The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  We didn't expect to emerge from the basement in less than a week or so.

  There simply wouldn't be enough water for niceties; we would have to skimp. And I hadn't even figured on the water needed to flush the Thomas Crapper. Ern had said once that a portapotty was a simple rig. I hoped he hadn't forgotten his mental blueprint.

  Urination was no real problem if we were willing to do it in my basement john, because you can pee endlessly into a toilet bowl and it will maintain its fluid level. But as I roused Kate again to take her place at the pump, I felt a familiar abdominal urge. I denied it and let sleep return, knowing that in a few hours we would have to face a problem in, ah, solid-waste management.

  It must've been the shock that woke me, about nine-thirty in the morning; whacked me right through the mattress. I sat up, hearing familiar voices under stress in the near distance, peering through the open basement door toward faint illumination. Kate lay at my side, and I managed to get up without waking her. From what I gathered, Master Lance had innocently made use of my toilet before anybody discussed it with him.

  With all my muscles tight from the previous day, I still felt vaguely humanoid. In my lounge area Cammie was setting up a cold breakfast. "The kid didn't know," I called as I shambled my way to the candlelit area. "And it's the day after doomsday, and we're still vertical, team."

  Ern came out of my john with a "why me" look, asking if I had felt an earth tremor. He added, "Sharp jolt, not the usual shuddery shakes we get in the Bay Area."

  "A quake," Kate said and yawned, standing in the doorway. "Goody, just what we need now."

  Shar, after explaining the facts of water conservation to Lance, exited my john and went straight to my coffee table to criticize Cammie's choice of food. "Pineapple juice and stewed tomatoes for breakfast?" She lifted her hands in helplessness.

  "That's what Uncle Harve had the most of. I thought these big quart-and-a-half cans would be about right for a meal."

  Then the second shock hit, the sonic clap that set crockery and nerves ajangle and, judging from the sound of it, blew out one of my windows. "Goddamn," I said.

  Lance, jaw stuck out in defiance, voiced for all of us as he latched his belt: "They better not be atom-bombing us again."

  Ern: "Roughly two minutes between ground shock and air shock; thirty miles or so. But in which direction?"

  Everybody had frozen in place. Into this still-life Shar said, "If it's south, we may be okay. In any case, we have several hours. The radiation reading in the bathroom is about four rems, but Lord knows what it will be later if that was another bomb."

  "I suggest we all, uh, tinkle in the john and hold our heavy stuff until we get a portable rig fixed," Ern said as Cammie started toward my john. To me, he said, "We can't keep drawing air from the basement forever, Harve. Got to make a decent filter."

  "I don't suppose the Lotus air-intake filter would do."

  After a moment, half-listening to Shar arrange a repair party to the upstairs window: "No—but its twelve-volt battery would sure boost the tunnel lights without making us sweat for it. And you just gave me an idea," he added, grabbing up the empty pineapple juice can. "How long would you need to get the battery?"

  "Five minutes. It's no biggie, and I know the drill."

  "Wear your stream waders, raincoat, hat, gloves, and a scarf to breathe through. Near as I can figure, Harve, there's still a hundred and fifty rems an hour firing away at anybody outside."

  I dressed for my mission, dreading it. I would absorb another ten rems in five minutes—maybe less in the garage, if I used the scarf to breathe through and buttoned my rain slicker. The women had already gone upstairs, leaving the trapdoor open so that a gloomy light flooded the basement.

  Ern glanced at me at the stairwell. "You're early for Halloween, fella, but that's a great costume."

  "Screw you, fumble-fingers," I chortled. In those hip-length rubber waders, with gloves and my wide-brim rain hat as accessories to my slicker, I felt clumsy and absurd; almost as absurd as my brother-in-law, who stood studying a juice can in one hand and a roll of toilet paper in the other.

  I stumped upstairs, unsealed the kitchen door, shut it after me, and while crossing the screen porch to the back door, I learned to step lively without scuffing. A thin patina of dust lay on the porch, stuff that had passed through the screen during the night, and I didn't want to breathe it.

