The Rackham Files

by Dean Ing

  "Touch that stuff and you're a dead man," said the bruiser, spying a ten-speed bike in the gloom. "Jimmy, we lucked out."

  Jimmy, the younger man, brandished the wrench at Ern, who moved back and started to call a warning to Shar. He never got the chance and in any case he would've been warning the wrong person.

  The big man with the carbine stepped up to the vanwagon's open doors and was met in midstride by a thunderous blast. Shar had found the antique fowling piece. The tremendous spread of shot took out a bike spoke, knocked a bedroll out of the cargo area, and snatched the carbine from the man, who cartwheeled end for end. Everyone reeled away from the godawful roar and the smoke that followed like a bomb burst from inside the vanwagon.

  Ern looked wildly for something to throw at Jimmy the wrench man but found the wrench available. Yowling, hands in air, young Jimmy raced back to his damaged van and tumbled inside. Shar emerged from the vanwagon coughing and spitting, the little blunderbuss empty but still in her hands.

  The big man came to his knees, stared at his arms through torn shirt sleeves. Ern was near enough to see the bluish welts on his hands; raised knots like some disfiguring disease that began to ooze blood as both watched in silent fascination. Then the big fellow saw my sis march into view; saw her cock the harmless thing as if to fire again. He stumbled to his feet then and ran doubled over, holding his arms across his body and crooning with pain. Ern ran a few paces after him until he saw that the man had no intention of retrieving his weapon. Obviously the old van was drivable, because in seconds the ex-rough type was spewing gravel in it.

  The vanwagon was another matter. Its radiator torn loose, steering rod hopelessly bent, it could not be navigated another hundred feet, much less the twenty miles to my place. Ern managed to start it and got it far off the macadam while water poured from ruptured hoses. The McKays then traded relieved kisses all around and started rigging for their second-stage flight. It was then half past two in the afternoon.

  That was about the same time, said Kate Gallo, that she first noticed the burly black-haired gonzo at the racetrack. I let her tell it, making me the heavy in her waggish way. She explained she'd been running from a check-kiting spree and I said nothing to contradict her. But when she tried to describe our open-water crossing as literally floating across, I started to hum "It Ain't Necessarily So" and got my laugh before moving over to help Ern.

  He was wiring all three tiny bike generators together, positive to positive and negative to negative. That was when I admitted that Ern McKay had truly found a way to recharge my damn battery! The output of a single generator was too puny to feed a whopping big car battery, but three generators in parallel? Still a trickle-charge, but a significant trickle.

  I thought it might be hard work to pedal with three generators riding against a bike wheel but I was wrong. Ern insisted that we connect the generator's positive terminal to that of the battery only while someone was pedaling. If that circuit was intact while no one pedaled, he said, the battery's energy might trickle out through those generators. As it was, we could recharge the battery with about four hours of pedaling and have twelve hours of light without draining the battery at all. I could've kissed him for that. Kate did it for me, squarely on his forehead.

  At length Kate reached the point in her tale where I "abandoned" her to search for my family, and I filled them in with a brief account of my trip along the mountain ridge. "If you had any illusions about the flatlanders around the bay pulling through this," I concluded, "forget 'em. The burn cases in Oakland alone would overload burn-unit facilities from coast to coast."

  With a glance toward the comatose Mrs. Baird, Shar muttered, "You might try for a bit of optimism."

  "I am optimistic, sis. I'm assuming a lot of burn victims will survive the firestorm and fallout long enough to profit from medical treatment. If you've read about the quake and fire in San Francisco back in 1906, you'll recall it was the fire that caused the most casualties. Volunteer crews came from as far as Fresno to help. Trainloads of food and volunteers in, trainloads of refugees out.

  "It's not as though there were no precedent for this," I went on, mostly for the benefit of our younger members. "Europeans saw great cities destroyed, whole populations decimated or worse, forty years ago. London, Dresden, Berlin—and don't forget how Japan was plastered. I know it wasn't on such a scale as this, but they did find ways to rebuild."

  "It took 'em years," Ern reminded me. "And they had American help."

  I nodded. "You're mighty right there, pal. And that's all we can expect, too: American help."

