Cheryl lay on the bed, her head close to the radio. She looked at my nakedness and smiled like a vixen.
Suddenly her lips were on mine, liquid and yielding. I felt the pulsing fire leap in my blood. I saw the sensuous woman triumphant in her eyes.
“You devil,” I laughed. “When I want to talk seriously—”
“There’s a time for talking, my love, and a time for—”
She gasped as I pulled her down on the bed beside me.
Afterward, Cheryl lay pressed against my side, her eyes closed and a smile on her lips. I relaxed in the peace and the stillness of our love. I became aware again of George Knight’s voice coming from the speaker of my portable.
The third day of the war, and we knew that the collapse of civilization was complete. Nothing could hold back the chaos. The stench of death in Los Angeles was a mirror held up to the face of a ruined planet. Few people had died in the original bombings; the cities had been organized to meet that emergency, but no organization could cope with what followed—a network of continental rivers, steeped in radioactive poison and carrying the sickness everywhere.
We had one way we could help—and only one: George Knight’s plea to the people of Los Angeles.
Cheryl stirred and opened her eyes. She leaned across my chest to turn down the radio.
“What happens, Jerry, if they don’t listen to him?”
“They’ll kill a good many of the Russians, and the Russians will retaliate.”
“Our world shrinks to the size of a mountain valley.”
“Enough—we have each other.”
“You and I, Jerry—we’re not twenty yet, and the others look to us—” She drew in her breath sharply.
“Why, Jerry? Why you and me? Couldn’t someone else—”
“We can’t dodge it.”
I pulled on my shirt. Cheryl got up and put her arm around my shoulder. “I’m beginning to see you now, Jerry, as Pat did.”
I cracked her rear with the palm of my hand.
“A man, Jerry. That’s all it takes—but suddenly I realize how much courage it takes to be a human being.”
Through the window behind her I saw the windmill lifts of a helicopter whirring against the red sky.
“The Soviets are back,” I said to Cheryl, pointing toward the ship. “Run over to the lodge and tell the others to break out the guns. I’m going down to the hospital after Psorkarian. The Cossack might just be able to knock down the ‘copter with a submachine gun.”
“Be careful, Jerry.”
I left the cabin and ran toward the hotel. The ship was moving toward us cautiously; the pilot wasn’t taking any unnecessary risks, and he didn’t know how well armed we might be. I assumed they were still after Clapper; no other possibility occurred to me.
On the village street, half a block from the hotel, I saw Boris Yorovich and Janice Gage, walking arm in arm. Naturally, they hadn’t seen the Russian ship. They were too immersed in each other. I jerked them back to reality; Yorovich said he would get Psorkarian.
“George Knight’s all right?” I asked.
“The transmitter’s working fine; Janice and I came up for dinner. We were on our way back—”
“Join him as soon as you can; I don’t like to leave him alone.”
They ran toward the hotel. I returned to the lodge beside the lake; most of our weapons were there. As I sprinted over the hill, I saw a parachutist descending twenty feet above me. The paratrooper had a submachine gun in his hand.
The man came down close to me. I sprang as his feet touched the ground. I had no time to reach the lodge and arm myself. The man was a giant, a human machine of flesh and bone driven by the hypnotic opiate of hatred.
Screaming in animal fury, he swung his submachine gun toward me. I kicked upward against the barrel. The hail of bullets spattered the trees above my head. I kicked again and I saw his grip loosen; I jerked the gun from his hands. He lunged at me, swinging his arms like bear claws. I clipped his jaw with my knuckles. Physically the blow rocked him back on his heels, but he seemed unaware of the pain.
He reached for my feet and dragged me down. His clawing hands found my throat. I fought to break the grip, hammering my fists into his jaw. The face was a bleeding pulp before his fingers slid away and I was able to breathe again.
I stood up. A clanging echo sang in my ears. I heard more gunfire, from another direction, and after a moment I located it: the transmitter! The objective of this raid had not been Willie Clapper, but George Knight.
