Ill Wind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “How do they keep it running!”

  The distant locomotive hauled four cars behind it, a passenger car, dining car, and two box cars, as well as a car filled with wood mounded high behind the engineer’s cab.

  “This is great news,” Todd said. “I’ll check it out. Looks like he’s heading toward Tracy.”

  When Todd whistled, both horses trotted over, eager for a ride. He patted Stimpy on the neck. “Next time, girl. It’s Ren’s turn.”

  Todd saddled Ren and made ready to swing himself up, then ran back toward the small house trailer. Though Todd got up at dawn, Iris was never an early riser. And although they shared the trailer for convenience, Todd was careful to respect her privacy. He banged on the side. “Hey, Iris—come on out!”

  She stepped out the swinging door, bleary-eyed and blinking at the commotion.

  “It’s a train, Iris! I’m going to check it out. I’ll be back as soon as I have some information.”

  “A train? Impossible.” She folded her arms. “How does is it work? They couldn’t have found a way to neutralize the petroplague.”

  “Do you want come with me?”

  She ran a hand through her unkempt black hair and seemed to think about it. “No, go on. Just let me know what you find out.”

  Todd had already turned for Stimpy, too excited to reply.

  * * *

  The locomotive sat ticking and hissing, at a standstill in the Tracy railyards. Sleek like a giant black caterpillar, its wheels and cow-catcher were blazoned in bright scarlet. The ornate hand rail running along the boiler, the hinges, the bell and steam-whistle all shone bright gold. The sooty smokestack flared out in a wide black cone, and all its rivets glittered like brass buttons. In gold-painted letters under the two windows in the engineer’s cab was the name Steam Roller.

  Todd led his horse in among the people crowding the tracks. Iris was right—what was the catch? If this one train works, then where are the rest of them?

  Other people arrived, walking along the railroad tracks, stepping between the ties. They had seen the locomotive approaching for miles, and they had walked from their homes and their work out in the produce fields. Todd sensed a childish excitement, as if Santa Claus had appeared to them long after they had stopped believing in him.

  The locomotive steam whistle blew with a screech that set them all jumping. Todd grabbed Ren’s bridle to keep the horse from rearing in panic. The crowd fell silent as someone stirred in the locomotive’s engine cab and stepped out, squinting in the bright sunlight and looking at his audience. Three other men stayed inside the cab, watching the crowd and allowing their spokesman to meet the spectators alone.

  The man wasn’t tall, but his build was massive and bearlike. He had broad shoulders and a muscular chest stuffed inside a cotton engineer’s coveralls. His dark and splotchy complexion hinted at a mixed race; his skin glistened with sweat.

  But the most striking feature was that his completely hairless head sat on his shoulders like a bowling ball: no beard, no mustache—even his eyebrows had been shaved away. As the bald man gripped the door frame with one hand, Todd noticed dark hair sprouting from his knuckles. What would make a man want to shave his entire head like that?

  The engineer bellowed at them in a voice that seemed used to giving orders and shouting long distances. “Civilization isn’t dead if you don’t let it die! We can’t give up! With human perseverance, we can bring it all back.”

  The man’s words seemed rehearsed, as if he had shouted the same thing at every stop along the track. Still, the speech reflected Todd’s own thoughts. “As more and more of us pitch in, we can make a miracle happen.”

  The people standing on each side of the train murmured, as if they didn’t believe him. But at least they listened to the man—he had impressed them just by arriving in his train.

  “What’s your name?” Todd shouted.

  The dark man looked at him. “Call me… Casey Jones.”

  Some of the people snickered, others didn’t get the joke. “Listen to me,” said the man claiming to be Casey Jones. “We got this train running again. Wood-burning locomotives were used long before we became dependent on plastics and fossil fuels. We had to refit some parts, but it was nothing that a little know-how and persistence couldn’t do.

  “We’re traveling through central California to collect your extra food, the stuff that’ll decay in your fields. We intend to take this train down to Los Angeles and bring relief to the starving people there.”