  The sun's glow on the east ridge fought its way through a grayish yellow haze as I crossed the yard, and I wished I'd dug the tunnel all the way to the garage. A few tiny visible gray flecks drifted down, dislodged from my staunch old sycamores by wisps of breeze, and I tugged the scarf up over my eyes. I had forgotten my sunglasses but could see dimly through the scarf, and I kept an old pair of racing goggles in the Lotus.

  Before filching the battery, I tried the Lotus phone, hoping to learn whether we'd been bombed again, feeling sure we had. I couldn't even punch a prefix without a busy signal. Well, what had I expected? In an urban disaster public two-way communication channels are among the surest casualties.

  Pliers and screwdrivers are vicious tools, but in ninety seconds I'd used them to wrest the battery terminals loose while trying to identify a putrid odor nearby. I pried the battery up, fearful of the faint dust coat on the car and floor. Then I eased the hood down, lifted the heavy battery, and hurried to get those goggles from the glove box, pausing long enough to pop the glove-box lamp—socket and all—from its niche. Given time, I could've pocketed a dozen twelve-volt bulbs from the car, some with sockets intact.

  But I didn't get that time. What I got was a silent thunderclap of emotional shock as I recognized what stood motionless, had stood there while I worked, in a shadowed corner near me.

  "You can put the mattock down, son," I managed to say. "Nobody wants to hurt either one of you."

  He was a slender seventeen or so, with corn-silk hair falling like a shed roof across his forehead and a wide mouth meant for grinning. His dark windbreaker and jeans were a typical high school uniform; not much protection, yet he was still lively enough to be dangerous. You couldn't say the same for the woman huddled at his feet, draped in a pathetic torn canvas awning. The kid had tucked it around her, unable to find anything in my garage to keep the lethal dust away from himself. "You've gotta help my mom," he croaked, the mattock still on his narrow shoulder.

  "We can't do it here," I said, and stared at the mattock. He lowered it in slow suspicion.

  "Where, then?"

  "In my house," I heard myself say, thrusting aside all the carefully reasoned arguments of an era that had vanished forever under mushroom clouds. "Help me lift her and then take this battery for me."

  En route to the house I learned something about masks and goggles; unless they are sealed against your cheeks, goggles quickly fog up when a mask directs your exhalations upward. I had to breathe out through my mouth and still I nearly fell on my ruined back steps, half-blind with my limp burden.

  "Only four minutes, Harve," my sis called as she heard us come into the kitchen. "I timed you."

  Kate raced down from the second floor, arms loaded with wrapped packs of toilet paper, calling, "I found it, Mr. McKay, in the"—and then she saw the wild eyes of the youth as he pressed himself against the wall, and she gaped at the awning-wrapped woman—"closet, Holy Mary comeseethis," she finished just as loudly. It had the ring of a call to arms.

  Kate and the boy regarded each other warily, and I developed a notion that both he and his mother might be so contaminated that, like Rappacini's daughter, their very bodies were poison. Though that was purest fantasy, their clothes might well be a danger.

  I made a command decision then, unwrapping the canvas as I said, "Throw this thing outside, kid, then come upstairs," The woman seemed gossamer, very frail in a short housedress and open-toed flat shoes. I took her upstairs as fast as I could, ignoring the outbursts as Shar and Cammie came into view; ignoring also the awful smell of the woman.

  The boy—
his name was Devon Baird—found us in my upstairs john and was too scared to protest at the sight of his mother being stripped by a clownishly dressed stranger. "You get every stitch off, boy. Toss it in the tub and rinse your hair with water from the toilet tank."

  The mother's straight blond hair and breast were streaked with vomit, but the worst was from her diarrhea. I kept my gloves on while sponging Mrs. Baird's sad little bod with a damp towel, propping her up until young Devon stood by, shivering and naked, to help.

