Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25)

by Fletcher, John

  It was the problem of formal religion, and I was afraid of it—afraid of the potential conflict it involved. Each man has his own god. A sincere faith often comes hand in hand with a fanatic will to convert others. We had such a jumble of orthodoxies in our valley, faith itself might one day smash our new world into dust.

  My solution to the problem crystalized around the feeling each of us had for George Knight. I proposed it that night at dinner in the lodge.

  The knoll where Knight and Thatcher and the Negro were buried I made our community place of worship—a church without walls and without ritual, a church for all men open to the face of God.

  The idea was a dud at first. The conventions of the dead world passed slowly. Yet, in time, we accepted the knoll as a commonplace part of our lives.

  It was a slow-working miracle performed by the gentle persuasion of a Quaker who was dead. It made us see the essential spirit of all our gods.

  It was our first real vision of George Knight’s new world.

  II. Outside the Valley—July, The First Year

  IN JULY I made my first expedition away from the valley. By that time our economy was functioning without a hitch. We were farming more than fifty acres of the rich, black soil; the corn was already waist high.

  Eight times Chen Phiang and Feodor Psorkarian drove to the city, foraging for equipment and supplies we had not found in the village. By their third trip they had brought back two enormous vans, and enough drums of diesel fuel to keep the trucks running for years.

  They pillaged every library that had escaped the fire. Stewart Roswell classified the books and shelved them in the village high school. Eventually we had more than two hundred thousand volumes. Reading became one of our regular leisure activities.

  That summer was an idyll for us all. We faced no hardship and no privation; none of us had any really difficult work to do. Four or five hours a day was the longest time anyone worked on the farm. An idyll in the hot, mountain sun.

  By the beginning of July ten couples had moved into cottages along the lake. Yorovich was living with Janice Gage and Psorkarian had taken Lola Donne—or perhaps it was the other way around.

  A kind of wedding ceremony gradually developed. At a meal in the lodge, when we were all together, both the man and the woman formally announced their intention to live with each other. They asked me to assign them a cabin of their own.

  Chen Phiang married Charlotte Sutong. Charlotte’s sister, Betty, was living with the most adaptable of the two Indians, Palra Rubhai.

  Giorgio Leopardi married Helen White, a fragile, serious, intelligent girl very much like himself. Conscientious in the ritual of his church, Leopardi went through an intense, inner conflict before he made up his mind. We had no ordained priest to perform the sacrament of marriage and no likelihood of finding any.

  Igor Morrenski, plodding, slow-witted, and conscientious, took a wife amazingly different from himself. Emily Marsh, not yet twenty, was by far the most attractive of the five refugees the Yengs had brought in. She was a goddess for him to worship.

  Only Karl Grennig and Vasili Shostovar had not taken wives. Except for Mom and Virginia Grant, both in their sixties, and Carlota Porra, not yet fourteen, we had no other unattached women in the valley. Potentially it could become an explosive situation. The least reliable men in our community were excluded from something the rest of us shared.

  In order to head off that conflict, I tried to find other refugees to bring to the valley. During July Grennig taught me to fly the helicopter; he gave the same instruction to Psorkarian, because I was taking the Cossack with me. I needed his quick wit and very possibly his accurate trigger finger. Our shadow government I left to Stewart Roswell and Boris Yorovich.

  We flew north first, beyond the Techachapis. The San Joaquin Valley was a wasteland. Three or more of the big bombs had fallen there—perhaps because Soviet bombers had been shot down over the valley, or the San Joaquin may have been a tactical Soviet target. In either case, the results were the same.

  Farther north the devastation was worse. The bombs in the San Francisco area had changed the face of the map. A forty-mile chunk of the peninsula had disappeared; the bay was open to the sea. A tiny, smooth-domed island, washed by a heavy sea, marked the point where the city had been. Bombs had ripped open an inland lake farther west in the bed of the Sacramento River.

