“Hey!” a distant voice called. “Stop that!”
They looked through the fence. Three middle-aged men in bright-colored shirts and pants were playing golf, totally oblivious to the evacuation. One of them was waving his golf club angrily at them.
“Didn’t you hear the news?” James called. “There’s a tsunami coming in.”
“Don’t you believe it,” one of them called back. “Just another drill.”
“Fake news,” muttered the second.
The third said, “I’d rather die golfing than running—”
“Have it your way,” said James, pulling up his pants, and suddenly doubting. What if they were right—?
No. They were wrong, he wished he could believe them, but they were wrong—and in a couple hours, they’d find out how wrong. He wondered if they’d make it to the eighteenth hole in time, shook his head in disbelief, turned back to Hu. “Idiots.”
Hu smiled weakly. “Suddenly, I don’t feel so stupid.”
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
Refreshed by their rest, rehydrated by the water, they made it to the crest of the hill, then half-coasted, half-pedaled down the other side.
They continued east on Wilshire Boulevard, past the Beverly Hilton Hotel to where it crisscrossed Santa Monica Boulevard. Navigating the wide diagonal intersection with Santa Monica wasn’t as hard as James feared. Traffic was inching along here, but there was still room to thread the bikes between the ranks of cars.
Wilshire was a straight line east from there, a gilded belt around the waist of Beverly Hills, lined with elegant palm trees. Much of the traffic here was turning north at every opportunity, aiming for Benedict Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, any higher ground at all. A lesser but steady stream of vehicles pushed eastward and inland. At an average speed of ten miles per hour, there was still a chance for most of them to survive.
Overhead, the sky was filled with more helicopters than either James or Hu had ever seen. Police, news, rescue, fire, military, and private services as well. Some were monitoring, others were evacuating.
Here, the sidewalks were wide enough, they had room to ride—they were an incongruous sight pedaling through the most elegant district in Los Angeles. Elegant—and doomed. All the surrounding communities that kept these businesses thriving would be gone in less than two hours.
As James and Hu pedaled steadily east, they heard a continuous drone of chattering voices leaking from the radios of the vehicles they passed, bits of audio flotsam that refused to assemble into any kind of coherent narrative.
Here the pedestrian traffic was lighter. There were other cyclists on the road and on the sidewalk, but not a lot. Motorcycles growled between the rows of cars. Three people on Segways rolled past them. And surprisingly—for this neighborhood, anyway—they even saw a pair of homeless women, determinedly pushing their overloaded shopping carts eastward. There were buses too, all kinds, packed and overloaded, some with people even riding on the roofs, something Hu had never expected to see in America.
If anyone had expected last-minute desperate looting of Wilshire Boulevard’s elegant storefronts, they would have been disappointed. Even those who might have been tempted were seeing survival as a much more useful priority.
The day was growing hotter, and this far inland, the hot yellow sun was shaded by a smoggy brown haze—a rising cloud of dust, stirred up by a million vehicles.
For some reason, James was reminded of a scene from Disney’s Fantasia. The “Rite of Spring” segment. All those thirsty dinosaurs, plodding slowly east across an orange desert, toward a sanctuary that didn’t exist, eventually dropping to the dirt and dying, leaving only their whitened bones as evidence they had ever existed. He wondered what future archaeologists would be digging up here, a thousand, ten thousand years in some unimaginable future.
“James?”
“Huh?”
“Are you all right?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine.”
“It’s time to stop. Drink some more water.”
James shook his head to clear it. He rolled to a stop. Hu was right.
But they’d made it down the hill, past the golf course, past the Hilton, past the intersection, even past the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. What was that—two miles? Three? Whatever. He was starting to feel the exertion—not tired, not exhausted, but definitely, his muscles were tightening. He hoped Hu wouldn’t mention the trailers again. He might be tempted to give in.
But Hu said nothing. He passed James a water bottle. James had to resist the temptation to gulp it all down. Instead, he sipped carefully, once, twice, a third time. “Where are we?” he asked, looking around.
“We just passed Robertson. We’ve still got another couple miles.” Hu burrowed into his pack. “Do you want a protein bar?”
James nodded, held out his hand. He unwrapped the little granola brick and hesitated with the wrapper—then he realized how little difference it would make if he found a trash can here in Beverly Hills or not and let it fall to the sidewalk. He chewed and swallowed slowly.
Hu grabbed a water bottle and a protein bar for himself as well. “Do you think the tsunami is going to get this far?”
James didn’t answer immediately. He chewed thoughtfully. “Well… if this wave is as big as the president said, a hundred feet high, it’ll certainly get as far as the 405, but how much farther, I dunno, that’s a lot of water. If it was less, then the 405 would be a pretty good breakwater—except around LAX, of course. The airport’s just gonna disappear. But—” James frowned, picturing the geographical layout of the basin in his head. “But I don’t think the 405 will stop it. Might slow it down a bit, but a lot of water is still going to get over it, under it, through it.” He took another bite, still thinking. “Y’know, those underpasses are bottlenecks, they’re going to generate a lot of pressure, all that water trying to force through. Anything directly east of any of them is probably gonna take a hit, and if the pressure is strong enough, the overpasses will certainly blow off. So yeah—it’s gonna get this far. A hundred feet—it’s just too much water.”
Hu looked west, toward the beach, as if he could already see the onrushing catastrophe. He looked at his watch. “How far east do we have to get?”
James shrugged. “It’s not just one wave. It could be several waves. You haven’t seen the footage I’ve seen, from Sumatra and Fukushima. It’s not what you think. It’s not like a wave at the seashore, just bigger. It’s like the whole ocean rises up in a flash flood that comes in for… I don’t know, an hour? Maybe more? All that water pushing in behind. It has to go someplace, the path of least resistance.
“It’s gonna hit hard, really hard. It’s gonna knock loose, knock down, knock out everything it hits, pushing it all forward, like a horizontal avalanche. Everything loose, cars, boats, buses, everything that breaks free, trees and billboards and lamp posts, everything that collapses, houses, stores, buildings. All that water, it’s going to drive that in like the front end of a bulldozer.
“It’s gonna be bad. Real bad. Maybe those golfers had the right idea. Do what you love doing, right up to the end.” He took another bite and waited for Hu’s response.
Hu looked nervously to his watch, then back to James. “We’re not gonna make it, are we? I mean, with Pearl. Where she is, she’s awfully far from any hills—and we’re running out of time.”
“I know—” James said. He took another thoughtful bite, chewed for a moment, then spoke with his mouth half full. “But I’ve been thinking. There’s that big black building, less than two blocks from Pearl’s house. It’s what?—ten stories high. We can get there, easy-peasy. The top two floors should be high enough.”
“What about the bulldozer—?”