“Isn’t this the dumbest thing you ever heard of?” Mercer said to Allison. “All this yellin’ and shootin’ to protect a fuckin’ side of beef?”
He walked to the porch and looked up at the people standing there. Allison followed him.
“Awright, listen up! Who’s in charge here?” Mercer demanded.
“I am.” It was the tall woman who had escorted Allison the day before. Without her burnoose, Allison could see she had red hair cut almost as short as Frank Burk’s, and a deeply freckled face.
“What’s your name?”
“Helen Burk. I’m Mr. Burk’s wife, and I protest the way you and your men have invaded our home.”
“Get down here, Helen,” Mercer said.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, walking slowly down the steps. Mercer ignored her. She looked at Allison. “Why are you doing this to us?”
“Because — “ His voice was harsh in a dry throat. “Because you stole the Brotherhood’s cow, you lied to me, and now you’ve killed one of my friends and maybe some young men who were only trying to protect us. To protect us from bandits.”
Her eyes met his and would not look away. “Please, Mr. Allison. Please don’t let them hurt us. Please, the kids.” The fear in her voice set off the children. Even after they were sent back inside, their wails filled the air. Mercer kept Helen Burk in the yard. He turned to face her.
“I expect your menfolks will be in the neighbourhood any minute. Maybe they’re even watching us now. Where from?”
“I don’t under — ”
“Yes you do. Somewhere right near here, there’s a little spot where they can see this place. I want you to stand where they can see you and hear you. Do you understand?”
She nodded quickly and walked out through the dead grass of the meadow towards the road. Mercer walked beside her, his .45 in his hand. To their right, trees stood close-ranked along the edge of the meadow. Thunder rumbled not too far away. Allison saw Mercer lean towards Helen Burk, almost intimately.
“Frank? Frank, if you can hear me — they got all of us. We’re all okay. We’re okay.” Mercer prompted her again. “They want everyone to come out, unarmed. Hands on your heads. Or they’ll kill us. Oh, Frank do it, please, please. He’ll do it, he will. Please — ”
After a pause, men came slowly out of the woods: six of them, all in their thirties or forties. Hands on heads, they walked across the meadow towards Mercer and the woman. Allison recognized Burk and the two who had tried to block the road; the others he had glimpsed occasionally in the past. Neighbours, he thought. But they’d preyed on other neighbours, and killed Dave Marston.
— Mercer was falling backward, arms flailing. The woman beside him looked startled. The six men, off to one side, hesitated. An instant later shots banged, echoing off the farmhouse and the trees.
Allison raised his .45 and fired twice at one of the men. They were running, throwing themselves back towards the woods. Helen Burk bent over with a gasp and fell. More shots blew little clouds of dust above the clumps of yellow grass.
“Stop it! Cease fire!” screamed Bert. He strode across the yard and yanked a rifle barrel up into the acrid air. Allison ran out into the meadow, with a few of the soldiers behind him. Bert was snarling at the others to stay put. Inside the farmhouse, children screamed.
Mercer got up and dusted himself off. Helen Burk was convulsing, knees drawn up to her chest; she wheezed and panted. Three of the six men were dead. The others, including Burk, had made it back into the woods and vanished.
“Who started shooting?” Mercer asked.
“I don’t know,” said Allison. “I — we saw you fall, and someone was shooting, it was just automatic.”
“Fuck.” Mercer spat in a hole near his feet, then reached into it and yanked out a square of mud-smeared green plastic. A sharpened stick jutted from the bottom of the hole.
“A punji stick. Must be my lucky day ’cause I didn’t step right down onto it. These assholes thought they was playin’ war games. Punji sticks — hey, you want to finish off this poor woman here?”
“Me?” Allison said.
“You shot her. I saw you. Thought for sure you’d get me. Now, you going to put her out of her misery?”
“Jesus, lieutenant.”
“Man, she’s not going to live, but she’ll take a while to die. If you can’t do it, I will.”
Allison lifted the .45 and took a few stiff steps over to the woman. Her freckled face was oddly pale, with blue around the lips Just like poor Dave, he thought. She was starting to groan: “Frannnk … Frannnk.”
