The Walk

CHAPTER TWELVE

12:32 p.m. Wednesday

Marty was anxious to leave and wasn’t going to wait around to have his wound stitched up. He did his bit for the disaster relief effort and wanted to get moving before they tried to get him to do more. There was still the Santa Monica Mountains and a smog-choked valley between him and Beth.

He got up and looked for Buck, which meant he had to wander among the wounded with his eyes open and his head up, really seeing their faces for the first time. They were all the same. It didn’t matter whether they were injured or not, or how seriously they were hurt. They all shared the same body language, the same expression. It wasn’t terror, sorrow, or pain, though there was plenty of that, too. They all looked lost. Everything they were connected to was gone. Their homes, their jobs, their families, their own bodies, the ground beneath their feet, all shattered.

Marty remembered walking away from that collapsed overpass after rescuing Franklin. The first thing he noticed was Bob Baker’s Marionette Theatre and he couldn’t figure out how or why it existed. Back then, he didn’t see the relevance of puppetry in a modern world. Now he did.

They were all puppets, animated by the properties, responsibilities, and relationships they were tied to, all the things that were missing now. The earthquake cut all those strings.

Marty knew he wasn’t any different. He was grasping for that one string he had left, the one that led back to Beth.

And Buck, he was holding on to the one thin string that kept him alive: his tough-guy, bounty hunter persona. He needed to be a hero, to constantly prove his guts, to make a decisive move in a life-or-death situation, which was why he probably went out of his way to create those situations when fate didn’t bother to.

At least that was Marty’s instant pop-psychology take on things. It was probably simplistic and too easy, but it was the best explanation he’d come up with yet for Buck’s impenetrable, one-dimensional personality.

He found Buck on a stretcher, giving blood, eating Oreos. It made Marty angry. Buck was the last person he expected to find lying around when they should be on the move.

“What are you doing? You already gave blood.”

“Actually, I didn’t. I was just eating their cookies.”

Marty glanced at his watch. It was nearly 1 o’clock and he still had a long way to go. “Damn it, Buck. Why couldn’t you have done this while I was doing it? Now it’s going to take twice as long to get out of here and I want to get going.”

“So go.”

It wasn’t a malicious retort. Buck said it casually, without malice or bitterness, taking Marty completely by surprise. Marty didn’t know what to make of it.

“You mean it?”

“They need me here. Giving blood. Crowd control. Guarding the cookies. Whatever. I want to do my part. Maybe I’ll even get one of those slick windbreakers.”

Buck was trying to look at something, but Marty was in the way. Marty followed Buck’s gaze, and saw Angie bending over a box of supplies, her back to them. It was a nice back.

“You really think you’ve got a chance with her?”

“Wrong question, kemosabe,” Buck grinned. “What you should be asking is: how long can she control her natural urges?”

Marty couldn’t recall anything Angie said or did that could have made Buck so hopeful. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she wasn’t the real reason Buck wanted to stay. It came back to strings. He might have found his here.

Buck was always looking for opportunities to prove his heroism and his courage, and this one was ready-made. And best of all, there was a woman he could impress doing it. If Buck was really lucky, maybe he’d even get a chance to shoot someone.

“But if you need me,” Buck said. “I’ll yank this fucking needle out of my arm right now and we’ll get the hell out of here.”

Marty smiled. Everything Buck just said seemed to confirm Marty’s conclusions about him. For the first time, he thought he really understood who Buck was.

“I think I’ll be all right. They need all the help they can get here and, unlike you, I’m too selfish to stay.”

“You got family responsibilities, Marty, that’s not selfish. That’s being a fucking man. I’ll catch up to you later, make sure everything is okay.”

“Any time, Buck.” Much to Marty’s surprise, he realized he actually meant it. “You know where I live. I’ll leave your name with the guard at the gate, assuming there’s still a guard and a gate.”

Buck held out his hand to Marty. “We’ve been through battle together. That’s a bond that can never be broken.”

