Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (58 page)

Pete Reilly nodded. “I could say I don't want to give him ideas, but that one's too obvious. He's bound to have it already. He needs to know he's not the only one who can play that game. If the Lancers lose their horses, they won't be able to boss the Valley around any more, and all the ranches are up at the north end, near the Santa Susanas.” He looked out at the assembly. “Any volunteers to go bell the cat?”

Jared's hand rose, almost of its own accord. “I'll do it,” he said. “The message is pretty simple. And it'll be interesting to see what the Valley looks like these days. I haven't been up there for a long, long time.”

“This is better,” Reilly said.

“Sure it is.” Jared nodded without even thinking. He'd grown up an American. He was a Topangan patriot now, though. “But I'll see what they're selling, too. They've got a lot more stuff to scrounge through than we do.”

“Have any money?” Reilly asked, his voice dry. Topanga was small enough that it mostly ran on barter. The Valley wasn't.

But Jared nodded. “Yeah, some.” Gold and silver were always good. So were pre-Change metal-sandwich coins. No one now could make anything like them. The metal might not be precious, but the package was.

“Okay, go for it,” the big Brain told him. “And check out how things are. If we can stir up trouble for Bruce from his own people, he'll stay too busy to give us grief.”

“I'll do it,” Jared said.

That seemed to settle the meeting. As the crowd filed out of the Theatricum Botanicum, Connor said, “I want to come, too.” He sounded like a small-town kid who longed to see the big city. The way things were these days, that was about what he was.

“Let's see what Pete says,” Jared answered. The idea of having his headstrong son along didn't thrill him. Neither did the idea of quarreling with Connor. If he could say no and blame it on someone else, he had the best of both worlds.

*   *   *

Because they were ambassadors, Jared and Connor rode horses out of Topanga and into the lands the Chatsworth Lancers called their own. Pete Reilly, blast him, hadn't minded Connor coming along. Jared hadn't learned to ride till he was an adult. He could do it, but feared his clumsiness showed. Connor took horses for granted. He wasn't betwixt and between in the post-Change world the way his old man was.

They hadn't gone far north of the fortified frontier before a couple of men with strung bows came out of what had been a State Farm office back in the days when there were such things as State Farm offices. They had quivers on their backs, but didn't bother nocking arrows. “What's happening, dudes?” one of them called.

“We've got a message for your boss from Topanga,” Jared answered.

“Oh, yeah? What kind of message?”

“One for your boss,” Jared repeated—pointedly enough, he hoped, to get the point across but not to piss off the archer.

He must have gauged it about right. The man frowned, but said, “Well, go on up to Chatsworth Boulevard and turn right for a couple blocks. He's, like, at home, far as I know. You know where Chatsworth Boulevard's at?”

“Past Devonshire. Yeah.” Jared had studied a Thomas Brothers road atlas before setting out. His memory of Valley streets was old, old, old.

“You got it. Awright, go ahead.”

Ahead they went. Men with picks broke up the asphalt on what had been a parking lot in front of a Ralph's supermarket. Men with wheelbarrows hauled away the rubble. No one moved very fast, not on a hot day like this. Deadlines were, well, dead. Sooner or later, the work would get done. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, the day after.
Mañana.

The farther up Topanga Canyon Boulevard they rode, the wider Connor's eyes got. “Buildings fucking everywhere,” he said in a low voice. He stared east, toward the mountains. “Do they go all the way there?” He pointed to show what he meant.

“They sure do,” Jared said. “More than a million people used to live in the Valley. Most of them are just bones now, but still . . .”

“People throw those big numbers around. They don't mean squat. Then you see—this.” Connor shook his head in wonder. “Where do the ones who are left get their food?”

“Here and there, around the edges and in what used to be parks and torn-up parking lots like the one we've seen,” Jared answered. “Not a million people now. Say, twenty or thirty thousand. That's a lot next to Topanga, but it would've been a small town before the Change.”

“So what are we?” Connor asked. “Ghosts rattling around inside all that stuff they built?”

