The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  After a long silence Shar mused, "As far back as I can remember, bubba, you prided yourself on finding alternatives. Nearly drove mother crazy, and got your backside tanned to saddle leather. But you've turned out to be one of those people who have so much self-discipline, except for feeding your face, that you tend to think of yourself as judge, jury, and . . ."

  I'm sure she was about to add "executioner." Despite my best efforts, somehow my little sis had learned about the heroin wholesaler, years before. I rousted him in Ensenada and brought him back after he jumped bail. I'd been naive then, and he was such a mannerly dude, and I didn't know about short ice picks in homburgs until it glanced off a rib on its way in while I was negotiating a slow curve on the coast highway. As I saw it, Mr. Mannerly had executed himself.

  "Nolo contendere," I said to my sister.

  "Cute," she said gently. "What I was getting at is, why aren't you one of the irresponsibles?"

  I said it was a fair question and mulled it over as I pumped. Finally I replied, "Maybe because we were farm kids, though we moved to town before you had chores to do, sis. Sure, I love alternatives; they're fun! But feeding those stupid chickens and collecting eggs were things for which there simply were no alternatives on our farm. They wouldn't stop laying on weekends no matter what I told 'em. On a farm you try a lot of alternatives, but you shovel a lot of shit, too. Maybe there's an ideal balance. And maybe that's what I'm trying to steer you toward."

  In the dim light her profile and the way she had of lifting one shoulder while she cocked her head took me back many years, to when my little sis consulted me on matters she wouldn't dare bring to mother. Finally she laid a loving hand on my arm. "I'll think on it," she promised. "It certainly won't do to let Lance defy his father in this dreadful cooped-up situation."

  At this juncture Kate padded back to announce that the potty had passed her most exacting test. Shar allowed as how she was simply bursting to try it.

  "You see," I called as Shar moved away, "indoor plumbing! We've weathered the worst."

  Su-u-ure we had . . .

  Ern and Cammie returned moments after my exchange with Shar, and they were elated when I showed them how easily the pump operated. They drank some juice, and we agreed for Devon's benefit that his mother seemed better. Obviously her system had rid itself of most available moisture, including bile. There was no point in mentioning an IV with saline solution. We couldn't even boil or distill water, much less get it into her veins. All we could do was urge cold instant coffee down her throat when she was able to swallow. That wasn't often, and her gamma-ravaged body refused to keep it long.

  Her reddened skin was perhaps the only thing Shar could treat, by sponging her body with saltwater into which a bit of baking soda was stirred. I can't swear it helped much, except that it kept the silent, hollow-eyed Devon from dwelling on his own condition. If he had a chance it lay in his desire to stay active, and we stressed that he must eat and drink plenty.

  Shar's purse held a note pad and ball-point pen, which she used to begin a tally of events, beginning with the first ground shock. She started it as a running record of radiation versus time, but it soon grew into a series of anecdotes as well. There was something about the sharing of tales that brought our spirits up and drew Kate and Devon into the group. Not that we were idle. We took turns at the honey bucket and the pump, except for Ern. With extension cords and safety pins for test connections, he was busily embarking on an honest-to-God electric power system.

  Why hadn't we used the battery-powered radios on hand? Well, we had. Precious little good it had done us.

  During the night we'd thought about radio bulletins only when we were in the tunnel, where FM reception was hopeless. I tried to get San Francisco's KGO on the AM dial but found, instead, good ol' XEROK, Juarez, at that frequency. Even with the outrageous transmitter power of the Mexican station, I could hardly make out when they were transmitting in English; a skyful of energetic particles makes hash of most transmissions. From some unidentified station, I heard what may have been a list of local roads still open, but I couldn't spot the locale.

  Shar had tried a radio while taping film over my broken window but had quit in a hurry because, she said, the little they did hear was disturbing to the girls. She had gotten KSRO in Santa Rosa, which warned evacuees that the town could not absorb another soul. She got KDFM in Walnut Creek, which begged hysterically for help from a studio buried so deep in rubble that the announcer could not escape. From San Francisco and Oakland she got nothing. And that was when she quit trying.

