“And how do we get the oil out?” Bert persisted.
“I’m not sure of the details yet. We’ll find some engineers.”
“If you think so, Bob Tony,” Ted Loeffler said. “I’ll start head-hunting whenever you give me the word.”
“Are we agreed?” asked Allison, glancing from face to face. “Okay, Ted. Start looking tomorrow.” He looked at his watch. “Mercer should’ve had those squads here by now. Move to adjourn? Okay. Bert, you want to do a quick sweep around the place?”
Bert nodded and left. The others dispersed: to the kitchen, the generator shed, the bunkhouse. Allison went upstairs to the bedroom. Shauna sat in a bentwood rocker, staring out at the rain through a gap in the curtains.
“Hi,” he said, pulling off his shirt. She nodded. He stripped off the rest of his clothes and went into the bathroom. Setting the wind-up oven timer for three minutes, he showered and was out again before the timer could ring. Hot water was a scarce luxury. If only they had more fuel, more gas and diesel —
“Rain getting you down?” he asked quietly as he came back into the bedroom.
“No. I just needed some peace and quiet.”
“Get it while you can, kid. We have a new war tonight.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
He yanked fresh clothes out of a dresser. “Jesus Christ. Guys are going to die tonight to help keep us alive, and you don’t want to hear about it. What would you like to hear?”
“Don’t shout, Bob.”
“I’ll shout if I want to. Look, kid, I know where you’re coming from. It’s been heavy, sure. But, God, it could be so much worse. We’ve got Sarah, we’ve got our friends, a whole goddamn army, plenty of food. Up in San Francisco they’re starving to death. Kid, you can’t just fold up and quit. We’re getting through this. It’s going to get better, really better. Believe me.”
“Have you ever lied to me before?” she asked with a wan smile.
“Not in days.” He dropped his clothes on the floor and drew her out of the rocker; she let him carry her to the bed.
“I always forget how strong you are.”
“Not that strong. You’re just getting skinny.”
It was true: as he slid her jeans off and undid her blouse, he was struck by her thinness. Her figure hadn’t gone, but she seemed frailer. How long had it been since he’d paid any attention to her? Two weeks? A month? The work of running a private army was too much — he would have to cut back, spend more time with her. And Sarah. Allison knew he’d been neglecting her too.
“Pay attention,” Shauna hissed. “You’re a million miles away.”
He took the rebuke in good spirit and put more thought into his caresses.
“What’s this?” His hand paused on the nape of her neck; he pulled back her thick hair. “You’ve got a mole. How long has that been there?”
“Ow! That hurt. I don’t know. But it’s really tender.”
“Sorry. Listen, kid, we ought to get it looked at. I’ll dig up a doctor somewhere.”
“Forget it. It’ll go away.”
“Kid, something like that could be trouble.”
“Trouble? What are you saying? What kind of trouble? Does it show? Does it make me ugly?”
“Hey, hey, easy,” he murmured, running his hand down her side. “If it’s an infection, it could be a nuisance, that’s all. No big deal, kid.”
He worked harder to bring her to arousal and then to climax, wondering all the time how Mercer was doing.
*
The squads which Mercer had promised never showed up. Allison and Bert took shifts on sentry duty, patrolling the compound in the rain. Nothing happened. Before dawn, a private on a civilian motorcycle came up the road to report that Monterey had been secured. Three of Mercer’s men had been wounded; eighteen mutineers had been killed, and another twenty would be shot before noon.
Allison, Bert and Ted discussed the news over coffee in the kitchen.
“I feel like a mass murderer,” Ted murmured.
“Bullshit.” Bert shook his head. “Violence is a legitimate right of any government. Hell, it’s a government monopoly. And we’re the government.”
“Thirty-eight guys.”
“Ted — ” Allison put a hand on his shoulder. “Some of those guys could’ve come up here and blown you and Suzi and Ken — away. Hey, get your priorities straight. We’re protecting our own, any way we can.”
“Yeah. Yeah … I just feel shitty about it.”
