Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Page 3

  “Come on, Kirstie. You’re needed.”

  Without quite willing herself, she walked up the steps and through the door into a dark hallway echoing with screams.

  Chapter 3

  Rain drummed on the bedroom skylights. Robert Anthony Allison woke up and, as always, rolled right out of bed. Shauna, as always, slept on. He went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, knowing nothing would wake his wife.

  How many men, he wondered as he shrugged into his favourite silk robe, how many men had fantasies about sleeping with Shauna Dawn McGuire? Five million? Twenty? He’d done his best to encourage those fantasies: three movies in two years, each a blend of violence, romance and sex that nobody else could bring off. Shauna was a big part of the blend — some of his competitors said he’d still be directing drive-in horror movies without her — but who else could live with a sex goddess and still keep the objectivity a director needed to exploit her properly? Not her last two husbands.

  He padded back into the bedroom, studying Shauna’s face. The fantasies couldn’t include her merely human traits: her catatonic style of sleeping, her allergies, her humourless and self-absorbed lovemaking. As a husband he might resent those traits; as a director, his personal feelings never interfered with artistic concerns.

  A narrow flight of stairs led directly from their bedroom suite to the kitchen. Allison plugged in the coffee maker and watched the rain slash down. He looked west and north, down the hill to the willows along Escondido Creek, up the far slope to the ridge almost a mile away. It was all his own land. He knew every one of those scattered oaks, right up to the ridge where the land fell away almost vertically into the next valley. He knew the course of the creek, from the pool a mile upstream (on the eastern boundary of his land) to the canyon three miles southwest (just outside his land) where the creek met the Carmel River. At the age of thirty-two, he was landed gentry, just like the rich pricks up and down the Carmel Valley. But unlike them, he had earned his land, over ten square miles of it; the pricks had inherited it from grandfathers who’d paid next to nothing for it.

  Allison picked irritably at the peeling skin on his nose. Sunburn: he had pale and vulnerable skin, and the ultraviolet seemed to get past even broad-brimmed hats, but he was not about to run around like a clown, his nose painted white with sunblock ointment. At least the heavy overcast today would block some of the UV. He envied Shauna; she just turned a deeper and deeper brown.

  Breakfast was two cups of coffee, black, strong and unsweetened. Then fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups on the cold tile floor of the kitchen before he went back upstairs to his dressing room.

  Allison had thought carefully about the clothes for today’s interview: khaki trousers and safari shirt, dark-green ascot, glossy Wellingtons. A light-brown leather jacket with a broad sheepskin collar. He studied the effect in the mirror of his nineteenth-century wardrobe: outdoorsy, macho, semi-military. His close-cropped black beard and gold-rimmed glasses might make him look a little too bohemian, even left-wing; the beard might have to go soon. His hair was getting shorter with every styling — not yet a soldier’s white sidewall haircut, but close enough. The hole in his left ear lobe had closed up nicely. He put on a flat-brimmed Stetson, almost like a drill sergeant’s.

  Not a bad effect, he decided. It helped to be over six feet, with big shoulders and no belly. Even the sunburned nose helped a little, made him look less … studied. Sometimes your production values could be too good.

  “Who are we today — Ernest Hemingway or Smoky the Bear?”

  Shauna stood in the doorway to the bedroom, wrapped in an old terry-cloth bathrobe. Allison framed her between his hands, the great director visualizing a shot.

  “Kid, you got funk. Real funk. The robe is a genuine objet trouve, but I think I see pink plastic curlers in your hair, plus fuzzy pink slippers on your tootsies. Then in the background we see in deep focus the five-piece dinette set, genuine Formica and wood-grain vinyl trim, a K-Mart special this week only, plus a seventeen-inch TV set playing afternoon soaps.”

  “Wow. What are you popping?”

  “Caffeine, real Colombian brown. But I don’t drink it, I just snort it.”

  Shauna leaned against the doorframe and stretched in a big yawn. Not bad; remember that. It would look better in a black lace nightie, real Rita Hayworth, or even nothing at all. She doesn’t know the killer is lurking in the closet with the butcher knife, but the audience does.

