Connor’s father had muttered Well, Women’s Lib still lives, by God! But not too loudly.
The Montivallans had functioning bicycles because they’d just accepted that they couldn’t make pneumatic tires, and substituted solid rubber ones instead. They gave a rougher ride and you had to be careful not to get Melvined by the saddle dropping away and then smacking you unexpectedly in the balls, but they worked. They’d had a bunch of bikes so equipped on their ship, and Connor, Conan and half a dozen other Topangans were using them now along with the northerners. That cut the twenty-mile trip to Malibu from a long day’s hike there and another back down to something manageable.
With enough daylight once you got there to accomplish something; a day and a half all up, rather than three or four, and less time meant less risk. The slowest element was the wagon and its four-horse team, and the riders on horseback.
Dammit, we could have done these tires ourselves, it’s not like making watches! We could have, like, cut strips out of truck tires or something! Why didn’t the old guys do this years ago? It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it would work. Fuck it, we will do that now!
All the times he’d busted his ass when he could have pedaled, or just coasted most of the way from the Tillman place to the ocean . . . and it was a lot easier to push burdens on a bike than carry them on your back too. And bikes didn’t eat precious food when they weren’t working, the way horses and mules and donkeys did.
Why didn’t we think of it? Hell, maybe it’s because there are a lot more of them to have ideas.
That sort of thing had happened a lot since the northerners showed up a few days ago. His dad had actually cried when one of them told him that they were making new wind-up record players and that it would be—theoretically—possible to replace the treasured salvaged one that had finally given up the ghost a couple of years ago. It had been hideously embarrassing in a way he’d thought he’d put behind him when he married Luisa, though at least the old man had waited until the strangers weren’t there before he opened the taps.
Plus Connor would have to listen to more scratchy Steely Dan and weird electric guitar sounds if one of those new machines ever made it down here; he’d thought he’d gotten past that, at least. Though apparently the things were made to order and ferociously expensive, ten times the price of a good horse.
The sea hissed against the beach to his left, or against the rubble edge of the roadway where the beach petered out. Or was hidden by ruins where there was a little more in the way of beachfront property, always an endless blue presence and a sound of gulls. The hills rose to his right—the Santa Monicas were barer here than they were around the Canyon. A rabbit scurried across the road, and he reached reflexively for his blowgun, but they weren’t here to hunt for the pot.
And Conan’s frisking around them like a puppy, damn it. That bothers me too.
“Forward,” Karl said, and motioned.
The guys in kilts—there were two bunches, the ones he was with today who wore tailored kilts and were called Mackenzies, and the others with baggy wrapped kilts who called themselves McClintocks and had wild tats—seemed to have a whole language of broad gestures. They called it Battle Sign, and it was a lot like the ASL deaf people had used before the Change, but simpler and designed to be readable from a distance. They used it when they didn’t want to make noise, and a lot of the time they used it even when they spoke too, to keep in the habit so they could just stop talking if they had to.
They all leaned into their pedals and got going again. Now and then landslips had covered the roadway or the ocean bitten chunks out of it, and they had to dismount and manhandle the wagon around and then shove or carry their bicycles. They were rarely out of sight of the water; once he looked north and saw a herd of springbok bouncing like a mass of manic tennis balls across a hillside and away over the crest in horrified surprise at the sight of human beings.
When they reached the boundaries of what had been Malibu proper the hills inland gentled down and swung away from the coast, silent under a bright noon sky. Many of the town’s buildings had burned at one time or another, and spiny, weedy growth reached across or sprouted from their cracked foundation-pads, some of it still waxy green despite the summer dryness. Piles of tumbleweeds rested where wind had trapped them against something solid, though he thought there weren’t quite as many of them as there had been when he was a kid.
Other structures still stood, the breeze whistling in broken window and sagging door; one had simply disappeared under a mound of purple and crimson bougainvillea where a freak of ground channeled water to its roots. Birds flitted in and out, and in the middle distance a coyote trotted across the road on its own business.
