Blake did them both.
Little balls of fire rolled down the hillside and across the freeway like tears. He didn’t know what to make of them until one rolled right in front of him.
Only it wasn’t rolling. It was running.
It was a wild rabbit, a ball of flaming fur, fleeing from the inferno. The freeway was being over-run with burning wild life. And where these burning rats, squirrels, and rabbits perished on the hillside, new fires started. The blazing creatures, in death, were unwittingly increasing the size and ferocity of their pursuer.
At least on the freeway there was no dry brush to spark under their fiery corpses.
Just puddles of gasoline.
No sooner did the thought occur to him than one of the burning rodents ignited a puddle of fuel with a loud whoosh just a few yards away.
It burned out quickly, but it was enough to terrify him. Suddenly, in Marty’s mind, those flaming animals became rolling grenades.
He hurried along, looking in all directions, trying to keep his eye on every flaming creature, every drop of gasoline, every wrecked car, hoping to anticipate the next blast.
This was so damned unfair, he thought. After what happened in that downtown alley with Molly, and what he went through in Beverly Hills, he should be exempt from having to deal with explosions any more. Since Fate hadn’t issued that exemption yet, this had to be another cosmic payback, retribution for demanding more explosions in the action shows on his network, despite the creative and financial pleas from the producers.
Blow something up, he’d say. Something big. You can never have too many explosions.
Now he was learning first hand how wrong he was.
To his right, a Jetta exploded, spinning through the air towards him like a gigantic sheet metal football.
Marty ran like a wide receiver, only he was screaming and this was one pass he didn’t want to receive.
The car smashed into the freeway not far from where he had stood, cartwheeling over the top of several cars, then crashing into the low concrete median.
He stared at the wreckage in amazement, gasping for breath.
A rat did that, he thought. One hot rat.
Marty hurried on, frightened, performing “The Eyes of a Ranger” as loud as he could, the flames dancing along with him on the hillside like insane orange ghosts.
Up ahead, a deer stood shivering between two cars, staring at Marty. The animal was seared black, her hairless skin smoldering. Marty passed close enough to touch the deer, but didn’t. “I’ll Be There for You,” he sang, turning away.
Marty marched on through Mad About You, The Nanny,” and Baywatch . By the time he got to Touched by an Angel, the sound of explosions was receding behind him and sunlight began to break through the smoke ahead, revealing the ruins of the Skirball Jewish Cultural Center and the two overpasses that crossed the freeway at its peak.
The smaller overpass, the one nearest to him, joined Sepulveda to a small street leading up to Mulholland on the other side. The span seemed intact, but Marty ran under it with a shiver of panic anyway.
The taller overpass ahead was massive, rising up several hundred feet to stretch Mulholland over the San Diego Freeway. The span had collapsed on either end, creating a towering, concrete island out of the center section that remained. Marty could see maybe a dozen commuters stranded up there with their cars, castaways in middle of an urban ocean. From their lonely vantage point, the destruction in the LA basin and the San Fernando Valley lapped up against their concrete pillars like waves.
The choppers heading into the valley must have seen them up there, which could only mean the castaways were a low priority compared to the calamities elsewhere. That must have been little comfort to them, especially as each new aftershock shook them like glassware on a wobbly table.
The castaways looked down at him sadly as he passed.
“Help us,” a woman whimpered, her voice echoing off the roadway.
He looked up at her. There was nothing he could do, and saying so wouldn’t make a difference. So he just lowered his gaze and continued on.
Once again, Marty had little choice but to go under the unstable span, passing the piles of cars, concrete, and rebar that had come down in the quake. A man’s unscratched arm stuck straight out from amidst the rubble, coated with a fine layer of dust, a cell phone still clutched in his hand. For a moment, Marty thought about taking it and trying to place another call to his wife, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Buck would have, if he had anybody to call. Marty wondered who that made the better man.
Marty emerged from under the overpass and the valley opened up below him. He could see clear across to the San Gabriel Mountains on the other side. And in the concrete, sub-divided flatlands in between, through the haze of smoke, the face of the Big One stared back at him.
It was an angry, wickedly malicious face, the face of a vengeful giant who awakened from a deep sleep and dribbled a gigantic basketball up and down the valley, gleefully smashing entire blocks with each bounce.
Now the giant had taken his toys and crawled back into his hole in the ground to hibernate for a hundred more years before wreaking havoc again. By then, the mess would be cleaned up and everything rebuilt for him to destroy again.
Marty couldn’t see Calabasas from here, it was ten miles east, but he imagined it hadn’t fared much better.
He set off down the hill towards home.
4:07 p.m. Wednesday
Los Angeles shouldn’t exist. It had no natural harbor, no dependable water supply, and bad air. All it had going for it was year-round sunshine.
That was more than enough, with the right spin.
Nothing symbolized this more than the San Fernando Valley, once a parched dust bowl baking under the incessant heat.
But Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and a few other wealthy businessmen saw the potential under all that cracked, dry earth. It was lousy farmland but these businessmen were interested in harvesting a more resilient crop: money. But to do it, they’d still need water.
Otis and his cronies bought up all the struggling farms and only then used their considerable clout to divert water along massive aqueducts from the Sacramento Delta hundreds of miles north to the arid valley.
With the arrival of water, the land was worth hundreds of times what the businessmen paid for it. And what they didn’t own, they took control of by annexing it into the city. Otis used the pages of his newspaper to hype the valley as paradise and soon the people came in hordes.
Of course, Marty wouldn’t have known any of this if he hadn’t seen Chinatown. And if he hadn’t seen the movie, and learned about the scandal and dirty-dealing behind the valley’s creation, he couldn’t have lived there. Without a hint of scandal in its past, the valley would have been just too bland to be habitable.
The only natural source of water to the valley was the Los Angeles River, which remained bone dry half the year, only to swell in the winter as much as three-thousand fold in a single rainy day. As much as Los Angeles craved water, it didn’t appreciate the unpredictability of the river and treated it as they would any other piece of land. They paved it.
Now the Los Angeles River was a concrete-lined flood channel that snaked through the valley, except for one small patch designated as a park, where the Streamline Moderne-style Sepulveda Flood Control Dam held back the water when necessary and served as a cheap film location the rest of the time.
Even when the river was flooding, there was no shortage of exciting film to be shot. Inevitably, somebody would fall in, despite the fences and steep concrete banks and would spark a dramatic rescue effort which, more often than not, failed. It made great TV nonetheless.
The flood basin beneath the spillway, so rarely filled with water, was now overflowing with people. It was one thousand acres of open space and that was the only place anyone felt safe now.
As Marty came down from the Sepulveda Pass, he could see the dam, and the flood of people, just beyond where the San Diego Freeway merged with the Ventura Freeway. He wanted to avoid the tangle of unstable overpasses that converged there and so he climbed off the freeway as it came down the base of the north slope of the Santa Monica Mountains.