  Kate asked in disbelief, "From where? Fresno?"

  "No, from us! And millions more like us. Damnit, think! There must be two hundred thousand people schlepping around in Santa Rosa right now, and if the fallout missed 'em they'll probably be outside in shirt sleeves."

  "Sure—grubbing for roots," said Cammie. "And I've heard mom talk about the radiation that's spread all over the world now."

  "Can't deny that," I said. "We'll probably have higher infant mortality and ten times the cancer we've had in the past. I grant you all that, much as I loathe it. But don't tell me we lack the guts people had in Stalingrad and Texas City and Nagasaki!"

  "I wanted to be a golf pro," said young Devon softly. "Looks like I'll be a carpenter or a bricklayer."

  Ern: "Could be. Or a cancer researcher. Harve's not promising fun and games, Devon; only hope. We'll all have to bust our butts for a few years, and we have no assurance that we'll ever see things back to normal. Whatever that is," he said and chuckled. "It doesn't take a professor of sociology to predict a sudden change in the American way of life. On the other hand, it might not be so noticeable to farmers in Oregon or a dentist in Napa."

  "Oh God," Kate breathed almost inaudibly and quit cycling the air pump.

  Cammie asked for us all: "Trouble with the pump?"

  Kate took a long shuddering breath, shook her head, began to pump again. "My father has a summer home near Napa. Little acreage just outside of Yountville, which nobody ever heard of. Just a statusy thing. They rarely go there."

  "Maybe they're there now," I offered.

  Another headshake. "Not them; that's what hurts. You don't know my father. All his clout is in connections with people in the city." No matter where you lived around the bay, when you said "the city" you meant metropolitan San Francisco. "It's just about the only place where he doesn't carry a gun. No, my family will play out their hand right smack in the city."

  Of course I'd told them what the Santa Rosa broadcast had said. We knew the approaching fallout was coming from San Francisco itself. Most hands being played out in Baghdad-by-the-Bay were losing hands. It was one thing to reject your family's ways but quite another to envision them all dead in a miles-wide funeral pyre.

  "Maybe your folks had a cellar," Cammie said.

  Kate brightened. "Wine cellar. Part of the mystique."

  "You don't mean those Gallos," Lance said in awe.

  "No"—Kate managed a wan smile—"but I could lie about it if you insist."

  Ern said he didn't care which Gallo she was if she could produce a bottle of sherry, and that reminded me of the stuff in my liquor cabinet. I said to Shar, "We need to take another reading in the basement for that graph you're making. I'll just nip out and do it and bring back a bottle to celebrate our new electric light plant."

  It was around four in the afternoon. Shar consulted her graph and calculated that the outside reading should be around a hundred rems, while the basement should read about two or three—if the fallout cloud had missed us. Five minutes in the basement would be a twelfth of that dosage, which laid only a small fraction of a rem on the meter reader. "It's your hide, bubba," said my sis.

  I took the meter hardware and fed several sparks to the meter, then chose a half-empty bottle of brandy and some cream sherry the kids could sip with us. I rummaged and found two decks of cards.

  The basement stank like an outhouse. We needed the f
orty gallons of water in the tunnel for drinking, but my waterbed was available so I sloshed some water from the mattress into a pan and filled the toilet tank in three trips. The damned thing had to be flushed of its barf and never-you-mind.

  Then, after nearly four minutes, I checked the meter.

  The leaves of foil were completely relaxed together.

  Fighting jitters, I charged the meter again and took a one-minute reading. Meanwhile I cursed myself for assuming that the reading wouldn't be off scale in four minutes. I got a one-minute reading of over four rems an hour and hightailed it into the tunnel.

  Though abashed by my stupid error, I described it to the others, determined that they could profit by my dumbfuckery. Shar's conclusion was simple and direct; the only smart way to read the meter was to watch it closely for the first minute. If you didn't have a useful reading by that time, ambient radiation was roughly one rem or less.

  Her second conclusion was borne out as we took readings in the tunnel. Shortly before I'd gone out to the basement, heavy fallout had begun to irradiate my little place.

