Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (56 page)

“Right.”

“Well, before whatever it was hit us, where would you have thought to go if you had to get out of Denver or Boulder to survive?”

“Into the hills,” I said. “Not just the survivalists, everyone thinks that way. I get what you're saying. They'll come this way.”

“Yeah, and now we don't have Orry to take care of. All these supplies are great but we could get killed trying to keep them, and anyway they won't last forever. So, if everyone else is going to head for the hills, let's not sit here and wait for them to dig us out and take this place away.”

“And instead we should—”

“Go where they grow the food—east onto the plains.”

I nodded; he was making sense.

He asked, “How long would it take me to learn to use cross-country skis?”

“If we spend the rest of today packing, and eat a big breakfast tomorrow before we go, you could be sort of decent by tomorrow night at dinnertime,” I said, “and we could be a long way away. Maybe where people are still opening the door to refugees. The snow won't last this time of year but we can at least get out of the way of trouble, and maybe better than that.” I spread out the map and we looked at it. “If we head due east, eventually we'll pick up 76 and we can follow it into Nebraska; that goes up into farm country and there's no big towns on it for a long way.”

“I guess we just leave Orry here, eh?”

I could hear the tears in Mattie's voice, and I knew what answer he was looking for, so we wasted time putting our friend in as much of a grave as we could dig and piling stones on top of it.

That night in the bed, Mattie started crying. For a moment I thought of moving to another bed. But then I thought about trying to do all this alone, and how much smarter he was and how much more stuff he knew.

So I wrapped my arms around him. Considering how valuable he was, if I had to hug him now and then, I could get used to it.

Next morning, we slept late, ate huge, and skied away. Mattie caught on faster than I'd promised, and we spent the day laughing and zooming along the snowy roadsides, almost unaware of the burned-out cars and frozen bodies. It was the first good day since the Change, the first of many.

*   *   *

M
ONDAY
, 8 J
UNE
2015, 1
P.M.
–11
P.M.
R
AFTER
XOX R
ANCH

After a while, I dry my eyes, and tell myself to cowgirl up. I go out to walk around with Mattie while he visits everyone and shows off his splinted right arm and stitches and makes them all laugh that Mister Matt is too tough to die, and Miz Claire is too mean to let him.

Mattie insists on holding kind of a party from dinner till bedtime, and we have to put in an appearance at Marjorie's Service of Delivery and Thanksgiving. So it's a little late before we finally get into bed next to each other, and he snuggles up to me in a weird, gingerly awkward fashion because he's in more pain than he has been letting anyone see.

“I didn't mean to say Broken,” I confess, as soon as we've blown the candles out. “It just popped out. For no reason.”

“
No
reason?”

I admit, “Well, not for
no
reason. I, uh, I'm used to you. I'm really used to you.”

His lips brush my cheek, and he awkwardly strokes my hair with his left hand. “Thanks, honey. I'm used to you too.”

by
Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove is an escaped Byzantine historian. He found that telling lies for a living was more fun than putting in the footnotes. His books include
The Guns of the South
,
In the Presence of Mine Enemies
,
Ruled Britannia
, and
Every Inch a King
. He has lived in the west end of the San Fernando Valley for the past thirty years, and quite enjoyed imagining it ruined for the purposes of this story.

J
ar
ed Tillman sat in his front room, carefully winding up the phonograph. You had to feel how tight the spring was. It wasn't the original, but it wasn't new, either. One of these days, it would break. He just didn't want that day to be today. He felt like listening to music, not messing around inside the mechanism to install the most nearly matching spring he could pull out of his junk drawer.

As things went, the phonograph was modern. It probably dated from the early 1950s, made to be taken to picnics and parties where there was no power. That meant it could play 33
¹
⁄
₃
RPM records, instead of speeding them up to a shrill gabble the way an older player with settings only for 45s and 78s would have.

Where there was no power . . . Jared's mouth twisted. No power anywhere now, not these past thirty years. He scratched at his mustache and plucked out a hair. It was white. He let it fall to the ever more threadbare wall-to-wall carpeting. He'd been in his mid-twenties when the Change came. He remembered how things had been, and how he'd grown up in a different world.

Carefully, he set the needle on the record's outer grooves. The needle wasn't sharp. The record wasn't new, which was putting things mildly. The speaker was a cheap piece of junk. But Steely Dan—tinny, scratchy Steely Dan, but Steely Dan even so—filled the room in the house off Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Like the ruins that remained from before the Great Southern California Dieoff, it reminded him things hadn't always been this way.

“Shit, I didn't even like Steely Dan back then,” he muttered. But you took what you could get. Bands he had liked, bands like Nirvana and Green Day, put their music out on CDs. These days, CDs were good for nothing but scaling through the air and for seeing rainbows.

Eucalyptus leaves dappled the sunlight that poured in through the west-facing windows. Eucalyptuses sent roots to the center of the earth to pull up what water they could. Along with olives and scrub oaks and pepper trees and a few hard pines, they were what could grow in arid Topanga Canyon.

