The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  My central roof beam, a rough-sawn timber supported by A-frames, had buckled halfway between its slanting supports. No telling how soon it might completely collapse without a jury-rigged support, but I couldn't see light through the roof and wanted it to stay that way. An intact roof would keep fallout particles from drifting down into the attic—a little more distance between our heads and hard radiation. I had laid fiberglass batts between the attic joists for insulation, but it wasn't much protection against fallout; too fluffy and porous.

  I called for Kate to accompany me and puffed out to the garage, pausing on the screen porch to snap the circuit breaker to my water pump. The garage and smithy hadn't come through unscathed. A pressure wave had slanted the clapboard west wall, taking the window out. I had two things in mind: checking for damage to the structure lest it fall on the Lotus, and collecting tools to dismantle the child's swing set I'd erected outside, years before, for Cammie and Lance. The tubular A-frame of the swing set was rusty but ideal for propping up that broken beam in my attic. Now a dozen other problems intervened, each clamoring for top priority.

  I stopped and looked around, breathing hard. Some things Kate could do alone—I hoped. But she didn't know where I kept my tools, so I'd have to collect things. Rummaging for my necessaries, I explained. "Kate, in the root cellar are two rolls of clear polyethylene wrap, about knee-high, the kind of plastic you can unwrap and nail over broken windows. It may have a brand name on it—Visqueen, I think. One roll is two-mil—uh, too flimsy. Get the ten-mil stuff and haul it out here. It's eight feet wide when you unfold it. Cut a piece and stretch it across outside this broken window, and then do the same on all the house windows, upstairs and down, okay?"

  She was already sprinting for the root cellar. I found the short, big-headed roofing nails and hammer, placed snips next to them, then snatched up penetrating oil, wrenches, and my other hammer and hauled my freight into the yard. I met Kate on the way, toting her milk-white roll of plastic film. I pointed to her tools and then attacked the swing set's rusty bolts with oil.

  Kate looked into the sky—wishing, I supposed, for an umbrella. "Why not nail the plastic over the windows from the inside?" she asked.

  "Makes a better seal on the outside," I hollered, more snappish than I intended. "You're trying to keep the wind from blowing tiny particles of radioactive ash indoors. If a breeze slaps a plastic sheet that's on the outside, it'll only make the edges hug tighter instead of bulging open between the nails."

  I found it hard to explain one thing while doing another, and it made me clumsy. Naturally I ripped my sleeve while detaching the chains of the two little swings. It occurred to me that those sturdy chains could serve as guy wires if I drove nails into the links, so I piled the chains where I wouldn't forget. And forgot. One bolt hung up, and I was in the act of swinging the hammer when I recalled that if I put one little dent in the tube, most of its stiffness would be lost. I managed to ease the blow, and with that, the whole tubular framework squealed and collapsed, and I bundled the pieces so I could carry them over my shoulders.

  Kate was spacing her nails only at the corners. "You need a nail head every six inches," I shouted.

  "I've been thinking about the way people use this stuff on unfinished houses," she called back. "They nail strips of wood all the way around the edges."

  She was right. "I don't have any furring strips," I began, then remembered. "Yes I do! Some old strips of wooden molding on the floor against the smithy wall. Break 'em up as you need 'em and go to it! If you need more, just—just use the hammer's claw and pull the molding loose in the rooms upstairs." That hurt; I'd mashed many a finger installing the stuff. I carried the tubing up to the attic, wondering how much of my place we'd have to cannibalize while securing its basement.

  In my haste I'd removed bolts I hadn't needed to remove, wasting time instead of thinking it through. It was hot work in the attic without much light, and only when I'd reassembled the A-frames did I notice that they were too long by a foot. And I'd need those chains, and big twenty-penny nails to help anchor the tubular legs and the chains. What I needed most was another set of hands and a heaping dose of calm. I was starting to act suspiciously like a panic-stricken klutz.

  Okay, so I might have to cut the ends of the tubes off. My list of hardware lengthened: swings with chains attached, hacksaw, nails, battery-powered lamp (my three-way emergency flasher from the Lotus would do), and stubs of two-by-four. If the steel A-frames simply didn't work, I might have to break into an upstairs interior wall for wooden supports. That meant I'd need a pry-bar and wood saw. Dashing downstairs and outside, I called to Kate: "Great; neater than I'd have done it!" She had woman-handled my telescoping ladder from the garage and was stretching a sheet of poly film across my kitchen window.

