I HAD an uneasy feeling that Thatcher wasn’t simply the ordinary old man he pretended. He spoke too well, for one thing; he put his ideas in words that would not occur to the average man. He had volunteered no information about himself. I didn’t know how he had come to meet Mom in the orange grove, or why she felt he needed her help. If anyone were obviously capable of taking care of himself, that was Pat Thatcher. Perhaps the shoe was on the other foot. Maybe Thatcher attached himself to us because he knew we needed him.
Miles ahead of us, glittering like a fragment of glass lost in a pool of darkness, I could see Big Bear Lake, at the heart of a broad valley thickly grown with pines.
A highway turnout had been made at Lakeview Point. Hidden in the shadow we saw Willie Clapper’s blue Cadillac, lying on its side precariously close to the edge. It had been overturned by the blast. Flying debris and soil particles had scoured off the paint on one side of the car.
Thatcher and I put down our cartons and moved toward the Cadillac cautiously. Thatcher pushed a shell into my rifle and carried it across his shoulder. We bellowed Clapper’s name but got no reply. I climbed the frame and tried to pull open the door. It was locked and the car was empty.
Thatcher scratched his head with the barrel of the rifle.
“If Clapper’s gone, he must have locked the car from the outside.” There was a sudden sound in the trees above the turnout. Thatcher whirled, snapping the rifle to his shoulder. The noise wasn’t repeated and warily he lowered the gun. It had been nothing.
Thatcher looked at the car again. “The way I figure it, Willie Clapper drove past us like a bat out of hell. Then he parked the car up here, got out and locked it up just before the bomb went off. It would have been suicide if he had been farther down the highway—no protection there at all. But if that’s the way it stacks up, Clapper knew the bomb was going off—and he knew approximately when.”
“How could he? That doesn’t make sense. And where’s Clapper now?”
“That’s an interesting question, Jerry. Gone with the big wind—maybe. Your first one’s easier; he was working with the Reds.”
“Willie Clapper? Now I’ve heard everything.”
We returned to the highway and picked up our cartons.
We made another quarter mile before Mom gave out. She dropped on the shoulder of the road, not quite unconscious but close to it. We improvised a camp close by in a small clearing sheltered by a V-shaped wall of rock.
Thatcher took the first watch. I knew I couldn’t keep awake. My mind was in a daze, where nothing mattered very much. I had a nagging mistrust of Thatcher—an uneasy feeling…
When Pat Thatcher shook me awake I felt as if I hadn’t slept at, all, yet I saw dawn in the eastern sky.
“We said we’d change off every few minutes, Pat!” It seemed entirely natural to use his first name. The suspicion I felt suddenly struck me as absurd.
“You looked as if you could use the rest, Jerry,” Pat replied. “I found a spring about a hundred yards down the road. Go stick your head in it. The water’s cold as hell, but it’ll do you good.”
At least it washed the cotton out of my head. When I walked back to the camp the chilly morning wind felt pleasantly cozy. Thatcher threw me the rifle and lay down on the pine bed beside Jim Riley. I crossed the road and sat on a boulder, watching the sunrise over the valley.
I thought of the people who had been trapped under the bomb. How many had died?—half a million; twice that?
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned. Cheryl Fineberg stood beside me, holding out her sweater.
“You looked so cold out here Jerry. Don’t you want to put this on?”
I grinned and pushed my arms into the sleeves. Cheryl was a nice little thing to have around. It was the first time I saw her simply as a girl.
Unfortunately Cheryl’s sweater was too small. It pulled painfully against the abrasive burns on my back. I took it off again.
“Maybe I ought to start getting used to a few discomforts,” I apologized.
“We all should, I guess.” She folded the sweater carefully. “I’ll put this aside. Your mother might really have to have it if—well, later on…”
Yes, later on: if we were still refugees in the mountains when winter came. So that possibility had occurred to Cheryl, too. She wasn’t the kind of girl who tried to avoid an unpleasant fact by pretending it wasn’t there.
“The morning is so beautiful, Jerry. It’s hard to believe the nightmare last night was real.”
