The Caravan on the Coast

A Short Excerpt from Toronado Draft #2

They left San Diego in a caravan and took I-5 north along the coast. John Carver and his son took up the lead in the most expensive car, a pearlescent white-colored 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible powered by hydrogen fuel cells. It was one of the rare Carver’s models that did not use internal combustion. The Continental swam in the fluctuating strata of the road’s heat mirage and skimmed atop the ersatz water pools that charged ever forward on the sun-blasted pavement. The white car bled into its own otherworldly reflection in pursuit of itself like a comet with a morphing, amoebic tail. As Shepherd watched the strange phenomenon, he felt a sudden thirst tug urgently at the base of his tongue. The optical illusion only added to the significance of the journey in his mind. It represented a sign of divine inevitability leading, like a fluttering banner of conquest, their passage into lands destined for the taking.

Dean Hensley and Shepherd took up the second position in an ‘87 Firebird running on compressed natural gas. It was the morning of the Los Angeles dealership’s grand opening. The boss had called in all hands to bring any inventory the company could spare up north. Nervous energy filled Shepherd to the brim. The coffee he’d finished just before leaving San Diego lay sour and acidic in the bottom of his stomach. Rumors and speculation about staffing policy had flown about aggressively among the employees in the days leading up to the event like so many belligerent birds when one steps too close to a nest. Despite his lofty feelings about their northern trajectory, those more immediate concerns deflated his mood.

“If John asks me to relocate, then I’m not doing it,” Shepherd murmured from the passenger seat. He stared out the window at the brown hills that sloped down toward the ocean. He felt uncharacteristically insubordinate in the moment.

Hensley scoffed. The salesman perched behind the steering wheel with his hands gripping the top edge and his seat pulled as far forward as it would go. He had an old woman’s posture when driving. The other salesmen had mocked him over it for a while, but Dean never showed any embarrassment or defensiveness. They’d given up on it as an avenue for attack after a short time.

“You know you’ll never have to refuse,” the wiry man replied. He wore his classic fitted black suit and bolo tie. “You’re wrong in two ways. The boss would never move you, and even if he did ask, you wouldn’t refuse him. Me? I’m a mercenary. But you were built into this thing from the beginning.”

At that point, the San Diego dealership had been in business for three years. Money flowed like wine in a mythic bacchanalia. It had turned out that the Mexicans loved the cars, and their nouveau riche in Southern California had plenty of money to spend. Whether the money was dirty or clean did not matter to Carver. On many occasions the salesman had shared glances with eyebrows raised over bundles of cash passed across the counter. But money was money.

“You know, it’s not like I belong to Carver,” Shepherd insisted. “We have history. That’s all.”

Hensley dipped his head down and glanced over. “From what I hear, it’s a little more than Car Business 101.” He let the statement hang.

Shepherd sighed. “I’ll say what I always say. It’s not my story to tell. The boss’s business is his own.” He knew what the salesman wanted but managed to put it out of his head as quickly as it arrived. He’d developed an automated rejection system when it came to his genesis story with Carver.

Hensley lolled his head back dramatically. “Yes, of course. How could I forget? You have your conscience. That’s another thing I never understood.”

“What do you mean?” Shepherd asked.

“You’re a religious guy, right? Catholic?” Dean said.

“Lapsed. I haven’t been to Mass in many years,” Shepherd murmured, “at least not with any regularity.”

“Yeah, but you have your code,” Hensley replied. “Everyone sees it. You give off a kind of, well, energy or aura.”

Shepherd twisted in his seat to face the driver. “What? Is this a topic of conversation at work?” He’d always hated the idea that people were talking about him at the dealership when he wasn’t around, developing parallel realities over which he had no control.

“Not really.” Hensley chuckled. “Well, it’s come up a few times but not in a bad way. You give off a— How should I say this? You seem like you should be wearing robes, or maybe a collar.”

Shepherd sighed. “Vestments?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m not saying you're naive or unworldly. It’s hard to explain. It’s like you’re required by some law of your nature to assume the best of other people’s intentions. I think Carver likes that about you. I don’t think he’d want you to change.”

“Dean, I have no idea what you mean by that,” Shepherd insisted, although he heard echoes of things the boss had said to him over the years in the back of his brain.

“Maybe you really don't,” Hensley said with a shrug. “If so, then it only illustrates my point.”

The two drove on in silence for a while until they’d traveled north of Carlsbad and caught glimpses of the glassy water to the left where it spread out indefinitely until becoming lost in the sky. Sea and firmament mingled into one indistinguishable entity. Big, rectangular warning signs on tall, metal posts stuck up at intervals between the road and the ocean. The bold, black lettering inside a bright red border suggested that, while not prohibited, entering the water was not recommended. The very center of the signs depicted a stick figure, that universal sin-eater of industrial accidents and unsafe behavior in public parks, experiencing some kind of distress while swimming. I wonder if it’s the same man on every warning label? He’s the world's most tragic figure, the unluckiest man alive, and he doesn't even get a name or face. He could be me or you. That black circle on his shoulders is a mirror. We all became the sufferer of one thousand fates in Year Zero, an undefined semiotic stand in killed in endless absurd permutations.

