The Chevy wagon had come a long way up the 405 when the gunfire to the north started up. “Oh, dear!” Liz’s mother said.
“Oh, no!” Liz said.
What Liz’s father said meant about the same thing as Oh, dear! and Oh, no! Still, it was a good thing the wagon that had been a car carried no more gasoline. What Dad said would have made the stuff explode.
Then he said something a little calmer but no less disgusted: “Timing is everything, isn’t it?”
“How are we supposed to get through that?” Mom asked.
“Carefully?” Dad suggested. Mom and Liz both gave him the same kind of look, the look you gave somebody being difficult on purpose. He sounded hurt as he went on, “Well, I don’t see how else we can make it through that unless we feel like getting filled full of holes. Which isn’t what I had in mind.”
“Let me put it another way,” Liz said. When Dad was being difficult, sometimes the best thing to do was be difficult right back. “How do we go around that? Or how do we get to Westwood without getting shot?” Those were two other ways, as a matter of fact. And the second one let Dad keep on being difficult if he felt like it.
Mom’s warning cough worked as well as a lion’s warning growl would have. “Did I say anything?” Dad asked plaintively.
“Not yet,” Mom said. “I suggest you don’t, unless it helps.”
“Okay. The only way to get to Westwood by going around the fighting is probably by going through one of the dead zones.”
Liz wasn’t sure that helped, even if she was pretty sure her father was right. Dead zones were the places where bombs had landed. They were the reason the Harbor Freeway didn’t make it up to downtown Los Angeles in this alternate. They were the reason the Santa Monica Freeway didn’t make it all the way into Santa Monica. They weren’t radioactive any more, not after 130 years. But they were still so battered that hardly anybody lived in them.
“Can we get the wagon through?” Mom asked.
“Won’t we stand out like bugs on a plate?” Liz said at the same time.
“I don’t know,” Dad told Mom. To Liz, he said, “No, we won’t stand out that bad. Things are flat in the dead zones, but not flat flat, if you know what I mean. That’s not what worries me about the whole thing.”
“And what worries you about the whole thing is … ?” Mom prompted.
“Whether the Westside and Speedro will try to sneak soldiers through the dead zone and get into Westwood that way,” Dad said. “Does the Valley have troops looking west? If they don’t, the other side will turn their flank just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
A split second later, so did Liz. “I bet that’s what Luke was trying to find out!”
“I bet you’re right,” her father said. “One thing we can be pretty sure of, though—if he did find out, he didn’t pass it on to the people farther south. Of course, we don’t know if he was the only spy they had. If they were smart, he wouldn’t have been.”
“I don’t like the idea of maybe needing to leave the wagon behind,” Mom said. “How can we be traders if we don’t have trade goods? And does the Valley have soldiers posted at the edge of the Santa Monica dead zone?”
“Good question,” Dad said. “If there are no other questions, class is dismissed.”
“You say that when you mean you don’t know,” Liz said.
“I never worried about it. Did you?” Dad said. Liz had to shake her head. He added, “Besides, they could have sent them out after we, uh, disappeared from this alternate. What it all boils down to is—”
“Which stupid chance do we want to take?” Mom finished for him.
He nodded. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”
The Santa Monica Freeway line held through the first day of fighting. Valley riflemen and musketeers kept Westside and Speedro soldiers from breaking through for a couple of hours. Then the heavy machine gun arrived. It fired off a burst—pock! pock! pock! pock! Those big, heavy booms couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Neither could the way the big, heavy bullets chewed through wood and bricks—and flesh—out to a mile and beyond. As soon as the machine gun opened up, the enemy lost his enthusiasm for advancing.
“Ha!” Sergeant Chuck yelled. “Thought we forgot about it, did you? Well, let’s see how you like it!”
The Westsiders didn’t like it a bit. One of their cannon thundered. The ball flew over the machine-gun crew’s heads. You couldn’t hide a cannon, not with all the smoke it spat. The machine gunners started banging away at it as soon as it fired.