  Two hundred miles north of the state capital we saw our first people, an enormous refugee camp sprawling on the flat, hot plain near Shasta Dam. Shock waves had cracked open the dam and water trickled in scores of tiny streams across the plain. Tents, shacks jerrybuilt from cardboard containers, and automobiles crowded the banks of the streams. We skimmed low over the camp, and we smelled the stench of death. The bodies, huddled by the water, were bloated and black with decay. Buzzards picked at the white skulls; coyotes walked the ruins.

  We followed the Sierra range south. On the Feather River we spotted a small camp, but it was deserted. Two dozen automobiles were parked by stone fire rings. Clothing, cots, and empty food cartons were scattered on the ground, perhaps by foraging bears. Water from a recent rain lay in the open fire beds, indicating that the people had been gone for some days.

  At dusk we were over Tahoe. The forests and the resorts on the east shore of the lake had burned in a fire started by the bomb that flattened Reno. The fire had cut a crescent path around Emerald Bay. We saw three cars in the State Park which overlook the bay. Ten people were sprawled grotesquely on the ground. A child was crawling in the dust.

  We brought the helicopter down in the clearing. The child screamed when she saw us and tried to run. I caught her. She clawed at my face with her hands and pounded her fists against my chest.

  “Take it easy, kid; we want to help you.”

  “You have guns! You kill people!” She couldn’t have been more than four. Her voice still had a trace of a childish lisp. We finally quieted her hysteria by giving her food. She was ravenously hungry; she ate like a starving animal.

  While I still held her in my arms, Psorkarian and I crossed the clearing and examined the bodies. The adults had been shot. The appearance of the camp suggested a pitched battle. I asked the girl what had happened.

  “They came and they talked to my Daddy and then they began to shoot.” With her dirty hands she stuffed more crackers into her mouth.

  “Who came, kid?”

  “The bad men. They said they would give Daddy money for our food, and he wouldn’t take it.”

  “Where are the men now, do you know?”

  “In the woods.” She pointed vaguely. “Do you have anything else to eat?”

  “All you can hold. Let’s get you cleaned up first.”

  “The picture’s clear enough,” the Cossack said. “Some of the survivors die of radiation; the rest fight it out over the scraps of food that are left.”

  “In less than two months we’ve become savages.”

  “Starvation, Jerry, has one law—survival.”

  A shot echoed from the trees and a bullet sang across the fire ring. The child began to scream again. The Cossack fired his rifle into the darkness. I grabbed the girl and ran toward the helicopter. Bullets slashed the earth close to my feet. I threw the child into the back of the cabin and snatched up the submachine gun, spraying the trees with lead. I heard a shrill cry and a man’s voice cursing.

  Psorkarian pushed past me into the ship. I fired another round as he started the motor. I leaped into the cabin and the helicopter rose slowly. I saw a mob of men and women crowding into the clearing, firing up at us. I swept them with bullets from the machine gun.

  As our ship cleared the pines, Psorkarian said, “They thought we had food—or maybe they wanted the ‘copter.” I saw him smile. “And I was just about to suggest that this would be a peaceful place to spend the night. Seems to me, we’ll be safer down in the valley with the dead.”

  Safer with the dead. We didn’t have to worry about their integrity or their respect. Only the
dead would understand George Knight’s dream. The living? In another generation they would be dancing war chants around a witch doctor’s ceremonial campfire.

  III. The Valley—Christmas, The First Year

  “You were right, Jerry,” Cheryl said. “It does sound pretty.”

  I stooped and kissed the back of her neck as I carried another log to the fire. We were in our cabin dressing. From the lodge next door we could hear the piano, and the voices singing carols. It was Christmas Eve, our first winter in the valley. Snow lay four feet deep on the ground. The full moon, riding low above the ridge, transformed our tiny world into a fairyland.

  The traditional Christmas was entirely my idea. My shadow government had been against it. Yorovich and the Cossack because they knew nothing about the holiday; Cheryl because it was a Christian festival excluding other faiths.