  He washed her hair out with loving tenderness, talking to her all the while. "We're gonna be all right, mom," he said; and, "It's my turn to take care of you," and, "These guys have food and water. You'll be okay." His gaze at mine asked whether he was a liar. I didn't want to give him my opinion.

  The Baird woman's breathing had been shallow. Momentarily it became stertorous, and then she retched; long trembling dry heaves. What did come forth came from the other end; a thin trickle that soiled the toilet lid. The boy pressed his mother's face to his stomach and beseeched me wordlessly with tear-filled eyes. Maybe my sis had been waiting for something poignant enough to let her accept these strangers gracefully. In any case, she waited no longer but pulled me aside and began to tend the woman.

  I said to the boy, perhaps too gruffly, "Have you been sick like this, too?"

  He hesitated, started a negative headshake, swallowed hard, glanced away.

  "You have to be strong, and truthful, if we're going to help you," my sis said. It had a threat in it. I wished she'd always been this firm with Lancey-pants.

  Mumbling, he said, "She made me wear that damn awning in the culvert while she went to find a better place in the middle of the night and wouldn't let me give it to her until we got over your fence about dawn and then she started puking and—and all. I barfed a little just before you found us. I think it was her being sick that made me sick."

  Shar said she hoped he was right and asked why the devil I was still wearing contaminated clothes. While I took my scare costume off in an upstairs bedroom, Shar got the fallout meter and set it between Mrs. Baird's thighs while Devon murmured hopeful things and answered Shar's questions. It seems that Mrs. Baird, a divorcee wary of adult male help, had been panicked by a radio warning at roughly ten the night before; had driven wildly from Concord without the least idea where she was taking her son. She simply took the road of least resistance away from the debris of a shattering, flattening blast wave that had freakishly left their apartment whole while sending storefronts screaming like buzz saws through crowded streets, and through the people composing those crowds. By the time the Bairds drove through it, the massacre of innocents was hours old, and the scenes they passed were silent and dead.

  When stopped by a wreck, they had run together up the highway, taking refuge in a culvert for a time. Assuming Ern's estimate was close, she must've taken nearly two thousand rems during those first few hours when the fallout was at its most lethal level, showering its gamma radiation in all directions. Devon's dose might have been survivable as he cowered in that culvert, but Shar's single glance at me endorsed my thoughts about the woman; we were in the presence of death momentarily deferred.

  "Her reading is about ten rems per hour," my sis said as I handed an old bathrobe to the youth. "That's about the same as it is everywhere on this floor, maybe a bit more—maybe because of all that," she indicated the pile of clothing in the bathtub. "Let's get her to the basement, Harve, and make her—better." We both knew that was a white lie. We could only try to make her comfortable. But Devon perked up a bit, stumbling along in a robe that swallowed his thin frame. Later Shar presented Devon with her old jeans and sweater from my guest bedroom.

  Ern, feverishly slashing precise cuts in cardboard boxes he had pirated from the root cellar, stared in glum silence as we made a pallet for Mrs. Baird near my waterbed. The boy hurriedly visited the john and from the sound of it was trying to muffle his dry heaves. Kate had stashed containers of water in the tub, and I figured Devon knew enough to use it as necessary.

  I told Ern how I'd found the pair; watched him work, mystified at the juice tins Lance had emptied into my old stewpot. My nephew was now modifying them in accord with the one Ern had made.

  Ern made no complaint about the foundlings, no reproof for my weak-minded decision to take charity cases I had sworn not to take. He chose another topic. "I hope you got the battery. It's going to get damn tiresome in the dark when those dry cells run down, 'cause we can't afford to keep somebody pedaling a bike all the time. Uses too much oxygen; gives off too much water vapor and carbon dioxide."

  Cammie was making a tinned beef sandwich for Devon. I asked, "Cammie, will you bring that battery down from the kitchen?"

  My niece stopped assembling the sandwich, glanced at her dad, made no move to comply until he gave her the slightest of nods in the basement gloom. I dug the glove-box lamp from my pocket and gave it to Ern, who recognized its utility without a word being spoken. And then I sat down with Lance and mimicked the things he was doing with juice cans. I had some thinking to do.