  I dumped trash from a hefty cardboard box in the garage; placed nails, pry-bar, and saws inside; then simply swept an array of hand tools from their places over my workbench and added them to the load. I grabbed my flasher lamp from the Lotus and grinned in spite of everything as Spot plopped down in the passenger seat with a little falsetto yawp. It was his way of begging a ride. Poor fool cat, he was infected by all this hurry and could think of nothing more exciting than a nice little rip down the road. Which was the last thing in the world I intended to do. Or was it?

  "Sorry, fella," I told him, returning with the box to get the chains. Kate was trying to lengthen the ladder, having finished with the broken first-floor windows. I parked my load on the screen porch and helped her.

  "I'll have to steal that molding upstairs," she said, hoisting her shoulder bag by its sling. Bright girl: she'd dumped her bag and used it now to tote hammer and nails up the ladder. The scissors she was using to slit the plastic weren't mine; a matched set of stilettos so sharp she didn't need to snip with them. I wondered how near I'd been to getting them between my ribs earlier in the day, then thought again about her ability to fend for herself. Kate was street-smart; more so than my sis and her family.

  "Kate, it's five thirty, roughly a half-hour since the bombs. More could hit any minute and you know where to take cover if they do. Judging by those clouds," I stabbed a finger to the west, then north, "we may have only a few hours before fine gritty ash starts falling here."

  "Tell me later," she grunted with another fine leg show as she leaned out to my upstairs bathroom window.

  "I may not be here later." She stopped, frowned down at me, her brows asking her question, so I answered it. "I intended to bring all my tools and stored fuel from the garage to the tunnel, but I can't do that and check on my sis, too. If I hadn't listened to Shar, I wouldn't be any better prepared for this than your average bozo. Her family is somewhere out there," I nodded at the southern skyline, "and you can see parts of the road from where I'm going. Believe me, I intend to be back soon, but I've got to do this. I've got to," I repeated as though arguing with somebody, which I was: my own sense of self-preservation. I started to give her more instructions but there would be no end to them, so I shut my trap and turned away toward the garage.

  "It's only fair to tell you," she called after me. "When I lock myself up in that basement without you, it won't be with a full-grown cheetah."

  A clutch of scenarios fled past me as I headed for the garage with Spot at my side. Each scene led to some innocent act on Kate's part that would cause Spot to show her a modest warning. Not that his threats are loud, as big cats go, but a raised ruff and an ears-back show of his front scissors will scare the piss out of a Doberman pinscher. Who would blame Kate for unlimbering my target pistol against him the instant his spinal ridge fur came erect?

  For that matter, I wasn't sure how well Spot could accept a week of confinement, and I worried about that as I fired up the Lotus and eased it from the garage. I told Spot to stay, sizzled toward the closed gate, then shouted, "Spot: come," before engaging the fans to leap the fence. I was twenty yards ahead of him when I called out. Would you believe the lanky bugger beat my Cellular over an
eight-foot fence?

  It had been a silly stunt, I saw, as Spot's half-canine claws raked the paint of my rear deck. But I was only doing thirty-five at the moment—half-speed for him across open ground. Spot scrabbled into the seat and placed a forepaw against the dash, settling his chin onto the door sill, sniffing the air. I hurled the Lotus along an access path leading to the fire lane up the mountain.

  Every few years a brush fire proved the wisdom of fire lanes, bulldozed paths along ridge tops that cleared away brush and grass as a barrier against wildfire. A four-wheel-drive vehicle or a ground-effects car like my Cellular could follow a fire lane all the way to the top, if you avoided the occasional boulder. And the new obstacles that I should've counted on, but hadn't. People.

  For the first five minutes I had to dodge only a farmer and his cream-yellow Charolais cattle along the lower slopes. The man didn't even disfavor me with a glance. Whatever errand took me over his property, the responsibility for his dairy herd made him single-minded. I hoped he could keep them all under a roof for many days since (Shar had told me) cattle and dogs aren't as resistant to radiation as, say, swine and poultry.