If Dan had served the cannon, he would have run for cover as soon as it fired. But what did you do then? You couldn’t shoot once and vanish, not if you wanted to win. And so the cannoneers had to come out again and try to reload their piece. One of the men in the machine-gun crew had binoculars much like the Tascos Dan used on sentry duty. As soon as he saw the artillerymen stirring, he let out a yell. The machine gun fired several more bursts.
Another cannon fired, and another. One cannonball cut a Valley soldier in half about six feet from the machine gun. Dan tried not to look at that, but it had a sick fascination to it. The poor man’s top half didn’t die fast enough to suit Dan—or, probably, the fellow himself.
But the near miss was also just one of those things to the machine-gun crew. They went on shooting as if nothing had happened. Before Dan went into battle himself, he wouldn’t have understood that. He did now. If the machine gunners had the shakes, they didn’t have time to indulge them. Doing your job, doing what you could for your friends, came first.
That was also true for the Westsiders and the soldiers from Speedro who seemed to be their allies. They pushed forward again and again, even though the terrible machine gun and the Valley riflemen and musketeers—and, once or twice, even the archers—punished them when they tried. Medics with red crosses on their smocks dragged the wounded to cover. You weren’t supposed to shoot at medics—it wasn’t sporting. Accidents did happen. For the most part, they were real accidents, not cheating.
Dan glanced at the sun, which was sliding down toward the Pacific. That was how he thought about it. He didn’t worry about the earth turning. He worried about … “What’ll we do when it gets dark?”
“Depends on what those sweet and charming people do,” Sergeant Chuck said, or words more or less to that effect.
“Okay, cool. Far out, even, man,” Dan said. “What’ll they do? What do we do if they try a night attack?”
“Gotta have fires,” Chuck answered. “We get some big fires going, they’ll show us anybody who tries sneaking up.” He went on, thinking out loud: “Gotta get fuel together, then. We should have done that already, but I don’t think we have, or not enough.” He eyed Dan in a … sweet and charming way.
“Hey!” Dan squawked. He didn’t like shooting at people. He really didn’t like people shooting at him. But he didn’t want to chop wood and carry it, either. “C’mon, man—cut me some slack. I was the one who made you think of this!”
“Well … yeah,” the sergeant admitted. He wasn’t even slightly used to backing down. After a moment, he reached over and thumped Dan on the arm. “Anybody who’d sooner stay and fight than get out of it’s okay in my book.”
“Mm.” All of a sudden, Dan wondered whether squawking had been such a good idea. But once you chose something, you didn’t get to take it over. If you got to try again, to do things differently, wouldn’t you have another world after a while? Maybe better, maybe worse, but for sure not the same.
Sergeant Chuck went to talk to Captain Kevin. Maybe Kevin had to talk with higher-ups, too. Any which way, some of Kevin’s company and some of the reinforcements came down off the freeway line. Before long, Dan heard them hacking away with axes. He heard them cussing, too. They liked their new duty no more than he would have.
Like it or not, they got the job done. The .50-caliber machine gun laid down covering fire so they could move the wood out in front of the freeway line—out to the south. A
couple of soldiers got wounded doing that, but only a couple. At sunset, the Valley men lit the bonfires.
The wind had been coming out of the west, off the ocean. It swung around after the sun went down, and started blowing from the mountains to the sea. If flying embers spread the fires toward bomb-ravaged Santa Monica … well, so what? Dan watched them burn that way with, if anything, a certain sense of relief. Anybody trying to sneak through the dead zone would be sorry.
Eleven
Once upon a time, in both this alternate and the home timeline, the section of Los Angeles called Venice had really had canals. They were long gone there, and they were long gone here, too. The Mendozas’ wagon rolled north through Venice toward the wasteland that was Santa Monica.
Liz tried not to think about the gunfire to the north—to the northeast, now. Not thinking about it wasn’t easy, because it got louder and closer every minute. She wasn’t calm, or anything close to calm. To keep from driving her parents crazy, she had to pretend she was.
After a while, she wondered if they were pretending, too, so they wouldn’t drive her squirrely. If they were, they made better actors than she did.