Marty shook it, put some real emotion into it this time. Somewhere back there, Buck became his friend and now they both acknowledged it.

“This is the third time we’ve said good-bye,” Marty said. “I think we’re getting better at it.”

“Just try not to bring a big fucking wave down on me this time.”

Marty smiled and walked away, marveling at how strange his life had become. He’d just invited the guy who shot him to stop by his house any time.

Wait until Beth hears about that, he thought.

And then, for the first time since the earthquake, he had a good, hearty laugh.

1:00 p.m. Wednesday

Los Angeles wasn’t so much a city as it was the undefined space between many small towns that had grown too close together. Unless there was an obvious cultural landmark, like the Chinese Theatre or Rodeo Drive, it wasn’t always easy to know where you actually were.

Marty didn’t know when, exactly, he left Hollywood and entered West Hollywood. Had he been a few blocks north, on Santa Monica Boulevard, it would have been obvious.

From the east, West Hollywood began roughly where the Pussycat Theatre once stood. The theatre was still there, but around the time West Hollywood became a city, it transformed into the Tomcat, showing fare like I Love Foreskin, to better serve the community.

From the west, Doheny Drive was a definitive boundary line, with large signs on grassy plots on either end of the intersection informing travelers the instant they crossed into chic Beverly Hills or gay West Hollywood. The only thing missing was razor wire and a mine field.

But Marty was still heading west on Melrose, and indications weren’t as obvious. He assumed he was in West Hollywood only because he wanted to be that much closer to home.

He still couldn’t quite believe what had happened to him since he got out of bed. The most important thing on his mind that morning was Sally Sorenson’s exuberant nipples and what he was going to say about them in a Standards amp; Practices meeting that afternoon. He had no idea that instead of talking about “excess nipplage,” he’d be running down Gower Street, chased by 15 million tons of surging water.

Nothing in life, with the possible exception of disaster movies, prepared him for that, and in most ways, reality was stubbornly refusing to play by Irwin Allen’s sensible rules.

Wasn’t the day supposed to start with some wacky vignettes introducing him to the racially and morally diverse group of survivors he’d be stuck with?

Where were the doomed lovers, the conniving coward, the touching elderly couple, the idealistic fool, and the self-sacrificing innocent?

And shouldn’t his sexy love interest be at his side and not off-camera?

He stopped to stare at the enormous Pacific Design Center, an eleven story, block-long slab of cobalt blue glass known by most Angelenos as The Blue Whale. Behind it was a newer, taller, bright green companion monolith, known by most Angelenos as The Ugly Green Thing Behind The Blue Whale. To Marty they looked like huge, molded- plastic containers.

Just lift the lid and place people inside to preserve freshness!

Now both buildings looked as if they’d been dive-bombed by a squadron of architecture critics.

As Marty pondered the wreckage, another stark reminder of the immensity of the disaster he’d lived through, he wondered what his life would be like after this, how it would change him or if he was changed already. He was probably as irrevocably altered as the landscape around him. It was just too soon for him to know how extensive the damage was, or if it was really damage at all.

Marty started to walk away and immediately felt all that orange juice sloshing around inside him. So he stopped beside a pile of rubble, took a cursory glance around, opened his fly and pissed.

He was wondering why this didn’t mortify him the way crapping in public would, and why men always found it necessary to piss against something, when an angry voice broke into his irrelevant thoughts.

“Cut!”

At first, Marty thought he imagined it, channeling the spirit of a very disgruntled Irwin Allen. You’re doing this all wrong! Where’s the microcosm of society? Where are Shelley Winters and Red Buttons?

But then the voice was back, louder and angrier this time. “Cut, God-damn it, CUT!”

Marty finished, zipped up his pants, and turned around to see a small, three-man film crew on the sidewalk across the street.

