The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  "Besides, Spot should be able to go the distance to the water on foot if he goes at the pace of a bike."

  "How will you feed him?"

  "He may have to work that out himself. My corn patch always gets its share of varmints, and he's learned to snag a raven. He's learned to be wary of a 'coon, but if he's hungry enough he'll make out okay, I think."

  An ugly trickling noise told us that Mrs. Baird's body was losing more fluid, a purely mechanical response that we found to be blood instead of fecal material. Shar turned away to attend to the duty she had assumed. Ern and I continued to hammer away at the barriers that stood between us and the north side of Suisun Bay.

  I couldn't help ruminating on that day at the racetrack. From a purely selfish standpoint I'd have been smarter to head north instead of coming home. I wondered how often kissable Kate cussed herself for not splitting when she had the chance.

  Ern studied Shar's little graph and mused, "One thing's clear: wherever we go, we can't risk it while the radiation count is much over ten rems an hour outside, in case we have to come back. That means we have a week to plan before we run for it."

  "Unless we take another heavy dose of fallout," I said. "The damned missilemen are still pounding away at—har, har—'selected targets,' as they put it in the radio bulletins. If we spot another cloud heading for us, we'll have to be ready to jump. Agreed?"

  "Shit. Agreed. Boy, could I use a snort."

  "Not if it puts you to sleep like it did the other night. Personally I could lay waste to three helpings of abalone supreme. We're just going to have to hobble along without our crutches, Ern."

  "Don't remind me." Then he vented a light flutter of laughter, almost a schoolgirl giggle, which I'd learned to identify as delighted surprise. "You know what? We're neglecting the obvious, Harve. If any of the bridges are still spanning Suisun, we can all walk across!"

  "Well, I'm a dirty sonofabitch."

  "Very perceptive," he grinned. Despite the dying woman an arm's reach away, perhaps because laughter was so inapropos, we failed to strangle our mirth. Presently Shar returned with the emptied bedpan, and Ern told her why we were amused.

  She perked up, but with a caveat. "Maybe the radio will give us a hint if the bridges can be crossed. If not, one of us may have to risk a solo trip to make sure."

  I agreed, no longer amused. The Lotus was the only fast way to make that reconnaissance. And the only one who could drive it well was fat ol' Harve.

  IV. Doomsday Plus Three

  Maybe the Plains Indians were more in tune with their psyches using calendar hides than we were using our almanacs. Lacking written language, they made annual decisions on the most memorable event of the year and drew a small picture on a tanned hide adjacent to the last year's picture. In that way a calendar hide became a history of the tribe. The outstanding event for our tiny tribe, on the third day after the initial nuclear strikes, was the death of Mrs. Baird.

  None of us could say when her body finally yielded to hopeless odds. It happened during the night, the thread of her life parting as silently as a single strand of cobweb. She was already cold at seven in the morning when Devon awoke for his turn at the pump. He must've mourned through the entire hour, unwilling to wake the rest of us, because he was all cried out by the time I woke up.

  Though I could have carried her body out to the basement alone, Devon insisted on helping; his right, his duty. I almost had to fight him to prevent him from going outside to dig a grave.

  "She took the chances she did," I reminded him, "because she wanted you to live. Don't make hers a wasted sacrifice, Devon."

  Shar convinced him that several hours outside, especially with the dose he had already sustained, would positively kill him. "Anyway, we've got a better way. We can preserve her remains until we can give her a proper burial," she said with a motherly hug.

  I didn't dwell on the mechanisms of dehydration or putrefaction; only told him we should follow the ways of early Americans with an elevated burial and claimed a false certainty that the body would be well preserved. Devon Baird honored me by pretending to be wholly convinced.

  By midmorning Shar and Devon had done the best they could with the emaciated, stiffening body, sprinkling it with cologne I never used anyway. The most grotesque moment came when we carried the body upstairs to my maple dining table and began to roll it into its shroud of screen. Ern had the presence of mind to take a reading in the dining room—about four rems, a reminder that we must not let our pitiful service become a drawn-out affair—and he had the good sense to stand aside until the precise instant when the body rolled off the table.