The farther north she and her folks went, the stranger the looks people gave them. “You fixing to go into the dead zone?” a cobbler called, looking up from the boot he was resoling.
“What if we are?” Dad said.
“Well, plenty of folks go in there,” the local answered. “Not so many come out again. You look like nice people. Wouldn’t want to see anything bad happen to you.”
A ferret-faced fellow coming out of the tavern next door leered at the Chevy wagon. “Wouldn’t want to see anything bad happen to you while we ain’t around to grab the leftovers,” he said.
“Oh, shut up, Stu,” the cobbler said, and then, to the Mendozas, “Don’t pay him no mind. He’s got as much in the way of brains as my cat, only I don’t have a cat.”
“Er—right,” Dad said. “Any which way, I expect we can take care of ourselves.” He displayed a modern copy, made in the home timeline, of an Old Time Tommy gun.
“Well!” said the cobbler, who didn’t seem to know quite what it was. “Pretty fancy piece you got there, buddy.” He turned. “Ain’t it, Stu? … Stu? Where the devil did he go?”
He’d turned green and ducked back into the tavern. Liz watched him do it. He knew exactly what Dad was showing off, and how many bullets it could spray. He clearly wasn’t a predator—he had no taste for a fight. He was a scavenger. If somebody else did the Mendozas in, he’d scrounge what he could from the things the real robbers didn’t want.
“Are you sure that was a good idea?” Mom asked as the wagon rolled on. “One of those guns is worth a mint here. We may have people coming after us on account of it.”
“Anybody who tries will be sorry,” Dad said. “We don’t just have one Tommy gun—we’ve got three.”
Liz was anything but thrilled about shooting people. But she wasn’t thrilled about people shooting her, either. She supposed she could pull the trigger if she had to. If she did end up killing somebody, she’d probably heave her guts out right afterwards.
When she said so, Dad replied, “As long as it is afterwards. In the meantime, do what you’ve got to do. You can be sorry about it later.”
“You don’t talk like a history professor,” Mom said.
“I hope not,” he told her. “I know enough history to know thinking like a history prof from the home timeline while we’re here is liable to get us killed. I don’t want that to happen. It’s too permanent.”
Houses and shops with people in them got thinner and thinner on the ground. Piles of rubble and obviously empty buildings grew more and more common. But just because a building was obviously empty, that didn’t mean it really and truly was empty. Maybe—probably—bandits lurked in some of the sorry structures that looked about ready to collapse under their own weight.
Dad handed Mom and Liz their submachine guns. That put a lot of firepower on display. Were the bandits on vacation? Or did they figure they didn’t want to tackle a wagon defended by three Tommy guns? Liz had no way to know. She did know she was glad things stayed quiet.
And then they got into the dead zone. Where the bomb hit, there mostly wasn’t enough of anything left to make rebuilding worthwhile. Everything looked charred and melted, even after 130 years. The scrubby weeds pushing up through cracks in the glassy crust didn’t do much to hide that. Nothing could. It was like looking at a dead body in a threadbare suit.
Liz thought about Santa Monica in the home timeline. She thought about the beach and the malls. She thought about all the people, especially on weekends. And she thought about the RAND Corporation. The Russians had likely used a bomb here to make sure they knocked it out.
Well, they did. Along with the United States, they knocked almost everything out. Liz started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” Mom asked.
“It’s all ruined.” Liz sniffed. “No matter what we do, we can’t fix it. It’d be like unscrambling an egg.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong, sweetheart,” Dad told her. “But you’re not. All we can do is help a little and try to find out what went wrong.”
“It’s not enough!”
He nodded. “I know. It’s what we can do, though. And it’s more than most of the bombed-out alternates ever see. Easier and cheaper just to leave them alone. We don’t have the people or the resources to do anything else.”
“We don’t want to bother.” Liz made it into an accusation. “We don’t care.”
Dad only nodded again. “Mostly we don’t,” he agreed. “We’re spread too thin the way things are. And Crosstime Traffic needs to show a profit, not a loss. And so …”
“So we make like a bunch of vultures and watch things die,” Liz said.