“We were lucky. If we had gone on to the desert as we were supposed to—”
As I glanced in Cheryl’s direction I saw, far up the road, a man walking toward us. I stood up, slipping my finger through the rifle guard. The sun rose over the ridge and in the slanting shaft of light on the highway I recognized Willie Clapper. He raised his hands high.
“Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I’m a friend. I’m not armed.” His voice was ragged with fear.
I motioned for him to join us. He ran forward eagerly. “My cabin was burned. I have no food. If you could spare me a little something to eat—” His wheedling trailed off hopefully.
“We met last night, Dr. Clapper,” I said, “on the road. Perhaps you remember—”
“I was scared. I couldn’t think straight.”
“You deliberately started a second fire and tried to kill us.”
“I thought you were— Well, the Reds would send subversives out to get me; I’ve fought the good fight so long.”
From Willie Clapper’s point of view, that nonsense was probably logical. “All right,” I agreed. “You can eat with us.”
Thatcher made no attempt to hide his anger when he saw Clapper; if the decision had been up to Pat, Clapper would have starved.
I thought Mom would be pleased to find herself so close to her idol. Instead, she was cold and aloof, remembering that Clapper had nearly run her down the night before.
I had made our fire at the back of the clearing. Sheltered by the rocks, we could not be seen from the road, nor were we able to see more than a twenty-foot segment of the highway. The Soviet paratrooper stumbled on us totally unprepared. We heard the indrawn breath from the mouth of the clearing.
For a second no one moved. We sat staring dumbly at the enemy; he stared back at us. His uniform was torn and smeared. His face seemed unusually red, as if he had stayed too long in the summer sun. He was carrying a submachine gun; he raised it slowly.
Willie Clapper sprang up. “Not me!” he yelped. “You know who I am. These others—”
Thatcher slammed his elbow into Clapper’s stomach, and the politician dropped, groaning. Simultaneously Mom screamed and snatched my rifle, firing blindly.
The Soviet soldier toppled toward us. His gun clattered from his fingers. Cheryl caught it and bent over the man. “He’s still alive,” she said. “Your shot went wild, Mrs. Bonhill, I think he was hurt in the fire.”
Cheryl looked at the submachine gun. She ran her fingers over the firing stud. “This may be the man who killed my father; he may be the man who dropped the bomb on the desert.”
IX. The City—Friday morning, 2:30 A.M. Dr. Stewart Roswell
TWENTY-FOUR of us stood rigid against the cloister arches while General Anton Zergoff walked toward George Knight. Raw, heavy-muscled, animal power, a Goliath armed with whip and revolver and the absolute authority of the military conqueror—facing a slight, unimposing, beaten man, armed only with the intangible strength of conviction.
“The Quaker Pacifist,” Zergoff purred. “The coward afraid to fight.”
He lashed the back of his hand against Knight’s jaw. The Quaker reeled, blood trickling from the freshly opened wounds in his lip. The General bent close to the smaller man’s face.
“This is the idiot who betrayed Alexander Gordov. In a people’s democracy, Comrade Knight, we are realists. I consider it my responsibility to educate you in the fundamental psychology of human nature.” Zergoff swung his hand again; Knight stagg
ered and I saw his eyes glaze with pain. “Every man will fight, Comrade Knight—every man, when it means his own survival. It shall be my pleasure to smash this bourgeois idealism of yours. And when you are broken, Comrade, you will work with us or face the firing squad—however the whim happens to strike me.”
George Knight lifted his hand quietly. In a quiet, almost compassionate voice, he said, “And now, General, like your misguided friend—” He gestured toward Dragen “—now you will quote Christ’s words and order me to turn the other cheek. The due of Caesar.”
Zergoff stood for a moment clenching his fists. Then, slowly, he began to smile. “No, Comrade, I expect to apply a somewhat more realistic psychology.”
