by Larry Niven
The stranger camp was more than a mile away, right down by the shore. There were foxholes and low fortifications around it. Organized. It looked organized. And there were a lot of people, and they sat around fires they didn’t bother to hide, and they had food. Alim counted seven women.
“The women do most of the work,” Gay said. “Them and the rabbit stud in the blue suit. And a lot of them are white, but I counted ten blood, and one’s the sergeant.”
“The sergeant.” Alim digested this, too. “And they do what he tells ’em?”
“They jump when he waves his arms,” Gay said.
“Officers?”
“None I saw. I think the sergeant’s in charge.”
“They done it. Alim, they made it,” Jackie said. “Shit. They really did.”
Alim didn’t say anything. Jackie would explain. After a moment he did. “What we were talking about last night,” Jackie said. His voice was full of excitement. “Not black power, just power. And there’s a lot of ’em, Alim.”
“Not all that many.”
“Maybe they want recruits,” Jackie said.
“You crazy?” Gay snorted. “Join the fuckin’ Army?”
“Shut up.” Alim continued to study the camp through the binoculars. There was orderly activity down there. Garbage carried outside the camp and dumped into holes. Sentries and outposts. Tubs of water over the fire, and everybody washed out their mess kits in hot water. That camp was run like an army, but there was something wrong. It wasn’t all the same, something just wasn’t the way it ought to be.
“Alim, they got what we want,” Jackie said. “Power. Enough guns to do whatever they want. We could join up with them, we could hold anyplace we wanted. Shit, we could do better. That many people, we could take over this whole goddam valley, shit, keep growing, keep recruitin’, we could own the whole fucking state.”
“You been sniffing?” Gay asked.
“Shut up,” Alim said again, and he said it so they knew he meant it. The quick silence was gratifying. Power. And that was the problem: How could Alim Nassor have power if they joined up with that army? “They don’t have no wheels at all?”
“A bike. Big Honda. It went scouting north with two on it. One blood, one honky.”
“In uniform?”
“The honky had on overalls,” Gay said. His tone made it clear he didn’t know what was going on, and didn’t know why Alim wanted to know, either.
“No wheels. We got a truck, and we know where there’s some wheels,” Alim muttered. A farmhouse back down the road. Three trucks, guarded by ten to fifteen men with rifles. Alim had no chance to take it, but this outfit — he shushed the others as the sergeant came into view. Blood all right, a big mother, not all black. Light brown, with a beard. Beard? In the Army? The sergeant wore chevrons, though, and a big pistol on his belt, and he was pointing to people and when he did they got up and did things, brought wood for the fires, washed cooking pots. He wasn’t shouting and he didn’t have to wave his arms and scream. Power. That man had power, and he knew how to use it. Alim studied him closely. Then he looked up and grinned.
“That’s the Hook.”
Gay said, “Huh?” Jackie began to grin.
“It’s the Hook.” Alim treated himself to a whistling sigh of relief. “I know him. We can deal.”
It would take setting up. Alim had to talk to the Hook as an equal, as a commander of men. They had to talk as two men with power. He couldn’t let Hooker know just how bad things were. Alim left Jackie on the hill and went back down to camp. Time to do some shouting and screaming. Time to get those bastards to work.
By noon his camp was organized. It looked good, and it looked like there were more of them than they were. He took Jackie and his brother Harold and went toward the Army camp.
“Shit, I’m scared,” Harold said as they walked toward the shoreline.
“Scared of the Hook?”
“He beat the shit out of me once,” Harold said. “Back in ninth grade.”
“Yeah, and you had it comin’,” Alim said. “Okay, they’ve seen us. Harold, you go in. Leave the rifle here. Go in, hands up, and tell Sergeant Hooker I want to talk to him. And be nice to him, you know? Respectful.”
“You can bet your ass on that,” Harold said. He straightened and walked tall, hands out where they could see they were empty. He tried to whistle.
