Slow Apocalypse

413 Pages·2012·1.6 MB·English

by  Varley John

SLOW APOCALYPSE
BOOKS BY JOHN VARLEY
The Ophiuchi Hotline
The Persistence of Vision
Picnic on Nearside
(formerly titled The Barbie Murders)
Millennium
Blue Champagne
Steel Beach
The Golden Globe
Red Thunder
Mammoth
Red Lightning
Rolling Thunder
Slow Apocalypse
THE GAEAN TRILOGY
Titan
Wizard
Demon
The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction
SLOW
APOCALYPSE
JOHN VARLEY
ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario
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Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St.
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Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India •
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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.)
Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin
Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England This is
an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not
assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by John Varley.
Cover photos: rusty background © Piotr Tomicki/Shutterstock; rusty car door
handle ©
Hemera Technologies/Thinkstock; car door handle © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.
Text design by Laura K. Corless.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage
piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only
authorized editions.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
FIRST EDITION: September 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Varley, John, 1947 Aug. 9–
Slow apocalypse / John Varley. — Ace hardcover ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58150-6
1. Petroleum industry and trade — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3572.A724S58 2012
813’.54—dc23
2012011636
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
This Los Angeles book is dedicated to our Los Angeles friends,
Jon Mersel and Marion Peters
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue: From the Journal of David Marshall
PROLOGUE
The sound of automatic weapons firing made everyone look up.
Dave Marshall was standing on the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard with a
hundred other gawkers. They had all been looking at the front entrance to the W
Hotel, where half a dozen men in black armor, combat helmets, heavy
equipment belts, and military assault rifles were blocking the doors. They didn’t
wear any kind of insignia or identification of rank, no bright yellow FBI printed
on their backs, no Homeland Security patches, no LAPD.
A few minutes earlier three black armored personnel carriers had roared up
and these anonymous heavily armed men poured out. They quickly cleared the
small plaza around the subway station, and a dozen of them had entered the
building just as Dave was leaving it.
He was as curious as everyone else, and maybe a little worried, so instead of
doing the prudent thing—if this was a bomb report or a hostage situation—
which would have been to get as far away as possible, he’d lingered to see if he
could find out what was going on. Regular LAPD patrol cars arrived without
sirens, half a dozen of them almost simultaneously, and the officers had blocked
off the street and gave orders for everyone to move along. That’s when they
heard the gunfire.
He looked up. One of the big panes up there had shattered. Shards of glass
glittered in the sunlight as they twisted and turned on their way down. Before
they had gone very far a human figure followed them, falling backwards, his
arms flailing.
Dave could tell the man was bald. He could see bright redness on the back of
his white shirt. He even fancied he could see a stream of blood arcing away from
the falling body, though that might have been his imagination.
Then he lost sight of him behind other bystanders, and there was the sickening
thump as the man landed very close to where Dave had been standing only
seconds before. It was much louder than he would have expected. He actually
felt the impact with the concrete. There were shouts and screams of horror.
The cops quickly got a lot more serious about moving people along. He was