The Valley-Westside War

by Harry Turtledove

  No cell phones here. No water-dropping airplanes or copters, either. And the wagon was the fastest way to escape they had. The only other choice was getting out and running. If the horses freaked and stood still, they would have to try that. Liz didn’t think it seemed like a whole lot of fun.

  Things ran past them in the night. Coyotes and raccoons and feral cats hated the fire, and feared it, too. So did rats and mice and hamsters and squirrels and … everything, really.

  When she looked back on that night, none of it stuck in her mind as a whole lot of fun. The fire got closer and closer and hotter and hotter. The smoke got thicker and nastier, till she felt as if she were smoking about ten packs of cigarettes every time she breathed in. Mom gave her a hanky soaked in water to put over her nose and mouth. It helped some—till it dried out. That didn’t take nearly long enough. She soaked it herself the next time. Mom splashed the fabric of the wagon to keep embers from catching.

  Mom also rigged makeshift breathing masks for herself and Dad. “Shall I make some for the horses, too?” she asked.

  “I don’t think they’d put up with it,” Dad answered. “Besides, do you want to stop and find out?”

  Mom automatically looked back over her right shoulder. So did Liz, and wished she hadn’t. The flames were much too close, much too big, and much, much too hot. Dad’s question kind of answered itself. In case it didn’t, Mom took care of things: “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “About what I figured.” Dad snapped the whip above the horses’ backs. They were already doing all they could, but he wanted to make sure they kept on paying attention.

  “What happens if the smoke gets them?” Liz asked through the bit of cloth that wasn’t keeping as much smoke out of her lungs as she wished it would.

  “We jump down and we hold on to each other and we hustle,” Dad said. “Next question?”

  Liz decided she didn’t have a next question. The answer to the one she’d just asked gave her plenty to chew on all by itself.

  Mom looked over her shoulder again. Liz admired her nerve. She didn’t want to know exactly how close those leaping, crackling flames were. If things were going to turn out badly, couldn’t it be a surprise? If you knew you were about to get roasted … Well, what could you do? Scream, maybe, and then stick an apple in your mouth.

  Except she didn’t have an apple. She didn’t think the flames would stop when she was just done to a turn, either—not that it would matter to her one way or the other at that stage of things.

  Then Mom said, “We’re gaining.”

  “What?” Liz wasn’t sure she’d heard right. Nobody ever talked about how loud a really big fire was up close. The people who knew things like that were mostly either firefighters or dead.

  “We’re gaining,” Mom said again. Liz could hear her better this time. Maybe Mom talked louder. Maybe they were a little farther from the flames. If they were …

  “We’re gaining!” Liz said joyfully.

  She looked over her shoulder then. The flames were still too close, but they weren’t way too close any more. That looked like progress, all right.

  “Just hope sparks and embers don’t set the wagon roof on fire,” Dad said. Liz gave him a reproachful stare, not because that wasn’t possible but because it was. They couldn’t stop it if it did happen, so she didn’t want to hear about it.

  Heart pounding as loud as the flames were roaring, she looked over her shoulder once more. The fire was definitely farther away now. She approved of that. She would have approved even more if it were a mile beyond the moon.

  A few minutes later, Dad let the horses slow down. “I’m pretty sure we’re good,” he said. “It’s burning straight west, pretty much, and we’ve got north of it.”

  “What do we do now?” Mom asked.

  “How about we sleep for a week?” Dad said.

  “Works for me,” Liz said. “And you know what else? I bet we’ve got so much soot on our faces, nobody can recognize us.”

  “That works, too,” Mom said. “I was going to say we should wash in the morning, but maybe not. In the meantime …”

  In the meantime, Liz had no trouble at all falling asleep in the wagon.

  Back in the Valley, Dan hadn’t thought about sleeping on asphalt wrapped in no more than a blanket. That didn’t mean he couldn’t do it. If you got tired enough, you could sleep anywhere. He proved that: Sergeant Chuck had to shake him awake when the sun came up the next morning.