“We all feel shitty about it. I mean, who wants to kill people? But we’ve got a duty to our families, and Lamb’s crazy people, and the Carmel Valley people.”
“And now the Monterey people,” said Bert.
“Right on,” Allison agreed.
“Does it ever stop?” asked Ted. “Today Monterey, tomorrow the world.”
“Sure it stops,” snapped Allison. “It stops when we’re reasonably secure. Now that Monterey’s under control, we don’t have any major threats from the outside. We’ll take over Ord, just to save whatever we can, but that’s it. So can that shit about tomorrow the world.”
“Hey, kemo sabe, I’m your faithful companion, remember? You don’t need to bark at me.”
“Okay. Let’s forget it, right?” Allison felt angered by Ted’s conciliatory tone and blinking eyelids. What a time for him to go soft. “I’m going into Monterey to see what’s happening. Probably be back around sunup.”
*
The Range Rover’s tires hissed on the wet road. Allison looked at the gas gauge and silently swore to himself: he was burning gas and exposing himself to an attack by Frank Burk, just to get away from Ted. True, the guy was an organizational genius; they would have been lost without him. But he was coming apart at the seams. It was depressing and alarming; despite all that he and Ted had been through together in the last six or seven years, Allison realized that Ted would have to be exploited or dropped.
The drive through Carmel and into Monterey took a long time. Muddy water rose above clogged culverts and swept across the road in many places; here and there the asphalt was gone completely. Another year, and horses would be more useful than trucks even if the gas held out.
— Gas. He kept thinking about the Sitka Carrier, just a few miles away with enough gas and diesel fuel to keep them going for years. Somehow it had to be salvaged, whatever the cost —
The stink of oil-soaked beaches was heavy in Monterey and mixed with the smell of smoke. The debris left by the waves always smoldered a bit, but now fires were burning all over the undamaged parts of town. The streets were empty in the rain. In the civic centre, a squad of soldiers in ponchos flagged him down. In the blue light of dawn they looked cold and sleepy.
“Morning, Mr. Allison,” said the buck sergeant in charge. “The lieutenant’s operating outa the library.” He pointed down the street to a glass-and-brick building on the corner, near the edge of the wreckage area.
Allison parked and went inside. Three or four Coleman lanterns made pools of light on the main floor. At a desk beneath one lantern sat Mercer, drinking coffee and eating a sandwich. He waved a dispassionate greeting as Allison came in. Across the floor, a dozen soldiers were smoking dope and playing cards.
“Want a sandwich?”
“No. It’s all gone okay?”
“It was a fucking picnic. People here were so glad to see us, they wet their pants. Told us where the guys were, how many, all that.”
“You’re a genius. A genius. How much do we control?”
“Up into Seaside, I guess.”
“The Leadership Committee wants to take over Ord.”
“That makes sense. Sure. Take a day or two.”
“Then we stop.”
“I don’t know about that. Might still be an idea to take over the whole Martial Law Zone.”
“The whole MLZ. Wow. Can we handle that?”
“Man, we can handle anything if we got enough gas.”
“All right. And maybe I ca
n get you the gas.” He sketched out his salvage plan. Mercer ate.
“Might work,” he said at last. “Need some professionals. What do we do if it doesn’t work out?”
“Damned if I know. I keep hearing that San Francisco’s got no gas, the San Joaquin Valley’s got no gas. If we can’t salvage the tanker, we’ll have to start cooking alcohol.” Mercer smiled. “Man, come on. I’m talkin’ transportation for hundreds of trucks, not some funky way to get you up and down the creek.”
“Then let’s get at the Sitka Carrier.”
“Okay. Come on,” Mercer said, standing up.
“What?”
“Time for the big recruiting speech.”
They went back outside. Across the street was a broad, sloping lawn below the fire station. Soldiers, bareheaded and unarmed, were filling the lawn; behind them came Mercer’s men, rifles levelled. Allison estimated over five hundred mutineers must be in the group. They looked tired and scared; most were kids, trainees. But a few were older men, senior NCOs and a few officers.