  This was my place. If I chose to get sticky about it, they were all guests subject to my rules. As I'd warned Kate, democracy couldn't reign unchecked when our lives depended on everyone taking some direction. If I made the rules, couldn't I break them?

  Well, I had; first with Kate and now by ushering this desperately sick woman and her teenage son into my shelter after agreeing with Ern and Shar that extra people would overcrowd our "lifeboat." Now I sensed that my kinfolk were realigning their ideas about my leadership. That worried me. Was I or wasn't I the one who ran things in my own home?

  I compared my work with Lance's and punched holes in the next juice can more like his. Then I realized I was actually letting a spoiled kid show me what to do. I didn't like that one damn bit.

  However, Lance was working in accord with our recognized expert: Ern. I could choose to do things differently for the sheer pleasure of self-determination, or I could do them the right way. Seen in this light, my urge for control looked pretty silly. Any leader who leads primarily for the joy of wielding power is a leader ripe for overthrow, especially if he makes too many bad decisions. I couldn't fault that logic. It had brought about the Magna Carta and the Continental Congresses and the Russian revolution and goddamn if I wasn't denying my own right to run things in my own castle, so to speak.

  Had I made a bad decision, bringing the hapless Bairds in? I knew Shar thought so; suspected the others felt the same way. Yet no one had overtly challenged me for it. Maybe they were giving me another chance—or enough rope. And maybe Ern's mystifying work with toilet paper and tin cans would prove faulty, too, but he had a good track record. The least I could do was give him the freedom to keep improvising, even if that meant my temporarily becoming a peon on his tiny assembly line.

  In this way I discovered a rationale of leadership that we seemed to be adopting without endless wrangles about it. I knew where things were; had physical strength the others lacked; and in the economic sense we were living in an investment I had made. On the other hand, my brother-in-law brought technical expertise that I lacked, and at this point our survival was chiefly a matter of technology and its applications.

  To some extent my sis also knew more of the technology than I did. I'd be suicidally stupid if I failed to let them guide us while we navigated these nuclear shoals. Like it or lump it, I knew I should accept this erosion of my authority, letting it pass to Ern without making a big deal about it. I neglected the fact that Ern was not the authority figure in his household. Shar was:—and she hadn't exercised much authority with Lance.

  Kate interrupted my reverie, having taken a sentry position on the second floor. She had used a spatula to pry a few inches of tape loose at several window edges, the better to squint at our horizons without going outside. Anger and dismay filled her voice as she called, "It's another radioactive cloud west of us!"

  The Golden Gate bomb needed forty-five minutes to thr
ust its cloud so high that we could see it over nearby ridges. There's been lots of speculation about the warhead, some claiming it was meant for military reservations near the north end of the bridge, and some insisting it was part of a ragged second-strike volley targeted against cities instead of military sites.

  We weren't concerned about strategy but about tactics. That cloud was headed our way, and if we were going to survive another day in the tunnel, we would need something better than the air supply in the house. It might've been adequate for two or three people, but with so much activity by a half-dozen of us, our sealed environment was becoming a hazard.

  Shar made herself a poncho from polyfilm and a babushka to match, taping it together with Kate's help. She wasted no time explaining when I protested her trip outside. "The girls can tell you, bubba," she said, mimed a kiss, and went outside.

  "You and Mr. McKay have taken the most radiation so far," Kate told me, "so she's the logical one." For what, I asked. "To make a slit in the film over the cellar doors and tape a flap of film over it, leaving the bottom of the flap untaped. It makes a one-way air-exit valve, to encourage flow of air through the tunnel. I volunteered but I'm not sure I know the best way to do it. Shar claims it'll only take a minute or two."

  I nodded. If that new fallout cloud dumped on us, it would soon be too late for outside work. "Kate, can you use the fallout meter?"

  She smiled almost shyly. "Cammie showed me. Should I start taking readings here in the kitchen?"