Karl grinned at Connor’s son: “Not a bad shaft there, boyo.”
Conan shrugged, flushing under his dark tan. “I missed.”
“No, you didn’t—I knocked him out of the way. ’Twould have hit him, so, had I not shot. He’ll not be bothering us more, though, either way. Likely they were laying up and keeping an eye on us, planning to strike in the dark. Assuming they really were Eaters, the which is also very likely.”
“Aye, likely on both counts,” Boudicca said from just behind the Topangan. “There was a nest of them up there, and not a pretty sight, by the Dagda’s dick.”
There was a necklace on the red-dripping point of her leaf-shaped shortsword, held up for Karl and incidentally Connor and Conan and their fellow Topangans to examine. The thong was ancient plastic, probably fishing line, but the finger-bones and teeth were much more recent, and so were the dried ears. He supposed the bones could have been gathered from the roadside skeletons, but he didn’t think so and the ears certainly weren’t. He contemplated them with distaste as the Mackenzie flicked them to the ground, cleaned her sword with a swatch of weeds and sheathed it.
Conan gulped: “Well, I guess that settles the question of whether there are Eaters in Malibu.”
Connor had also suppressed a slight start when she showed up; the Mackenzies all moved lightly, but he thought he could do about as well himself. He’d been a hunter all his life, and a scout in war. But she was like a ghost even by those standards. The dogs padded back as well, licking their chops and waving their tails with an air of self-satisfaction; half the northern archers were standing with their backs to the action, their eyes moving, and the mounted four were farther out still.
“If we didn’t get them all,” Connor pointed out. “And if they don’t move away now.”
He looked around at the ruined town. If there was a little tribe of Eaters in residence—resident at some parts of the year, at least—they might well have dozens of routes for moving unseen, holes knocked in walls and tracks through the tangles of saplings and brush that choked the spots between buildings. They would most certainly know every thicket and crevice and bush of the ruins better than an occasional visitor.
His skin crawled at the thought of being here after sundown, and having them swarm out at arm’s length . . .
The two Mackenzies who’d followed Boudicca into the building appeared briefly on the balcony, looked around, performed the mildly gruesome chore of retrieving arrows, waved, and turned back. When they’d rejoined their companions, there was a brief joint prayer. They seemed to do that sort of thing a lot. This one asked someone called The Mother to witness that they’d killed the Eaters because it was necessary and not for kicks, which it sure as shit had been.
There had been Wiccans in Topanga and still were a coven or two—hippie territory, after all—but they and the Mackenzies had found as many points of difference as agreement after half a century of separation. That had seemed to bother the locals more than the visitors, who simply expected to meet strangeness among strangers. Connor considered himself a lazy Buddhist, like a lot of his compatriots, but some people needed more red meat on that side of things.
He was just getting used to the notion that the Canyon was not only small, poor and isolated, but conservative and backward as well. Other places seemed to have changed more since the Change, while Topangans preserved more of the old way of seeing things. Or at least his generation had, for all that they’d grown up exasperated with their elders for dwelling in the past.
“I misdoubt the rest will try us tonight if there are any more,” Karl said. “Not after this. It can’t be a large band and we probably killed every third fighter they had, aye, or better. Forbye they must hunt game and gather for the most of their food by now, so they’re at our throats by habit and because we’re on their runs, not because they must.”
Connor looked around again. “I’d just as soon not chance it. There’s no telling where they’ll pop up—there might even be intact sewers so they could travel underground.”
Karl nodded. “Right you are, and that’s a good thought. We’ll pull out a little east on the road back and camp in that stretch of open ground after we get what we came for, keeping careful watch, so. I’d rather not be within bowshot of any buildings hereabouts after sundown.”
He looked at the map again. “And the target will be one street over, I’m thinking, the sporting-goods store?”
The Mackenzies chuckled at the name, with the sort of laughter that a mildly dirty joke got, which was a bit bewildering. Conan laughed too when one of them explained it to him. Evidently sporting had a slightly different meaning up north these days.
