Slow Apocalypse Read online

  SLOW APOCALYPSE

  BOOKS BY JOHN VARLEY

  The Ophiuchi Hotline

  The Persistence of Vision

  Picnic on Nearside

  (formerly titled The Barbie Murders)

  Millennium

  Blue Champagne

  Steel Beach

  The Golden Globe

  Red Thunder

  Mammoth

  Red Lightning

  Rolling Thunder

  Slow Apocalypse

  THE GAEAN TRILOGY

  Titan

  Wizard

  Demon

  The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction

  SLOW

  APOCALYPSE

  JOHN VARLEY

  ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2012 by John Varley.

  Cover photos: rusty background © Piotr Tomicki/Shutterstock; rusty car door handle ©

  Hemera Technologies/Thinkstock; car door handle © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

  Text design by Laura K. Corless.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  FIRST EDITION: September 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Varley, John, 1947 Aug. 9–

  Slow apocalypse / John Varley. — Ace hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58150-6

  1. Petroleum industry and trade — Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3572.A724S58 2012

  813’.54—dc23

  2012011636

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  This Los Angeles book is dedicated to our Los Angeles friends,

  Jon Mersel and Marion Peters

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue: From the Journal of David Marshall

  PROLOGUE

  The sound of automatic weapons firing made everyone look up.

  Dave Marshall was standing on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard with a hundred other gawkers. They had all been looking at the front entrance to the W Hotel, where half a dozen men in black armor, combat helmets, heavy equipment belts, and military assault rifles were blocking the doors. They didn’t wear any kind of insignia or identification of rank, no bright yellow FBI printed on their backs, no Homeland Security patches, no LAPD.

  A few minutes earlier three black armored personnel carriers had roared up and these anonymous heavily armed men poured out. They quickly cleared the small plaza around the subway station, and a dozen of them had entered the building just as Dave was leaving it.

  He was as curious as everyone else, and maybe a little worried, so instead of doing the prudent thing—if this was a bomb report or a hostage situation—which would have been to get as far away as possible, he’d lingered to see if he could find out what was going on. Regular LAPD patrol cars arrived without sirens, half a dozen of them almost simultaneously, and the officers had blocked off the street and gave orders for everyone to move along. That’s when they heard the gunfire.

  He looked up. One of the big panes up there had shattered. Shards of glass glittered in the sunlight as they twisted and turned on their way down. Before they had gone very far a human figure followed them, falling backwards, his arms flailing.

  Dave could tell the man was bald. He could see bright redness on the back of his white shirt. He even fancied he could see a stream of blood arcing away from the falling body, though that might have been his imagination.

  Then he lost sight of him behind other bystanders, and there was the sickening thump as the man landed very close to where Dave had been standing only seconds before. It was much louder than he would have expected. He actually felt the impact with the concrete. There were shouts and screams of horror.

  The cops quickly got a lot more serious about moving people along. He was jostled and almost lost his balance because he kept looking back over his shoulder and trying to count the floors. It wasn’t until he was across the street and could stand still for a moment that he was able to get a good look at the hole in the side of the building where the big glass pane had been. One of the black-clad commandos was leaning out, looking down at the dead man below. Dave was now sure that the man had fallen from the eleventh floor.

  Something else he was sure of was that, no more than ten minutes ago, he had been talking with the dead man in the man’s apartment.

  Suddenly, he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

  It had all started a little over twenty-four hours before…

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hollywood and Vine. The Walk of Fame, the boulevard of broken dreams.

  Dave Marshall was standing on Carmen Miranda’s terrazzo and brass star embedded in the sidewalk, in front of the Hollywood and Vine subway station.

  The place bustled with activity at midday. Noon, by Dave’s watch.

  He was looking for a man who lived in the W. The concierge told him his quarry had left over
an hour ago, and had said something about needing a drink.

  Where would you go if you needed a drink at noon on Hollywood Boulevard?

  On the southwest corner was what used to be The Broadway. All that was left of that was the sign on the roof. It had been converted to condos, and the ground floor was a trendy restaurant and nightclub called Katsuya, frequented by wannabes and some actual celebrities. The drinks there would be expensive, and it wasn’t open, anyway. Almost across the street from him was the fabulous old art-deco Pantages Theater, home of the Academy Awards for eleven years. Several small businesses were squeezed in along the theater frontage, and one of them was the most likely spot to find his man: the Frolic Room.