I snatched up the paratrooper’s submachine gun, where it had fallen, and I ran toward the village. I came toward the appliance shop from the east. West of the transmitter I saw occasional spurts of gunfire in the shadows.
Two men were leaving the transmission shack. In the pale light inside the building I saw George Knight lying back in his chair. He was dead. They had beaten the gentle Quaker to death with the butts of their weapons. The two men were stringing wires from an explosive charge they had left in the building.
I raised my gun and fired. They died screaming, as the bullets ripped open their skulls. Four other paratroopers, who had been holding off Yorovich and Psorkarian, sprang up at the sound of the shots. I had no shelter. Bullets from their guns tore the soft earth toward me. I squeezed the trigger of the submachine gun; simultaneously Yorovich and the Cossack moved out of hiding. The four men died in our crossfire.
Blood soaked the sleeve of my left arm. My fingers felt numb, with a kind of remote and impersonal pain. Yorovich and Psorkarian loomed out of the shadows.
We ran along the village street in the darkness. The sky above us was red with the last light of the dying sun.
XI. The Valley—Monday afternoon Jerry Bonhill
AFTER we buried Knight, we made fifteen graves at another part of the lakeshore for the nameless men who had died during the Soviet air attack. There were no survivors.
The Soviet attack made it clear that the broadcasts were having some effect in the city. Otherwise, the Russians would not have traced the transmitter and tried to destroy it. Stewart Roswell warned me not to read too much into that, however. “General Zergoff has a bitter, personal conflict with Knight. He would send his whole force up here, if he thought he could find Knight.”
It was late in the morning before I had an opportunity to examine the helicopter.
I asked Vasili Shostovar to go with me. He had been a mechanic in Moscow and, better than any of us, he would be able to judge what repairs had to be made. The thin, swarthy man had begun to modify his clothing and he looked less like a slum kid in uniform. He made no more oblique references to party discipline. He had joined us in the ambush of the second Soviet car; that made him one of us, and I accepted it. But there was no feeling of friendship between us, none of the honest affection I felt for the Cossack and Morrenski—yes, even Andrei Trenev, who had attempted to help Willie Clapper escape.
The Russian looked over the motor carefully.
“She’s as good as new, Bonhill.” His words were vaguely slurred; on his breath I caught the sour odor of liquor.
“What about the fuel?” I asked.
He glanced into the cabin. “Better than half a tank.”
“Could we use gasoline from the village service stations?”
“I doubt it. But Psorkarian says there’s an airport in the eastern part of the valley; you ought to find some aviation fuel there.”
“Do you know how to fly?”
“No. Grennig, the Russian, does.”
Karl Grennig was twenty-four, as large as I am and perhaps thirty pounds heavier—all of it hard muscle. He had the blond, Nordic good looks, which the Germans had once built into a maniac’s cult of war.
“You want to use the ‘copter?” Grennig asked.
“Possibly.”
“The Doc says I’ll be up and around by tomorrow. Where do you want to go—” He hesitated for a moment before he added, with an n smile, “—Commander?”
“We’ve
no use for titles. My name is Bonhill.”
“Sorry, sir. You’ll have to—”
“The ‘sir,’ too. We’re not a military camp.”
“It’s a habit the Communists taught us. Personally, I’ve always hated it.” When Karl Grennig got the point, he jumped on the bandwagon fast enough. But the transition was a nasty thing to watch. Grennig was suddenly buddy-buddy with me. “I’ve got news for you, Bonhill, you may not have picked it up, yet. The Red troop transports won’t be coming in any more; maybe they’ve already stopped.”
“Roswell tells me they have landings scheduled for a week. What happened?”
“I picked up the gossip at headquarters. They’re keeping this under wraps as long as they can. It’s a breakdown in the distribution of supplies to the Siberian bases. Primarily food and fuel.”
“How many Communist troops are in Los Angeles now, Grennig?”
