Tales of Downfall and Rebirth

by S. M. Stirling

  Anyway, Mattie was for sure my friend, probably my best friend, maybe my only real friend.

  When I pushed the doorbell button (out of habit) it didn’t ring, probably the first time, ever. Normally if anything had malfunctioned at Mattie’s house, Ravikumar, being a repair contractor, would’ve died of shame.

  I knocked, loud.

  Ravikumar yanked the door open. “Claire! Good to see you! Are your parents coming?”

  “Couldn’t get them to.”

  Mattie had way better folks than mine; all Ravikumar’s comment was one little wince, and then a change of subject. “We are trying to sort things out here; it is so dark without power I don’t see how we can get to the shelter safely in the dark. We may be better off if we stay put till it is light.”

  I nodded. “If you think so—”

  “Also, can you help us understand something? Mattie tried an experiment—”

  Mattie was holding up a plastic yogurt container that reeked of vinegar.

  “Mattie,” I said, “if it’s science stuff, you’d be better off talking to Orry—”

  “Just look,” he said. “Alligator clips to Mom’s wedding ring and an aluminum can pull tab. Both in straight white vinegar. Okay? Should be a simple battery. But none of Dad’s multimeters budge. And a multimeter is basically a magnetic needle inside a coil, so I also wrapped my Boy Scout compass in bell wire and hooked that up, and the needle never budged from north.”

  Feeling stupid and helpless, I reached for the phrase I’d heard from him and Orry many times. “Electromagnetic pulse?”

  “See, I told you you’d get it!”

  “Get what?”

  “That that’s what it can’t be! I mean what it isn’t! I mean . . . look, an electromagnetic pulse might destroy electrical things, maybe even fry the multimeters, destroy car wiring and even wreck batteries if it was big enough, but I put the compass and wire together after the whatever. So it’s not that all the electrical stuff got destroyed. It’s that electricity doesn’t work anymore. See?”

  I didn’t really, then, but I nodded.

  Kanti said, “You see? She’s smart like Mahtab. And she says so too. Electricity does not work anymore. We have to get away before people realize you can’t fix things.”

  Ravikumar looked miserable. “What if electricity starts working again in five minutes? Or a year? So many years into this business—”

  A window broke upstairs and someone yelled “Ragheads!” out front. Then another window broke. I charged out and found Danny and Zach Davis, ten-year-old twin spawn of Tammy Davis, the neighborhood trash-drama queen, winding up with more stones.

  “Hey!”

  They ran. With my heavy pack, coat, and hiking boots, no way I could catch them right now. Next time I did, though, they were going to hurt real bad.

  Mattie trotted down from upstairs. “Some broken glass on the floor. My bass tipped over, but it’s a block of wood, and electric anyway.”

  “There will be more of this,” Kanti said, quietly.

  “Right,” Ravikumar said. “As always.” He closed the door. “All right, we’ll finish packing and go.”

  Five minutes later, Kanti’s pack held a couple of photo albums, some jewelry, and mostly clothes. Mattie had clothes, a big bag of rice, and the Boy Scout Fieldbook. Ravikumar had less clothing and as many hand tools as he could manage. They all had water bottles in the side pockets and sleeping bags tied on. “That was fast,” I observed.

  “One of those things Morton insisted on,” Ravikumar said, smiling. “We had to have packs handy with lists in them. Let’s go.” He opened the door and we walked through.

  As we hurried up the street, Ravikumar said, “During Partition, one day my grandfather had walked over to the next village for some work, and when he was coming back, he saw the smoke rising and decided to go to his aunt’s house instead of home. So he lived. Three sisters, his eldest brother, their mother, all of his nephews and nieces, and his fiancée, they all were killed, every one, after they had spent three days talking about whether they had to go. Grandfather didn’t even stay to bury them; he started for Jaipur with just the money in his pocket. Mattie, I hope you will always remember you are descended from people who knew when to run away.”

  “It’s sad, though,” Kanti added. “We’ve been happy here.”