Mercer and Allison crossed the street and walked up the driveway to the fire station’s main entrance. It was brighter now, under a low overcast that streamed by from the west. Civilians, scores of them, were gathering in front of the library and on the nearby city hall lawn.
“Long as you’re here,” said Mercer, “you might as well be the emcee.” He nodded towards a microphone standing by the fire-station entrance.
“For what?”
“We’re executing twenty dudes caught raping or robbing civilians, or firing on our men. They’re like a warning that we mean business and we’re righteous. Anybody co-operates, they’ll be okay. They don’t, they get shot.”
“Jesus, Odell, you really get me into some of the — ”
“Do it. We got a million more things to do today besides this.”
The battery-powered speakers crackled and squealed while Allison introduced himself. He began diffidently, but gained confidence and spoke with growing fervour about the hardships everyone had faced, about the need for soldiers and civilians to stand together. After a few minutes, people began to applaud. At the end, the applause was long and loud.
It swelled even more as the twenty men were marched out. Their hands were tied behind them; gags were stuffed in their mouths. Many were bruised and blood-streaked. Each was escorted by two soldiers, who gripped him by the elbows. One, a young man with a captain’s bars on the collar of his fatigue shirt, tried to break free; a blow to the head from a pistol butt quieted him.
Five young soldiers carrying M-16s came around the corner, marching in step. They wore glossy chromed helmets and bright-blue neck scarves; mirrored sunglasses masked their eyes. The crowd quieted almost in a breath, except for the squallings of babies.
At a sergeant’s command the five soldiers lined up at parade rest, facing a patch of grass just a few feet from the microphone where Allison stood.
The first five prisoners were thrown onto their bellies on the wet, dead grass. The firing squad raised their rifles. Allison looked up, at the crowds on the lawns and the street and in the windows of the buildings. This was the civic centre of a small California city. Until a few months ago, no one here could have imagined such a scene. He wondered if the others saw it with the same dreamlike lucidity and sharpness.
“Fire!” snapped the sergeant. Allison’s ears rang, and he remembered the woman he’d shot. The prisoners bounced and twitched under the impact of the bullets. Their escorts dragged away the bodies to make room for the next five. Allison made himself watch, and when one of the prisoners looked up and met his gaze, Allison did not look away. So what if the son-of-a-bitch was a living, thinking human being; that was why he’d been a problem. An instant later the prisoner’s face was concealed in the red-soaked grass.
The civilians cheered as the last bodies were hauled away. Allison relaxed. This was what the great leaders of the past had known, this power of life and death. No other power compared with it.
Allison did not get back to Escondido Creek for many days. The Monterey area was crawling with deserters. Women were raped and murdered, men shot dead before their children, houses burned, food stocks destroyed.
Mercer force-marched his men at night, across the muddy fields where artichokes had once grown. In predawn rain they emerged out of darkness, slipping silently into towns while the deserters slept. Not many shots were fired except in the executions.
Allison went with them, sharing the wet and tiredness. When a town or village was secured, he went in and presided over the executions. Then he met with the local people and appointed a government; by nightfall he was off again.
He had been so long at the ranch that the world beyond Monterey looked foreign. Roads were breaking up; farmlands had turned into weedy bogs. Whole neighbourhoods in Watsonville and Salinas had burned down. Mold spread across sodden carpeting in empty offices. Dogs had learned to hunt at night, in packs of fifteen and twenty; Allison often heard them bay in the dark, but they never challenged the soldiers. Rats were everywhere.
So were people. It seemed as if every building in the MLZ, intact or not, was jammed with people. Some were refugees from the coast, others from the towns and cities to the north — Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, San Jose — where food was scarce and gangs fought each other in the streets.
First out of curiosity, then out of necessity, Allison interrogated many of the refugees. The local councils in the Bay Area, he learned, had survived the attempted military takeover, but were desperately short of food and fuel. They were planning to salvage the Sitka Carrier.
When he heard that, Allison’s skin prickled. He gave orders that anyone recently arrived from the Bay Area was to be brought straight to him; the three or four people he then saw were able to give enough details to confirm the rumour.