Alim was aware that there were movements to his right. Hooker had sent men out to flank him. Alim turned and shouted to purely imaginary followers. “Hold it up there, you bastards! This is a peace talk, dig? I’ll skin the first dude that shoots, and you know I’ll do it.” Too much, Alim thought. Like I’m worried they won’t do what I say. But the Army dudes heard me, and it stopped them. And Harold’s in the camp and nobody’s done any shootin’ yet…
And he’s done it, Alim shouted to himself. He’s talking to Hooker, and by God he’s done it. Hook’s comin’ out to meet me. We’re all right, all-fucking-right.
For the first time since Hammerfall, Alim Nassor felt hope and pride.
Two heavy farm trucks ground across the mud flats, taking a tortuous path to the new island in the San Joaquin Sea. They stopped at a supermarket, still half flooded, glass windows scraped of mud by laborious effort. Armed men jumped out and took up positions nearby.
“Let’s go,” Cal White said. He carried Deke Wilson’s submachine gun. White led the way into the drowned building, wading waist-deep in filthy water. The others followed.
Rick Delanty coughed and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell of death was overpowering. He looked for someone to talk to, Pieter or Johnny Baker, but they were at the far end of the column. Although it was their second day at the store, none of the astronauts had got used to the smells.
“If it was up to me, I’d wait another week,” Kevin Murray said. Murray was a short, burly man with long arms. He’d been a feedstore clerk, and was lucky enough to have married a farmer’s sister.
“Wait a week and those Army bastards may be here,” Cal White called from inside. “Hold up a second.” White went on with another man and their only working flashlight, handpumped, and Deke’s submachine gun.
The gun seemed an irrelevant obscenity to Rick. There was too much death all around them. He wasn’t going to say that. Last night Deke had taken in a refugee, a man from southwards with information to trade for a meal: a gang of blacks had been terrorizing the south valley, and now they were linked up with the Army cannibals. It might not be long before they came to Deke Wilson’s turf again.
Poor bastards, Rick thought. He could sympathize: blacks in this shattered world, no status, no place to go, wanted nowhere. Of course they’d join the cannibals. And of course the local survivors were looking strangely at Rick Delanty again…
“Clear. Let’s get at it,” White called from inside. They waded in, a dozen men, three astronauts and nine survivors. A driver brought one of the trucks around so that the headlights shone into the wrecked store. Rick wished they hadn’t. Bodies bobbed in the filthy water. He choked hard and brought the cloth to his face, White had sprinkled a dozen drops of gasoline on it. The sweet sickening smell of gasoline was better than…
Kevin Murray went to a shelf of cans. He lifted a can of corn. It was eaten through with rust. “Gone,” he said. “Damn.”
“Sure wish we had a flashlight,” another farmer said.
A flashlight would help, Rick knew, but some things are better done in gloomy darkness. He pushed rotten remains away from a shelf. Glass jars. Pickles. He called to the others, and they began carrying the pickles out.
“What’s this stuff, Rick?” Kevin Murray asked. He brought another jar.
“Mushrooms.”
Murray shrugged. “Better’n nothing. Thanks. Sure wish I had my glasses back. You ever wonder why I don’t pack a gun? Can’t see as far as the sights.”
Rick tried to concentrate on glasses, but he didn’t know anything about how you might grind lenses. He moved thr
ough the aisles, carrying things the others had discovered, searching for more, pushing aside the corpses until even that became routine, but you had to talk about something else… “Cans don’t last long, do they?” Rick said. He stared at rotten canned stew.
“Sardine cans last fine. God knows why. I think somebody’s already been here, there ain’t so much as the last store. We got most of what was here yesterday, anyway.” He looked thoughtfully at old corpses bobbing about him. “Maybe they ate it all. Trapped here…”
Rick didn’t answer. His toes had brushed glass.
They were all working in open-toed sandals taken from the shoe store up the road. They couldn’t work barefoot for fear of broken glass, and why ruin good boots? Now his toes had brushed a cool, smooth curve of glass bottle.
Rick held his breath and submerged. Near floor level he found rows of bottles, lots of them, different shapes. Fiftyfifty it was bottled water, barely worth room aboard the truck; but he picked one up and surfaced.
