“No spurting,” Mattie said. “So he’s dead.”
“That was the idea,” I said. “Did the happy-happy family down there hear us?”
They were still all gathered around the fire; it sounded like one of the kids was crying and Angie was trying to soothe it.
“I guess he didn’t realize guns don’t work anymore,” Orry said.
“He should have tried one out,” Mattie said. “If it had been working, at least he’d have known whether the safety was on.”
Orry giggled. “That shotgun doesn’t have one. Did you know that, Claire?”
“Nope, but I guessed he wouldn’t know.”
“If I could guess what people know,” Mattie said, “the world would make more sense.”
“No shit,” Orry said. “Let’s follow Kevin’s tracks in the snow toward the shelter. If we go that way maybe we’ll meet them coming the other way, and we can ambush them.”
Kevin’s tracks led us down around the ridge to a big backpack. Orry opened it and said, “Yeah, canned goods and frozen food. Couple jugs of milk. We should remember to pick this stuff up after we settle with Buchanan; we don’t need it right now.”
“What was he doing with it?” Mattie asked.
Orry shrugged. “Probably he was coming back from looting the neighbors, saw us on the ridge, and just walked right up. We’re not exactly woods scouts, are we?”
The weird thing was, those were his last words, ever. Like one minute later, as we followed the tracks toward the shelter, Buchanan stepped out of the shadow of a pine tree and jabbed a bat under Orry’s chin, full force, then brought it up and back down savagely across Orry’s forehead.
I pulled the linoleum knife from my pocket and lunged forward, raking Buchanan’s face from cheek to cheek across the eyes. Buchanan dropped the bat and screamed.
I jabbed forward with the steak knife in my other hand, but it just bent on his leather coat. Meanwhile I backhanded with the linoleum knife across the hands covering his face, slashing through flesh and tendons. By then Mattie was behind him, swinging with a hard sidearm to jam a wood-drill bit deep into the man’s back.
Buchanan fell to his hands and knees. I stepped over him, jerked his head back by his mullet, and cut my second throat of the day. This one spurted, so I guess his heart was still going, but not for long.
We turned Orry over; he was breathing but unconscious. “We need to get him into the shelter,” Mattie said.
“Turn him on his side so he won’t choke,” I said. “We need to get those assholes out of our way.”
At the fire, the wife was huddled with the two kids, trying to quiet them with, “Daddy will be right back.”
“Your husband and your brother are both dead,” I said. “This is our shelter now. Get out. Run and keep running.”
She screamed.
I remembered Orry lying back there in the snow, and how bad we needed to get him in, and the mess these redneck dipshits had made of the shelter, and just snapped. I grabbed the end of a stick in the fire and threw it at the bitch’s head. She jumped back, still shrieking.
Mattie threw another one that hit her on the chest, maybe singed her coat, and she burned her hands keeping it from landing on the kids. She grabbed her little brats by the hands and started running up the hill, slipping and stumbling on the snowy slope. Mattie and I threw some more burning sticks after her. I yelled, “Don’t come back, bitch!”
“Should we tell her she’s heading straight for her dead brother?” Mattie asked.
“Does it matter?” I shrugged. “Think she’s gone for good?”
“Probably. But let’s make sure we stay alert while we carry Orry in.”
A minute or two later, as we were scooping Orry up, with me taking the shoulders, we heard a screaming wail. “See, she found out about her brother anyway,” I told Mattie.
We both laughed too long and too hard. It sounded all sick and weird. Maybe she heard us. By the time we stopped, she’d quit wailing.
We carried Orry inside into the brightly lighted bedroom, undressed him, and put him under the covers. “Never would have thought I was going to see his dick or care so little when I did.”
Mattie snorted. He felt Orry’s head very gently. “No soft spots on his skull. Big bump high on the back.” We peeled back his eyelids and held the kerosene lantern close. His pupils were different sizes, and there was some blood on the whites. “All I remember about that is that it’s bad,” Mattie said, “but we’ll have to look that up in the survival library that Orry said they have here.”
The shelter was like Bilbo Baggins’ summerhouse: three bedrooms, kitchen, toilet, common living area, workroom. A whole wall of useful books contained a bunch of medical and first aid manuals. We confirmed that Orry probably had a bad concussion, from which he could recover, but might have worse brain damage and could die from it any time. All we could do was to keep him warm and clean and gently put water into his mouth till he woke up. “Speaking of warm,” I said, “why is it so freaking cold in here? And I could really use some food.”
“I have an idea,” Mattie said. “Smell all that smoke? Bet you for sure they didn’t know to open the damper on the woodstove.” He turned the damper. “Yep. Orry said the smoke goes up to some kind of condenser system that prevents a big plume going up into the air, so it’s safe to have a fire here. And you can see they laid this one and couldn’t get it going. Thank God they didn’t think of taking kerosene from that lantern.”
“Yeah. Hey, does it have to be so bright?”
He twisted the little valve at the base. “Nope. All right, well, the damper’s open, I’ll re-lay this fire—it’s way more than we need—and see about some cleanup.” The kitchen was a mess; apparently the family had just been breaking into things and dumping them on the floor. “We should probably put that fire out, outside, and see if the door can be blocked, will you please?”
