Combustion (37 page)

‘It’s better if you don’t expect it.’

Her eyelids flutter.

‘Stay with me.’

Her face is grey.

‘Lola! Are you staying with me?’

She is not. She passes out.

Spike barks.

‘No, taking off my shirt will not make her wake up.’

‘Lola.’ Corey lightly slaps her cheek. ‘Lola.’ She’s limp in his arms. He feels sick to his stomach. ‘Lola, wake up.’ She doesn’t. He inspects the wound.

Spike barks.

‘Yes, thank you for pointing out I’m not a doctor. But I need to stop the bleeding —’

~ * ~

‘Who are you talking to?’

Caught, Corey looks at Lola as her eyes blink open. ‘I’m, well, I um...’

‘It’s your dog, isn’t it? You’re talking to your dog.’

Corey takes a moment, then nods.

‘You know what he’s saying?’

He nods again.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’

‘Most girls think it’s crazy.’

‘I’m not most girls.’

‘I noticed.’

She winces, looks at her wound. ‘Man, it hurts like a
mutha.
I mean,
seriously.’

‘It’s not that deep, but we have to stop the bleeding. We need a bandage to put some pressure on it.’ He stops, thinks, then realises what he must do. He pulls off his T-shirt.

Spike barks.

‘Shut it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘“I see you’ve finally got your shirt off.”‘ He’s been telling me to do it for weeks, thought it’d make you like me.’

Lola can’t help but check out his cut physique as he rips the T-shirt, still damp from the tar pit, into one long strip and binds it around her torso, makes sure the material presses firmly against the wound. ‘That should do it until we get you to a doc.’

She nods stoically.

‘I’m glad you’re okay.’

‘Thanks to you.’

‘You helped me too. Anybody would have done the same thing.’

She smiles through the pain. ‘You know, they really wouldn’t.’ She looks him in the eyes. ‘I’m having a thought, which I’m turning into an idea.’

‘Oh, yeah? What is it?’

She pushes herself up and kisses him on the mouth, hard and fast.

He’s genuinely surprised. ‘But - aren’t you with Scott?’

‘Not any more. Remember when I said other people wouldn’t do what you did? I was talking about Scott.’

‘Really? I did not get that
at all.
I think I told you I’m not great with subtext.’

‘Then let me lay it out. In a crisis situation you see a person’s true nature. I saw his and it was awful. And then I saw yours, and it was - breathtaking. It literally took my breath away. And now I’m worried I’ve screwed up any chance of... us.’

‘Well, yeah, you kind of did.’

She deflates. ‘I know, and I’m so pissed off about that.’

He looks at her. ‘You let me do that whole thing, with the dancing and the moonlight and the beach and you didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend. It was bloody embarrassing.’

‘Of course it was. And I’m an
idiot.
But I did it because I like being with you. If you could just - do you think you could forget about it? Because I think this works. You and me. It works.’

He rubs his face and turns away and she can see he doesn’t agree. Gee, she
royally
screwed this up. She can’t think of anything to say - but she can think of something to sing, so begins in a low, husky timbre: ‘Baby come back ...’

She sings the song for a moment and then trails off when it doesn’t have the positive effect she was hoping for.

He studies her. ‘You know, I’ve always thought she
should
come back in that song.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. He seems to be genuinely apologetic, and he went to the trouble of writing a great song.’

‘So you think she should give him a second chance?’

‘Well, if the roles were reversed and he hadn’t told her the truth about, say - how he could understand his dog, for example, or maybe he’d landed his helicopter in the middle of nowhere and told her to get out —’

‘And she’d been really pissed off about it.’

‘Exactly. Then maybe, you know, considering all that, they could call it even.’

‘Maybe they could.’ She rises up and kisses him again - and he’s not surprised by it this time. They part and their eyes meet. She touches his face. ‘You know you don’t need to protect me, or try to save me, right? I’m not your mother.’

He nods.

‘I’d like you to tell me about her, though. About what happened.’

‘I will.’

‘Good. You can start now if you’d like.’

Corey regards her for a moment, then begins: ‘Well, her name was Roberta . . .’

~ * ~

EPILOGUE

Cement dust swirls around the room.

Whack.
Corey slams a heavy mallet into a brick wall.
Whack.
Another lands right next to it, swung by Judd this time. Rubble falls to the floor and is scooped up in a shovel, which Rhonda deposits into a large green garbage bin. Lola picks up the next load with her shovel and the process begins again.

All wearing dust masks and work clothes, they’re in the living room of the house on Sepulveda which Lola inherited from her grandfather. It was partially damaged on 7/27, when a motorcycle ploughed through the wall they’re presently demolishing, so Lola decided to extend the hole and install a panoramic window to overlook the front garden.

Like her grandfather’s house, greater Los Angeles is being rebuilt too, though three months after the events of 7/27, progress is glacial. Lola had heard the damage is even worse than the Northridge quake in 1994, the final price of the clean-up and reconstruction estimated at over one and a half trillion dollars. The good news is that the death toll, though still a staggering 1867, was less than first feared.

Whack.
Lola takes in Corey as he swings the mallet again. The Aussie volunteered to do the renovation and it’s going really well. He’s very good with his hands, in a number of ways, which she’s happily finding out, and knocking down walls is one of them. They’re taking the relationship slow but it feels right to her, like nothing she’s experienced before. He’s a man - actually he’s a
bloke
- and she couldn’t be happier about that.