“Yeah,” Connor said, ignoring the byplay. “We cleaned it out six years ago and the stuff you want was still there. Never saw any use for it.”
“But now we do!” Conan crowed; he was getting his color back, after the brief spasm of deadly violence. “Flying! This is gonna be, like, so cool!”
• • •
From fifteen hundred feet the Top of Topanga gave you an unsurpassed view northward into the Valley, all the way across to the Santa Susanas lying blue on the northern horizon and the San Gabriels eastward; two hundred and sixty square miles of ruin all laid out below you, and with a lot of detail if you used a powerful telescope. It was one of the reasons Chatsworth had never been able to rush the Wall by surprise.
“Why didn’t we think of this?” Jared Tillman said. “Once the Chatsworth Lancers came up with the damned catapults.”
“Were loaned the catapults by Kim Jong-Il’s grandson, apparently . . . and ain’t that a kick in the head . . . but you’ve got a point.”
Jared and Kwame sat waiting patiently in the shade of a stone pine. The tracks up here weren’t passable for wheeled vehicles anymore, what with washouts and landslips and plain decay; thickets of bamboo-like Giant Cane had to be slashed out of the way to widen the narrow footpath, and it would take a while for the packhorses and people plain lugging things to get here and this part of the plan to get moving, and they were spectators now anyway. They couldn’t have done it earlier, it was too likely to be noticed.
Jared took another long draw on his pipe, the sweet musky odor of the weed trailing back west with the prevailing wind from the north.
“And apparently Kim Jong-Il’s grandson is sort of a cheapjack Sauron knockoff these days,” he said. “With his lackeys puttin’ on the orc.”
“Well, that’s the version we’re getting,” Kwame said judiciously. “I’m sure not feeling much love for them from the northerners, or the Japanese.”
“If he’s arming Mark the Merciless and Winnie the Weasel, I’ll go with the Dark Lord thing.”
There was a persistent updraft here, warm and dry this time of year, and the sun-warmed stone at his back was easy on his old bones.
“Damned if I know why we didn’t come up with this,” Kwame said thoughtfully. “Yes, it’s a desperation ploy and it would be much more so for us to try alone, but we could have done it with some practice if we’d thought of it. Done most of it, at least. We’re not exactly combat virgins ourselves.”
Jared grunted; he wasn’t, and had the scars to prove it. But Kwame had been a professional in the Marines, and led Topanga’s fighters at need for more than forty years in the intervals between raising olives and goats. Yet . . .
“I think Connor was right. There just aren’t very many of us and most of us are busy squeezing out a living most of every day and trying to relax when we’re not doing that or sleeping. The amount of wondering time we’ve got is limited,” Jared said. “He’s right about the youngsters thinking the sun shines out of the Northerners’ orifices, too, though I’m not as worried about that as he is.”
Kwame shrugged. “Not worried about outsiders corrupting our pure Topangan culture and leading our youth astray, you mean? Christ, Connor has grown up, hasn’t he
? And you and I have gotten past the age when you think you’re going to save the day by being serious every minute.”
They shared a chuckle, and Jared jerked his thumb northward, indicating not the Valley or the corpse of California beyond but the inhabited lands after that.
“There are millions of them up there, Kwame, and they’ve got a lot bigger leisure class who can sit and think, and hire people to make stuff.”
Kwame began to laugh outright, and Jared glanced at him with a flash of irritation that would have been sharper except for the pipe he was smoking.
“You were, what, twenty when the Change hit?” the War Brain said.
“Yeah, twenty and a bit. You were thirty, right? Doesn’t seem so important now.”
Kwame nodded. “Not between us, no. But maybe it’s a bit more ironic for me seeing jaws drop at the awesomeness of a huge, huge population of nearly five whole millions in a country covering a third of this continent, say a tight teeming crowded cheek-by-jowl average of two-point-something people per square mile, with seventy-five thousand in their biggest city? Greater LA had what, twelve million? SoCal maybe sixteen all up?”