  Ern kept the body from thumping the floor. Devon reacted quickly enough but was so weak that he sat down hard on the floor, his mother's head in his lap. "I'm sorry, mom," he whispered, and caressed the dead face. He was unable to rise without help. The kid was much closer to total physical collapse than I'd thought, running on sheer guts.

  At last we got the screen rolled around the body and snugged it with wire, and while it may seem ludicrous to hold a funeral service over a roll of screen, that's what we did, holding lit candles. Shar had told me it was my job to say the right words. Devon would want a man to do it, and Ernest McKay would've frozen solid trying.

  I said: "Lord, You've heard it all before. You must be hearing it from a hundred million throats today. For which we give no thanks."

  I saw Shar's startled frown, her silently mouthed "Oh," or maybe it was "no." But I saw Devon nod, eyes closed, knuckles white on the fists at his sides. I continued.

  "You gave this good woman the terrible gift of free choice, Lord, and she exercised it to keep her son alive, knowing it might kill her.

  "And it did. Greater love than this hath no man and no woman, and for this alone we would ask You to cherish her. It's said that you can't take it with you, but Mrs. Baird beat the odds. She takes with her our greatest respect, and our hopes for her everlasting grace.

  "If I misquote Khayyam, I crave Your understanding:

  O Thou who woman of earth didst make,

  And in her paradise devised the snake,

  For all the freely-chosen horror with which

  the face of mankind is blackened,

  Our forgiveness give. And take.

  Into-Your-hands-O-Lord-we-commend-her-spirit-Amen," I ended quickly. I half-expected a lightning bolt before I finished. I didn't care.

  We persuaded Devon that it wasn't strictly proper for him to act as pallbearer; that Ern and I wanted that honor. That way he didn't have to watch us hauling the screened bundle to an upstairs window, where, after a little cursing and prying, we got the old-fashioned window raised enough to slide our burden onto the gentle slope of the roof. We bound the screen in place with baling wire, working as fast as we could. It would've been more coldly sensible to place Mrs. Baird's body on insulation in the attic, but it seemed necessary, somehow, that we place the dead outside the lair of the living.

  And then we resealed the window and went back to the tunnel with a side trip to get a bottle for the wake we held. And yes, I got shit-faced and no, not too shit-faced to take my turn at the pump. Devon got his chance at the bottle, too, and he was more sensible about it than I was.

  It seems that I had a meal that day, a soupy stew with half-cooked veggies and more carbonized biscuits. I suppose Shar or the girls cooked more horsemeat, because the following day there was plenty of it, sprinkled with brine and folded in film. My last clear recollection was of Shar draining the water from that jugful of damp alfalfa seeds and putting them away again.

  I don't justify getting drunk; I merely record it. If we'd had another emergency that afternoon, I probably would've paid for it with my hide. As it was, the big trouble came later.

  V. Doomsday Plus Four, Five, Six, Seven

  My next few days began with a hangover that segued to a powerful thirst, which I tried to slake with tomato juice. Shar said it was fine with her if I drank everything in my liquor cabinet sinc
e it kept me from eating much. My head detonated every time the kids whooped during the joke festival Cammie initiated, and my tongue felt like a squirrel's tail. I straggled back to the root cellar and listened to the radio.

  The world news was surprising only in its details. Chinese troops had surged across the Sino-Soviet border to the great trans-Siberian railroad and there they had stopped, daring the Russkis to trade nukes. NATO forces were as good as their word; they had stopped Soviet armor before the lumbering red-starred tanks got more than a toehold in West Germany. But not with neutron bombs. They had done it with a bewildering array of small antiarmor missiles; some laser directed, some wire guided, and some with sensors that guided them straight down onto the thin topside armor of the tanks.

  The Soviets had staked a lot on that self-propelled artillery of theirs, and they lost the bet. It was a whole lot easier to replace a German infantryman with his brace of cheap, automated, tank-killer missiles than to replace a seventy-ton Soviet tank with its trained crew.

