Not all the lava events were trivial garage-sized ones. A few fissures as big as three blocks wide opened and sent broad sheets of molten matter rolling like rivers down main thoroughfares. That was when the Icelanders showed up to give advice about cooling the lava with hoses. Teams like Mattison’s were called out to build lava dams, sometimes right across the middle of a big street, so that the flow would back up behind the new rock instead of continuing right on into the towns to the west—or, perhaps, into Los Angeles proper, the city itself, still far away and untouched on the other side of the Golden State Freeway. The dams did the trick; but they had the unfortunate side effect of walling off the Zone behind ugly and impassable barriers of solid black basalt.
Today’s route takes Mattison and Company on a grand tour of the entire Zone. Freeway travel is a joke in these parts once you get anywhere east of Rosemead Boulevard, and there are new lava-created dead ends all over the place on the surface streets, and so it takes real ingenuity, and a lot of backing and filling, to make a short trip like the one from Arcadia to San Dimas, which once would have been a quick buzz down the 210 Freeway. Now it’s necessary to backtrack down Santa Anita around the new outbreaks on Duarte Road, and then to come up Myrtle in Monrovia to the 210, and take the freeway as far east as it goes before it gets plugged up by last month’s uncleared lava, which is not very far down the road at all; and then comes a lot of cockeyed wandering this way and that on surface streets, north to south and north again, through such towns as Duarte and Azusa and Covina and Glendora, places that no Angeleno ordinarily would be going in a million years, in order to get to the equally unknown municipality of San Dimas, which is just a couple of hops away from Pomona.
The landscape becomes more and more hellish, the further east they go.
“Look at all this shit,” Nicky Herzog keeps saying, over and over. “Look at it! This is fucking hopeless, you know? We all ought to give up and move to fucking Seattle.”
“Rains all the time,” says Paul Foust.
“You like lava better than rain? You like fucking black ashes falling from the sky?”
“We don’t give up,” Nadine Doheny says dreamily. “We keep on keeping on. We are grateful for everything we have.”
“Grateful for the volcanoes,” Herzog says, in wonder. “Grateful for the ashes. Is that what you think?”
“Leave her alone,” Mattison warns him. Nadine’s conversation is made up mostly of recovery mantras, and that bothers the flippant, sharp-tongued Herzog. But Doheny is right and Herzog, smart as he is, is wrong. We don’t give up. We don’t run away. We stand our ground and fight and fight and fight.
Still and all, the Zone looks awful and even after all this time he has not grown used to its hideousness. There are piles of ashes everywhere, making it seem as if a black snowfall had hit the area, and also, not quite as universally distributed but nevertheless impossible to overlook, little encrustations of cooled lava, clinging to houses and pavements like some sort of dark fungus. Light dustings of pumice drift on the breeze. The sky is white with accumulated smoke that today’s winds have not yet been able to blow out toward Riverside. Where major fires have burned, whole blocks of rubble pockmark the scene.
The truck has to detour around all sorts of lesser obstacles: spatter cones, small hills of tephra, lapilli and cinders and lava bombs and other forms of ejected volcanic junk, et cetera, et cetera. Occasionally they pass an active fumarole that’s enthusiastically belching smoke. Around it, Mattison knows, are piles of dead bugs, ankle-deep, killed by gusts of live steam or poisonous vapors. The fumaroles are surrounded also by broad swaths of mud that somehow has been flung up around their rims, often quite colorful mud at that, green or pink or red from alum deposits, bright yellow where sulfur crystals abound. Sometimes the yellow is laced with streaks of orange or blue, and sometimes, where the mud is very blue, it is splotched in a highly decorative way by a crust of rich chestnut-brown.
“It’s like fairyland, isn’t it?” Mary Maude Gulliver cries out, suddenly. “It’s like something out of Tolkien!”
“Crazy hooer,” Lenny Prochaska mutters. “I’d like to give you a fairyland, you hooer.”