  “We can be happy again. Somewhere else. But we have to be alive for that.”

  We headed for Orry’s house. I guess Orry was the logical name for a kid whose real name was Marcus Aurelius Orczegowski, especially because he hated “Mark.” Only teachers called him that.

  About a block from the Orczegowski house, we heard the crowd shouting.

  “Morton’s place?” Kanti asked, quietly.

  “Could be,” Ravikumar said.

  “I know a back way in.” I told the truth because it was simpler. “Morton lets Orry smoke weed, but not at his house because he’s paranoid about cops. Sometimes I smoke with Orry, out and around the neighborhood. Sometimes we have to run. There’s a way into the house through the back.”

  Ravikumar didn’t waste time judging. “Mattie, go with Claire. We will take a discreet look from the front. If everything’s okay, we all meet up at Morton’s, if not, we meet back here. Go!”

  * * *

  Those burbs were a maze of fences and dogs, but the house behind Orry’s place had three big distinctive evergreen bushes trimmed into cube shapes. Strangely, the car in the driveway had a glow coming from under its upraised hood. As we ran past, I caught a glimpse of candles all around the engine, an open manual on top of the air cleaner, and a man with white hair and a lined face bent over it reading, hands resting in prayer position, so that it looked as if he were trying to follow the Sacred Book of Chilton’s invocation to the Mighty God Horsepower. Even having forgotten so much, that momentary picture has stayed with me all these years.

  We heard him shout behind us but I was already yanking open the emergency gate in the high back privacy fence.

  Flickering orange light glared over the top of Orry’s garage. I heard shouts interrupting shouts, and Morton’s voice cutting through, sounding like calm reason. A little late for him to start now, I thought.

  The long-dead electric meter on the garage wall swung on its hinge. Morton had realized Orry might not want to turn a light on while evading cops, so the release was concealed but easy to work in the dark. I grabbed the house key and opened the garage and kitchen door.

  Orry’s voice from upstairs was soft. “Who’s there?”

  “Claire and Mattie.” I tried to speak as soft as Orry.

  “I’m in my room. Crawl when you come through the door.”

  We rushed up the stairs and down the hall, bending forward awkwardly in our heavy coats with our backpacks, crawling across the dark floor, sliding on books, papers, CDs and DVDs and games. Orry crouched by the corner of the curtain, sighting a rifle whose muzzle rested on the sill. A pale redhead, he looked like Mattie’s pigmentless twin.

  “No one’s noticed me,” Orry breathed.

  The flickering light in the front yard was from candles, burning sticks and boards, and a couple of Coleman lanterns held aloft. Morton stood in the driveway, in front of a row of five wheelbarrows loaded with stuff. He faced a crowd of about thirty neighbors, who stood along the concrete gutter that separated the street from the narrow sidewalk, held for the moment by suburban property rights habits.

  The argument was about whether the supplies in Morton’s wheelbarrows meant that he had been hoarding, and whether everybody should be allowed to share it.

  “Dad knew you and your family would come, Mattie,” Orry whispered. “So we loaded five wheelbarrows. If we’d been sure that you’d make it, Claire, we’d have one for—”

  The shout from up the street froze my blood. I can’t imagine what it must have done to Mattie
.

  You know the kind of asshole guys that always have three cars out front of their house, and stand out there pretending to fix them so they can drink beer and yell things at girls? Four of those, and of course Ms. Tammy “Speak English, Don’t Wear Cloth On Your Head, and Don’t Be Brown” Davis, were pushing Ravikumar and Kanti by the arms up to the crowd. “They’as sneakin’ up to join their Jew buddy,” Tammy shouted. “Jews and ragheads!”

  Morton Orczegowski lowered his rifle to point at the ground, walked forward quietly, and stood at arm’s-length from the front rank of the silenced crowd. “I invited Mr. and Mrs. Kaushik to come with me to my shelter. We bought and paid for everything, including the wheelbarrows, and they are ours. Just let us go with our families and the property we need, and we will leave the whole house, and everything in it, unlocked for you to take what you want from there.”

