Ill Wind (56 page)

He and Todd rode together in the comfortable silence of two men who had already spent too much time together and had used up their conversation. In the wagon bed behind them, Henrietta Soo snoozed in the afternoon heat. Lying against the ten smallsats they had hauled from Pasadena, she sweated under the reflective blankets that tried to keep the heat away.

Todd slouched his cowboy hat over his eyes as the horses plodded along. His arms still ached from days of pumping the railroad handcar across southern California and part of Arizona—but overall he was amazed at how uneventful the journey had been.

Todd kept tattered old maps in a sack under the buckboard, marking his best guess of where they were on their trek. Once they had abandoned the handcar and took to the roads, Casey’s railroad chart hadn’t been much help. By Todd’s reckoning, they had crossed Arizona into New Mexico,
then
veered south toward Alamogordo and White Sands. Pushing hard, they might reach Spencer Lockwood’s solar-power farm within the next two days.

Early that morning, the last settlement they encountered was a Native American village and old trading post. They had refilled their water containers and traded gossip and news for a delicious breakfast of fresh eggs and tortillas. The desert road stretched arrow-straight ahead of them. The three horses trotted along the easy path with a distance-eating gait.

“People up ahead,” Casey Jones said. His deep voice was gruff and startling in the sleepy afternoon stillness.

Todd cocked his hat back and squinted at two people walking down the road out in the middle of nowhere. Both were tall, a man and a woman; the woman carried a brilliant neon pink backpack.

As the wagon approached, the two hikers stepped off to the side of the road and stood, hands on hips, and waited. The man, tall and broad-shouldered with a mane of straw-colored hair and a devil-may-care grin, stuck out his hand in a classic hitchhiker’s pose. He carried a shotgun over one shoulder and a broad hunting knife at his belt.

Beside him, the woman looked tired, but
well-proportioned
. She stood like an amazon. She had auburn hair and a strikingly pretty, strong face—nothing dainty about it. She probably hadn’t been much to look at competing in a world of fashion models and heavily applied makeup; but now she was quite memorable.

Casey reined in the horses, and the wagon came to a stop. In the back, Henrietta Soo sat up blinking; she crinkled the reflective blanket away from her.

“Hey, can you give us a lift?” the big blond man said.

The woman smiled at Casey,
then
flashed a broader grin at Todd, as if she had just seen saviors coming to rescue her. “We’d really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m Heather Dixon.”

She stretched out her hand, and Todd didn’t know if she meant for him to shake it or just give her a hand up into the wagon. She turned to her companion. “And this is—”

He cut her off with an almost savage grin. “Clyde,” he said, “you can just call me Clyde.”

#

By now, Miles Uma had grown accustomed to the assumed name “Casey Jones.” After months by himself, hiding from anyone who might recognize him, Uma had successfully walled himself off from his former existence as the captain of an oil supertanker. He had never told his real name to Rex O’Keefe and the Gambotti brothers, now lost somewhere in LA, alive or dead. He had never told Todd.

The parched scenery around him with its palette of tan, mauve, and rust seemed a million miles from the ocean and the knotted gray clouds he had seen every day on the bridge of the
Zoroaster
. Uma drove the team of
horses,
trying not to recall the times he had captained the enormous steel ship.

He had spent his life on the sea: working on tugs up in Alaska, spending six months on a barge, then working his way up to the supertankers owned by Oilstar. He had served in the merchant marines, spent a few years in the Navy when he was younger, and learned everything he needed to know about ocean-going vessels. The sea was his family, his lover.
Ever-changing
, the sea was always there.

But now the air around him smelled of sage and yucca. He couldn’t recall how the ocean smelled—though he could never forget the stench of spilled crude oil.

Uma extinguished most of those stray thoughts from his mind. He found it easier to forget by latching unto a task, pouring his entire being into accomplishing it. Whether it was fixing up the locomotive
Steam Roller
, gathering food to bring to the starving masses in Los Angeles, or carrying satellites off to New Mexico.

He still had nightmares about seeing the towering Golden Gate Bridge in the darkness, breaking through the control room door locked by Connor Brooks. He still felt the millions of barrels of oil gushing out from his fragile tanker, saw the TV footage of the spill crawling across the San Francisco Bay.

Uma remembered the brutal finality of the swift board of inquiry that had stripped him of his captain’s rank. Oilstar had fired him, of course, and Uma couldn’t argue with their decision. He was the captain of the
Zoroaster,
he was responsible for the actions of his crew. Anything else was just an excuse . . . and Miles Uma did not believe in excuses.

It didn’t matter that Connor Brooks had actually caused the crash of the oil tanker. It didn’t matter that one of Oilstar’s microbiologists had actually spread the Prometheus organism that devoured gasoline and petroleum plastics. It didn’t matter that everyone else had found some way to pass the buck.

Uma vowed to spend the rest of his days atoning, to make amends in any way possible, one task after another, from now until the end of his life.

When he and Todd Severyn and Henrietta Soo had left the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they worked the handcar to propel them along the tracks away from the city, through the San Gabriel Mountains, and into the great southern basin that was one of the least-populated areas in the entire United States. He took twice as many shifts as Todd or Henrietta, refusing to rest, enjoying the pain in his arms because that seared away distractions. Rolling along the rails, they got up an even greater speed than he had estimated, moving along near 25 miles per hour on the long straight stretches across the desert.

The distance from Barstow to Needles was murder, some of the bleakest, hottest wasteland he had ever imagined. Even though they worked through the night, it took them three days to cross the distance and to ascend the near-impossible slopes of the mountain range that stood like battlements across their path. But they made up for the time descending the east side of the slopes, across the California border, into the more hospitable terrain beyond the Colorado River.