  “Where you going?”

  “Fort Ord. Lunch with our old buddy General Miles. Two or three drinks, burger and fries, then I ask to borrow the Sixteenth Airmobile Cavalry for a couple of months.”

  “Gee, thanks for not inviting me.”

  “Kid, you don’t get invited — you get deployed. You’re my force de frappe. I don’t waste you in these little skirmishes.” He put his arms around her.

  “God, you say the sweetest things to me, I mean, really, God.”

  They lurched companionably downstairs to the kitchen, arms around each other. Shauna poured herself a cup of coffee, took the mandatory sip-before-first-smoke-of-the-day, and lighted a Marlboro. She slid into a chair at the kitchen table, next to the window.

  “Know what I miss? I really miss the hills being green.” She waved her cigarette at the hillside across the creek: it was a dull beige, with here and there a green bush or weed.

  “Wait’ll next year, kid.”

  “Do you think it’ll be okay again by next year?”

  “Kid … No. It won’t be okay. It’ll be worse. A whole lot worse.”

  “Hey, Bob Tony. It’s such a beautiful morning, don’t spoil it.”

  He looked around the high-ceilinged kitchen, at the gleaming copper pots, the used-brick fireplace, the microwave, the doorway to the sauna and hot tubs.

  “Okay, it’s a bad setting for a prophet of doom,” he said. “But I’m getting an intuition. Like this next project could be the last for a long time, because already there’s no cable and soon there won’t be any more movie theatres.”

  “Okay,” she shrugged. “This is the way the world ends. So what?”

  “The oracle is working on it. — Listen, I’m late, I’m due for lunch in half an hour. What are you doing today?”

  “Thought I’d go into Carmel, do some shopping.”

  “Mmmh. Okay. I’ll be back around three or four. Talk to Lupe about dinner before you go.” He kissed her with husbandly absent-mindedness and left.

  The house was part of a compound on the crest of a narrow ridge. On the north stood a barn and stables; on the east, a garage, sheds and two-story guest house; on the south, a big greenhouse and the low, flat-roofed servants’ quarters. The area within the compound was partly garden and partly swimming pool.

  Allison sprinted through the dead garden, past the swimming pool, and into the garage. Hipolito Vasquez, the gardener and handyman, was changing the spark plugs in the Chevy van. Next to the van were Allison’s red Mercedes 450 SL convertible and Shauna’s silver Jaguar XJ sedan.

  “Buenos dias, Don Roberto.”

  “Buenos dias, Hipolito. Y como estan los ojos, hombre?”

  Hipolito grinned under his salt-and-pepper moustache. “Mucho mejor, gracias a Dios.” He had made the mistake, a few days ago, of working outside without sunglasses. The UV had given him a mild dose of snow blindness. A lot of people got it these days, but usually only once: two or three days of agony were enough to teach caution to anyone.

  Allison got into the Mercedes; Hipolito opened the garage door, and the convertible backed out into the rain. Allison let it glide down the long, curving blacktop drive to the gravel road along the creek.

  He didn’t like the road because it gave others access to his land. Farther up the creek was a ranch run by some weird religious sect called the Brotherhood, and farther still a handful of cabins that had been taken over recently by four or five families. Both groups left Allison and each other alone, but it was still an annoyance to see their jeeps and vans go
ing past.

  The creek was high, running fast and brown. Allison worried about it. The willows and oaks along the stream seemed to be handling the UV pretty well so far, but most of the local grasses were dying off. Erosion was getting serious, and in places the creek had undercut healthy trees and toppled them into the water.

  The valley narrowed as he drove southwest, until the road wound through a steep-sided canyon just a few feet above the creek. As he came round a corner, Allison swore and stamped on the brake. Walking in the middle of the road was a tall figure in a hooded green poncho.

  Without even glancing over his shoulder, the man moved to the side of the road. Allison roared past him in a spray of mud and gravel, then stopped and backed up.

  “Need a ride?”

  The man was young, with a blistered red face beneath sunglasses. He smiled shyly and nodded.

  “Where you headed?” Allison asked.

