner looks at a corpse—whether it’s been hit by a train, torn apart by sharks, mutilated with an ax, mangled in a car crash, or left decaying in the sun for a week, infested by maggots—it doesn’t sicken or terrify him. Why? Because it isn’t a human being any more. It’s an object, a by-product, a thing. A fleshy sack of organs and bones that just resembles a living thing.
Marty would just have to get in the right frame of mind.
But it occurred to him that coroners had an advantage he didn’t. They rarely witnessed the killing, the moment when a person stops being a person and becomes a corpse.
Then again, millions of soldiers over tens of thousands of years had come to grips with that moment on the battlefield. And most of them didn’t lose their minds. How hard could it be?
Be a fucking man.
Yes, Marty thought. That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll be a fucking man.
He turned and faced north on what was left of Rodeo Drive. For the first few blocks, houses on both sides of the street were aflame and charred bodies were scattered on the sidewalks.
Be a fucking man.
Marty took one flap of his wet jacket, raised it in front of his face like a cape, and trudged across the blackened grass into the smoke.
2
:42 p.m. Wednesday
The statues had pubic hair.
It wasn’t some artist’s chiseled interpretation of pubic hair, but actual hair of some kind glued to the carved crotches of a dozen stone nudes. Beyond that, the row of gaudy statues that lined the top of the wall around the Sunset Boulevard mansion would otherwise have been unremarkable.
When Martin Slack first saw those statues twenty years ago from the front seat of his over-heated Chevette, arriving from Northern California for his freshman year at UCLA, he knew for certain he’d arrived in Los Angeles.