“Two hundred thousand. A quarter of a million at most. The whole Red machine has broken down in Europe and Asia. The after-effects of the bombing are worse than anyone expected. The Politburo is finished…”
LOS Angeles was the only metropolitan area, which had a chance of surviving. That was the assumption we had to make. More and more I realized how fundamental Knight’s message was. The invading army was all that remained of the enemy, and the city was all of America that had escaped the disaster. Here, flung together, were the two halves of our world, the last fragments of the old civilization. Here they had to find peace; they had to survive. In this city—if they listened to Knight—we could build tomorrow.
If they listened to George Knight. They had to hear the Quaker’s message and they had to believe in it. It was the only chance.
XII. The City—Tuesday, The Fifth day. Jerry Bonhill
TUESDAY afternoon, the fifth day of the war, I went back to Los Angeles with Stewart Roswell. Grennig piloted our helicopter.
I wore two revolvers belted to my jeans and I carried a rifle. But I made sure Grennig carried no arms.
I offered Roswell a rifle, but he pushed it aside. “I’ve never shot a gun in my life, Jerry.”
“It’s time you started learning.”
He smiled. “Even to build a society based on love?”
“Idealism with teeth in it.” I pushed the weapon in his hands; he took it reluctantly. “A man has to survive before he can build.”
Grennig brought the ‘copter low over San Bernardino and we saw the first stark evidence of the fighting. The downtown district of the suburb was a burned-out ruin. Residential streets had been bombed indiscriminately, but many of the houses were still standing.
As we moved closer to Los Angeles, the devastation became worse.
The industrial district and the heart of the city were an unrecognizable shambles.
Roswell said, “They were expecting a naval attack when Knight and I left the city.”
“That must have been the heavy guns we heard yesterday.”
Roswell’s face was white; beads of sweat stood on his lips. “It looks as if the navy made a successful landing. The Russians were trapped. They used gas and destroyed everything—to hold the territory they had taken.”
Karl Grennig broke in, “Our boys are supposed to have—I mean to say, the Communists are supposed to have very effective chemical weapons. A couple of dozen bombs dropped from the air would wipe out the city.”
At Roswell’s request we flew north from the harbor and landed on the beach. The homes along the ocean front boulevard were undamaged. Roswell picked up the rifle I had given him.
“Idealism with teeth to it,” he muttered. “I’m going to need this after all, Jerry.”
He jumped from the cabin, landing on the soft warm sand. “One man would give the order to destroy the city; and one man would manage to survive, if all the world died. Don’t wait for me. I don’t think I’ll be back.”
He strode toward the wooden stairs leading from the beach to the top of the bluff. I called after him, “Where the hell’re you going, Roswell?”
He plodded on without answering. I motioned Grennig toward the cabin door. His face paled. “It’s suicide, Bonhill! There are still some Soviet troops around up there. We don’t stand a chance.”
“Then we have to bring Roswell back, don’t we?”
When Grennig and I reached the boulevard, Roswell was on the walk in front of a large, pseudo-Spanish mansion. I knew the house. It belonged to Marvin Dragen III.
Soviet soldiers lay dead on the boulevard, their guns still clutched in their hands. These were the diehards; they had won the city of the dead—and died themselves. None of the men was wearing a mask. Obviously they hadn’t known the gas was to be used.
I saw him, then, as the door of the Dragen house swung open. A tall, Soviet General in full dress uniform. The Order of Lenin on his breast caught and held the glint of the afternoon sun. He was wearing a gas mask that hid his face and deprived him of his only human resemblance.
A god of war gone mad, for the danger from the gas had long since gone. He held a submachine gun in his hand. He aimed it at Stewart Roswell.
“Zergoff,” Roswell whispered.
The Russian squeezed the trigger before I had time to fire. The hammer of Zergoff’s weapon fell on an empty chamber.
“I held the beachhead,” the Russian said proudly, his voice muffled by the mask. “Not even the American navy could throw me out.”
“You did this?” Roswell asked. “You killed them all?”
Roswell fumbled with his rifle. But he did not fire. He turned away and walked toward Grennig and me, staggering like a drunken man. Zergoff continued to fire.