He jerked a revolver from his belt, emptying it except for one shell. He put the weapon on the table, motioning the Soviet soldiers back against the wall. Watching Knight’s face, he beckoned one of Dragen’s bullyboys, disarmed the man and handed him a riding crop. He pushed Knight close to the table, where he stood two feet from the loaded revolver.
“A lesson, Comrade,” Zergoff said, “in human nature. You should find the experiment illuminating. Comrade Bergoll, here, has always been obedient to party discipline. I am ordering him, under no condition, to touch the revolver. That weapon is for you to use; your only way to save yourself, incidentally. Comrade Bergoll will beat you with the crop until you break down and defend yourself. The gun’s there, by your hand. Who knows? You might even reach it in time.”
General Zergoff moved back with the Soviet soldiers. He gulped a stiff drink from the vodka bottle, then he signaled with a gesture, and the beating began. I felt a sick nausea. Somewhere among the prisoners I heard a man vomiting; Zergoff bellowed with laughter. “The party develops strong bellies,” he said; “if you survive.”
And all the while I heard the steady slash of the crop upon human flesh. Knight neither cried out nor resisted. The silence lengthened; it endured for an eternity.
Sudden fury distorted Zergoff’s face and he ordered the torment to stop.
George Knight still stood beside the revolver, bleeding and almost unconscious. I thought he smiled; it was difficult to identify an expression in the pulp of his face.
“Is it possible, General,” he asked, “that your psychology of human nature needs revision?”
“You won’t destroy me the way you did Gordov!”
“General, before your experiment began, you admitted failure.”
“I have not failed! On your knees you will confess—”
“If I believed in violence, when you left the gun on the table I would have used it against you, General. You knew I wouldn’t. You knew you were safe.”
General Zergoff hurled an unopened bottle at Knight. It struck Knight’s head, and the Quaker collapsed on the floor. The bottle shattered against the wall. His face white, Zergoff moved toward Knight. With the toe of his boot he turned the Quaker on his back.
“Not dead,” he grunted, with what seemed to me a tone of satisfaction. He snapped his fingers at his men. They propped Knight into a chair and tried to revive him.
Zergoff faced us, pacing up and down while he talked; slowly he regained confidence.
“You have seen a demonstration of our methods of education. The lesson should be clear to you all.”
Was he so accustomed to success, to the Communist formula of fear that he didn’t know what he was saying? The lesson was there: we had watched the conqueror admit defeat. Knight had given each of us the will to resist in our own way, armed with our individual beliefs. Anton Zergoff had missed the point.
“We have a use for each of you,” the General went on. “You can serve us painlessly or after indoctrination. The choice is yours.
“Los Angeles is our key to victory. Beginning at dawn we shall funnel manpower into this area—according to the present plan, approximately five thousand men an hour. We have transformed the war into an infantry conflict; with all of Europe, Asia and Africa to draw from, we hold the overwhelming superiority in manpower. On both sides the atomic weapon is finished. Production capacity has been destroyed. Your air force as well as ours has been reduced to a negligible factor. True, your navy is still intact. But we have submarines in the Los Angeles harbor to hold off any direct naval attack.
“I am telling you this—the full, strategic picture—so you will understand that our victory is inevitable. We ask your help in order to bring the day of peace closer and spare your people the futile sacrifice of a long infantry war.
“We will go on the air at noon, on a twenty-four hour basis. We expect each of you to speak for us to your fellow citizens. Nothing really different from what you have already said or written, nothing different from what you believe yourselves. Can you honestly call that propaganda? Can you still say we are not sincerely humanitarian, not—”
An officer came to the door. Zergoff turned toward him. “Well?” he snapped.
“He has left the city, Comrade General.”
“The fool! The heart of a rabbit. Have you traced him?”
“It is probable that he went to some sort of a vacation house—”
“Find it.”
The officer saluted and turned away. As Zergoff swung toward us again, he saw that George Knight had regained consciousness. The General took the revolver from the table and ambled toward Knight’s chair, smiling with smug self-confidence.
“Possibly, Comrade Knight, my original approach to your re-education was wrong. Here is the weapon I gave you before, still loaded with the one shell you refused to use to defend yourself. Take it, Comrade.”