Mattison shushes him. He smiles at Mary Maude. It’s hard to see this place as a fairyland, all right, but Mary Maude is one of a kind. Give her credit for accentuating the positive, anyway.
Aside from the mineral incrustations in the mud, the Zone shows color where the ground itself has been cooked by the heat of some intense outbreak from below. That ranges from orange and brick red through bright cherry red to purple and black, with some lively streaks of blue. But this show of color is the only trace of what might be called beauty anywhere around. Every building is stained with mud and ash. There are hardly any live trees or garden plants to be seen, just blackened trunks with shriveled leaves still hanging from the branches.
There aren’t many people still living in these neighborhoods. Most of those who could afford it have packed up all their worldly possessions and had them carted off to new homes outside the Zone and, in a good many cases, outside the state altogether. A lot of those at the very bottom of the income ladder have cleared out also, moving to the new Federal relocation camps that have been set up in downtown L.A., Valencia, Mojave, the Angeles National Forest, and anyplace else where there was no irate householders’ association to take out an injunction against it. The remaining residents of the Zone, mainly, are the lower-middle-income people, the ones who haven’t yet lost their houses but couldn’t afford to hire moving companies and aren’t quite poor enough to qualify for the camps. They are still squatting here, grimly guarding their meager homes against looters, and hoping against hope that the next round of lava outbreaks will happen on any street but their own.
Just how desperate some of these people are getting is something Mattison discovers when the truck’s erratic route around the various obstacles takes it through a badly messed-up segment of a barrio somewhere between Azusa and Covina and they see some kind of pagan religious sacrifice under way in the middle of a four-way intersection, where the pavement has begun to bulge slightly and show signs of imminent buckling as gas pressure builds from below. Flat slabs of blue-black lava have been piled up in the crosswalk to form a sort of rough, ragged-edged altar that has been surrounded by green boughs torn from nearby trees.
What is evidently a priest—but not any sort of Catholic priest; his dark face is painted with green and red stripes and he is wearing a brilliant Aztec-looking costume, bright feathers and strips of fur all over it—is standing atop the altar, grasping a gleaming butcher-knife in his hand. The altar is stained with blood, and more is about to be added to it, because two other men in less gaudy outfits than the priest’s are at his side, holding forth to him a wildly fluttering chicken. Assorted pigs, sheep, and birds are lined up back of the altar, waiting their turn. In a wider circle around the site are perhaps fifty shabbily dressed men, women, and children, silent, stony-faced, holding hands and slowly, rhythmically stamping their feet.
The nature of the thing that is taking place here is utterly obvious right away to everyone aboard the Citizens Service House truck. Even so, it isn’t always easy to believe the evidence of your eyes when you see something like this. Mattison stares in shock and disbelief, wondering whether they have slipped through some time-fault and have dropped down into an ancient era, primitive and barbaric. But no, no, prosaic evidence of the modern century can be seen on every side, lampposts, store fronts, billboards. It’s just what’s going on in the middle of the street that is so exceedingly strange.
“Holy fucking shit,” Buck Randegger says. He’s a former highway construction worker who has been substance-free about four months and is, much like this lava altar, still plenty rough around the edges. “I thought the fucking Mexicans in this town were supposed to be Christians, for Christ’s sake.”
“We are,” Annette Perez tells him icily. “And also other things, when we have to be. Sometimes both at the
same time.” The butcher-knife descends in a fierce arc, the newly headless chicken flaps its wings insanely, the crowd of worshippers jumps up and down and cries out three times in a high-pitched ecstatic way, and Randegger expresses his disgust and amazement at the whole weird pagan scene with a maximum of pungency and a minimum of political correctness. For a moment it looks as though Perez is going to jump at him, and Mattison gets ready to intervene, but she simply shoots Randegger a black glare and says, “If this was your neighborhood, carajo, and you had a god, wouldn’t you want to ask him to stop this shit?”
“With pigs? With sheep?”
“With whatever would do it,” she says.