  I knew if I turned the arrangements over to Mom that I’d get exactly the thing I had in mind. Mom was a storehouse for superficialities. She gave us an innocuous holiday of genial good fellowship—a holiday for kids.

  We had fourteen of them in the valley that Christmas, ranging in age from four to fourteen. After our first exploration north to Tahoe, Psorkarian and I made six more helicopter hops out of the valley before the snows began. Each time we were able to rescue orphaned children and bring them back with us.

  The children gave me a kind of hope again. They would keep our new world alive, if we failed.

  The Cossack and I traveled as far away from our valley as Utah and the northern states of Mexico. We had seen so much desolation, so much death, we had become immune to it. People had survived, yes—but fewer than we would have guessed—and sometimes we spotted roving bands on the earth below us. They had become almost literally savage tribes —barbarians, thinly veneered with the skills of civilization and the mores of sophistication.

  Twice the Cossack and I tried to talk with small groups. They respected us because we were better armed; but they had no respect for what we had to say.

  One group gladly traded us two small children for a case of canned food. Even the mothers shed no tears. They had a new system of values built on expediency, survival, and a reasonably full belly.

  Cheryl got up from the dresser, pushing her new shirt—a bright, flannel plaid—into her jeans. Mom had insisted on having gifts to go with her kind of Christmas, and I authorized Lin Yeng to issue new clothes for all of us from the warehouse.

  “How do I look?” Cheryl asked.

  “The way a wife should.” I grinned and ran my hand over the swelling mound of her abdomen.

  She kissed me. “Jerry, he’s going to be born in a good world.”

  “Of course, we’re making exactly—”

  “I know how you’ve felt since that first trip out, when you brought back little Nancy Watson. You haven’t talked about it, but there isn’t much you can hide from me.”

  “It’s all right now, Cheryl. I wanted to do too much too fast; I realize that.”

  “Do you, Jerry? Sometimes I see the sadness and the frustration in your eyes and I—” She looked into my face. “You need the symbolism of Christmas; we all do. Perhaps that’s why you insisted upon it the way you did.” She kissed me long and ardently and her lips murmured, “Merry Christmas, Jerry.”

  We crossed the snow to the lodge, using the snowshoes Igor Morrenski had made us out of pine and strips of deer hide. Most of the others were there ahead of us. I had worked late that afternoon in the corral, building a stall roof broken by the weight of snow. Three long tables were set close together in front of the fire. Mom had decorated them with pinecones and fir boughs. She had found some red and green candles in the warehouse. The children sat together at one table, laughing and whispering together and eyeing the packages under the tree.

  As much as possible we kept the children together, to build in their minds an instinctive pattern of mutual sharing. Yet a family discipline was necessary, too; each of them had a permanent home in one of the lakeside cottages.

  The women brought in the food from the lodge kitchen—three large roasts of deer meat, vegetables canned from our own fields, cranberries withdrawn from the warehouse, hot pumpkin pies with a strange, cracker-like crust made from ground cornmeal and our own butter. Except for salt and sugar and luxury items, we had made ourselves independent of the canned food in the village.

  When our Christmas Eve dinner was finished, Mom brought in the punchbowl. I had let her have liquor to make the eggnog, which she considered fundamental to the holiday.

  Mom filled cups for all the adults. She hesitated when she came to me. At home she always made me a special, “stickless” concoction—even after I had started in college, and had gone on the usual freshman-year bender. Finally she filled a cup half full. “You’re—you’re living with a woman now, Jerry; I guess it’s all right.”

  She never called it marriage.

  I noticed that Vasili Shostovar and Karl Grennig came back to the punchbowl three times in rapid succession. I remember thinking that we might have trouble; Mom’s eggnogs were never mild. This was the first time the two opportunists had a chance to drink since I put the liquor in the storehouse.

  But we were abruptly thrown into the children’s world of Christmas, and I forgot about our two misfits. Mom stooped under the tree and began to pass out our presents. Most of the others had followed the pattern Cheryl and I set; nearly everything there was for a child.

