A squad of Valley foot soldiers came east on Sunset toward them. Liz tensed. One of the soldiers called, “You folks are out late.” The men kept marching. Liz tried not to be too noisy with her sigh of relief. She must have done well enough—none of the Valley men stopped and looked back at her.
When they got to the 405 and Sepulveda Boulevard, Dad turned right again and went down onto Sepulveda. “What are you doing?” Mom asked with exaggerated patience. “Speedro’s the other way.”
“I know,” Dad said. “If they’re looking for us anywhere, they’ll be looking at the Santa Monica Freeway line and at the edge of things between Westwood and Santa Monica. If we go north instead—”
“We go up into the Valley,” Mom broke in. “Is that where we want to be?”
Good question, Liz thought.
But Dad said, “Sure. Why not? It’s the last place the soldiers down here will look for us. And we can go east from there, go around the dead zone in downtown L.A., and get back to Speedro. That’s better than trying to sneak south through Santa Monica, don’t you think? What else would they be looking for?”
That was also a good question—a better one than Liz wished it were. Dad liked to take a backwards slant on things. Sometimes that worked really well. Sometimes it didn’t work at all. But Santa Monica, especially after the latest fire, wasn’t any place Liz wanted to be.
“How much can they learn from what they find in our house?” Mom asked.
“Not enough.” Dad sounded confident as he guided the wagon up the onramp to the 405. “They’ll see that electric lights shine, that refrigerators keep things cold, and that Coke tastes good. And what can they do with any of that?”
A horse-drawn wagon plodding along a freeway built for speeding cars seemed almost unbearably sad to Liz. It also went a long way toward proving Dad’s point.
Thirteen
When Dan woke up, he felt as bad as if somebody had kicked him in the head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and then, “Oh, wow!” Somebody had kicked him in the head—he remembered that much. And now he wished his head would fall off so he didn’t have to put up with the pounding, throbbing ache in there.
Somebody … Who? That didn’t come back right away. But he hadn’t decided to lie down here on the ground in the gloom by himself. No. He’d been talking with someone, and they’d had an argument, and then a fight.
“I lost,” he said sadly. “I must have lost.” That didn’t make him feel like much of a soldier. He looked around, though turning his head hurt, too. Come to that, almost everything hurt. Twilight hadn’t altogether faded. The sun had been setting when whatever happened, happened. So he hadn’t been out too long.
Whoever’d licked him hadn’t taken his matchlock. That was good. He imagined trying to tell Sergeant Chuck how he’d lost it. That would have hurt worse than the thumping he’d taken. Hard to believe, but it would have. What would Chuck have done to him for losing his gun to a Westside rebel? Nothing pretty.
Or was it a Westside rebel? “Liz!” he exclaimed, and with the name things started flooding back. He hadn’t just lost—he’d lost to a girl!
And what were they talking about before she tried using his poor aching skull for a football? He had trouble coming up with that. It made him mad—it was important. He was sure it was. It was even more important than his humiliating defeat. Where did she learn to fight like that?
“Must have been in the home timeline,” Dan muttered. For a second, the words didn’t mean anything to him—they were only words. Then he remembered what lay behind them. A whole world where the Fire didn’t fall! A whole world where they still had electricity and refrigerators and Coca-Cola! A whole world … that didn’t give two cents for this one. A whole world … that just wanted to find out what had gone wrong in this one, that didn’t care anything about fixing it up.
Rage filled him. Was that fair? Not even close! If they could catch Liz and her folks, maybe they could … Do what? Dan wondered. Something, anyhow. They had to be able to do something. He heaved himself to his feet and started dogtrotting back to the house where the traders—the traders from that other world—had lived.
He was in good hard shape, the way a soldier needed to be. He should have made it back to that house without even breathing hard—it wasn’t much more than a mile. He took about three strides and then stopped, fighting not to be sick. He’d never got kicked in the head before, not by a girl, not by a horse, not by anybody or anything. He didn’t know how very badly that kind of injury could mess someone up—adventure stories didn’t talk about such things. He might not have known, but he found out in a hurry. Trying to do anything fast left him dizzy and wondering if his skull would split in two. As a matter of fact, he hoped it would.