  Ravikumar said, “My house is also unlocked, and we have only what is in our packs and what my friend Morton is sharing with us. Please go take what you want, but leave us alone.”

  The crowd was quiet, looking at one another. Morton said, “Just let Mr. and Mrs. Kaushik walk over to me. Don’t hold them that way, you’re hurting them. We can’t get away from you, anyway, any of us.”

  A big guy in a Confederate strap-cap released Kanti’s arm, and the scrawny, scruffy, probably meth-head holding her other arm did the same. She walked quietly out of the crowd to stand next to Morton; a moment later, so did Ravikumar.

  “Now,” Morton said, “We will be gone in five minutes, and you can have—”

  A woman with a loud voice, the kind my mom called “brassy” I guess because it cut through all the other sound like a trumpet, announced, “This is so fucking silly. I just need that box of powdered milk that I can see right there in that one wheelbarrow, for my kids.” She walked up the driveway.

  Morton said, “Ma’am, I can’t let—”

  “It’s just milk for my kids.” She kept walking. “You are not going to shoot a mother who just needs milk for her kids. That’s just silly.”

  Watching him from behind, I didn’t see Morton’s face, but there was a weird twitch in his back muscles, around the shoulder blades, like he was fighting himself for just an instant, before he raised his gun.

  A loud click. Nothing more.

  He tried the trigger again. Click.

  “See?” she said, triumphantly, holding aloft the box of powdered milk and another whole canvas bag. “I’m taking this other stuff too so I don’t have to make extra trips.”

  The crowd wavered for a second. Morton pulled a pistol from his shoulder holster.

  A man in sweatpants and a Homer Simpson T-shirt stepped out of the crowd with a shotgun and pointed it at Morton. Startling, loud clicks beside me: Orry pulling the trigger over and over. “It isn’t firing at all,” he whispered.

  Morton turned at the clicking of the gun behind him, took one step forward, and pushed the muzzle down. “Looks like guns don’t work either.” He was looking right into the man’s eyes. “So we’ll have to—”

  The lady stealing the bag of food, trying to walk out through the crowd, wailed, “No!”

  People were grabbing and pulling at the bag. Someone pushed her forward onto her knees, and the powdered milk burst. Morton took one step forward, his arm outstretched—maybe to help her, or to calm the crowd—and that ratty little meth-head slammed him in the head with a shovel. Morton fell; Ravikumar jabbed the meth-head in the face with the gun butt, and bent to look at Morton.

  Orry, beside me, was screaming, “Dad! Dad! Daddy!”

  Ravikumar Kaushik looked up at us. For an instant, even the people tearing the bag of supplies apart froze. Mattie and I, later, both agreed we remembered the same thing: Ravikumar saw his son, looked into his eyes, and said something we couldn’t hear.

  Then a man whipped a garden rake over his head, down onto Ravikumar’s shoulder, dragging him to the pavement, and some people closed in, kicking and stomping, shoving Kanti away, while the rest rushed up the driveway to the wheelbarrows.

  I grabbed my friends’ arms and stepped back hard, twisting them around to break the spell. “Orry, your coat and pack! Out the back! Before we’re cut off! Downstairs! Now, now, now!”

  The boys leaped down the stairs after me, through the kitchen. The first shoulders were already crashing against the front door.

  We raced through the garage, across the backyard, and through the open gate. The man I had seen seeming to pray to his engine was standing there with a shotgun, but he let us by and kicked the gate shut behind us. Orry jammed a screwdriver through the hasp and said, “Guns don’t work either, run!”

  I never saw whether he did; we just fled across his yard and down the empty street, ducking behind the first big hedge and creeping over to an alley.

  Wild yelling and cheering behind us, but they didn’t seem to be coming our way. Mattie started to run back, but Orry and I grabbed his arms and dragged him along that alley. “I heard my mom call me!”

  So had I, but I hissed, “It wasn’t her, it’s a trick!” I knew Kanti wasn’t calling for him, she was calling to him; it wasn’t help me, it was good-bye.