  I decided to try a third time early in the afternoon, and while using the homemade toilet in the root cellar, I poked a little aerial past our book barrier, hoping to tune in and hear something that would make me feel better. I got Santa Rosa's rebroadcast of an EBS bulletin claiming that the Soviet Union had paid with its life for exceeding the parameters of limited nuclear war. The announcer called on Americans to throw open their doors—those who still had doors—to battered victims escaping from target areas. It tried to cheer us with the news that the President was safe, but in my case I'm afraid it failed there. Finally it insisted that many small towns were responding heroically to hordes of evacuees. The Santa Rosa announcer then broke in and reminded all and sundry that Santa Rosa was not one of those towns. Evacuees from the San Francisco bomb were reminded that the Golden Gate spans were now in the bay. I snapped the radio off then. I'd had enough and went back down the tunnel to my little family, hoping to hear something that would make me feel better.

  During our first long afternoon in the tunnel, we at last had time to organize and to accept our enforced isolation from the deadly world outside. Shar suggested our rotation schedule for air-pump duties and assembled notes to estimate our individual radiation doses. Meanwhile Ern separated the wires on one end of an extension cord and, drilling pilot holes into the soft metal of my Lotus battery terminals with the awl on his knife, inserted small wood screws as anchors for the bared wire ends. I stapled extension cords for twenty feet along one wall of the tunnel. With spare wire and safety pins, Ern soon had a bike headlamp completing the circuit.

  At that point the kids cheered and abandoned Cammie's bike, grateful for a source of light they didn't have to work for. Ern observed dryly, "You kids are lucky; many bike generators are six-volt but these are twelve, so the bulbs are compatible with a car battery." Then he hauled the other two bikes near our cheery little half-amp light and, one by one, stole their generators and headlamps for the tunnel. During all this I heard the McKay family's one-day saga.

  Ern had driven to work at Ames that morning, playing a tape album by the twin-piano Paradox duo instead of listening to the radio. The traffic was very light. Small wonder! He had been stunned to find everyone at the shop in a dither over the news reports, and then had tried to telephone Shar. Their line was busy because Shar, by this time, was trying to call him.

  Long ago they'd agreed that Ern would feign illness and return home if hostilities seemed near. He couldn't at first believe things had deteriorated so far, but the model shop at Ames was operating at less than half-strength that morning. Ern kept quiet, stayed near his phone, and swore he would not run for home on the strength of unconfirmed reports of a tussle with Syria.

  He had just began checking sensor holes in a specimen wing section when he overheard his manager on video link talking with his wife, who worked in the nearby Satellite Test Center; whatever American citizens might think, Soviet citizens were streaming into firestorm-proof subways in major cities while our spy satellites watched.

  Ern knew that STC, spy master of those satellites, would be a primary target if war came. And STC was only a short walk across Moffett Field from the Ames complex. Ern was not fool enough to wait for some official NASA holiday announcement and was jogging to his car moments later.

  At home in their suburb north of San Jose, the kids were nearly off to school before Shar caught the first scarifying bulletins about the capsizing of
our leviathan Nimitz. Shar called them back, ordered them both into hiking duds, and started trying to contact Ern while she consulted her checklists.

  My sis had done everything once: EST, Catholicism, a lover, and a bookkeeping job for a parts supplier in Silicon Gulch. I suspect that each of those activities included a common side effect: a knack for compartmenting and categorizing. In Shar's case it yielded checklists that first became a joke, then a mainstay in the family.

  Her crisis-relocation checklist went further than a vacation list. In addition to shutting off the water heater and resetting the thermostat, she included a cleanout of several cabinets that would fill the vanwagon. Ern had the Ford runabout, but their vanwagon, with its cavernous storage space on a sturdy light chassis, squatted in their carport ready to serve as their first-stage booster vehicle. It was roomy enough for boxes of medicine and food, Ern's tool chest, bedrolls, even a pair of bikes and the hand-operated winch that could haul them from a ditch. The other two bikes could fit on racks outside. Each bike had its own wire basket for the individual survival packs Ern had assembled. If they became stymied somehow en route to my place, their plan was to jettison the first-stage (translation: park the vanwagon) and continue using the bikes as second-stage vehicles.