Gibbons, meanwhile, is backing the truck out of the intersection, since the assembled congregation now is staring at them as though their presence here is quite unwelcome and it seems manifestly not a good idea to try to drive any closer. Mattison, taking one last look over his shoulder, sees a small pig being led up the side of the altar. The truck swings left at the first corner, then takes the next right and right again, which brings it around to the far side of the site of the ceremony in the same moment as a little earthquake goes rippling through the vicinity, 3.5 or so, just enough to make the gaunt blackened palm trees that line the street start swaying. The worshippers in the intersection behind them glower and point at the truck as it reappears, and begin to scream and yell furiously and shake their fists, and then Mattison hears some popping sounds.
“Hit the gas,” he tells Gibbons over his suit radio. “They’re shooting at us.”
Gibbons speeds up. The street ahead is carpeted with a layer of loose ash maybe two feet deep, but Gibbons ploughs through it anyway, sending up swirling black clouds that make everybody on the open deck close the faceplates of their suits in a hurry. Beyond the ash is a stretch of crunchy cinders and other sorts of tephra, so that they all grab hold of each other and hang on tight as the truck clanks and jounces onward, and then a little newly congealed lava in the road makes the ride even rougher; but after that the street turns normal again for a while and they can relax, as much relaxation as may be possible while you ride in an open truck through territory that no longer looks like just a suburb of Hell, but the Devil’s own back yard.
There have been repeated outbreaks of tectonic activity here before, early on in the crisis—that much is obvious from the burned-out houses and the black crusts of old lava everywhere and the ashen landscape—but something new and big is apparently getting ready to happen. The sky here is dead white from thick upwellings of steam and sulfurous fumes, except where the fumes are coal black. Streaks of lightning keep jumping around and the ground trembles continuously, as if a non-stop earthquake is going on. The sidewalks are warped and bulging in many places and some little red tongues of lava can be seen beginning to ooze from cracks in the pavement. Every few minutes a dull distant boom can be heard, a muffled sound that definitely gets your attention, something like the fart of a dinosaur that might be sauntering around a few blocks away.
Three or four weary-looking fire crews and some Guardsmen are slowly taking up positions in the street and getting their gear into order; some of the biggest pumps Mattison has ever seen have already been hauled into place for the lava-cooling work; police helicopters are whirling overhead, booming down orders to whatever remaining population may still be living here to evacuate the area at once. It is a truly precarious scene. Mattison is ever so happy that he traded the horrors of substance abuse for the privilege of visiting places like this.
The same thing is occurring to some of his companions, evidently. Blazes McFlynn lays his hand on Mattison’s right arm and says, “I didn’t sign on for any goddamned suicide missions, Matty. Let me off this fucking truck right now.”
“Let you off?” Mattison says mildly.
“Fucking A. I want out, this very minute.”
Mattison sighs. McFlynn always makes trouble, sooner or later: if only he had known that this San Dimas operation was going to be tacked on to the day’s outing, he probably would have opted to leave McFlynn behind at the outset. McFlynn is, of all goofy things, a bombed-out circus acrobat and pensioned-off movie stunt man, strong as a tow-truck winch, who over the course of time has found relief from stress in a whole smorgasbord of addictive substances and now—having very badly broken his leg while winning a moronic barroom bet that involved jumping off the top of a building, thereby acquiring a severe limp that makes it hard for him to practice either of his professions, draws generous compensation pay from a variety of governmental sources while undergoing one of his periodic spells of detoxification and Citizens Service. His first name is actually Gerard, but if you call him anything but Blazes he will react unpleasantly. He is the only man in the house for whom Mattison in his pre-sober state would have felt any reticence about decking, for McFlynn, though some five inches shorter than Mattison, is probably just about as dangerous in a fight, gimpy leg and all.
“Are you saying,” Mattison asks him once more, “that you don’t want to take part in the current operation?”
“The whole street is going to blow any minute.”