In eastern Arizona they passed an abandoned ranch with horses running loose in a large pen out back; wagons rested in a supply yard by the barn. The ranch house stood silent, and as they rolled the handcar into the dawn light, ready to stop for the day, Todd kept staring at the horses. Uma knew what was on his mind.

With a wagon and team of horses, they could make better time without killing themselves from the effort. By now, Uma himself felt ready to drop from aching muscles, and Todd and Henrietta were worse off. Their pace had decreased over the last two days.

They stopped and went to the ranchhouse, hoping to replenish their supplies and at least have a good rest inside a real house on real mattresses, possibly even wash. Todd called out as they walked around the ranch yard. He saw no one moving, only the horses in the back meadows. Uma went to the ranch house, finding it unlocked. No one answered their shouts, and all three entered the darkened home.

The air smelled heavy and musty, as if no one had moved there for months. Everything was reasonably neat, unmolested by scavengers. Underlying it all hung a sour, rancid stench that was oppressive in the thick heat of the house.

They went into the kitchen, where morning light spilled through a broad window onto ceramic tiles and countertops. Uma opened the sealed refrigerator, and a strong gust of rotten meat drifted out. He did find some cans of soda and beer, which they took with them.

“Look at this,” Henrietta said. She reached to one of the door shelves and pulled out a cardboard box that contained five glass bottles. Prescription labels marked it as insulin. In another package, glistening needles lay surrounded by globs of translucent mucus—the remains of plastic hypodermic syringes.

In the big reading room and study, they found the corpse.

The man had been there for probably two months. The dry desert heat had preserved him somewhat, but not enough. He lay blackened and swollen in a big, overstuffed leather chair. His eyes were closed. His hair and fingernails had continued to grow.

Todd stumbled and sat down heavily in a chair, hanging his head in his hands. “Just like I found Alex,” he said. Uma didn’t know what he was talking about.

The study had tall French windows, covered with sheer curtains. Books lined the oak shelves along two walls, and a large fireplace sat black and cold, mounded with white ashes . . .

That afternoon, they buried the man out back.

They spent the rest of the evening gathering supplies. The isolated ranch apparently held many months of stores. All the meat in the freezer had turned rotten, but a large cache of canned goods, as well as dried and smoked meats, remained.

Todd seemed to enjoy rounding up three of the horses and hitching the wagon. Together, they strained to load the ten solar satellites into the bed of the wagon. Uma, Todd, and Henrietta washed with tepid water from the emergency tank by the barn; Uma took the time to shave his entire head with the straight razor. They stayed the night, getting a good rest on comfortable beds, then set out the following morning.

Uma drove the horses as they turned away from the railroad tracks and headed toward New Mexico. They made good time, and Uma began to feel a numbed contentment at seeing the landscape roll by beneath them.
Doing something.
He did not think about his past.

While he doubted he would ever be happy again, for the first time in many months Uma did not feel miserable. He thought of himself as Casey
Jones.
. . .

And now, in an incredible, vengeful coincidence, they encountered Connor Brooks, like a great kick in the crotch.

Uma hunched down and kept silent under his rag turban while guiding the horses. Perhaps Brooks just wasn’t bright enough to recognize him, but Uma could never forget the face of the maniac that had caused the wreck of the Oilstar
Zoroaster
.

Throughout the day, Brooks rode in the back of the wagon, acting charming and talking with Henrietta Soo. She extolled the importance of the solar satellites, talked about where they were going, and how their mission could bring about a renaissance of civilization.

The young woman, Heather Dixon, latched onto Todd.
She sat beside him in front asking questions about himself, appearing demure but not sure if she was going about it the right way. Todd was overwhelmed by the attention. He avoided Heather’s eyes but glanced at her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking.

On the other hand, Heather and Connor Brooks seemed to resent each other a great deal. Uma saw it all.

As the miles passed, he just sat on the buckboard guiding the horses. A storm raged within him, and he didn’t know what to do.

#

Todd looked up from his conversation with Heather when Casey Jones stopped the wagon. By sunset, they had reached the wooded foothills of a low line of mountains. It amazed him how fast the afternoon had gone by.

Heather chuckled. High thin shreds of cloud started to turn amber in the slanting light. Just a short walk away, he could see a slash of green through the hills that marked a small stream. Casey Jones jumped down from the buckboard and unhitched the horses, hobbling them so they could graze on the thick scrub.

The big dark man had been unusually reticent since noon, but Todd was preoccupied talking with Heather. Her companion Clyde climbed out of the back of the wagon and helped Henrietta down, smiling graciously at her.

“I noticed you had decent supplies in there,” Clyde said. “It would be great to have an nice dinner for a change.”

Todd kept looking at the green line of the stream. At the abandoned ranch in Arizona he had taken a couple of bamboo fishing poles and lures, hoping to find a chance to use them. “I think I’d rather try for some fresh food,” he said, pointing toward the stream. “Why don’t you fix up what meal you
want.
I’m going to try my hand at catching some trout over there.”

“If you’ve got two poles, I’ll come along and help,” Heather said, startling Todd. As soon as she spoke, he realized that was exactly what he hoped she would say.

In his former life, working around oil fields and dirty rigs, he never considered himself an expert in the social graces. Heather seemed a bit too eager to go off alone with him, and he felt a stab of guilt thinking about Iris—who was now about fifteen hundred miles away.

Todd remembered his awkward courtship of Iris, a few telephone calls,
the
long horseback ride from Alex Kramer’s home down to Stanford to pick her up, and the enjoyable times they’d had in the Altamont commune. But he never understood why a woman like Iris Shikozu would be remotely attracted to an old cowboy like himself. Was it just a relationship of convenience?
Someone to team up with during the crisis of the spreading petroplague?