  Yawning, Dan started to sit up straight. Then he didn’t. You never could tell whether Westside snipers were waiting for somebody to do something that dumb. Chuck was on his hands and knees. He’d been ready to push Dan down if Dan forgot where he was. Since Dan didn’t, Chuck relaxed.

  Relaxed or not, he didn’t look so good. He needed a shave, and smoke from last night’s watchfires streaked his cheeks and forehead. “Boy, Sarge, you ought to clean up,” Dan said.

  “Look who’s talking. You’d stop a clock at fifty yards,” Chuck retorted. He was probably right. Dan had been firing a matchlock musket all day. Every time the gun went off, it belched out a great cloud of fireworks-smelling gunpowder smoke. How much of that was he wearing on his face?

  “What do we do today?” Dan asked.

  “Wait and see what our loving neighbors to the south try,” Chuck said—or something like that, anyhow. “If they want more trouble, we can give it to them. If they sit tight, we’re not going to go after them or anything. What would the King of the Valley do with land south of the Santa Monica Freeway?”

  Rule it? Dan thought. As soon as he did, he wondered, But how? It would take a long time to get messages and orders back and forth between Zev’s palace up in Northridge and these lands way down here. Back in the Old Time, people said, you could talk to anybody right away, no matter how far apart the two of you were. Radio, TV, telephones … Dan believed in them, but they weren’t around any more. The telegraph survived—where people didn’t steal wires for their copper, anyway—but who really wanted to pay attention to orders in Morse code? Dan knew he wouldn’t.

  “Have they started shooting yet?” he asked.

  “No, but it’s still early,” Sergeant Chuck answered. “I don’t know that they won’t, and neither does anybody else.”

  Dan’s stomach growled. It had ideas of its own, and wasn’t shy about letting the rest of him know about them. “Will anyone bring us breakfast?” he asked.

  “I heard they were supposed to be making sandwiches, but I sure haven’t seen any.” Chuck looked around. “Wait—speak of the devil.”

  Kitchen helpers with big cloth sacks crawled up and down the freeway dealing out sandwiches and Old Time soda bottles full of watered wine. Dan’s sandwich was smoked pork and pickled tomato on a hard roll: something that wouldn’t go bad in a hurry. He made it disappear in a hurry, so how long it would keep didn’t matter. Chuck’s breakfast was the same, and vanished even faster.

  “It’s not bacon and eggs and hash browns, but it’ll do,” the sergeant said.

  “Yeah, Sarge, but think what army cooks’d do to bacon and eggs and hash browns,” Dan said. Chances were the cooks would do fine by them. He didn’t let that bother him. Complaining about army cooks probably went all the way back to the Old Time.

  “They’re pretty lousy, all right,” Chuck agreed. Sergeants complained about cooks, too. Sergeants complained about everything. It was part of their job.

  Here and there, Valley soldiers started standing along the freeway line. When nobody fired at the first few, more men did the same. Dan and Chuck stood up at the same time: not soon enough to take a big chance, and not late enough to seem yellow. Getting shot wasn’t part of anybody’s job … except when it was.

  “Dan! Musketeer Dan!” somebody farther down the freeway called.

  “I’m here!” Dan sang out. “What’s happening, man?”

  “They want you back at the traders’ house, so step on it,” the messenger answered.

  “
May I go, Sergeant?” Dan asked.

  “How can I say no?” Chuck replied. “If the Westsiders attack, we’ll just have to try and fight the war without you. I don’t know that we’ve got much of a chance then, but we’ll do our best.”

  Propelled by such pungent sarcasm, Dan was glad to get away. He let the messenger lead him down to the level of the ordinary streets and take him back to the house where Liz had lived. (Of course, her parents had lived there, too, but he didn’t think about them very much.)

  With electric lights down there in the bottom basement, could they have had TV and a telephone, too? A moment’s thought made Dan decide that was silly. What would they watch? Whom would they call?

  He couldn’t ask the messenger. You weren’t supposed to gossip about what was in that house. He would be violating an order if he did, and he’d be making the other soldier violate one, too. He kept quiet.

  When he got to the house, he asked Captain Horace, “What’s up, sir?”