“We’ll go on foot from here,” Bow-Captain Karl said as they stopped at the edge of what had been a small, rich town. “Helms on the now.”
The northerners all took off the odd cowflop-like things they called bonnets and put on their helmets, open-faced bowls with flared neck-guards that would give fair protection without restricting sight or hearing. Plus more shade than the bonnets would; you could tell they came from a place with a lot of rain and cloud.
Karl went on: “Bring the bicycles in the wagon, we’ll need to load that when we get there. Thora, you and the riders are rear guard. Boudicca, Gwri, point.”
The Mackenzies seemed an easygoing lot, not much given to martial stiffness, but Connor both admired the way they obeyed instantly and spread out, and resented it. He was tempted to argue for the sake of the thing. What did being a Topangan mean, if not telling people who tried to give you orders where to head in? But he decided not to; not least because it would be like stepping backward in time, with the young longbowman playing the part of his father and his own son looking on.
Also it would be stupid to pick a fight with someone doing the right things. Connor hadn’t lived nearly forty years in the world the Change made by being that sort of stupid.
Karl looked around as they walked forward, eyes narrow. “There’s more land that could be farmed here,” he said slowly. “More room between where the houses stood.”
Connor nodded silently at the enquiring look the archer gave him. The way his father told it, Malibu had been full of rich people who liked big lots and parkland, sort of like Chatsworth but not so fortunate. By the time the refugees from LA got this far, they’d been really hungry, and there was enough running water around here to keep them from dying quick.
“Why haven’t you Topanga folk settled any of it?” the Mackenzie asked curiously. “Plowland being something you’re fair short of, it seems to me.”
“Some people tried,” Conan said. “A couple of them lasted . . . what was it, Dad?”
“Two months,” Connor said. “Back around the time I married your mother, just after the Battle of the Avalanche. But they may have been missing longer. Some of their friends came out here and checked on them and they were just . . . gone. Like they’d walked out the door and never come back.”
He looked at Karl. “There’s even better land a bit farther up the coast around Oxnard and Ventura, really good open land not built up, and lots of it. We haven’t tried that, either.”
“We should,” Conan said, with a sudden blaze of enthusiasm. “We could all just pick up and move and not have to scratch at rocks anymore. Let the Chatsworth pukes spend their lives breaking up parking lots.”
His father ignored him and went on: “Because it’s the sort of flat open country the Chatsworth Lancers would really love if they could get at it. If a lot of us left, enough to keep one another safe, they’d be able to swarm through the Canyon and run a lance right up the ass of whoever had moved. And if it was just a few . . . well, I told you what happened to the Roghayeh family.”
Conan glowered at him and then spoke, ostentatiously to the Mackenzie:
“The way the old folks tell it, a day or two after the Change, a like,
huge horde of people came up the Coast Road from LA. Mostly on bikes, but a lot on foot too, some dying every step of the way but there were so many they just kept coming, day after day for a week or so and then a trickle for another week. We pulled back north into the Canyon and blocked the road and stood ’em off, but they ate everything bare and drank the creeks dry all the way to Santa Barbara.”
“Farther,” Connor said grimly. “A few got most of the way to the Bay. Lots got to Paso Robles, at least.”
Silently: I used to get bored when the old guys talked about stuff like that, maybe because it was them talking. For Conan, it’s just interesting history that happened a long time ago. And your granddad’s favorite stories aren’t as boring as your dad’s when you’re his age.
One night just after the last war with the Chatsworth bunch . . .
Christ, was that nearly two decades now?
. . . Connor and his father had gotten truly wasted with wine and weed; they’d both been in that one, after all. Jared had helped hold the Wall, and Connor had saved Topanga village from a sneak side attack when he ambushed a Valley probe trying to infiltrate along the old hiking trails, and he got back far enough ahead of them to give the alarm. The older and younger Tillman had started getting on a little better afterwards; his father had taken him more seriously.