  Dave made his way over there.

  Everybody in Hollywood knows the Frolic Room, though most residents have never been inside. Its exterior has been in countless movies and television shows. There’s something about the neon outside that evokes the 1940s, and sleaze. Every other month or so the sidewalk is blocked with big reflective screens and camera dollies, and the curbs are full of the grip trucks and Winnebagos that signal a movie shoot. But not today. When there’s no shooting going on, the front door is usually open, as it was now.

  He entered and stopped to let his eyes adjust. It was a small room, quite dark, a lot longer than it was wide. To the left was a bar with a dozen stools, and to the right was a counter with more stools, beneath a black-and-white mural of Hollywood scenes done in the style of Al Hirschfeld. The bar got some of its business from tourists, movie buffs, and people waiting to get into the Pantages next door, but most of the people who drank there were regulars, many of them relics from an earlier Hollywood. Three of these serious morning drinkers were seated at the bar near the door, and all the way back was the short and scrawny figure of Colonel Lionel Warner, USMC, ret., hunched over and scowling down at his drink.

  He didn’t look up as Dave took the seat beside him.

  “I guess the sun is over the yardarm somewhere,” Dave said.

  Warner scowled down at the bar, then killed the last of his drink, which had probably been a Jim Beam. Warner was about seventy, but you wouldn’t want to tangle with him. Bald as a cue ball, with a face weathered by desert and jungle, he still communicated a wiry strength that said he could toss a man twice his size through a window, and had done so many times. His hands were scarred, with thick knuckles. He was a spit-and-polish Marine down to his boots, his clothes always freshly pressed, his bearing upright and military. But today he was hunched over his drink, and he looked a lot older than he had two days ago, when Dave had last seen him.

  “That yardarm business is navy talk,” Warner said. “Marines drink whenever we want to.” He signaled for another. The bartender looked dubious.

  “Maybe you ought to wait a bit, Colonel,” he said.

  Warner lifted his head and glared at him.

  “Do I look visibly intoxicated to you?” He turned to Dave. “Marshall, do I look drunk?”

  Dave had to admit that he didn’t, though he knew he must be.

  “Then set me up again, and one for Mr. Television Writer here. You guys know each other? Stan, this is Dave Marshall. Dave, meet Stan.”

  Being a writer carried no particular weight in the Frolic Room. Hollywood is lousy with writers. Some of them even work now and then. Stan poured for both of them. Dave took a sip of the bourbon and looked at the colonel.

  Lionel Warner first saw combat in Vietnam and seemed to have been at least peripherally involved in every American conflict since then, right up to and including the beginning of the Iraq War. But many of the things he had done were off the books. There was a lot he claimed he couldn’t talk about. Beginning in the early eighties he had been involved with intelligence work for agencies he had never named. Dave wasn’t sure that some of them had names. He’d been talking to Warner for just over a month, looking for ideas, for stories he could tell, and had gotten the distinct impression that what he’d heard was just the tip of the iceberg, that 90 percent of what Warner might have told him was just never going to be told.

  That was a shame, because while some of the stories the colonel had been free to relate were interesting, none of them had really grabbed Dave. But he kept plugging at it, because he knew there would be something there eventually, and because he rather liked the old buzzard.

  Dave had met the colonel at a wrap party for a picture about the Gulf War. He hadn’t been involved in the picture, but he knew somebody who knew somebody, and found himself with an invitation. Warner had been the military advisor. They found themselves thrown together more or less at random, and when the colonel found out Dave was a writer he said he had a lot of stories to tell, and then told some of them. They were fascinating. Dave had never done a war picture, but there was no need to tell the colonel that, and he didn’t seem to care. Dave was looking for ideas, and the colonel was a fountain of them. At the end of the night they had an informal agreement to meet and see what they could develop.

