Shock Warning

CHAPTER THREE

“Get ready for stinky!” shouted Danny Impellatieri as they drove north on the Golden State Freeway toward San Francisco. The Five, people called it now, just as they now called the Santa Monica Freeway the Ten. It was a sign of the decline, he decided. The end of the world, for all real Californians. In the old days, when he was growing up in Los Angeles, people knew the difference between the Santa Monica Freeway, heading west, and the San Bernardino Freeway, heading east. Between Highway 101, heading north through the Cahuenga Pass, and the Hollywood Freeway, after it split off in Valley Village and became Highway 170. Between the 110 that was the Pasadena Freeway and the 110 that was Harbor Freeway.

Between the days when California had names and today, when it had numbers. Between romance and quantification. The poetry had fled, to be replaced by the accountant’s green eyeshades. And yet the state was broke, diminished, destroyed.

Progress.

Hope, Emma, and Rory had never been to San Francisco, and they were more than a little trepidatious. To all too many Americans, especially those in the Midwest, the City by the Bay was a combination of Sodom and Gomorrah without Lot’s saving grace — as Herb Caen used to call it, Baghdad by the Bay, back in the day when Baghdad meant Sin City, not Saddam City. But to Danny, it was the city of DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul; the city of Geary Street, not O’Farrell Street. The city of white-gloved women on their way to take in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Opera, of foghorns, and the military might of America, over in Oakland, or Vallejo, or on Treasure Island. To Danny, it was a city of what America used to be, not what America had become.

All of which made him today the bad guy. When the thought police, the PC Nazis, came, he would be one of the first to go — maybe to Alcatraz, maybe straight to the needle at San Q. How fast the country had changed. But somebody had to be the bad guy, and it might as well be him. After all, his wife, Diane, was dead. And with her had died so much, more than a year ago….

He reached over and laid his hand, ever so gently, on the thigh of the woman sitting next him in the passenger seat. Not his dead wife but soon enough his new wife — the woman for whom he had released the past and embraced a new future that he had never envisioned, had never prepared or planned for, but which he joyously welcomed.

Was it wrong? Could you stay married to a ghost, or did the ghosts of the past demand that we, the living, go on living? Why wouldn’t they? Didn’t they want to go on living themselves? Had they died willingly? Didn’t all God’s creatures want to live? Wasn’t that the first principle of life, of the life force? To go on living, even after death? If you fought against the dying of the light, if you fought against death, did not that bring you closer go God? Or was He just another myth, a fairy tale told to children by their elders to explain away the terrors of the night? Those things that exploded in the midst of the safest environments, that robbed you of your certainty just before they stole your life and the lives of others, randomly, capriciously, in the way of the Greek gods, or the Fates, or, God help us, the meaningless lares and penates.

Her name was Hope. Hope Gardner — and soon enough, if she accepted him, Impellatieri. And then where once there were two families with four parents and three children, there would now be one family with three children.

He was going to propose to her in San Francisco.

“I know this place on Clement Street.” He pronounced it right, with the accent on the second syllable. In every city, there were test words, the ones that separated the natives from the locals. Cle-MENT Street was one of them. Like HOUSE-ton Street in New York. Not only was all politics local, so was pronunciation. And it was precisely in these interstices that spies and illegals and confidential ops got killed.

It was never the big things. It was never the cover stories. It was the little things, the details, that tripped you up, like DiMaggio’s batting average. The Great DiMaggio, who accompanied Hemingway’s Old Man on his fateful journey to the Sea, in spirit, if not in person. Simplicity, not complexity. The best cover story was 99.9 percent true. Everything important must be true except for the sliver of a lie that you told. Even to the ones you loved most.

And this was your life; to lie to everybody important to you, to everybody you loved, and to tell the truth, the whole truth and almost the entire truth, to those whom you despised, to those whom you loathed, to those whom you were about to kill.

After all they’d been through in the past year, it was a vacation well-deserved, and in his favorite city. No matter how nutty it was, San Francisco was still the best town in the country, a place devoted to wine, food, natural beauty, and the pursuit of sybaritic happiness. If Thomas Jefferson were alive, thought Danny, he’d live in San Francisco. Although maybe not George Washington…

“How stinky, Dad?” asked Jade, his daughter, from the back of the BMW. He could almost hear her mother’s voice. Diane’s voice. Diane, whom he’d loved so much that they had conceived the most wonderful daughter together. But she was gone now. And no matter how much you loved a woman, you could not make love to a ghost. You could not even love a ghost. All you could do was honor her memory and love the creature that allowed her to live on….