Now that you mention it,
Jared thought,
yes
. Topanga didn't prompt such gloomy reflections. Topanga had always been way the hell out in the boonies. Being out in the boonies and built to human scale was the whole point to Topanga. Long before the Change, someone had written of Los Angeles, The future is here—and it's coming to get you. That future might be past now, but it sure left a big corpse.

As Jared and Connor came to the north end of the Valley, things began opening out again. There were empty lots that looked as if they'd been empty since before the Change. The vineyards and half-grown olive trees came from after the Change. Wine from these parts would probably be crappy, but even the nastiest plonk, as Jared had reason to know, beat hell out of no wine at all.

A little naked blond boy with a stick watched chickens pecking under the olives. Jared smiled; he could have seen the same kind of thing in Topanga. “This looks more like home,” he remarked.

“It's too wide,” Connor answered. The Valley was a valley, yeah, but a big valley. Topanga Canyon was, and looked like, a canyon. Jared's son went on, “I feel like a bug on a plate.”

Jared had the same feeling. There were mountains on the horizon, but you could tell that horizon lay a long way away. He wondered how he would do somewhere like Kansas or Nebraska, where all you could see was miles and miles of miles and miles. Not too well, was his best guess. But, while he was more likely to end up in the Midwest than in, say, Tibet, he wasn't much more likely, so he didn't waste time worrying about it.

“This has to be Chatsworth Boulevard,” he said after a while. They swung the horses down the narrower road. Calling it a boulevard didn't make it one. Houses sat on big lots. Horses grazed. Knights—Chatsworth Lancers—practiced with spear and sword. Archers sent arrows whistling toward far-off bales of straw. Men wrestled under the shade of trees. When war was personal again, training was like paying life insurance premiums.

Just past the first street east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, they rode up to a house set well back from the road. A tough-looking fellow opened a gate in the rusty chain-link fence fronting Chatsworth Boulevard. “You the Topangans?” he asked. When Jared and Connor nodded, the man went on, “Semaphore said you were on your way. Well, c'mon in. The boss wants to hear what you got to say.”

*   *   *

Bruce Delgado scowled at the men from Topanga. One was older than he was, the other plainly a chip off the old guy's block. “You're telling me how I can fight a war?” Bruce growled—Eddie and Garth were listening, so he had to sound tough. “You got your nerve.”

The older Topangan—Jared Tillman—shook his head. “That's not what I said,” he answered. “I'm telling you what we'll do if you set fires. If you don't, we won't. We think fires are a nasty way for anybody to fight.”

As a matter of fact, Bruce thought the same thing. That didn't necessarily mean he wouldn't do it. Plenty of weapons were nasty but effective. The military history books filling the shelves of his study showed that all too well.

He spread his hands now, and sipped from a glass of brandy. His henchmen had their own, and he'd given the Topangans some, too. The kid had drunk most of his. The older man had sense enough to go easy. Oh, well. It had been worth a try.

Leaning forward, he said, “You think you can sneak firebugs past my patrols? Good luck!”

“You think you can stop us if we try?” Jared Tillman returned. “Good luck to you.”

There was a bluff called. Eddie clucked sadly. People in the Valley—in all of Southern California—were too thin on the ground for patrols to do much good. Moving at night, holing up in empty buildings (and how many zillion were there to hole up in?) by day, the Topangans almost surely could get up into the hills north of what had been the 118 Freeway. Wait till the winds started blowing, pour the oil, drop the matches . . . It could work.

“We're not even fighting,” Bruce protested, again hoping he could sound as sincere as his father getting a lemon off the lot.

“I hope we don't,” Jared Tillman said. “But you people have been scoping us out for a while now. Maybe you think that even though it didn't work the last couple of times, it will now. We're ready—that's the biggest part of what I've got to say, aside from talking about fire.”

He made more sense than Bruce wished he did. But the Chatsworth Lancers had to use their army every now and then. Just having it wasn't good enough. An army that sat around or rode herd on peasants all the time started crumbling. It was like a football team that practiced endlessly without ever playing a game.