  Ern squalled his little Ford into the driveway in time to see Cammie toss the last bedroll into the vanwagon and wasted no time scrounging some extras: shovel, a roll of aircraft-quality tow cable, old bleach bottles he'd filled with drinking water, and the "decorative" blunderbuss from over their mantel.

  That funny-looking little period piece had been my gift once upon a time, a purely defensive household item for Shar. A do-it-yourself kit from a gunsmith, it was short stocked, a smoothbore modified from flintlock to percussion cap. Of course it would fire only a single black powder charge and then had to be reloaded. But its bell mouth spread to an inch and a half diameter, and I loaded it with BBs. You needed two adult hands to cock it. You also needed a good grip when you pulled the trigger, because it had a recoil wallop like a baseball bat. Any intruder who was even in the general direction of that bell mouth would find his world suddenly filled with thunder and smoke and steel pellets, and if it didn't blow him into another dimension it would at least give him serious misgivings about wandering into my sis's home without knocking. Nor would folks a block away sleep through it. The blunderbuss was, I thought, just about perfect for one exclusive purpose: point-blank defense within the home. Anyway, Ern stuck it into the vanwagon.

  I couldn't help laughing when Lance interrupted his mother's account of the bike argument. "They wouldn't let me bring my bike," he accused, "so I brung the skateboard. Dad thought I was nuts but I wasn't."

  Give the little bugger credit—he was good on a urethane-wheeled skateboard and he knew it, and wore his pads into the vanwagon like a gladiator heading for the arena. In a way, he was.

  Shar locked their house and fumed while Ern topped off their fuel tank from his Ford, using the electric fuel pump trick he'd shown me. They left the outskirts north of San Jose intending to take freeways to Niles Canyon. It didn't take long to see the futility of that idea.

  Traffic on Highway Six-Eighty was already stalled clear back to the off-ramp. Shar folded their local map under her clipboard and directed Ern to a state road, then to a winding county road when their second choice permitted them only a walking pace. They passed under the freeway presently and saw highway patrolmen with bolt cutters nipping a hole in the freeway fence to let cars leave the hopeless logjam up there.

  When Ern spotted a pickup running along the sloping ridge of railroad tracks in Fremont, he followed. The right-of-way led them to the little community of Niles, but a highballing freight with hundreds of hangers-on nearly clipped the vanwagon, and Ern decided they'd played on the railroad tracks long enough. They hit Niles Canyon Road then, seeing that traffic toward the distant town of Livermore was bullying its way across all four lanes in escaping the overcrowded bay region.

  Of course they saw the wrecks and quickly learned to look away since neither of the adults had special medical training and their first responsibility was to get their own two kids to safety with a minimum of lost time. A few motorists helped others; a delivery truck dragged one car out of the road with a tow cable while other traffic, including Ern, streamed past. Ern didn't stop until forced to, but he was expecting trouble, and when the chain of rear-enders began ahead, he wisely slowed before he had to, gaining ten feet of maneuvering room.

  Standing atop the vanwagon, Ern studied the blockage. Two lanes had been stopped for some time after one car, rear-ended, had spun sideways. The other two lanes had continued, drivers in the balked lanes trying vainly to edge into lanes in which cars moved bumper to bumper. No one would give. Someone finally tried to bluff or force his way in, touching off a chain reaction as cars took to the shoulder trying to pass the new obstruction. As Ern watched, two fistfights erupted. One guy with a knife was sent packing by another flailing tire chains. At that point people began simply to abandon their cars in favor of hoofing it.

  "I counted fourteen cars between us and the front of the jam," Ern recalled as he snubbed the third bike generator against Cammie's bike wheel in the tunnel. "I figured with enough people helping, we could get all the wrecks pushed onto the shoulder in fifteen minutes, even if we had to winch some of 'em sideways." Ern figured he was an hour or so from my place if they stuck with the vanwagon but longer if they continued by bike. Besides, they'd be abandoning food, hardware, and protection if they left the vanwagon.