  To my surprise, Radio Damascus was still 'casting. They didn't know whose little kiloton-size neutron warheads had depopulated most of their military bases and wasted no breath on it. Instead Damascus called on the Muslim world to defend Syrian honor with instant cessation of oil shipments to the US and its friends. I was willing to bet that every supertanker in existence was hugging a breakwater somewhere.

  Our national news comprised remotely fed bulletins from the EBS, carefully upbeat in tone, claiming we had weathered the worst. I nearly failed to catch the implication of one report from Alaska. The Soviet raid on our pipeline had been squashed, with only scattered remnants of the raiders still afoot in Alaska. That meant US soil had been invaded, and since no one mentioned the condition of our petroleum pipeline, I figured it was blown in a dozen places. Those "scattered remnants" of Russkis were probably much better equipped for Arctic warfare than our own people; shortchanging the defense of our largest state is virtually an American tradition.

  On Doomsday plus five, we began to move back into the basement. We had a frightening hour when Ern's readings told him we were taking heavy radiation in the tunnel. But the basement reading was roughly the same, which told us something was wrong with the meter.

  So Ern did some meter maintenance. He removed the plastic top, fished the little desiccant lumps out, and baked them on our little stove:—while Cammie and Kate made more biscuits. Using cotton swabs, Ern gently wiped the inside of the meter clean, taking special care to remove the dusting of tiny flecks of gypsum that clung to the aluminum leaves and monofilament.

  Then he deposited the dried desiccant back in the can, resealed it, and took fresh readings. It said we were taking only two tenths of a rem in the tunnel and slightly under one rem in the basement. That made sense. It also told us the clammy humidity of the tunnel had finally worked its way into the fallout meter, giving high but spurious readings.

  By now I was a believer in alfalfa sprouts. Shar merely added a quart of water and swirled it in the jug to wash the growing sprouts once a day, then drained the water for soup and capped the jug again. Long white tendrils extended from the seeds, a growing, spongy mass that thrived even in the gloom of the basement. I wasn't eating a lot, and when my pants got loose, I just tightened my belt a notch.

  Shar made a little speech after brunch—Devon had christened our second meal "lunper"—reminding us that when we had no good reason to be in the basement we should creep back to the safety of "Rackham's lair"—another of Devon's phrases. Shar made her point: did we want to absorb twenty rems a day or only four?

  Spot made the most of his freedom to pace the tunnel while the rest of us were busy in the basement. We took the rest of the drinking water from the john, partly drained my waterbed, then took sponge baths in my tub. Kate, first to bathe, was stunned at the way the rest of us stank. Of course she had smelled just as ripe a few minutes before. Each of us then shared Kate's dismay, but soon our noses gave up and quit complaining. The whole basement reeked of bodies.

  Ern caught a radio broadcast that mentioned bridges. The long span to San Rafael was down; the San Mateo bridge was limited to military traffic and you could get shot or run down trying to walk it. The Carquinez and Benicia bridges would be cleared soon, which told us that they still spanned the narrows of Suisun Bay.

  We began to hope that "soon" might mean the bridges would be navigable within a few days. At worst, said Ern, we could clamber around stalled cars and cross the Benicia bridge to the north. That sounded reasonable to me, because neither of us realized how the Corps of Engineers intended to clear those bridges.

  On Doomsday plus six we uncelebrated a week of underground exile and Ern volunteered to give us sunlight in the basement. Among the things Cammie had lugged from my garage was my so-called surface plate. A surface plate is just a slab, usually of granite, polished so perfectly flat that you can use it to measure the exact amount of warp on a race car's cylinder head. But I'm cheap. I bought an old jet fighter's front windshield at a surplus shop, knowing that it had to be optically flat, a surface plate of glass.

  The thing was two feet long, a foot wide, and two inches thick; heavy as guilt and solid as virtue. Ern surmised that it might stop gamma rays while letting light through.