  He hadn’t expected to hear back—all sorts of ephemeral deals are cooked up at parties like that, and they seldom survive the night—but Warner called the next morning and wanted to get together. That led to their first meeting for lunch in the restaurant at the W, where he was surprised to learn Warner had a two-bedroom condo. Dave knew the insane prices apartments sold for in that building, and he knew Warner couldn’t have made that kind of money on a colonel’s salary. But if half the stories he’d told him the night before were true, he’d had plenty of opportunities to pick up a little here and there, under the radar. If you are involved in the “takedown”—his word for assassination—of a Colombian drug lord, for instance, who was going to complain if you pocketed a few of the stacks of hundred-dollar bills guys like that liked to keep around for bugout money? That, or bags of jewels, or raw gold. Dave hadn’t asked Warner where his money came from, but when the right time came he planned to. There was very likely a good story there, if he’d tell it.

  The colonel had been studying him for quite a while. Now he spoke.

  “What would you do if you knew the world was going to end?”

  “What? Like, today? Next week? Next year?”

  “I guess that would make a difference,” Warner allowed.

  “Are you talking about the planet blowing up, something like that, where nobody could survive? Or just a major catastrophe, like an earthquake?”

  “Smaller than the planet blowing up. Bigger than an earthquake. Let’s say it’s not the end of the world, but it’s the end of the world as we know it.” He frowned. “Isn’t there a song about that?”

  “R.E.M.,” Dave said, surprised that the colonel had heard it.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I listen to the radio. My men in the Gulf War liked that song. And don’t forget, my generation invented rock ’n’ roll.”

  “So you did. Are you telling me you’re getting drunk because you think the world’s going to end?”

  Warner considered it.

  “It might. I’m not saying it will. But I think there’s hard times ahead.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  And he did.

  It took several hours, and more drinks. Colonel Warner paced himself instead of tossing them back, but he was pretty out of it by the time he was through. Dave had made his first drink last for most of the story, so when Warner began to show signs of passing out, Dave was able to navigate him out onto the street, across it, and up the elevator to the eleventh floor of his building. He found Warner’s keys, got him inside, and poured him onto the nearest couch, where he fell instantly asleep. Dave pulled off the man’s shoes, and stood for a moment looking down on the old warrior.

  Quite a story he’d told him. Could any of it be true? He frankly doubted it, but it didn’t matter. It was the story that counted, and he finally had what he wanted.

  Dave thought about it all the way down in the elevator, then on the escalator down to the Hollywood and Vine subway station. He could see it a
ll falling into place as he stared up at the thousands of empty film reels that decorated the ceiling of the station, and it got even better as he boarded the train and found a seat. The train sped through the long tunnel under the Cahuenga Pass, and soon reached the end of the line in North Hollywood.

  When he first started interviewing the colonel he’d parked in the structure behind the W, but it was outrageously expensive. There was plenty of free parking within an easy walk of the North Hollywood station. He told himself that it left him well positioned to pick up his daughter in Burbank after the meetings, but the truth was, he was pinching pennies. A year earlier he would never have given a twenty-dollar parking fee a second thought. Hell, he’d been known to hand a twenty to the parking valet.

  Not any longer.

  He found his five-year-old Cadillac Escalade. According to his wife, Karen, it was already an antique, ready for the scrap heap. She was ashamed to be seen in it, which is why she was driving the newer Mercedes these days, even though the Caddy had been her idea.

  He was still early to pick up his daughter, Addison, at the equestrian center. He drove down Lankershim, then Riverside, then Alameda to Bob Hope Drive and found a place to park the beast in the shade at Johnny Carson Park. Right across the street were the NBC Burbank Studios, where he had labored for seven very lucrative years.

  Three years ago.

  He had written for a lot of different comedies at first, none of them very memorable, but all of them paid well, thanks to the Writers Guild minimum basic agreement. It changes your life, getting on staff at a successful sitcom after six years of scrambling as a freelance. Karen and he had been living in a studio apartment in North Hollywood when Addison was born, and the rent was overdue. They managed to scrape by, and then, almost without warning, they were well-off, living in a two-bedroom high-rise in Mid-Wilshire.

  Then came the big break. He wrote a pilot called Ants! It was about three exterminators waging war on a race of alien insects who were living among them. But it wasn’t X-Files material, it was a little Coneheads and a little Slackers and a little Men in Black and a little Ghostbusters. He had based one of the characters on the John Goodman character in Arachnophobia, another on the Jenna Elfman character in Dharma and Greg, and another on…well, on several characters, all of them played by Adam Sandler. The pilot was picked up, and the first season was a smash. The show never made number one in the Neilsons, but was usually in the top ten.