  Then a middle-aged man passed me on a scrambler bike at a suicidal pace, bounding down from the fire lane. Jesus, but he was good! The burrrp and snarlll of his engine vied with my Lotus for only a moment, making me realize how much noise I was making on my way up. Spot's senses beggared mine; the quick jerk of his head revealed a young fellow who was evidently prying debris from the drive chain of his bike. Then a girl Kate's age slithered and slewed downhill on a trail motorbike, hair flying, riding point for a half-dozen others who were taking their half of the fire lane right down the middle. I like to think it was a family making good on their preparations for urban disaster. I didn't enjoy taking evasive action, but I couldn't expect amateur bikers to maintain much control down such a grade.

  The first lone hiker I spied was trying to blend into the scrub, a biker's leather pack slung from one shoulder, his right hand thrust into it as he watched me pass. No doubt he'd heard me coming, and if he'd had more time, I suspect I'd have seen a handgun. Pure defense? A 'jacking? He probably couldn't have controlled the Lotus in ground-effects mode, but when a man's eyes are as wild as his were, you can't expect him to give a whole lot of thought to his actions. More bikers appeared on my skyline, bobbing toward me; then a few single hikers, all with small packs or none at all. I wondered why until I saw the logic of it.

  On the other side of the ridge top lay the entire south and east Bay Areas, a series of forested ridges becoming rolling open meadows with farms and, in the valleys, bedroom communities: San Ramon, Danville, Dublin, Pleasanton. To the southwest stretched Oakland and other big population centers that would be feeding terrified throngs into the imagined safety of the hills. The vast nuclear hammer blows had struck forty minutes before—any people fleeing up the highland roads might've abandoned the roads when the great shocks came, especially those who were most highly mobile. And nothing but a baja-rigged sportscar was as mobile as a tough lightweight scrambler bike. No wonder the first wave of evacuees down the fire lane consisted almost wholly of bikers!

  More bikers passed. One bike lay in the edge of the scrub, its front wheel fork ruined, and I guessed that the guy who was afoot with the saddlebag and the frightened eyes had abandoned it. Then Spot's attention drew mine to tiny figures that bobbed across open heights; people afoot who had abandoned the fire lane, perhaps fearful of the onrushing bikers. I saw a half-dozen of them in the next few minutes, one squatting over another who lay face-down. I couldn't tell if it was a mugging, but in my work you tend to infer the worst and I figured the rough stuff was only beginning among people who would need each other damned soon.

  I topped out on the last ridge near state park property, staring down to locate the road from Livermore, then let my gaze sweep to the cities along San Francisco Bay. I said, "Oh—my—God."

  Parking the car just off the fire lane, I made Spot stay as my sentry, retrieving the snub-nose little piece I kept clipped under the dash with its cutaway holster. Twenty miles away, where Oakland fronts the bay, was—had been—Alameda. Now the entire region, miles across, lay half-obscured under a gray pall like dirty fog. Winking through it were literally thousands of fires, some of them running together by now. Black plumes roiled up from oil storage dumps, and as I watched, a white star glared in the bay, hurling debris up and away in all directions. Even faster than the debris, flying away in what seemed a mathematically precise pattern, a ghostly shock wave expanded through the smoke, fading as it spread from its epicenter. In the paths of the debris, spidery white traceries of smoke fattened into a snowy mile-wide chrysanthemum that hid the source of that mighty blast. It looked like one of the old phosphorus shells from an earlier war, but an incredibly enormous one. I guessed it had been a shipload of munitions.

  All the smoke over Oakland seemed drawn toward Alameda; in fact, sucked toward the broad foot of the smoke column we'd been taught to call a mushroom cloud. But this mushroom had a ring around it and several heads, the top one so unimaginably high that it seemed nearly above me. The mind-numbing quantity of energy released by that airburst had heated every square inch below it so that the very earth, like incandescent lava, heated the surrounding air and triggered leviathan updrafts that fed the stem of the cloud. I was watching a city consumed by fire, the updrafts creating winds that howled across skeletal buildings and fed flames that would rage until nothing burnable remained.

  Nothing could live in or under that hellish heat unless far down in some airtight subbasement. Even after everything on the surface was consumed, the heat, baking down into the earth below fried macadam, would linger for many hours to slowly cook the juices from any organic tissue that might have somehow survived the first hour of firestorm. In a few hours there would not be a child—a tree root—an amoeba—living within miles of ground zero.

