Kirstie sagged against a wall. “Oh God.”
A few minutes later, she and Sam and Einar and fourteen other people were walking through the darkened streets. Candles burned in a few houses, but most looked deserted. From one pitch-black house, though, music blared; shadowy figures stood on the front porch, smoking dope and giggling. In a dark back yard, a dog howled.
Above the housetops to the west, fire pulsed under orange-and-black clouds of smoke. Fine soot stung their eyes and tasted bitter.
Kirstie, Sam and Einar led the others up several blocks to the Co-op. It was a big building, part of a chain of consumer-owned supermarkets in the Bay Area. They were surprised to see its beige facade was glaringly illuminated by floodlights from a big white van parked near the entrance. Across the sides of the van was written: KSRA ACTION NEWS — All the News for Sacramento!
A reporter stood on the sidewalk, with a cameraman and sound girl behind him, and a cluster of uniformed National Guardsmen between him and the entrance to the market. The reporter was interviewing their commanding officer, a young lieutenant who looked self-conscious. Standing around the van were dozens of civilians, most of them shouting angrily.
“I realize it seems unfair,” the lieutenant was saying to the reporter, “but our mission here is to protect property. It’s other people’s job to look after persons in distress. I’m sorry if that disappoints some of these individuals, but that’s our job.”
Kirstie shouldered past a guardsman and tapped the lieutenant on the arm, ignoring the news crew.
“Lieutenant, I must insist that you allow us into the market.” He gaped at her, startled as much by her Scottish-schoolmistress accent as by her boldness. “I have to feed five hundred homeless and injured people.”
The young officer’s girlish mouth set hard. “I have my orders, ma’am, and those orders are to prevent looting. The Office of Emergency Services will be in action here as soon as possible, and that means your people will be looked after. Now would you please move on.”
“I will not move on.”
He turned and walked stiffly away; Kirstie would have followed him, but the reporter turned his attention to her. He was a boyish, curly-haired man in baggy jeans, a leather coat and rimless glasses.
“You say you’re trying to feed five hundred people? Where are they? What kind of shape are they in?”
She hesitated, imagining the effect of TV cameras and inane questions on the people in the schoolyard. They’d gone through enough without having to entertain viewers sitting comfortably in undamaged homes far away.
“Many of them are badly hurt, even dying,” she said at last.
The reporter put down his microphone, and his cameraman stopped taping. “My name’s Jason Schwartz, KSRA News. Could we see these people? Maybe interview some of them?”
“I don’t think that would do much good, Mr. Schwartz. — No, wait a moment. If you’ll help us, you can interview anyone you like.”
“How?”
“Take us somewhere, where there’s food. A market, a warehouse — I don’t care. And help us bring the food back in your truck.”
“Are you asking us to help you loot some unprotected store?” grinned the cameraman.
“No, to help us feed some unprotected people.”
“Why not?” asked the sound girl. The reporter nodded slowly.
“I can see the humanitarian angle,” he said. “Sure. We can only take three or four of you, though.”
“That’s fine.” She told the volunteers to go back and help get the cafeteria ready; then she and Sam and Einar climbed into the back of the van. The cameraman got in behind the wheel and doused the floodlights on the roof; the guardsmen were left to protect the Co-op in almost total darkness.
“Never seen anything like this,” Jason Schwartz said over his shoulder, one arm resting comfortably on the sound girl’s shoulder. “We got tape you wouldn’t believe. We came on down Interstate Eighty into Richmond, and boy, you should’ve seen those tank farms burning!”
“It was really, you know, far out,” said the sound girl. “Like almost a religious experience, you know?”
“Shut up, Michelle. Listen, if we get a chance before the chopper pickup we’ll run some of that tape for you guys. Just un-fuckin-believable. These big, big, orange flashes, you know, and the stuff pouring like lava down into the bay, sort of like the last days of Pompeii, you know? Wow, and we got really, really close; there wasn’t any police or firefighters there. I seriously think we got a chance for an award.”
They had turned south onto Sacramento and were driving past block after block of two-and three-story apartment buildings. Candles glowed dimly in many of the windows. The only stores they saw were small convenience markets and corner groceries; most had been looted, except for a few guarded by armed civilians.
Then they were in Oakland; the apartment buildings here were older, taller and grimier, interspersed with used-car lots and funeral homes and Polynesian restaurants. To the south, fires reflected pink and orange off the low overcast, silhouetting the high-rise towers of downtown Oakland. A few fires burned just ahead, but no sirens wailed and no one moved in the streets. All the apartment windows were black.
“Christ!” The cameraman jammed on the brakes, too late, and the truck bounced over two bodies in the middle of the street.
“Fred, Fred, stop!” yelled the reporter. “That’s hit-and-run, for Christ’s sake!”
“Shit, Jason, they were already dead. Look, oh God, the whole fucking street is full of ‘em.”
He slowed to a stop. In the truck’s high beams, the street and sidewalk ahead were littered with bodies. They lay in heaps and singly; their clothes looked strangely tattered and discoloured, and their skins were mottled. A black woman had fallen from the door of the taxi she’d been driving. Her face was puffy and looked scarred. Two dachshunds lay stiffly beside a boy of nine or ten. The air was sharp with the smell of chlorine.
“Like Jonestown,” Jason whispered. “Jesus. Fred, get your camera.”
“My eyes sting. I think we should get outa here.”
“The hell with your eyes. C’mon.”
Kirstie and Sam and Einar talked quietly while the others got their gear together.
“This is the chlorine spill,” Sam murmured. “God knows if it’ll get thick again. A shift in the wind and we could all be dead.”
“Oh God,” said Kirstie. “That’s why their skin is like that, and their clothes are in shreds. It was raining. Some of the chlorine must have formed hydrochloric acid.”
“It could start eating the hell out of our tires,” Sam murmured. “We’d better get out of here while we can still move.”
“There’s a supermarket on the corner,” Kirstie said. “If we’re quick and lucky, maybe we can get what we need.”
She turned and started walking quickly towards the supermarket. Behind her she heard Sam and Einar following, and Jason’s voice as he improvised a report. Fred’s floodlights threw her shadow ahead of her.
The supermarket’s entrance was piled with dead people, men, women, children, lying among spilled shopping carts and scattered groceries. Their faces were puffy, mottled and contorted in the light of her flash. The doors to the market were open, but barricaded by corpses.
Kirstie stopped. The men caught up with her.
“I can’t go in there,” she said. “I’m sorry — it’s — I’d have to—”
“We will go around,” said Einar. “In the back.”
There were all coughing: pockets of chlorine trapped between buildings were embittering the air. At the rear of the supermarket, an alley led to a loading dock. Two men in blue coveralls were curled up on the dock; their eyes glinted in the beam of the flashlight.