~ * ~

Whack.
Corey thumps his mallet into the wall again. So the trip to the Florida Keys has been put on the backburner indefinitely. His relationship with Lola is hitting its stride so there is no way he’s going to leave LA. They have a great time together and he’s as happy as he’s ever been. He’s even talked to her about his mother, which has been a difficult but positive experience. His only concern is what he’s going to do with himself after this reno is done. Should he start a chopper-for-hire business? Apart from the fact there are already a bazillion guys in LA doing just that, he’s been flying his whole life. He’d like to try something different for a while. He just doesn’t know what it is.

On the plus side, Spike likes Lola and Lola likes Spike. She doesn’t seem to give two hoots that he talks to his dog. He tries to keep it to a minimum around her mates and work colleagues, but no one appears to give a stuff. That’s one of the great things he’s found about the entertainment business in Los Angeles. Eccentricity, and by eccentricity he means outright craziness, is not shunned here, but celebrated - especially if you’re successful and making people money.

~ * ~

Rhonda scoops up a load of rubble and drops it into the bin. The landing, though not a success in the ‘did you save the aircraft?’ department, was a big success in the ‘did everyone live?’ department. There were a few minor injuries - some cuts and bruises, and one guy broke a finger - but that was it. Not only did it burnish her already impressive reputation, but it snapped her out of her Orion simulator funk. She has yet to perfect it, but the experience of flying and landing the 737 had changed her thinking enough so that she now felt comfortable improvising when things went south.

She has Severson to thank for that. As usual, he came out of the whole thing smelling like roses. His impromptu post-crash speech was filmed by one of the grateful passengers on a mobile phone, uploaded to YouTube and has been now been viewed over fifty-seven million times. With his increased profile, he has been tapped to lead the Mars mission’s crew selection committee. Having been happy to say previously that a decision was ‘above his pay scale’ so he could shirk responsibility, Severson now finds himself
at
that higher pay scale - with the extraordinary responsibility of deciding who will be the first human being to set foot on the red planet.

Since 7/27, she’s been going the lovey-dovey with Judd often and unprompted. She now understood the simplest thing, which her father never did: tell the people you love how you feel, every day, because you never know when the cabin will suffer an explosive decompression.

~ * ~

Whack.
Judd swings his mallet again and dislodges another chunk of the wall. Once he’d passed the counteragent to the federal authorities they’d synthesised and distributed it. The petroleum companies began adding it to their supplies five weeks after 7/27, though it was another month before people felt completely comfortable about driving or flying again, particularly in Southern California, where winds and weather had spread the virus widely. With its fifteen-year half-life, the counteragent would be in use for the foreseeable future.

If anyone stopped to ruminate on the planet’s reliance on fossil fuels, it certainly wasn’t obvious to Judd. People were just happy to get back to business as usual. So Zac Bunsen had caused a great deal of heartache and almost destroyed the city, but had failed to change much of anything.

If Judd and Corey had been famous previously, they were bona fide superstars now. Even before the
Atlantis
4 movie started shooting, Twentieth Century Fox signed them for a sequel based on their adventures on 7/2.7. There’s no title yet but Judd is leaning towards
Ignition,
the studio likes
7/27
and Corey thinks
Combustion
could be a goer.

Principal photography on the
Atlantis
4 movie is slated to begin next week. The announcement, which brought them to LA in the first place, was rescheduled for next Monday. That’s why Judd and Rhonda are in town - and how Corey lassoed them into helping with the reno.

~ * ~

Ding dong.
The doorbell rings.

Lola pulls the dust mask down around her neck. ‘I’ll get it.’ She moves through the house and opens the front door.

On the stoop stands Scott Ford, movie star, the Blue Cyclone, looking sheepish. Lola regards him blankly. ‘What?’

‘I just - I came to apologise. Your assistant told me where you were.’

‘Well, I will kick his arse for that. I’m taking the week. No work.’

‘This isn’t about work. This is - I’ve been trying to contact you for three months. You didn’t return my calls or texts or anything.’

She stares at him. ‘Gee, I wonder why.’

‘Look, I was hoping we could have lunch and talk about it —’

‘You went sailing while I was trapped under a beam in a building. There’s nothing to talk about.’

‘I’m sure we could find something, sweetness.’ He leans in, lightly touches her forearm, smiles his four-billion-dollar smile.

Her tone remains even. ‘Get your goddamn hand off me.’

He removes it. ‘There must be some way I can walk this back?’

‘There really isn’t. But there is a way you can stop me telling the world what happened.’

Scott’s smile vanishes. Instantly. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘Really?’

He studies her, realises she would. ‘What do you want?’

‘Three times in the near future I will call on you with various projects from my clients. They’ll be quality projects and you will say yes to starring in each one of them. You will make each movie for fifty per cent of your current quote because you “love it so much” - and you will do it with a smile.’

He looks at her, clearly chilled and excited in equal measure. ‘You are the devil.’

‘If that means I own your arse, then yes, yes, I am.’

‘Lola, is there a vacuum cleaner somewhere? There’s so much bloody dust. . .’ Corey rounds the corner, his dust mask around his neck too.

Scott sees him and gets very excited. ‘Oh, man. Corey Purchase! I just finished your
LA Times
profile. What you did on 7/27 was
amazing.
You saved the city - the world, really.’

‘Oh, no.’ Corey waves it off. ‘You’d have done the same thing, mate.’

Lola looks at Scott, her expression inscrutable. ‘Yeah, you would have, wouldn’t you? If you hadn’t gone sailing?’

He ignores her. ‘So, how do you guys know each other?’

‘Corey’s my boyfriend.’

Suddenly Scott’s very uncomfortable. ‘Oh. Right.’

Lola isn’t. ‘Actually, Corey has an excellent movie concept he’s working on at the moment. A zombie-vampire mashup.’ She grins at Scott. ‘We should set up a meeting.’