  Far to the south another deadly column climbed through the stratosphere. Its shape was different, its pedestal and ring of smoke broader, with one well-defined globular head that was beginning to topple, so it seemed, eastward, blown by prevailing high-altitude winds. I wondered if any USAF personnel had bunkers in Sunnyvale deep enough to live through that ground-level wallop. The firestorm raging into San Jose was too distant for me to see flames, but the smoke suggested low-level winds blowing east to west toward Sunnyvale.

  Nearer to me, some traffic moved, but for the most part the arterials were simply clotted into stagnation. A faint boom, horn bleats, and beneath it a soft whispering rumble told me of a million lethal scenes being played out below me against a backdrop of Armageddon. A pair of bikes braapped past me fifty yards off, and a dozen hikers labored up the slopes, reminding me of a crowd straggling away from the site of some vast sporting event after the fun was all over.

  Short stretches of Morgan Road were visible from a promontory some distance away, and I turned to get my stubby 7-by-50 monocular from the glove box only to see a man in a half-crouch trading eye contact with Spot. He hadn't seen me. The man wore a business suit and expensive shoes and he was motionless except for his right hand, which was drawing a medium-caliber automatic, very slowly, from a hip pocket.

  "I wouldn't," I said. He jerked his head around, saw me holding my little .38 in approved two-handed police stance, and wisely decided that he wouldn't, either. "Just put it back in your pocket, Jasper, and don't look back. I don't want to kill you—but I don't much want not to at the moment."

  The handgun disappeared. He tried to smile but his sweat-streaked face wanted to cry instead. "Lotus and cheetah," he enumerated, licking dust-caked lips. "I know you. Can't recall the name, but word gets around. My name's Hollinger; I'm an attorney." And I will be damned if he didn't two-finger a little embossed card from his vest!

  I ignored it, watching his hands as I moved to the car and fumbled for my gadgetry. "I haven't time to chat and neither do you, Mr. Hollinger." I waved him away with the revolver as I came
up with the monocular, not wanting him near while I peered through it.

  "Look, my car's two miles back, on the shoulder. No fuel. Cadillac. I'll sign it over to you for a lift to Santa Rosa."

  I chuckled. "Tried to sandbag us, and now you want to plea-bargain. You're a lawyer, all right." I motioned him away.

  He wasn't used to summary judgments. "The emerald in this ring is worth five big ones, buddy. It's yours for a lift. You won't get many offers this good."

  "In two weeks there may be emeralds available for anybody who likes 'em. God Almighty couldn't get you to Santa Rosa right now; you waited too long. Put the fucking ring in your pocket, stay off the fire lanes, and look for shelter in Antioch." He crossed his arms, threw his head back, and inhaled. "Or I can put you out of your misery right now because you're starting to bug me," I finished, thumbing the hammer.

  He turned and ran; limping, cursing, and sobbing, ignoring my free advice. I scratched Spot between the ears as I watched the man scramble down, and stuck my convincer away as a fortyish couple approached. They were both rangy, with small scruffy-looking packs, Aussie hats, and high-top hiking boots; and the man saluted me casually as they passed. They didn't seem panicky and their faces were weathered from many a day in the open. They weren't breathing as hard as I was and I was glad for them, hoping they could translate their readiness into long-term survival. If only Shar and Ern had kept up their daily two-mile runs—one of the many fads she'd badgered him into during the past years—I'd have felt more confident about them. Now, they were probably somewhere below me to the southwest, waiting for a road to unclog or pedaling their second-stage vehicles, or maybe lying in a ditch with bullets in their heads while some business-suited opportunist pedaled away with their survival packs.

  I knew my kinfolk; they'd all reach me together or not at all. Scanning the road, I saw that something had blocked it in one of the ravines beyond my view, for a solid line of traffic formed a chain that wound for miles to the south, perhaps to Livermore. Nothing larger than a big bike traversed the road nearby, and for every citizen who headed for my ridge, twenty kept to the roadway. I hoped they didn't expect too much when they got to Concord, and hoped I was wrong about that, though I wasn't. Singletons moved faster than groups, a moving panoply of Americana. One old guy trundled a wheeled golf bag along; not, I hoped, stuffed with putters. Most evacuees carried something and most showed that they hadn't given their evacuation much thought until the last possible moment. When I saw the man, woman, and two kids loping along my heart did a samba stumble-beat, but it wasn't my family after all. I guessed they were active in scouting because they walked fifty paces, trotted fifty, then walked again. They were the only group that overtook most singletons.