  “Boo!” someone shouted. “What about ourselves, man? LA deserves what they got—polluting the air, squandering water!”

  Casey Jones glared at the audience from his high position on the Steam Roller’s steps and began to speak with the fervor of a revivalist preacher. “They’re cut off down there! They need the supplies. They’re starving. Starving. You’ve got too much here. You can’t use everything in your fields, and you know it.” He held his hands out, pleading, as if he needed this mission to succeed more than the people in Los Angeles did.

  “Give me your surplus. We’ll take it down to feed the people. It’s the least we can do. Consider it the first step to reconnecting the United States. How can you argue against that?”

  “Screw the U.S! What have they done for us?”

  “What will they give in exchange?” the mayor of Tracy asked.

  “Who knows?” Casey Jones said, as if angry at the suggestion. “What’s important is we’ll be helping them. On my trip back up, we can haul industrial supplies, things they can’t use. We’ll try to barter as best as we can. How would you like new pieces of sheet glass, or metal, clothes, ceramic parts,?”

  “How do we know you’ll bring anything back?” the mayor said.

  “You don’t! You’re missing the whole point.”

  “I’ll give you some,” a tall, thin man said. Todd recognized him as Marvin Esteban, one of the local farmers. “I’ve got cabbages. I’m already sick of cabbages. We’re going to be eating sauerkraut all winter.” People chuckled.

  As a few others chimed in with offers to donate bushels of almonds or tomatoes or fruit, Todd found his mind wandering. This train was making a bee-line down the Central Valley toward Los Angeles… toward Pasadena and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  And the solar satellites.

  Todd leaned over to pat Ren’s neck, his face burning with excitement. This just might be a chance to do something worthwhile, something that could really make a difference—besides acting as a technical liaison for Doog’s commune. He didn’t know if that crackpot solar-power scheme would work, but just having the chance made it worth the trip. And the fact that it seemed so impossible made it all the more desirable to do. Anything was better than sitting around and growing sprouts.

  He grinned and yanked on Ren’s bridle as the horse began to sniff the ground. Todd wondered what he would have to do to talk Iris into going with him.

  * * *

  Back at the Altamont commune, Todd and Iris’s trailer sat on four wheel rims, leveled with concrete blocks. Todd had meant to move out as soon as he found another place, but he never seemed to get around to it.

  The trailer had once been hauled around the country by a retired couple from Alexandria, Louisiana. Abandoned in the Altamont and scavenged by Doog, the trailer had begun falling apart long before the petroplague hit. Its sides were white aluminum, bent in places, stained with green traces of moss.

  After Todd and Iris had patched the cracks and stuffed rags into the holes left by dissolving insulation, the trailer remained cozy even in the evening chill. Remembering that first night together by the campfire, Todd had suggested they sleep in separate beds. Iris had shrugged, not pushing the issue—and Todd kicked himself, too embarrassed to raise the issue again.

  Now, snug inside their trailer with the door closed and the windows shut, Todd and Iris argued far into the night.

  Iris talked, her words growing sharper. “Todd, you’re just excited. You’re like
a little kid in a toy store and you’re going off half cocked. You can’t save the world by yourself. And all you’d be doing is running away when we need you here.”

  “But we’re not doing anything here,” he said in exasperation. “We’re like a bunch of old soldiers who never saw battle, sitting around talking about the war. You worked so hard at Stanford, trying to stop the spread of the petroplague. And now that the world has changed, you just want to roll over and play dead. There’s still a lot more things we can do, and this is one of them! Casey Jones and his train are proof that it’s not as hopeless as we thought. Let’s at least try it.” He hesitated, and said almost as in afterthought, “We can always come back here if it doesn’t work.”

  Iris rolled her eyes. “Casey Jones!” She sat forward on the edge of the small bed. Anger vibrated from her. “Get a grip, Todd. Look at a map for once. We don’t have any real transportation. We can’t just think of ourselves as the jet-setting crowd like before. You don’t leave San Francisco, jaunt down to Los Angeles, pick up some satellites, hoof it over to New Mexico, and then trot back here if it doesn’t work.”