The obese camera operator lowered his 35mm Arriflex and spit out a gob of chewing tobacco, nearly hitting his lanky assistant, who was lugging the camera pack, totally lost in a daze that probably began with the first rumble of the quake a day ago. They struck Marty as a post-apocalyptic Skipper and Gilligan.

The director was marching across the street towards Marty, who immediately pegged the guy for the job because the only thing he was carrying was attitude and the cigarette between his lips. This would be the post-apocalyptic Thurston Howell, only downsized and edgier for the new millennium.

“Really, you were marvelous. Very special. Now do you think you could do the exact same thing, only without pissing this time?”

“What was I doing?”

“You were mankind,” The director held up his hands in front of him, making the lower edges of a frame for himself with his index fingers and thumb. “I was panning down from the building and settling on your back, to give the destruction human scale, when you decided to whip out your schlong and piss.”

“Now you have human scale and irony. You rarely find that in stock footage. You should be thanking me.”

Based on the equipment Marty saw, and the subject matter, he figured they were shooting stock footage. It was Hollywood’s oldest little secret. Virtually every movie and TV show ever made used some uncredited footage shot by others and already seen many times before. But it was the very innocuousness of the footage that made it possible to get away with it without most viewers ever noticing.

Marty started to go when the director suddenly blocked his path.

“Wait a minute,” the director flicked away his cigarette stub and pointed to Marty’s bag. “You work at the network, don’t you?”

“No.”

“How did you know I was shooting stock footage?”

Marty couldn’t resist showing off. “A news crew would be using a video camera. You’re using 35mm film, no sound equipment, no lighting, no real crew, and you’re shooting a building and my back. It was an educated guess.”

He tried to sidestep him, but the director blocked his path again, whipping out a card.

“I’m Kent Beaudine, King of Stock Footage.”

Which is also what the card said, along with a drawing of a crown resting jauntily on top of a happy-faced film reel.

“You know the building in LA Law? That was mine,” Kent said. “You ever see that shot of the full moon with a wispy cloud passing in front of it? Mine. Spielberg, Coppola, Scorcese, they’ve all used it.”

“That’s nice,” Marty shouldered his way past him.

Kent motioned to his crew to stay put and fell into step beside him. “This is your lucky day.”

“Doesn’t feel like it to me.”

“I know what you mean. Today we’re witnessing a terrible tragedy and feeling the suffering of our fellow man.”

Kent slowed, sidelined by all that suffering. He lowered his head somberly to ponder it all.

Marty slowed, too, despite himself, and looked at Kent. At that instant, the director looked up, his face alight with enthusiasm, and pointed his finger at Marty. “But tomorrow it’s going to be a movie, we both know that. It’s just a question of who makes it first!”

Marty groaned and continued on his way.

Kent hurried up beside him. “And whoever does is going to have to recreate all of this.”

“The tragedy and human suffering.”

“That’s easy, it’s the massive destruction that’s hard. But you’ve got the inside track.”

“I don’t see how.”

“No one has ever had good earthquake footage before. Everything’s on video. It looks like shit, it never matches the rest of the movie. The audience knows right away it’s fake, so you’ve got to spend a fortune on model work and CGI. Not anymore. I’m shooting this on 35-millimeter film. This will be the first, feature quality stock footage of a cataclysmic earthquake. It’s going to be an evergreen. You’ll be seeing this film in movies and TV shows for the next thirty years. But you, Marty, can be the first to use it.”

Marty stopped. “How do you know my name?”

“It’s on your business card,” Kent tapped the laminated identification tag on the strap of Marty’s bag. “It looks embossed. Very impressive. I’ve been thinking of doing that.”

Marty suddenly had a notion, but it would take some investigation to see if it would work. “What kind of footage do you have?”

“Hollywood Boulevard submerged, the spires of the Chinese theatre poking through the mud. Geysers of fire shooting out of Farmer’s Market. The La Brea Tar pits swallowing up Wilshire Boulevard. That’s just for starters.”

Marty suspected it might be his lucky day after all, but not for the reasons Kent thought. “You did all of that shooting in just one day on foot?”