When things got late that night Jared had talked about what he’d seen when Kwame sent him and a few others to scout up this road, a year after the Change. They’d needed to know . . . and after that, they’d known. Not all of them had come back, and for years afterwards the Brains had leaned hard to keep people from going outside the Canyon at all.
Most of the time he didn’t pay much attention to the old man’s stories and feels, especially that oh-we-had-it-rough-in-the-Change stuff, but . . . the tone hadn’t been hectoring that time, or superior, just flat and . . . factual, spoken while he stared at the wall. His father had bad dreams for a few weeks after that, because he’d brought the memories back. Connor didn’t, words were never quite like the real thing, but it wasn’t something he liked to think about much.
“And some of ’em . . . their kids and grandkids . . . are still hanging around, I bet,” Conan said. “So when we come this way to salvage, it’s a bunch together and we don’t stay after dark.”
Karl nodded and whistled. Four of the monster dogs jumped out of the wagon and sat at his feet, staring up at him intently with their ears cocked . . . and their heads were easily over his belt-buckle while they did it, despite his being a six-footer or better. They probably weighed nearly as much as he did, too.
I wouldn’t want those things staring at me, Connor thought. Jesus, those fangs are as big as my little finger. If those are hunting dogs, what the hell do they hunt? Elephants?
Part of the answer was obvious: they hunted people who gave their owners grief. He’d seen pictures of dogs that big, Great Danes and Mastiffs, but he’d never been sure if they were exaggerations. Now he knew they weren’t. The thought of how much these things must eat every day made him wince. And that made him feel . . . poor. Which was a novel experience; nobody in Topanga had much more than anyone else. He couldn’t even pretend these kilties were a-fucking-ristocrats like some of the northerners; from the way they talked it was obvious that they were just farmers and blacksmiths and hunters and whatnot back home, much like his people. They even seemed to run things in a basically similar way, talking and voting.
They certainly seem to get a lot more out of it, for sure.
The Mackenzie consulted his map, an old Rand McNally, looked around and snapped his fingers and pointed as he said sharply:
“Scout!”
The dogs split up and went ahead down the ruined street; they moved in swift bursts, stopping dead and sniffing with their black wet noses every ten or twenty yards, their ears cocked.
Karl made another sign, and two women followed, the ones named Boudicca and Gwri, Connor thought. Boudicca moved like a cat, and like a cat seemed to sense things with her whole skin. Her bow was slung and she held a gruesome-looking weapon in her hands, shaped like a heavy butcher knife with a hook on the reverse mounted on a six-foot pole. Gwri had an arrow on the string and slightly drawn as she followed, black eyes never still.
The rest of them came behind at a distance, arrows ready too. Connor slipped a dart made from a tenpenny nail stabilized by a plastic bead into the tube of his blowgun and brought it up. Some preferred a tuft of feather to steady the dart, but he’d learned on this type as a kid . . . and they weren’t going to run out of either nails or plastic beads anytime in the next ten generations or so.
The dogs stopped, looking around and sniffing and then crouching slightly with their muzzles pointed at one building, a two-story structure with an arcade below and a second-story balcony running along its length. Most of a red-tile roof was still intact above.
Boudicca threw up a hand and everyone else halted too—the Topangans after a few extra steps, when they realized the northerners had frozen in place. She tapped two fingers towards her eyes, then used them to indicate the building on the seaward side of the street. The ground-floor windows and doors had been glass and the fragments of them lay amid drifted dust and sand and shreds of tumbleweed; gaping dark holes of empty windows loomed behind the balcony above them, with a length of cord swinging in one. That might be the wind . . .
The woman with the polearm—glaive, it was called—knelt under the balcony, then looked backward at Karl.
He made a sign. She nodded, crouched back on the balls of her feet, poised, then leapt suddenly and thrust the glaive upward with her hands low towards the base, quick as a snake’s strike. It plunged up through what must be a hole in the floor above, crunching aside tattered board. Where there had been silence, there was suddenly a shriek of agony as she bared her teeth and wrenched it back.