  “Don’t you feel any responsibility for what happened? Remember spraying Promethus? Well, I do.”

  “But there are so many important things we can do here. I agree that the world is going to have to pick itself up, but it has to be a grassroots movement, in small places like this. We have to build from the bottom up, not the top down. We don’t have a foundation anymore, that’s what we have to work on.”

  Todd thought of the days he spent aimlessly riding around the hills, just talking to people, shooting the breeze, carrying news and gossip from one group to another. What point did that serve? He tried to keep from snorting. “Like what?”

  “Like fine-tuning trade between the communities surrounding us. Like working on getting those electrical lines laid from the windmills out to Tracy, or back down into Livermore. You said yourself the Lab people there have come up with ways to refurbish substations and bring back limited electricity. Think of what that would mean in rebuilding the world.”

  Todd didn’t see how that was different from using the solar-power satellites. Besides, once the smallsats were functioning they could serve a much wider area than just a limited island up in the hills. But that wasn’t the main reason he wanted to go.

  “Everything that we do here sets an example. It has an impact, Todd. Just stick with it and you’ll see.”

  “Yeah, like your music concert. Tell me how that’s more important than getting an entire solar-power farm working. Explain to me how finding a way to play rock-and-roll is going to help a lot of people.”

  Iris looked stung. “You’ve got to have a dream, Todd.”

  “Sounds more like a nightmare to me,” Todd muttered, his own anger growing… he couldn’t reign it in anymore. “Bringing back drugs and noise and juvenile delinquents—that’s one thing I’d rather leave behind with the old society. Iron Zeppelin and Visual Purple and Neon Kumquats or whatever those bands are called. You can keep them.”

  Appalled, Iris actually giggled. “Todd, you’re so stupid sometimes.”

  Todd knocked the wooden chair backward as he stood up. The chair would have tipped over, but the trailer was so cramped it merely bumped against the wall and righted itself again.

  “Fine, Iris,” he said. “If trying to make the world a better place makes me stupid, I’ll just go on being an idiot. But at least I’ll be helping a heck of a lot more people then these wackos we’re living with.” He opened the door.

  “Todd—where are you going?” Iris’s dark eyes widened.

  “Out. Away from… from this.”

  “Todd!”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be back. That’s a promise,” he growled and stomped outside.

  The door slammed by itself, and he heard Iris calling, “Wait!” But her words were cut off by the smack of the door, which sounded like a gunshot in the darkness. Todd walked off. He considered taking one of the horses to Tracy, where Casey Jones and his steam train waited. But he knew the commune would need Ren and Stimpy—and they’d be safe here, just like Alex Kramer would have wanted. He went off on foot into the moonlit night.

  * * *

  Inside the refurbished dining car of the steam train, Captain Miles Uma, formerly of the Oilstar Zoroaster, relaxed and pondered the night. Used for storage, the dining car now carried crates of ripening fruits and vegetables, nuts, and other produce. The odors mingled in the tight space.

  Rex O’Keefe and the Gambotti brothers kept to themselves in the passenger car; Uma didn’t mind. Once Uma had gained their confidence, they did what they were told, as if they were happy that someone had finally stepped up and taken charge, accepted some responsibility. Like any good captain, Uma treated them with respect—and now that they had order back in their lives, they didn’t mind the work.

  Uma cracked open two of the narrow windows to let the night breeze in. Outside, the sleeping city of Tracy was dark, save for the fires of a few late-night people; everyone else bedded down with the fall of darkness.

  By the flickering light of a stubby beeswax candle, Uma dipped his fingers in a bowl of tepid water, took a bar of soap and lathered his face and head. He removed a long, sharp straight-razor, propped a small mirror up against the inner wall of the train where he could see his reflection, then began to shave by candlelight. First, to hone his attention, he shaved his eyebrows; then he worked at his beard stubble, and finally scraped his head, shaving the back by feel alone.

  It made him feel clean, and renewed and different. He wished he could slice away the pounding guilt as easily.