Jared laughed himself; it was funny when you looked at it that way. Laughing was better than letting your memories bleed and then sobbing and getting sad-drunk, anyway. A bit of casual conversation with Moishe Feldman came back to him and he went on:
“What’s really ironic is that they say Des Moines, Iowa is the giant sophisticated metropolis of North America, the place people in Montival talk about with awe, the biggest city between Panama and the Arctic. A hundred and fifty thousand square-headed blond hicks eating bacon and cornbread in the center of flyover country and they’re where the action’s at. Whoa, man! I guess we Angelenos are the hicks now.”
Kwame grinned unsympathetically. “No, our grandkids are the hicks. With cougar-tooth necklaces. We seem to have rejoined civilization as Inbred Cousin Jeb from Toothless Holler, like it or not. We’re the real Beverly Hillbillies.”
The reference went past Jared, until he searched his memories for old reruns seen when he was a kid and laughed. Then his voice grew wistful:
“Did you know you can just go in to a restaurant in Portland or Corvallis or Boise and order a burger or a pizza?” he said, and sighed; so did Kwame. “I heard one of the . . . guys with the crossbows . . . grousing to his buddy about how much he missed that. That and cold beer.”
“And you didn’t strangle the bastard?” Kwame exclaimed.
“Not when he was in armor and I had four decades on him, but God I felt like it. Burgers! Cold beer! Dude, no shit, tell me! I’ve been missing it a hell of a lot more than you have, and for forty-six years.”
Spit ran into his mouth at the thought . . . and memory . . . of a cheeseburger smoking off the grill with a side of fries and onion rings, despite a reasonably adequate dinner not long past. In modern Topanga you ate what you had, if you had it, which was mostly mush and vegetables and olives and a little cheese or fish or maybe rabbit if you were lucky. If you went to someone else’s home, you ate what they had . . . which was mostly pretty much the same.
For a wedding or a funeral, in a good year, someone might slaughter a goat and roast it to be washed down with lousy wine accompanied by actual bread. The Valley had a couple of restaurants; the Canyon didn’t. The closest thing was the sort-of-bar Maureen’s family ran down at the beach which catered to sailors when a ship was in, and she just served booze and snacks and would cook what you brought her. He was used to it all by now, but he hadn’t grown up that way.
“I, for one, welcome our new Oregonian overlords,” Jared intoned, and blew a smoke ring.
Then he had to explain it for Kwame, whose parents hadn’t been into movie adaptations of H.G. Wells—that one had come out just before he was born—and who hadn’t watched The Simpsons either. He returned his gaze to the view behind him. The shadows were lengthening to the west, and . . .
“You know something?” Jared said. “It just occurs to me that this view really has changed since the Change. Crept up on me but this makes me think back. Changed even in the last ten, fifteen years.”
“Well, yes,” Kwame said. “I should think so.”
He’d always had a more precise diction than Jared, though he could also cuss better than anyone else in Topanga, which might be the Marine Corps talking.
The finicky part must be Annapolis, Jared thought.
As far as he knew Kwame was LA born and bred and his father had been a high-powered lawyer with political connections in the California Democratic Party. He’d just happened to be visiting Topanga on leave that St. Patrick’s Day of 1998. Down from the family home in Calabasas for dinner at the Inn of the Seventh Ray with one Anne McGillicuddy, and he’d still had the ring in his pocket when the flash of light and pain hit. Since they were both still alive and still married forty-six years later, with two sons, two daughters and a round dozen grandkids, at least something positive had come of the evening the world ended.
Jared found one son and four-and-counting grandkids enough effort . . . though being a granddad had most of the fun of parenting and far less work. Maybe that had been different before the Change, but he didn’t think so.
“Remember the fires in ’eighteen?” Kwame went on. “God, the smoke was almost as bad as the Change Year. Must have been another couple of dozen people died of black lung coughs that time, even with everyone tying wet cloths over their mouths.”
