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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
2:42 p.m. Wednesday
The statues had pubic hair.