He'd grown up in the canyon. He was a second-generation hippie; his folks had moved here to join a commune, and never left. They'd sold candles and pots from a little shop, and sometimes pot on the side. There'd never been a lot of money, but there'd always been some. Enough, or close enough. They'd always said that, if you didn't sweat it, close to enough was enough.

And maybe they were right, and maybe they were wrong, and certainly they were dead. Old Doc Leibowitz gave Jared's mother statins and blood-pressure meds as long as he had them. She had a coronary a couple of years after he ran out, and that was that. A Topangan scavenged more from a Valley house not long afterwards. Someone else got help for a while, but not Mom. Dad . . . Dad had smoked tobacco as well as weed. Lung cancer would have been a bad way to go even with twentieth-century medicine. Without it . . . He smoked lots of weed, and as much opium as he could get, and died in less pain than he would have without them. And Jared's wife had hemorrhaged when Connor was born, and the doc and the midwife couldn't stop it.

Muttering, Jared pulled a paperback off the shelf.
The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash
had been old even before the Change. Before too long, the cheap paper would crumble, but it hadn't yet. Paper made these days lasted longer, but there wasn't much of it. Ben Franklin would have understood post-Change printing just fine. Books sold across a continent for pocket change were as dead as everything else from the old days.

He found the poem he was looking for, not that he needed to: he'd long since memorized it. No great trick—“The Middle” was only four lines long. But seeing the words made him see the world the words came from. He remembered that world, ached for that world, with a terrible longing that would never go away and that would never do him any good.

Nine and a half million people lived in Los Angeles County when the Change came. They took water and food and electricity for granted—till all of a sudden the power and the internal-combustion engine disappeared. Most of the water came from hundreds of miles away, so it disappeared, too. The food arrived in trucks and ships with engines . . . till it didn't any more.

Some people tried to get to less crowded, wetter parts of the world on foot—or by bikes if they had bikes. Some hunkered down, trying to ride out what they hoped would be a temporary disaster.

Before the Change, Jared had read that the natural carrying capacity of the area was about a quarter of a million. About ninety-eight percent of the people had died either trying to escape or waiting for help that never came. His nose wrinkled as he remembered the stench that had filled the air for months.

Topanga was lucky, as places around here went when the Change hit. It was isolated and not too crowded. People were more used to doing for themselves than most Angelenos. Streams ran year-round, in good years anyhow. The canyon gave the Topangans an outlet on the sea, and another on the San Fernando Valley: a prime scrounging resource. And, being a canyon, it was defensible.

He read the poem again. It talked about remembering bygone days. The last two lines had the meat.
So many I loved were not yet dead,
Nash wrote.
So many I love were not yet born.
Yes, that was the truth, sure as hell. Any middle-aged person through all the history of mankind had been there. But, for his generation, the Change was The Middle. Reworking the poem, you could say
So much I loved was not yet dead.

You could, but how much would it help?
Steely Dan was singing about the Royal Scam. The song should have had a proper stereo system. Yeah, and I should have a Mac and a modem, Jared thought. People in hell were sure they should have mint juleps to drink.

They wouldn't get them. Jared wouldn't get his computer. No one under forty had any idea what the Internet was, or had been. The record would play as well as it played on this windup piece of junk. This was the way the world went on, not with a bang—explosives didn't work any more, either—but a whimper.
Tough shit, Eliot.

Shoes scrunched on dead leaves and dry grass outside. Jared's mouth twisted again. Here was Connor, nineteen now and home from patrol. This brave new world was the only one he knew. He had all the answers—he was sure of it. At nineteen, who didn't? Fathers and sons had butted heads since the beginning of time. The Change, the chasm between Before and After, between who remembered and who didn't, only made things worse. And they said it couldn't be done . . .

*   *   *

Oh, for Christ's sake!

Connor Tillman shaped the words without saying them. His old man was listening to music again. That was always a bad sign. Whenever Dad started playing records, he fell as far back into what his generation called the Good Old Days as you could now.

Get over it, Pop.
Connor didn't say that, either.

He'd yelled it often enough when he and his father brawled. It was an easy rock to grab and hit with. The world was what it was. You had to roll with it. The Good Old Days were over. Finished. Done with. Done for. Kaput.

Connor was tempted to believe things couldn't have been all that great. He was tempted, yeah, but he couldn't. Too much remained behind that nobody now could or would match: everything from dead cars to the crumbling paved roads they'd run on to the incredible warren of empty houses and shops and who knew what that filled the Valley.

Even Connor's pants were pre-Change Levi's, patched at the knees and butt with leather. His boots and sleeveless leather vest and his broad-brimmed straw hat all belonged to here-and-now. But the zipper and copper rivets on the pants spoke of other times. And no one now made binoculars like the ones on the strap around his neck.

He turned the doorknob. The lock had failed; a bar secured the door at night. The locksmith might have fixed it, but putting in the bar had been easier and cheaper. Dad did it himself. He could deal with the real world when he decided he wanted to.

“Hey,” Connor said. Electric guitars sounded funny to him. No instrument that still worked was anything like them.

“Hey,” Dad answered, nodding. His eyes were a million miles and a million years away. They always got like that when he started listening to records. With an obvious effort, he came back to the present. “How'd it go?”