  “Monterey, sir.”

  “Jesus, that’s still eight or nine more miles. Come on, get in. I’m going right into Monterey.”

  “Bless you, sir. It’s very generous of you.”

  One of the Brotherhood. Allison cursed the guilty charity that had made him stop, while the young man got in and dripped on the leather seat.

  The canyon twisted around a long, steep spur of rock and ended abruptly; the road dropped through a stand of oaks and met the Carmel Valley highway. From the valley, it was hard to see any clear break at all in the hills; Escondido was indeed a hidden creek.

  Allison drove fast, with his usual brusque aggressiveness. Not many other cars were on the road; the fields and orchards of the Carmel Valley looked bleak; the only livestock in sight were six or seven cows in a meadow, bunched around a stack of hay. Each wore clear plastic goggles — too common a sight to be funny anymore. Cattle without them went blind in a day, and the pain in their eyes drove them crazy. A blinded bull had killed a rancher up the valley a couple of months ago.

  “How are your livestock doing?” Allison asked, though he knew they must be alive — his passenger smelled strongly of cowshit.

  “They’re mostly well, praise God.”

  “Hell of a time to be ranching, though.”

  “It’s the time of Tribulation, sir. We bear what the Lord sends us. Are you saved, sir?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “I’ll pray for you. And I’ll ask Mr. Lamb to pray for you too. Once you’re saved, these troubles don’t burden you.”

  “Who’s Mr. Lamb?”

  “He’s our leader. A very holy man. He’s drawn us together here to care for one another and endure the Tribulation.”

  Allison was tempted to wonder whether a truly holy man would hole up on Escondido Creek when the world outside was falling apart; but he had wasted too much of his youth arguing with cranks and cultists in the film business to bother arguing. He said nothing, and the young man fell silent also. The Mercedes hissed through the rain.

  Carmel, with its kitschy dollhouse roofs among the pines, had all the charm of an out-of-season amusement park. A hand-lettered sign had been stuck into the gravel shoulder of the road: NO WORK KEEP GOING. The hospitality of Old California, Allison reflected, didn’t extend to unemployed drifters.

  North of the town, Highway 1 was really deserted, and he drove fast until he reached Monterey. With the tourist trade dead, the city was sustaining its revenues by nailing speeders; Allison kept carefully within the limit.

  “Where can I drop you?” he asked.

  “Anywhere along here will be fine, sir.” Allison pulled over to the curb. Three men, loafing in the entrance to a bar, stared opaquely at the car. Out-of-town drifters could be chased away, but not the local boys.

  The young man put out a big, calloused hand. “Thank you, sir. May God bless and keep you.”

  “And you,” Allison replied solemnly. The kid was a zombie, all right, but a likeable one. Put a machete in his hand and he’d make a great psychopathic killer, stalking the unbelievers. Too bad you couldn’t make a nickel from a religious-nut movie any more, not with half the audience just as cracked as this kid but not so polite.

  Allison accelerated again as he passed the shabby storefronts of Seaside. The few businesses still open had heavy wire screens over their windows, and signs on their doors: Guard Dog on Duty, Max. Two Customers in Store at a Time, Clerk Is Armed. Tough times. The only laugh anyone had had in ages had been President Wood’s inaugural boast that the recession would be over in sixty days. That had been three weeks ago; nothing had changed yet, except that people had stopped saying “recession” and started saying “depression,” just like the Reagan years.

  Highway 1 curved northeast around Monterey Bay. The view was spectacular, even in the rain: to the west the long dark arm of the peninsula, to the north the open grey waters of the bay, to the northeast the long dunes that marched along the coast. Out in the bay he saw a tanker coming in to its offshore moorage, three or four miles due west of the refinery at Moss Landing. A monster, one of the half-million-tonners that had come out of moth balls recently. With almost no oil coming out of the Middle East anymore, the North Slope of Alaska had become crucially important; tankers were running up and down the coast nonstop, but even so the supply was never enough. To overcome the bottleneck, they were even refining some of the oil in Valdez and sending it down as gasoline and diesel fuel. Allison toyed with the idea of a tanker-hijack story; half a million tons of gasoline would be worth a hell of a lot these days, when it cost six dollars a gallon with a ration card, and fifteen on the black market. Well, save it for later —