  “You know the way you found the door down into the room with the electric lights?” the Valley officer said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, we found another door like that,” Horace said.

  “Under the basement, sir?” Dan asked. “What’s in it?” He could imagine all kinds of things, each more marvelous than the last. A TV set that worked? An auto that worked? Why think small? What about an airplane that worked? If only you could fly!

  But Captain Horace shook his head. “No, not under there. It’s set into the wall in the regular basement, the room above the one with the lights.”

  “Oh.” Dan knew he sounded disappointed. A room there wouldn’t be so big. You couldn’t put a car into it, let alone an airplane. But maybe you could put other cool stuff in there. “How do we get in?”

  “I hope you can help us figure that out,” Horace said. “So far, we haven’t had much luck.”

  As if to show what he meant, somebody started banging on the wall with what had to be a sledgehammer. Boom! Boom! Boom! The racket made Dan’s head ache. “Got to be a better way than that,” he said.

  “It’d be nice if there were,” the captain agreed. “What can you come up with? If you can get us in there without tearing the place apart, I’ll make you a sergeant on the spot.”

  Dan imagined three stripes on his sleeve. He imagined the look on Sergeant Chuck’s face when the underofficer saw him with three stripes on his sleeve. That look would be worth ten dollars—no, twenty. And twenty dollars was a lot of money. “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  “See what you come up with, that’s all. We don’t expect miracles.” Horace’s mouth twisted in a crooked grin. “I sure wouldn’t mind one, though.” He went to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the basement: “Knock it off! … Knock it off!” Mercifully, the banging stopped. Horace breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s better. Now the top of my head doesn’t want to fall off.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dan said again. He’d had the same idea. He thought like a captain—or the captain thought like him! What would Sergeant Chuck say about that if he were ever rash enough to mention it out loud? Something interesting and memorable—he was sure of that.

  He went downstairs. A burly Valley common soldier was leaning on the handle of his sledgehammer. The musclebound man didn’t look sorry to take a break. Nodding to Dan, he said, “You’re the guy with smart ideas, huh?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see,” Dan said. “Where’s this door at, anyway?”

  “In the wall there. If you look real close, you can just see the crack,” the other soldier answered, pointing. “I sure hope you psych something out, man. This wall’s gotta be reinforced concrete, or else whatever’s tougher than that. I could keep banging away at it from now till everything turns blue, and I don’t know if I’d ever bust in.”

  “Okay.” Dan peered at the wall the way he’d peered at the floor when he found the trap door. He wasn’t sure he would have spotted this hairline crack if the muscular man hadn’t pointed it out. He wondered how anybody’d found it in the dim light down here.

  When he said as much, the guy with the sledgehammer said, “Dr. Saul went over the whole wall with a magnifying glass. That’s how.”

  “Oh,” Dan said. “How … scientific of him.” You had to be thorough to do something like that. You also had to be a little bit crazy, or more than a little bit. Except if it paid off, the way it had here, you weren’t really crazy, were you? Or maybe you were, and lucky, too.

  “What are you gonna do?” The other soldier didn’t sound as if he thought Dan could do anything. A moment later, he explained why: “Dr. Saul tried everything under the sun. He sure couldn’t get in.”

  “Groovy.” Dan had just been thinking how lucky Dr. Saul was. Well, so much for that. He eyed the almost invisible door. He eyed the sledgehammer, and the broad-shouldered, sweaty soldier who’d been swinging it. He eyed the tiny handful of concrete chips on the floor. No, brute force didn’t seem to be the way to go.

  What then? If you couldn’t break down a door, how did you go about tricking one? He remembered a story he’d read, one that seemed to have been all the rage right around the time the Fire fell. It wasn’t a true story—or people nowadays didn’t think so, anyhow. But the wizard and his followers had got stuck outside a door into a mountainside that didn’t want to open.

  Dan pointed at this one. “Friend!” he said. Nothing happened. He laughed at himself. He might have known. Then another idea struck him. What was that word?

  Before he could remember it, the guy with the sledgehammer started laughing at him. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “My folks read me that story, too. But it’s only, like, a story, man.”