“Real stinky, I hope!” shouted Rory, Hope’s son and younger child. “Gross-out stinky! Barf-in-your-socks stinky! Girl gross-out stinky!”

Rory was sitting in the backseat, between his sister and Jade, still getting used to the idea that, horrors, he might have yet another sister in his future. Two against one was by his standards a fair fight on the playground, but the backseat of a car was an entirely different proposition. You couldn’t hit a girl, not if you were a real man. Not if you were like his dead father, or like Danny, who had lost his wife in that terrorist attack in Los Angeles, or like the weird guy who had saved him from the bomb back in Edwardsville, Illinois, where they used to live before his dad got killed and his mom met Danny and…

“Okay, hold your noses, kids!” shouted Danny. “Here comes Cowschwitz.”

Hope bit her tongue even as she held her nose. Everybody knew the term “Cowschwitz” was incredibly un-PC, even as most Californians who drove up and down I-5 between L.A. to San Francisco used it.

There would be cows as far as the eye could see on both sides of the freeway, that Rory knew. Cows for miles. Nothing but cows, mooing, lowing, farting, sending vast plumes of methane into the atmosphere, killing the ozone, destroying the climate, and alerting the aliens on Mars, or the Mother Ship or the planets orbiting Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse to our malevolent presence. Nothing good could come out of Cowschwitz, thought Rory, except maybe some milk and some really good steaks.

The girls squealed. Rory expected shrieks from Emma, his real sister, but Jade, Danny’s daughter and only child, was an altogether mysterious creature. She was four years younger than Emma, but she seemed older, wiser, more mature. Maybe that was because she had lost her mother and she was an only, whereas he and Emma had lost their dad, but at least they had each other. And their mom…

“Here we go!” said Danny, gunning it.

Instinctively, Rory threw his arms around his sister, Emma.

“Any moment now,” said Hope, getting into the spirit of things. Rory glanced at his mother just as she tossed a smile at Danny. There was definitely something going on with those two….

Jade clutched his hand. “Ready, Rory?” she asked. He nodded, then made like a deep-sea diver and held his nose as he went under.

“Pee-you!” shouted the kids, almost in unison.

Emma was the first to see it. She said nothing, but only let out a small gasp, as if the gap between expectation and reality were something that might be papered over in the next quarter mile. Rory, however, had long ago learned to interpret his sister’s gasps—

“What is it?” he asked.

“Look,” she said, pointing. And whispering.

At first, Rory only saw the vast expanse of the Central Valley in all its uncinematic nonsplendor. Miles and miles of nothing, flatlands, with invisible mountains to the east of them and to the west of them, and a vast ocean not far away.

Then Rory saw it—

A dead cow.

One, at first. And then two. And then ten. And then at least a hundred.

Dead, all dead.

“Mommy!” screamed Emma. “Make it stop. Make them go away!!”

The car hurtled northward at more than seventy-five miles an hour. The CHP never stopped anybody on this stretch of I-5. But still the dead cows would not stop. They kept on coming, in serried ranks collapsed in homage to a bovine Morpheus, lying on their sides as if sleeping, but their bellies already bloated with death, some of them already burst open, their guts spilling out, the stench rising….

“Oh, my God,” said Hope. “What…?”

“I don’t know,” said Danny, already punching the keys of his secure iPhone. As per the agreed-upon code with Fort Meade, he hit a pound key in the middle of his home phone number, then a series of rotating digits depending on the day of the week minus four, which he knew would send the message directly over a secure channel to the one man who could possibly answer his question. To the one man whom he needed to alert, right now, before the situation got even further out of hand. To a man he’d never met, but whom he trusted beyond all others.

There was an overpass, just ahead. As they approached—

“Look!” shouted Rory. “Over there — people!”

Danny slammed on the brakes, screeching and skidding. A small group of people was clustered to one side of the overpass. He could see candles flickering as they huddled around something, looked at something — something that, to judge from their gazes, was on the concrete wall of one of the bridge’s struts.

The car slowed and rolled to a stop. “Stay inside,” Danny commanded, but it was Hope who relayed the order and gave it parental authority.

“Nobody move,” she said. “Let Danny handle it.”

He got out of the car, ready for anything.

A group of Mexicans, farmworkers, was huddled together, their faces illuminated, flickering in the light of scores of candles, all eyes turned toward an object on the wall… muttering to themselves in Spanish. No, not muttering — praying.

Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen

And then he saw it. “Jesús, Maria,” he gasped