  * * *

  For the next hour the tunnel was a hotbed of projects. I was urged to do nothing that even smacked of exercise because my great bulk would use up twice as much air as, say, Lance—and I'd give off more cee-oh-two and water vapor. So I sat near the little six-watt bike headlamp and took several long readings on the meter.

  Shar turned over the sponge-bath chore to Devon and went to use our temporary john. She sprinkled a shotglassful of bleach into the hole after using it, carefully extracted the half-full bag, and placed it into a big brown paper grocery bag. The taped seams of the plastic bag might give way, but it wouldn't come apart with heavy kraft paper around it. She installed the next plastic bag with the paper sack already surrounding it in the plastic trashcan, and I wondered why Ern hadn't thought of that. It is truly amazing how fast we get smart when faced with a dribble of dookey.

  Especially somebody else's.

  I also understood how farm and ranch people earn their penchant for earthy humor. Dealing with natural functions like evacuation on such a grand scale, you're often faced with side effects that could outrage a saint. But you can always joke about them, robbing them of their power to beat you down. Maybe that explains the rough jokes we shared while in the tunnel.

  Ern read my sister's notes and found little to criticize. At a quarter till five we were reading almost exactly two rems per hour in the tunnel, which scared the hell out of us until we found it subsiding soon afterward. We didn't talk about it to the kids, who were fixing a simulacrum of supper and pedaling the bike.

  By six o'clock Shar had a radiation-versus-time graph and an estimate of the total dosage for each of us. For Mrs. Baird, who continued her heaves and diarrhea without losing much fluid, Shar simply put a question mark. I knew the answer in total rems had to be in four figures.

  Next to Devon Baird's name she wrote four hundred, with another question mark after it. He seemed to be perking up, even insisting on pedaling the bike and pumping air. Best of all, he was retaining food and liquids now. His question mark was the only valid one, but who was so cruel as to tell him that?

  I was next on the list with an estimated forty rems because I'd been in the attic and outside, too. Shar and Ern came next with thirty-five; Kate had taken five less. And below Cammie's twenty-five came Lance with twenty or so. Maybe Lance was young enough at eleven to be one of the "very young" who, like the aged, were supposed to be more vulnerable. I tried not to begrudge him the advantage. In any case it was an arguable set of estimates—in Ern's jargon, strictly paper empiricism.

  My sis didn't mention lethal doses in front of Devon Baird. Instead she dwelt on the positive side. "In class we studied the Lucky Dragon incident," she said, spooning a portion of tuna and green peas that was not—couldn't possibly be!—half as bad as it sounds. "The entire crew of this Japanese fishing boat was accidentally dosed in 1954; they even ate contaminated food. They took gamma doses of around a hundred and seventy-five rems, and all of them survived it! I think one man died months later from some medication, but the rest made it. And they took much higher doses than we're taking here."

  Devon, listlessly: "What if they keep dropping bombs near us every day?"

  Ern said, "I can't believe there's much more to shoot at around here."

  "I hope not," Devon replied, and dubiously addressed his tuna salad.

  Presently we finished our meal, and though Spot made overtures to the leftovers, I steered him firmly to his farina mix. A tally of our food told us we'd have enough for two meals a day through ten days without resorting to horsemeat. By then we might be eating farina mix ourselves. At least we wouldn't have to cook it.

  Shar urged Kate to be dealer, referee, and sergeant-at-arms for a card game among the younger members, and as soon as Devon got engrossed in the game, my sis motioned me nearer to Ern, who was seated at the air pump. "Let's talk about what we'll have to do next month," she said loudly enough to be overheard, and then much more softly, "Mrs. Baird seems to have a new problem."

  The woman was semiconscious now but never spoke and could barely swallow. Shar had noticed the gradual, steady appearance of clear blisters on the woman's skin. Though some blisters were forming on her torso, they predominated in a sprinkle of raised glossy patches on her lower legs, arms, neck, and face. To Devon's query, Shar had only smiled and said we'd have to wait and see. To Ern and me, she said, "I'm afraid it means severe radiation burns, probably direct skin contact with particles only a few hours from the fireball. The blisters are on all sides of her body, so there's no way we can make her comfortable unless—but I guess the waterbed is out of the question."