But he had to get back, even if he couldn’t do it fast. If he couldn’t run, he would walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl, he thought. It didn’t quite come to that. He could walk, as long as he didn’t try to hustle.
Little by little, he realized he was glad the sun had gone down. The torches and lamps he saw as he got into Westwood seemed to pierce his eyes and stab his brain like needles. Cooking odors and the general town stink were much stronger than usual, too. He gulped several times. He was hungry, but maybe it was just as well he had an empty stomach.
The traders’ house still had guards posted in front of it, and torches in the sconces by the front door. Dan narrowed his eyes against what felt like an intolerable glare. The torchlight let the sentries get a good look at him. “Look what the cat dragged in,” one of them jeered.
“Drinking on duty?” the other one asked.
“I’ve got three stripes now. You can’t talk to me like that,” Dan said. The men stiffened to attention—rank did have its privileges. That his speech wasn’t slurred also helped. He went on, “Is Captain Horace still in there?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” the sentries chorused—they didn’t sound snotty any more. One of them ventured, “Uh, what happened to you, Sergeant?”
“What’s it look like? I got beat up.” Dan didn’t say Liz had done it. He supposed he would have to tell Horace, but he didn’t want these yahoos being the first to know.
He went inside. He went downstairs. He had to squint even harder against electric lights than he had against the torches—they were that much brighter. Captain Horace stared at him. As the sentry had, he asked, “What happened to you?”
“Sir, I saw Liz—you know, the traders’ daughter—coming out of the UCLA library. I came up to her, and I … I lost the fight, that’s all.”
Horace’s eyebrows leaped for the sky. “How in blazes did a girl whip you?”
“Sir, she fights better than our dirty-fighting coaches. That’s the truth.”
“Where could she have learned to fight like that?” the officer demanded.
“In the home timeline, sir,” Dan answered. “It’d have to be.”
“What the devil is the home timeline?”
Dan explained—as well as he could, anyhow. Looking back, he didn’t know how good a job he did. All he knew was the little Liz had told him. And he was trying to remember it after she’d knocked him cold.
When he got done, Captain Horace said, “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard in my life.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said. You didn’t want to argue with officers. Even when you were right, you were wrong if you did something like that. But the electric lights overhead hurt his sensitive eyes. Pointing to them, he went on, “Where in this world do we have lights like that? Where do we have all the other stuff here? Where do we have Coca-Cola?”
“That’s a … good question, Sergeant,” Horace said slowly. “And I wish I had a good answer for you. This Liz was heading north, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then she and her folks are likely at the Brentwood market square, eh? We’ll send some men up there right away.” The captain scowled. “But chances are they’ll already be gone. I wouldn’t hang around, anyway, not after I got into
a fight with one of King Zev’s soldiers.” In his own way, he was tactful. He didn’t remind Dan that Liz had not only got in a fight but won it. “So we’ll also pass the word to the border stations. They must have come up from the south, right?”
“I’d think so, yes, sir,” Dan replied.
“Then we’ll catch ’em when they try to escape, that’s all. No one can assault a Valley soldier and expect to get away with it.” Captain Horace sounded plenty confident.
“That all sounds good, sir. The only thing is … The only thing is, they’re sneaky.” Dan had the feeling his superior was missing something. Trouble was, he had no idea what. It had something to do with Liz and her folks and how sneaky they were. But what? His poor battered brain wouldn’t tell him.
“I don’t care how sneaky they are. They can only go one way,” Horace said. “And when they do, we’ve got ’em.”
The Chevy wagon reached the top of Sepulveda Pass. This was the place where the Westside had built its stupid, greedy wall, the one that touched off the war with the Valley. Looking north, Liz could see all the lights of King Zev’s domain flickering in the darkness.