“Apple juice, by God! Hey, gang, we need hands here!”
They waded down the aisles, Pieter and Johnny and the farmers, all dog-tired and dirty and wet, moving like zombies. Some had strength to smile. Rick and Kevin Murray dipped for the bottles and handed them up, because they were the ones who didn’t carry guns.
White, the man in charge, turned slowly away with two bottles; turned back. “Good, Rick. You did good,” he said, and smiled, and turned slowly away and waded toward the doorway. Rick followed.
Someone yelled.
Rick set his bottles on an empty shelf to give himself speed. That had to be Sohl on sentry duty. But Rick didn’t have a gun!
Sohl yelled again. “No danger; I repeat, no danger, but you guys gotta see this!”
Go back for the bottles? Hell with it. Rick pushed past something he wouldn’t look at (but the floating mass had the feel, the weight of a small dead man or a large dead woman) and waded out into the light.
The parking lot was almost half full of cars, forty or fifty cars abandoned when the rains came. The hot rain must have fallen so fast that car motors were drowned before the customers in the shopping center could decide to move. So the cars had stayed, and many of the customers. The water washed around and in and out of the cars.
Sohl was still at his post on the roof of the supermarket. It would have done him no good to come closer; he was farsighted, and his glasses had been smashed, like Murray’s. He pointed down at what was washing against the side of a Volkswagen bus and called, “Will someone tell me what that is? It ain’t no cow!”
They formed a semicircle around it, their feet braced against the water’s gentle westward current, this same flow that held the strange body against the bus.
It was smaller than a man. It was all the colors of decay; the big, drastically bent legs were almost falling off. What was it? It had arms. For a mad moment Rick pictured Hammerfall as the first step in an interstellar invasion, or as part of a program for tourists from other worlds. Those tiny arms the long mouth gaping in death, the Chianti-bottle torso…
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s a kangaroo.”
“Well, I never saw a kangaroo like that,” White said with fine contempt.
“It’s a kangaroo.”
“But—”
Rick snapped, “Does your newspaper run pictures of animals two weeks dead? Mine never did. It’s a dead kangaroo, that’s why it looks funny.”
Jacob Vinge had crowded close to the beast. “No pouch,” he said. “Kangaroos have pouches.”
The breeze shifted; the crescent of men opened at one end. “Maybe it’s a male,” Deke Wilson said. “I don’t see balls either. Did kangaroos have… ah, overt genitalia? Oh, this is stupid. Where would it come from? There ain’t any zoo closer than… where?”
Johnny Baker nodded. “Griffith Park Zoo. The quake must have ripped some of the cages apart. No telling how the poor beast got this far north before he drowned or starved. Look close, gentlemen, you’ll never see another…”
Rick stopped listening. He backed out of the arc and looked around him. He wanted to scream.
They had come at dawn yesterday. They had worked all of yesterday and today, and it must be near sunset. None of them had even discussed what must have happened here, yet it was obvious enough. Scores of customers must have been trapped here when the first flash rain drowned their cars. They had waited in the supermarket for the rain to stop, they had waited for rescue; they had waited while the water rose and rose. At the end the electric doors hadn’t worked. Some must have left through the back, to drown in the open.
In the supermarket there were half-empty shelves, and the water floated with corncobs and empty bottles and orange rinds and half-used loaves of bagged bread. They had not died hungry… but they had died, for their corpses floated everywhere in the supermarket and in the flooded parking lot. Scores of bodies. Most were women, but there were men and children, too, bobbing gently among the submerged cars.
“Are you…” Rick whispered. He bowed his head and cleared his throat and shrieked, “Are you all crazy?” They turned, shocked and angry. “If you want to see corpses, look around you! Here,” his hand brushed a stained and rotting flowered dress, “and there,” pointing to a child close enough for Deke to touch, “and there,” to a slack face behind the windshield of the yolks bus itself. “Can you look anywhere without seeing somebody dead? Why are you crowding like jackals around a dead kangaroo?”
“You shut up! Shut up!” Kevin Murray’s fists were balled at his sides, the knuckles white; but he didn’t move, and presently he looked away, and so did the others.