Jared nodded, trying to see the view as someone who’d come to it new would.
There were some tall buildings, whose earthquake-canted, fire-scorched, rusted hulks were still visible down in the huge oval basin, but most of the San Fernando had been wall-to-wall suburbs and low-rise commercial buildings, nearly all built in the classic balloon frame style of two-by-fours and plywood under the stucco or siding. Fall brought the hot dry Santa Ana devil-winds and sparks from something or other. The Valley hadn’t gotten the sort of week-long firestorm towering into the stratosphere that had consumed central LA a couple of years after the Change, hot enough to burn asphalt and steel itself, but by now nearly everything that could burn in a normal flame had burned one year or another. Unless someone was actively protecting it, and sometimes even if they were.
The swimming pools had turned into traps for runoff, gradually filled with rubbish and silt, became little seasonal marshes and then grew up in thickets of locust and oaks, false banana and bamboo, citrus and morning glories and impenetrable tangles of roses. The ditches and storm drains had blocked one by one, and once the water couldn’t run away the pavements and foundations had concentrated the winter rains on former lawns and gardens, doubling the effective total on the areas that weren’t covered, and they’d grown up in hardy trees or bushes, whose roots were breaking up the pavements one slow inch at a time.
People had gradually turned the concrete-lined LA river into a series of ponds that shrank and swelled with the seasons and dried out totally only in bad years; mainly by dumping stuff in and packing dirt layered with plastic around it as checkdams to catch the winter floods that poured down the streets, supplemented by the natural tendency of junk to wash downstream. And the water-table had risen steadily again, now that it wasn’t pumped dry by deep wells; more springs and seeps and natural swamps had reappeared every year . . . except in the occasional drought.
From here, going on a couple of thousand feet up and miles away, most of the San Fernando Valley looked more like a sort of scrubby patchy savannah interspersed with dusty bare zones of cracked, tilted concrete foundation pads, instead of a ruined city. Though the gridwork of roads still divided it and brick chimneys and the snags of cinderblock walls poked up here and there, sometimes through block-sized jungles of artichoke thistle taller than a man. The most orderly-looking parts were where those lawns and parks and laboriously-cleared parking lots and such had been turned into groves and fields and
pastures, miserable enough compared to what the San Fernando had been before the city grew over it, but lavish by Topanga’s standards. There were patches of that activity scattered around most of the Valley where small groups had managed to ride out the Dieoff, though the north and northwest had the most. He supposed that given enough time it would all look that way, centuries of hand-labor sweat undoing two generations of mechanized frenzy.
“All our visitors had was old maps and pictures.”
“Yeah,” Jared said. He sighed. “I hope we did the right thing, signing up with Montival.”
“After that . . . fucking amazing thing with the Sword . . . there wasn’t much opposition.”
They sat silent for a moment. Jared shook his head. He didn’t think alien Montivallan mind control rays were penetrating the tinfoil beanie he wasn’t wearing . . . but something very strange had happened. Also he now believed what the newcomers had frankly stated about the bearer of the Sword being able to detect falsehood.
It probably makes you immune to genital warts, too. I thought the Change had opened my mind but maybe it was just putting the key in the lock.
Kwame voiced his thought or something like it: “I’d be willing to believe it glows blue when goblins are near if they told me so. Flets in Muir Woods, pardon me, Eryn Muir. But you know the really scary thing?”
At Jared’s enquiring look he went on: “One of them told me it could stop evil magicians, and undo their fell enchantments.”
Jared chuckled. “Why’s that scary . . . Oh. Oh, shit!”
Because it means there may very well really be evil magicians running around. Casting fell enchantments on those who don’t have the Sacred Snickersnee of Contagious Goodness handy and someone with the right DNA to use it. Oh, I do not like that at all. Serious bummer. Maybe Kim Jong-Il’s grandson really is a cheap Sauron knockoff with the Identity Bracelet of Power. One McGuffin to Rule Them All . . .
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