What she saw was how few and faint those lights were. When you came to the top of the pass in the home timeline and started down toward the Valley, all the neon and fluorescent lights blazed out at you. These fires seemed pathetic by comparison.
“Doesn’t seem to be anybody after us,” Mom said.
“Nope.” Dad sounded smug. “We would’ve heard people on our trail. With no motors or anything, you can hear a long way in this alternate.” As if to prove his point, an owl hooted in the hills off to one side of the pass. Liz never would have heard that driving along in a car with a million other cars all around. Now they had the old freeway almost to themselves.
“They must think we are heading down to Speedro,” Liz said.
“Sometimes the fastest way to get somewhere is the long way around,” Dad said. That sounded as if it ought to make sense, in a Zen kind of way. Almost everything Dad said sounded as if it ought to make sense. Sorting out what really did from what didn’t could be a full-time job, though.
“We can sell jeans to King Zev himself,” Mom said. “Who wouldn’t want a pair of brand new Old Time jeans? They’d be fit for a king.”
“If we have a pair that fits him,” Liz said. “Isn’t he supposed to be sort of short and round?”
“He’s a bowling ball with a mustache,” Dad said, which gave her a case of the giggles. “But he is fairly smart, I think—which won’t help him fit into denim.”
Mom started to snore. Liz was jealous. She was also way too wound up even to try to sleep. Escaping from occupied Westwood was bad enough. But that she’d been in a fight with somebody she knew, that she’d hurt him … She didn’t like the idea, not even a little bit.
If she’d lost, Dan and his buddies would be questioning her right now. They wouldn’t be gentle about it. She understood all that perfectly well. She’d done what she had to do if she wanted to stay safe. Remembering that truth made her feel better—but not enough better.
The owl hooted again, or maybe it was another one. A coyote howled at the moon, for all the world as if it were a dog. She wouldn’t have heard that zooming along in a car, either—or stuck in traffic not zooming at all. No morning and afternoon rush hours in this alternate.
Mom stirred. “I think we’re all right,” she said sleepily. “If they were going to come after us, they really would have done it by now.”
“It’s my fault. I feel bad about it,” Liz said. “If Dan hadn’t liked me too much, nobody would have paid any attention to our house. Then none of this would have happened. It would have been like another alternate.”
“Maybe it is. Maybe it’s one where we know the breakpoint,” Dad said. “Maybe there’s a whole Mendoza family going on about its business in an alternate almost like this one—except Dan didn’t like you or didn’t meet you, and we never ran into any trouble.”
“I don’t think so,” Liz said. They hadn’t found any alternates with breakpoints after the discovery of crosstime travel. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a home timeline. There would be a bunch of home timelines, each a little different from all the others. And if that didn’t make your head want to explode …
“Probably not. It’s not a big enough deal,” Mom said. “But that kind of thing could happen one of these days.”
“It’ll be a mess if it does, too,” Dad said. “We’ve never found another alternate that goes crosstime, right? If we can’t find others, we’ll just have to make our own.” He might call it a mess, but he sounded cheerful about it.
“Brr!” Liz shivered, though the night was mild. The idea gave her the horrors. They didn’t talk about that kind of thing in school. She knew why not, too. It would give people even more to worry about than they already had. As if life wasn’t complicated enough!
After a while, Dad said, “I think we can pull off onto the shoulder and stop. They haven’t realized we might have headed north.”
“A good thing, too, or we’d be in even more trouble,” Mom said. But she turned around on the seat and grabbed a couple of blankets. Sleeping in the wagon was cramped, but it wouldn’t be chilly.
The horses seemed glad to stop. Some scraggly grass grew by the side of the road. They nibbled at that. Dad spread some oats on the ground, too, and put out a water bucket for each animal. “They aren’t like cars,” he remarked. “You’ve got to take care of them all the time, not just lube and oil them every seventy-five thousand kilometers.”
“They might as well be people,” Liz said. “And I sure could use a lube and oil change right now.” She shifted under the blankets, trying to get comfortable.
