“Beats me.” Captain Horace sounded cheerful admitting how ignorant he was. “Far as I know, nobody’s looked. There are wires up there, you say?”
Dan thought Dr. Saul would blow a gasket. He wasn’t quite sure what a gasket was, but the scientist sure looked ready to blow something. He tore at his hair. Dan had never seen anybody do that before, though people talked about tearing their hair all the time. No wonder Dr. Saul’s looked as if he’d never heard of a comb. Maybe he was lucky to have any hair at all.
“Nobody’s looked?” he roared, loud enough to raise echoes in the basement under the basement. “Are you people blind, or just really, really stupid? Why haven’t you looked?” He suddenly rounded on Dan. “Why haven’t you looked?” he demanded, as if it were all Dan’s fault.
“Sir, I don’t know anything about electricity. I don’t know anything about wires,” Dan answered. “I’m still learning how to take care of a matchlock.”
“Well, do you suppose you can learn to get me a ladder?” Dr. Saul said. “Somebody’s got to do the work around here.” By the way he said it, he meant he had to do everything himself. But he didn’t have to find a ladder and then lug it down two flights of stairs. That was work for the likes of Dan.
Once the ladder was in place, Dr. Saul climbed it as nimbly as a monkey. That was one more thing people said without thinking about. How nimble were monkeys? Dan had never seen one. He didn’t know anybody who had, either.
The scientist got a cover off so he could look right at the fluorescent tube under it. He cautiously reached out and touched the tube. “Isn’t it hot?” Dan asked.
“No. I didn’t think it would be.” But Dr. Saul sounded relieved enough to show he hadn’t been sure. He gave the tube a twist, and it came away from something set into the ceiling. It also stopped glowing, which made the underground room noticeably gloomier.
“Did you kill it?” Captain Horace asked.
“No, no, no.” Dr. Saul shook his head. His hair went on moving after his head stopped. “I want a look at the socket.” Cautiously, he tugged at the socket. “It’s set into the concrete, confound it. The wire must go through there.”
“Are you sure there’s a wire?” the officer said.
“Of course I am. Of course there is,” Dr. Saul said. “This isn’t magic, you know. But we’d have to chip away that concrete to get at the wire and trace it back to the power source.” He muttered to himself. “We’d probably break something.”
If “we” suddenly started chipping concrete, who would do the real work? It wouldn’t be Dr. Saul. He thought about things—he didn’t actually do them. It wouldn’t be Captain Horace or any sergeant. No, it would be somebody a lot like Dan, somebody who wasn’t good for anything else. They’d look at it like that, anyhow.
Dan slid up the stairs and out the trap door while Dr. Saul was still talking. Nobody noticed him go. Who paid attention to common soldiers? When you needed one, you went and grabbed him. Otherwise, forget it.
By the time they might have thought about needing Dan, he was already back on the Santa Monica Freeway line with the rest of his company. He could hope they would grab somebody closer to chip concrete.
They likely did. They didn’t come grab him, anyhow. That suited him fine.
Liz had seen several wagons like the one the Stoyadinoviches gave the Mendozas. It was made from an old Chevrolet, a brand still alive in the home timeline. The engine and the fenders and the roof were gone. Losing the engine saved a lot of weight. Losing the fenders saved weight, too, and let the wainwright install big wooden wheels with iron rims to replace metal wheels and rubber tires that had rotted away. And in place of the roof were iron hoops and a cloth cover that reached up much higher and let the auto body hold more.
When Liz looked at the team hitched to that contraption, she cracked up. “What’s so funny?” George Stoyadinovich asked. “They’re good horses—you won’t find better ones this side of Santa Anita.”
“I’m sure they are,” she said. “But … It’s a car, right? And what’s a car? A horseless carriage, right? And so this is a horseless carriage—with horses! How crazy is that?”
Mr. Stoyadinovich thought about that for a few seconds. Then he started to laugh, too. “I never looked at it that way before.” He turned to Dad. “Keep an eye on her. She’s dangerous.”