  He was at Fort Ord. To his right were the boxy little prefabs of married-personnel housing; to his left, the firing ranges, closed off from the sea by steep dunes. Despite the rain, many of the ranges were in use. Most of the trainees were blacks; the whites stood out because of the anti-sunburn ointment on their faces. They all looked wet and miserable. The irregular popping of rifle fire made him think again about buying some guns; it was getting easy to imagine Shauna being pulled from her car and raped, himself being beaten up by some mob. Paranoia — the stock response of the middle class in hard times.

  The three black guards at the main gate looked a little paranoid too: brisk, alert, suspicious. Even in the rain, their sunglasses looked more sinister than silly. They checked his driver’s licence, car registration and credit cards, made a phone call, and only then allowed him through.

  A disquieting thought occurred to Allison: how the hell could he shoot exterior scenes in a war movie, when white actors would sunburn in minutes and risk snow blindness in an hour? Make-up — he’d have to get his make-up people working on it. Most of the filmmakers he knew were convinced everything would be back to normal by spring; Allison’s intuition told him nothing would be back to normal for a long time. And he trusted his intuition. Three times now, he had guessed — known — what kind of movie would be popular in two years, and each time he’d been right. The last one, Gunship, had been such a screaming success that he’d let himself be pressured into another war movie even though it hadn’t felt right.

  The hell with it. The Longrangers had a good script, a small cast and a modest budget. It would still turn a profit and stir up the critics. Then he could sit back and choose the next project without so much hassle —

  Doublethinking. The world is coming to an end tomorrow, but next week will be fair and warmer.

  He parked outside the Officers’ Club, a rambling two-story building with the mandatory stucco walls and red-tile roof, and walked slowly across the lot to the front doors. Discipline. You don’t lose your cool, you don’t run, least of all when you’ll get wet anyway.

  A young second lieutenant, freckled and sunburned, was waiting for him. He escorted Allison to a small dining room on the second floor, overlooking a stand of eucalyptus and a woebegone flowerbed. General Ernest Miles was already there, looking out the rain-streaked windows. His eyes were brilliantly blue, his square face deeply tanned. Allison found him
self standing straighten “Hello, General. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

  “No, just got here myself. I’m drinking Perrier, but help yourself to whatever you like.” Miles waved a thick hand towards the bar in the corner.

  They settled companionably in easy chairs by the windows, reminiscing about the filming of Gunship two years before. Miles had been the commanding officer at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where they’d done the location shooting, and he had helped a lot. Allison privately suspected that Miles’s transfer to Ord was largely due to the success of Gunship, which among other things had been a terrific recruiting film.

  Waiters brought lunch; Allison and Miles moved to the table across the room.

  “Good salad,” Allison remarked.

  “Hothouse lettuce. Can you believe it? Here we are in the middle of some of the finest farm country in the world, but they have to grow lettuce under glass.” Miles regarded his plate with a kind of perplexed regret. “God knows where this will all end up. Ozone, flares, UV, weird weather — ” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe what we’re contending with.”

  Uh-oh, thought Allison. “Well, you seem to be coping pretty damn well, General. The troops here look sharp.”

  “It’s communications that’s killing us, Bob. Every time one of those solar flares goes off, we get an instant power surge that blows hell out of microchip circuits. Knocks out computers, telecommunications, missile electronics, the works. Knocks out all our satellites as well. Washington is putting in fibre-optic cables as fast as possible, and they’ll help some, but it’ll be — oh, a couple of years before we’re back to an adequate communications capability. The Russians could invade Germany tonight and we wouldn’t know about it until next Tuesday.”

  “At least the Reds have the same problems, right?”

  The general’s grin returned. “Worse. We hear rumours that a couple of their missiles have blown up in their silos due to electronic malfunction.”

  “They didn’t — ?”

  “Not nuclear explosions, no. But they showed that the Reds can’t trust their hardware. We can’t either.”