The other thing, of course, was that when you had an army and didn't use it, somebody else would stab you in the back and take it for a spin himself. Somebody like Garth, say. Bruce didn't think Garth was disloyal—the pup would have had an accident by now if he did. But somebody like him. Somebody who hadn't fought in several wars and didn't know there was no such thing as an ironclad guarantee, double your money back, for victory.

Bruce wondered if Tillman was delivering his warning not least to stir up that kind of trouble among the Lancers. He wouldn't be the only one who kept an eye on the past to guide him through the present. The Topangans were dopers, yeah, but not dopes. They knew what kind of position they held, and they knew how to defend it.

He had to answer the hippie, and in a way that wouldn't turn his own men against him or make them think he'd gone soft. “We'll do what we do,” he said, his voice as harsh as he could make it. “You do what you do, and we'll see who comes out on top in the end.”

“It doesn't have to be an I-win-you-lose kind of game, you know,” Jared Tillman said sadly. “Can't we do better than that? How many million died, just in this county, when the Change came? Do we still have to do all the same stupid shit they did in the old days?”

“Are we not men?” It wasn't philosophy—it was a Devo song you still heard on the radio when Bruce was a kid. Or maybe it was a Devo song and philosophy both. “You think human nature's changed? That would take more than what we went through more than thirty years ago.”

“You know what? I'm afraid you're right,” the Topangan said. “You know what else? It's a goddamn shame. Okay. Do your worst, and we'll do our best—”

“Your worst, you mean.” Bruce knew stolen Churchill when he heard it, and he wouldn't let Jared Tillman get away with that. “Like you wouldn't jump us, start inching into the Valley, if you saw the chance. Yeah, right. Tell me another one.”

He didn't look at Jared's face. He looked at Connor's. Sure as shit, the kid dreamt of empty houses and offices and shops to plunder. The Valley wasn't Egypt, dry enough to preserve things for thousands of years. But it hadn't been thousands of years. It had been only thirty. Plenty of stuff from the old days, the great days, was still good, still undiscovered, just waiting for tomb raiders smart enough or lucky enough to grab it.

Like me. Bruce jerked a thumb at the door. “Go on. Beat it. You said what you had to say. Now the time for talking's done. Now it's time for doing.”

They left. He sat in his fancy office chair, thinking hard. He wondered if you could find enough people to cut a big firebreak through the brush on the other side of the freeway. Not without regret, he decided he probably couldn't, not if he wanted to eat through the winter. Subsistence sucked, when you got right down to it.

He remembered the days when poor people had been fat. If you were fat now, you were either rich, rich, rich or you had something wrong with you. People worked a lot harder than they had when machines did the tough jobs for them. They had less to show for it, too. No wonder they weren't fat. The wonder was that they were here at all.

Too damn bad the Topangans were here. With a little luck, before too long they wouldn't be any more.

*   *   *

Jared and Connor rode south down De Soto, a mile or two east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Jared wanted to see more of the Chatsworth Lancers' domain than the chief thoroughfare. A dead McDonald's sat at the corner of De Soto and Devonshire. Actually, it wasn't quite dead: kids played on the slides and crawled through the translucent plastic tubes, squealing the way they had before the Change. Jared had scorned the Golden Arches then. To him, they'd been a big part of what was wrong with America at the end of the twentieth century.

What was wrong with America a good way into the twenty-first century was a lot more obvious. It had nothing to do with French fries and burgers the consistency of hockey pucks. The grease, the salt, the yum . . .

The salt . . . “You know,” Jared said thoughtfully, “if the Lancers attack us and we win, we ought to stop selling them sea salt for a while, see how they like that.”

“What's so special about sea salt?” Connor asked.

“It's got iodine in it,” his father answered. Just because electricity and internal combustion and explosives were gone, that didn't mean knowledge was. People couldn't use it all any more—but they still could use some. “Without iodine, people get goiters.” He put a hand to the base of his neck to show what he meant. “They get stupid, too—not real, real stupid, but stupid. It used to be a big deal. Then they put iodine in everybody's salt, and it wasn't. Since the Change, it is again, unless you live near the ocean.”