“Let him die in his own way,” Roswell said, “in his dead city. Pray God give him just one minute of sanity before it’s over! Let him smell the stench of death and see the ruins; let him know the thing he’s done; let him judge his own inhumanity. That’s hell enough for any man.”
Roswell gripped my arm. He was gasping for breath and I saw tears in his eyes.
CHAPTER THREE
The First Two Years, Jerry Bonhill
I. The Valley—Tuesday evening, The Fifth Day
THIS was our physical world—fourteen men and two boys; twelve women and a Mexican child of fourteen. Five of them were Chinese; two were Negro; two Indians; four Russians, a German and an Italian. Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Hindus, Buddhists. The races of man; the nations of man; the faiths of man.
I told them briefly what we had seen in Los Angeles. I said they were free to go back to the dead city and live with the dead, scavenging food in the ruins.
I saw dismay on their faces, the shadow of the lonely horror. I went on quickly to suggest a general plan of survival.
I said we would begin with an inventory of our resources—the tools, the canned food, the clothing, the gasoline, the hunting guns, the shells, which were available in the village. We would move everything into the largest market and use it as a warehouse. Until we worked out a system of replacements, nothing was to be taken out of that warehouse except on my written order. I asked Lin Yeng and his wife to manage the warehouse for us—to classify the supplies and to set up an accounting system for all withdrawals.
From the back of the room Vasili Shostovar spoke up. “Highhanded is the word for it. Suppose we don’t want to play your game, Bonhill?”
I answered quietly, “You don’t have to stay in the valley.”
Shostovar snorted. “All this fine talk of yours about your American way of life! Right now you’re setting up Communism. Did we vote on any of this? Did we elect you to—”
Psorkarian sprang up, his face angry in the white glare of the lantern. “Then we’ll hold an election. We’ll put Jerry in office.”
I knew the Cossack would get a majority, but that sort of formal procedure was the last thing I wanted. “These are only emergency measures,” I told him. “Anyone of you would suggest exactly the same things.”
I set up a communal dining system for all of us in
the lodge, because that made it easier to use our food efficiently. I asked seven women to do the kitchen chores—Mom, the Sutong sisters, and three of the women Chen Phiang had picked up on the road. Since the supply of fresh food was our most immediate problem, I suggested that we begin farming operations at once.
Morrenski said, in his plodding way, “I have seen seed packets in the stores here. We can use them for the first planting.”
“For our second season, we’ll take seeds from this year’s crop,” Trenev added.
I assigned Chen Phiang, Shostovar, Grennig and Giorgio Leopardi to work with Morrenski and Trenev, and I threw in the three kids as well—Jim Riley, Ted Fisher and Carlota Porra. It would do them good to work in the summer sun, and they needed to feel that they were doing their part.
Our only source of fresh meat would be the game we shot. I appointed Boris Yorovich and Feodor Psorkarian our community hunters. It was logical, then, to give them control of our firearms. In the shadow government I had to make, the two men would be the police power.
We had one more interruption from Shostovar. “You’re organizing a nice little dictatorship, Bonhill; I hope the rest of these fools understand that.”
“An emergency economy,” I repeated patiently.
“Communism, and we may as well face it. You arbitrarily assign us work. You give us no choice. You—”
“You make the choice if you stay in the valley,” I reminded him for a second time. “We’ve all had our fill of arguments over words, Shostovar. There’s one big difference between what we’re doing and the police state you came from. Here you aren’t afraid to say what you think. You didn’t hesitate to call me a dictator a minute ago. You know you can talk as much as you like and nothing’s going to happen to you.”
The meeting broke up after dark.
“This is the beginning, isn’t it?” Cheryl asked me as we crossed the hill.
“We’ll survive. If we have faith in ourselves, our world will never die.”
Faith: that fundamental human need. I had organized the material resources of the valley, but I had provided nothing to satisfy man’s inner soul. I mulled that over as I showered and dressed for dinner.
Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) Page 17