“We do pass on antibiotics when we can.” Did Dad sound defensive? If he didn’t, why not? “And we showed them how to make the anthrax vaccine. More of their cows and sheep live, so more of them live, too.”
“Oh, boy.”
Liz’s sarcasm was largely wasted, because the gunfire from the Santa Monica Freeway line changed note. Dad paid more attention to that than he did to his own daughter. His head came up like a wolf’s when it took a scent. “The Valley soldiers are using that heavy machine gun again,” he said.
“Heaven help anybody coming at them, then,” Mom said.
“Yeah.” Dad nodded one more time. “Only thing I worry about now is whether Cal’s boys will try an end-around through the dead zone. If they do, we’ve got problems.”
But they didn’t, not while the light held. Liz wondered why not. Scavengers and scroungers did come in here sometimes. Most people in this alternate stayed away from places where H-bombs had fallen, though. They had to know the fallout wasn’t poisonous any more, or the scavengers wouldn’t go in. Still, lingering fear or superstition kept almost everybody away.
The sun went down. The stars started coming out. Dad stopped the horses and gave them their feed bags. They chomped happily on oats and hay. The Mendozas, not so happily, ate bread and smoked pork and sauerkraut and raisins. They drank rough red wine that would have got any vintner in the home timeline fired. It was safer than the local water, which was guaranteed to give you the runs.
“Isn’t this fun?” Dad said as they got ready to sleep in the cramped wagon. “Isn’t this cozy?”
“Fun?” Liz said. “As a matter of fact, no.”
“Too blasted cozy, if anybody wants to know what I think,” Mom added.
“Everybody’s a critic,” Dad said. Liz gave him a dirty look. He could fall asleep in thirty seconds and keep sleeping through anything this side of the crack of doom. Trouble was, he thought everybody else could do the same thing. Most normal human beings couldn’t, and he didn’t get it.
“Warmer tomorrow,” Mom said. “Breeze isn’t off the ocean any more.”
“That’s true.” Dad sniffed. “You can smell the smoke from all
the fires.”
The horses could smell it, too, and they didn’t like it. They snorted and shifted their feet, as if to say they would rather be somewhere else. Liz would rather have been somewhere else, too. Then she noticed a red-gold glow on the eastern horizon. She watched it for a little while, and decided she wasn’t imagining things.
Pointing, she said, “That fire’s getting closer.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s—” Dad broke off. He started watching the fire, too. After a few seconds, he said something incendiary himself. Then he said something even worse: “You’re right.”
He jumped out of the wagon. “What are you doing?” Liz asked.
“Harnessing the horses,” he answered. “No fire departments around here worth the paper they’re printed on. We’ve got to get away, because nobody will put that out before it gets here. And horses are faster than people.”
That all made good sense, however much Liz wished it didn’t. She also wished he could hitch up the horses faster. The job looked easy, but it wasn’t, not if you wanted to do it right.
While he worked, of course, the flames didn’t stop. Mom said, “You want to hurry that along there?” She sounded much calmer than she could possibly have felt.
“I am hurrying,” Dad snapped.
“Well, hurry faster,” Mom told him.
The breeze blew harder. It sent a puff of smoke that made Liz cough. Stop that, she thought, but it didn’t. After what seemed forever, Dad jumped back into the wagon. He flicked the reins. The horses went off at a trot without so much as a giddyap. They’d probably wondered what was taking so long, too.
From everything Liz had heard, fire made horses stupid. From everything she’d seen, horses were no big threat to get fives on their AP tests anyway. But, this once, panic worked for the Mendozas, not against them. The horses wanted to get away from the fires, and so did the people they were pulling.
It was going to be closer than it had any business being. In the home timeline, Dad would have been on his cell phone yelling his head off. A water-dropping plane or helicopter would have splatted the leading edge of the flames. That would have slowed them down enough to let endangered people get away. And, of course, in the home timeline, they wouldn’t have been stuck in a horse-drawn wagon to begin with.
The Valley-Westside War Page 19