Outside, I kicked the fire apart and dumped dirt and snow on it with a shovel. The thin crescent moon showed tracks on the snowfield, plainly and clearly. If this didn’t melt tomorrow, good luck staying hidden. For sure there’d be more crowds on the roads soon. But for tonight, the dark and cold would probably shelter us.
When I went back inside, Mattie had the fire going. I dragged the door closed on its remaining hinge, then lashed it by its handle to a board I propped diagonally across the frame, and stuffed some spare towels into the remaining crack. I hung a string of bear bells on that diagonal brace; if anyone tried to break in, we’d know.
That night Mattie and me shared the double bed that was probably built when Orry’s mother was still living with his dad.
Mattie curled up against me with his face in my neck. I could feel his tears running down.
“You okay?”
“Just thinking about how scared I am not to have Mom and Dad anymore. And about how hard I cried for that poor murdered little boy on the road, and taking care of the dog . . . and then I thought, I just chased a mother and her kids out in the snow to die. After I killed her husband.”
“We don’t know that they’re gonna die.”
“Claire.”
“Okay, you don’t know. And I don’t care.”
He cried harder, and hung on to me. It was easier to put an arm around him than anything else.
What the hell, he was warm.
* * *
FRIDAY, MARCH 19–SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 1998
JUST SOUTH OF LYONS, COLORADO
The snow melted early the next morning as another chinook came in. We moved Buchanan and Kevin into a dry creek nearby. Mattie said that bears or coyotes or dogs gone feral would mess them up enough so that no one would be able to tell we’d killed them, and anyway probably no one cared.
We rested, ate, and made sure that condenser chimney was really working.
Two days later, we got up to
find another blizzard blowing, and Orry, who had never awakened even when we’d dripped water into his mouth, was dead.
We gave it some time in case it was just a coma, but after we’d had breakfast and cleaned up, he was cold and stiff.
“I was thinking,” Mattie said. “We’ve been seeing billows of black smoke south toward Boulder, north toward Lyons, and southeast toward Denver, right? And the cities will run out of food soon, but right now everyone’s locked down by the snow, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, before whatever it was hit us, where would you have thought to go if you had to get out of Denver or Boulder to survive?”
“Into the hills,” I said. “Not just the survivalists, everyone thinks that way. I get what you’re saying. They’ll come this way.”
“Yeah, and now we don’t have Orry to take care of. All these supplies are great but we could get killed trying to keep them, and anyway they won’t last forever. So, if everyone else is going to head for the hills, let’s not sit here and wait for them to dig us out and take this place away.”
“And instead we should—”
“Go where they grow the food—east onto the plains.”
I nodded; he was making sense.
He asked, “How long would it take me to learn to use cross-country skis?”
“If we spend the rest of today packing, and eat a big breakfast tomorrow before we go, you could be sort of decent by tomorrow night at dinnertime,” I said, “and we could be a long way away. Maybe where people are still opening the door to refugees. The snow won’t last this time of year but we can at least get out of the way of trouble, and maybe better than that.” I spread out the map and we looked at it. “If we head due east, eventually we’ll pick up 76 and we can follow it into Nebraska; that goes up into farm country and there’s no big towns on it for a long way.”
“I guess we just leave Orry here, eh?”
I could hear the tears in Mattie’s voice, and I knew what answer he was looking for, so we wasted time putting our friend in as much of a grave as we could dig and piling stones on top of it.
That night in the bed, Mattie started crying. For a moment I thought of moving to another bed. But then I thought about trying to do all this alone, and how much smarter he was and how much more stuff he knew.
So I wrapped my arms around him. Considering how valuable he was, if I had to hug him now and then, I could get used to it.
Next morning, we slept late, ate huge, and skied away. Mattie caught on faster than I’d promised, and we spent the day laughing and zooming along the snowy roadsides, almost unaware of the burned-out cars and frozen bodies. It was the first good day since the Change, the first of many.
* * *
MONDAY, 8 JUNE 2015, 1 P.M.–11 P.M.
RAFTER XOX RANCH
After a while, I dry my eyes, and tell myself to cowgirl up. I go out to walk around with Mattie while he visits everyone and shows off his splinted right arm and stitches and makes them all laugh that Mister Matt is too tough to die, and Miz Claire is too mean to let him.
Mattie insists on holding kind of a party from dinner till bedtime, and we have to put in an appearance at Marjorie’s Service of Delivery and Thanksgiving. So it’s a little late before we finally get into bed next to each other, and he snuggles up to me in a weird, gingerly awkward fashion because he’s in more pain than he has been letting anyone see.
“I didn’t mean to say Broken,” I confess, as soon as we’ve blown the candles out. “It just popped out. For no reason.”
“No reason?”
I admit, “Well, not for no reason. I, uh, I’m used to you. I’m really used to you.”
His lips brush my cheek, and he awkwardly strokes my hair with his left hand. “Thanks, honey. I’m used to you too.”
Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers
by Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove is an escaped Byzantine historian. He found that telling lies for a living was more fun than putting in the footnotes. His books include The Guns of the South, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Ruled Britannia, and Every Inch a King. He has lived in the west end of the San Fernando Valley for the past thirty years, and quite enjoyed imagining it ruined for the purposes of this story.
Jared Tillman sat in his front room, carefully winding up the phonograph. You had to feel how tight the spring was. It wasn’t the original, but it wasn’t new, either. One of these days, it would break. He just didn’t want that day to be today. He felt like listening to music, not messing around inside the mechanism to install the most nearly matching spring he could pull out of his junk drawer.
As things went, the phonograph was modern. It probably dated from the early 1950s, made to be taken to picnics and parties where there was no power. That meant it could play 331⁄3 RPM records, instead of speeding them up to a shrill gabble the way an older player with settings only for 45s and 78s would have.
Where there was no power . . . Jared’s mouth twisted. No power anywhere now, not these past thirty years. He scratched at his mustache and plucked out a hair. It was white. He let it fall to the ever more threadbare wall-to-wall carpeting. He’d been in his mid-twenties when the Change came. He remembered how things had been, and how he’d grown up in a different world.
Carefully, he set the needle on the record’s outer grooves. The needle wasn’t sharp. The record wasn’t new, which was putting things mildly. The speaker was a cheap piece of junk. But Steely Dan—tinny, scratchy Steely Dan, but Steely Dan even so—filled the room in the house off Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Like the ruins that remained from before the Great Southern California Dieoff, it reminded him things hadn’t always been this way.
“Shit, I didn’t even like Steely Dan back then,” he muttered. But you took what you could get. Bands he had liked, bands like Nirvana and Green Day, put their music out on CDs. These days, CDs were good for nothing but scaling through the air and for seeing rainbows.
Eucalyptus leaves dappled the sunlight that poured in through the west-facing windows. Eucalyptuses sent roots to the center of the earth to pull up what water they could. Along with olives and scrub oaks and pepper trees and a few hard pines, they were what could grow in arid Topanga Canyon.
He’d grown up in the canyon. He was a second-generation hippie; his folks had moved here to join a commune, and never left. They’d sold candles and pots from a little shop, and sometimes pot on the side. There’d never been a lot of money, but there’d always been some. Enough, or close enough. They’d always said that, if you didn’t sweat it, close to enough was enough.
And maybe they were right, and maybe they were wrong, and certainly they were dead. Old Doc Leibowitz gave Jared’s mother statins and blood-pressure meds as long as he had them. She had a coronary a couple of years after he ran out, and that was that. A Topangan scavenged more from a Valley house not long afterwards. Someone else got help for a while, but not Mom. Dad . . . Dad had smoked tobacco as well as weed. Lung cancer would have been a bad way to go even with twentieth-century medicine. Without it . . . He smoked lots of weed, and as much opium as he could get, and died in less pain than he would have without them. And Jared’s wife had hemorrhaged when Connor was born, and the doc and the midwife couldn’t stop it.
Muttering, Jared pulled a paperback off the shelf. The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash had been old even before the Change. Before too long, the cheap paper would crumble, but it hadn’t yet. Paper made these days lasted longer, but there wasn’t much of it. Ben Franklin would have understood post-Change printing just fine. Books sold across a continent for pocket change were as dead as everything else from the old days.
He found the poem he was looking for, not that he needed to: he’d long since memorized it. No great trick—“The Middle” was only four lines long. But seeing the words made him see the world the words came from. He remembered that
world, ached for that world, with a terrible longing that would never go away and that would never do him any good.
Nine and a half million people lived in Los Angeles County when the Change came. They took water and food and electricity for granted—till all of a sudden the power and the internal-combustion engine disappeared. Most of the water came from hundreds of miles away, so it disappeared, too. The food arrived in trucks and ships with engines . . . till it didn’t any more.
Some people tried to get to less crowded, wetter parts of the world on foot—or by bikes if they had bikes. Some hunkered down, trying to ride out what they hoped would be a temporary disaster.
Before the Change, Jared had read that the natural carrying capacity of the area was about a quarter of a million. About ninety-eight percent of the people had died either trying to escape or waiting for help that never came. His nose wrinkled as he remembered the stench that had filled the air for months.
Topanga was lucky, as places around here went when the Change hit. It was isolated and not too crowded. People were more used to doing for themselves than most Angelenos. Streams ran year-round, in good years anyhow. The canyon gave the Topangans an outlet on the sea, and another on the San Fernando Valley: a prime scrounging resource. And, being a canyon, it was defensible.
He read the poem again. It talked about remembering bygone days. The last two lines had the meat. So many I loved were not yet dead, Nash wrote. So many I love were not yet born. Yes, that was the truth, sure as hell. Any middle-aged person through all the history of mankind had been there. But, for his generation, the Change was The Middle. Reworking the poem, you could say So much I loved was not yet dead.
You could, but how much would it help? Steely Dan was singing about the Royal Scam. The song should have had a proper stereo system. Yeah, and I should have a Mac and a modem, Jared thought. People in hell were sure they should have mint juleps to drink.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 46