“I’m sorry. Very sorry,” Allison whispered, and shot her in the head.
Mercer was already walking back to the farmyard: “You, you, you — get out there and bring in those bodies. Sotelo, you get in that house and tell everybody to shut up. You five, go get some shovels and start digging. Rest of you fan out and try to catch those three dudes who got away. Hurry it up. Gonna start raining soon.”
“Hey, tough break, Bob Tony,” said Bert as he patted Allison’s shoulder.
“They were asking for it. Punji sticks, for God’s sake. They’ve got sharp sticks smeared with shit all over the place, like Vietnam or something. Completely paranoid.”
“Absolutely,” Bert agreed. “You were defending the lieutenant from attackers. No military court would dream of punishing you.”
Allison smiled, then laughed. The idea of a trial of any kind seemed absurd. Justice was dead; now there was only self-preservation. These would-be survivalists had been foolish and unlucky. They’d prepared for the end of the old order, but not for the beginning of the new. They’d thought that violence would protect them during the brief period before other people obligingly died off, like some disaster novel; then they’d inherit the earth. Allison knew better, had known it since Bert had shot the driver of the Trans Am: the violence would never stop. It was the inheritance tax paid by the survivors. So be it.
*
The day was long. Mercer had the surviving civilians trucked out to Fort Ord for interrogation; they would then be deported out of the Martial Law Zone. Their property would be administered by the army for the duration. “Lots of good stuff here, too,” Mercer remarked to Allison after a quick inspection of the cabins. “Plenty of dehydrated food, lots of guns and ammo, probably a big fuel dump somewheres. If they’d left their neighbours’ cow alone, they’d have been all set.”
Jeremy Lamb was not very horrified when Allison came by to tell him what had happened.
“We shall pray for them all, especially the children. It is terrible to hear of such things. But this is the time of Tribulation; we must accept what is measured out to us. We thank you for your help, Mr. Allison. I wish we had some way to repay you.”
“You have a way, I think,” said Allison. “Three of the men are still loose. One of them is Frank Burk. As long as they’re in the valley, we’re not safe. But if we could keep these soldiers here for a while, they’d track those guys down and keep the peace. It’s just a matter of being able to feed and house the soldiers.”
Lamb looked thoughtful. “My friend, a few months ago I would not have agreed. I would have been afraid of the harm your soldiers might do. Now I see the need more clearly. But to support so many — ”
“I know it wouldn’t be easy, but they could save us from more serious problems.”
“Yes, yes … Perhaps we might send a petition to General Miles.”
*
“You shot her,” Shauna said blankly.
“I wasn’t aiming at her. The men were right near her, and when Mercer fell down I thought they’d pulled something on us. In a way they had, with that goddamn punji stick. But I could just as easily have hit Mercer himself. A forty-five isn’t very accurate.”
“My God, my God, Bob. You’ll go to jail.”
“No. I was defending an army officer. Ernie Miles might order a hearing or something, but that’s all.”
“How could you do
it?”
“By aiming and firing,” Allison said. “The same way they blew a hole in poor Dave.”
“Was that the idea? Dave gets killed so you can shoot some unarmed woman. If you guys had stayed here where you belonged, and left everything to the soldiers — ”
Thunder crashed outside. Rain pounded on the bedroom skylights. Shauna walked back and forth, rubbing her neck. It was not yet sundown, but the room was dim except for blue flashes of lightning.
“I can’t take much more of this, Bob. It’s getting way too heavy.”
“Name a better place, kid, and I’ll take you there.”
“God damn you, I know there isn’t any place else.”
“Kid, you can’t do mad scenes. Sit down. Listen.” Grudgingly, she obeyed. “Sure, it’s a shitty time. I didn’t exactly get off on killing her. It had to be done or she would have gone on suffering. There’s no other way to cope with this, kid — just, you know, do what has to be done. Because if we don’t, we’re finished.”
He was relieved when her beautiful face loosened into weeping: “I just want it to end. I just want everything okay again. Ohh, Bob, why is everything so fucked up?”