“Water’s still bad, huh?” Shepherd asked after shrugging off the pensive silence.

“It’s always bad,” Hensley replied. “Seems worse than ever now. I used to drive out to the coast from the ranch during my years of doing nothing and fish for surfperch, swim and camp out for the night if I could find a good spot. Not anymore. It’s all sick and dying. It’s that damn red algae. Every day it looks like something big died out there and bled out. They say it’s technically still safe enough to swim, but I wouldn’t trust it.”

Years earlier when the water first started turning red along the California coast, Shepherd had watched an investigative television program that attempted to explain the cause of the phenomenon. The scientists interviewed referred to it as a “Harmful Algal Bloom,” although everyone else simply called it, “the red tide.” Your average citizen likely preferred the latter term because it was appropriately apocalyptic and granted the mystical significance warranted by the ominous shade that appeared and intensified at the tail end of Year Zero.

At the time there were two competing theories about the origin of the bloom. The first and more popular hypothesis argued that a confluence of environmental factors caused by the events of Year Zero had developed ideal conditions for rapid algal growth. The increase in water temperatures off the coast, along with the massive runoff during the floods, formed a nutrient-rich breeding ground for the organisms to proliferate. The other theory posited that the algae was a hearty and unidentified mutant species released from the ocean floor by the earthquakes. This idea could not be dismissed easily due to the fact that the algae was indeed biologically different from those typically found along the coast. Scientists needed to conduct more research to determine how exactly California’s red tide differed from other commonly observed Dinoflagellates. All the experts had agreed that the bloom’s long-term presence was unique. Harmful algal blooms typically consume their excess nutrient source and then die off. That this expected turn of events had not happened implied there must be a constant source of food. The earthquake release theorists argued that this not only bolstered their claim but also implied that the quakes had opened vents on the ocean floor which supplied the conditions enjoyed by the algae. Like most projects in California, a great expedition planned to find a definite cause and solution for the issue had stalled out. At times, public outcry or funding offers from some tech tycoon revived the project for a while. If any progress had been made on that front, then Shepherd was not aware of it.

The bloom became one of those new facts of life, yet another strange marker for the times that a long-dead generation might have seen as a sign of judgment. Like most perplexing events in the American public eye over Shepherd’s lifetime, the cause of the red tide trailed off unresolved into a lingering, haunting mystery. For as long as he could remember, the big stories never had definite endings anymore. They didn’t even possess that satisfying irony in their unsolved nature, the kind that allows the average man who thinks himself cleverer than most to click his tongue and make vague comments about billionaires or politicians to imply they’re up to something your common citizen will never understand. In his moments of fanciful conjecture, Shepherd considered that there was some new god in charge and that he was even cleverer and crueler than the one he’d replaced. Nobody believed in the new god but that was how he liked it. The camouflage of disbelief allowed his capricious destructiveness to appear as the unavoidable accident events of a chaotic and unpredictable world as he surfed carelessly along the California coast on the red tide.

Shepherd stared through the driver’s window past Hensley’s arms at the tainted water. Like his fear of death, the raw significance of the ominous shade lingered benignly in the periphery of his daily existence until moments like these. Then it turned suffocatingly real. Shepherd had held the fear from his youth that the world and its people experienced a steady and irreversible poisoning, an inevitable result of human carelessness which would render everyone impotent, grub-like, smooth and idiotic. The crimson bloom in the water was only the most obvious example of this process, the toxification of the planet which had accelerated with Year Zero, a time of chemical disasters: refinery fires, oil spills, crumbling facilities leaking into the groundwater. If the ocean could change so quickly and endanger entire local ecosystems, then what hope was there for humanity? We’re getting weaker, all full of plastic, bodies drowning in electromagnetic waves, wireless transmissions. We only had one child. They said we were lucky.

“You know I went out there once on a buddy’s boat?” Dean peered over with a raised eyebrow while posing the question.

“Out on the bloom?” Shepherd asked.

“Yeah.” He looked at the road ahead of them pensively. “Obviously we didn’t go out into The Crimson Triangle, but we got close. There’s an eerie kind of quiet out there, the kind that creeps into the back of your head and starts to take up space.”

“They say everything is getting hotter,” Shepherd mused. “Certainly feels like it sometimes. Between that, the fires, and all the violence, I might get out of California before too long. They say the worst of it is over, but it’s probably only a matter of time before something else happens.”

“Maybe you’ll leave, but I doubt it.” Hensley replied with a sly smile. “We changed the subject. I won’t go there again.”

Shepherd knew, despite his protestations. He knew that Hensley knew it too. So long as Carver needed him in California, he wasn’t going anywhere. What was the draw? Was it history? Perhaps it really was that simple, or it was the nature of the business. It seemed like hope, a constructive effort built out of the old, decaying, and forgotten. He was too old to change his course in life. He did not even want to, despite his latent suspicions and misgivings.