Next thing she knew, it was dawn. She yawned and stretched. She’d meant it about the lube job—she really was stiff and sore. By the way her folks grumbled, so were they. Yeah, they were older than she was. But they hadn’t had a Valley soldier try to throw them into the middle of next week and almost succeed.
Down the north side of the Sepulveda Pass went the wagon. Dad had to ride the brake, which made the wheels squeal. Otherwise, on the downhill slope, the wagon would have bumped the horses’ backsides. He breathed a sigh of relief when the terrain leveled out.
He got off the 405 at Victory. “Here we are, in the wonderful, romantic Valley,” he said.
It didn’t look wonderful or romantic to Liz. It looked a lot like Westwood: a relative handful of people living in what had been part of a great city. Without imported water and food, the Los Angeles basin couldn’t support anything close to the population it had in the home timeline.
Ruined, tumbledown houses and shops spread as far as the eye could see. The dead zone in the Valley lay off to the northwest, where the aerospace factories had stood. The Russians knew that, of course, and gave them a bomb.
A man selling avocados on a street corner called, “What have you got?”
“Blue jeans—genuine Old Time Levi’s,” Dad answered. “Top quality, too. I don’t have many left.”
“How many avocados you want for a couple of pairs?”
“Whoa,” Dad told the horses. Not stopping would have been out of character. He and the man with the avocados haggled for a while. Levi’s were hard to come by, while avocados grew all over the place in Southern California. On the other hand, as the local pointed out, you couldn’t eat blue jeans. When the man threw in a beat-up basket to hold the avocados, Dad made the deal. “We can eat some on the way and give the rest to the Stoyadinoviches,” he said.
“Do we have more to worry about than avocados?” Mom pointed up the street. Marching their way came a platoon of Valley soldiers: archers, musketeers, and a few tough-looking riflemen.
“Well, I hope not.” Dad steered the wagon over to the curb, the way you’d steer a car in the home timeline if an ambulance or a fire engine or police car came at you. The platoon tramped past with no more than a couple of sidewise glances toward the traders.
>
“Whew!” Liz said as the wagon started rolling again.
“I didn’t think the soldiers in Westwood would have got word about us up here so fast,” Dad said. “Still, I wouldn’t have liked to find out I was wrong.”
That made Liz look back over her shoulder. She saw the Valley troops, other people on foot, people on horseback, and a few carts and carriages and wagons. Everything looked normal—normal for this alternate, anyhow. She told herself she was jumpy about nothing. Then she told herself to believe she was jumpy about nothing. Herself laughed at her.
“I wish you could step on the gas and make the horses go faster,” Mom said. That made Liz feel better—she wasn’t the one one with the jitters, then.
“Matter of fact, so do I,” Dad said. “But I can’t.” He flicked the reins. Maybe the horses went a tiny bit faster. And maybe they didn’t.
Step on the gas. That was a funny phrase. Cars in the home timeline burned clean hydrogen, so it made sense there. But people in this alternate also said it when they meant hurry up. Cars in 1967, when the Fire fell, hadn’t burned hydrogen—they’d burned nasty, stinky, polluting petroleum. Petroleum wasn’t a gas—it was a liquid. She knew that. She needed a moment to remember that the part of the petroleum Old Time cars burned was called gasoline. People must have clipped that to gas, even thought the stuff wasn’t.
Victory went east, straight as a string for a long way. Dad stopped to rest the horses and bought lunch at a roadside taco stand. He could have done that in the home timeline, too, though people there would have had conniptions if he’d driven a team of horses on the street. The tacos were pretty good. They were handmade, not cranked out in a factory and nuked when the order came in. That helped.
Nuked. In the home timeline, you nuked something when you threw it in the microwave. Oh, it meant using nuclear weapons, too, but most people didn’t dwell on that. The home timeline had escaped atomic war, and with a little luck would go right on escaping it.
The Valley-Westside War Page 23