  Never argue with somebody with a sledgehammer, especially when his shoulders are twice as wide as yours. That was an old rule Dan had just made up. Instead of arguing, he said, “Yeah, it’s only a story. What have I got to lose, though? I mean, do you want to pound reinforced concrete for however long it takes?”

  The other soldier looked at the pitifully small bits of concrete he’d managed to break loose. He looked at Dan. His wave of invitation was almost a bow. “Go for it, man.”

  “I will, as soon as I …” Dan snapped his fingers. The Elvish word did come back to him! He pointed at the doorway, even though he had no idea whether that made any difference. “Mellon!” he said.

  Silently and without any fuss, the door swung open.

  Valley soldiers did guard the west-facing approaches to Westwood. Liz supposed that made sense. With all the fighting the day before, the Westsiders might have tried to sneak a column through the dead zone. But she’d hope she and her folks would be able to get into Westwood and start selling their jeans before the occupiers noticed they were around.

  No such luck. The soldier who seemed to pop up out of nowhere didn’t have a matchlock. He carried an Old Time rifle. His U.S. Army helmet was two lifetimes old. “Halt!” he called, and his voice said they’d better do it. “Who are you people, and what are you doing here?”

  “Whoa!” Dad called to the horses. He pulled back on the reins. The animals stopped. Then he said, “We were coming up here with a load of denim pants—genuine Old Time Levi’s, fresh like they were made yesterday—when all the shooting started. We couldn’t go through, so we went around. And here we are.”

  “Levi’s fresh like yesterday, huh?” The rifleman laughed. “I’ve heard traders sling it before, but you’ve got more nerve than anybody. How about telling me one I’ll believe?”

  “Pull out a pair, Liz,” Dad said, cool as a superconductor. “Let Doubting Thomas here see for himself.”

  “Sure.” Liz scrambled over the seat and into the back of the wagon. She grabbed a pair of jeans and showed them to the soldier. “See? With a zipper and everything.” The only trousers in this alternate that didn’t close with buttons used zippers recycled from Old Time clothes. But not many zippers still worked, and not many tailors bothered with them. Buttons d
id the job. Zippers were mostly for show, the way cuff buttons on suit jackets were in the home timeline.

  Before asking for a closer look, the Valley soldier called, “Hey, Harvey!”

  “Yo!” A voice came from nowhere. “What’s happening, man?”

  “Cover me. I need to check something out.”

  “You got it.” Harvey still didn’t show himself.

  “Now let me see those jeans,” the soldier who’d challenged the wagon told Liz. She didn’t make any sudden moves when she handed them to him. Maybe his father was a tailor, or maybe he was when he didn’t carry a gun. He felt the fabric. He held the pants up against the sun to see if they had any thin spots. He worked the zipper several times and peered at the way it was sewn to the rest of the fly. The more he examined them, the more surprised he looked.

  “See?” Liz said.

  “Yeah.” The Valley rifleman seemed to nod in spite of himself. “Unless this is just one supercool pair to show people … You’ve got a whole bunch of these in the back there?”

  Liz nodded. “You better believe it. Look for yourself if you want to. We’re no ripoff artists.” She made herself sound angry, the way a trader who’d been unfairly challenged naturally would.

  “I’ll do that,” the soldier said. His expression said a lot of the people who protested hardest were the biggest thieves. That only made Liz mad for real. Nobody liked getting called a liar, even if just by a raised eyebrow.

  And she wasn’t lying. She walked around to the back of the wagon and pointed to the big old stack of Levi’s. “Go ahead. Pick any pair you want.”

  The rifleman trusted her far enough to sling his weapon for a moment, anyhow. He leaned forward and pulled a pair out of the middle of the stack. He gave them the same once-over he had with the ones Liz offered him. When he finished, he said, “Well, I take my hat off to you.” And he really did lift the old-fashioned steel pot off his head. “These are the real McCoy. I don’t know where you found ’em, but I bet we’ll want to buy ’em. Pass on, Miss. Pass on.”