  Guiding a train along the abandoned tracks was very different from captaining an enormous supertanker like the Zoroaster. But it kept him moving and gave him some way to stop the clamoring depression; Rex O’Keefe and the others were swept along with his dream. Uma found that by focusing on a task, he could stop thinking about the wreck against the Golden Gate Bridge….

  As everything fell apart, Uma had wandered north from San Francisco, changing his name, fearing that someone might recognize him. Uma had been doing a good job of blaming himself. He worked odd jobs, trying to run from himself and watching with a growing anguish as things grew worse. Until he stumbled across the train station in Napa Valley.

  Uma finished shaving and blew out the candle, feeling his way to an empty, comfortable seat in the refurbished dining car. He was exhausted, not from the work that he did to keep the wood piled in the furnace, but from being sociable tonight.

  He didn’t enjoy social occasions, but the people had prepared a meal for them, wanting to talk for hours, until Uma and the others had finally gone back to the train. He had tried to answer most of their questions, but it got tiresome after a while.

  In the morning at dawn, just as he was struggling to awaken from his cramped sleeping space on the dining car bench, Uma snapped his eyes open when he heard a rapping on one of the half-open windows.

  “Hey, Casey Jones, you in there?” Uma wrenched his stocky body into a sitting position and blinked out at a tall cowboy. “I want to join your group,” the cowboy said. “I think you need another person.”

  Uma went stiffly to the window of the dining car, not welcoming the man inside. The cowboy walked over with a large nervous grin on his face and stuck his hand through the open window.

  “I’m Todd Severyn, pleased to meet you.” Uma shook his hand warily. The cowboy looked strong, but troubled circles surrounded his red-rimmed eyes. Grass stains splotched his pants. “I walked all night long just to get here.”

  “We could maybe use some help, “ Uma said, “but it’s a backbreaking job. You sure it’s worth it to you?”

  “It depends on your priorities.” Todd’s gruff answer seemed to speak to more than just the question Uma had asked. “I got my reasons.”

  Uma stepped aside just enough to let the cowboy onto the train. “Don’t we all?”

  Chapter 59

  F
ive miles south of General Bayclock’s Manzano Mountain headquarters, a field of mirrors spread across three acres. Though gaps separated the three-foot mirrors, the reflected glare gave the impression of a seamless plain of molten silver.

  The suggestion to use Sandia Albuquerque’s abandoned solar test project to generate electricity sounded like a good idea, but Bayclock wanted to see the apparatus himself.

  The computer-controlled mirrors were designed to rotate, follow the sun and focus the blinding rays on a three-story concrete tower. The intense illumination heated a special vessel to generate steam that would turn turbines and produce power. Now the mirrors stood frozen in place, useless without hourly brute-force manual adjustment. It would take years to polish the mothballed mirrors back to the accuracy needed for optimal focus.

  The scientific pinheads didn’t have the common sense to engineer anything practical, Bayclock thought as he scowled at the useless apparatus. No allowance for contingencies. They reveled in the nifty toys they built and patted each other on the back. The general held little hope that refurbishing this system would be anything more than a futile effort. He had seen enough. He strode through the field of mirrors, back to where his horse waited with the armed escort.

  The woman who headed up Sandia’s energy research program—Bayclock had already forgotten her name—trailed after him. She looked as overbearing as the number of programs she had once managed. At just over six feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds, she rivaled Bayclock in size; her big butt and flabby arms implied a contempt for her own physical health. Her ragtag group of scientists followed as she kept up with Bayclock, step by step.

  “You want the electricity, we’ll deliver. It’s a simple matter of granting us access to the dry lubricants. I guarantee we can have part of the mirror field up and running at minimal levels within a week. Replacing the seals comes next. And after that, eighteen months to optimize the mirrors. No problem.”

  Bayclock reached the edge of the mirror maze. His executive officer and three armed guards waited on their own horses. Bayclock said, “You told me this field was computer controlled. How are you going to synchronize the mirrors’ movements to the sun without computers?”