Knight did not move. Zergoff shrugged and balanced the revolver on the arm of the Quaker’s chair. “You would not fight for yourself —but of course you would defend a helpless man. Typical middle-class nobility. Surely, Comrade, you would sacrifice your soul to save another man?”
“If it were the will of God.”
Zergoff selected a prisoner at random. He ordered Bergoll to lash this new victim with the riding crop.
“Take the gun, Comrade. If you fire at Bergoll, the beating will stop.”
Knight held his hands folded in his lap. The prisoner cried out in agony; blood spilled from his lacerated face. In Knight’s eyes I saw a surge of pity, as if he felt the pain himself.
“Here is an innocent man.” Zergoff bent toward the Quaker, no longer smiling and no longer confident. “A persecuted man. You can save him—at the sacrifice of a principle. You lose nothing real. No property; no money. It costs you nothing, Pacifist!”
“Nor would I save him.”
Zergoff clenched his fists. Slowly the color drained from his face. “Comrade if you will fire the gun —simply fire it, Comrade!—I will give you your freedom. You can leave this house and go where you please. You have my promise as a Soviet General.”
“And all I hear is the voice of a Soviet General—not the inner voice of God.”
The prisoner fell and Zergoff, quivering with anger, waved Bergoll aside. He snapped one of his men to attention and took his submachine gun. Grinning again he carried the gun to Knight and laid it gently in his lap.
“Now, Comrade, fire,” he whispered. “You can kill us all; you can destroy the high command of the invasion.”
George Knight did not touch the gun. He glanced up at Zergoff and he said gently, “You know this experiment is safe, too, General. I will not use the gun.”
Zergoff leaped at him, hammering Knight’s face with his fists. When the General’s fury subsided, the Quaker was unconscious again. Zergoff said drunkenly, “Send them back to their rooms. Dragen, get me a bottle.”
I carried George Knight up the three flights of carpeted steps. As I lowered him into the chair, his eyes fluttered open. In a whisper he said, “Thank God I—I had the strength to go through with it.”
He lapsed into unconsciousness. I stood looking at him, and I knew I saw a miracle.
CHAPTER TWO
The First Two Days
I. The Highway—Frid
ay, 9:00 A.M. Boris Yorovich
I SAW the redheaded girl first, looking down at me. Her face was hard, but the expression was something new to her. It didn’t fit her well. Behind the grimness I saw a sensitive, clear-eyed innocence, like the farm girls on our party posters. She had my submachine gun in her hand; it was aimed steadily at my heart.
“You’re going to kill me?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
Americans were softhearted fools, the commissars had always told us. The tension in my muscles relaxed. If I rolled against her legs, I could knock her down and take the gun from her. I tentatively tried to move my legs and I felt the numb pain again. I wasn’t sure I could walk. That damned fire! …
“I’m surprised you speak English,” the girl said. “That will make it easier—what we have to do.”
“We were ordered to learn your language for the invasion.”
I turned my head and I saw the others. An elderly couple, a dark-haired man with a politician’s slick face, a child, and a boy about the girl’s age—a big, half-naked, giant, who looked like a Finn or a Swede. He might be the redhead’s husband, but I didn’t think they married so early in America.
“You have a name,” the girl said.
“Boris Yorovich, Lieutenant, Soviet Paratroops.” That much we were permitted to tell them.
“I’m Cheryl Fineberg.” She told me the names of the others, and I was baffled. I thought this was a family unit—the Americans cling together with typical middle-class loyalty, the commissars had said —but only the blond giant and the old woman had the same family name.
The girl tossed my gun to the old man and bent over me, ripping the torn uniform away from my leg. The hot pain was like fire when she touched my skin.
“It’s a nasty cut,” she said, “and you’re badly burned.” She opened a small, canvas bag and stood tiny bottles and tubes of medicine on the ground until she found the drug she wanted. “This should kill the infection, Lieutenant Yorovich. Afterward, we’ll put a salve on those burns. How did you get hurt?”
Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) Page 12