Connor shrugged. “I climbed up to the high ground. Saw some rabbits and some quail and a coyote. Nothing got close enough for the blowgun.” He had a green-painted aluminum tube on his back and a pouch of darts by the short sword on his belt. “Oh, and there were a couple of deer way off in the distance. Nothing much going on on Old Topanga Road.”

“Surprise!” Dad said. “There never was.” Old Topanga Road ran into Topanga Canyon Boulevard from the west right here, where Topanga village lay. Even back before the Change, Old Topanga Canyon had been sparsely settled compared to Topanga Canyon proper.

“I know, I know,” Connor said impatiently. “Gotta keep an eye on it, though. It's our back door, like. The Lancers have come that way before. Don't want 'em doing it again.”

“Nope.” Dad nodded again. “The Chatsworth goddamn Lancers! Is that funny, or what?”

“Not funny when you've fought them.” Connor had a puckered scar on his left arm from a skirmish with the Lancers a couple of years before. That had been his first fight, and came too close to being his last.

“I've done it.” Dad had a scar, too, an old pale white one, in almost the same spot as Connor's. “But still . . . When I was your age—”

“Spare me,” Connor said. He'd heard Dad's rap too often. Back before the Change, when everything was wonderful and it was all one country, Chatsworth had been far enough out in the boonies that a lot of people there kept horses. Because they did, now they ruled the west end of the Valley. Petty lords in places as far away as Pacoima and Studio City had a healthy respect for their fighters. So did the Topangans. Chatsworth dreamt of conquering the canyon and reaching the Pacific. For Topanga, that dream was a nightmare.

“Right,” Dad said tightly.

“What's to eat?” Connor asked. “I'm starved.”

“Still some of the dried, salted grunion left,” Dad answered. “Olives. Cheese. Oranges. The porridge is cold, but it still smells okay.”

“Cool,” Connor said. The porridge was beans and peas from the garden in what Dad still called the backyard, with garlic and onions and wild mushrooms thrown in for flavor. Boil it into mush, and it was . . . food. Connor'd been eating the same kinds of things his whole life. He took them for granted.

Dad had been eating this stuff even longer—ever since the Change. He let out a sigh, the way he did every once in a while. “What I wouldn't give for a Double Whopper with cheese, onion rings on the side, and a big old chocolate shake,” he said, and sighed.

“Yeah, Pop,” Connor said patiently.

Chocolate was good, but he could count the times he'd tasted it on the fingers of one hand. Onion rings were fried. Who had oil to waste on such luxuries? Nobody in these parts, that was for sure. Olive oil and a little butter—that was about it. What didn't get eaten went into lamps . . . when there was any that didn't get eaten.

Connor fed his face. He was still a little hungry when he finished. Most people, at least in these parts, were a little hungry most of the time. His father stood just under six feet. His mom had been five-nine. He was barely that himself. Food had been something you took for granted when his folks were kids. There'd been times when the only meat in his stew came from the big green caterpillars that chewed up tomato vines. The scary thing was, they hadn't been too bad. Hunger made you not worry about such things.

The sun set not long after they finished. He and his father went to bed. No need for a blaze in the fireplace. It wouldn't get cold. It hardly ever got really cold, even in the winter. A blanket, maybe two on a bad night, and you were okay. You could easily starve or die of thirst. Millions of people around here had in the years before Connor was born. As far as he knew, though, not a single one of them froze.

*   *   *

Sherman's hooves clopped dully on the faded, potholed asphalt as Bruce Delgado rode south down Topanga Canyon Boulevard toward the Ventura Freeway. Just past the freeway lay Ventura Boulevard. A couple of miles south of the Boulevard—a Valley phrase that had connoted money back in the day—his Chatsworth Lancers no longer ran things. The hippie freaks from Topanga took over.

Bruce scowled behind his catcher's mask. His armor wouldn't have made the SCA cream its jeans. Covering the rest of his head wasn't some blacksmith's finest creation. He wore a German helmet his grandfather'd brought back from Europe after World War II. Good luck making manganese steel like that these days! He'd sanded off the swastika decals. They would've given too many people the wrong idea of what the Lancers were all about.

Thick leather gauntlets covered his hands. His pre-Change work boots had steel toes. Greaves and armguards had started life as sheet metal on one dead car or another. His Kevlar flak jacket had steel under it, front and back. The shit had been bulletproof, but that didn't mean it would keep out arrows or sword points. Quite a few people had made their last dumb mistake trusting it too far.

Once upon a time, the aluminum tubing that formed the shaft of his lance would've had a broom on the end so some guy home from work could sweep the bottom of his pool. A blacksmith had forged the point topping the lance, and put a little lead in the other end to improve the balance. For now, the lance sat in a boss on the right side of his saddle. He was still well within Chatsworth territory; he didn't expect trouble.

He especially didn't expect trouble with four other Lancers along. Their armor, and that which covered their horses, was of the same catch-as-catch-can style as his own.
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
ran through his mind. The rhyme fit, every bit of it: the nylon fabric covering his Kevlar was cop-uniform blue, somewhat faded now from years of sun.