  "In more ways than one," I admitted. "I hate to bring it up, but while stealing some water from it to flush the toilet, I realized that that water will not be drinkable."

  They both gaped at me in the gloom. "But we've only got maybe twenty gallons left in the tunnel, Harve," said Ern. "And about the same in your bathroom. What's wrong with waterbed stuff?"

  "The chemicals I put in to prevent algae," I said and sighed. "It's not just bleach, guys. Bleach slowly deteriorates a vinyl mattress, so I used a pint of a commercial chemical. It's poison. I'm sorry."

  We fell silent for a time. The kids didn't notice because they were talking louder, making noise for noise's sake. I understood why when I heard the Baird kid's spasms from the root cellar. He was losing his dinner into our jury-rigged john. I'd spent years rooting out soured curds of the milk of human kindness from my system because of the work I'd chosen; yet the quiet courage of this slender kid forced a tightening in my throat. I knew why I hadn't befriended him more: I didn't want to mourn if we lost him. That didn't say much for my courage.

  "That poor boy," Shar murmured, "has diarrhea too. I wish we had some plug-you-uptate."

  That was our childhood phrase for diarrhea medicine. I said, "Mom used to have a natural remedy. You remember what it was?"

  "Well, she started with an enema of salt and baking soda, but that was to replace lost salt and to clean out the microbes. This isn't the same thing. If anything the Bairds probably don't have enough intestinal flora. Anyway, mom also gave us pectin and salty bouillon."

  "Why the hell didn't you say so," asked Ern. "We've got a half-dozen bouillon cubes in each bike kit."

  I put in, "If it's pectin you need, I doodled around with quince preserves from all those quinces falling off my bushes. There's so much pectin in a quince, you can jell other fruit preserves just by adding diced quince."

  "I'd forgotten you make a hobby of food. God knows how I could forget, you great lump of bubba."

  "Beat your wife, Ern," I begged.

  "Just washed her and can't do a thing with her," he said.

  As soon as Devon returned to the card game, Ern took a flashlight and went to find the bouillon cubes. Our carefully nurtured good spirits took a dip when he returned with only one tiny foil-wrapped bouillon cube. "I know
I put 'em in," he complained, tossing the single cube to Shar.

  Lance saw the gleam of foil. "Dibs," he shouted. "I saw it first, mother!" My nephew's tone suggested that he could be severe on infractions of fair play.

  Shar regarded him silently for a moment, knowing as we all did that Lance had retrieved flashlights from the bike kits. Mildly: "Lance, you must've eaten at least fifty already."

  In extracting confessions my sis had only to exaggerate the offense to have Lance set her straight. "Fifty? Naw, there was only a few."

  "How many do you have left?"

  "All of 'em. Right here," he said and patted his belly. In the ensuing quiet his grin began to slide into limbo.

  "Aw, he's all right, Miz McKay," Devon said in the boy's support.

  The point was that Devon himself was not, and bouillon could have helped him. Inwardly we writhed with an irony that we must not share with Devon. "Thank you, Devon, but I'll decide that. Lance, come here a minute," said Shar.

  Mumbled: "Don't wanta."

  "Two meals tomorrow, Lance."

  He came bearing the word "Bully."

  Shar indicated that he should sit between his parents. Then, in tones of muted mildness, my sis composed music for my ears; a menacing sonata, a brilliant bel canto that struck my nephew dumb.

  Did Lance recall his father's threat? Shar was ready, even eager now, to endorse it. Lance would touch no food or drink without asking first. He would perform every job we asked without audible or visible complaint. He would use nothing, take nothing, play with nothing unless he got permission first. It was not up to Lance to decide when an infraction might be harmless.

  Of course he had an alternative, said Shar with a calm glance toward me. Lance could elect to do as he pleased. He would then be thrashed on his bare butt by parents and his uncle (here I saw the whites of his eyes) and would be bound and gagged if need be for as long as necessary.

  "By now, dear, you may have thought of claiming you need to go to the bathroom while tied up. Of course you can. In your pants. Since you have no other clothes and you can't wash the ones you have, you may want to think twice before you do that. But it's up to you, sonny boy," Shar gradually crescendoed.