“He’s the one who pointed the cops to those Sons of Liberty bastards,” Del went on. “The leader, some guy named Burt Pitt, was caught at the Mexican border, of all places. Now I guess he wishes the borders were more open than they are,” Del said, with a grim chuckle.
Even as they drove along PCH, a ribbon of highway that hugged the ocean shoreline, Carter could see, in the hills and palisades, burn scars where the fires had swept down through the chaparral before running out of fuel on the concrete roadway and the broad beach beyond. But in their terrible progress the flames had destroyed hundreds of houses, consumed untold millions in property, and taken dozens of lives.
But what Carter was looking for, as he scanned the cliff-sides, was something else.
Del had the radio on — a country-western station, of course — and he tapped his fingers on the wheel in time to the music. The singer was claiming that there was a reason God made Oklahoma, but Carter hadn’t been paying attention, so he didn’t know what it was.
At the turnoff to the Temescal Canyon hiking trail, there was a chalkboard sign saying that, although the trails were open, it was advisable only for experienced hikers to proceed. “Fire danger still exists,” the sign said. “Report any indications of fire immediately.”
“And hey, look at that,” Del said, pointing to another sign in the lot where the parking validations used to be dispensed. “Parking fees have been waived.” Nothing pleased Del more than a bargain. “God help me, I’m starting to love this town.”
Carter had never seen such a turnaround. For a guy who had hated L.A. — its noise, its commotion, its traffic, its phonies with cell phones welded to their ears — Del had made a near miraculous conversion. And it was the Fourth of July — or Götterdämmerung, as Del liked to refer to it — that had made the difference. On that day, he had seen things in Los Angeles that no other place on earth could ever have offered. He had seen creatures — living and breathing and hunting — whose petrified bones he had studied all his life. He had seen, on al-Kalli’s lawns, a glimpse of a prehistoric world hundreds of millions of years old. And even in the fires — the raging, deadly, uncontrollable conflagration — he had seen the power of nature unleashed, and he had seen the city scourged, like Sodom, and in his eyes reborn to a rough kind of beauty. He rooted for Los Angeles now.
Which explained, Carter thought, the purple and gold Lakers T-shirt.
Del hopped down out of the driver’s seat, his green canvas knapsack slung over his shoulder. Carter got out more carefully — his body was still plenty battered and bruised. In the fall from the Mercedes, he’d sprained both ankles, broken one arm, dislocated one shoulder, bruised several ribs, and scraped the skin off both shins. He didn’t look so good in his hiking shorts, but then, there didn’t seem to be anyone around to notice. The parking lot was empty, and as they started up the trail, they saw no sign of any other hikers. Or even much wildlife. Everything was preternaturally quiet, and the air still smelled of cinder and ash. The fires had beaten jagged and unpredictable paths all through the Santa Monica Mountains and the nature preserves, cutting wide swaths down the sides of some hillsides, while leaving others unscathed. Even in Summit View, where Carter had been found unconscious by a fire crew, some of the houses had been reduced to a pile of ash, while others, just across the street, had sustained nothing but smoke damage.
He’d been back there only once since the fire. He’d had Beth drive him to the crest of Via Vista, or what was left of it, and he’d looked over the side of the cliff, where the Mercedes had disappeared. Several hundred yards down, turned over on its back like an eviscerated turtle, he could see the black and twisted wreckage of the car; he half expected the klaxon to still be making some feeble noise.
But there was nothing; no sound, and no sign of the gorgon who had ridden it down. The trees and brush down there were largely intact, as were large parts of the park-lands to the north. Had it crawled off to die in the brush? Had it been cornered, and consumed, by a sudden change in the fires, a gust of Santa Anas that had blown the flames all around it?
Or was it still out there, somewhere, foraging in the tens of thousands of acres that made up the vast preserves, learning to survive in this altogether new world?
For all the misery it had nearly brought him, Carter hoped that it was — and that, when he was in better shape again, he would be able to go in search of it.
“You see those photos,” Del asked, without turning around on the trail, “the ones from the cell phone cameras? They were showing them again last night on the news.”
“I’ve seen them,” Carter said — grainy shots, taken through the smoke, by people stuck in their cars on back roads, of a huge and lumbering creature crashing through trees and, in one case, slinking through a culvert under a freeway. A fire department helicopter, bringing a huge bucket of water up into Bel-Air, got its own long-distance shots, but from so high above, and through all the swirling smoke, it looked as much like an armored vehicle of some kind as it did a creature of legend and lore.
And no one, from the witnesses to the authorities, had any idea what to make of it, or what to do about it if they did. The city administration had its hands full with the more immediate problems — thousands of displaced people, a conspiracy of arsonists to round up and prosecute, sporadic but continuing smaller blazes, disaster relief to claim from the feds (and then find some way to dispense). The Godzilla stories had been put on the back burner, as it were, everywhere but the tabloids and the Fox network.
“So what did you want to show me?” Carter asked, stepping carefully over the rocks and boulders strewn across the hiking path; many of them looked as though they had come loose in the fire and just recently tumbled to rest down here.
“My home away from home,” Del said, “if it’s still standing.”
Carter had no idea what he was talking about until they came to a fork in the trail and Del headed to the right, to the more arduous route — the one that Carter now remembered they had taken on their previous expedition up here. He also recalled passing an abandoned old cabin covered with graffiti. If Del imagined that it was still standing…
All around, Carter could see the charred remains of the trees and brush that had once afforded so many animals, from gray quail to the occasional bobcat, a refuge and a home. But now the landscape was more desertified than ever, with only an occasional weed or patch of grass poking its head up above the layer of ash and cinder that coated the ground.
The cabin, which had at least sported a roof and walls the last time they had come past here, was now nothing but a pile of charred timbers, melted glass, and broken bricks. The blackened branches of a scorched sycamore reached out toward it as if in consolation.
“Any special reason you wanted to come back here?” Carter asked. “Were you expecting some mail?”
“You laugh,” Del said, “but I was living here lately.”
Carter stopped. “You were what?”
“Living here,” Del said, treading carefully through the ruins, his eyes on the ground.
“Why? What was so bad about your sister’s million-dollar condo on Wilshire Boulevard?”
“It was a million-dollar condo on Wilshire Boulevard. It gave me the willies just being there. Out here, I didn’t have a valet trying to park my truck, I didn’t have horns honking all night down on the street, I didn’t have my brother-in-law freaking out every time I tried to play some Willie Nelson on his sound system.”
“Out here you didn’t have a sound system,” Carter pointed out.
“I had a battery-operated boom box,” Del said, stopping in front of a blob of twisted black plastic, the size of a toaster now. “And this was it.”