Boom. Another explosion shakes the street to her left. She needs to get away from here now. She runs. Burning cars clog the road as shell-shocked people mill around like zombies. Lola shouts at a group as she passes by: ‘If the exhaust turns black the car explodes! Tell everyone!’ They just look back at her dully.
She runs on, then realises she doesn’t know where she’s running to. She needs to get off the street, out of harm’s way, but her house is miles from here. Her grandfather’s place isn’t, it’s only twenty minutes away on foot, give or take. She inherited it a few months back. It’s empty, awaiting a renovation before it’s rented or sold. She could head there—
Boom. Another explosion shakes the air as she approaches an intersection. The smoking wrecks of three cars block the road. A telephone pole is on fire. Two bodies lie on the bitumen, burning. Smoke drifts across the road. It looks like a carefully staged scene from a Michael Bay extravaganza. It’s not. It’s real, and it’s the most terrible thing she has ever seen. She sprints past the horror and makes up her mind. She’s going to her grandfather’s place. Right now.
Doheny is gridlocked with cars, many on fire. How did this happen 50 fast? She must get word out about the exhaust. She wishes she’d embraced social media more wholeheartedly than the MySpace profile she’d never once updated. If she were on Twitter she could tell the world instantly.
Scott Ford. He has thirty-three million followers on Twitter. If he can tweet about the exhaust changing colour it could make a huge difference. She dials his number.
Boom! An explosion right behind her. She’s hit hard in the back, slapped to the ground, the wind knocked out of her. Her ears ring as she gulps air, tries to catch her breath, looks back through the smoke, sees she was struck by a car seat — with a young guy still strapped to it. That’s not good. She takes a moment to recover her composure, stands shakily and checks the guy. He’s dead.
Smash. That’s not an explosion. She turns. A young white man sprints towards her from a shattered shop window cradling what looks like a Nespresso coffee machine. A shopkeeper, an older Asian gentleman with a severe buzz cut, swings out of the store’s front door and aims a pistol at him — as he runs right past her.
‘Oh shit!’ Lola ducks low. The shopkeeper fires and Nespresso man is hit in the back of the leg and drops the machine, which shatters on the ground beside her. Nespresso man keeps moving, limp-runs away as the shopkeeper brandishes the weapon and screams after him in Korean.
This is insane. Lola stands, keeps her head low, passes the shopkeeper and runs on. She remembers watching the 1992 LA riots on television when she was a kid and never forgot the crazy mob mentality that spiralled out of control and killed, if she remembered correctly, fifty people. Whatever’s happening in the city right now has the potential to be worse than that. She can feel it.
She realises even her grandfather’s house is too far away. She needs to get off the street now. She scans the area, searches for a place to take refuge, if only temporarily, that isn’t a store or a house with a gun-toting owner on the lookout for looters.
A tall white and blue building appears through the smoke that blankets the street, maybe three hundred metres away. It has — she counts — six floors. Is it an office building? Whatever it is she’s sure she’ll be safer inside it than out here. She can wait for things to cool down a little, make some calls, get Scott to tweet about the black exhaust.
Boom. Another explosion shocks the air. She feels the sting of debris on her cheek. Man, that was close! She sprints towards the building, cuts through the haze, fear turning in her chest. If she can just get to it in one piece she’ll be right. She’ll be right. Corey said it last night when she blew him off. She wonders if he’s all right now. She wants to call him, make sure he’s okay, but, really, would he even pick up? He didn’t even want to be friends. Then she remembers he doesn’t have a mobile phone.
The building looms out of the haze and suddenly she’s in front of it. She scans the flagstone wall for a way in but can see no obvious doors or windows—
There! What’s that? She sees a vehicle has hit the building, dented a metal roller door and created a gaping hole. There’s no one inside the car and both doors are open, surely the first time a Mercedes Gullwing has been abandoned with keys in the ignition.
She has a way in, except she’ll need to roll the Merc out of the hole to gain access. She leans in, thumps the gearbox into neutral, releases the handbrake until it clears the hole where the dented roller door has pulled away from its tracks, leaves herself a half-metre gap, then pulls on the handbrake again. She ducks low, works her way through the hole and enters the building.
She instantly feels safer; the explosions outside now remote. She looks around, realises it isn’t an office building, it’s a self-storage facility. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around. She knew these kinds of places didn’t need many people to operate but she’d have thought there’d be at least one person there, just to keep an eye on the joint?
Boom. The explosion is vast, comes from her left and blows in part of the flagstone wall. She’s knocked to the floor.
Crunch.
‘Ahhh!’ Something very heavy lands on her left leg. The pain is horrible and instantly she feels dizzy. She can’t see anything through the haze of smoke and dust and she can’t move either — she’s pinned to the ground. The dizziness gets the better of her and she decides she just might have a little nap. As she closes her eyes she wonders if she’ll ever open them again.
20
The Baldwin Hills Overlook offers a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Los Angeles. Actually it’s not quite three hundred and sixty degrees, more like three hundred and twenty, but you can pretty much see everything that’s going on in the city.
Bunsen stands atop the overlook and takes in the destruction he has wrought. Phase Two has been a total success. The Swarm has performed exactly as intended, though watching it work its terrible magic has been difficult. The human toll — just an abstract idea previously — is very real to him now. Even so, he has no regrets.
The plan was, simply, to make people switch off their combustion engines. That’s why the Swarm was designed to turn a vehicle’s exhaust purple as soon as the engine was infected, then black before it exploded. It was a warning, so people understood that if they didn’t turn off their engines they would die. Of course, for the warning to be effective, some people needed to die early in the process.
Kilroy didn’t agree with this. Even though he is a stone-cold killer with years of experience in the ways and means of death, he baulks at hurting anyone he believes is innocent. That’s why he wanted Bunsen to release the video this morning. Kilroy had created a two-minute Flash animation that explained the virus, what the purple and black colour of the exhaust meant, told people to turn off their combustion engines before there was any chance they could explode and urged them to leave Los Angeles ASAP.
Kilroy wanted to post it online and send it to all the news outlets before the Swarm was released but Bunsen overruled him, explaining that the threat needed to be real and obvious or it would have no power. Bunsen did, however, promise to release it before Phase Three, and he expects Kilroy to remind him of that as soon as he returns from dealing with Alvy.