“Really? I never would have noticed,” Dad said, deadpan. Mr. Stoyadinovich laughed harder than ever. Liz stuck her nose in the air and sniffed. That only made Mrs. Stoyadinovich and Mom bust up. Liz glared at her mother, who ignored her. Sometimes you couldn’t win.
“You’ve got a pretty good cargo there, too,” Mr. Stoyadinovich said. “People go out and party when they find Old Time Levi’s in good shape. And they should, because it doesn’t happen very often any more. And the ones you’re taking north, they’re just like new.” He winked.
Liz knew what the wink meant. The jeans in the wagon weren’t just like new, from some unearthed clothing store. They were new, from the home timeline. The locals wouldn’t know the difference. These were special trade Levi’s, made in a style that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1960s.
The Chevy wagon’s doors and front seat were still intact. The windshield could have survived, but the driver needed to be able to use the reins when he sat behind the steering wheel. “Is that a cool set of wheels or what?” George Stoyadinovich said, winking again.
By the standards of this alternate, the wagon was without a doubt a cool set of wheels. By the standards of the home timeline … “I think it’s what,” Liz said.
For a moment, George didn’t get it. Then he did, and laughed twice as hard to show he did. “You are a troublemaker,” he said. He aimed his right forefinger at Liz and brought his thumb down. “Bang!”
She mimed being shot, and staggered all over the place. “Too much ham in your sandwich,” Dad told her.
“Let’s go.” Mom was the relentlessly practical one in the family. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we make it up to the Westside again.”
Dad sat behind the wheel. Springs creaked when Liz got in beside him. The old upholstery had long since rotted away. The new upholstery was leather, which made Liz a little queasy. People in the home timeline didn’t think leather was quite so bad as fur, but they used imitations almost all the time. There were no imitations here. All the Old Time Naugahyde was long gone, and Naugas seemed to be extinct in this alternate. So the locals used the real stuff, and didn’t lose any sleep about it. This couldn’t have been any more real—it smelled powerfully of cow.
“Giddyap!” Dad flicked the reins. He had a whip, too, in case the horses didn’t feel like moving. But they leaned into the traces and started to pull. Slowly at first, then at a more respectable speed, the wagon headed toward the Harbor Freeway. It had its southern end in Speedro.
In the home timeline, people called the Harbor Freeway the 110 as often as not. It was part of the U.S. Interstate Highway system. Here, it hadn’t joined that system when the Fire fell. A sign left over from the Old Time told the world it was State Highway 11.
They had to pay a twenty-five-cent toll to get on what was still known as a freeway even if it wasn’t free. Dad passed the silver coin to the toll collector without a murmur. Old as it was, beat-up as it was, the Harbor or 110 or 11 or whatever you called it was far and away the best route north.
Not far from where the Harbor Freeway joined the 405—also called the San Diego Freeway—a hot-air balloon floated five hundred meters in the air, tethered to the ground by a rope. Speedro kept it up there to watch for trouble from a long way off. Seeing it made tears sting Liz’s eyes. In the home timeline, a Goodyear blimp took off and landed right about there. She wondered if the balloon’s gas-tight skin had once been part of a blimp.
The San Diego Freeway swung northwest. The Harbor Freeway went straight north. In the home timeline, it went straight north to downtown Los Angeles. In this alternate, it went straight north to … nothing. Se
veral big bombs had taken out downtown here. The stump of City Hall still stood. It looked like a candle that had burned most of the way down and then slumped over.
In the home timeline, Los Angeles County had more people than forty-two or forty-three states. Liz couldn’t remember which. Even with cars burning clean hydrogen, that Los Angeles still had smog. And so did this one, even with far less than a tenth as many people. The way the mountains and the breezes worked, air pollution always got trapped here. When the Spaniards first saw Santa Monica Bay, they called it the Bay of Smokes. So tears of sorrow weren’t the only things bothering Liz’s eyes.
The horses plodded up the 405. When you lived in a world without cars, without phones, without TV and the Net, nothing happened in a hurry. Dad tried to use the steering wheel to keep the Chevy wagon’s wheels from going into potholes. Sometimes he could, and sometimes he couldn’t. When they did hit a bump, Liz’s teeth came together with a click. The springs were as old as the rest of the chassis.