“Hell no,” Kent jerked his head towards his camera crew. “We used motorbikes.”

Marty followed his gaze. There were three motorbikes parked on the sidewalk just outside the spitting distance of the tobacco-chewing cameraman.

Yes, indeed, it was Marty’s lucky day. “Where are you going next?”

“I hear the Century City towers collapsed. Thousands of people died. It’s gotta look spectacular.”

“You ought to go to the valley.”

“Yeah, right, like anyone cares. You’ve seen one pancaked apartment building, you’ve seen them all.” Kent took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and offered it to Marty, who declined.

The director stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “I’m trying to get landmarks, or what’s left of them. That’s what people what to see destroyed. That’s what has emotional resonance and, more importantly, re-sellability. Why do you think asteroids in movies always hit the Chrysler Building or the Eiffel Tower?”

Kent took a deep drag and blew the smoke off to one side, away from Marty.

“You’re right, of course.” Marty said. “But I’ve got special needs. The movie I’m thinking about takes place in the valley and the city.”

“You’re thinking about a movie?”

“It’s about a guy who’s walking home from downtown LA to his family in the valley. The movie will shift between his wife and kids trying to survive in their ruined neighborhood and this guy’s heroic struggle to get back home.”

Kent thought about it a minute. “ Die Hard meets Cold Mountain.”

“More like The Odyssey meets Survivor. I see Tim Daly or Kevin Sorbo in the lead.”

“I like it. It’s fresh and original. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“If you were to shoot exactly what I needed, it wouldn’t be stock footage any more(it would be second unit work. You’d get a screen credit, maybe even a co-producer card.”

“But I would still own all the rights to the footage in perpetuity.”

“Absolutely.”

Kent smiled and put his arm around Marty. “Let’s go scout some locations.”

1:30 p.m. Wednesday

Beverly Hills was not a city, it was a theme park. And today, the attractions, gift shops, and concession stands of Wealthy World were closed.

Marty shared a motorbike with Kent, holding the director loosely by the sides, as they snaked their way around millions of dollars in leased German cars left abandoned on the buckled asphalt of Santa Monica Boulevard. The Skipper and Gilligan, carrying the equipment, followed right behind them on the other two motorbikes.

They passed solemn, armed police officers leaning against their shiny, black-and-white Surburbans, manning the barricades that sealed off Beverly, Rodeo, and Camden drives from intruders.

And yet, just across the street, beyond the grassy park that ran alongside Santa Monica Boulevard, hundreds of Beverly Hills residents were trapped under their five-car garages, waiting for help that Marty knew would never come. The cops were too busy rescuing Polo shirts and dragging Cartier watches to safety from the flattened stores.

Those streets and the shops on them were the Smithsonian of Beverly Hills, where ancient history was measured in increments on a parking meter; where a Prada bag and an Hermes scarf were artifacts of incalculable cultural, artistic, and scientific value, at least until the new fall lines came in; where the original kinescope of the I Love Lucy pilot, screened hourly in the Museum of Television and Radio, was as well guarded as the Mona Lisa.

Kent made a U-turn, steered the motorbike onto the park across from Rodeo Drive, and stopped, much to Marty’s annoyance. They had hardly covered any ground yet which, of course, was Marty’s only reason for riding along with the stock footage crew.

“Why are we stopping?” Marty asked.

“Rodeo Drive is dust, we can’t pass that up. It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire!” Kent hopped off the bike and motioned the Skipper and Gilligan to park alongside.

Marty sighed, resigning himself to the inevitable. Even with the occasional stop for filming, he’d still move faster with Kent and his motorbike than without him. He sat down on the edge of a large, concrete fountain in the park to wait Kent out.

Kent looked at ruptured asphalt and crumpled storefronts of Rodeo Drive through the frame he created with his hands and yelled at the Skipper. “Get a couple wide angles from here.”