*
Late that evening, Allison and Mercer drove back from Fort Ord. Ted Loeffler and Bert D’Annunzio were waiting in Allison’s study with Lamb and Ray Wilder.
“It’s official,” Allison smiled. “We get Lieutenant Mercer and the two platoons assigned to the valley. It’ll be tough, because we’ll have to support them, but I think we can manage with the Brotherhood’s help. We’ll use Burk’s empty cabins as their main base, with smaller groups at your place and ours, and down near the mouth of the canyon. Once we’ve nailed Burk and his two friends, things ought to settle down.”
Ray Wilder looked doubtful. “I wonder, sir, if it’s wise to put soldiers so close to civilians. There could be problems.”
Mercer shook his head slightly. “My men were civilians just a few weeks ago. Lots of ‘em have sisters. Some of ‘em are even born-again Christians.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Lamb said.
“Even if they weren’t,” Mercer went on, ignoring him, “they’d watch their step because I’m watchin’ over ‘em. You will have no problems with my men.”
*
Three days later, not long after sunset, three men on bicycles came through the canyon from the Carmel Valley. They were stopped at Checkpoint Alpha, where the road climbed out of the canyon into the upper valley. After radioing the ranch, the soldiers on duty allowed the men through.
Allison met them in the living room. Another lightning storm was breaking over the hills. The men introduced themselves: all were ranchers in the Carmel Valley. Their spokesman was a powerful old man named Olson.
“We heard about the soldiers you got here and how they cleaned out those survivalists,” Olson said. “We got the same kind of problem. People holed up here’n’ there, come out at night, steal cattle and anything else they can find. My oldest boy got shot in the foot a couple weeks by somebody tryin’ to swipe hay.”
“Can’t you do something yourself?”
“We’re law-abiding people, Mr. Allison. I know everything’s gone to hell, and some people are taking advantage and running wild. But that’s not for us. We couldn’t just go up to some fellow’s house and shoot him dead. And we don’t have jail or anything. Even if we did, we couldn’t spare anybody to guard it, or feed prisoners, or any of that. We’re having a hell of a time just looking after our families.”
Jesus, thought Allison, it was like something out of Seven Samurai. He rubbed his beard solemnly. “Can you help support Lieutenant Mercer and his men? Food, shelter, that kind of thing?”
“I guess. Give us an idea what it’ll cost — ”
They dickered and argued for some time. At last all agreed on terms: Mercer’s two platoons would patrol the part of the Carmel Valley occupied by the ranchers and their neighbours. Allison had been appointed Designated Administrator of Escondido Valley by General Miles; the appointment was vague enough to permit him to operate in neighbouring areas as well, enforcing martial law and trying offenders. In exchange the ranchers would provide two-fifths of the soldiers’ food and supply adequate quarters for up to three squads at a time. Food, tools and weapons would also be contributed to a central store in the ranch compound.
When the ranchers left, Olson gripped Allison’s hand. “We’re glad to have you folks for neighbours,” he said. “You’re good people.”
*
Later that night, as lightning flashed through the skylights and hail rattled down, Allison looked in on Sarah, sleeping in what had been his dressing room. She was small and pale, her dark hair tousled on the pillow. He thought she was the most beautiful child he had ever seen.
Shauna came out of the bathroom on the far side of the bedroom. She wore her ratty bathrobe; Allison wondered irritably if she ever wore anything else these days. She was taking a long time to snap out of her current depression.
“So you got to borrow an army after all,” she said, dropping the robe and sliding into bed.
“Huh?”
“Remember? The day of the waves you were going to ask Ernie Miles to lend you some soldiers. For the movie.”
“My God. That seems so long ago. Maybe we ought to make Longrangers after all.” He sat heavily on his side of the bed and began to undress.
“You’re having too much fun being a real soldier.”
“Fun, my aching ass. Most of the time I’m scared out of my mind. Now at least I’m only anxious. If Mercer makes us a few more friends, I might even relax a little.”