  We ran along that alley in the dark until we were all stumbling. Orry said, “This way!” and we followed him back onto a wider street, heading west to judge by the dark shape of the mountains against the stars.

  In the street, little clusters of people wandered aimlessly. There were some fires starting to burn in every direction. Behind us, there was a sudden high flame; Orry looked back and said, “I’m guessing that’s Dad’s spare fuel tank.”

  At the edge of the big park-with-a-pond west of our subdivision, Orry stopped and held up a hand. Between gasps he said, “Always imagined it would look like this when Dad talked about it. Sounds so different though. Never imagined no motorcycle or chain saw motors, no sirens, no car horns, no guns.”

  I looked up from where I’d been bent over, coughing hard; I was in shitty shape in those days and the air was already thick with smoke. “I never imagined it at all.” We all gasped for air for a minute or so; at least with the wind from the west, it was only a little smoky so far.

  Orry said, “Okay, no way we can go much farther in the dark. One of us would turn an ankle or somebody’d ambush us or we’d fall into something we never saw. We have to hide till we have light to move by.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. I realized Mattie wasn’t talking, which was a first, and not a good one.

  “Trails Park, for tonight. Up to the shelter tomorrow. I’ll explain more once we’re safe for the night. Meanwhile I have a bolt cutter and crowbar in my pack, and the pump building for West Lake is close.”

  It took less than a minute to break in; inside, Orry produced a candle from his pack and lit it. There was a little workbench with tools, a big, now silent, pump and motor, and a little room on the concrete floor. “No windows,” Orry whispered, “so we can have a light.”

  He dragged on the door to make sure it was shut all the way. “I didn’t pack much food,” he said, apologetically.

  “I did.” I started pulling things out of my pack. We all gulped a bottle of water, wolfed things from the bags, and then swallowed more water. Mattie still wasn’t talking.

  Orry investigated the small refrigerator under the table. “Ha, lucky day. Some naughty maintenance guy was keeping beer here.”

  “Not really time for a party,” I said.

  Orry shook his head. “It’ll help us sleep. We need to do that.”

  Mattie spoke. “My mom and dad say . . . they say . . . I promised them I’d never drink till . . . till . . .” He began to cry.

  “You don’t have to,” I told him, “but it might help.”

  Orry and I had three beers each; Mattie reluctantly had one. I’d been thinking about how cold that floor would be, sleeping in my coat, but
Mattie said, “My sleeping bag is a big double and . . . and I want to have somebody hold me. My mom used to hold me when I couldn’t get to sleep.”

  He looked pretty pathetic. I said, “Okay, but don’t even think about trying to get a feel.”

  He was warm, almost like the big dog I’d always wanted. Even though he was still sobbing and whispering “thank you for holding me,” between the beer, the warmth, and too much exercise I fell asleep right away.

  I had no idea that this sharing a bed thing was going to be the rule for the next seventeen years.

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 1998, 5:50 A.M.

  TRAILS PARK, WESTMINSTER, COLORADO

  Who was this person hanging on to me? Why wasn’t I in my bed? Why was it so hard and cold under me?

  I remembered, poked my head out into the pitch-black chill, and tried to crawl out without disturbing Mattie, feeling to find my boots and coat. Mattie wriggled out beside me.

  Three feet away, Orry was crying, very softly, choking it down and plainly trying to pretend to be asleep.

  I wondered about both boys, and if they’d be okay. I knew I wasn’t like other people—my folks had spent almost as big a pile of money trying to find out what was defective with their big fat ungrateful daughter as they’d spent buying me out of the Busan orphanage in the first place. I guess it was worth it for Mom to have something to say when the other moms were bitching about their kids, and Dad maybe ’cause I was somebody to talk to that wasn’t as crazy as Mom, and only got in his way a little bit when he happened to think of it.

  I tried to imagine seeing my father killed, like Orry and Mattie had seen last night.

  No idea, no clue, no feeling. Dad was okay and I kind of liked him, so maybe I’d be pissed off.