Other wagons used the freeway. So did people on horseback, people on foot, people on bone-shaking bicycles, and one guy on a skateboard of sorts. He’d found Old Time roller skates and nailed them to the ends of a board. When he pushed himself along, he could go faster than he would have walking.
Dad eyed his style. “He’s not ready for the X Games—that’s for sure.”
“They have the sense to wear helmets when they do those stunts,” Mom said. “Knee pads and elbow pads, too. If he falls down, it’s just him and the asphalt. I bet the asphalt wins.”
“People aren’t nearly as safe here as they are in the home timeline,” Liz said. “They worry about it a lot less, though. It’s funny.”
“It’s crazy,” her mother said.
“But it’s true,” Liz insisted.
“People here figure something’s going to get them. And it usually does,” Dad said. “In the home timeline, they think they ought to stay safe, so they try more. And you know what? Sooner or later, something gets them anyway.”
“That’s true. But it usually takes longer than it would here,” Mom said, and Dad couldn’t very well disagree.
They pulled off the freeway at the Rosecrans ramp, which was still in decent shape. A large sign directed them to GORDON’S GOOD EATS. Liz knew that offramp in the home timeline, because her family used it to visit cousins. A Denny’s sat at that corner there. She stared at Gordon’s. “Oh my God!” she said. “It’s the same building!”
“It sure is,” Mom agreed.
“Prices will be better here,” Dad said, which was bound to be true. He added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the food is, too.”
You couldn’t get a hamburger with avocado and vine-ripened tomatoes at a Denny’s. On the other hand, you couldn’t get an ice-cream sundae or even a Coke at Gordon’s Good Eats, though the orange juice was better than Denny’s. When it came to restrooms, Denny’s won hands down. As she usually did in this alternate, Liz came out of this one wrinkling her nose.
There was a guarded campground next to Gordon’s. Camping behind barbed wire cost another quarter. To stay in character, Dad grumbled when he paid it. Afterwards, he winked at Liz. There hadn’t been quarters in the home timeline for years and years. There, a quarter wasn’t enough to worry about. Neither was a dollar, even if they still had dollar coins.
Dad asked people coming south what things were like on the Westside. “There’s gonna be a rumble, man,” one traveler said. “Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s gonna be.” Another man nodded.
“Can we get through?” Dad didn’t say anything about stopping. You never could tell who was a spy, or for whom.
The traveler coming down from the north shrugged. “You can try, like. I wouldn’t give you no money-back guarantee.” Some of the phrases of Old Time advertising had stuck in the language here.
The back of the seat reclined in the Chevy. It went back farther than an airplane seat would. You could sleep on it … after a fashion. Liz and her parents lay side by side. One of them wiggling was liable to wake somebody else. Liz had passed plenty of nights she enjoyed more.
By what had to be a miracle, Gordon’s Good Eats had coffee the next morning. Liz didn’t usually like it, but she thought of it as medicine now. Her folks poured down cup after cup. It wasn’t cheap, not by this alternate’s standards, but Dad didn’t say boo.
They got back on the 405—they didn’t have to pay a toll this time—and started north again. With luck, they would get up to Westwood as the sun was setting. Liz thought that was good for all kinds of reasons. If it was dark, the Valley soldiers would have a harder time recognizing them.
Then Dad passed Mom the reins. He ducked into the back of the wagon. When he returned, his beard was gone. He didn’t look like the same person any more. After he took back the reins, Mom did up her hair instead of letting it fall down over her shoulders. She put on a pair of glasses to replace her contacts. She looked different, too, even if not so much as Dad did.
“Your turn, Liz,” she said when she got through.
Liz put her hair up, too. Mom showed her how she looked in a mirror from an Old Time compact. She did seem different, but different enough? Maybe for somebody who’d met her only a couple of times.
“If Dan sees me, he’ll know who I am,” she said gloomily.
“Well, what are the odds?” Dad said. “There’s only one of him, after all, and we won’t be going right back to where we were.”
“Besides, they’re probably still trying to figure out how we disappeared,” Mom said. “They can’t think we’d come back again.”
“I sure hope not,” Liz said.