“Friends.” Shauna turned off the Coleman lamp. “Those aren’t friends, they’re vassals.”
He laughed in the darkness, surprised that she knew the word and pleased at its aptness. “Better to have ‘em than be ‘em, kid.”
She made love to him with uncommon passion, and he responded fiercely and hungrily. Later, when she lay snoring in his arms and the storm grew into a blue-flashing roar, he kept seeing Helen Burk’s face at the instant of her death. Not until the storm passed, and grey dawn filled the skylights, did he fall asleep. As he did, he thought: This is what it’s like to be haunted.
Chapter 10
The car, a three-year-old Pontiac, arrived at the Kennards’ house promptly at 2:30 in the morning. Don and Kirstie put their luggage — a single duffle bag — on the seat beside the driver, and settled down in the back seat.
“What luxury,” Kirstie sighed. “Actually going somewhere without walking.”
“No kidding,” the driver agreed. He was a young Chicano, part of the Berkeley local council’s full-time work force. “We got fourteen, fifteen cars converted to propane or natural gas. Wish we had more. I don’t care what anybody says, it ain’t natural to have to walk all the time, you know?”
“A lot of people are converting, aren’t they?” Don asked. “We’ve been seeing more trucks and cars on the streets lately.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Trouble is finding the equipment and then finding the propane or gas. But a lotta guys are using their heads to beat the shortages.”
That was true enough, Don reflected. Berkeley was even beginning to look different as people began to experiment with different kinds of energy resources. Some had made solar panels and were heating their homes with them. But that was only a piecemeal solution, he knew. Perhaps one household in twenty had self-generated hot water and space heating; one in fifty had its own electric light, usually from a bicycle-powered generator. Berkeley as a whole was down to ninety minutes of electricity, every other day.
The streets at night were busy, almost crowded in some places. Hundreds of bicycles were out, and a few trucks. Here and there a building glowed with electric lights: hospitals, a few local-run clinics, the food-distribution centres. Otherwise candles burned everywhere. People had begun to adjust to staying up all night and sleeping most of the day.
Down near the wreckage zone, the driv
er turned into a side street along a park, and found his way blocked by a truck. “What now?” he growled.
A backhoe was operating in the park, its engine roaring as it dug a long, deep trench parallel to the street.
“What a waste of fuel,” Don said.
“No it’s not,” said Kirstie. “Smell. There’s quite a pong in the air.”
Don nodded, wrinkling his nose. A work crew of ten or fifteen men and women, wearing the orange armband of the Berkeley local, stood by the truck; several held furled stretchers. Other people, adults and children, were crowded along the sidewalk. Some were crying.
“It’s a burial,” Kirstie whispered. “They’ve got to work fast.”
Someone opened the back of the truck. In the headlights of the Pontiac, the Kennards could see bodies stacked three or four deep. Members of the work crew, wearing white surgical masks and gloves, climbed up and began hauling out the corpses, swinging them onto waiting stretchers whose bearers took them to the trench and dumped them in.
One of the workers came up to the car and said to the driver: “I think you better back up and go another way. We’re going to be here awhile.”
“I can see that,” the driver answered. “Man, that’s real sad, ain’t it? Really sad. More typhoid?”
“Yeah. The doctors say it’s getting worse.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, on our block you can take your pick, you know? Typhoid, meningitis, hepatitis, stomach bugs they ain’t got names for yet.”
“I believe it. Well, take it easy.” The worker turned and plodded back to the truck. The stink of putrefaction thickened; swearing, the driver threw the car into reverse.
“It never quits, does it?” Don said quietly. “No energy, no clean water. No clean water, people get sick. No energy, no transportation and no medical technology, so people die.”
*
The western edge of the wreckage zone, facing the bay, was beginning to resemble a shoreline. A crude harbour was in operation. Sailboats and a very few power craft crossed the bay to San Francisco and Marin, carrying passengers and small quantities of trade goods; payment was in goods or in local-council scrip. The Kennards had anchored Naiad here after their return from Monterey Bay in March; now, in early April, the little sloop was equipped for the much longer run to Vancouver.
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