The Firebird rattled slightly as two huge police drones flew over low from behind. Their dimly gleaming white and black armor plated underbellies passed only maybe one-hundred feet above the windshield. The craft looked like two orcas on the hunt seen from deeper waters. They sent up a tawny cloud of dust behind them along the interstate. The rolling front overtook the car and darkened the interior for a moment.

“God damn that surprised me!” Hensley exclaimed as he worked his hands back and forth on top of the steering wheel to steady the car.

The drones were models designed for combat, the kind that drew eyes wherever they went because their deployment prophesied death, aesthetic violence, orange plumes of fire, and the pale yellow eruption of muzzle flash. They were bulky, seeming to defy the laws of flight like bumble bees. The deployable arms folded back against their sides carried weapons of varying lethality. One of the craft slowed, adjusting its turbines from cruise to hover mode. Flashing red and blue lights came on all over the carapace. They dazzled the eye even alongside the ultraviolet gleam of sun glare atop the ripples of cowling.

“Well, shit. They’re going to block off the road,” Hensley groaned.

He was right. The halting drone extended landing skids and gently lowered down to rest in front of Carver’s Continental. It left enough space for the caravan to come to a gradual stop. By the time the resulting whirlwind of dust cleared, Carver was already stepping onto the pavement and brushing off his slacks and polo shirt. He hunched over to spit by the car’s front tire and then swiped at the top of his shaved head before turning to approach the Firebird. Hensley killed the engine, and the two opened their doors. Loudspeakers on the drone blared out a generic message about road delays and warned that any attempts to pass constituted a federal crime.

Carver had to yell to be heard over the din. “I checked the road alerts. There is some kind of armed pursuit between here and San Clemente. Apparently they’re going lethal, so they want the road clear.”

A police cruiser crowned by flashing lights pulled by. Two NPF highway officers got out by the drone and retrieved rifles from their vehicle before deploying road flares. Carver walked over to talk to them. He returned to the Firebird after a few minutes.

“Should be half an hour at most. They didn’t want to give many details, but it sounds like a straightforward kill order.” He paused to examine his clothes for dust particles again. “No worries. We left early enough. There’s plenty of time.”

Hensley scoffed and leaned back against the black Pontiac. “Kill order? Where were the kill orders back in Year Zero with all the looting? What’s the point now?”

“Well, a liberal is only an authoritarian when nobody needs it,” Carver said with a wink. The three of them laughed at the comment. It is true what they said about the car business, Shepherd thought. Something about it attracted hard-headed realists. Perhaps we really are all descendants of the Italian futurist dream of speed and power, and the automobile is fascism in practice. Where did I read that? Strange, I don’t recall.

Shepherd noticed John Junior standing a few paces toward the Lincoln with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the road between his shoes. The young man was visibly uncomfortable, his shoulders hunched and lips downturned. His gloominess was not due to the conversation. He was too far away to hear over the drone’s repeated announcement. He was uncomfortable because he was not like them in essence, and his youth was not the whole account of it. At that moment, Shepherd first understood that, although Junior bore his father’s name, the younger Carver was not like his father at all. It should have been the first sign of things to come, yet Hensley was right, and Shepherd did tend to assume the best of other people. He looked back at old John and noticed with alarm that his dark eyes were watching him scrutinize his son.

The NPF officers came over after about twenty minutes and said the road would be open again soon. The Carver’s employees returned to their vehicles and waited for the all clear to move ahead. After about ten more minutes of waiting, the drone lifted up in a fresh vortex of dust. The caravan forged on. A few miles north, they passed the charred husk of an SUV tilted at an angle against the freeway’s outer concrete barrier. Scorch marks fanned out from the ruin like bat wings. Fire retardant foam partly coated the mangled form. The remains looked strangely oceanic, as though it had rested on the seabed for a century and grown nodular masses of coral all over its structure. An NPF cruiser idled nearby. A few smaller drones wheeled in circles overhead, relentlessly scanning for heat signatures like carrion birds above a carcass.

Shepherd's eyes danced a tiny bird’s anxious, fleeting forays across the exposed portions of charred frame marked with the mottled archipelagos of blistered paint that had been spared the worst of the blaze. He played that daring game of ocular advances and feints through territory populated by the hidden grotesque. At any moment the sight of the deeply textured yet structurally smooth igneous formations of flesh fired by unimaginable and instantaneous heat could reach through his feeble defenses and grasp at the core of his being with the electric fingers of sudden revulsion. Yet he looked anyway. It was not an act of defiance against the tyranny of the everyday nor an experimental effort to shock himself from the stupor of business as usual. He watched purely out of squeamish curiosity for the impossibly white crescent of teeth leering through the lipless cavern mouth of a skull blackened by fire and holding a brain now no more remarkable than so much steamed cauliflower. He may have spied flame-thinned limbs caught in the tangles of the melted interior but could not tell in the brief moment of unobscured sight.