Slow Apocalypse Read Free

been living in a studio apartment in North Hollywood when Addison was born, and the rent was overdue. They managed to scrape by, and then, almost without warning, they were well-off, living in a two-bedroom high-rise in Mid-Wilshire.
    Then came the big break. He wrote a pilot called
Ants!
It was about three exterminators waging war on a race of alien insects who were living among them. But it wasn’t
X-Files
material, it was a little
Coneheads
and a little
Slackers
and a little
Men in Black
and a little
Ghostbusters
. He had based one of the characters on the John Goodman character in
Arachnophobia
, another on the Jenna Elfman character in
Dharma and Greg
, and another on…well, on several characters, all of them played by Adam Sandler. The pilot was picked up, and the first season was a smash. The show never made number one in the Neilsons, but was usually in the top ten.
    They had a seven-year run. During the second year Dave and his family moved into a five-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills. Then the show was canceled, and he’d been scrambling ever since.
    He got some money from syndication rights, residuals, but that market was not what it used to be. A lot of stations preferred to sell their off-peak time to infomercial companies instead of spending money to run an old show. He had written three sitcom pilots, but none of them had been made. During the last year he had even tried to get back as a staff writer on another show, anyshow, but got nowhere. He was about to turn forty, over the hill for a sitcom writer. You have to be tuned in to those absolutely latest trends, and even if he felt he was, he was
perceived
as being an old man. At thirty-nine. A one-hit wonder.
    In desperation, he was trying to write a feature movie, something he had never done. And he was using the same formula that had worked so well with
Ants!
That is, find out what’s popular and do that, only more. In other words, copy.
    What was most popular right then was war films based on video games. So his research had to be in two parts: games, and war. The first part was easy. Even if he was a living fossil of almost forty, he could buy and play games just like anyone else. He felt he had a good handle on that stuff. But he’d never served in the military and all he knew about real war was what he’d seen in movies or read in books. Colonel Warner had been consulting for studios and gamers for years. Dave had winced when he learned how much Warner’s per diem was, but he paid it. And so far it had been a bust, he’d not heard a thing that inspired him toward a story line.
    Until today. And oddly enough, the story line didn’t have anything to do with war.
    He realized he was woolgathering, switched on his iPhone, and started dictating everything he could remember about the colonel’s unlikely story while it was still fresh in his mind.
    That occupied him for a little over an hour, and he realized he’d better get going or he’d be late picking up his daughter.
    There is a neighborhood in the Valley where most people own a horse.
    It’s east of the Disney Studios, west of Dreamworks, partly in Burbank and partly in Glendale, just across the Los Angeles River—actually a concrete-lined ditch most of the year—north of Griffith Park. It surrounds the Los Angeles Equestrian Center. Drive through it on Riverside and you’ll see that instead of bike paths, there are horse lanes. Take any of the side streets and you might see blacksmith trailers parked in driveways, with the smiths busy shoeing horses. Most of the houses, and even a lot of the apartment buildings, have stables in the back. The area is crisscrossed with riding trails, and bridges connect it to the much bigger network of trails in Griffith Park itself.
    This is where Dave’s daughter had stabled her ten-year-old warmbloodgelding, Ranger, since she convinced Dave to buy him two years ago. Ranger was a move up from her first horse, Hannah, an even-tempered Appaloosa mare