  While the children played on the floor under the tree, we went back to the punchbowl. “Why, it’s empty!” Mom said, giggling a little—one of her eggnogs was certainly more than she could handle. I saw that Grennig and Shostovar were gone. They had finished the eggnog and gone to sleep it off—or so I thought.

  “I’ll have to make another batch,” Mom decided, glancing at me. “Jerry, won’t you let us—”

  “If it’s all right, Jerry,” Lin Yeng put in, “I’ll run over to the warehouse and get some more liquor.”

  I signed the withdrawal requisition and handed it to him. While he was gone, we sang carols around the piano. Half a dozen of them. Then Barbara Yeng began to look anxious.

  “I don’t know why he’s taking so long,” she said. “I’d better see if he needs any help.”

  She was back in five minutes, and Lin Yeng was leaning heavily on her arm. His face was bruised and bleeding; his right eye was swollen shut. Barbara helped him into a chair by the fire. While Hank Jenkins cleaned the wounds, the Chinese told us what had happened.

  When he opened the door of the storehouse, Grennig and Shostovar had been inside—very drunk. They were maneuvering a case of whiskey through a broken window. Yeng went to stop them—and that was all he remembered until Barbara found him sprawled on the floor.

  My immediate reaction was to go after the two men, but I reminded myself that this was a community responsibility—and I waited to see what the others would do. This was our first clear-cut criminal act.

  And I wasn’t let down. They reached a decision almost as a matter of course, each of them in his own way very much aware of the precedent of justice we were setting up.

  Igor Morrenski said slowly, “They have taken material from our warehouse without a requisition—without even offering to do the extra work to earn it. We should make them do the work, and deprive them of what’s left of the stolen liquor as a penalty.”

  “If they refuse—”

  “Then they should have none of the other things they get by living with us. That means food and a place to sleep and our friendship.”

  “That’s exile!” Mom cried.

  “If they choose that, yes,” Cheryl told her.

  “What about my cousin?” Chen Phiang asked. “Do we punish them only for taking property, and not for the harm they have done him?”

  “We’re trying to make a world for free men,” Yorovich added. “Property has a secondary place with us. Shostovar and Grennig have violated everything we believe in.”

  From his chair Lin Yen
g spoke slowly, lisping because of his cut lip. “I think we might use two penalties. I’ll miss some time from work because of what they’ve done. Shostovar and Grennig should make that up in general community labor. Secondly, they should be sent back to school with our kids until the teachers are satisfied that their incorrect attitudes have changed.”

  “With these two,” Roswell reminded us, “that sentence could run forever.”

  “I was thinking about special classes,” Lin Yeng explained. “A reading program, let’s say. They might be made to spend a certain period each day with books selected by Stewart Roswell, and Roswell could give them examinations at intervals.”

  That settled it. Yorovich and Psorkarian were sent to bring the two men in. By that time the community accepted them as our police arm. The decision was made by the whole group acting together, with no prompting from me.

  I saw our dream emerge into a still sharper reality. Cheryl was right. Christmas had been a time for the renewal of my faith.

  IV. The Valley—March, The First Year

  ON AN afternoon in March I rode west out of the village with Boris Yorovich to Cedar Lake, a very small, artificial lake, which had once been a motion picture, set. Since the village was wired for electricity, Yorovich had spent months trying to work out a scheme to give us power again. He had a general knowledge of electronics and he had done a great deal of technical reading during the winter. The narrow dam that made Cedar Lake had a drop of nearly thirty feet. Yorovich thought he could find material in Canster’s appliance shop and build a generator to take advantage of the flow of water.

  “I could use three men most of the summer, Jerry,” Yorovich said.

  “We can spare them. The kids will do a lot of the farm work.”

  “I may want more part of the time.” He pointed down the gully below the dam. “I want to channel three more streams into the lake, Jerry, so we’ll have a larger flow of water over the dam; it’ll help prevent a freeze-up next winter.”