Allison sent word to Ted to recruit a salvage team as quickly as possible. He did not intend to be ripped off.
*
It was a cold, misty day in early June when he drove back home. To the east the sun was baking the valleys beyond Salinas; air rose shivering with heat and the fog over the ocean swept in to replace it.
Allison sat in the rear of a Cadillac limousine. His chauffeur was black, as was his bodyguard. Ahead was a truck full of soldiers; behind was another. Two motorcyclists led the way. A waste of gas, Allison had thought. Mercer had disagreed.
“You are the main man now. A lot of people might like to take a shot at you. Then we’re all back in the shit.” Allison had reluctantly agreed.
He and Mercer made a good team: Mercer worried about internal betrayal, Allison about external threats. First it was Frank Burk, next the mutineers in Monterey, then the Bay Area locals. For now, no outside threat was really serious. The Carmel Valley Army was almost seven thousand strong; it controlled the whole coast from just south of Santa Cruz down to Big Sur, and inland to Highway 101 north of Watsonville. He had the support of the people; in Salinas, they’d even donated hidden food supplies without being asked. With Fort Ord’s armaments at his disposal, he could even consider taking over all of central California.
— Except that he had no gas. And the Sitka Carrier sat out there, slowly bleeding diesel.
The motorcade reached the ranch just before sundown. Most of the escort went back down the road to the now-permanent camp known as Fort Apache, half a mile away. Allison went into the kitchen and found Lupe giving Sarah some breakfast: tortillas smeared with butter. No one else was around. Lupe explained that the senora was still asleep, as were most of the others; Senor Bert was out patrolling the edges of the Brotherhood’s property. Allison nodded and let Lupe serve him a big meal of eggs, fried potatoes and ham. It no longer felt odd to eat breakfast at sundown, or supper at dawn.
“How ya doin’, squirt?”
“I’m fine,” Sarah beamed. “Did you bring me anything?”
“No, doggone it. I’m sorry, I forgot. Next time for sure.”
“Did you see Mommy?”
“No. We only went places around here. Salinas, Castroville. Your mom’s down in L.A.”
“How come she never phones?”
“Phones don’t work any more, love. When things get better, we’ll call her.”
“Shauna says they’ll never get better,” Sarah pouted.
“Oh, she’s just saying that. Things are better already. We’ve got lots of food, electricity and all these nice soldiers to look after us.”
“They scare me. Kenny says they kill people.”
Allison made a mental note to speak to Ted about his kid. Then again, Kenny was just relaying his father’s half-baked ideas. Better to have it all out. If Ted didn’t smarten up, he’d have to be dropped from the Leadership Committee. Or they could set up an Executive Group — sounded good — and leave him off it.
“Kenny’s just trying to scare you, silly. If we didn’t have the soldiers, all kinds of bad people would come and take everything away from us. Like Frank Burk.”
He saw fear, real fear in her eyes, and regretted his words. Burk was a bogyman for everyone these days: the lurker in the shadows, the avenger. The bastard’s corpse was probably rotting somewhere in the woods, but until it was found they would all jump at the thought of him.
“Daddy, can we go somewhere else? Can we go home?”
“Sarah, love, we are home.”
“I mean the old home. Before the Apartment.”
— The house in Topanga Canyon, in the long-ago days of two years ago.
“No, love, but listen: how about watching a movie on the TV? Popeye? Superman?”
“Only if you watch it with me.”
“Sure. I’d like that.”
They went into the den, where a big Hitachi projection screen dominated the room. Allison got out a videodisc and put it on; then he took a beer and a can of Pepsi out of the fridge behind the bar and settled down to watch Superman. They snuggled together, giggling; soon Sarah was lost in the movie, slurping her Pepsi. Allison put aside his beer after one sip. It was definitely past its shelf life.
When Krypton exploded, Sarah started screaming. Her body went rigid in Allison’s arms. Lupe hurried in, clucking in Spanish, and whisked her away. Sarah’s screaming went on for a long time.
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