“Maybe so. That’s why we’re here, to get things under control if it does. You want to walk back from here to Silver Lake? You think you’ll catch a bus, maybe, or phone for a cab? The option of your departing this operation simply does not exist at this moment, okay, McFlynn?” McFlynn tries to say something, but Mattison talks right over him, although keeping his voice mild, mild, mild, as he has been taught to do all the time when addressing the inmates, no matter what the provocation. “You find this work not to your liking, well, when you get your cowardly ass back to the house tonight you can tell Donna that you don’t want to do volcano work any more, and she’ll take you off the list. You aren’t any fucking prisoner, you understand? You don’t have to do this stuff against your will and in fact you are perfectly free, if you like, to pack up and leave the house tomorrow and go back to your favorite substance, for that matter. But not today. Today you work for me, and we work in San Dimas.”
McFlynn, who surely was aware when he began complaining that this was where the discussion was going to end, is just starting to crank up a disgruntled and obscene capitulation when Gibbons says, over the radio from the truck cab, “Volcano Central wants us to start setting up the pump, Matty. Satellite scan says there’s a lava bulge about to blow two blocks east of us down Bonita Avenue, which is the big street straight in front of us, and we’re supposed to dam it up as soon as it comes our way.” So they are going to be right on the front line, this time. Fine, Mattison thinks. Hot diggety damn.
They all get off the truck, and seal up their suits, and set about getting ready to deal with the oncoming eruption.
Because the pump they will be using this time is a jumbo job, just about the biggest one Mattison has ever worked with, he designates not only Prochaska and Hawks, once again, for the pumping crew, but also Clyde Snow and Blazes McFlynn, who will be up front not only because he’s strong but also because Mattison wants to keep a close eye on him. In any case he’s going to need all the muscle-power he can get when it becomes necessary to swing that big rig around to keep the shifting lava penned up. He puts the generally reliable Paul Foust in charge of the controls that operate the pump itself. The rest—Randegger, Herzog, Evans, and the three women, Doheny and Perez and Gulliver—Mattison deploys at various points along the line to the standpipe, so that they can keep the hose from getting tangled and cope with any other interruptions to the flow of water that might arise.
Everybody is in place none too soon. Because just as the signal arrives from the rear that the water connection has been made, there comes an all too familiar bellowing and groaning from the next block, as though a giant with a bad bellyache is about to cut loose, and then Mattison hears five sharp heavy grunts in succession, oof oof oof oof oof, followed by an eerie crackling sound, and suddenly the air is full of fire.
It’s like one of the Yellowstone geysers, except th
at what is being flung up is a lot of tiny bits of hot lava riding on a plume of bluish steam, and for a couple of moments it’s impossible to see more than a few feet in front of your face-plate. Then there is one single booming sound, not muffled at all but sharp and hard, and the bluish geyser of steam in front of them triples or quadruples in height in about half a second, and the pavement ripples beneath their feet as though an earthquake has happened precisely in this spot. Mattison comprehends that there has been a terrific explosion a very short way down the block and they are all about to be hurled sky-high, or maybe are already on their way up to the stratosphere and just haven’t had time to react yet.
But they aren’t. What has happened is that an underground gas pocket has blown its head off, yes, but it has done it in one single clean whoosh and all the pent-up junk that is being released has taken off for Mars as a coherent unit, the steam and mud and lava bits and whatnot rising straight up and vanishing, clearing the air beautifully behind it. A couple of good-sized lava bombs go soaring past them, fizzing like fireworks, and come down with thick plopping thunks somewhere not far away, but they don’t seem to do any damage; and then things are quiet, pretty much. The whole blurry geyser that was spewing straight up in front of them is gone, the ground they are standing on is still intact, and they can see again.
Mattison has just about enough time to realize that he has survived the explosion when he registers the force of an inrush of cool air that’s swooping in from all sides to fill the gap where the geyser had been. It isn’t strong enough to knock anybody down, but it does make you want to brace yourself pretty good.