All but Jacob Vinge. His voice held a tremor. “We got used to it. We just got used to it. We had to, goddamm it!”
The current shifted slightly. The kangaroo, if that was what it was, washed around the edge of the bus and began to move away.
The Jeep Wagoneer had once been bright orange with white trim, a luxury station wagon that only incidentally had fourwheel drive and off-road tires. Now it was splashed with brown and green paint in a camouflage pattern. Two men in Army uniform sat in the front seat, rifles held erect between their knees.
Alim Nassor and Sergeant Hooker sat in back. There was little conversation as the car wound through muddy fields and ruined almond groves. When it reached the encampment, sentries saluted, and as the Wagoneer came to a stop the driver and guards jumped out to open the rear doors. Alim nodded thanks to the driver. Hooker did not seem to notice the men. Nassor and Hooker went to a tent at one side of the camp. It was a new tent from a sporting-goods store, green nylon stretched over aluminum poles, and it did not leak. A charcoal hibachi inside kept it warm and dry. A kettle bubbled over the charcoal, and a white girl waited inside to pour hot tea as the two men sat on folding chairs. Hooker nodded dismissal when the tea was poured. The girl left, and the guards took up posts outside well out of earshot.
When the girl was gone, Sergeant Hooker grinned broadly. “Pretty good life, Peanut.”
Nassor’s grin faded at the name. “For God’s sake don’t call me that, man!”
Hooker grinned again. “Okay. Nobody to hear us in here.”
“Yeah, but you might forget.” Alim shuddered. He hadn’t been called “Peanut” since eighth grade, when they studied the life of George Washington Carver, and inevitably the name was settled on George Washington Carver Davis until he obliterated it with fists and a razor blade embedded in a cake of soap…
“Not much out there,” Hooker said. He sipped tea, grateful for the warmth.
“No.” Their scouting expedition had told them nothing they hadn’t expected, except that once there was a break in the rain and they saw snow on the tops of the High Sierra. Snow in August! It had frightened Nassor, although Hooker said it had sometimes snowed in the Sierra before That Day.
They sat uncomfortably despite the hot tea and the warmth of the tent, despite the luxury of being dry, because they had too much to talk about, and neither w
anted to begin. They both knew they would have to make choices soon enough. Their camp was too close to the ruins that had been Bakersfield. In the ashes and wreckage of the city there were a lot of people who might get it together, more than enough to come out and finish Nassor and Hooker. They hadn’t got their shit together yet. The survivors lived in small groups, distrustful of each other, fighting over the scraps of food left in supermarkets and warehouses — the scraps that Hooker and Nassor had left.
It came down to this: In combination, Alim and Hooker had enough men and ammunition to fight one good battle. If they won it, they’d have enough for another. If they lost, they were finished. And they’d stripped the country around them. They had to move. But where?
“Goddam rain,” Hooker muttered.
Alim sipped tea and nodded. If only the rain would stop. If Bakersfield dried out there’d be no problem. Wait for a good day with strong winds — there were always strong winds — and burn out the whole goddam city. A hundred fires started a block apart would do it. Fire storm. It would sweep across and leave nothing behind. Bakersfield would no longer be a threat.
And the rains were wearing down. There had been an hour of sunshine the day before. Today the sun was almost breaking through and it wasn’t noon yet, and there was only misty rain.
“We got six days,” Hooker said. “Then we start gettin’ hungry. We get hungry enough, we’ll find somethin’ to eat, but…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Alim shuddered. Sergeant Hooker saw Alim’s expression, and his mouth twisted into a curl of evil contempt. “You’ll join in,” Hooker said.
“I know.” He shuddered again at the memory. Of the farmer Hooker had shot, and the smells of the stew, and the sharing out of portions of the man, everyone in the camp taking a bowl and Hooker damned well seeing that they ate it. The ghastly ritual was what held the group together. Alim had to shoot one of the brothers who wouldn’t eat. And Mabel At least it did that. Their ritual feast let him shoot Mabe and get rid of that troublemakin’ cunt. She wouldn’t eat.