Curiosity drew Dan back to the house that had been Liz’s. He knew what they said about cats. He knew he ran the risk of hard, unpleasant work. He went anyway. He was a soldier, but he wasn’t an old soldier.
Sure enough, somebody—a luckless common soldier not named Dan—had chipped away a lot of concrete from the roof of the basement under the basement. Some other soldier—or maybe the same one—had swept up most of it. Most, but not all. Little chunks still gritted under the soles of Dan’s boots.
Dr. Saul was up on a ladder again. He was poking around up there with a stick. He’d said something about electricity not biting wood. Dan didn’t follow all of that, but Dr. Saul knew his own business best.
Or maybe nobody knew anything. “This can’t be the power pack that keep these lights going,” Dr. Saul insisted. “It can’t be, I tell you! It’s too small—way, way too small.”
“Well, if it’s not, what is?” Captain Horace asked.
“I don’t know!” Dr. Saul yelled, and then he said something Dan wouldn’t have expected to hear from a distinguished scientist.
Captain Horace was about to say something just as lovely when somebody yelled from up above: “They’re clanging the alarm!”
What Horace said then made Dr. Saul’s remark seem like sweet talk by comparison. What Dan said made both the officer and the scientist gape at him. He never knew it, though. He was clattering up the stairs, and paid no attention to whatever went on behind him.
He dashed up the stairs from the basement to ground level, too. By then he noticed Captain Horace wasn’t real far behind him. But the captain couldn’t catch him. Dan ran out of the house, down Glendon to Wilshire, down Wilshire to Westwood Boulevard, and down Westwood Boulevard to the freeway line.
The shooting had already started by the time he got there. Westsiders to the south were banging away at Valley soldiers up on the freeway. “Take your place!” Sergeant Chuck yelled when he saw Dan.
Dan did. He started loading his matchlock. He could see plumes of smoke that showed where enemy musketeers were firing. He worried more about what he couldn’t see. Riflemen with Old Time weapons could shoot at him from ranges at which he couldn’t hope to reply. They used smokeless powder, too. Unless he saw a muzzle flash, he wouldn’t even know where they were shooting from. And if they hit him … No, he didn’t want to think about
that.
Then he heard a bigger explosion and saw a bigger flash from a distant window. “Good!” Chuck yelled. “Dog my cats if that wasn’t an Old Time rifle blowing up!” Ammunition two long lifetimes old could get touchy—could and did. Yes, riflemen needed several different kinds of courage.
A more familiar boom made Horace duck. A cannonball flew over his head and landed with a crash somewhere north of the freeway. Westside artillerymen—or would they be from Speedro?—started reloading their piece.
“Where are our rifles?” Chuck yelled. An Old Time rifle could shoot as far as one of those cannon. A matchlock couldn’t come close. Dan didn’t waste ammunition trying. The Valley’s fearsome .50-caliber machine gun could make hash of the enemy gun crew in nothing flat. Where was it? Nowhere close enough to use, anyway.
Valley riflemen did start shooting then. Every round they fired meant scrounging for more. What would happen when it all finally ran out or grew too unstable to use? The matchlock musketeer would reign supreme, that was what.
In spite of the riflemen, the cannon boomed again. This time, the roundshot thudded into one of the freeway supports. It felt like an earthquake to Dan. The supports had to be strong. They’d stood up through real earthquakes. But Dan was pretty sure they weren’t meant to stand up to cannon fire. What would happen if one fell down?
Then a stretch of freeway falls down, too, dummy. Then you fall down.
He wanted to do what any soldier in a spot like that would want to do. He wanted to run away. But he couldn’t. His superiors would hang him for being a coward—unless they decided to do something even more interesting and painful. That wasn’t his biggest worry, though. Letting his buddies down was.
So he stayed where he was posted. Under cover of the rifle and cannon fire, enemy soldiers ran toward the freeway line. He fired at one of them. The fellow went down. Maybe Dan’s bullet hit him. Maybe someone else’s did. Dan never knew for sure, and didn’t much care. All he knew was that he had to reload as fast as he could. And he did.
The Valley-Westside War Page 18