The Skipper spit a gob of tobacco into the stagnant water in the fountain. “Without a crane, we aren’t gonna see much from here ’cept the barricades. We gotta get closer. Those are the money shots.”

“Just get the damn wide angle. I’ll have a chat with the local constabulary.” Kent took a deep drag on the small stub of cigarette he had left and exhaled slowly. “When I’m done sweet-talking them, they won’t just welcome us onto Rodeo Drive, they’ll help you carry the equipment.”

While Kent sauntered across the street to work on the cops, Marty glanced at the fountain he was sitting on. It was a round pool about a foot deep, surrounding a cracked statue of a stout, naked nymph holding an armful of squirming, open-mouthed fish. According to the plaque at the base, the antiquity was a gift to Beverly Hills from Cannes, their official “sister city” in France. They’d probably been waiting 400 years for someone to unload it on.

The Skipper peered through the eyepiece of the camera, then set it down on the ground, abandoning the shot in a huff. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to shoot anything with him standing there like that. He’s right in middle of the shot.”

Marty glanced back at Kent, who was waving his arms around, animatedly articulating a point to the stoic policemen. Kent didn’t seem to be making much headway, which meant they could be here a while.

The thought made Marty look over at Kent’s motorbike. The director had left the key in the ignition.

“You work at the network?” The Skipper asked Marty.

“Uh-huh.” Marty’s gaze hadn’t left the motorbike.

“I worked a camera on The Tortellis in ’87.” The Skipper spit a gob of chaw and watched it arc through the air until it plunked into the fountain water. “Some people confuse that with The Torkelsons because they were both NBC sitcoms that started with a ‘T.’ But they weren’t in the same league.”

Marty nodded like he was listening when, in fact, all he wanted to do was jump on the motorbike and speed off. A couple things stopped him from acting on the impulse. For one, he’d never driven a motorbike. For another, it probably wasn’t a bright idea to steal something in front of a camera and two police officers.

He shrugged off his pack and dropped it on the grass. Might as well get comfortable.

“ The Tortellis was from the guys who did Cheers.” The Skipper spit at Gilligan, just to see if he’d jump out of the way. He didn’t. The gob dribbled down Gilligan’s shirt, but the dazed assistant didn’t seem to notice. “It could have been Frasier, but it wasn’t. It sure as hell wasn’t The Torkelsons, though.”

The Skipper jammed some more tobacco into his mouth and watched Kent argue with the cops. Marty watched, too.

From the irritated look on the cops’ faces, it seemed if Kent tried to press his point any further, they’d gun him down. In a pique of anger, Kent flicked his cigarette stub at them and turned away.

The street exploded.

Marty toppled face-first into the fountain as a gale force wind of flame blasted through the cracked asphalt of Rodeo Drive and blew in all directions.

He felt the agony of the searing caress and heard the unearthly roar of the firestorm as it passed over him. His screams drowned in the water.

And then, only moments after it was ignited, the firestorm was gone, totally extinguished, absorbed into the air like a fine mist.

Marty immediately rolled over, his burning jacket hissing in the water. His back smoldered, red-hot needles of pain piercing deep into his flesh. He lay half-floating there for a long moment in shock, listening to the crackle of fire, astonished to be alive, trying to reconstruct what had just happened. He guessed that Kent’s cigarette stub ignited gas that had accumulated under Rodeo Drive from a leak somewhere. The jolt of the blast knocked Marty off-balance into the fountain, and the ring of concrete and the foot of water saved him. The firestorm passed right over his back, scalding his flesh.

It felt like someone tried to iron his shirt while he was still wearing it. But it could be much worse. If it hadn’t been for the two layers of wet clothing, he probably wouldn’t have any skin left on his back at all. Marty sat up slowly, grimacing in pain, and looked around.

After all the destruction he’d already seen, he thought he was past being stunned by the epic scale of the devastation, by the familiar rendered into something altogether different and nightmarish.

He was wrong.