  His scheme was simple. He toted the glass slab outside, galumphing in my protective outfit though it swallowed him whole. Then he shoveled dirt away from the top of my basement window, waving as he heard us cheer the light that burst into the basement. Finally he dropped the glass plate against the window and replaced some of the dirt so that the only light reaching us was through that thick windshield.

  While he took another sponge bath, we learned that his scheme was flawed, since the radiation reading jumped a bit near the window. We took more readings and found that my stone divider wall made a big difference. Near my office area the reading, and the light, were highest. In my lounge area behind the stone wall, the radiation level was "normal," less than a rem, and enough light reflected from my walls to make us happy.

  That little oblong of light had a beneficial side effect. We no longer needed to pedal the bike as much, and pedaling had released a lot of water vapor and carbon dioxide, which were still a problem.

  On D + 7—we had coined enough jargon terms to confuse a linguist by them—we ran out of horsemeat. I used the last pinch of it to hide a half-tab of comealong for Spot, who must've wondered if he was becoming a manic-depressive.

  We still had enough food for another two days, and my water heater's drain spigot was still yielding drinkable water. Shar had already started her second batch of alfalfa sprouts in a stainless steel bowl and served up that first batch to the music of general applause. She harvested three pints of sprouts in a few days, from a half-cupful of seed and without direct sunlight. That was our nearest approach to a green salad, very popular with soy sauce.

  The same day was marked by the remainder of the McKay family saga. I record it at this point because I didn't hear it until eight days after it happened. The kids were bored by my hunting stories, and the playing cards were so badly creased that they might as well have had faces on both sides. We were sharing raisins and onion soup when I thought to ask Shar how they had got from their wrecked vanwagon to my place.

  Their first decision, said my sis, was to travel light. They took maps, cheese, and tinned meat, and wore jackets. Ern locked the vehicle in the vain hope that he might return to it, then mounted his bike and tried towing Lance. He found it rough going uphill and let Lance fend for himself as soon as they passed the overturned truck. The truck, of course, blocked off other cars, so that bikes and pedestrians didn't need to dodge speeders.

  Lance, like many kids, often went to and from school on his skateboard. The fat urethane wheels ran amazingly well over macadam, and on the first downslope, Ern found Lance spurting ahead with a few kicks. The skateboard was more maneuverable than an expert's bike, but after a near-collision with a motorcyclist, my nephew went to the rear of
the McKay procession to avoid becoming what he termed a "street pizza."

  After two hours they neared exhaustion, but their path led chiefly downhill then and they finally reached the road that doubled back toward my place. They were on the safe side of Mount Diablo at last, and Shar coasted to rest at the foot of a short, tree-lined uphill stretch. Panting, they rested and watched a collegiate youth who sat at the roadside with a wheel dismantled from his expensive lightweight bike.

  "What's the trouble?" Cammie asked.

  "Picked up a nail," said the young man. "Can you believe I didn't think to bring a cold-patch kit?"

  Ern had placed one of the tiny cold-patch packages in each bike bag. He saw the tubular pump clipped to the youngster's bike frame and dug the cold-patch kit from the vinyl bag on his bike. "What am I bid for this?"

  Big eyed: "A box of chocolate bars?"

  Ern: "We'll settle for one apiece." He was making the trade when the first great flash backlit his skyline.

  "Don't look! Hide your eyes," Shar screamed, ignoring her own advice as she grabbed for Lance, who stared at the sky in rapt fascination. A biker and several hikers went full-length onto the shoulder, perhaps expecting a heavy concussion.

  The second flash seemed nearer, coming as it did from a direction with lower hilltops and less masking of the initial dazzle. The third and fourth flashes were also distinct and they felt the jolts, the sudden bucking of the earth itself, conducting shock for many miles beyond ground zero. Leaves showered around them.

  Cammie was first to seize her bike, pedaling past a gas station and grocery store well in advance of her family. The first airborne rumble didn't seem loud. But scarcely had Ern turned onto the road toward my place when he, like the others, felt the solid slap on his back from the second blast, the errant shock wave that crossed the bay to macerate Concord before funneling up the narrow valley to blow my windows out.