A man leapt up howling, and was transfixed by three Mackenzie arrows in the time it would have taken to count that high, twisting and jinking under the massive impacts that smashed the broadheads through bone, then falling back out of sight. Another dashed out of the ground floor, a long knife in either hand, face a mass of hair and bulging eyes and brown broken teeth.
Connor had the blowgun’s carved mahogany mouthpiece to his lips; he aimed and shot with a deep huff! of exhaled breath that turned into a hissing psfth in the tube. The nail split the man’s Adam’s apple from ten yards away, the yellow bead dancing against his skin as he collapsed in convulsions and sprayed blood from nose and mouth.
Boudicca brought the steel cap on the butt of her glaive down on his temple with a swift flick and a crunching sound you knew would come back to you later, then nodded a single brief gesture of thanks to Connor.
He found that warmed him, which was a little odd from a girl only a bit older than his daughter Maria, but there you were.
Two more figures started upright on the balcony itself, turning to sprint back indoors; one had a spear and one a pre-Change fiberglass bow and a clutch of arrows thrust through a rag belt, and he was trying to put a shaft to the string as he ran. Out in the street, Gwri drew and shot before the one with the bow could take more than a couple of steps. The arrow hit his back with a hard wet sound, like a sweaty hand slapping a shoulder, and he pitched forward.
In the same instant Boudicca had dropped the glaive, drawn her shortsword and snatched her little steel buckler in her other hand and sprinted unhesitatingly into the derelict building with two of the other Mackenzies and a brace of the hounds at her heels. There was a gurgling shriek from inside, and snarls like great sheets of ripping canvas, then thumps like bodies falling down a stair, then silence.
“Sin é!” she called out from inside. “That’s it! Got two!”
A third figure came out on the balcony, then dropped to the floor and did a scrambling crawl so that the balustrade gave some cover; Gwri’s next arrow went up in a blurred streak and slammed
into the aged wood of one newel post, into it and halfway through in an explosion of bone-white splinters on a line that would have bisected him if the post hadn’t gotten in the way.
The hidden figure turned into a scrawny, near-naked man as he sprang up and ran full-tilt down the rest of the balcony, dodging right and left as he ran, with four near-misses close enough to feel giving extra speed and some thin shrieks to his flight. Then he leapt down to the street, vaulting from the balcony to the roof of a rusting van, down to the pavement like a ball bouncing, then hurling himself up to catch the gutter of a roof that had slumped to within ten feet of the ground when the building gave way and half-collapsed. He went up the gapped tile surface in a rush as agile as the feral monkeys that infested the Santa Monicas.
That mad dash put him better than two hundred yards away, but the dogs were almost at his heels, soaring in huge leaps of their own. One missed its jump to the ruined roof and dropped back to the pavement with a yelp; the other two made it, but their paws made them scrabble and lurch on the tile. Which was probably why he kept running straight away and didn’t dive head-first through one of the holes in the roof. Connor wouldn’t have wanted to go into a confined space with those beasts on his heels either.
Conan’s father saw from the corner of his eye that his son was drawing, though it was a long shot. Karl was leaning forward with the head of his nocked arrow pointing down. There was a brief twisting pull as he brought it up and drew in the odd northern way, then the hard snap of the bowstrings and a whippt of cloven air. On the crest of the roofline the running figure lurched up on tiptoe and seemed to flex like a whip as he was struck and flung forward. It was too far to hear the wet smack of steel in flesh, but Conan’s arrow went through the same spot barely a second later.
“Anwyn take it, lost the arrow,” Karl said mildly as he came erect again.
Crap. These people really are as good with their bows as they like to think they are. I didn’t think anyone could shoot so quick and be accurate with a draw like that monster. A hundred and twenty-seven pounds, Christ!
The Desert and the Blade Page 51