Beverly Hills was a blazing wasteland. Buildings and cars and trees were consumed by fire. Flames licked out of a huge crater where the pavement once was, feeding on the last wisps of trapped gas escaping from below.

There was no sign of the Suburbans, or the police officers who once leaned against them, or of Kent Beaudine, the casual wreaker of the city’s doom. Marty assumed they were at the bottom of the crater, entombed with countless movie-star baubles.

The lavish houses and tall trees fronting the park were on fire, the ravenous flames jumping to the surrounding homes. It wouldn’t be long before the whole neighborhood was burning. He’d have to move fast if he didn’t want to get caught in it on his way home.

Wincing with pain, Marty lifted himself into a sitting position on the rim of the fountain, swung his legs over the edge, and was about to stand up when he froze. He’d nearly stepped on one of the smoking chunks of asphalt that covered the park like pieces of a meteor.

But that wasn’t what made him stop in mid-motion.

The Skipper was lying on the ground, his body scorched naked by the fire, his skin black as charcoal. But he was alive, smoke curling from his nostrils, his lungs seared.

“I don’t want to die,” the Skipper squealed, looking at Marty with imploring eyes, smoke pouring out of his mouth.

Marty crouched beside him but couldn’t bring himself to touch the man. “You won’t.”

But a few moments later, the cameraman did.

Marty didn’t even know his name. All Marty knew about him was that he spit tobacco and worked on The Torkelsons.

It wasn’t much of an epitaph.

He rose up slowly, unable to take his eyes off the horrifying sight of the dead man. Somewhere deep inside, the Skipper was still burning, thin wisps of smoke drifting out between his charred, dead lips.

Marty looked around for Gilligan and found him in pieces. The camera assistant had been decapitated by a piece of Rodeo Drive, his headless corpse slumped over the smoldering battery pack.

He looked away, repulsed and terrified. In a war, Marty thought, there must come a time when a person becomes inured to the carnage and violent death, when the experience changes from something unusual and shocking into something commonplace and expected.

That time hadn’t come for him yet. He wished it would hurry up and get here or, if it didn’t, that he could be spared any new variations on the theme. Marty didn’t know how much more he could take.

His sanity felt almost physical, like a joint that had already been flexed too far. He knew it was about to snap, but unlike with a torn ligament or broken bone, he had no idea what consequences to expect if it happened.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Maybe it would be a pleasant numbness, a blissful separation from direct contact with reality.

Or maybe not.

It could mean losing all sense of self, all intelligence. He could end up a mewling idiot, staggering mindlessly through the rubble.

And then he would never get home.

Stop being a pussy. So people are dying horrible, grotesque, and painful deaths right in front of your eyes. Big fucking deal. Be glad it’s not you and move on.

Lately, the voice in his head was sounding more and more like Buck and yet, strangely enough, seemed to be making more and more sense to him.

The way to deal with it, he decided, was to look at death clinically, the way a coroner does. When a coroner looks at a corpse-whether it’s been hit by a train, torn apart by sharks, mutilated with an ax, mangled in a car crash, or left decaying in the sun for a week, infested by maggots-it doesn’t sicken or terrify him. Why? Because it isn’t a human being any more. It’s an object, a by-product, a thing. A fleshy sack of organs and bones that just resembles a living thing.

Marty would just have to get in the right frame of mind.

But it occurred to him that coroners had an advantage he didn’t. They rarely witnessed the killing, the moment when a person stops being a person and becomes a corpse.

Then again, millions of soldiers over tens of thousands of years had come to grips with that moment on the battlefield. And most of them didn’t lose their minds. How hard could it be?

Be a fucking man.

Yes, Marty thought. That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll be a fucking man.

He turned and faced north on what was left of Rodeo Drive. For the first few blocks, houses on both sides of the street were aflame and charred bodies were scattered on the sidewalks.

Be a fucking man.

Marty took one flap of his wet jacket, raised it in front of his face like a cape, and trudged across the blackened grass into the smoke.