  Wearing heavy gloves, winch and tow cable in hand, Ern trotted past other drivers, urging them to help instead of just honking. The owner of the first car in the mess stood at bay with a jack handle, threatening to brain the first guy who touched his car unless they'd help him pull his fender away from his blown-out tire. Someone offered him, instead, a ride in another car, and implied that his most likely alternative was a knot on his head from a dozen determined men.

  Ern used the man's jack handle as a pry bar under the crumpled edge of the fender, then hooked his tow cable to the handle. With several men hauling at once, they pulled the fender away from the wheel. The owner drove off very slowly while his blown tire disintegrated on its rim, no longer part of the general problem.

  One car, abandoned and locked by its owner, was hors de combat simply because the owner had taken his keys. The steering column was locked, so even after smashing a side window, the men couldn't steer the heavy coupe over to the shoulder. Ten men could tip it over on its top to get it out of the way, though, and they did, even while Ern begged them not to. Fuel tanks dribble a lot when a car's wheels are in the air.

  The first car to shove its nose past the others was a big sedan, and its driver, a level-headed woman, backed up while others used tire chains as a tow cable from her rear bumper. She pulled two more cars free before charging off down the highway. Ern winched a pair of small cars sideways from the tangle, with help from the owners, anchoring his winch to the base of a steel highway sign. "Played hell with the jack sockets on the cars," Ern said, and grinned, remembering it, "because I had 'em stick their jacks into the chassis sockets to give me something to hook onto." He didn't try that with heavier cars, fearing his winch wouldn't take it.

  It took thirty minutes to clear two lanes, and while fifty people struggled to clear other lanes, improvising as they went, Ern sprinted to the vanwagon just as Shar got it started. Soon they overtook the guy riding on his rim. Ern estimated it would've taken the man five minutes to change to his spare, which made that press-on-regardless outlook seem pretty shortsighted.

  They left the highway at the outskirts of Livermore, a town experiencing its first-ever taste of terminal traffic constipation. Cammie described it wide-eyed: "Worse than Candlestick Park after a game! You'd see a car go shooting down a side street and then it'd come howling back a few blocks further. People were driving across lawns, pounding on doors, getting stuck in flower beds, you name it."

&
nbsp; "Like one of those car movies where they do crazy things," Lance put in. "But in the movies they get away with it." Lance had pegged it nicely; too many citizens imagined they could do the stunts they saw on the screen, and too few realized how much those stunts depended on expertise and hidden preparations.

  Once they were across town and headed north toward my place, said Shar, she thought they'd pulled it off. They drove slowly, with frequent horn-toots to warn hikers and bikers who streamed out of Livermore along with many cars. There was some traffic into the town as well, coming down from the hills.

  Shortly after the road began its twisting course toward Mount Diablo they saw the other van, a battered relic, its driver approaching with no thought for other traffic but the steady blare of its horn. Ern braked hard. "I didn't think they'd make the turn at the rate they were coming," he said.

  They did, but only by taking all the road and forcing a hiker to leap for his life. They didn't make it past Ern, though, sideswiping his left front fender with an impact that threw both vehicles into opposite ditches.

  Since all four McKays were harnessed, they sustained nothing worse than the bruise along Ern's muscular forearm. Shar quieted Lance's wails ("I wasn't really scared," he insisted.) and after ascertaining that they weren't injured, Ern found that his door would no longer open. He went out the back of the vanwagon, both kids piling out with him, and then hugged them close in protective reflex. Approaching from the other van was a bruiser in his forties, a semiauto carbine in his hands and murder in his face. Behind him, a younger man limped forward hefting a big crescent wrench.

  "Damn fool, didn't you hear me honk? That thing of yours better be drivable," snarled the big one, using his carbine as a deliberate menace.

  Ern realized he was being hijacked. "Don't point it at the kids," he pleaded, wondering if either vehicle could be driven. "I'll just get the bikes and—"